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| https://jordanbpeterson.com/ |
How do thinkers attract a following? Why are some more successful at
this than others? How come we've all heard of the Prophet Mohammed
(PBUH), but not of, say, Trevor from the local secure unit (PBUH
too), who has also been visited by an angel and also has a number of
views on a number of topics? This question – that of the reception
of ideas – is always a fascinating one.
The
phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor and
sometime clinical psychologist who recently achieved Transatlantic
fame for “dominating”, as his fans would have it, a British TV
news interview provides an interesting case study.
A
brief chart of Peterson's fame goes like this. In 2013, still an
obscure academic in his early 50s, he started recording his lectures
at the University of Toronto and uploading them to YouTube. Already
popular with his students, the lectures started to build up views and
a podcast followed.
Then,
in 2016, Peterson tipped his hand in the culture wars, releasing a
series of videos attacking a proposed bill (since passed) to amend
the Canadian Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on grounds
of gender expression and identity. This had the (presumably desired)
effect of triggering student protests, the coverage of which made him
a mainstream media celebrity and added yet further legions of
subscribers to his YouTube channel. A week or so ago, on a world tour
to promote his bestselling self-help book Rules
for Life,
he did that
interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News. And now he is
something approaching a household name in the UK.
A
common response amongst intelligent people I know seems to be like
this: “I don't agree with what he says, but I do like his
presentational style and/or his method.”
My
take, however, seems to be nearly the opposite of this. For me, the more
troubling aspects of Peterson's output are not the opinions he
expresses, at least when these are expressed explicitly (in which case they are often sound, so far as they
go), but rather the presentation and the methodology.
In this post,
I'll explain my disquiet about the presentation: how Peterson
communicates his material, including how he presents his arguments
(to the extent he does this at all). In the sequel, I'll talk about
methodology, in the sense of the sort of questions he asks and how he
goes about answering them.
That
Interview
First
off, though, there's the response to the Channel 4 interview itself.
I can't let this pass without comment. It seems that I'm largely
alone in thinking that there was little in it that was in any way
impressive. I feel I should explain my reasons for so thinking.
Peterson,
it's true, has a magnetic presence in the clip. He has a Byronic
intensity. Physically handsome and brooding, he earnestly listens to
the questions and delivers his responses with calmness and apparent
directness. But isn't it the content that should count when you
are deciding whether or not someone is worth listening to?
Let's consider the segment on the gender pay gap (starts around 5:20), the bit for
which Peterson got the ravest reviews.
What
I would suggest we must bear in mind when evaluating it is this: the notion that women may transpire to be disadvantaged in the
world of work, fairly or unfairly, for reasons other than direct discrimination on the
sheer ground of their membership of a category called “women” (to
be clear, other
than even unconscious
discrimination on that ground) is not a difficult or esoteric
idea. It is not something that the average educated person requires an academic to be flown over to appear on telly to have
pointed out to him or her.
To
give a well-known example, a higher percentage of women than do
men work part time (largely because women are more frequently left looking after children).
Hence, the once common employment practice of excluding part-time
workers from occupational pension schemes disproportionately affected
women and for that very reason was outlawed by the European Court of Justice in a 1994 ruling as contrary to equal pay protection. In 2018, the existence of such possibilities, to use a concept that Peterson
endorses in his YouTube videos, is, or should be, part of the cultural context, the shared framework of meaning, of any current, educated
discussion of the topic.
In
practical terms, this means that if your contribution is just to say,
“Aha, the gender pay gap could be due to reasons other than
(direct) discrimination on the ground of gender!”, the value of
your contribution is approximately zero. Yet that is precisely the
tack that Peterson takes stubbornly for literally a minute and half of the discussion,
until under persistent questioning he eventually, for the first time offers up a possible other reason, namely the (controversial) notion that women are biologically
prone to be less “agreeable” than men (which I will come on to
shortly).
Before
this, during this 90 second period of darkness, Newman states that
she is not making any claims about “why
[the gap] exists”:
in other words, that she is not asserting that it is necessarily down
to direct discrimination. Peterson ignores the invitation to actually
say something about indirect discrimination, and instead triumphantly
declares: “You
have to say why it exists”.
No.
No. No! (As
a famously disagreeable lady once put it.) It was for the supposed
expert sitting there in the interviewee's chair to offer and defend a
claim about why
women are on average paid less than men, not hunker down and wait for
his interviewer to propose something. He should have done so from the
start instead of making obfuscating, impressive-sounding noises about
multivariate analyses and making curt, empty denials of the charge
that he is indifferent to the plight of people who suffer
discrimination.
True,
Newman could, perhaps, faced with such obtuseness, have better
articulated and pressed Peterson on the possibility of discriminatory practices unfairly targeting
circumstances
associated with a particular group (such as the treatment of
part-time workers, who are mostly women) as distinct from direct
discrimination of members of that group qua
members of that group (as with the Presidents Club). But to place any
weight on this failure would be to forget – and many of those
fawning over Peterson's showing do seem to have forgot – that this
was a TV interview with a professor conducted by a journalist, not a debate. It occurred purely as an
opportunity for Peterson to expound upon his ideas – all to help
sell his own fucking book, no less.
Indeed,
even if we read the exchange as a debate rather than an interview,
Peterson's approach leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The essay-writing
advice he gives his students (per his lectures) is to build
up one's opponent's argument, to put it in its strongest possible form
before attacking it. Here, you can watch someone conspicuously fail
to follow that advice. There is no attempt on his part to anticipate
and meet objections, just utter defensiveness.
You
do not – or, at least, you shouldn't – score points in a debate
by treating it as courtroom cross-examination, by imagining that the
aim of the game is to stick to your side's already pleaded case and to concede as little as possible by giving little more than yes/no answers.
Normal debate – or at least valuable debate – involves repeated concession, the
routine acknowledging of the element in truth in what the other side
is saying. Consider, by the way, in this respect, the squeals of
delight from alt-right nutjobs over Newman's admission at one stage
in the interview “You've
got me”,
when Peterson makes what she regarded as a good point. According to
Breitbart, for instance, this was the moment when “Feminist
Cathy Newman Crumbles”.
In light of that headline, the only thing that it is surely crumbling
is the Socratic tradition of earnest, rational discourse that has
nourished Western civilization for 2,500 years.
The
other thing that I dislike about Peterson's approach is his failure
to articulate conclusions, a failure to make explicit what its all
too often merely implicit in what he says.
For
example, let us assume, for these purposes, that he is 100% right
that women get paid less because, or in large part because, they tend
to be less assertive about their own compensation. What should we
make of this? Do employers have any responsibility to change their
wage-setting practices, or is it all down to individual women to
learn how to be more assertive? I think everyone watching, if asked,
would agree that Peterson in fact thinks the latter. In the
discussion that ensues he seems to imply that there is very little
that employers, still less wider society, can or should do about the
matter. But he doesn't – at least not in this interview – ever
expressly say this. He does not say explicitly, for example:
“It
is not unreasonable for firms to pay more assertive employees more
than less assertive ones”.
Now
that would be an interesting, controversial proposition that might open up
fertile vistas of discussion. But Peterson doesn't go there, doesn't
take on the challenge. I think there are at least some other
commentators occupying broadly the same part of the political spectrum who
would be candid enough to complete the thought. For example, by way
of analogy, when debating the decriminalization of cannabis, Peter
Hitchens will tell you not just that cannabis is a nasty drug and
that liberals don't take the issue seriously enough (the usual
tack of commentators taking an anti-drugs line), but will go on to
assert that serious jail time for its use would act as an effective
deterrent and hence eye-watering tough sentences for mere users are
justified. This is what is good about Peter Hitchens. For in light of such a suggestion, it is possible for the rest of us to wonder: Hmm, is locking
up dope-heads for 15 years really
going to do more good than harm? In the same way, to say outright
that (for example) “it is not the responsibility of private businesses to do
anything about how macho, domineering behaviour is received at work”
yields a concrete proposition that we can examine and challenge. I
respect such an approach – i.e. that of putting a concrete
proposition on the table – even if I might happen to think the
proposition in question a silly one, because its very articulation
generally advances the debate by allowing us to see what the real
issues are. Unfortunately, it seems to be part of Peterson's debating
modus operandus to avoid advancing propositions. Too much is being
done by insinuation.
Another
thing worrying me is that several people praised Peterson for the
“consistency” of his views as expressed in the interview. This
endorsement baffles me, since not contradicting yourself in the
course of a 30-minute discussion is a low bar indeed. One, therefore,
wonders this particular piece of praise actually has as its real
target, consciously or otherwise, the marked lack
of nuance
in his approach. If this is a correct supposition about how people
evaluate thought, that is fucking
terrifying (for
reasons which I presume are too obvious to have to labour by further articulating here).
Incidently,
after writing the above, I happened to catch another
Channel 4 news debate about the gender pay gap, between Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs and Catherine Meyer of the Women's Equality Party.
In this piece, those key issues that the Peterson discussion
completely ignored – those of indirect discrimination and structure
inequalities – were acknowledged by both sides and debated in an
constructive way. It was just so much more enlightening, so much
better, than the Peterson/Newman affair. I would challenge anyone who
watches this to identify any good reason – reason other than that
of our frail, human weakness for entertaining displays of machismo
over serious discussion – why we are all talking about the other clip instead.
Down
with the kidz
When
it comes to the YouTube videos that made Peterson's name, I am going
to admit that his lecturing style has some admirable features. But,
again, there are some features which are less admirable. And we need to
talk about those too. For my suggestion, as we will see, is that both the
more admirable features and the less admirable ones likely play a direct
part in explaining his popularity.
I
watched the lecture series “Maps of Meaning”, based on Peterson's magnum opus, explanation-of-everything book (which I have not read, but then neither have most of his internet fans). I picked the 2016 vintage for no particular reason (he updates the series ever year). So far I have got as far as Lecture 4, meaning I've seen about 5 or 6 hours of footage in
total.
The lectures are a sort of blast through various strands of
thought in psychology, theory of knowledge, cognition, sociology and
political theory. We learn about theories of motivation, the social behaviour of squid, high school killers, René Descartes' evil demon, women sniffing out attractiveness from bloke's T-shirts, the open texture of
language, the psychology of board games, Mutually Assured
Destruction, chimp behaviour... All kinds of fun things. (Whether
it is supposed to be anything more than a blast is a question we will
come to shortly.)
It
is generally entertaining stuff. Peterson, when on form, has an
immediate, engaging style that soon has everyone in the seminar room
eating out of his hand and that even goes a long way towards winning over someone like me (Breitbart: “... Liberal Danno Crumbles!”).
So,
for example, he will start talking about Dostoyevsky's Crime
and Punishment by
saying that he highly recommends it, how it is about a protagonist,
Raskolnikoff, who you will really relate to because, hey, he's just like
you, he's a student, bright but having a tough time of it, trying to make ends meet and feeling jealous of his peers. We then get a lovely
account of how Dostoyevsky sets up the psychological and ethical drama by making the young killer's motivations horribly plausible, in part by making his landlady victim so
unloveable and in part by so beautifully articulating the twisted
chain of reasoning the student adopts to justify the murder – an
observation which Peterson now uses as the springboard for the
previously mentioned advice (an old academic chestnut, but good advice nonetheless) that if you want to make a serious argument, make the position you are attacking as attractive as you can possibly make it.
At
another juncture, he draws on Jean Piaget's studies of childhood play to
make an extended point about how people create meaning through the
partly cooperative, partly competitive medium of game playing. He
brings this alive by asking his students whether
Settlers of Catan is a “good or a bad game?” Is is better or worse than Risk? Monopoly? Why in each case? This the class finds, rightly, a fascinating exercise.
Later, in the same vein, he talks about massively multiplayer online
games, referencing the work of Edward Castranova who calculated the GNP per capita of some of the fictional worlds in EverQuest was higher than that of real world countries such as Bulgaria. This is
then a springboard for inviting his class to consider whether the
internal world of such games is at least, if not more, “real”
than much of the external, physical world. Surprisingly, for someone
whose current USP is telling millennials to Grow Up And Get A Job,
Peterson here comes down on the side of the virtual
worlds, even going as far to argue that there is more reality in
participating in a sophisticated online game than in serving burgers
in McDonalds.
There
are lots and lots of recommendations (Orwell, Carl Jung, YouTube videos of DNA
molecules): “you must go take a look at”; “I highly
recommend”, “it's a great book”... Peterson genuinely wants to
inspire his students to go out and get this stuff for themselves, and
hopefully his sheer enthusiasm for the material is infectious.
True,
Peterson has been labelled a stupid person's smart person for a set of reference points “apparently drawn from a high-school English-class reading list”.
But I don't think the basis of this criticism (as opposed to, I'm
sorry!,
the conclusion, as will become apparent...) is terribly fair, or to
any sensible point. If Peterson can inspire a young person's interest
in political theory using Animal
Farm
as a way in, or, I don't know, in motivation frames by chatting about
Settlers
of Catan,
then that is surely a good thing. I can't see any sting in the sneer
that someone is trying to be Down With The Kidz, unless (as often
happens) they fail in this endeavour. But Peterson succeeds: his
students evidently love him.
Bigger
than Darwin
What,
however, is questionable about the lectures is the complete lack of
any structure, and in particular, any high-level, sustained argument.
To say that they are discursive or digressive would be an
understatement. This would be to imply that there is some overall
thread of thought that is being digressed from. There simply isn't.
What
you get is basically lots of 5 minute chunks composed of anecdotes and
summations of modern learning on a particular topic. We then segue onto a new topic by way of digression (a sketch of his style: “...
oh, and by the way, chimps are seriously bad guys, really they
are. What they do is this...”). Or else the professor will come to the end of a point, pause romantically, holding
his head as if to channel his thoughts, and launch into a new
topic that is essentially a non sequitur (albeit in the literary
rather than the logical sense) from what it follows. Indeed, at
the start of Lecture 2, rather alarmingly, Peterson asks his class
literally to stop him at any point if they hear him repeat anything
he has said before: “I can't precisely remember what I've told
you... I don't want to tell you the same story three times, you
know”. Apparently even he cannot quite recall how all this fits
together!
Not
only is there no overall argument, no serious carry-forward from one
idea to the next, there is no organisation of the material according
to any logical system at all. The lectures are not histories of
thought within a particular field. Nor are they topic-by-topic
examinations. Basically, the only evident organising principle –
the only reason that we might infer as to why Peterson is talking
about one thing rather than another at any given moment – is that
these are Things That Jordan Bernt Peterson Thinks. So much, then,
for the Enlightenment project of replacing respect for oracular
pronouncements of wise men with respect for depersonalised reason and
learning.
Sometimes
our professor gets so convinced that every single thing in his head is a pure
nugget of wisdom, so swept up in the performance of this massive brain
dump of these riches, that he badly embarrasses himself. Or, to put
it more politely, what he says falls short of the accepted standards
of serious scholarship. I've taken the trouble to transcribe this
extraordinary segment, in which Peterson claims that he has worked
out, purely deductively, that modern evolutionary science is
fundamentally incomplete in some way that he cannot fully articulate
because he is, like, not all that up-to-speed on the latest stuff,
sure, but, hey man, you need to just take his word for it:
“The way it works, apparently – and I don't believe this is the whole story, although it is more-or-less the whole Darwinian story – is that something more-or-less works and it makes a million copies of itself and there's tiny variations in those copies, often, at least in principle, because of copying error – which is where I think the theory is weak – and then they all die, except, like, two. And so why didn't those die? And the answer is that they happened to vary by chance in the direction that the environment varied, and so they get to continue. And so the reason evolution works is that everything dies. Everything fails. ...
“Now I think that's not exactly right because I don't believe that our understanding of evolution is complete. There's a bunch of reasons I don't believe it. One is, DNA is pretty damn complex. It is not obvious how it could have evolved [Oh yeah: like the eye...]. And even the people who discovered DNA were very, very perplexed by the fact that it existed. So one of them … thought that it came from outer space and it had evolved somewhere else. ….
"But there is this other issue too and it's called epigenesis [in fact epigenetics - epigenesis is something else] and that's put a whole spoke in the scientific wheels in the last 20 years, because the theory was 20 years ago that all evolution proceeded through random mutation. And it was random, right? But it turns out that that is not exactly right because there have been a number of demonstrations that if something happens to generation A, that will produce a transformation in the genetic information that's transferred to generation B. And the transformation is not only the consequence of damage but actually a form of adaptation to the environment. Now that's a tough one because 20 years ago when I was studying evolutionary biology, if you had said you can transmit acquired characteristics, it would be like, you're over there with the creationists! Because that was no go, that was against the rules.
“The fact that epigenesis [epigenetics] happens at all means that there are a lot of things about how DNA works that we don't know [No, it doesn't. For an for an informed comment on the misunderstandings and quackery surrounding the concept see this article]. Now I actually think what's happening is the DNA is a very complex microcomputer. And I don't know exactly how it operates. But maybe it's a quantum computer. It's very complex. Remember, it's had 3 and half billion years to figure out what's going on and it's pretty good at surviving. So you don't want to underestimate it. And the structures it builds at the molecular level are so complex it just... there are some great animations of those things … on the net. They are so complex that you can't help but think of them as computation when you watch them. They're not random processes, man! [By now, Peterson seems to be conflating the notion of the computational nature of normal biochemical processes, which isn't controversial or in issue, with the notion that mutations in DNA might somehow be controlled by such processes, which is the suggestion in issue and is controversial.] I watched the little molecule that checks for errors in the DNA replication string. I mean it checks for errors in the DNA replication string, man! To figure out how it does something like that without some form of computation strikes me as impossible.
"Anyways, I think what happens is that over time the DNA plays – like, it can manifest itself in many different forms – and it also capitalizes on mutation. I think that is how it works.
I
mean. Fuck. This is the guy we are installing as the next
Public Intellectual? Could we maybe have instead that US Senator who
talked about the Series of Tubes? Or, say, Joey Essex? Sure, those
guys would talk a lot of shit – perhaps, sure, even slightly more
than you and I might do down the pub. But at least you won't catch any of me, Senator Stevens or Joey Essex taking our vague speculations about
what men in white coats could be coming up with if only they were a
bit more imaginative and attempting to elevate these half-baked ponderings to the status of
wisdom via the ex cathedra authority that comes from
being a Professor of Psychology saying stuff in a seminar room
midway through a scheduled lecture that he is giving in a University of Toronto
Department of Psychology undergraduate course. Listening to Peterson
talk on this topic I was reminded of Bob Trivers' snarky aside about
Stephen J Gould – that he thought he was “bigger than Darwin”.
Except Gould at least bothered to train as a palaeontologist, do
some relevant research and publish a bunch of scientific papers on
the subject before venturing to challenge aspects of Darwinian
orthodoxy. How plodding of him. Gould apparently knew he wasn't smart enough to
conduct all of his iconoclasm via the medium of an ex tempore aside
in a lecture about personality (and without first learning the
difference between epigenesis and epigenetics).
Shuffle
Appeal
Such
horrendous lapses aside, the wider objection here is that by not
giving us any sort of map (ironically, given the title of series) to
the overall argument, if any, that Peterson is trying to advance the
listener is prevented from meaningfully engaging with his thoughts.
Sources of ideas are always duly credited – simple plagiarism is
not, at least, one of his sins. But, yet, still, the
unstructured approach makes it more or less impossible to
determine what, if anything, he is uniquely bringing to the table,
other than a sort of vague desire to emphasise certain themes (such
as the importance of hierarchy, the Badness of chaos, the fact that
motivation is needed for all thought and action, etc, etc).
Ultimately, this makes it impossible to take him seriously as an original thinker.
Simultaneously,
though, this haphazardness is, I strongly suspect, a major component
in Peterson's popular appeal. The lectures are accessible, easy to follow basically because, frankly, you don't need to do too
much work to follow along. This is precisely because there is no real
large-scale argument running through them.
Consider
that serious, important works of thought are never quite this easy to
lap up. They are always
difficult, at one level, to follow: rewarding, but hard work. This
tends to be so even if they are composed in a light, engaging style
with as least as much literary and rhetorical skill as Peterson can
muster. I offer Darwin's The
Origin
of Species
and Nozick's Anarchy,
The State and Utopia
as a couple examples. Why are those two books undisputed literary
classics, ultimately great reads, and yet hard work? Because you have
to have to pay serious attention throughout. This is because you
carry forward what is argued in one section forward to the next,
integrate it with, and critically evaluate it in the context of, the
developing argument. You can't nod off for a bit because you will
miss an important plank in the overall construction.
For
example, in Species,
Darwin starts, in chapter 1, gently enough, by criticising the then accepted wisdom
that all the variation you see between breeds of domesticated animals
is purely the result of centuries of breeders mixing and matching between a fixed,
original set of archetypal breeds: all domesticated pigeons are
descended, Darwin argued, from a single species, the rock pigeon, so
all the differences of colour, shape and size you see between the
different breeds must have arisen during the process of
domestication. The reader must carry these thoughts through to
chapter 2, where variation in nature comes to be discussed. Darwin then
introduces the concept of the struggle for existence into the mix (in
chapter 3), a further idea that the reader has to assimilate, before
she is encouraged to takes these two findings (the fact of the
struggle for existence, and the fact of variation) as premises and
combine them with a third, that of genetic inheritance, to arrive the
argument for natural selection (finally developed in chapter 4). Later
chapters explore the consistency or otherwise of the theory (the
multiple implications of which the reader has to keep alive in her
mind throughout) with the evidence of the geological record and the
geographic distribution of groups of species.
Even
with the benefit of having been pre-taught the basic tenets of the
theory of evolution, sitting down with the Darwin's original great (and surprisingly brief) work places demands on you as the reader. The demands arise
because you have got to carry the building blocks of the argument
forward from one stage to another: a big draw on your working
memory. They also arise because you have to be able to distinguish
between and be aware at all times of the different argumentative
status
of the various parts of what Darwin says: the distinction between
evidence and argument, premise and conclusion, evidence that is
building up to a conclusion yet to be drawn and evidence that is
offered as corroboration for an already-stated conclusion. This
requires a kind of constant forensic alertness. Darwin makes both of
these tasks as easy as he possibly can by very clear signposting and
great clarity and brevity of expression. (As Peterson would say: go
read, highly recommended!) But it is still a somewhat demanding read.
After all, natural selection is an inherently, non-trivially complex
theory: it involves a specific form of interaction between three
major component ideas: inheritance, variability and selective
pressure. You cannot just reduce it down to one of those ideas as
representing its “essence”, or some vague blend of the three. And
it is ultimately rewarding for all the same reasons that it is hard
work: you are integrating knowledge, getting a real sense of
progress as you work you way through, and giving your brain a serious
workout at the same time.
The easy, but rather short-term appeal of Peterson's lectures is that they doesn't work like
this at all. You really can zone out for five minutes and return to
find that what the guy is saying still makes some sense. There's no
grander scale argument, and so no need to keep track. There's no
seeming need, either, to monitor the status of the different
anecdotes and examples that Peterson gives. For instance, are his
comments about the Columbine killers supposed to be an example of
what the human mind is capable of, or something that will be
developed as an aspect of a more general, positive, law of (male?)
psychology ... Who cares, man? You are not getting tested on any of
this stuff!
Peterson's
lectures have, in other words, what I would call Shuffle Appeal. They
don't make excessive demands on your working memory because they each
little segment fully works as a self-contained little presentation.
And then it's off to the next anecdote, the next idea. Incidentally, to
link back to the opening paragraph, that would also seem
to be the organisational principle of the Qu'ran, which of course
doesn't function as a stage-by-stage ethical treatise. (The same can be said for much of the Old and New Testaments too.) It is primarily a
series of disconnected observations, anecdotes, pearls of wisdom and
indignant moral criticism of young people today. As you might expect
from the work of a well-to-do, 40-something merchant, as the Prophet was. It's your
dad shouting at the telly, Jeremy Clarkson writing his newspaper columns, Alan Partridge on Radio Norwich... A middle-aged man thing, it seems.
Propagandists,
note, never, ever choose to advance their ideas in an argument when a
narrative (Jud Suß) or a series of emotive images and
associations (Triumph of the Will) will do the job. Why not?
Because an argument appeals to the intellect, which is often a less
powerful route than an appeal to gut emotions (in part, this is
surely because of the issue of cognitive load, raised above). And
because an argument is naked: it shows its workings, it is vulnerable
to having its conclusions tested, its premises ripped away. Worst of
all – from the perspective of tyrants and bullies – as Karl
Popper pointed out (more of him in part 2), the advancing of rational
argument always implicitly involves a concession to the person it is
aimed at, a concession that their decision (to act a certain way, or
believe a certain thing) must ultimately prevail – an
acknowledgement that all the arguer can do is plead a case, seek to
persuade the listener that her interest is in reality aligned with
what the arguer asks. Not the sort of thing, perhaps, that a guy who
always Stands Up Straight and Throws His Shoulders Back to assert dominance has any time for.
Perhaps,
some readers will suggest, this is unfair. Perhaps Peterson isn't
making any grand case at all. All he is doing, perhaps, is whetting
his students appetites with a series of gee-whizz snippets of what
philosophy and psychology can offer. OK, perhaps. Sure. But if so, it
has to be conceded that Peterson cannot deserve the status of an
important, original thinker. If, on the other hand, we are supposed
to understand that there is some original, deep thought being traced in
these lectures, then Peterson is open to the criticism that he
doesn't actually argue his case at all whilst pretending to do just
that – and so is guilty of a quite serious form of charlatanism.
To
give an example, I can detect a ghostly, and rather disturbing, trace
of an “argument”, if you can call it that, drawn through the
course of Lecture 2, namely that because “meaning” is something that
it is vitally important to humans we shouldn't try to defuse
dominance hierarchies (that particularly vicious animal form of
social organization) where they occur in the world because such hierarchies are one of the ways that
animals, including humans, can create meaning in their lives. Now,
the most charitable interpretation (given some of the absurd non
sequiturs which would otherwise arise in the course of the lecture) is to conclude that, no,
Peterson isn't making that, or any other grand argument on that scale. If, however, anyone disagrees with
this and thinks that Peterson actually is here saying something like
dominance hierarchies are a good thing and purporting to offer
reasons for this, then I'd be interested to know. If so, I would
have much to say (and none of it less than scathing) about his method
of establishing the point.
Ultimately, I
don't see how Peterson and his followers can avoid this skewer.
Either he is merely an entertaining purveyor of other people's ideas
in the way that, say, Bill Bryson or Alain de Botton are (but not
someone who should be lauded as an original thinker), or else he is a
thinker who offers a patter of anecdote and allusion in place of
rational argument (and hence a charlatan or a mystic).
