Jordan Peterson

Yes, he's calm, cool, collected, intelligent,and wrong--the thinking man's right wing ideologue. He fills a niche once occupied by the late William Buckley, giving right wing nonsense an air of respectability. The lefties are "Maoist" because the essence of Maoism is identity politics. Really?

 

That and people like Newman are not intelligent enough to spar with him, making his ideas appear more credible than they are.

 

It seemed she couldn't even begin to understand what he was saying, but was addressing some caricature she had of him based on her own ideological preconceptions--and she never did get it. Hence, the constant silly attempts to put words in his mouth. One of the advantages Peterson and the others have is that there are elements of the left who have carried political correctness and victimology to such extremes that public antipathy to them can be easily tapped to discredit "the left" in general. If there had been an interviewer capable of exploring some of the things he was saying about natural dominance hierarchies, the Agreeableness personality trait, etc., it could have been a really fascinating interview--e.g., somebody who could ask how much empirical support there is for the notion that social dominance hierarchies are hardwired into the human brain, or that the scarcity of women at the top of those hierarchies has little to do with cultural prejudice. Or how would he have handled an open-ended question on Marxist-Lenininst-Maoist ideolgy and its relationship to the campus Left? I suspect he could easily end up looking like a fool. But would the viewers understand it?

It would be intriguing, for example, to hear Dr.Peterson expound on some of his views, such as those expressed at a Harvard talk, quoted in: The Intellectual We Deserve | Current Affairs
"… in the 60s, as far as I can tell, .. we got this misbegotten idea that the way to conduct yourself as a responsible human being was to hold placards up to protest to change the viewpoints of other people and thereby usher in the utopia. I think that’s all appalling, I think it’s appalling. And I think it’s absolutely absurd that students are taught that that’s the way to conduct themselves in the world. First of all, if you’re nineteen or twenty or twenty one, you don’t bloody well know anything. You haven’t done anything. You don’t know anything about history, you haven’t read anything, you haven’t supported yourself for any length of time. You’ve been entirely dependent on your state and on your family for the brief few years of your existence. And the idea that you have any wisdom to determine how society should be reconstructed when you’re sitting in the absolute lap of luxury protected by processes you don’t understand… let’s call that a bad idea… " The Intellectual We Deserve | Current Affairs
How does that grab you, you fuckin' hippies? Alt Right/Lite Gamers take heed! Peterson may have forgotten that men age nineteen, or twenty, or twenty one, or even eighteen were being shipped over to Vietnam in large numbers, many to die, and others were faced with that prospect, making it understandable they might have thought they had something worth saying on the subject. And even back then, they were allowed to marry and vote at twenty-one, so why not to hold up signs?

Or consider some of his half-baked views in his monumental Maps of Meaning:
“The devil is the spirit who underlies the development of totalitarianism; the spirit who is characterized by rigid ideological belief (by the “predominance of the rational mind”), by reliance on the lie as a model of adaptation (by refusal to admit to the existence of error, or to appreciate the necessity of deviance), and by the inevitable development of hatred for the self and world.” (p. 316). Uh, Dr. Peterson, wouldn't you consider the elaborate grand theory of everything outlined in this book and apparently put forward as a guide to human action an ideology?

“...all of Western ethics, including those explicitly formalized in Western law, are predicated upon a mythological worldview, which specifically attributes divine status to the individual.” (p.480.) Prove it!

“A society predicated upon belief in the paramount divinity of the individual allows personal interest to flourish and to serve as the power that opposes the tyranny of culture and the terror of nature.” (p. 483)
Is that so? Could you relate that to the rise of the AltRight and Donald Trump?

The diagrams in that book have been described, aptly I think, as "masterpieces of unprovable gibberish" The Intellectual We Deserve | Current Affairs : e.g.,



Nathan Robinson sums it up. The Intellectual We Deserve | Current Affairs :"The inflating of the obvious into the awe-inspiring is part of why Peterson can operate so successfully in the “self-help” genre. He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom."

 

Having now read a chunk of '12 Rules' and watched more videos I've arrived at a couple of conclusions.

First is that JP is too conservative a thinker overall for my taste. He's erudite in a charming kind of a way, and has charisma no doubt, but still, most of his criticism is levelled squarely at 'the left' as he sees it. Now I'm not saying that criticism isn't justifed, but it seesm a bit imbalanced. Whilst I am all for the individal as the basic unit of society, it's also a fact that vast corporate as well as state power often threaten this principle, as well as, and in most countries far more than those on the far left with their obsession with identity politics.

Second, his use of Christian symbolism and Old Testament stories seems to me extremely naive. He's taking it on face value and not really looking deeper into the origin of these texts. I would actually see that as kind of manifestation of the all-pervasive conservatism that seems to run through much of what I've seen of his output.
That's a secondary point though. He doesn't actually say 'I am a Christian' but talks as though the ultimate wisdom and truth of the Bible was undisputed fact. At least at a psychological level. To me this appears to be simply an assumption, and perhaps a very un-timely one at this point in history.

 

I think these criticisms are spot on. Yes, he is erudite and charming, which makes him dangerous. He provides ammunition for critics of "The Left" by what amounts to irrational hyperbole, comparing campus leftists to totalitarian mass murderers and justifying "dominance hierarchies" in terms of what amounts to natural law. The fact that he can be calm and reasoned in his approach doesn't make these arguments less preposterous. As you say, he treats the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition as indisputable ultimate wisdom. Many readers will take this at face value without realizing that Peterson is a mythicist who draws on Jungian psychology to legitimize myth and metaphor as sources of ultimate truth. He actually doesn't believe in a personal God who answers prayer, but does believe that Christ is the ultimate archetype for humanity, as a metaphor for the Self, modeling the human need to face death continuously and be resurrected. Jordan Peterson and the Archetypical Nature of Jesus

And he provides what appear to me to be sophistical challenges to claims that women and minorities suffer real discrimination in the workplace. He claims that women are too "agreeable"( i.e, compassionate and polite) to make it to the top in numbers comparable to white males--a rather backhanded compliment.http://www.jordanbpeterson.com/docs/230/2014/24Petersonpsychometric.pdf As for racial minorities, he suggests that because many variables, like family structure and sub-cultures, contribute to a person's advancement, we can dismiss as "myth" that race or ethnicity are responsible--even though many of those variables are closely tied to a history of formal and informal racial discrimination. It's not "white privilege", it's "majority privilege"--even though the majority in this country are whites. So what? His analogy to "majority privilege" for Chinese in China or for Africans in Africa is specious. http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/31/jordan-peterson-gets-wrong-right-white-privilege/ His ideas on the necessity of inequality are rooted in trait theory which "relies solely on statistical analysis, and when applied to psychology highly reduces the complexity of the human experience to bite size chicken McNugget constructs".Jordan Peterson, Masculinity, Jung and the Alt-Right.

Peterson is a fan of Nietzsche , who, he says ,thought more clearly about 9the deepest questions of human existence than anyone in history" (12 Rules, 347). Professor Larry Arnhart characterizes Peterson's thought as "Darwinian aristicratic liberalism, reflecting this attachment to Nietzsche. "Peterson's position is Darwinian, because he explains human nature through evolutionary psychology. It is aristocratic, because he sees that the hierarchical structure of human society is rooted in evolved human nature. It is liberal, because he argues that a liberal social order conforms best to that evolved human nature". "Liberalsim", here, of course means classical liberalism or "libertarianism", base on rugged individualism not the socially progressive kind that Peterson attributes to Social Justice Warriors who are collectivists like Mao and mass murderers. This is ideological snake oil, pure and simple--chicken soup for the fragile white male ego..

 

I have to agree with that analysis. I should maybe mention that I think he's using the Christian angle too as a way of attracting interest. There is a raft of public intellectuals who have risen to prominance over the last years on an atheist ticket, and I think there's a danger that some might imagine here's a nice man on the side of God. I watched a youtube video with Rupert Sheldrake for example, who seems to have taken that particular bait, whilst I feel, not really loking deeper into the political dimensions. But again, Sheldrake never reveals his political alignment so really that's speculative.

I'd just like to re-emphasize what you say about Peterson's conflating modern politically correct campus politicas with the atrocities of the Soviet Union. I think that's a very important point to make.

Here's Sheldake anyway - Making what I think is a big mistake. As have the guys behind this video. Mybe I ought to menton that Sheldrake is a church going Anglican. Therefore he is coming at these issues from a very different angle from JP.

 

Jordan Peterson pushes Christianity because it's part of "Western heritage" and a metaphor for humanity's challenges and "resurrections." He was asked pont blank :Are you a Christian? Do you believe in God? https://nationalpost.com/feature/ch...with-warrior-for-common-sense-jordan-peterson His answer: "I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist." So is that what makes him superior to Sam Harris? What he is is a traditionalist in the vein of the late William Buckley and National Review who push a pseudo-Christian message because it keeps the masses in their place.

 

It's understandable that Sheldrake would be drawn to Peterson, since he fancies himself a "rebel" standing up to the materialistic "dogma" of modern science, just as Peterson is standing up to those "Postmodernist Marxists" who allegedly control Academia. Sheldrake has found himself on the fringes of the scientific community because he is unable to convince it of his controversial theories of canine telepathy, purpose in nature, and "morphogenic fields" that provide a collective unconscious in a more literal sense than even Jungians like Peterson would imagine. It might be that the science is off base in its basic assumptions, as Sheldrake argues in The Science Delusion. Or it might just be sour grapes over his inability to convince fellow scientists that his theories are falsifiable and empirically grounded.

 

I read 'The Science Delusion', and found it well researched and argued, although I am no scientist.To an extent though, it is sour grapes, and the title (which was changed in the USA) is a parody of Richard Dawkin's 'The God Delusion', although it seems written in a far less polemical style.
Sheldrake's main claim to fame is I think his idea of Morphic fields and Morphic Resonnance. There isn't much empirical evidence, and really I don't think the idea is entirely new, but maybe a restatement of something like Aristotle's idea of the soul.

My sense of it is that Sheldrake finds himself embattled with materialist and atheist arguments seeming to gain more prominence, and few scientists in the public domain who put up their hands to any spiritual leaning. To suddenly have a prominent intellectual presence online such as JP who isn't avowedly atheist probably seems on the surface like a good thing to Sheldrake, who incidentally, doesn't talk much about psychology.

On your previous post - Buckley was someone who was much better known in the USA than here in Britain. I think it's only in the internet era that I even really became aware of his existence through watching clips of interviews he conducted with various people who interest me from that era. I do see how you might draw a comparison though with JP.
Sometimes it takes me a while to see the various nuances of how things play out politically in America.It's very differently stacked than in the UK. Once pointed out though it's pretty clear.

 

There's enough ambiguity to Peterson that he's able to mask an essentially authoritarian agenda behind a libertarian facade. Take, for example, his proposal to combat the Postmodernist Marxist Maoist menace on campus by launching a website to identify and brand "post-modern neo-Marxist" course content in university curricula by means of artificial intelligence software. He said:"I'm hoping that over about a five-year period, a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West," he said at the time. "So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults." In other words, professors who run afoul of his subjectively defined concept of postmodern neo-Marxism would be blackballed by AltLite True Believers. The prudent professor might think twice about including on his/her syllabus Foccault, Derrida, or Marcuse, not to mention Marx. What about Al Gore? Anyone familiar with McCarthyism and the House Unamerican Activities Committee during the 1950s might feel a chill up the spine upon hearing of Peterson's project. In the guise of trying to eliminate "indoctrination cults", he'd instill conformity by intimidation. Fortunately, Peterson, in the face of an outcry from his colleagues and the academic community, has put the project "on hiatus". The most ambitious study of Marxism and left radicalism on college campuses, by Gross and Simmons in 2006, found that only 3% were Marxists--mostly in the social sciences and humanities-- and that even in those disciplines, less than a quarter were radicals. (Peterson, himself, and the AltRight/Alt Lite movements, are radicals, not conservatives, albeit on the right wing of the spectrum.) Peterson's whole emphasis on restoring traditional values,defending dominance hierarchies as "natural" hard-wired evolutionary imperatives, denying social injustice and opposing social activism, is authoritarian, based on the paramount value of order.

 

The 'Marxist' scare isn't confined to America. I recently encountered a family who won't send their children to school because they don't "want them to be brainwashed with Marxism". These folks are what I'd call 'county conservative' types, the kind that would aspire to go fox hunting if it were to be made legal again. Because of their misunderstanding of reality, their children will no doubt get a low quality education and virtually no socialization with other kids of their age group.
No doubt they'd jump on the bandwagon with JP in generally denouncing the negative impact of single parent families - although he's more blunt than that and really only talks about 'single mothers' - whilst at the some time depriving their own children based on their own political and ideological bias.

I think that Marx in the classroom is a paranoid right wing fear, and isn't at all valid. Many teachers may be left leaning, very few would identify as Marxist. Most are probably centrists of one kind or another. Same in higher levels of academia in my experience. Mostly sociologists, social historians and so on who even think of Marx.

 

To my knowledge, I've never run into a real Marxist, nor even a post-modernist. Around these parts, people would assume that a post-modernist would be somebody with a newfangled mailbox. I read about all the outlandish goings on in Academia, and assume they must be tenured professors in elite east coast or west coast universities. Tenured professors account for only 17% of faculty in the U.S., and it seems unlikely that the other 83% would be so foolish as to engage in open political proselytizing. Fortunately, I never had professors who seemed to be trying to radicalize me. I took care of that on my own. I'd think that trying to indoctrinate the students would be a big turn off, and would probably backfire, and besides, it's unprofessional. ProfessorWatchList.org, targets only faculty who are deemed left of center by the conservatives who monitor them. And really, just because Young Earth Creationism, white racial superiority, male chauvinism, and the policies of the Trump administration aren't taken seriously by the profs doesn't mean those views are being unfairly discriminated against. Most faculty are trained to have an empirical basis for their views, and some opinions are more supportable than others. Post-modernism seems to have run its course. Teaching critical thought is not the same as liberal indoctrination. Indeed, the most prominent lingering traces of it are on the AltRight of the political spectrum, which seems to be premised on "alternative facts" and denial of objective truth.The myth of the leftist campus is skillfully skewered in an article by Dr. Kelly Wilz. The Myth Of The Liberal Campus | HuffPost These observations make it all the more apparent that Peterson is out of touch with the reality around him in the 4,000 some North American colleges, community colleges and universities. Or he's just a demagogue, which seems likely.

 

It always seemed to me that post modernism was more favourable to the right than the left. Despite the protestations to the contrary by Derrida. In many ways, it is very difficult to be a post modernist and a Marxist at the same time, as post-modernism rejects the so called 'grand narrative' of which Marxism is a prime example.
JP and at least one of his allies, Camille Paglia, claim that really, those nasty, left wing professors clung on to their Marxist views nontheless. This may well be a paranoid right wing fantasy.

I tend towards the view you express, that much more indoctrination of a right wing nature takes place nowadays, and not only in academia, but the popular media too. I find Marxism to be a useful tool in terms of critical theory, but mention anything to do with Marx to a lot of people these days, people who might otherwise seem quite sensible even, and immediately you're supporting the gulags, mass murder , the end of individual freedom and the rest. Nothing of course, could be further from the truth. Unbridled capitalism sucks in my view. It creates vast wealth for the few, massive poverty for the many. It is slowly toxifying and destroying the natural environment, etc etc. The lie that capitalism =freedom, socialism = bondage is one that somehow has promulgated through many layers of society. Freedom to work on a zero hours contract for less than a living wage doesn't seem much like freedom to me, yet that's the reality for millions in Britain today. On the other hand socialist measures such as the National Health Service get comletely taken for granted and come under unceasing attack from the right wing ideologues who see an opportunity to cash in.

I see that I'm starting to rave slightly here, so I'll leave it at that. I'd just add that most demagogues need to apeal to women as well as men, and Peterson is clearly aiming at young and impressionable men, and seems not to mind how many women he offends.

 

I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I disagree with Peterson on his stance regarding morality being predicated on religion. I forget what thread it was, but I believe @Okiefreak and I discussed something along these lines before and while a lot of morals might have been codified within religious texts and ideas, providing sources of morality that perhaps are easier to point to than say oral traditions, I think most moral actions and behaviors probably not only preceded monotheistic religions but Homo Sapiens.

Regardless, I find criticisms of atheism like this much more interesting than generic ones like attempting to flip the burden of proof.

 

This is one area where I largely agree with Peterson. In fact, he's one of the few celebrity thinkers who seems to be pretty much in sync with my own views. Too bad he makes a wrong right turn and detours onto the Highway to Hell. As an aside, I'd think that a professor lecturing to us on Dostoevsky would get his details straight. The passage that he thinks was from Crime and Punishment ("without God, everything is permitted") was actually from The Brothers Karamazov . Picky, picky, I know, but most literate folks should know that, at least when they're putting themselves forward as authorities on morals. As to Ivan Karamazov's point, for some people (maybe most), I suppose it's true. Operant conditioning is an important part of behavioral development, and that involves rewards and punishments--immediate or expected. If some folks thought they could get away with it without being detected, they'd do all sorts of awful things. In fact they already do all sorts of awful things. Were all those pedophile priests who molested all those kids in violation of so many moral rules all atheists? I find it incomprehensible that a person could have any regard for God at all and do such things, but they obviously do them. I'm fortunate to know lots of people who I think are incapable of doing such things--some Catholic, some Protestant, some Muslim, some atheists and agnostics. I enjoy regular table fellowship with them, and it would really be hard to tell one from the other in terms of my perception of their trustworthiness and moral character. In fact, there are lots of atheists I'd trust more readily than some of the religious folks. What keeps them honest? Values and habits I think. Where do those come from? Possibly some are hard wired into those mental modules evolutionary psychologists are fond of speculating about; others (most I think) come from culture. So I'd disagree with Ivan Karamazov that a God to reward and punish us is necessary for morality, but I think some sense of loyalty to values beyond self, grounded in a transcendent sense of meaning and the sacred, is essential.

You " think most moral actions and behaviors probably not only preceded monotheistic religions but Homo Sapiens". I think so, too. E.O. Wilson, the godfather of evolutionary psychology (then known as socio-biology) thinks it happened with maybe homo habilis, when humans developed a module for group interests to compete with self-interest in guiding their behaviors. It seems the elements may go back even further, to feelings of empathy and reciprocal altruism exhibited by a great number of non-human species. But empathy, reciprocal altruism, and loyalty to the hunting band get us only so far. Those sentiments are most effective among kin or people who know each other well. As human societies expanded into nations and empires, they faced the challenge of getting them to treat strangers according to the norms developed for bands of hunter-gatherers. And I agree with Peterson--the process by which this is done isn't strictly rational. Empathy, reciprocal altruism, and the golden rule are functional for society, and if one wants to live in an effective society, it's rational to go along with them. But there are always those who will try to cheat and take advantage. I agree with Peterson that psychopaths and sociopaths can be completely rational. We have one in the Oval Office. Ironically, the snake oil Peterson peddles may keep him, or others like him, there.

There are plenty of secular moral philosophies, as well as religions, that tell us how we should live. The problem is how to get people to embrace them. That involves appealing to emotions--our sense of the sacred, the beautiful, the things that give life meaning. The great prophets and teachers who gave us our world religions contributed mightily to this process. The processes by which this is done run the gamut of the major schools of psychology--social conditioning via Behaviorism, Freudian ego defense mechanisms, a need for cognitive balance, and yes, myths and symbols drawn from Jung's collective unconscious.

One fascinating dimension of Peterson's pitch is how it struck a cord with the "lost Boys" and insecure males of our society--echoing similar movements of the recent past: Robert Bly's mytho-poetic Men's Movement of the 1990s, drawing men out of their offices into the woods to beat drums, run naked, and celebrate the myth of Iron John; and the Promise Keepers, drawing on similar sentiments for a more conventional Christian male movement. Men are feeling threatened with being displaced in the twenty-first century. Demagogues sat up and took notice when Milo Yiannoploulos rallied the Gamergaters around male angst. Peterson is not the shock jock that Milo was, but is able to tap into the same wounded male psychology, with a mytho-poetic overlay to make it seem intellectual. I think he may do some good in giving man children a sense of direction and appeal to values beyond their couches and laptops, but I think he'd dangerous when he directs their critical eyes outward toward feminists, post-modernist Marxists and Social Justice Warriors instead of inward toward themselves. As a thinker who made a big contribution to Western heritage once said: "Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"

 

Mis-quoting Dostoevsky is a definite blunder, almost a mortal sin, and anyone who has read 'The Brothers Karamazov' will know that it's just so pivotal to the whole plot......

JP is casting himself as the 'dancing master' in my sig quote from Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot'. True value comes from within. The real ethical sense likewise.

 

Has your opinion of Jordan Peterson done a 180 since making this thread @BlackBillBlake ?

 

Nice cut and spliced video. Not sure what it is you're trying to communicate with it though? Just a compilation of Newman barking some accusations at Peterson.

Sargon breaks it down pretty well.

 

That she looked foolish is what I tried to communicate.

 

I've looked deeper into his writing and more videos and yes, I've changed my mind.


I think it would be easy to get a false or at least a partial impression from just watching youtube videos - and I think that's what I did. But I'm glad I started the thread nonetheless, as he's certainly someone who is getting a lot of attention and it seems exerting an influnence.