I'll try to explain why I'm enamored with the guy, though I do try and resist it. I've fallen victim to a few cult followings in my past - Ayn Rand in my teens and then Noam Chomsky in my early twenties. So I know the danger signs of falling into an ideological trapping, and I do see that happening with some of Peterson's fans.
But I don't care about the fight against "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" or any of his discussion about free speech. His value for me is due to his religious content. I, like many people my age, grew up in a conservatively religious household and became irreligious as soon as I left home. I thought of it as breaking free from burdensome constraints.
But after years of attempting to "simply be a good person", I've found that there is indeed some kind of void that needs to be filled. And yet, I just cannot go back to being (in my case) an evangelical christian. Once you're out, you're out. So where should a modern, rational, scientifically literate person do when they need a deeper source of particularly religious meaning in their life? Peterson is the first person I've come across who has even come close to answering that question adequately. No matter how many faults the man has, he has done me this kindness. All the rest is fluff to me.
I do think he's a bit of a prophet, in that he has the ability to inspire conviction without guilt, passion without irresponsibility, and courage without hubris.
Thank you for posting this honest revelation. I sympathize as I also had similar infatuations with Rand in my teens and Chomsky in my twenties.
However, let me also warn you that this path of becoming infatuated with "thinkers" like Peterson is a dead end.
People like Rand, Chomsky and Peterson look heroic merely because they are willing to shout the loudest and attract the spotlight.
If you are really searching for authentic meaning, you're probably not going to find it among those in in the spotlight.
Instead of Rand, seek out Robert Nozick.
Instead of Chomsky, seek out Murray Bookchin.
Instead of Peterson, seek out Alasdair MacIntyre.
There are smart, brilliant thinkers of every ideological stripe. However, the best and brightest rarely make the NYT bestseller list. Continuing to be attracted to "thinkers" like Peterson will only lead to disappointment. Almost everything he is saying has been said before by someone who was smarter and a better writer, and most importantly kinder, than Peterson.
There is one thing about Peterson that makes this interpretation a bit more difficult. For most of his career, the guy was a relatively obscure but respected academic, not making an effort to reach a broader audience with his message except through a well liked course for undergraduates at the University of Toronto. He had strong convictions and a clear message, and there was certainly a current of conservative political belief, but his launch into fame was largely happenstance. He took issue with a new Canadian law that he considers an attack on free speech, and this came at a time when conservative media feels its job is to emblazon this kind of viewpoint.
He has done a good job surfing the wave of fame for sure. In my opinion the core of it is not about fame though, the core is a message he's promoted for decades and that he truly thinks is correct, and helpful to people.
I don't see Peterson as an end in himself. I see him as a valuable pointer. He hasn't shown me any destination, only a recognizable path. But I've spent my adult life looking for that path with no luck, so it's a huge achievement in and of itself.
I think you're falling into a trap that's easy to fall into, and perhaps lies at the crux of the criticisms leveled against Peterson. What I'm about to say has certainly been more eloquently stated by someone else, but I'll do my best here. As I see it there are effectively two types of knowledge acquisition and transference. The first is explanatory knowledge. Scientists and philosophers work to build new explanations of the world. In this realm, it makes no sense to re-tread familiar territory, and the faster we accumulate this knowledge, the better.
There's another realm, and it's what I would call cultural knowledge. These are like "social truths" that are arrived at via some method of consensus in a given group of people. In this realm, the re-treading of familiar territory is acceptable, so long as the knowledge still needs to propagate throughout society or be contested by those who deviate from it. In this realm faster is not better, because these truths act as societal stabilizers.
I see Peterson's influence as belonging to the second realm. I find it irritating when people point out that "it's been said before". Yes, I'm sure it's been said before, but that is not the point. The point is to revivify that knowledge within a culture. To assume he needs to tread new ground is to treat him as belonging to the first realm, and I don't think that's the correct approach here.
You've described "Top Down" and "Bottom Up" means of knowledge production. Often cast as rationalism and empiricism respectively. One favours knowledge that is known already and seeks to generalise that to explain the world, and the other favours knowledge that is produced trying to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis.
Each approach has it's conceits, strengths and weaknesses but truth emerges where these are reconciled and a synthesis is arrived at.
You need to be religious to have morals (unless you are Muslim, he hates Muslims...)
There is another video of him stating that women want to be brutally dominated, and that is why women support Islam... can't find the video now though.
Women should just have a family, not try to have a career or work.
There are plenty of examples of him being hypocritical, pseudo scientific, and anti-women. There is a good collection of this on the subreddit enoughpetersonspam.
This. i felt same. i feel uncomfortable following a passionate thought leader without being able to critize his ideas. for that aim i find myself in thought-provoking arguments with my lgbti activist friends, which was very intellectually-fun times for me.
the thing makes me most uncomfortable about his attitude is what he doesn't say. demonizing 'social justice warriors' and repeating danger of politically correctness is ok, but what criticism about rising nationalism, alt-right movement? this is the elephant in the room he does not talk about, instead he is only focusing on small-minority leftist groups. don't know weather he is biased towards right, or he is trying to get-well with these group. but these are my two cents.
He clearly condemns fascism, anti-semitism, etc, and is mostly individualist. I believe he doesn't directly address /pol types much because they haven't been literally inches from his face, whereas identity-politics people have been, as well as surrounding lecture halls carrying on and breaking windows to intimidate him and his audiences. He certainly condemns the worst alt-right ideas.
sure he is. he could have make criticism about alt-right with exact same harshness and might not say too much thing about leftists without too much changing his stance. this bothers me since i believe raising nationalism is much bigger threat than a couple thousands of university students. (although 'political correctness' is also a raising problem)
Ah yes, but the article paints a picture of him actively not doing so because he's trying to help exactly those who are caught in this 'raising nationalism'.
More than once I've caught myself leaning into or at least not challenging views that I strongly disagree with when talking to someone espousing them, because I felt it would not really be helpful/productive. I can see Peterson doing the same, and avoiding outright condemning the 'alt-right' in the way you desire because he might feel it would not lead to a desirable outcome.
I'm uncomfortable giving him this leeway, but I have to admit that I respect Scott enough to not write what he did without a decent degree of thought.
For myself, at least, I can't tell if this is the right approach. But at the very least I can say it's not as simple as always expressing my 'true' beliefs. That would be lazy.
I don't think his critiquing of modern identity politics is necessarily an ideological thing. Like you say he's been embattled for some time over his opposition to the whole "C-16" gender pronouns thing. For better or worse this firmly gained him cheerleaders on "the right" while gaining him vociferous condemnation on "the left".
As GP points out he's not so critical of his alt-right cheerleaders. Perhaps we would like it if he took some responsibility for his more regressive fans but I don't think he sees that as his problem. Maybe that's fair enough too. Maybe he just sees himself as a guy who's "speaking the truth" moreso than "a leader".
I think this critique of him is fair. I would have less of a problem with the SJW-types if they showed any interest in combating the more extreme/hostile elements in their own side. I should expect the same from the right, and though Peterson does mention his opposition to the alt-right from time to time, he could do with a fair bit more of it.
I think this is all spot-on. Polarization itself makes for a lot of confusion, and many accuracies being tossed out the window for politics. Someone recently opined on the problem of having 'the wrong fans' like this: if the KKK likes a tax law that benefits them, does that make the authors and other supporters of that tax law white supremacists? For some reason people are a lot more sensitive when it's about ideas. Especially lately, when there seems to be so much fear that thought might cause atrocities, since it precedes them.
You can keep the supernatural stuff at bay and just use the Bible the way it's intended to be used, as a repository of wisdom. It's got a bunch of really cool stories in it that are also really dark and rich. They don't just have one moral. You can see yourself in any of the characters in any of the stories and it will show you what to look for and how to respond.
Have you ever explored the dichotomy of religion and spirituality? We tend to think of them as synonymous but to me they represent two different things that are often coincident. The word "Religion" comes from latin words meaning "to bind together" and this to me suggests it's more about the collective, whereas "spirituality" is more about individual experience.
So religion is the whole thing of living by a particular moral code, going to church every sunday, marrying within your creed etc. it's a very "wordly" concept.
Spirituality then is the whole "higher consciousness" "explaining the unexplainable" thing.
We can be religious without being spiritual, and spiritual without being religious. Ayn Rand for instance, or much of modern atheism serve as examples of the former. Ayahuasca, psychodynamicm, meditation etc. the latter.
Of course we often have the two come together as they complement each other quite well but we often see spirituality subjugated by religion, or people scared off spirituality by it's religious connotations.
I'm not a fan of Peterson, but from the bits I've looked into I find the part you highlight most attractive.
I come from a deeply religious (Evangelical) background, and in some ways, perhaps, my situation is 'worse' than yours because I never left because I felt that it was burdensome. On the contrary! I loved much of it and in hindsight the structure and social life it provided me might've been extra-valuable in light of my Asperger's. I just couldn't believe it, and moved to another city, country, etc.
While I'd like to say I figured it out in the interim, I'm still very much working on that. However, I found that at least on the personal level, zen buddhism has filled a significant part of that void, and if you haven't looked into it I can highly recommend it.
I've not looked into the more social aspect of it, though. That's high on my list. I'm bracing myself for a degree of disappointment, because I often don't really like the 'woo-hoo buddhist types' that I run into who are or claim to be buddhists. But I have no real evidence for that.
Nonetheless, despite my ongoing 'search', I feel zen has provided enough that I feel I can be some degree of content without running back to more 'traditional' religion (and I have considered that, up to going back to an evangelical church).
If you're interested in discussing this further, don't hesitate to send me an email.
I personally think there's a very valuable role 'us' ex-evangelicals/ex-religious folk can play in this growing sense of emptiness that I see all around me, and that I see turns people to various 'extreme' movements that all strike me as rather less-than-stellar (alt-right, extreme SJW, rabid marxists/anarchists/whateverists). I'm still often shocked at how many nonreligious folk around me simply do not understand the sense of community that, among other things, a church can provide. It's like talking to someone who has never been in love!
EDIT: Let me add that I don't immediately have anything concretely against Peterson either, and the article kind of confirms my suspicion that he's a bit like C.S. Lewis, which I consider mostly a good thing. I would not want to deny anyone the positive role Peterson could play in their lives, in the same way that Lewis played a very important role in my life. Peterson makes me uncomfortable in a way Lewis usually didn't, but that could be because my point of entry was, well, being deeply religious.
As one of the people who you probably think doesn't understand the sense of community that a church can provide, I am curious if you think church can provide a sense of community that can't be provided by a bowling league, book club, or any other local gathering of people.
I have nothing against people gathering to find a sense of community but I am somewhat against the beliefs of most organized religions that I am familiar with.
Coming from a similar evangelical background to the person above, I can say that the community is very different than that of a club or sports league. I'm not diminishing the community that you can get out of it - even seemingly-trivial associations can become profound. Some of the strongest connections I've had with people have been with co-workers.
But a community centered around a particular framework, with a particular set of goals that extend beyond even the lifespan of the people involved, combined with an outlet for collective grief/ecstasy. It's hard to describe if you haven't grown up in it, but it's different from any other community I've experienced.
I'll second this. A book club, or any other gathering I've experienced (and I've searched frantically), pales in comparison to the 'smallgroups' that were part of my religious world. The closest I came to that experience in a non-religious way were some of the Alain de Botton style 'Church for Atheist'
meetups. And even then only the ones that were organized by an overtly religious person!
I personally don't find what he says worthwhile. It's honestly not worth bothering looking into him, in my mind with all of the terrible things he has said, and believes, he's pseudo scientific, and really doesn't understand much of what he tries to argue as well.
You need to be religious to have morals (unless you are Muslim, he hates Muslims...)
There is another video of him stating that women want to be brutally dominated, and that is why women support Islam... can't find the video now though.
Have you read Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton? You don’t have to be an atheist to enjoy it but it does have an interesting view on the void that you mentioned.
In some places there are even “church”/gatherings for non-religious people called Sunday Assembly
This is a nice even-handed review. It has been hard to get a clear picture of what Peterson is about and I've had to sift through an awful lot of partisan spite-pieces on both sides to try to get to the bottom of what's going on with him. The following paragraph jumped out at me here:
"The politics in this book lean a bit right, but if you think of Peterson as a political commentator you’re missing the point. The science in this book leans a bit Malcolm Gladwell, but if you think of him as a scientist you’re missing the point. Philosopher, missing the point. Public intellectual, missing the point. Mythographer, missing the point. So what’s the point?"
I think part of the problem with our initial impressions of Peterson is he (or comes across) tries to present himself as these things kind of like he misses the point of himself sometimes .. but maybe that's just from having been taking such an embattled position so long.
The article goes on to describe Peterson as "a prophet". As a student of psychology I don't personally think his views are "groundbreaking" but he does take a set of very well worn ideas and attune them to modern times.
I read Bertrand Russell's "Conquest of Happiness" [0] a number of years ago and to me it seems to tick a lot of the same boxes, but perhaps in a less timely fashion.
It's easy to think Russell managed to get his views out without annoying anybody but he had his fair share of partisan controversy in his time as well. It's only after the dust has settled that we view him as one of the most important western philosophers of the 20th Century.
In order to get a clearer picture of what Peterson is about, I did the unthinkable and watched a lot of his lectures. My opinion is that he's extremely thoughtful, formidable not so much in original thought, but careful synthesis of the many well-known sources he draws on most, and above all worthwhile. That is I think he says a ton of things that are fascinating (as Scott says, kind of in the Gladwell sense) and things that a lot of people could do with hearing these days. As far as the Gladwell thing goes, it's different because Peterson isn't making many scientific claims, or even claims as such. He's an intellectual psychologist synthesizing a - again, not original, but lucidly formulated - perspective on the human psyche itself. Not claiming how the world is, but how it is to us in our biological body-minds, which for many purposes is the only place that matters. His message is Jung meets Dostoevsky meets Joseph Campbell meets C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, but also meets Peterson.
Well that depends on which of Peterson's ideas you are talking about. You can't just say "oh his teachings are fine" and that means that none of the publicity machine around him is of any consequence. There are very much two aspects to Jordan Peterson. What I came on here to say (and have since stayed for the discussion) is that that other aspect to him really isn't as sinister as people make out. I think he does play it up for publicity though. Would you not agree?
>Peterson isn't making many scientific claims, or even claims as such.
My first encounter with Peterson was hearing his "lobster theory", which struck me as such pseudoscientific piffle that I've tried to pay him as little attention as possible ever since.
I imagine the reason Peterson elicits such strong reactions is because he presents differently for different audiences. As suggested elsewhere in the comments, "he's built his own persona into this gigantic strawman that looks like an ogre to everybody", luring them into attacking a position he never held so that he can appear calm, wise and reasonable in his rebuttal, and take the role of the poor attacked underdog.
He speaks of "postmodern curtural marxism", yet by his own admission, has never debated a marxist. Like the best controversialists, he picks his fights very carefully, preferring to "debate" with campus teenagers than other "intellectuals".
For those who haven't heard it, his "lobster theory" goes:
1. Lobsters are animals with a hierarchical society
2. Lobsters have a "seratonin based nervous system". Humans also have a "seratonin based nervous system".
3. Therefore, a hierarchical society is natural (and therefore best) for humans.
This is most unfair. You may take issue with specific aspects of how Peterson, specifically, articulates the evolutionary origin of social hierarchy. You may even take issue with evolutionary psychology at large, which is a separate argument. To call the idea that there is an evolutionary origin, or that it is ancient, 'psudoscientific' seems to be just name-calling, unless you have a basis for this you aren't presenting here. Peterson is far from the first to think or write about it.
I simply don't have time to engage with his lectures. I've seen all the summaries and they're just something I don't need. Thankfully.
What I do see is him continuously parading around the podcast circuit and the polarised discussion online about him.
My gut reaction when I heard him on Joe Rogan was one of disgust, while quietly finding I actually agree with a lot of what he says. He's a guy who has access to "truth" (in the pragmatic, William James sense) that many of his attackers do not.
I don't believe he's on the level of any of those people you've put up him up alongside. I think he draws on their work, mediates and applies their ideas as a clinical psychologist does.
Clever, no doubt, and with a message that is undoubtedly of value to many, and certainly making a lot of money at it too.
>> I simply don't have time to engage with his lectures. I've seen all the summaries and they're just something I don't need.
Then it's easier to understand how you came by your opinions of him. Quite a bit harder, if you'll excuse me, to understand why you wrote more statements about him than anyone else in the thread, though.
>> I don't believe he's on the level of any of those people you've put up him up alongside.
I agree with this 100% (and would bet my entire net worth that Peterson does too), did not intend to give that impression at all, and edited my comment to reflect that.
The term is called "Dissonance". It's okay and quite normal to have conflicting emotions about things. To have the head and heart in conflict. Peterson himself would say this is part of the process of getting to the truth. If you're just courting "comfortable" ideas all the time you'll get nowhere.
I agree, and to segue a bit, I think it's rather unfortunate that his thoughts on psychology, human behavior, and dealing with tragedy are likely buried beneath partisanship for many people.
He's a career clinical psychologist, father of two, well studied in Jungian archetypes, and bears all the mannerisms of being a folksy father figure. And what do you know, there is some popularity of memes referring to him as a "father of YouTube/Reddit/Internet" and wishful posts for him to be their father along with them.
If there are people listening who have a deficit of such a figure in their lives, perhaps it's good they receive something to compensate for it. That seems more important than the partisan pontificating to me.
He at least offers a structural critique, not minor tweaks, to the liberal order. If a young person is feeling alienated and disempowered, he recognizes that the solution isn't to just go to school or whatever watery prescription modern society might suggest. There are many conservative thinkers who, though they're basically irreligious, will tell young men to pull their pants up and take out the trash. Our moral landscape is such a wasteland that guys like this can tut about manners or whatever and he seems like a prophetic genius.
He's a thoroughgoing Jungian and a mediocre philosopher. He gets sassy with reporters, which people like, I guess. But he's still going to situate the problems with modern society with a couple of french theorists rather than the forces that actually affect people's daily lives.
I'd also argue that his popularity is a sign that people still really, really want religion/religious guidance in some form.
I've listened to a few of his lectures and read a few articles about him and I don't see a difference between what he says and what every other self-help author who wants to sell millions of books is saying.
It's mostly vague hand-wavy kind of stuff that sounds profound in the moment but later realize it's either blatantly obvious truth dressed up in fancy words or it's nonsense wearing the same clothes.
Had he not gained fame and notoriety through his campaign against that Canadian law and political correctness in general, I don't think anyone would have cared about what he has to say.
If anyone familiar with his work could point me towards some of it that would dispute that characterization I would be happy to read or listen to it, provided I don't have to pay for it.
I think perhaps check out the Russel Brand "Under the skin" interview - I think that's the closest I've seen to Peterson getting a good stiff interview. You probably know Russell Brand as that guy that was married to Katy Perry but trust me, once you get past his whimsy he's got a razor sharp intellect. On the face of it he embodies much of what Peterson speaks out about, and you'd think they'd be at loggerheads but it was a remarkably enlightening interview.
I'm only 10 minutes or so into it, but this is a quote (not exact, but close enough) from Jordan Peterson:
"(music and cathedrals) are ways of trying to symbolically represent how things could be if they were put in the proper state of balance or harmony"
What does that even mean? The only concrete nugget of knowledge I can get from that is that cathedrals are designed in a relatively balanced manner. Symmetrical, I guess.
I plan to listen to the rest of this interview but that statement was a particularly good example of the hand-waavy nonsense that I was talking about so I decided to record it here so I didn't forget.
Symbolically would mean that it represents something to do with the human condition. In the case, I would imagine, he means that the design of cathedrals and great music both tap into some kind of perfect or balanced thing in humans. Such a thing is something to aim for, or towards. Its how we cant write a recipe to how to write great (not just good, but the real stuff that makes your hair stand on end) music - and that sense of awe we feel in a cathedral. And both are man made and not a natural beauty.
He has also talked about the cross formation of most churches, but I don't think that quote was about that.
Interestingly this has been flagged, but there's only a couple of replies that I can see that are grey, and only a couple that's critical of the article and subject. But I can't see any flames at all, just the usual HN courtesy.
Is the auto flag mechanism to do with up and down votes of comments? Does that make some comments controversial? I like upvoting comments that go against the stream, but would that mean that the whole discussion gets more likely to be auto flagged? Would a user's best bet be to go with the crowd (and to downvote or not vote up such dissenting opinions) ?
One thing I fight with, internally, is his idea that if you "clean up your room", so to speak, your life will start to have meaning. Because of him, and due to doing his Self-Authoring program, I followed the steps, took responsibility for my life and changed a lot of things, but the meaning part has yet to hit me. Perhaps it's there, yet buried, I don't know.
I think you've come up against his particular brand of "pragmatic truth". It's true if the end result is good. You may not have found the meaning you thought you would when you started following his teachings, but perhaps you have improved your life. In the pragmatic sense in which Peterson wields the term (echoing William James), this is "truth" and thus "meaning" has been realised.
"Clean your room" is an internalization: how can you judge or even change the world if your room (your life) is a mess? The point is to fix yourself first, then start taking on the world. And do it all in small steps.
> the meaning part has yet to hit me
You don't feel any sort of pride after getting yourself in order? Are you sure you have yourself in order?
The average person could do with a lot more introspection, but to suggest that they cannot effect change or note its imperfections without being perfect themselves is silly.
>You don't feel any sort of pride after getting yourself in order? Are you sure you have yourself in order?
alt: "You didn't feel touched by Jesus/the holy spirit because you didn't reach out with full sincerity."
> to suggest that they cannot effect change or note its imperfections without being perfect themselves is silly.
It's not the idea of perfection, but the idea of being able to successfully make changes at a small level and slowly and increasingly make more profound changes in your life. There's a great deal of arrogance/idealism to believe you can jump on the bridge and command a ship.
> alt: "You didn't feel touched by Jesus/the holy spirit because you didn't reach out with full sincerity."
It's perhaps akin to how when a person goes into therapy, the first step, if practical, is to deal with any substance dependency issues. At least where I live, it's a prerequisite for further therapy (barring acute needs, perhaps).
I wouldn't be surprised if this is Peterson's thinking too, although I also wouldn't be surprised if Peterson doesn't know what the 'next step' might be (or is hesitant to recommend it).
At least based on my experience, both a good thing and a failing about modern therapy (and if I understand correctly Peterson is primarily a psychologist/therapist) is that it explicitly does not get too much into the stuff beyond a 'direct', pragmatic kind of mental health. For the rest you're encouraged to look elsewhere or cobble something together yourself.
So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way.
“He, uh, told us that we should do good, and not do evil, and now he’s looking at us like we should fall to our knees.”
I can't get onboard with this interpretation. There are a ton of people who are very charismatic and prone to making sweeping statements about the universe, and yet they don't gain a substantial following. Reza Aslan, for example. He's popular, but not nearly on Peterson's level. There are people who are drawn to Peterson simply due to his charisma, but I think at the end of the day there's something else going on. I think he's hit some kind of nerve though it's difficult to pinpoint it.
Edit: Ha, maybe I should read the goddamn piece before commenting.
He has absolutely hit a nerve, or hit a few nerves and done so with great accuracy.
You see the thing about Peterson is for whatever reason (could even be just for the purposes of marketing himself), he is very much the controversialist.
Time and again he'll say something controversial that he knows will troll a huge audience and then he's always got research and facts to back it up. That his take is often facile isn't really of consequence as any typical interviewer doesn't have the tools to take him up on it.
The guy is a professor of psychology. You may not like him or his views, but he is "smart", and fundamentally the meat of his message is actually quite benign so you can't even really accuse him of being "bad".
It's like he's built his own persona into this gigantic strawman that looks like an ogre to everybody.
Is it really that controversial though? I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever.
It feels more like his statements are elevated to controversy by how polarised, anti-contextual and narrow the margins of contemporary discourse have become rather than him being particularly controversial.
"Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet...
I don't think controversy needs to be modern. To take a more extreme example, it was common just over 100 years ago in the UK to hear that women should not have the vote due to the distinct natures of men and women [0]. Now (for comparison's sake) we hear Peterson talking about how women are naturally more "agreeable" and "self-sacrificing", and that this is vital for the purposes of childcare [1]. I'm not qualified to debate biological determinism, but I do wonder whether statements like this reinforce existing prejudices about the capabilities of both men and women in the workforce. Just recently for example there was an article about how men tend not to work in nurseries, "as parents assume they pose risk to children" [2].
Though I agree that they may have the same effect on the general population, there are still large differences between claiming that "on average, on a very large sample size, population X has more Y than Z," saying "population X must always be Y" and saying "population X is banned from doing anything but Y".
Whether there is a slipper-slope danger here is, I think, the real question, and how much other values should we sacrifice, if any, to actively and energetically avoid this slippery slope.
Like I say, the meat of his ideas are not controversial and actually quite banal. He doesn't really say a lot of things that self-help authors haven't been saying for years.
As you point out the acceptable margins of contemporary discourse are stifling and he purposely sets out to challenge (even "bait") them, and this is what's controversial. I think this is what people like him for, as much as for his actual therapeutic writings.
> I'm nearly 40 and I feel like had Jordan Peterson said a lot of what he says now when I was at University it would have been of almost no note whatsoever.
Whether it would have been controversial in another context is irrelevant to whether it is controversial, which is never an inherent feature of an utterance and always a statement about its relation to a particular context.
But, yes, I'm nearly 45 and a lot of it would have been controversial when I was in college (in fact, a lot of it is almost identical to controversial things right-wing speakers were saying when I was in college; the only exception of note seems to be the factual controversy over his description of the content of specific current laws.)
> "Enforcing equality of outcomes though imbalanced policy is less desirable than giving equality of choice and letting other natural variables dictate the outcome" seems such an uncontroversial statement as to be almost self-evident, and yet...
...it's been a controversial statement from the right for four or five decades or so, and only not earlier because before then the right was almost uniformly overtly opposed to equality of choice, and didn't need to engage in elaborate concern trolling of this form.
It's not controversial because anyone disagrees that equality of choice and opportunity is the ideal, it's controversial as a criticism of specific policies because it assumed that equality of opportunities/choice is not their goal, and, where those laws directly address material circumstance as part of their mechanism, assumes that the circumstances addressed are immaterial to equality of choice/opportunity.
> because anyone disagrees that equality of choice and opportunity is the idea
Yes, this is something I've noticed. How when he talks about equality he assumes the premise that everybody is talking about "equality of outcome" rather than "equality of opportunity" which may be the case to a certain extent, but nobody that's actually studied inequality to any serious degree believes this.
Having watched a lot of Peterson's lectures, there's a fact about him which I think might lead a lot of critics to say false things about his level of confidence or arrogance. He speaks in a very confident, impassioned tone, but his actual words are permeated by deep humility.
Yes, there is a dissonance there that led me to be suspicious at first. It's probably just that he's an introvert who learned "how to speak confidently" from a book or a course or something.
That said, I don't think he comes across as completely intellectually honest in a lot of his interviews. I think that this might be more a product of a lot of the bad faith he's been subjected to than anything intrinsic to his ideas. Though I do think he plays it up a bit now to broaden his reach.
I think he learnt how to speak from a few decades of teaching, and in his teaching technique (as opposed to speech giving, debating). I've noticed most teachers and lecturers I've met as being good confident speakers. Not all academics, but the proper educators, almost all yes.
I've noticed that he does fall into set patterns of anecdote and stories in interviews, like he will reply to a question and then pause for a little bit and then reply with something almost pre-scripted, a previous thought but slightly changed.
I've noticed this in teams, too. Sometimes there is something which is clear to everybody, but which needs the right person to say it, in order for it to have the necessary gravitas to be followed.
I think a lot of people need authority figures to function.
I've watched Jordan Peterson's Personality lectures back when he had only a few hundred subscribers and have been amazed at his immense traction of late. His book is mostly a regurgitation and summary of his lectures with some political and personal anecdotes thrown in; however, I would still recommend it as a introduction to some of Peterson's thought system and mostly agree with the review.
A well-timed cat poster can have the same effect. The problem is, if there's little substance to the message, the effect is short-lived. The key to running a good cat poster business is spacing out the shallow messages, you can even reuse them if they're slightly reworded or just spaced far enough apart.
>Jordan Peterson is a believer in the New Religion, the one where God is the force for good inside each of us, and all religions are equal paths to wisdom, and the Bible stories are just guides on how to live our lives.
It's hard to take a reviewer seriously when they make a statement like this, that is blatantly untrue ("all religions are equal paths to wisdom"). Peterson is known to be very critical of Islam, and has gone as far as saying that it's incompatible with western values (paraphrasing).
But I don't care about the fight against "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" or any of his discussion about free speech. His value for me is due to his religious content. I, like many people my age, grew up in a conservatively religious household and became irreligious as soon as I left home. I thought of it as breaking free from burdensome constraints.
But after years of attempting to "simply be a good person", I've found that there is indeed some kind of void that needs to be filled. And yet, I just cannot go back to being (in my case) an evangelical christian. Once you're out, you're out. So where should a modern, rational, scientifically literate person do when they need a deeper source of particularly religious meaning in their life? Peterson is the first person I've come across who has even come close to answering that question adequately. No matter how many faults the man has, he has done me this kindness. All the rest is fluff to me.
I do think he's a bit of a prophet, in that he has the ability to inspire conviction without guilt, passion without irresponsibility, and courage without hubris.