A Lukewarm Defence of Jordan Peterson (Apologies Folding Ideas)
Jordan Peterson may be the highest profile victim of the narcissism of small differences. And I know Peterson is a Jungian, I'm not sure what his opinions of Freud are. But let's talk about times where he's had his feelings hurt by, I think I can confidently say, an unfair characterization.
Specifically Ta Nehisi Coates basing Red Skull on JP and Olivia Wilde basing the antagonist of "Don't Worry Darling." on JP.
Brass Tacks - The Narcissism of Small Differences
This is my broad observation of the JP phenomenon. Arguably only Trump has exceeded JP in commanding attention. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but one other comparison I can make between the two figures is that neither are particularly persuasive. More polarizing.
Now, I can draw a line between JPs effective detractors, and JPs ineffective detractors. That line being the narcissism of small differences and specifically, the ineffective detractors have a move they cannot make and we are left with two tribes staring across an impassable ravine at each other.
The move they cannot make is thus: It's not okay to tell yourself a comforting story.
Let me set a record for most used quotation on my blog:
We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it's important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it's also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we're going to resist our leaders we have to say, "On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it's intolerable; therefore we resist." If there are no facts we can't resist, it becomes impossible. ~ Timothy Snyder, How to build an authoratarian regime - and how to stop one.
Jordan Peterson's effective detractors are mostly white straight men, they are often very much civil and JP's habit of engaging these effective critics (who are unlikely to be effective in persuading him, but can effectively create a public sphere - a world of facts through which resistance is possible.)
Now, my difficulty is that I haven't read "Between the World and Me" but I have seen Ta Nehasi Coates speak in interviews, speak with John McWhorter, I've read some of his articles from the Atlantic. I also haven't seen "Don't Worry Darling" and am not likely to. Let's keep it in proportion - Don't Worry Darling was a financial success seen by almost nobody, and likely readily forgotten. It has social commentary yes.
Wikipedia tells me that Don't Worry Darling has been compared to Stepford Wives, and Get Out. I'm also going to throw in 2020's The Invisible Man. I've seen the movies Don't Worry Darling has been compared to. Don't Worry Darling was made for $35 million, and made like $87 million at the box office. That's a tidy chunk of change. The Invisible Man '20 was made for $7 million dollars, and made $145 million dollars. Get Out was made for $4.5 million and made $255 million. There's two Stepford Wives, the original made $4 million at the box office which inflates to $24.2 million in '22 money. The 2004 remake was a financial and critical failure it made $100 million at the box office. Barbarian '22 was made for $4.5 million and grossed $45 million.
In this sense, what I have is tidbits of namecalling, that JP often spins into publicity coups or at least reinforce the notion that he has no effective detractors. And it's because of that move these detractors can't make which is - it's not okay to just tell yourself a story.
Leaving you with name-calling. They are bad, we are good. No! We are good, they are bad.
The Wilde Example of Ineffective Resistance
WILDE: Terrifying. We based that character on this insane man, Jordan Peterson, who is this pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community. You know the incels?
GYLLENHAAL: No.
WILDE: They’re basically disenfranchised, mostly white men, who believe they are entitled to sex from women. ~ from this interview
I've watched a couple of JP's responses, and I don't care. There's an obvious retort that can deflate the whole conversation and it involves speaking a tribal taboo.
COUNTERFACTUAL INTERVIEWER: But aren't you trying to be a psuedo-intellectual hero to a community of mediocre unsuccessful women? You know blamers and excuse makers?
And that's that. I feel it is fair to characterize Wilde's descriptions as "callous" and "flippant" from which I infer that Wilde, like Peterson prefers to tell herself stories rather than interrogate a world of facts. What generally indicates someone who interrogates a world of facts, is they employ things like qualifiers, refer to "nuance" and tend not to use ad hominems or come down strongly on people, but rather ideas.
Kramer: If you say a birthday wish out loud, it doesn't come true!
Franklin Delano Romanowski: That's just a silly superstition.
Do you get it? This is one of my favourite absurd jokes in Seinfeld so I hope I don't have to explain it to you.
Corrupt Mayor Analogy
Imagine the mayor is corrupt. You sit on the city council, and the other councillors approach you clandestinely to speak of the corruption - appointing friends, taking bribes, kicking puppies... and you say, okay, let's appoint an independent investigation to go through all our finances and review all our appointments and expose him. And then the other councillors go 'woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah woah... let's not go crazy. We were thinking we might just poison him.'
'Why wouldn't we expose his corruption?'
'...well, because we appoint friends, take bribes and kick puppies. We don't want transparency or accountability. We just want the mayor gone.'
A Short List of Effective Detractions
I've already embedded a Seinfeld clip, but for me there was a moment with JP that was a very Larry David sitcom scenario - the ones of the form: you trusted your accountant but you discover he does drugs, you trusted the pro shop salesman then you discover he can't play tennis, you trusted the chef then you discover he doesn't wash his hands, you trusted the psychiatrist then you discover he discloses patient details...
Hey so i figured something out that i thought i'd tell you about this took me like 30 years to figure out and i figured it out on this tour so there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss you see that pinocchio for example, but it's a very common idea and i figured out why that is i think so imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if...
This is like saying "I figured out the end of Inception, I saw it 12 years ago and I've been thinking about the top spinning and the wobble for 12 years and I figured it out on this tour whether Dom is awake or still in a dream..." to which the answer is, you've figured nothing out because the information doesn't exist to figure it out. What you have is not knowledge but an opinion.
And to be clear, if JP said Dom is awake and Nolan does a Comic Con panel tomorrow and a fan asks if Dom is awake or asleep at the end of Inception and Nolan says "Dom is awake" JP would still not have figured out that Dom was awake, because again the information doesn't exist to figure that out. Even Nolan, the director is just offering his opinion on something outside of the film he created. I situation like this occurred with Ridley Scott saying Deckard was actually a synth in Blade Runner, or when JK first announced after the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that Dumbledore was gay. Ambiguous multi-valent clues like visions of a Unicorn and Dumbledore never smashing lady bits do not mean the information is actually in the text to figure out a definitive conclusion. I'm not sure a fan can yet conclude Dumbledore is gay, by watching the Fantastic Beasts films, which I feel might be able to be screened in Qatar.
Anyway I've digressed quite a bit, my point being that JP as anything beyond a clinical psychologist that noticed actual problems with then-progressive-now-woke initiatives collapsed and collapsed quite quickly. Read on in the transcript or watch the interview and you get what I would describe as "convoluted psycho babble to the effect of not saying much at all." aka words that are hard to distinguish from Judith Butler's.
The list:
Sam Harris points out JP's sophistry
Cosmic Skeptic deconstructs JP on religion
Perhaps with the sole exception of Cosmic Skeptic who did laudable work with his video, not only are these people who can effectively resist JPs baseless claims and death-by-word-salad, most of them didn't have to do any special prep. to effectively resist JP. Harris reads from a book he had published a decade before anybody heard of JP, Matt Dillahunty just did what he does to any theist caller into the Atheist experience, Dr Grande just evaluated JP's videos the same as he always does - by the research papers. Dawkins just poses simpler and more plausible hypothesis for the collective unconscious, Stephen Fry just uses his usual eruditeness.
...so I, I can understand why a 19th century figure like Frazer or you know in "The Golden Bough" or, or, or like Mary McCarthy*, or Jung, or, um, Joseph Campbell can, can make wonderful myths out of myths, they're telling a story about stories, and telling us what they mean; well, I I I don't refute it, I repudiate. I, I, I, allow myself to believe - No, actually. Yes it's it's all very well and you can, you can build a very nice theory about what these myths mean and who these hero are, what these quests are, and how they're only seven stories and yes... But again, the the stand-up comedian type empirical system he says "okay so i'm a small roman person uh, under those circumstances and what is this really meaning to me?" I'm sorry no. I've I've got as Wordsworth put it: It's getting and spending and doing and having children and looking and hoping life gets better and enjoying life with my friends, but to erect it into a spiritual language and a theater of, of, of, uh...of human meaning uh, is delightful and it... but i think we have to recognize that it's a game, to some extent it may be it may indeed be true I mean I... You know I'm not saying this to to to demolish your argument, but i'm saying it's... ~ Stephen Fry from his interview on JP's podcast (37 minutes in) transcript by google, corrections, punctuation and emphasis by me. *I've never heard of Mary McCarthy prior to this interview, I found an author by that name on Wikipedia but couldn't connect her bio there to this subject.
And all these white men have this privileged move they can make with JP, which is they can question the legitimacy of telling yourself a story.
Lukewarm Conclusion
I'll wind up going in circles. I write far too much about Jordan Peterson, I feel this way because Jordan Peterson is someone whom I feel can widely be safely ignored. In fact, I'd go as far as to say JP is fundamentally wrong enough that he is vulnerable to "give him enough rope" if not having fallen prey to it already with the recent uptick in production values and having sponsored adds for investing in precious metals, releasing clips using the term "globalists" etc. JP may well have forked himself, I haven't watched it because of the inherent boringness of cryptocurrencies, but how well could this video have possibly aged?
The lukewarm defence is really just as it began - you don't have to resort to strawmanning, hit-pieces, ad-hominem attacks etc. to the extent that it becomes a diagnostic tool - it appears the people that get viciously fixated on JP do so because they are attempting to play the same game, and in turn this helps explains JPs obsession with woke-neo-marxist-post-modernist whatever because they in turn are trying to play the game he is playing, the game described eloquently on-the-fly by Fry. An attempt to take multi-valent material and saying it means this. "I've figured it out."
My last published post was on multi-valance, I cited JP as an example. JP is himself multi-valent, he can be interpreted as an intellectual or a psuedo-intellectual, or domain dependent he can be interpreted as both simultaneously. He can be read as a crazy ex-proffessor (a quite lucid, mechanical interpretation) or as a wannabe T.S. Elliot (a less lucid, something interpretation). Ta Nahesi Coates can interpret him as an authoritarian megalomaniac/cartoonish villain.
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| Captain America #28 - Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Honestly it's a pretty funny joke. |
And far from characterizing it as a grossly unfair comparison, I think there's legitimate social commentary there especially with the context provided by Cap in the panel that proceeds the actual joke/comparison. The legit commentary is inarticulate people outsourcing their thinking. That's the essential value adding activity of public intellectuals, though this itself is likely an unfair characterization. Any audience we can divide into two groups (with no guess at percentages) an audience that engages with active critical faculties, and audiences that don't. Something that is as true of JP as Ta-Nehisi Coates' audience. However, it is likely far more common that the average person comes across someone who thinks uncritically that JP is the shit, as Ta-Nehisi Coates' fanboys. I find it hard to gauge the level of venom in Coates' joke, something that is much easier with Wilde, because of the interview.
My defence of JP is lukewarm because JP spends so much of his time, and is so invested in pseudo-intellectual garbage. It is likely that this interpretation can equally be applied to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Olivia Wilde and many other of JPs detractors.
What is different is that JP feeds off his ineffective critics, their efforts keep him relevant and solvent. Such that it was likely 3 years ago that I was hosting friends for lunch and had a guest ask me if I'd heard of Jordan Peterson. At that stage I felt it was too late for their to be no general consensus on JP, like say Eckhart Tole, Deepak Chopra, Sam Harris, Slavoj Zizek and Noam Chomsky. Maybe a year or two after that I still came across people asking for my take on JP. A phenomena of uncertainty and unfamiliarity that I do not understand.
JP's multi-valence I interpret as such: First the good. JP appears to have been a competent clinical psychologist, enough to say that becoming a patient of JPs is better than rolling the dice on the available pool of clinical psychologists (given that there is no extant regulation that forces psychologists to employ evidence backed therapeutic approaches, see Candace Newmaker and William Goble) which is to say if you suffer from depression, JP is going to get you into healthy eating and sleeping routines that sort of thing. Also if JP is your lecturer on personality and psychometrics, you will likely gain a degree of expertise on these subjects. Furthermore, JP is competent at identifying pseudoscience when it comes from the extremities of the left.
Alas, this is not unique. There are many champions against the excesses of the left, and some small percentage of them are not tribalist which JP certainly is. By this I mean it's pseudoscientific garbage when a feminist reads patriarchy into a text, or an anti-racist reads white supremacy into a text, but it somehow magically isn't when JP reads embodied consciousness and AI and robotics insights into the Book of Genisis. I couldn't find the actual podcast excerpt where Sam Harris reads to JP from "The End of Faith" just Holy Koolaid's animation, but going from memory JP at one point when Sam starts reading mystical insights into the Hawaiin cook book, comments that Sam sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic.
So onto the bad, I can interpret JP as non-integrated. JP suffers. Likely from cognitive dissonance based on how much of the meaning he gives himself is based on the precise methodology that ideologies he vehemently opposes do. I interpret that JP is emotionally incapable of the vulnerability to accept a proposition like "the universe is indifferent to our existence" and in that it predicts that JP is not an apologist for religious superstition in the same sense many secular liberals do, something that can be cynically described as the sentiment "stupid people need religion so let them have it." or a bigotry of low expectations.
JP needs to believe in something or he'll have an existential crisis. Is how I read JP. He isn't "boss" or "baller" but acknowledging the multi-valence of "beast-mode" maybe. He is incredibly fragile and that's why he fights so hard. At best he wastes a lot of people's valuable time, as he wasted mine with his lecture (delivered in my home town) where he promised he was going to actually answer the question "do I believe in God?" and as he waffles through word salad, he leaves space wide open to at worst, believe it's okay to tell a story to yourself that say, your best friend is Jesus and you have a good job and nice car and nice house because the omnipotent omniscient creator of the Universe cares about the petty details of your life. You have good reason to know that to be the case, you just can't understand or articulate it like JP does.
That's a lot of baggage. The A-Priori Christianity, the cognitive dissonance over post-modern methodology, the personal fragility. All that is there with JP for the interpreting.
By analogy, if you care and are concerned about the excesses of the left. You are having a dispute with your neighbour over a tree in their yard's branches encroaching on your yard. JP rushes up and courageously volunteers himself to champion your cause. On this issue you may be in the right and your neighbour a complete arsehole, but enthusiasm, even courage is no way to optimise your champion. There are lawyers that deal with these disputes dispassionately and professionally and they have track records. More importantly they are capable of resolving these issues, because they acknowledge and understand a world of facts, a public sphere in this case of the law.
JP doesn't acknowledge a public sphere of facts, hence Cosmic Skeptic has to do work to determine that JP is an atheist, he thinks for example that the events described in Genesis and Exodus are not historical events. He just can't answer questions about them in precise speech.
JP I can do without, Ben Shapiro I can do without. We just have a bad system with no alternatives for ellevating people to the role of Champion. One I suspect is largely based on spectacle rather than merit.
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