“Seriously?”: Part Two of Critiquing Jordan Peterson’s Politics
From Lobsters to Bastards, By Way of Suicide
Part One can be found here.
The sub-Reddit dedicated to all things JBP is fascinating, if for no other reason than it shows how cults of personalities develop around identifying and defining The Line. Just what would/does such and such think about x, so I know what to think about x? Peterson obviously isn’t to blame for this, and I can’t help sympathising. As an aspiring psychoanalyst, he is no doubt very conscious and a little perturbed by the way many have come to view him: discovering you’re suddenly Dad to thousands of strangers can’t come easily.
One issue on which there seems to be little doubt are his views on the biological determination of gender. Articles upon articles have been written assessing these normative views on gender, and by people with far more knowledge on the subject than me, so I’ll attempt something else.
Reading through his recent bestseller, the following passage grabbed the senses.
“There isn’t a shred of hard evidence to support any of their [the pomos’] central claims: that Western society is pathologically patriarchal; that the prime lesson of history is that men, rather than nature, were the primary source of the oppression of women (rather than, as in most cases, their partners and supporters); that all hierarchies are based on power and aimed at exclusion. Heirarchies exist for many reasons — some arguably valid, some not — and are incredibly ancient, evolutionary speaking. Do male crustaceans oppress female crustaceans? Should their hierarchies be upended?”
Nothing discredits the illusion of a great, gravitational force called Progress more than the recurrence of arguments like this. If you thought “surely we’ve moved past all that,” you had better think again sunshine.
First of, if all the research dependent on the social psychological categories of the ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ do not rise to the level of hard evidence, how much of Peterson’s academic work, heavily dependent on similar constructions, can be considered valid?
Secondly, the problem with relying on Is to attain Ought, is that naturalistic justifications can used to defend practically everything and anything. Prior to women’s liberation in western Europe and North America, exactly the same sort of arguments were used to counter calls for female suffrage or equality in the work sphere. Only previous traditionalists would at least do readers the credit of comparing humans with other mammals. (It’s clear today’s Left is in a right old state, but the Right’s newfound prophet is regularly appealing to crustaceans in order to defend the establishment.)
By the same token one might say remind readers of Kropotkin, and his observation that ‘mutual aid’ has determined the success of a great many species. Wolves, bats, walruses, otters and tapirs display high levels of cooperation; others like termites, bonobos and macaques, that with egalitarianism to boot. And, in case you’re wondering, they all have that “gotcha!” ingredient serotonin, too.
On the level to which Peterson asks us to descend, it would be equally just (and oh-so-intellectually ‘dark’) to argue that Nature is advocating anarcho-syndicalist arrangements for her one creation capable of both meta-cognition and system analysis. Yet, a form of capitalism practised by a few nations — and, in all of them, established with tremendous savagery — for a miniscule period of history, is for Peterson the ideal state. (Freud ably dispels readers of such simplistic notions, so perhaps our subject didn’t read him as carefully as he did Jung?) The slightest deviation, at least towards one end of the political spectrum, will unleash all sorts of demons.
Peterson has also argued that a denunciation of the “male-dominated power hierarchy”, sometimes known as the patriarchy — again, which at every other opportunity he tells audiences doesn’t exist — is a sign of “ingratitude, built on resentment”. The same malady that afflicts the Palestinians. Real wisdom, he claims, comes from recognising that only an “evil tyrant” can be a “wise king”. (The realm of whom, I can’t help feeling, is Sadomasochism.)
If this balanced, ‘circle of life’ mysticism really does form the foundation of his worldview, why doesn’t he equally criticise those propagating the “wise king” perspective? Peterson has dedicated countless hours to yelling at undergraduates who look to the heads of banks, nations and the corporations which dominate their lives, and see evil tyrants; so what about their opposite?
Aren’t those who always accept the stated ambitions of Western foreign policy makers, who sincerely believe that the offices of state are somehow holy (and those who fill them are automatically meritable, despite the evidence), and, say, royalists, just as much a threat to the delicate balance?
I would agree that things are more nuanced than either interpretation allow. Yet, seemingly without fail, when it comes to power, Peterson adopts the role of courtier. (Except when he’s imagining the golden boy of the neoliberal establishment as Lenin 2.0.)
Christopher Lasch, no orthodox leftist, was all too familiar with the ‘ingrate’ barb JBP rehashes. Lasch responded by arguing that criticism of the society to which one belongs can be a true act of loyalty. That shining a light on corrupt power can be an attempt to regain, or build, legitimate authority.
But outside of the usual concerns about “SJWs” spreading their influence within, American, Canadian and British institutions are, for Peterson, essentially above reproach. He never allows himself — or anyone within screeching distance — a critique of the fundamentals. Even if these societies have come to be ruled by chaotic free markets, invisible hands, increasingly unwritten rules and the unaccountable high priests of Credit, his idealisation of the structure knows no bounds. And besides, all you need is competence, and you too could rise to the top of these dominance hierarchies. (Which, again, seemingly crumble outside of their respective national borders.) So what are you complaining about? Isn’t that all that matters?
Another epoch-defining quote:
“In societies that are well functioning — not in comparison to a hypothetical utopia, but contrasted with other existing or historical cultures — competence, not power, is a prime determiner of status. Competence. Ability. Skill. Not power. This is obvious both anecdotally and factually. No one with brain cancer is equity-minded enough to refuse the service of the surgeon with the best education, the best reputation and, perhaps, the highest earnings.”
I’m sorry, but is this really, truly one of the great minds of our age? Someone who thinks anecdotes and facts are by definition mutually exclusive (he embellishes a lot at dinner parties?), and thinks he can get by without ever defining what he means by vital, foundational concepts like competence and power?
He also has the tendency of insisting “competence is power,” even though, and he’s in a distinct minority among social scientists here, he suggests the latter shares no correlation with status. All without stopping to assess whether being competent in a position of power itself justifies the existence of those roles. And can we assume he means, here, those Anglo-American countries he typically heaps praise upon, even if he chooses obscurity when committing ink to paper?
Consider how he appends the above with not a single scientific source, even though he assures us there are facts which support his case. Instead he returns to his screed against the usual suspects. What am I to conclude other than by asking, “what is Peterson fudging?”
I wouldn’t linger, only one of his key pieces of advice is to “be precise in your speech.” He writes this in 12 Rules not long after using the term “web of life” and the pseud-tier “confront the chaos of Being.” Elsewhere, we’re told “it’s been an even shorter fifty years since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ignited the environmental movement. Fifty years! That’s nothing! That’s not even yesterday.”
The Big They
On his recent trip to the United Kingdom, Peterson was asked to address a pressing social problem in the West: the rising, tragic trend of suicide among young men. In the UK it is the single largest cause of death for males under the age of 40. He got understandably upset, and made some very good preliminary remarks about the lack of worth and meaning that many from this demographic — my demographic — feel. He followed it up with absolute tosh.
This is both important, and personally relevant, so excuse the lengthy quote.
“We’re alienating young men. We’re telling them they’re patriarchal oppressors and denizens of rape culture and tyrants in waiting. We fail to discriminate between their competence and their tyranny, and it’s awful…”
And how has that happened? “Oh God that’s a complicated question,” he prefaces, before, incredibly, providing the same old.
“It’s partly happened because every culture has a tyrannical element. I mean, our culture isn’t perfect — there is oppressive elements to it, y’know? It’s not completely fair. So some of it is just the age old observation that you don’t get a culture without a bit of a tyranny. A lot of it is resentment and failure to take responsibility. It’s instead of people looking at the part they play at making the world a dark and terrible place, and blame something like the Patriarchy, and assume that all the men who compose it are somehow malevolent tyrants, or tyrants in waiting. It’s ideological possession, and there’s no excuse for it. It’s motivated by resentment mostly.”
Well. He then goes on to praise “Western civilisation1,” adding that “to consider [it] a corrupt, patriarchal tyranny, and to lay that at the feet of young men, and then to tell them they have to be discriminated against because of the systematic, let’s say racism and misogyny of the past. It’s appalling.”
This isn’t a difference of emphasis, I am now seriously considering if Peterson is coming to my screen from a parallel universe. Germaine Greer had nothing to do with my blues.
Could it be that our glorified ‘self-help’ guru cannot think in anything other than a handful of sound-bites — which to his credit, manage to resonate with men my age — and that can explain the astonishing repetitiveness? (I’m suddenly, and strangely, reminded of that oft-voiced criticism about the seductiveness of victimhood.) Or is it something worse. Does he really think that Postmodern Neo-Marxism (‘PMNM’ from here on out) has something to do with high suicide rates? Why else would he roll out those stock arguments against his terrible They?
The process of alienation that makes many susceptible to suicide is complex. And there’s certainly scant reason to believe that ideas with little currency outside of campuses, and virtually no institutional backing, are chief causes (although I await this social science wizard to demonstrate it). The World Health Organisation has a far more compelling case when they claim material factors, such as poverty and unemployment, are driving the tragedy.
And the psychologists Curran and Hill have gone even further. They argue that we should consider the culture which accompanied, and propelled the economic liberalisation that pummelled many of the domestic industries in the West.
When the New Right captured the state, it waged war on the unions — a traditional guarantor of social solidaity — and the bureaucracy. Through local government initiatives, business practices and the rapidly colonised civil service, its disciples preached greed, competition and ‘self improvement’. This “engineering of the free market”, as it has been called, sought to turn people into entrepreneurs, further atomised from their fellow citizens. The resulting society was one that no longer viewed itself as such. Individual perfectionism and hucksterism were the virtues to be aspired to, whereas systematic efforts to improve the nation’s health, education, or reduce its inequalities were rejected. Practically everything, that is, outside of the military. (It used to be that the police force was a protected sector too, for obvious reasons. Here, neoliberalism is now undermining itself.)
The free market could solve all, and, should you find yourself lacking in any way, those at the top would tell you there’s but one to blame: yourself. (Satirising the neocons of his era, Alexander Cockburn drew attention to the Victorian echoes in such rhetoric: “Pauper, heal thyself!”)
Peterson might have taken notice of this paper if the researchers had limited themselves to the negative effects of social media and the surveillance culture it has facilitated. Where there undoubtedly exists an often unbearable pressure to project a successful, “virtuous,” socially-acceptable self. But Curran and Hill do not shy away from the greater assault on the post-war social contract either, and the institution-undermining, steroid-capitalism values it promoted.
That all of that would’ve led to rampant anxiety, depression and despair in a subject population is unsurprising to non-ideologues. And the broader truth these researchers acknowledge is important, if nothing new. Systematic theorists going back to Durkheim have seen suicide as a fundamentally structural phenomenon; greatly shaped by the prevailing ideological and economic conditions.
Indeed, he too was acutely aware of the dangers posed by individualistic cultures:
But the individual in himself is not sufficient as an end for himself. He is too small a thing. Not only is he confined in space, he is also narrowly limited in time. So when we have no other objective than ourselves, we cannot escape from the feeling our efforts are finally destined to vanish into nothing, since that is where we must return. But we recoil from the idea of annihilation. In such a state, we should not have the strength to live, that is to say to act and struggle, since nothing is to remain of all the trouble that we take. In a word, the state of egoism is in contradiction with human nature and hence too precarious to endure.
It’s a shame, too, Peterson hasn’t read a word of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi or Orestes Brownson, all of whom were more convincing when they linked pervasive alienation to the workings of capital, and the cultural accompaniment, hyper-individualism.
What can motivate ordinary men and women to behave decently most of the time and heroically in emergencies?
Perhaps it might help to reduce the many temptations to behave otherwise. Chief among these in 21st-century America are the relentless sexualization of advertising and entertainment, the pervasive economic insecurity engineered by business and government (especially Republican) policies, and the enfeeblement of civic life entailed by extreme laissez-faire ideology. These things make it harder to maintain dignity or restraint and to trust or care about other people. None of them are necessary consequences of skepticism or intellectual freedom, and some of them are promoted most vigorously by people who loudly proclaim themselves religious.
So, how peculiar that a rise in suicide among men and women corresponds with a rise in mental illnesses that is, to a significant degree, attributable to an empirically-understood sociocultural restructuring. It’s almost as if, falling into that trap all first year psychology students are warned against, JBP is mistaking correlation for causation. He identifies something he happens not to like: the post-1989 Left. Which in fact was a reaction to the Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolutions’ (something the former was astute enough to see), and wishes us to believe that that is to blame for another, terrible consequence of that social engineering project.
Alternatively, perhaps 2016’s Ghostbusters trumped all that.
With characteristic tact, not only did Peterson imply that can thousands of deaths be linked to thinkers of the contemporary Left. This political tendency as a whole is, according to him, to blame for the rise of the alt-right. He dislikes being told that he’s in their orbit, or they in his, but he certainly shares a common enemy.
Perception Management — The Alt-Right Connection
Everything comes back to the same first cause: the corrupting anti-Western Left.
What of the skinheads, Nixon’s Moral Majority, the National Front, and the ‘besieged white’ neuroses that have long plagued many Western cultures, you may ask. Take Tocqueville, who was taken aback by the tremendous menace non-whites played in the imaginations of most white North Americans; and he was writing at a time when the power of Caucasians was arguably at its zenith. Or, you might suggest, what of Bruce Frankin’s War Stars, a book that charts the dogged persistence of this theme? Isn’t the alt-right simply a recurrence of the same old group mentality? That toxic mix of self-pity and self-aggrandisement we have seen dozens of times before.
But you would be missing the point. And, pah! Who gives a damn about history of that sort any more? If it hasn’t got Gulag in the title, it ain’t worth reading… or, at least, ordering and pretending to read.
It’s not the material world with its unpleasant facts that concerns this pragmatist and philosophical suicidee. It’s all prejudice. And if Peterson perceives no difference between 2018’s activists and the revolutionaries of the early 1900s; and senses a huge gulf between those he caters to and the traditional hard Right, that’s what matters. That second group becomes nuanced, reasonable, ironic and, vitally, loose with their cash. As for the first, well, we’re looking at the real tyrants in waiting.
In that Channel 4 interview which went viral (in one way that alone was revealing. Could it be a lot are people are invested in the idea that the woeful display by Cathy Newman is the best critics of JBP have to offer?), Peterson wondered why we ought to make a distinction between Mao and contemporary leftist activists2. What’s more, he explains in lectures, we have colourful “archetype” charts which, read a certain way, say they’re not just alike — they are, in fact, the same. Aren’t dodecagons pretty and reassuring?
Evidence that his allies include those who regularly bleat about white genocide and the Islamic takeover of the West (Rebel Media), are cultist women-haters (Stefan Molyneux), spread spurious, racially-charged stories for a living (Fox News), include religious fundamentalists (PragerU), use the PMNM conspiracy theory for their own anti-Semitic agenda (the Kekistan contingent), advocate ethnic cleansing (Ben Shapiro), and Katie Hopkins (ugh), is irrelevant. They aren’t the anathema ‘Tricksters,’ in his Jungian worldview.
And if fascists have had their minds poisoned by the Trickster categories of identity politics, it’s our ‘Hero’s’ divine duty to set them on the straight and narrow. Together, with all the above, he might succeed in purging Civilisation of the omnipotent spectre of PMNM.
His overwhelming fear of leftists, and the Bolsheviks he assumes they all really are, is garnered primarily from his veneration of pseudo-scientific Jungian archetypes (which once he was candid enough to compare with star signs). And is reinforced by a dogmatic interpretation of Russian literature and a neoconservative reading of the Cold War.
For the latter he cites the Black Book of Communism. He tells audiences that Marx’s utopian schemes have led to 100 million deaths, “and that’s just a conservative estimate”. Given that the Black Book’s compiler has been criticised for inflating his estimate in order to get such a ‘nice,’ round figure (it lends the speeches of demagogues far more punch), Peterson is again eschewing the thorny matter of facts.
Funnily enough, this total denunciation of an economic system, along with the messianic reaction entailed, in fact mirrors something from the early 20th century. Those who, citing the carnage of the First World War, Tran-Atlantic slavery, the virtual disappearance of the red races, Leopold’s Congo, the left-over feudal superstitions and pogroms, the millions dying as a result of either the limits of free markets, or the wilful malice of its practitioners (take the British response to the potato plague and multiple Indian famines), declared capitalism irredeemable. Followed by the pronouncement that their tragically compromised guidelines would solve all.
But they, persecuted by the tsar’s secret police and hounded by armed right-wing thugs, perhaps had better justification when they succumbed to paranoia.
Victor Serge, a Bolshevik dissident, once wrote:
Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? …If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us.
And to consider what he meant, Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts is a good start. In the preface, Davis discusses the perhaps 60 million famine deaths of that era, a period considered the last hurrah of enlightened European colonialism.
Millions died, not outside the “modern world system,” but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered, as we shall see, by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill.
He continues to emphasise the terrible lack of attention assessments of Liberal Capitalism paid to such tragedies,
It is like writing the history of the late twentieth century without mentioning the Great Leap Forward famine or Cambodia’s killing fields.
Even though a rational evaluation would convince anyone that Communism will never return as marked political force, the power of what amounts to Peterson’s feelings override all sense. Ensuring he remains in a constant state of alert, seeing the antecedents of Red Terror everywhere, even among those disagreeable enough to question commonsensical notions of gender.
Perhaps this, charitable as it is, can explain his amenability towards entering foolhardy pacts.
The final section can be read here.
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1 Elsewhere he describes Islam as Western, so we yet again are in ill-defined territory with the “precise” professor.
2 Ironically, but not at all pleasantly, the actual existing claimants to Mao’s legacy appear to be rather better at capitalism than those trained in Smith and Hayek. Those Godforsaken, tyrannical hellholes Peterson reminds us of, in his eloquent way, are often those countries which took the IMF’s bitter medicine of gutting their bureaucracies, and granting their natural resources to multinationals. In other words, adopting neoliberalism: the partner of neoconservativism. See John Gray’s False Dawn.
