Raymond on the remarkable rise of Doctor Peterson
If there is anyone out there who still hasn’t watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with the Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson, I would strongly recommend that you check out what was a wonderfully illuminating piece of television. I found it riveting, but I’m not sure if that was in spite of -or because of- the interviewer’s insistence on trying to put words into her interviewee’s mouth at almost every turn. If you try counting the number of times she says “so what you’re saying is …” before inserting a ridiculously skewed interpretation of what he has actually said, you will need all of your fingers and some of your toes. It is evident that ‘listening’ and ‘responding to what the other person has actually said’ were not part of Ms Newman’s game plan.
(continued in comments)
Some have argued that it was her job to challenge Peterson and not to just nod in agreement with whatever he was saying. This is a fair point and, if Channel 4 News applied that principle across the board, it would certainly present itself as a more balanced source of information. Peterson may not be right about everything, but even when he’s wrong, he has reached his position because he has at least considered the available evidence. But, in an age in which feelings appear to trump reason, he is regularly libelled as a neo-Nazi, slave-trading, baby-eating agent of the patriarchy, or something.
Ms Newman’s lazy assumption was that her guest was an ‘alt-right’ misogynist provocateur. Her researchers (I’m assuming she will have had some help) must be pretty dim if they thought that some back-of-a-fag-packet observations on this man’s significant academic oeuvre would cause him to recant his views. Mainstream news outlets regularly claim moral superiority over so-called ‘fake news’ sources, so examples of this kind of shoddy practice deserve to be highlighted and ridiculed.
There is a sense in which the exchange also illustrated what can happen to polite discourse once certain difficult topics are declared ‘off-limits’. Perfectly reasonable people who might, under normal circumstances, be prepared to discuss those difficult topics, start to retreat from debate. Once you’ve witnessed some poor sod raise his head above the parapet only to be monstered as a misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe (they’re all the same thing), it makes sense to keep your opinions to yourself. But people who shout those magic ‘shut-down’ words to dismiss their opponents eventually lose the ability to argue. And, when they come up against someone who won’t shut up and won’t back down, someone prepared to use logic and reason to make their points, the shouters have nowhere else to go. They don’t have the tools to argue because they’ve never had to do it; once their magic words lose potency, shouters are stuck in a very deep hole.
I have been following Jordan Peterson’s work since his experiences at Toronto University dragged him into what -for shorthand purposes- I’ll call the ‘cultural debate’. During that time, he has conducted himself with dignity and intelligence. He has had exactly this kind of discussion many, many times and is way too smart to be intimidated by folk who, rather than listen, choose to project their own ‘evil Nazi’ fantasies onto him simply because he doesn’t share their worldview.
His critics, generally speaking, don’t want (or are not equipped) to refute his arguments. Their standard approach is:
1) Try the magic words, like misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe.
When that doesn’t work,
2) Adopt the ‘straw man’ approach (like Cathy Newman) by deliberately misinterpreting his arguments (“so … you’re saying that all women are stupid?”).
When these tactics fail (and they always do), resort to:
3) Playing the ‘victim’ card.
On youtube, the average Channel 4 News interview gets a few thousand hits. On big stories, the numbers might head somewhere north of 100,000. The Newman-Peterson interview, at the time of writing, has had more than six million views. Once it went viral, Channel 4 announced that it had consulted ‘security experts’ (but curiously, not the police) because of ‘vile misogynist abuse’ received by their presenter. With the help of their ideological allies in the press, they attempted to switch the narrative from ‘hectoring presenter embarrasses herself with civilised professor’ to ‘female presenter bullied and exposed to vile misogynist abuse’ from Peterson’s so-called ‘army of trolls’. Make of that what you will. As a fan of his work, I’d be more inclined to thank Ms Newman for handing him such an epic victory.
However one chooses to interpret the interview, it feels like something significant may be happening. It’s not unusual for the younger generation to rebel against what is on offer from the world created by their parents and, when I listen to the kind of conversations that are going on, when I check out some of the podcasts, I get the sense that a cultural shift may be taking place. Jordan Peterson appears to have connected with a young audience in search of authentic meaning, an audience that suspects it could get a better deal than the one they’ve been told is the only one on the table. We assume that young people need their information delivered in bite-sized chunks, yet many of them clearly have the appetite to absorb long and deep discussions about complicated political and philosophical ideas.
(To take one example, Joe Rogan’s podcast with Petersen and Professor Brett Weinstein lasts for 2 hours 45 minutes and has been watched by 3 million people).
Some young people seem to have worked out that television and newspapers aren’t going to help them. Why trust a tired medium in which demonstrably partial people have set themselves up as the entitled gatekeepers of information?
They seem to have worked out that, by and large, teachers and college professors aren’t going to help them. Why trust a profession in which the intellectual gene pool is so dismally shallow? Lots of young people understand that when someone is in favour of every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity, that person is more of an indoctrinator than an educator.
When critics point out that Peterson’s message is not exactly ‘new’, they overlook an obvious point: To many young folk, what he’s saying seems new because, generally speaking, they will have been taught by people who adhere to the dead-end ideas of post-modern cultural relativism. And the people who taught those people will, generally speaking, have been taught by people who also adhered to those ideas. And the people who taught those people … you get my drift.
In the science fiction film ‘The Matrix’, the rebel leader Morpheus offers the main character Neo a choice between two pills: red or blue.
“This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
The hero must choose between the convenient falsehoods maintained by the blue pill and the inconvenient truths revealed by the red.
Having been trained to react to cultural relativism’s trigger words, drilled to respond to the poisonous diktats of identity politics, young people are now being ‘red-pilled’ by Jordan Peterson. If we are to avoid hurtling towards a nightmare post-dialogue age wherein ‘right’ and ‘left’ are literally unable to communicate with each other, I can’t think of a more important job or, indeed, a better man to do it.
If you haven’t already watched the interview, here it is:
Great viewing, thanks for that Raymond. I wish I’d seen it when it happened, but I’m very glad I’ve seen it now. I’d like to write a fuller appreciation, but time is not on my side right this moment, so I’ll confine my observation to the fact that he is talking about profoundly well thought through things that are complex and nuanced, and a TV interview, however willing to engage with complex issues, is radically constrained by the form within which it operates, and spectacularly fails here to really get to grips with the nitty gritty. Great stuff, and I hope I find the time to come back and watch again. I liked both combatants, but my gut admiration was really reserved for him, fighting to bat off the trivialisation, and surviving that with flying colours.
Good grief. I do not recognise his view of women and men and the relationship between them.
Takes all sorts etc.
So you’re saying that as a man, he’s better than her?
Excellently put, Raymond. I was directed to Pererson’s ‘Development of Personality’ lectures by a young(er than me) therapist colleague about a year ago, and I’d heartily recommend them. He covers the Greeks to the present via Jung, Nietzsche et al, and it’s that oddity, bingeworthy academia (though with practical applications aplenty). I do fear the co-option that some online warriors are attempting, though. It has worrying echoes of wise man/hero archetypes that Peterson often speaks of, and which don’t always end well,
That was great fun. Thanks for posting. There seemed to me to be an awful lot of flirting going in that interview – on both sides. That bit where she corpsed was a delight. Did they end up in bed, I was left wondering?
My general interpretation of it other than that was, not knowing anything about the man before watching it, Jordon Peterson seemed like a fascinating, intelligent communicator of ideas, completely unphased by the interviewer”s style of questioning, gently mocking it when appropriate – sort of like a toned-down (or reined-in) Malcolm Tucker. There have always been good presenters of ideas on television, as well as shite ones, and an appreciative audience will lap up well-prepared, informative, confident programming.
As for Cathy Newman, I know little of her either, but I thought she was fun, artfully presenting received ideas about Peterson, and almost inviting him to knock them down. She was definitely more the agent provocateur in this situation. Possibly she could have done more research about him before loading up with such easily disposed of, one-dimensional questions. Possibly she knew that, and knew what would make for an entertaining interview.
Anyway, thanks again for posting. He’s an intriguing thinker, and someone worth finding out more about.
2h 45mins? Bloody hell, that’s almost as long as those three blokes talking about “Fucking Top of the Fucking Pops”…
Fuckers need a cocking editor
If only we knew someone who was really good at editing podcasts…. if only… if only….
*harp glissando*
Only if it was ‘Why The Beatles Are PC Gone Mad (aka The Snowflake White , no sorry Non White, Non Gender Specific and Non Judgemental Album)
The Rogan-Peterson-Weinstein podcast is a belter. That 2hours 45 minutes just flies past.
As Barry points out, Peterson’s lectures on personality are entertaining and thought-provoking.
I’ve been following him for a while and have found those lectures useful on both a personal and a professional level.
I was wondering when the AW would engage with the phenomenon that is JP.
I’ve been discussing him with a pal for a fair while now – my pal is one of life’s contrarians, he relishes being a Times reader in a sea of Guardianistas, for example & has actively researched the growth of conservatism ( of the ‘intellectual’ or ‘philosophical’ type). Consequently, JP came onto his radar, particularly his YouTube appearances, so I checked them out. He’s no fool, thus immediately confounding the sloppy assumption that ‘conservative’ types are ill read, simplistic types with malign intentions. He’s sincere & he’ s a good performer who can hold an audience. I’m very sceptical of charismatic speakers of any stripe but I like to work out how they operate. My conclusion is that JP essentially operates like an experienced stand up – he has a well practiced ‘schtick’ – which consists of well defined ‘bits’ as stand ups call them – ice breakers, punch lines , flights of fancy, anecdotes & conclusions – the ‘ but seriously, folks’ bits.
Like a stand up, he knows his strengths & how to deflect criticism from his weaker traits – any stand up has to be able to handle & ‘ defeat’ hecklers, who ultimately can derail the whole ‘gig’ if left unchecked.
This is the underlying reason why Cathy Newman failed to lay a glove on him over the course of about 30 mins in the celebrated interview. Every single point she aimed at him he’s heard scores of times before & can bat aside with minimum effort. He has no need to lose his cool & so he remains collected & indeed charming in the face of what his ‘interrogator’ hoped would be a demolishing onslaught.
She’s no fool either, but she was woefully ill prepared & she deserved to get a hiding for being so lax. As a result, she did a major disservice to any ’cause’ she wishes to espouse as legions of viewers have concluded that her woeful showing is the same as the values she failed to get across.
JP gained hugely from the encounter, & really justifiably so.
I was sufficiently impressed to get a copy of the book he was promoting , so ‘ job done’ on the promo front.
‘ 12 Rules For Life: an antidote to chaos’ is his essential philosophy boiled down to a few hundred pages. I’m on Chapter 4 & have yet to be outraged or ‘converted’ to a new way of personal thinking. He’s certainly not an alt.right advocate, & not really a conservative. More what I understand to be a classic liberal. The unequivocal & straightforward delivery of considered ‘ common sense’ must indeed strike many youngsters as incredibly novel & powerful, conditioned as many appear to be think in terms of relativism. He hits quite a few nails on heads, has in my view some pretty dubious notions about men & women & their respective roles & has decided that the strawman of ‘Marxist Post Modernism’ is the cancer wrecking the West’s intellectual & spiritual vigour today.
He’s more of a performer than a philospher or genuine intellectual but some aspects of his take on life are pretty potent in these uncertain & worrisome times. A lot of folk certainly seem to respond favourably to his homespun, down to earth pitch.
He’s not the Messiah, but he’s not be dismissed out of hand as a bozo either.
Thanks for that interesting and considered response @junglejim. There are a couple of your points I think it would be interesting to expand upon.
You say that Dr Peterson is “more of a performer than a philosopher or genuine intellectual”. What disqualifies him from being a genuine intellectual? One of the qualities I would hope to encounter in an intellectual would be the ability to render difficult ideas comprehensible to the layperson and, in his lectures, Peterson passes this test with flying colours. I’d be interested to hear your specific objections to him being described as an intellectual or a philosopher.
I’m interested in your use of the phrase “the strawman of ‘Marxist Post Modernism”. Am I right to assume that you believe Dr Peterson to be barking up the wrong tree on what is, after all, one of his big themes? If my assumption is correct (ignore this point if it isn’t), it seems to me that there may be a contradiction built into your analysis.
You mention “the sloppy assumption that conservative types are ill read, simplistic types with malign intentions.”
The history of conservative thinking is longer and, I’d argue, richer, than those of liberalism and socialism. One must, then, surely ask where those ‘sloppy assumptions’ come from and which purpose they may be designed to serve?
Those sloppy assumptions are ubiquitous in political and quasi-political discourse in Western culture and have become the default position for many people. (They are, I would politely suggest, one of the reasons why political threads on this message board generally look the way that they do).
If one is prepared to acknowledge the widespread existence of those ‘sloppy assumptions’, the next step should be to ask how those assumptions were developed over time. I would suggest that Marxist post-modernism (I accept that there may be other things that you could call it) has had a significant part to play in the creation of an intellectual milieu in which the quality of our political discourse has been narrowed and degraded.
That’s not to say that I am making any specific argument for conservatism here. I am saying that the absence of knowledge about conservatism (which has helped create that default mode of sloppy assumptions) is down to several factors, one of which is most certainly the influence of Marxist post-modernist thinking upon academia.
Out of interest, in what sense is Postmodernism Marxist, particularly given the tendency of Postmodernists to reject grand historical narratives?
They’re all lefties int they, gavnah? Alllll the bleedin’ same!
My interpretation, for what it’s worth, is that what has developed is actually an unholy alliance between two ideas which should contradict each other (and that’s why I said that there are other things it could –and perhaps should- be called).
The post-modernists declared the end of the ‘grand narrative’ and ushered in the age of relativism. For all that there might have been some validity in positing a worldview that at least recognised that there might be a multiplicity of narratives, each with some degree of validity, it seems obvious that the idea of all narratives carrying equal weight can only lead to chaos and confusion.
As cultural relativism took hold, the ‘oppressed – oppressor’ narrative was revivified by opportunists who recognised, in identity politics, the perfect opportunity to subvert Western culture through some rebranded aspects of Marxist thinking.
That’s about as far as I understand it, Bingo.
Cheers, Raymond.
For my part, I think he’s basically bucketing together two groups he doesn’t like and who share a single objectionable idea – the vilification of Western power structures.
Beyond that, I don’t think Marxists and Postmodernists have a great deal in common, and in many ways the two ideologies are entirely incompatible.
Thanks for posting the video. I agreed with bits of it, disagreed with others (at times the conversation felt a bit like a battle as to whose generalisations should take priority), but I found all of it interesting, particularly the manner in which it was conducted.
FWIW, i’d avoid the use of the term “red pilling”. It has regrettable connotations arising from its use by an extremely unpleasant internet community of men’s rights activists whose views are far far outside anything I imagine any sentient adult would want to associate with.
Also, The Matrix is bobbins.
I hear what you are saying Bingo, but I don’t think the term is quite as corrupted as you suggest. There is, for instance, a talented young black female vlogger -Candace Owens- who works under the name of ‘Red Pill Black’.
I’m aware of that group you mentioned, but I’d rather not concede linguistic ground to extremists. The ‘red-pill’ notion for me will always be associated with the transformative notion posited in The Matrix.
To follow your logic, we’d have to concede -for instance- that the Union Jack now ‘belongs’ to the BNP.
Ironically, I think you’ve just Cathy Newmand me there.
So … what you’re saying is that we should join the BNP?
Someone has to do something about these greedy foreign lobsters brazenly replicating our central nervous system.
“Marxist post-modernism (I accept that there may be other things that you could call it)”
We could profitably start by recognising that the terminology he actually uses is “post-modern neo-Marxism.
So … you’re saying that Neo from the Matrix was in the Marx Brothers?
It’s taken you this long to realise that?
Hi Raymond.
Re: JP as an intellectual. I want my intellecuals to be demonstrably way smarter & far better read than I am. I’m barely even a pseudo-intellectual, firmly in the middle brow range & I don’t feel JP to be much smarter than me.
He’s a good performer, impressive in front of an audience, but like a stand up he chooses his topics & targets which aren’t subject to much scrutiny in the moment. Eddie Izzard is an amazing performer able to hold huge rooms in the palm of his hand, but I wouldn’t give you twopennce for his political insights.
So it’s on the page that an intellectual/ philospher has to really convince & having got to Chapter 5 of ’12 Rules For Life’, I’m getting rather underwhelmed on several fronts. I’m not convinced he’s got an overarching philosophy much beyond some fairly routine pointers on self reliance, not expecting the world to owe you a favour & men should be men & women should be women. There’s a mosaic of notions, gathering together a rather stern OT Biblical take on creation, with a pinch of Nietzsche & Jung thrown in, & the application of his observations of evolutionary biology – I’m not convinced that the levels of serotonin in lobsters can be extrapolated to human society, to be frank.
The ‘sloppy thinking’ I was referencing is the the notion from otherwise smartish/ reasonable people that because they associate ‘conservatism’ with reaction, greed & being rather dim – they’re notion of ‘I don’t like’ conservative types’ manifests itself as an underestimation of conservative thinking. Many are they who believe or ‘feel’ that there is no real conservative philosophy & that all it amounts to is greed and cynicism about human nature and any philosophy espoused by its advocates is essentially just attempting to ‘retro fit’ a fig leaf of respectably to what is just selfishness. Such people have an alarming tendency to assume conservatives are blockheads & therefore their viewpoints will be easily demolished – a classic underestimating of the values of others.
As for JP & his railing against the Post Modernists & the Marxists (2 groups which are no more monolithic than lumping all Christians together for example, & are not interchangable as JP seems to imagine they are – he makes a very simplistic leap from his disdain for (some) Marxists – to imagining there has been a cabal of totalitarians ( Marxist, obviously) responsible for most of the ills of the 20th C . which has now mutated into a potently malign force in western academia that is succeeding in unpacking all of the glue that has held The West (TM) together for millennia.
I can’t buy that for a minute, frankly having as it does more than a whiff of ‘conspiracy’ theory.
Post Modernists are certainly not all Marxists & Marxists are certainly not all Post Modernists. JP seems convinced that Post Modernism is a 60s phenomenon ( it isn’t) & that Marx & his advocates ( as identified by JP) are the most pernicious force certainly of the 20th C, & up to today. Highly contentious at best & once scrutinised, very hard to sustain.
His personal takes on the practical everyday stuff is where he’s on the strongest ground, but when he wades into the waters of wider analysis of politics and philosophy I don’t really buy what he’s selling.
I am however enjoying reading his book & examining some of my own standpoints & beliefs.
I don’t reckon we should judge JP on the strength of the worst of types who hold him up as a messiah like figure , any more than we should dismiss every aspect of Marxist analysis or Post Modernism because of BS or carnage carried out under that ‘banner’.
😀
Thanks again for taking the time to reply, sir. I will take you up on a few points.
– You believe that the idea of Marxists being ‘responsible for most of the ills of the 20th Century’ has ‘more than a whiff’ of conspiracy theory about it. If I said that this looks like you are giving Marxists a remarkably easy ride, I’d be guilty of a spectacular understatement. I believe that Marxist ideas, in one guise or another, had a catastrophic impact on the 20th century, so I’m guessing we won’t find much common ground on that one.
– Evolutionary biology is a new subject for me and I would be out of my depth trying to talk about it right now. I would, however, recommend that you check out the work of Brett Weinstein, who has acknowledged some common ground with Peterson. There are some excellent podcasts featuring Weinstein (a man very much of the liberal left) and I’d particularly recommend the ones hosted by Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan.
(If you don’t already know Brett Weinstein’s story, you should google ‘Evergreen State College – Brett Weinstein’. Once you’ve absorbed the surreal madness of that, my guess would be that you might be prepared to revise your view that there are no ‘malign forces’ at work in western academia).
– You have provided a definition of what you meant by ‘sloppy thinking’, but I don’t think you addressed my question, which was, perhaps, clumsily framed thus:
“If one is prepared to acknowledge the widespread existence of those ‘sloppy assumptions’, the next step should be to ask how those assumptions were developed over time … one must surely ask where those ‘sloppy assumptions’ come from and which purpose they may be designed to serve?”
– My last point (you’ll be relieved to hear):
Unlike the majority of posters on this site, I use my real name. This, I think, encourages me to be careful with my words. I work for the education department of a Scottish local authority and I would quite like to keep my job.
If we were having a coffee or a drink together, this is the point at which I would bludgeon you with a succession of anecdotes to back my assertion that cultural relativism does not just influence what is taught in schools; it utterly dominates it. I will ready concede that many of the folk who are tasked with inculcating these ideas would not necessarily regard themselves as ‘neo-Marxists’ or ‘post-modernists’, but those ideas come from somewhere and many of them are, I believe, pernicious.
I would dispute the notion that Marxist ideas have had a catastrophic effect. The Labour Theory of Value or Materialist view of history, to give two examples, are pretty innocuous and contain a large portion of what many would recognise as common sense.
What *has* been catastrophic, at both national and small group level, is Leninism.
Isn’t Leninism a catastrophic effect of Marxism?
I guess it depends whether we’re talking about history or philosophy.
You beat me to it, Mr Bingo. That very point.
No. Leninism is a fundamentaly undemocratic, authoritarian approach to society that poisons everything it touches. I think the general argument for it is that the means justifies the ends, while I would agree with those who argue that the means to a large extent determines the ends.
It doesn’t flow from Marx and Engels but from the political environment in early 20th Century Russia.
I agree that there are some fairly material distinctions between Leninism and Marxism (philosophically), but I think it’s tough to argue that Leninism didn’t emerge from Marxism (historically).
Leninism was a rupture from traditional Marxism, but it’s quite difficult to imagine Leninism occurring without Marx.
As a historical fact, Lenin called himself a Marxist, I agree. However it would be an error (albeit a frequent one) to treat Marxism and Leninism as synonyms.
Oh, absolutely. The two philosophies are not the same.
But if one were arguing that Marxism has had a catastrophic effect, one might be on fairly safe ground in pointing to Leninism (which we agree has been catastrophic) and saying “whatever the differences, the latter would not have occurred without the former”. Not all effects are intended.
FWIW, I’m a big fan of Marx. The Communist Manifesto is one of the most beautiful and persuasive books ever written.
I’m not convinced it actually works in practice, and I think his work has been co-opted to some truly appalling ends, but I can still totally appreciate it. Marx himself gets the thumbs up from me (bet he’ll be chuffed with that).
And I agree. I just think that Leninism and Marxism are so different and distinct that it does not help to use one instead of the other. China, for example, is run on Leninist lines but I doubt if Marx would see any of his ideas there (I certainly don’t).
If Marxism is being criticised per se, rather than the Leninist aberration, then it would be more transparent to make that distinction – otherwise it begins to look like sleight of mouth.
I think to get anything out of Marx’s political writings you have to separate the analysis from the programme; or, if you like, the diagnosis from the prescription. The former is cogent and intellectually coherent; the latter is based on a (literally) fatal misapprehension about What People Are Like.
I think that’s absolutely spot on, Moose.
Lando – as I say, I think it’s accurate to argue that Leninism is a historical consequence of Marxism, but inaccurate to suggest that it’s a philosophical inevitability of Marxism. I suspect that’s the delta in what we’re saying here.
I certainly agree that it’s unhelpful to treat the two as somehow interchangeable.
Hi again, Raymond.
Apologies for the tardy reply on my part – a combination of fatigue & realworld stuff getting in the way.
First off, it behoves me to say that I appreciate being able to have a civil exchange of views – sadly too rare online these days. Mostly what we see are salvos that barely consider anything the other party has said, with the endgame being an attempt to deliver a ‘gotcha’ one liner that closes the dialogue – a virtual ‘mic drop’. I like to think we can at least improve on that at the AW.
I also look forward to checking out your rcommendations for further reading.
For the record I’m not a Marxist (& have never been one), but I have encountered quite a few, from genial broadminded types to utter dolts, which I guess puts them on a footing with most other collective groupings.
Your question of where does this ‘sloppy thinking’ come from, & what purpose does it serve? is an excellent one & possibly central to the whole reason that JP has discovered he has the ears of so many folk right now (especially younger types).
My contrary pal that I discuss JP with loves a pat phrase, & in this case his offering was that the whole JP phenomenon is a symptom of ‘ the shrill binary of late modernity’. I’m not 100 % sure what he’s on about either but I think he’ s hoping to copyright the phrase for use in the continuing ‘culture wars’ or skirmishes at least.
Having dispensed with the facetious take on things, I do seriously think that like most of the *really* big issues, there is no single starting point, but for want of anywhere else to pitch in, my guess would be the trauma immediately following WW2. As Chiang Kai-shek is alleged to have replied when asked about the significance of the French Revolution, ‘ It is too early to say’, so the impact & implications of the Holocaust & Hiroshima & Nagasaki, in my view colour the whole late 20th C landscape, politically & culturally. Without wishing to sound remotely Post Modern, nothing can seriously be examined without the context of those events. Both were unprecedented & both meant that in fundamental ways, the world (& how thinking people looked at it) could never be the same. I’d contend that it is in this context that the original Post Modernists attempted to make some kind of sense of what had happened & what might happen in the future. To use a trite phrase, the exhausted survivors of WW2 as well as picking through the rubble & beginning to start again, also has their minds blown by what advanced, civilised people had done to each other. In the case of the Holocaust, what many felt unable to escape was the realisation that this was perpatrated by one of the world’s most advanced nations, capable of producing much of the finest music, art & philosophy the world has seen. My take is that schools of thought emerged that felt the need to completely tear down the sense that ‘ the West’ had any business claiming any high ground after what its most advanced nations had done. The other nation cited, let us not forget, is the only modern nation actually built on genocide that also has the distinction of having twice used atomic weapons on civilians but sees itself as a beacon of exceptionalism & an example to the rest of the world. For all of its plus points, the USA has the darkest of undersides imaginable.
It’s not hard to see how people would seek to align themselves with almost anything that was ‘other’ to this. Inevitably some of those were going to identify ( naively, to put it mildly) with the bloc that appeared diametrically opposed to the capitalists of the West & others would formulate critiques influenced to greater or lesser extents by the prime critic of capitalism, K Marx Esq.
My pal’s view is that the dense & nuanced stuff produced by the likes of Foucault & Derrida (utterly inpenetrable to most, & possibly 99% bullshit) found its way to American academia at a uniquely fertile & receptive time. The civil rights struggles & opposition to the Vietnam war were live, potent issues whose strongest proponents were often on the ‘radical’ campuses – that were often hotbeds of opposition to the state itself so in strange days, strange things have a habit of happening.
In time, some aspects of that oppositional culture became actually embedded in the fabric of faculties. Being the USA, an awful lot of of the standard of higher education is pretty poor & the net result over 2 or 3 decades can be likened to students absorbing a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of what was once a coherent if marginal set of ideas but is now just lazy received opinion. Faculties can easily become closed fiefdoms with key people doing pretty well & with no real incentive to examine what it is they espouse, especially if it’s now an orthodoxy of its own.
I imagine JP & others of a similar disposition has had to listen to plenty of sloppy platitudes from ‘ big names on campus’ who essentially have a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo & nothing to gain by rocking the boat. Raising a voice against such people & their stances can be detrimental to one’s job prospects, even when ‘everybody’ knows that much of what they spout is cobblers. The fact that JPs perceived opposition to such rot & his common sense stance have found an audience is therefore not such a great mystery.
The ‘straw man’ I cited in a previous post is not I believe a coherent, deliberate cabal with a specific sinister agenda, but rather the end result of a drawn out process of dilution of often legitimate concerns that have drifted to the extent that many of those who mouth them are not actually sure how & why we got to this point.
If JP’s holding forth didn’t resonate, he wouldn’t have an audience – but he does & he’ s a pop phenemon, who realising he’s onto something has run with the ball & here we are – with mega online hits & a runaway best seller.
I still think however that just because he’s able to point out some salient stuff doesn’t mean he has correctly identified the wider picture of what narks him & has the answers any more than I do. His fan club is way, way bigger though, & so he is significant.
I think his biggest error is to hold up The West as a paragon of virtues, that encompass his traditional take on things ( he’s very big on values) but doesn’t or won’t acknowledge that those values failed to prevent much of the worst behaviour the relative modern world has seen. It’s not to say that the much of what he loathes isn’t spot on , but he seems downright myopic about the myriad flaws in the system he values so much.
Apologies for what is essentially a stream of consciousness rant, but hope some of it is coherent.
😀
Very interesting post.
FWIW, I wrote my dissertation on the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism.
In a nutshell, my take (callow as it probably was) was vaguely similar to the above – I’ve always seen Modernism as the flower of the enlightenment, the moment where Western civilisation bucked off the shackles of religious ideology and tried to find something with which to replace it all. Belief in god was supplanted by belief in man, and in the perfectability of human society. When you start to dig, it’s striking how heavily certain Modernist works rely on forms and structures borrowed from religion, but with the theism removed.
Somewhere around the time of the two world wars, probably culminating at the gates of Auschwitz, the Modernist programme met its end. Humans were not the masters of their own destiny. Technology was as likely to produce Zyklon B as to permit human transcendence. The arc of progress could not be relied upon.
Postmodernism is the grief period of Western civilisation. If we can believe in neither god or man, then we’ll believe in nothing at all. The result is an epidemic of cynicism and nihilism, a phase where we’ve become better at tearing things down than building things of lasting merit. Objective truth is suspect, everything is relative and our thoughts turn inwards to a sort of collective navel gazing.
That was how I saw it back in the late 90s, anyway.
An excellent summary, sir.
The question now is … what next?
Thank you!
I’m inclined to guess that another big war will come next, followed by another cultural reset of some description.
There’s a part of me that wonders whether major wars don’t serve some sort of socio-historic function. I guess the question is whether humanity can actually survive another one to see what comes next.
That’s a reasonable guess and, in my pessimistic moments, I also fear that a war and /or some major technological catastrophe (perhaps caused by a massive solar flare or by Artificial Intelligence going disastrously wrong) will be the thing that forces us to re-set the dial.
In my optimistic moments, I imagine us entering a new age of enlightenment, forging a new relationship with the planet and with a variety of benevolent technologies. And, who knows, were we to discover that we are not alone in the universe, that might also be a philosophical game-changer.
Whatever the case, it seems like we’ll have to re-boot our imaginations in one way or another.
Excellent reply, sir, and thanks again for taking the time. I found myself nodding along with much of it (I also think your friend is on to something with that ‘shrill binary of late modernity’ phrase).
I think you may be doing JP a bit of an injustice when you say that he “doesn’t or won’t acknowledge” that Western values “failed to prevent much of the worst behaviour the … modern world has seen.” When he talks about the gulags or the holocaust, Peterson consistently makes the point that we can’t, as individuals, understand what happened until we accept that we could easily have been the people running the gas chambers. I took from this that his observation allowed (in fact, necessitated) an extrapolation from the ‘individual’ to the ‘societal’ level; if a person can succumb to his or her inner monster, so might a society. Maybe I’m being charitable, but that’s how I interpreted it and, in that sense, assumed that even his championing of Western values allowed for the possibility that those values might easily be subverted, to a catastrophic extent, by dark forces.
I’ve been talking with various people about the JP phenomenon and, as I said above, your friend’s observation resonates with me. The interesting topic is not ‘who’ he is or ‘how’ he is succeeding; we know the answers to those questions already. The really interesting question is … why?
His recent speaking engagements in London (booked before the transmission of that Channel 4 interview) sold out in minutes. A few weeks ago, an American college campus invited him to speak at their 400-seat theatre. He was ‘no-platformed’ by the usual zealots, so the organisers of the event decided to book the only available local alternative, a 1,500-seat concert hall. It sold out.
Much of the criticism characterises this audience as ‘alt-right angry white males’ (although mostly male, Peterson’s audience is clearly mixed), but that level of ‘analysis’ -and it is an act of generosity to describe it thus- will get us nowhere.
All it does is reinforces one of his key messages: namely, that identity politics is a dead-end street and -at the end of that street- lies a whole heap of trouble.
When I was growing up, to have assumed (and judged) someone’s views from their ethnicity, age or gender would have been considered discriminatory, vulgar and racist; now it has become the norm.
We are in a deep hole with this stuff, yet some folk want to keep on digging. I’d suggest that one of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is that many people have decided that they don’t like the view from that hole.
He’s a conundrum, to be sure. Articulate, well-informed, absolutely on top of his subject and above all calm in the face of some pretty brutal reframing of his case. It’s confounding; I like my alt-right spokespeople to be abuse-hurling louts in balaclavas (like, on the other side, the Corbynist demonstrators who shouted ‘you ain’t worth debating mate’ at Rees-Mogg when he went to talk to them). It’s much easier to write people off as extremists if their behaviour is extreme.
I feel a bit sorry for Newman, she’s a journalist who has to turn her hand to any subject, while he does this all day long. There’s something of the Richard Dawkins about him, in that you can find him very hard to disagree with, but still not like him at all.
I feel a bit sorry for her, too. I’ve just looked at her Twitter feed and literally everything she posts has hundreds of replies from smart-arses going, ‘So what you’re saying is….’
And it’s usually something to do with lobsters.
As in… “I’d like to treat Cathy to a lobster dinner”, which is unpardonably forward, if you haven’t been introduced.
Having watched the video, I think this is basically what happens when a style of debate that works great on Twitter is deployed against an adult in the real world. The little game of trying to box your opponent into a corner where they’re perceived to have Said The Bad Thing is a pretty limited stratagem, all in all.
I can’t speak for other disciplines, but in literary criticism postmodernism and Marxism don’t cancel each other out. It’s gone out of fashion now, but New Historicism has a foot in both camps.
The misapprehension comes from hearing the word Marxism and assuming it’s about politics and economics, rather than being used more broadly as a cultural paradigm (…yes, I used the word paradigm…have the last 30 years happened?).
I don’t know if Jonathan Dollimore is a Corbynista, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if he wasn’t.
Well… Marxism IS about politics and economics. You can apply the theory elsewhere, but Das Kapital doesn’t spend that much time on Chaucer.
The central problem with reconciling the two disciplines is that Marxism is a classic Modernist manifesto, and Postmodernism is… well, kinda over that stuff.
Obviously, where there’s a will there’s a way, but if I ever met a self declared Postmodernist Marxist I’d assume they must be suffering cognitive dissonance out the wazoo (one for Gary there – he loves wazoos).
Sidebar alert….Marx’s literary criticism is actually very good… and, like a lot of his stuff, not very Marxist.
Just to add to my recommendation of his 20 part lecture series – an amusing sideshow is watching many of his students trudging into the lecture hall, long after the lesson’s started. More seriously, his point about universities actually being a place where challenges can and should take place, is important. The Guardian (or at least much of its web space) seems to have nailed its colours to the identity politics approach, whereby if you haven’t experienced exactly what I have, then you can’t possibly comment.
You can’t comment either way. The Guardian turned off comments on the vast majority of its ID politics articles about a year ago, thereby freeing themselves to proceed well and truly down the rabbit hole.
I don’t think Jordan Peterson would have much time for me at all, as someone who couldn’t care less about responsibility or career (ugh!) and who’s more than happy to spend his life just going to the pool or beach.
Watching that interview reminded me of watching Piers Morgan “debate” gun control with Ben Shapiro. On paper, Piers’ p.o.v. might have had my support, but in practice his complete inability/refusal to listen and insistence on interpreting everything to suit his agenda and just repeating his own dogmatic slogans didn’t stand a chance against a higher IQ.
Yes – that’s probably where I part company with Peterson as well. I think he has a very very narrow view of masculinity, and I say that as someone who largely (though not entirely) confirms to it.
Ohhhh, get her!
I can’t stand Morgan, but be fair, at least he did well enough there to keep his temper under control. That arrogant, deeply unpleasant, creepy little shit Shapiro, who can do nothing more than parrot paranoid gibberish about how the risk of tyrannical political collapse in the U.S.A. can be mitigated by allowing every no-neck with a rusty pickup to run around tooled up with an assault rifle, just deserves a smack in the mouth.
I love it when people, calmly and logically, stand up to a meeja roasting.
Even so, poor Dr Peterson didn’t get to complete one sentence. In a prolonged half hour interview. Must be some kind of record.
John Humphrys started all that shit, the stupid old bastard. And he is stupid. It’s not journalism , it’s ego (in his case anyway).
Ruined Mastermind, that did. 0-0 draws every week – it was like Ron Greenwood’s England tenure all over again…
“You’ve started, but you won’t finish”
Yes, but they were veeeery long sentences.
If I was interviewing him, I’d probably try and disarm him with a well placed yawn.
Brilliant idea! Much better than exceeeeeeeeeeeeeeedingly loooooooooooooong questons.
Perhaps it’s me being old fashioned, but when I encounter these kind of people the same thought comes to mind, they’re just not very nice are they?
Being nice is weak, you big girl.
I guess this opinion piece in The Guardian is entirely predictable:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest
“…his arguments are riddled with conspiracy theories and crude distortions of subjects, including postmodernism, gender identity and Canadian law, that lie outside his field of expertise. Therefore, there is no need to caricature his ideas in order to challenge them. “
Isn’t Dorian Lynskey a music journalist by trade?
The Guardian is running a number of hit pieces on Jordan Peterson.
Who could have predicted that?
It just proves there’s a conspiracy, doesn’t it? Although ignoring him would prove that too. It’s a win-win.
I don’t particularly agree with Peterson’s philosophy or (as you’ve also indicated above) his views on men/women and their relationships.
However, I think part of the point Raymond is making here is re: how Peterson’s opponents respond to him. The interview at the top of the thread is one example, the Guardian piece above is another.
Neither really engages with what he’s actually saying (you get a far better and more even handed level of analysis from Junglejim above), preferring to attempt to hatchet him instead. It’s fairly indicative of how public discourse works now, which is a great shame.
Indeed. I didn’t think it was too bad – it’s just an example of the style used for interviews these days. I didn’t think the Guardian piece was too bad either. I find it difficult to understand the almost supernatural power conferred on the Guardian by the right, tbh. It has a fairly small circulation. I read it most Saturdays and find a wide range of writing, some of which is amusing, some of which is dull. The notion that it is somehow part of a sinister conspiracy that is Really Running Things is pretty risible.
I dunno. In both cases (article and interview) I think Peterson’s opposite number had shown up having already decided that he was A Very Bad Thing that must be given a shoeing. There’s no real engagement, just accusation.
Dorian Lynskey, in particular, repeatedly tells the reader that Peterson’s views are ersatz without ever really fully interrogating any of them. His focus is far more on telling us how horrible the guy’s audience are.
As I say, I don’t agree with him, but I don’t think he’s some sort of of evil that must be stamped on. It’s possible to disagree and still show a bit of respect (as you’ve indeed done in your very pertinent post below).
The problem with this sort of thing – as with climate change deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, homeopaths etc. – is that it is actually quite difficult to engage with without entering into the alternate reality on which it is based and spending a lot of time unpicking it. And doing so confers some sort of spurious credibility. So I’ve some sympathy with the journos, even while agreeing that neither is particularly illuminating.
It really requires a New Yorker-style long read, in which Peterson is given as much rope as he needs.
Coincidentally, there was an article on Peterson in last week’s New Yorker. A review rather than an interview:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity
“I find it difficult to understand the almost supernatural power conferred on the Guardian by the right, tbh”
A reasonable point, well made.
Presumably you’d make the same observation about the left and The Daily Mail if someone had provided a link to one of their skewed stories?
Or does that comment about ‘small circulation’ give you a pass?
In large part, yes. The Guardian isn’t quite as irrelevant as, say, the Morning Star however it’s a small part of a larger (if dwindling) print media landscape. The mass-market tabloids such as the Mail have much more influence.
It’s also true to say, I believe, that the Guardian operates to an overall higher standard of objectivity than the Mail, which is essentially a crude propaganda tool.
I’m quite partial to data myself. Sad to say, I actually get quite excited by it. So here’s some 21st century Scottish data about the agricultural sector: http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0052/00521489.pdf
There is some hair-raising stuff amidst the detail. However, here’s one headline: If you are a woman looking to inherit the family farm, the most important qualification isn’t a commitment to farming, or qualifications, or technical competence. It’s not having a brother.
This is just one economic sector, of course and one that might be described as more conservative than most. However, it does serve to shine some light on what the real issues are and, more positively, on the progress made elsewhere.
I found the most interesting aspect of the interview to be how he was focussed on ideas, whereas she was focussed on him. It’s Christopher Hitchens’ point about how journalism has turned on its head the traditional idea that you collected information about someone to provide their reputation: now your reputation precedes you and the story is altered to fit that.
CN’s persistent use of “so what you’re saying is …” is annoying as the OP says, but is also ironic in three ways:
1. She proceeds to say something which wasn’t what JP was saying at all.
2. She doesn’t need to translate unless you’re a moron: what he was saying was what he just said, we all just heard him say it?
3. She clearly isn’t interested in what he’s saying at all, as she seems determined to make this ad hominem.
The argument that “she has to interview lots of people about lots of things” doesn’t hold water for me because, errr, that’s her job?
It really doesn’t matter whether or why you agree with JP or not: my view of the OP is that @Raymond says, it highlights a depressing trend in the inability to tackle arguments on their own level, it’s always got to get back to “how does that make you feel?”
A tweet from Dr Peterson: Women: if you usurp men they will rebel and fail and you will have to jail or enslave them.
In short: he isn’t an intellectual. He’s a wanker.
Are those two things mutually exclusive?
That’s why I was frustrated with the interview. His argument should have been skewered. Instead, he came across as the sensible one.
“Violent attacks are what happens when men don’t have partners…the cure for that is monogamy”
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/may/23/jordan-peterson-public-intellectual-isnt-clever-violent-men-monogamy
He’s a cunt.
Someone suggests:
“Men who transition to a monogamous, or less competitive, mode of sexual behavior (fewer partners since last wave), reduce their risk for violence. Results were not accounted for by marital status or other more readily accepted explanations of violence. Findings suggest that competition for sex be further examined as a potential cause of male violence.” – Patrick M. Sefferin, The Competition Violence Hypothesis: Sex, Marriage and Male Aggression
To which someone says:
“It’s been a truism among anthropologists and biologically-oriented psychologists for decades that all human societies face two primary tasks: regulation of female reproduction (so the babies don’t die, you see) and male aggression (so that everyone doesn’t die). The social enforcement of monogamy happens to be an effective means of addressing both issues, as most societies have come to realize” – Peterson
Which becomes:
‘Why won’t women — all these wives and witches — just behave?’ – NYT
Which becomes:
‘We’re just told we should cure violent men with our magical vaginas’ – Guardian Fashion pages
Which becomes:
“He’s a cunt.” – Afterword
They admit to having magical vaginas then?
I saw that woman with the ping-pong balls at Blackpool once, perhaps she’s not so special after all.
Blackpool? Really? Well I never.
Well… it might have been Lytham St. Annes. Somewhere up there.
As it were.
Normoss, probably
Ee, Normoss.
Sometimes the feed line IS the punchline, Moose.
Hoi-hup-la!
Until you’ve seen it being done on the snooker table at United Services, Portsmouth on Gentlemen’s Evening, you haven’t lived
…and now a short intermission while Moose decides whether to go with ‘kissing the pink’ or ‘leaving the brown on the cushion.’
Too busy chalking up me cue.
Even the guy positing the Competition Violence Hypothesis says more research is required. Why do *clever* people, like Peterson, extrapolate from poorly research evidence? I’m pretty sure Michael Gove is a clever person, for example, and he does this all the time. Just the other day, he was making some bizarre statements about clean air.
Vaginas are magical, though? No-one seriously doubts that, do they?
There’s not a lot of clean air near him.
Aren’t all hypotheses (or ‘poorly researched evidence’ as you call them) by definition in need for further research?
Each of these comments is an extrapolation for the previous one. I assume everyone involved, the two journalists and our man Ruffers, are clever people. The interesting thing for me is how quickly the reductio ad cuntum happens once it’s been decided someone is a bad person. It’s got very little to do with the substance of what they say.
With you on the vaginas, by the way.
Absolutely. Hypotheses are merely guesses. What gets my goat is clever people quoting a hypothesis as though it’s a fact.
“Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity.”
(Speech at Carleton Place)
I stand by my diagnosis. He’s a wanker.
I’d like to see even the most ardent Peterson followers defend him after this.
https://i.imgur.com/FaqLAD6.jpg