What the Left—and Everyone Else—Can Learn from the Public Pedagogy of Jordan Peterson
A professor who instructs people to clean their rooms in lieu of protesting emerged in the fall of 2016 as an unlikely hero among many millennials—especially among young adult males who like YouTube.
Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, became a “free speech” cause célèbre after posting videos online criticizing political correctness and Canadian Bill C-16, objecting to the attempt to add “gender or identity or expression” to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination.
Peterson’s new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, appears to have catapulted him into even greater fame. The book, released January 23, became an international bestseller.
The self-titled “Professor against political correctness” has amassed more than 850,000 YouTube subscribers and nearly 500,000 Twitter followers. Camille Paglia, the quasi-feminist social critic known for her quick wit and rapid-fire assertion-slinging with little time for evidence, deemed Peterson “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan,” and VICE News echoed similar sentiments, crowning him Canada’s “most infamous intellectual.”
He’s been called “a clench-jawed crusader against what he sees as an authoritarian movement masquerading as social-justice activism.”
Indeed, Peterson reserves visceral disdain for “social justice warriors,” and he lambasts the humanities and social sciences in higher education for becoming a “postmodern, neo-Marxist playground for radicals.”
Of course, Peterson has received flak for some of his positions, including warning letters from his university. As his “brand” has risen in notoriety, anti-capitalists with whom I share certain political aspirations have labeled his ideas “bullshit”—and, to be sure, the philosophical framework from which the politically incorrect professor educates millions of people over the Internet has serious flaws, as detailed below.
However, I argue, those of us on the “Left”—including those with structural criticisms of capitalism and of other forms of hierarchy and authority deemed lacking in legitimacy, as well as folks organizing with visions of a better world—have something to learn from him. He has, for example, publicly made a “left-wing case for free speech.” Peterson’s public pedagogy, the informal or semi-formal educative work he shares predominantly through new media, also offers psychological starting points for those of us who take “social justice” seriously. As ironic as it is, given his crusading against “social justice warriors,” we can learn a lot from someone we disagree with. In fact, this approach echoes the ninth rule in his new book: The author entreats his reader to listen to others—even, and in particular, those with whom one might disagree—because those people might know something one does not.
Peterson’s public pedagogy can teach us—whether he intends for all of these lessons to be learned or not—how to better understand, interrogate, and struggle over the meaning of “justice,” be it “social” or otherwise.
Liberating the Logos and Our Understanding of Individuality
First, though, there is the not-so-minor issue regarding how and why parts of Peterson’s worldview remain antithetical to the deepening and extension of democracy that those on the “radical left” support.
To the point, these elements of his thought became the crux of a debate that unfolded between the renegade professor and an interviewer at a recent RSA event. Peterson’s insistence that people should straighten themselves out—by cleaning their rooms, for a start, he oft-implores folks—prior to making an attempt at political engagement, prompted some pushback from the RSA affiliate. The RSA interviewer pointed out that some of the most prominent, effective, and generally speaking, morally upright activists also had their own personal flaws, as was the case, he observed, with Martin Luther King Jr. and his extramarital affairs. Those flaws did not keep MLK from making indelible and admirable changes to society.
Peterson countered that were King to have straightened out his personal life, he perhaps could have been more effective in his civil rights struggles.
That may be true, but given the psycho-emotional and physical toll civil disobedience and militant organizing tends to exact on those who are truly committed to it, Peterson’s maxim probably does not apply across the board.
More importantly, though, is the assumption in Peterson’s formulation that sorting oneself out and engaging in politics (for lack of a better word) are mutually exclusive. His framing implies one should properly come before the other, and that instead of trying to change the world, change should begin with the individual.
This notion of individuality abstracts the individual from society, erecting a dichotomy when none need exist, given that what largely defines us as individuals are our relations with others. The philosopher John Dewey made that case, and Dewey is especially apropos given Peterson’s affinity for the pragmatist philosophy Dewey helped popularize. “Metaphysically, I am an American pragmatist,” Peterson wrote in a now-public email to Steve Kovach, who authored an article for Business Insider concerning Peterson.
What pragmatists like Dewey understood is that our necessary human association produces consequences, and it matters who makes decisions about those consequences and how such decisions are made. And democracy, as Dewey noted, must be “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” The democratic possibility is what makes the freedom of speech Peterson is adamant about protecting so meaningful.
When interviewing Peterson, the aforementioned RSA affiliate appropriately balked at the idea that in a purportedly “democratic” society individuals should let others run the political show. While Peterson makes much ado about responsibility, his conception of the term shirks the responsibility that one might feel toward civic engagement. That understanding of individual responsibility was even articulated by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth US president, who argued that citizens had the duty to participate practically in politics “in accordance with the highest principles of honor and justice.” Those who do not, he claimed, “are unfit to live in a free community.”
Roosevelt’s gunboat diplomacy and American exceptionalism aside, the notion of the individual invoked in his rhetoric has roots in the tradition Peterson also celebrates.
The Western understanding of the sovereignty and respect for the individual, Peterson suggests, is premised upon respect for the logos, the ability to articulate or formulate order out of chaos. The logos is a precondition for the realization of one’s potential.
Dewey, for one, grasped that insight Peterson is now helping to popularize. But he took it more seriously than Peterson appears to.
In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, Dewey criticized Plato for defending a class-stratified society characterized by a select few who “appropriate to themselves the results of the blind and externally directed activities of others.” As Dewey explained,
Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality.
Drawing on Dewey, any society that relegates major decision making to an elite few denies actualization of the logos and ergo deprecates the individual. Peterson’s philosophy of the individual and his disdain for “social justice” ideologically isolate individuality from the contexts whereby the logos—and thus more meaningful individual lives—can be realized.
Venerating the logos and the individual should thus teach us the importance of struggling to deepen the kind of democratic social relations that do not limit but instead expand people’s opportunities to participate in the decisions affecting them. Movements that, for instance, encourage the development rather than the subordination of people by instituting workplace democracy—illustrations of “democracy at work,” in other words—seek economic justice and try to do just that.
The True and the Good
In a 2016 message explicitly geared toward millennials, Peterson told his young-adult admirers to be wary of the kind of activist whose main aim “is to change other people.” Of course, we inevitably do change others, and ourselves, through the interaction that is a prerequisite for human life.
Peterson’s own online content is a form of public pedagogy insofar as what he communicates has an impact on others, which I’m sure he hopes it does. That is, he probably wouldn’t bother posting videos—now totaling more than 250—on YouTube if he didn’t expect them to have an impact on—that is, if he did not expect them to change—other people. The precept of free speech is paramount in part because it protects and enables, as the prominent Free Speech Movement thinker and later adjunct professor of philosophy Mario Savio once explained, “consequential speech,” communicative advocacy that can stir people to act and catalyze concrete changes.
Given that much of Peterson’s life is no doubt devoted to pedagogy, public and otherwise, it is safe to say one of his aims is to change others too.
As he individualizes problems that could be addressed socially, smuggling in his own attempt at social change in the process, his philosophy of education seeks to separate the “true” from the “good,” even though he wants to wed the two as a crucial part of his worldview.
In his aforementioned message to millennials, Peterson agreed with Jonathan Haidt, a cofounder of Heterodox Academy, who argued the search for “truth” and the search for “justice”—especially within the context of higher education—irreconcilably conflict.
Peterson often recounts the horrors that have emerged historically from utopian idealism, yet he commits a dangerous idealist fallacy by supposing educators ought to or even can avoid making pedagogical choices about what is important to educate students about and what the purpose of that education is to begin with.
That is, he ignores the notions of “justice” and of what is “good” or right and of value that necessarily inform how we educate and search for the truth.
Dichotomizing the explicit value concerns of “social justice” from “truth” obscures why and how “truth” can be of value. That framing erases the pragmatist conception of truth, predicated upon experimentation to determine what works and at least temporarily holds “true” in practice, from consideration. Arguably the greatest practical rationale for valuing truth gets discarded within the Peterson-Haidt dualism because the practicality of the search for and use of truth for and by human beings is not recognized as of value.
As another public intellectual and professor in Canada, Henry Giroux, argues, the failure to connect learning to politics also severs education from its democratic potential. Positing truth and justice as mutually exclusive in higher education rules out a pedagogy premised on the aim of realizing the individual through democracy, and neglects the value in students learning to exercise agency and to participate in the decisions affecting them.
And if a principal aim of education and the search for truth therein is not based on equipping students with the knowledge and skills to make those decisions, then people are less likely to learn how to apply and embody the logos and might even forfeit it entirely.
Peterson, to his credit, has been quick to criticize some trends in higher education that bode well for no one. He vocally criticized the incident that happened at Wilfrid Laurier University—when Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student and teaching assistant, was reprimanded for showing to her class a short clip of a debate, featuring Peterson, about the use of gender pronouns.
In contrast, though, something like the 2015 University of Toronto graduate employee strike—an action in which grad student workers foregrounded the job and income insecurity they faced, enabling them to build coalitions and foster a sort of social movement unionism among academic workers—was ostensibly not as an important an issue for him. The point is not that he or anyone else has to always attend to every major event, even if it seriously affects the school where and perhaps the students one teaches. Rather, what’s relevant is what and why one’s philosophical assumptions lead one to consider some issues worthy and others unworthy, to paraphrase an analytic technique famously used by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
If we learn to truly value free speech on campus as Peterson beseeches us to, then we need to create the conditions under which it can actually be exercised and valued in more than the abstract.
For a freedom of speech advocate, Peterson has yet to connect the political economy of academe to the persistent threats to free speech on campus. Although he has acknowledged the plight of adjunct professors in higher education, he has not publicly pointed out, as far as I know, how the precarious, low-wage positions faced now by the majority of the professoriate within the two-tiered system of higher education imperils academic freedom. Freedom of speech for professors appears wholly inadequate when the majority of faculty, at least in the United States, can now be fired—or, simply not be rehired for the next term, given their per-semester contingent employment—if they say something that irks department chairs or administrators. Examples abound. And they illustrate the inextricable if-oft-concealed tie between the “true” and the “good” or, put differently, between the search for “truth” and the quest for “justice”—teloses that Peterson again considers at odds with each other.
Except he doesn’t. He explicitly admitted trying to wed at least the former within his own philosophy during an interview-cum-debate with podcast host Sam Harris. In attempting to do so, he put forward a conception of truth based on humanity’s evolutionary survival. He likened it to a pragmatist approach, but determining whether something is true on the basis of whether it allows us to survive would not seem all that pragmatic. It doesn’t do much to help inform us of how to act in the present, going forward. It would also seem silly to search for the truth—as Peterson beseeches us to do, at the expense of working toward justice—if the truth could not be determined until we all died.
In another talk, Peterson shared an anecdote that belies similar logic. He explained how in 1989, the Berlin philharmonic orchestra played during a big celebration after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They played Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9” in front of a large crowd.
“You can imagine someone,” Peterson said, “critically minded and rational, at an event like that standing behind you, as you’re listening to the great strains of that symphony manifest themselves, tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘Well, you know, that symphony is going to end. What makes you think it has any meaning at all?’ ”
As he noted, it’s hard to respond to something like that. But, he added that you might say: “You should reconsider the way you’re looking at the world there, buddy.”
If you think that the symphony has no meaning because it ends “you’re not paying attention to what’s going on if that’s the way you think, or maybe you’re thinking too much,” he said. “Yes, you’re thinking too much and not paying enough attention. But it’s more serious than that. Say, ‘what does it all mater if in 10 billion years … the sun is going to expand and consume the earth? What difference does it make?’ And I would say, ‘Well, is that the kind of answer you’re going to give to a child that’s in pain?’ ”
Likewise, his attempt, at least in his debate with Harris, to postpone the adjudication of truth until our species becomes extinct robs it of its meaning too. His effort to marry the “good” of survival with the concept of “truth” showcased the tensions and shortcomings we all can learn from, and it points to a kind of “doublethink” embedded in his philosophy.
Doublethink, Dichotomous Narratives, and De-Democratization
George Orwell, the acclaimed British fiction writer of the twentieth century, popularized the concept of “doublethink” in his dystopian novel about a totalitarian future, 1984, one of the texts on Peterson’s official reading list. Doublethink involves holding two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time and believing them both to be true.
Although it’s not obvious at first blush, Peterson succumbs to a sophisticated version of doublethink when it comes to some of the foundations of his worldview, and he couches that within criticisms reflecting dichotomous thinking.
Another Orwell book Peterson approves of, as he explained to his class in one lecture, is Road to Wigan Pier, which is also the third book on his must-read list.
As he explained in the lecture, Orwell wrote the last part of the book
for the Left Book Club, which was this socialist group that would publish a book every month or so. And what he did was he wrote a critique of socialism—of British socialism. And he said, ‘Yeah, well this sucks man. We should be on the side of these working people. But the socialists I meet they’re not on the side of the working people. They’re like tweed-wearing, middle-class hyper-intellectuals who never go anywhere near the working class because of their class prejudices and for all sorts of other reasons. And they don’t like the poor at all. They just hate the rich.’
Peterson came to agree with Orwell’s criticisms. “That’s part of also what made me psychoanalytically oriented,” he said, “because one thing psychoanalysts always do, always, is if you say, ‘Here’s how I’m positively predisposed,’ the psychoanalyst says, ‘How are you using that to mask something easy and malevolent that you’re doing?’ ”
Taking a tip from his playbook and turning the psychoanalytic tables, it is worth exploring how what Peterson says serves as ideological gloss for other ways his public pedagogy functions.
In the same lecture quoted above, Peterson notes that “George Orwell was the first Western intellectual who figured out what the hell was going on in the Soviet Union. And he did that in the mid-forties,” adding that evidence was piling up about Stalin’s atrocities before then, “but unfortunately, what happened was the Spanish Civil War and the lefties were pretty much the good guys in the Spanish Civil War.”
What gets omitted from his narrative is crucial to understanding that history, though, and it illustrates what is going on with Peterson’s pedagogy.
He failed to mention that in December of 1936, shortly after writing The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell also made the trip to “Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles,” as the British author himself put it, adding that he “joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” He wrote that in Homage to Catalonia, which Wes Alwan appropriately plugged in the PEL podcast about Orwell on language and totalitarianism.
In Spain during the country’s Civil War, Orwell witnessed what meaningful, anti-authoritarian socialism could look like in practice: “The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing.” The movement Orwell experienced firsthand has been described as anarcho-syndicalist because of the role of the militant syndicalist labor union, the Spanish CNT-FAI, in reordering society along the lines of, as those involved also referred to it, comunismo libertario (libertarian communism).
“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” Orwell wrote. Every shop and café he encountered had been placed under collective democratic control, and servile forms of speech had disappeared. “All this was queer and moving,” he wrote. “There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”
In the book, Orwell also documented the irreconcilable tension between Soviet-style authoritarian socialism and the syndicalist-inspired libertarian communism of the Spanish anarchists. He exposed the lies of the Communist press in Spain, quoting excerpts from the party’s organ at length to showcase falsehoods. He also described what has since been corroborated: The Communists bear some responsibility for undermining the short-lived revolution Orwell thought worth fighting for by helping to ensure the demise of the short-lived Spanish experiment in economic democracy.
Peterson might not have read Homage to Catalonia, so he might not know that Orwell was critical of the Moscow-directed Communists before the mid-1940s. Or he might have opted to omit the part of history that fails to conform to the dichotomous worldview, popular during the Cold War, which pitted Soviet-style “Communism” against Western-style capitalist “democracies.”
He has lectured about the horrors of the Soviet Union before, lamenting that the atrocities committed by and even after Stalin are not widespread knowledge. The position he takes is curious, but it again helps indicate his presuppositions and outline his worldview. During the Cold War, especially in the United States, as Herman and Chomsky also demonstrated in Manufacturing Consent, major media devoted significant coverage to victims of a Communist state, like the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984, while the murder and rape of “unworthy” victims killed in the 1980s by military and paramilitary forces in Latin American countries supported by the United States received little-to-no coverage. Herman and Chomsky pointed out that with well-documented US attempts to subvert the administrations in Guatemala (1947–54) and the backing of military attacks on Nicaragua (1981–87), “allegations of Communist links and a Communist threat caused many liberals to support counterrevolutionary intervention, while others lapsed into silence, paralyzed by the fear of being tarred with charges of infidelity to the national religion.”
They added “that when anti-Communist fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in support of claims of ‘communist’ abuses is suspended, and charlatans can thrive as evidential sources.” Whether Peterson and his denunciations of the “bloody neo-Marxists” who “have invaded the campuses” and are supposedly “in the process of invading the rest of the culture as fast as they can possibly manage” qualifies as an updated example of the latter is hard to say. However, his assertion that the history of Communist state crimes has been neglected clearly neglects some not-too-distant history as well. And his conceptual linking of a so-called “radical Left” to the mass torture and death doled out under the Soviet Union could certainly function in similar ways to what Herman and Chomsky described in the 1980s, perhaps at minimum scaring “liberals” into disavowing more progressive policies and practices for fear they will lead to a dystopian nightmare of Orwellian proportions. Meanwhile, Peterson’s focus on the barbarity of what was in effect top-down state capitalism in the now-nonexistent Soviet Union comes at the expense of well-documented atrocities that still-existing Western governments, often acting on the prerogatives of the capitalist institutions undergirding them, bear responsibility for.
This not only reflects a serious double standard. The assumptions about historical and political worthiness also reinforce the de-democratization characteristic of the framework for understanding Peterson has popularized.
What Peterson’s Pedagogy Teaches Us about Social Justice
Peterson’s deficit when it comes to democratic sensibilities notwithstanding, his ideas and his perhaps pretentiously titled “rules for life” should not be dismissed outright.
In a recent book talk, of sorts, Peterson made a point in relation to one of those rules that anyone interested in a more meaningful notion of social justice could learn from.
Ruminating on one of the “rules” from the book—“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”—he told the audience the way to read the horrible parts of human history is as if you were the perpetrator.
“The idea that the savior is the person who takes the world’s sins upon himself is exactly that,” he said, relating the aphorism to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, as he tends to do.
Digging deeper, he added that the way “there stops being Nazis, is for you to know that the Nazis were you, and for you to decide not to do that again.”
Coming to such a realization is no easy task. It requires getting in touch with the evil, or the potential for it, residing within. That’s what we understandably try to suppress and, worse, what we pretend does not exist.
News recently broke that in Perris, Calif., a mere twenty miles from where I live, the parents of thirteen children are alleged to have tortured, abused, and held their kids—ranging in ages 2 to 29—captive for years. The children were found severely malnourished and some were tied up.
A common response to this news might be to wonder how anyone could do such a thing. Or, some could experience a knee-jerk desire to severely punish the parents for what they did.
However, if you read Peterson closely, he entreats us to come to a different understanding.
As is suggested by another chapter in his book—“Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them”—acting as if our demons within do not exist makes it all the more likely they will emerge uncontrollably, unleashing some of the worst horrors imaginable.
While parents might believe they would never do anything to hurt their children—and while we might prefer to imagine we would have been the organizers of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising rather than members of the Death’s Head Units of the SS who ran the Nazi concentration camps—ignoring the capacity for evil within each of us is, as Peterson explains, a recipe for disaster.
In The Gulag Archipelago, another book featured on Peterson’s recommended reading list, this insight was eloquently captured by Noble laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an author Peterson refers to often in his lectures.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
If we take Solzhenitsyn and Peterson seriously, we are, I think, compelled to put punitive paradigms of “criminal” justice aside in order to empathize. To do so in such a profound and indeed disturbing way helps us get just how we human beings can act so inhumanely.
That kind of empathy can translate into a radical forgiveness needed for another notion of justice to take root. It was on display recently during the trial of Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics national team doctor who was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing women gymnasts who were just children at the time of the abuse. Gymnast Emily Morales, 18, told Nassar she believed in forgiveness when she testified at his trial.
“You and I are human beings, we make mistakes,” she said. “Although you have hurt me, I want to forgive you and feel closure and move on to healing in my life.”
For anyone who has suffered abuse, the desire for vengeance has to be great, and the judge in the Nassar case certainly invoked a notion of justice infused with thirst for revenge. But that is not the formula for justice that best reflects those psychological realizations Peterson teaches about. It is also not a justice that shows respect for humanity, despite and even in part because of our penchant for cruelty. Nor is it necessarily the most effective method for reducing the cruelty victims want to address.
Early on when the #MeToo movement emerged in the fall of 2017, highlighting the issue of widespread sexual misconduct, prison abolitionists were sharing analyses similar to the above and were already discussing the importance of trying to end sexual violence without prisons.
“When we put people in prisons and in jails, often we are sentencing them to judicial rape because we know they are going to be assaulted when they go inside,” explained Marianne Kaba, who runs the abolitionist organization Project NIA. “Yet we are still putting people in that environment to be assaulted. How are you going to be an anti-rape advocate or organizer and still be pressing for people to be put into rape factories?”
A different idea of “social justice” is illustrated in an interview with a woman, Patricia Naqi, featured in Visions of Abolition, a documentary about the problem of prisons and possibilities for life without them. In the interview, Naqi recounts receiving a phone call at 3 a.m. one morning from detectives in Riverside, CA, where I currently reside. Her stepdaughter answered the phone. They were informed that Patricia’s mother and her 13-year-old sold had been murdered; they were murdered by the man who was going out with her daughter. He was later sent to San Quentin Prison and was sentenced to death without the possibility of parole.
Naqi described experiencing “a powerless moment,” but after getting involved in prison abolitionist efforts, she came to a profound realization. She observed that there was a moment when her daughter’s partner “snapped,” and she went on to ask: “Who’s to say that’s not possible for any one of us?”
Even though she doesn’t always want to think that he could be “rehabilitated,” Naqi added: “I know today that it’s a possibility… His life is being wasted just sitting in prison, you know, completely. That’s not the answer, and I know it’s not the answer… His story can be used to help other people.”
Understanding our shared capacities for malevolence as well as the innately human ability to actualize the logos and make order out of chaos, as Peterson teaches, is a precondition for a different practice of justice akin to the type Naqi alludes to. It becomes increasingly harder to justify existing Gulag-like institutions, like the US prison-industrial complex, when we grapple with the humanity of prisoners who might have done something wrong and also comprehend how we ourselves could commit just as bad, if not worse, acts of harm.
As Solzhenitsyn put it, echoing Naqi’s realization as he addressed the question of how those who participated in state-sanctioned torture and murder in the Soviet Union could have done what they did, he cautioned, so that “we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? ’ ”
After reminding readers of Socrates’s eternal lesson—“Know thyself!”—Solzhenitsyn added that when we are met with “the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.”
Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn made another point in the book that can show us how to develop one of those key moral principles Peterson preaches.
In evaluating how and why “several hundred thousand young men” in Russia took up arms against their own country during World War II, Solzhenitsyn concluded that you could not “explain this treason biologically. It has to have had a social cause.”
To act in an evil way, Solzhenitsyn also remarked, “a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act of conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.”
If we value precepts regarding responsibility, which Peterson claims have unduly taken a back seat to talk about people’s rights, it seems the only responsible thing to do is to assume responsibility for the society within which one becomes an individual. If we have an individual responsibility to account for the evil we are capable of so as to sort our own selves out, we arguably have as much a responsibility to honestly interrogate the justifications for, and the taken-for-granted assumptions regarding, the seeming normality and necessity of evils enacted by, and in some cases embedded in, our social institutions. This turns our attention to the relationships that shape us as individuals yet can also be reshaped, transformed, or perhaps even transcended by enough individuals assuming a more meaningful kind of responsibility.
Cultivating and exalting the logos and individuality in the manner Peterson insists is paramount should imply criticizing and surpassing the democratic deficit upon which his philosophy is hamstrung.
To do so would no doubt involve “the integration of the shadow,” to use Peterson’s phrase, borrowed from Jung. That means you must bring back in part the “monster” that’s been “edited out,” so that you are not merely a “persona,” someone meek, merely obedient and lacking individuality.
To stand up to evil, he offers, you have to incorporate some of the evil in yourself. Our attempts to assume responsibility, to disobediently confront the evil otherwise normalized and justified often in the name of justice, might reclaim the meaning of “social justice” if we incorporate our shadow in the process.
That might be the most important lesson Peterson can teach us.
James Anderson is an adjunct professor working in Southern California. He is from Illinois but now tries each semester to cobble together classes to teach at various colleges and universities in Southern California. He has worked as a freelance journalist for several online news outlets.
fantastic. how can i contact the author?
Glad you liked the piece. If you want to provide me with your email in the comments, I can send you a message. Or you could email the PEL folks and provide them with an email address for me to use to contact you, if you’d like.
Thanks,
James A.
What magnificent article. I have followed JP since his BillC16. Since than I’ve had pragmatic counters to his points on the will to power or his similarities with the post-modernist. I just wanted to say thank you so much for this article, it’s tremendous.
This is awesome! Thank you for writing this.
“To do so would no doubt involve “the integration of the shadow,” to use Peterson’s phrase, borrowed from Jung. That means you must bring back in part the “monster” that’s been “edited out,” so that you are not merely a “persona,” someone meek, merely obedient and lacking individuality.”
This is not what the “persona” means in jungian thought, and seems a really shallow understanding of these terms.
Of course, like all self-help gurus, Peterson’s stances furthers such approximations, but the wider problem is that jungian terminology has not proven to be useful in such discussion nor grounded in sufficient evidence.
I don’t think a discussion about Peterson’s limitations is complete or really worthwhile if his jungian hogwash goes unexamined and is simply assumed to be true because Jung is a known name in psychology, and surely if everybody talks about it, it cannot be entirely wrong.
I have recently started reading Jung and his ideas around the shadow, persona, animus – etc. what I heard from Peterson did not seem to be so contradictory to what I am reading from Jung. Jung said that the mask or persona was a compromise between the individual and the social. People suffer from over identification with the persona. Is this what you understand? How is Peterson’s take hogwash – ie, would you mind explaining further how his ideas are not a correct interpretation of Jung?
I think, when it comes to his arguments about free speech, he makes a huge assumption or, at least, expects us to agree with a huge implication: that a particular directive to avoid certain phrases or use certain speech in certain contexts is anti-free speech. There are already an incredible amount of things we can and cannot say in the work place, and when the argument falls back to relying on free speech and open discourse, it is a red flag to me.
Allowing the free expression of ideas is very important to a society, but Peterson hasn’t done a good job of explaining why the things he feels he should be allowed to say are in any way constricting which ideas can be discussed and debated. When I’m at work, I can bring up the ideas surrounding a coworker being an asshole, why I think that, and what types of consequences come from it. I don’t necessarily expect that I can walk up to my coworker and say, “Morning, asshole.”
It is my experience that personal immaturity can blow apart social movements; the personal and political are very much linked in this way. (Peterson shows no signs of having integrated his shadow.)
If everyone “cleaned their house” would there even be such a thing as politics as we know it? I think we would probably call it culture. This presents an activist as if he advocates not being an activist. As usual everyone wants to take a fragment of a comment from Peterson to absurdity.
Suska:
I’m not sure of your point. If everyone “cleaned their house [or room, or whatever]” and otherwise put their individual life in order that would be great, but I don’t think that can easily be separated from the process of people communicating and consciously collaborating to address the consequences of living together with the degree of interdependence that humans do. And those consequences most certainly exist. Moreover, how we remain interdependent is also important. That is, how we organize ourselves in relation to each other and the forms of organization we use so as to keep existing is kind of a big deal. I don’t think we could or can put ourselves in order to a desirable degree unless we also engage with all that. You can call that “politics,” if you’d like. It would be concern for “politics” broadly understood.
As I suggested in the essay, by primarily focusing on telling folks to get their own lives in order and by claiming that ought to come first before engaging in any criticism or attempts to change the world of which we are part, as Peterson does, does not emphasize enough what shapes us as individuals and what we can in turn shape regarding social conditions, institutions, etc. I’d argue that getting our individual selves in order and, crucially, assuming the responsibility needed to realize a fuller individuality, is predicated upon participating in the (social) decisions that affect you, which means focusing on more than just cleaning your room. The more internal work and the engagement with the world can and ought to be mutually reinforcing.
You wrote: “This presents an activist as if he advocates not being an activist.” I’m assuming you’re referring to my self-presentation in the essay? First, I’m not sure what you mean by “activist”. If it means arguing that the development of the individual can be linked to the mutually reinforcing participation in social or in “political” or (as Dewey understood a more robust practice of democracy) in “community” life, then you can label me that if you’d like. I don’t think my position was at all concealed in the piece; in fact, I took pretty transparent positions throughout.
Likewise, a cursory read of the essay would also reveal that I addressed much more than “a fragment of a comment from Peterson”. I quoted him at length and hyper-linked to videos wherein he expresses the ideas I discussed.
As to rights and responsibilities, I think there’s a split: the rich get the rights, the poor get the responsibilities.
well put distinction!
Critique of the comments on Peterson’s individualism: he doesn’t isolate the individual. This is made quite clear in his earlier work “Maps of Meaning.” He has a sense of being-in-the-world similar to Heidegger, from what I gather.
Speaking of which, you should do an episode on that. He has published a precis of the book (about 30 pages long) which is a fair summary of the book. Hell, you could probably get him on the podcast.
You’re right. In a lot of his work he doesn’t isolate the individual. He’s actually very careful to emphasize how interconnected we are. But he does do that in the way he discusses the individual in his message to millennials. And he does that to a degree in his new book; that was the point of contention with the RSA interviewer in the video I also linked to and discussed in my essay. The interviewer took exception to Rule 6 in his book — “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world” — and the arguments Peterson makes in relation to that rule. There and elsewhere (e.g. the message to millennials) I don’t think Peterson underscores to the degree necessary how what we are as individuals is in part a big assemblage of ever-evolving social relations with others (with the world). And I don’t think he adequately accounts for how assuming the responsibility to criticize aspects of the world that could be improved (and then acting as an individual collectively with other persons to make those improvements or transformations) can be an important part of setting your own house in order and improving/developing yourself.
It is interesting to read some criticism of Peterson which does have some basis in thought, but I can’t help thinking you are falling into the old post-modernist trap of befuddling the reader with a whole lot of theory that is automatically assumed as true when in fact it is highly disputable and also attributing ideas to Peterson which are not a genuine account of his views.,
For example you write:
‘Peterson often recounts the horrors that have emerged historically from utopian idealism, yet he commits a dangerous idealist fallacy by supposing educators ought to or even can avoid making pedagogical choices about what is important to educate students about and what the purpose of that education is to begin with.
I don’t think Peterson has ever argued that ‘educators ought to avoid making pedagogical choices’, but that is just assumed in this paragraph with no references or quotes to support its authenticity. It is also quite hard to un-puzzle this whole sentence to discover what has been stated here, another favorite trick of sophists seeking to win consent by bamboozling their audience..
Later you write:
‘That is, Peterson ignores the notions of “justice” and of what is “good” or right and of value that necessarily inform how we educate and search for the truth.’
Not sure if Peterson does this. This is not to say education is not value-oriented and probably biased, but at the other extreme it should not be permissable for any or every opinion to be accorded with equal value in terms of its ‘truth’ or connection to reality. This relativistic view of ‘truth’ is commonly held by Peterson’s haters, For example, in one interview I heard regarding gender issues and transgender rights the people opposing Peterson said with completely straight faces that humans do not actually have biological sex and that sex and gender are purely social constructs. They also argue that we must use non-binary pronouns to stop offending people or we are guilty of hate-speech and one professor suggested that if you cannot remember which pronoun you should use with a particular person (because there is a very long list of new pronouns seeking to be imposed on the English language by these social activists) then you should just take out your cellphone and look it up. What a great practical solution to a non-existent problem created by academic idiots! These are the ‘truths’ we are being asked to accept into our lives.
The following paragraph also just supports a completely relativistic view of the world, which if followed to its logical conclusion would just mean everything was true, black could be white, and scientology’s view of history with all the aliens and dinosaurs is correct because some people want to believe it is so.
‘Dichotomizing the explicit value concerns of “social justice” from “truth” obscures why and how “truth” can be of value. That framing erases the pragmatist conception of truth, predicated upon experimentation to determine what works and at least temporarily holds “true” in practice, from consideration. Arguably the greatest practical rationale for valuing truth gets discarded within the Peterson-Haidt dualism because the practicality of the search for and use of truth for and by human beings is not recognized as of value.’
Again convoluted arguments that maybe I have failed to understand, but overall a lot of social ‘science’ verbage and postmodernist philosophy used in combination in an attempt to refute a clear minded and logical thinker.
That is my 2 cents.
Simon
What I attribute to Peterson does actually “account for his views,” and I provided quotes and hyper-links to where those views are expressed. I don’t think I’ve fallen in to the trap of trying to befuddle the reader at all, although it appears that’s the function your comment serves, intentional or not.
You commented; “I don’t think Peterson has ever argued that ‘educators ought to avoid making pedagogical choices’, but that is just assumed in this paragraph with no references or quotes to support its authenticity. It is also quite hard to un-puzzle this whole sentence to discover what has been stated here, another favorite trick of sophists seeking to win consent by bamboozling their audience”
But here’s the issue. Peterson DID suggest that in his message to millennials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOeO_frzvg.
I hyperlinked to that video in my piece, by the way. So you’re wrong to state I offered “no references or quotes” in support of the claim. That’s not postmodern “bamboozling” there; that’s just pointing out that what you wrote is not accurate.
Also, in that message to millennials video Peterson explicitly concurs with Jonathan Haidt’s argument about the search for truth and the search for justice within higher education being at odds with each other — they’re conflicting “teloses” in the Haidt formulation Peterson endorses. By endorsing that view — and creating a whole message based on that — Peterson failed to acknowledge that educators do make value-laden choices (about the “Good” or about “justice”, if you want) when we teach. So that dichotomy Haidt tried to erect and which Peterson echoed misses something essential.
You just assumed that those who read your comments will assume your critique is sufficient to discount the criticism I just reiterated above. Also, you misquoted me. I didn’t write “educators ought to avoid making pedagogical choices”. I wrote that Peterson commits a “fallacy by supposing educators ought to or even can avoid making pedagogical choices about what is important to educate students about and what the purpose of that education is to begin with.” You should avoid omitting words when quoting directly. It’s sloppy.
Finally, I also argued in the essay that Peterson contradicts himself. You seemed to miss that point.
Perhaps Peterson falls into that trap because at times he tries to over-simplify to make his ideas more accessible to a wider audience. (He’s mindful of his “public pedagogy,” as I put it.) And perhaps it’s because sometimes the ideas he grapples with are complex. That’s one reason dismissing something complex as mere “verbage” is a mistake — or a less-skillful attempt to divert attention from what the arguments actually are. I don’t doubt Peterson knows that you can’t divorce notions of the “good” (or values) from the search for truth in education (or from education generally). But he explicitly endorsed that view in his message to millennials, and his critiques of concern for social justice within education reflect the same simplistic understanding. But if you’re an educator you damned well better make some conscious value judgments about what you teach and why. And that’s inevitably wrapped up in a teacher’s philosophy of education, and that philosophy always has some presuppositions — if sometimes unacknowledged — about the kind of individuals the teacher is hoping students will become as a result of learning what’s being taught and the kind of social world those individuals will create. So there is some concern for justice there. And that’s not a postmodern argument, sorry. Just asserting that doesn’t make it true, either. I’m not at all arguing for any extreme relativity in terms of truth or morals. So your claim there is baseless. Implicit in your writing is also the assumption that labeling ideas “postmodern” is sufficient to discredit them. Again, that’s sloppy. I wouldn’t assume readers will disregard something just because you call it postmodern bamboozlement or whatever other ridiculous aspersion you cast.
Likewise, the pragmatist conception of truth — or the shortened version of it I sketched in the piece and you quoted — is not postmodern philosophy either. It’s very simple — and you could critique it for that — but it’s decidedly not postmodern. For example, if I add two cups of popcorn together, I get four cups of popcorn. In that case, 2 + 2 = 4. But if I add a cup of water to a cup of popcorn, I just get soggy popcorn. So in the latter case, 2 + 2 does not equal 4 of anything of value.
To reiterate my argument from above, if you separate the search for truth and the search for the “good” (or a concern for values or for justice) then you also lose out on the reason why truth is of value. And in other contexts, Peterson is well aware of the importance of some semblance of a pragmatic conception of truth. He’s concerned with what works in practice. He makes that clear his new book. That’s also why he often assumes a Darwinian perspective (e.g. in interviews with Transliminal Media available on YouTube). Additionally, he tried to argue for a bastardized version of a pragmatic conception of truth influenced by evolutionary theory in his first debate with Sam Harris, which I also linked to in my piece. But he offered up a notion of truth in that debate which was not helpful, as I explained in my essay.
Again, I want to reiterate that contrary to your baseless claims, nowhere in my essay did I put forward a “completely relativistic” (postmodern) view of the world. I think there are value judgments that we have to make and should make explicit — and that means also taking those into account when educating. It’s disingenuous to call out folks for doing that, as Peterson has done (as in his message to millennials), without acknowledging clearly that one also does inevitably that. Pointing out the necessity of value judgments in pedagogy is very different from suggesting that all choices are of equal value in an extreme relativist view. What I argued is that truth and the notion of justice, broadly understood, can’t be separated when educating insofar as making decisions about what truths to search for, to teach and to study, and the concerns for the consequences of studying/teaching certain things in certain ways, means you’re making value judgments and decisions (conscious or not) about the purpose of (your) pedagogy and what kind of society you want it to contribute to. The Haidt-Peterson message and an attack on explicit concerns with (social) justice — however you define it — within education seriously downplay that fundamental aspect of properly self-reflective pedagogy.
That’s the attempted refutation. And finally, like your comment, I’ll end by pointing out that Peterson’s thinking — insightful as it can be —
is not all clear minded all the time.
To imply MLKjr would have been more effective had he not had extra-marital affairs, if indeed Petersen said this, is so far out there I’m not sure the man is sane.
MLKjr could’ve been more effective in his activism to make a better world but he was SHOT you arsehole!
Peterson did indeed do that. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD-VCRNIp-U
The discussion starts around 15 minutes. They don’t mention MLK Jr. until a few minutes later.
I am not so sure. MLKLJr being shot has nothing to do with how effective he was when he was alive.
If a man is running around sleeping with multiple women that would quite likely, in my opinion, take some of his focus away from doing other work. That opinion sounds quite sane to me. As a male I am constantly annoyed and beguiled by how my sex drive gets in the way of actually getting anything done! If I had multiple girlfriends that would take over my whole life.
Simon
This guy seems awesome. I went down a rabbit hole of watching him speak and I was mesmerized. He is saying things that I am always thinking and wondering about and he is saying things that make me cringe and hide waiting for the backlash. Makes me realize how much we are afraid to say anymore. I wish there were a reasonable critique of his ideas that is given as clearly as he shares his ideas.
Listen, I can’t spar with you on the level which may be needed here. I can certainly speak to being befuddled. I didn’t know this person existed until I read your article. After sort of becoming absorbed by him a bit I come back to this article and wonder, what exactly are you trying to say? What do you think he gets right? What does he get wrong? The way you compare and contrast him to Dewey left me feeling like we were comparing apples and skyscrapers. I also felt like reading what you wrote about his ideas about the individual were mischaracterizing what I have seen him say about those ideas. I don’t know if he is terribly inconsistent in how he makes his arguments and I have simply not seen that, but what he says about getting yourself together before you try fixing everyone else makes a lot of sense for me. He looks at it from a psychoanalytic perspective and says, look – given what we know about our own human nature and our ability to really make a mess of things and become quite violent etc – let’s make sure we acknowledge the darker parts of our nature. What he says about MLK is taken out of a larger context and is one comment among many. Given what I know about MLK and his ideas of purification – I would say MLK agrees with the idea that one needs to get one’s own house in order before trying to make changes. I don’t think he is saying never go and try to be an agent of change. I think he sees that the world is full of relatively unconscious people trying to take out their unconscious drives on society as a whole. That kind of thought seems to be a really important thing to mention when critiquing why someone says what he says. No? I don’t know – I’m just really confused because honestly, nothing I saw him say seemed problematic to me. It seemed nuanced, yes. It seemed to be something that would probably not provide a sort of recipe for how to change the world. But I guess it just seemed like what he was saying had more to do with understanding on a deeper level how the social justice warriors have, at the root, a similar kind of thinking to some very tyrannical leaders of the past albeit wearing the mask of virtue. There are many of us who really are on the fence about all of this social justice fighting. Most people I know don’t really care enough to figure out what irks them about it and so long as people are fighting for rights of people, it all seems fine. But for someone like me, there is an underlying “hmmmmmm” when I see things like the me too/times up movements and other social justice movements that feels like – wait – this *seems* like a good thing but for some reason it feels really off. For me, Peterson points to some of that. It isn’t to say that we should all sit back and do nothing, but the level to which we are conscious in this time will determine the level to which justice really ends up being served. I really appreciate your article. I wouldn’t have learned about this person otherwise. And I can’t say how badly I am interpreting the general feel of what you wrote because it honestly just isn’t clear to me what exactly you were saying. That’s no doubt a deficiency of mine. I am not an intellectual or your average PEL listener or reader I imagine. I would truly like to be moved to understand why people have a problem with Peterson that isn’t something that seems like a misunderstanding of what he’s trying to say.
This is the most generous take on Peterson I’ve seen in a bit, and I’ve just finished reading about 5 articles on the guy’s work.
If I have one critique, it’s that you give him too much credit for the ingenuity, timeliness or at least exposition of his last idea you mention (the inherent darkness in us). Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I don’t know of any leftists that cling to the idea of the perfectibility of man (though I’m sure there’s some weird left-transhuminist group I don’t know about that would argue that point).
One question though: I totally missed the connection in this paragraph:
“As is suggested by another chapter in his book—“Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them”—acting as if our demons within do not exist makes it all the more likely they will emerge uncontrollably, unleashing some of the worst horrors imaginable”
I see this as a separate point you go on to discuss next, the inherent darkness in all of us. What connection am I missing? It seems like disciplining children, forming them to your volition (even if it’s stated in a negative sense) is separate to human imperfectibility. What am I missing? And don’t try to bamboozle me with your post-modern-marxist-solipsist-bunk! (*wink, wink)
Thanks for the article!
Hi CB:
Thanks for the comment. That’s a fair point you make regarding giving Peterson too much credit for foregrounding the inherent darkness in all of us. You’re probably right that few folks on the Left still have the more naïve strands of classical liberal (the origins of Left-style anarchism) or Marxian thought predicated upon the unbounded perfectability of man.
I should add, though, that I suppose I’m someone on the “Left,” for lack of a better broad category, who does see potential for degrees of perfectability of human beings. Although, the notion of “perfectability” might have teleological implications I’m not so keen on. But I’ll say improvements and preferable potentials could, I’d argue, be better realized by transforming certain existing social structures or displacing them in favor of forms of organization and social relations that better respect the inherent dignity, capacities and needs of individuals.
I’m also sympathetic to Peterson’s point of emphasis – perhaps more so than most folks. I think Peterson is right: I don’t think most people – myself, and democratic/libertarian socialists on the “Left” I share perspectives with included – are attentive enough to those dark places. I might even go so far as to argue that at minimum recognizing the monster within, and better yet “integrating the shadow” to borrow Peterson’s Jungian phrase, might be a precondition for the informed theory and action necessary to create a more just society.
Thanks also for your question. It’s a fair one. It’s no doubt my fault for not clarifying the conceptual link between the Peterson rule I noted and what he and I referred to as the inherent darkness within us.
That connection admittedly isn’t the focus of the pertinent chapter in his new book. But that chapter is interesting. It includes references to Rousseau, Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking,” Jane Goodall, B.F. Skinner’s work teaching pigeons to play ping-pong (in a section that arguably gives behaviorism too much credit), and Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty”. This is an appropriate place to note that insofar as people take “postmodernism” to mean the creative assembly of seemingly disparate texts or ideas, then I don’t object to it at all if it aids in understanding. And Peterson, as the aforementioned book chapter and much of his work suggests, takes that kind of “postmodern” approach; the author of this video, an open letter to Peterson (promoted by PEL), argues as much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSuEccEYvaE&t=5s. But insofar as folks take “postmodern” to mean a rejection of all meta-narratives and an extreme moral relativity, I don’t accept that at all.
Regardless, that chapter from Peterson’s book also includes an anecdote about the battle of attrition that took place at the dinner table with this then-toddler son. In the chapter he stresses, in line with recurring themes, that human violence is the “default”; peace and the lack of serious physical conflict is more the exception than people think. That could be debated, but the point about underlying aggressiveness is well taken. He also argues for moderated, conscious and thoughtful discipline and (physical, as needed) punishment for children. Like most folks I know, I grew up with a good deal of that – at least a good deal of the latter. I’d just challenge the implication in the chapter that punishment should be considered as necessary and inherently justified. I’d submit that oftentimes, especially if the approach is advanced early enough, there might be more meaningful, impactful and value-forming ways of teaching kids – and in most cases adults – to recognize their own wrongdoing, to rectify it, to make amends as needed and not to repeat it. But to Peterson’s credit, he does claim in that chapter the minimum necessary force is always desirable.
Finally, as I hope folks understood, my PEL piece wasn’t a book review. I, in the main, analyzed Peterson’s “public pedagogy,” which is what enabled his book to become a bestseller I think. So it’s fitting to refer to a YouTube video – the interview Peterson did w/ Dave Rubin – to help clarify the connection you asked about.
“You are not a good guy, and you will take revenge on your children if they misbehave,” Peterson said after Rubin asked him about the rule from the book that has to do with not letting your kids do things that will make you dislike them. “You think, ‘Oh, no. I like my children.’ It’s like, other people might not like them. Maybe they don’t behave very well, you know? And you think you like them because you’re a saint, but you’re not. And you will take revenge on those children if they do things that make you dislike them (starting at 1:22:59; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJClhqGq_M).
My inference, linking the rule about kids to the inherent darkness, was borrowed in part from Peterson’s own ideas and unifying themes.
Thanks again for the comment and question.
Thanks for sharing the information about his views on discipline. Sort of disappointing. I think I’ve been too charitable toward him. I agree that we have a shadow but sometimes it seems he thinks we have zero ability to be temperate.
Several thoughts (and quibbles) on the author’s essay in instalments below in a line-by-line analysis. I have addressed the author personally, to make it more informal:
1) On “Liberating the Logos and Our Understanding of Individuality”
Your point: “That may be true, but given the psycho-emotional and physical toll civil disobedience and militant organizing tends to exact on those who are truly committed to it, Peterson’s maxim probably does not apply across the board.”
My response: If you devote time to sexual affairs, you devote less time to political organizing, unless those affairs contribute to political organizing (e.g. sleeping with someone as a means to gaining something toward one’s political ends). Surely, this maxim does, indeed, apply across the board. Again, if you spend time on one thing, you can’t spend it on something else, that is, if you take time to be linear and unitary.
Your point: “This notion of individuality abstracts the individual from society, erecting a dichotomy when none need exist, given that what largely defines us as individuals are our relations with others.”
My response: Peterson asserts the dichotomy because it is central to his philosophy. Yes, the dichotomy need not exist in someone else’s philosophy, but in his axiomatic system it does. It like saying, “There need not be a distinction between impressions and ideas in Hume’s philosophy.” Well, of course, there need not be. That is just self-evident.
Second, “what largely defines us” is a suppositional statement that would require much more proof than you provide. Why is it not “what largely defines us as individuals is our relations with ourselves?” You are giving us your view here under the guise that it is fact, when it is certainly not.
Your point: “Dewey is especially apropos given Peterson’s affinity for the pragmatist philosophy…”
My response: Pragmatism isn’t a monolithic philosophy or self-consistent set of propositions. Pierce’s attempt to change the name to pragmaticism is a humorous example of how even the main founders of pragmatism didn’t want to be associated with one another. Second, Peterson, from what I recall, has never mentioned Dewey as an influence. He has, however, referenced William James several times – and, I think, that comparison is apt.
Your point: Dewey takes the individual seriously, even though he – in my opinion, like many others, though in different ways (e.g., Popper) misinterpreted Plato’s Republic as anti-individualistic.
This conception of individualism and its relationship to achieving the fullest extension of democracy does not accord with Peterson’s admonishment to clean one’s own room before fixing the world, since it seems to suggest that people shouldn’t engage in the community but focus entirely on their rooms.
My response: First, Peterson is making the simple point that one should know something about the world before trying to fix it. Cleaning one’s room is, partially, a metaphor about cleaning one’s mind, so one can properly articulate their vision of the world. Once one can do this, then one can clearly communicate one’s ideas to the community, and the community may evaluate one’s ideas accurately. Plato’s thought experiment imagined that the Philosopher Kings would spend the first fifty years of their life studying and understanding the community, along with the community’s best interests, before they were allowed to rule. Everything during that first fifty years of their life is supposed to be specifically targeted toward becoming a competent leader.
I believe Peterson is trying to make the same point. Most eighteen year old students simply do not have the requisite knowledge to offer advice on the state of society or try to change it based on their own individual plans. Instead, what is happening is eighteen year old students are being told what is right and wrong by professors, and then those students puppet those same thoughts while protesting events. This is not individuals interacting as a means to extending democracy; rather, it is individuals who have been educated to believe certain propositions (not their own formulations), while at the same time being educated to believe the same thing that you write – that active engagement in society is how democracies function best. What this does is it takes the good idea of Dewey’s and yours – that we need individuals to participate in democracy for it to function – with the bad idea of not teaching students to think as individuals but rather training them to believe in the morality of the day.
Peterson is arguing against the latter, and not the former. And I think your argument conflates the two.
2) “The True and the Good”
Your point: “Of course, we inevitably do change others, and ourselves, through the interaction that is a prerequisite for human life.”
My response: You are using a self-evident proposition to refute a strawman of Peterson’s point to be wary of people whose main aim “is to change other people.” You should first explain Peterson’s whole point, before you use your self-evident proposition to make him sound silly.
Your point: “Mary Savio”
My response: …
Your point: “Given that much of Peterson’s life is no doubt devoted to pedagogy, public and otherwise, it is safe to say one of his aims is to change others too.”
My response: Obviously. Again, you are trying to refute the strawman instead of actually presenting his view in full to begin with.
Your point: “As he individualizes problems that could be addressed socially,”
My response: Clearly, but his philosophy is axiomatically against this.
Your point: “smuggling in his own attempt at social change in the process”
My response: Peterson is not smuggling it in; he is upfront and quite clear about trying to change the university and even opening up one of his own. Why are you trying to make him sound nefarious?
Your point: “his philosophy of education seeks to separate the “true” from the “good,” even though he wants to wed the two as a crucial part of his worldview.”
My response: So did Plato. Maybe you should do a follow up on him.
Your point: “Peterson often recounts the horrors that have emerged historically from utopian idealism, yet he commits a dangerous idealist fallacy by supposing educators ought to or even can avoid making pedagogical choices about what is important to educate students about and what the purpose of that education is to begin with.”
My response: Peterson is fearful of utopian idealism because he believes utopian thought (such as Marxism, even though Engels tried to paint it as “scientific”) contributed to millions of deaths in the twentieth century. His belief in a perennialist educational philosophy is based on the fact that many different geniuses have stood on the shoulders of giants, and have credited their success to reading the “greats”. This might be idealism, but surely having students read Shakespeare is different from having them believe that they must smash capitalism, at least in so far as one avowedly encourages violence and revolution while the other does not.
Your point: “That is, he ignores the notions of “justice” and of what is “good” or right and of value that necessarily inform how we educate and search for the truth.”
My response: Non sequitur.
Your point: “Dichotomizing the explicit value concerns of “social justice” from “truth” obscures why and how “truth” can be of value.”
My response: Speaking of obscure…
Your point: “Arguably the greatest practical rationale for valuing truth gets discarded within the Peterson-Haidt dualism because the practicality of the search for and use of truth for and by human beings is not recognized as of value.”
My response: “Peterson-Haidt dualism”? Was dualism the best word that came to your head there? To your actual point, the search for truth must be regulated by the principle of disinterestedness (even though it might not be entirely attainable) for the reason that if one is interested in getting some result, then the search for the truth will be skewed by that interest. It’s a pretty simple point they are making, yet you don’t have the decency to frame their argument charitably. Consider: a tobacco company that is searching for the truth about the health effects of cigarettes is going to get a different answer than someone who is inquiring into the same issue without any interest as to what the answer might be.
Your point: “Positing truth and justice as mutually exclusive in higher education rules out a pedagogy premised on the aim of realizing the individual through democracy, and neglects the value in students learning to exercise agency and to participate in the decisions affecting them.”
My response: But what this presupposes is that the justice you speak about is actually just. Again, what Peterson worries about is that in connecting justice with truth, justice will skew the search for truth. Lysenkoism might be a good example of this. Lysenko’s simultaneous pursuit of truth and, what he believed to be, justice, resulted in something that was entirely false.
Until we can figure out the is-ought gap, then perhaps we should leave these spheres as separate domains of inquiry. The truth is about discovering accurate descriptive claims, while justice is about discovering good prescriptive claims. These certainly can be connected and can work together fruitfully. But they also must work independently of each other as well. Independent pursuits of justice and truth would, at least, safeguard against any corruption that may occur within justice-truth ‘dualism’.
Your point: “And if a principal aim of education and the search for truth therein is not based on equipping students with the knowledge and skills to make those decisions,”
My response: No, the search for truth is implicitly enabling students to be equipped with decision making abilities. What do you think a search for truth entails? Understanding probability, experimentation, logic, etc., to most of us. Or do you suppose we should have a decision making class where professors tell students how they should decide things? That seems to be the exact type of authoritarianism that Peterson is warning against.
Your point: “Rather, what’s relevant is what and why one’s philosophical assumptions lead one to consider some issues worthy and others unworthy”
My response: Again, you are trying to draw a picture of Peterson here rather deceptively. The point you want to make is that Peterson doesn’t support unions because he is a dirty capitalist. Your next paragraph doesn’t even follow up this point or seem in any way connected to it; it’s just a dangling paragraph blatantly suggestive of Peterson’s motives. And you are a professor, correct?
Your point: “If we learn to truly value free speech on campus as Peterson beseeches us to, then we need to create the conditions under which it can actually be exercised and valued in more than the abstract.”
My response: No, the conditions are simple. A code of conduct where it says all speech is free is all that is required. That’s practical, and not abstract at all. This is what Lindsay Shepherd wanted to do with Laurier after the incident – institute a speech code like the one at U of Chicago – but it was rejected. FIRE rates free speech across universities in every state. That’s a very practical tool. Maybe you should check it out.
Your point: “Although he has acknowledged he plight of adjunct professors in higher education, he has not publicly pointed out, as far as I know, how the precarious, low-wage positions faced now by the majority of the professoriate within the two-tiered system of higher education imperils academic freedom.”
My response: Nice attempt at smuggling in your own issues. I feel for you.
Your point: “He likened it to a pragmatist approach, but determining whether something is true on the basis of whether it allows us to survive would not seem all that pragmatic.”
My response: Look into evolutionary epistemology. Peterson is heavily influenced by Piaget who wrote Genetic Epistemology. Also, from the Stanford Encyclopedia on Evolutionary Epistemology: “The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century suggested an alternative approach first explored by Dewey and the pragmatists.”
Your point: “Likewise, his attempt, at least in his debate with Harris, to postpone the adjudication of truth until our species becomes extinct robs it of its meaning too.”
My response: Have you read any other pragmatists other than Dewey? You seem to have no idea about Pierce’s truth at the end of inquiry idea – it’s quite important to his philosophy. Hume also had a very similar idea that prefigured it. Kant, on Dorothy Emmet’s interpretation, believed truth to be a regulative principle. Peterson is getting at the same thing. It is a idea with pedigree.
Alas…
I can’t go on anymore. I am disappointed by this article. The flow of the argument is very disjointed. Many paragraphs do not have any logical connection to each other. And this is what I find with most Peterson critics: at bottom, they just seem resentful. But I am sure you will get a full-time position one day, Jason.
I have several thoughts on the “analysis”. I will address the author of the comment personally (below) to echo the approach taken in his comments. I hope to do so with a little less hubris and without quite as many snide remarks and ad hominem attacks that produced such poor argumentation on his part.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “That may be true, but given the psycho-emotional and physical toll civil disobedience and militant organizing tends to exact on those who are truly committed to it, Peterson’s maxim probably does not apply across the board.”
Your comment: “If you devote time to sexual affairs, you devote less time to political organizing, unless those affairs contribute to political organizing (e.g. sleeping with someone as a means to gaining something toward one’s political ends). Surely, this maxim does, indeed, apply across the board. Again, if you spend time on one thing, you can’t spend it on something else, that is, if you take time to be linear and unitary.”
My reply: No. You’re making a quasi-utilitarian assumption that human beings function like mechanical organizer automatons. How many people can devote all their time to political organizing? If someone tries to devote all their time to organizing at the expense of intimacy and/or at the expense of satisfying drives and desires, it stands to reason that person’s sense of well-being and likely the person’s organizing abilities will suffer. High-profile activism and oratory can no doubt wear on a person. Burnout happens. Finding some enjoyment and gratification with other human beings can surely help some people mitigate the stress that compounds as a result of social movement participation. So the claim that “if you spend time on one thing, you can’t spend it on something else, that is, if you take time to be linear and unitary” clearly doesn’t account for people’s complex realities or for really simple facts regarding human experience and action in the world.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “This notion of individuality abstracts the individual from society, erecting a dichotomy when none need exist, given that what largely defines us as individuals are our relations with others.”
Your comment: “Peterson asserts the dichotomy because it is central to his philosophy. Yes, the dichotomy need not exist in someone else’s philosophy, but in his axiomatic system it does. It like saying, ‘There need not be a distinction between impressions and ideas in Hume’s philosophy.’ Well, of course, there need not be. That is just self-evident.”
My reply: Just because the dichotomy is integral to his philosophy – or, more accurately, to aspects of it, sometimes – doesn’t mean that ipso facto it is justifiable or that it (and the philosophy you claim it undergirds) should be beyond rebuke. If the dichotomy doesn’t make sense or has serious shortcomings, then constructing a system of thought around it isn’t sufficient to legitimize the conceptual move or to immunize it from criticism. Fitting an untenable idea within some semblance of a framework of thought does not remove the idea – or the flawed framework – from the realm of scrutiny. Sorry.
Your related comment: “Second, ‘what largely defines us’ is a suppositional statement that would require much more proof than you provide. Why is it not ‘what largely defines us as individuals is our relations with ourselves?’ You are giving us your view here under the guise that it is fact, when it is certainly not.”
My reply: I made a claim. It is a claim with a good deal of self-evident support to back it up, if you’re willing to think more a moment. Go ahead and think about it, John. We human beings are social creatures. We realize our individuality in a social context. We define and conceive of our individuality within that context and in relation to other people.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Dewey is especially apropos given Peterson’s affinity for the pragmatist philosophy…”
Your comment: “Pragmatism isn’t a monolithic philosophy or self-consistent set of propositions. Pierce’s attempt to change the name to pragmaticism is a humorous example of how even the main founders of pragmatism didn’t want to be associated with one another. Second, Peterson, from what I recall, has never mentioned Dewey as an influence. He has, however, referenced William James several times – and, I think, that comparison is apt.”
My reply: I agree. I never said pragmatism is monolithic. Yet, there are undergirding tendencies, shared ideas and some shared basic assumptions that allow us to refer to pragmatist philosophy and “American pragmatism,” correct? Certainly Peterson has made that general reference (to American pragmatism), has he not? Is he only referring to William James? Is there no connection between James and Dewey? It might be fair to argue each’s pragmatic take on truth was a response to the way folks like Russell reacted to pragmatism. And even if Peterson wasn’t influenced by Dewey, that doesn’t mean Dewey’s ideas can’t be used as tools to unpack some blind spots and inconsistencies in Peterson’s thinking.
The idea from my piece you highlighted and added commentary to: “Dewey takes the individual seriously, even though he – in my opinion, like many others, though in different ways (e.g., Popper) misinterpreted Plato’s Republic as anti-individualistic.
“This conception of individualism and its relationship to achieving the fullest extension of democracy does not accord with Peterson’s admonishment to clean one’s own room before fixing the world, since it seems to suggest that people shouldn’t engage in the community but focus entirely on their rooms.”
Your additional comment: “First, Peterson is making the simple point that one should know something about the world before trying to fix it. Cleaning one’s room is, partially, a metaphor about cleaning one’s mind, so one can properly articulate their vision of the world. Once one can do this, then one can clearly communicate one’s ideas to the community, and the community may evaluate one’s ideas accurately. Plato’s thought experiment imagined that the Philosopher Kings would spend the first fifty years of their life studying and understanding the community, along with the community’s best interests, before they were allowed to rule. Everything during that first fifty years of their life is supposed to be specifically targeted toward becoming a competent leader.
“I believe Peterson is trying to make the same point. Most eighteen year old students simply do not have the requisite knowledge to offer advice on the state of society or try to change it based on their own individual plans. Instead, what is happening is eighteen year old students are being told what is right and wrong by professors, and then those students puppet those same thoughts while protesting events. This is not individuals interacting as a means to extending democracy; rather, it is individuals who have been educated to believe certain propositions (not their own formulations), while at the same time being educated to believe the same thing that you write – that active engagement in society is how democracies function best. What this does is it takes the good idea of Dewey’s and yours – that we need individuals to participate in democracy for it to function – with the bad idea of not teaching students to think as individuals but rather training them to believe in the morality of the day.
“Peterson is arguing against the latter, and not the former. And I think your argument conflates the two.”
My reply: You suggested that Dewey “misinterpreted Plato’s Republic as anti-individualistic.” I’m not familiar with Popper’s commentary on that, but just obliquely referencing others (without providing the relevant source info) does not qualify as an argument against the claim I made and support I provided. Your suggestion also seems attributable to a woefully limited understanding of the individual. You might not be familiar with Dewey’s philosophy of the individual. To be clear, that was not some minor appendage to his oeuvre. He wrote a three-part series for The New Republic in 1930 titled, “Individualism, Old and New” and published a book by the same name (though minus the comma, I believe) in which he fleshed out his conception of the individual while taking to task common dualistic notions of individuality (arguably holdovers from antiquity).
Moreover, that “simple point” you claim Peterson is making is just not nuanced enough. I also think the “simple point” he makes is simply wrong, at least in the iteration I cited. People learn about the world by acting in it. Conceptualizing knowledge as divorced from practical activity is just not helpful or even accurate given our biological embodiment. As far as “cleaning one’s mind” goes, I’m not even sure what you or Peterson mean there. I assume other readers are probably skeptical as well. It’s not as if we sort ourselves out in a vacuum. Peterson knows and often enough stresses that point. We still have to operate in the world, to interact with people, to make decisions, and to act individually and together with others – we figure out aspects of ourselves and the rest of the world not just as, but also in large part by doing that (and by reflecting upon our actions and interactions en route to refining those activities).
And why is it that “the community” should be left to “evaluate one’s ideas accurately”? There is a pinch of authoritarianism baked into that presupposition, John. Are there not decisions that “the community” should not have jurisdiction over? The anti-authoritarian, mode of pragmatist thought I adduced in the piece suggested as much. Perhaps people ought to have say over decisions in proportion to the degree to which they are affected by those decisions. At least, that’s a decent guiding principle, consonant with the kind of liberatory democratic community that might enable individuals to maximize their potentials. And when you write that “the community may evaluate one’s ideas accurately,” what does “accurately” even mean in that context? You just assert it as fact, to borrow your favorite accusation. You also are simply accepting, weirdly, that 50 years of study should allow someone to “rule” over others. A person can study for decades and still not be an expert on another person’s (or other people’s) experiences, wants, needs, desires, preferences, etc. The idea you’re putting forward there is antiquated at best and disturbingly authoritarian at worst. I’d argue, drawing on what I wrote above, that proper respect and reverence for the individual (and for the community, for that matter), would nullify any order in which “a competent leader” would “rule” over others in the manner Plato described and you reimagined. You’re defending political theory that does not even comport with standard representative democracy, let alone with a kind of participatory democracy that actually venerates individuals by not subjecting them to autocratic decisions made by others.
You also questioned the political competency of “most” 18-year-old individuals. I don’t agree with that generalization, which you make without providing any evidence and without delving into the topic of what political (or social or civic) engagement might entail. Again, if adult individuals should have some say over the community life of which they are a part and over social decisions affecting them, then individuals who have reached an age that we recognize as early adulthood should not be discouraged from that sort of participation. That is especially true given that, having reached an age recognized as adulthood, 18-year-olds in the US are currently subject to political decisions and presumed responsible (held responsible as adults) when it comes to adhering to societal guidelines established via the political realm. Suggesting that those who are not yet some notably unspecified age that I guess you, maybe together with Peterson, would at some yet-to-be-determined point in time deem as eligible for democratic participation and political praxis should not concern themselves with issues and practices of social import is a rather disturbing proposal. A healthy society, I’d offer, would actually foster active engagement and encourage organizing among young adults especially. Again, contrary to Peterson’s apparent assumption – the one you want to parrot and portray as self-evident when it obviously isn’t – younger adults no doubt could/do actually bring a lot of unique generational knowledge and experience and enthusiasm to the table. The things they know are often quite relevant – even essential – when it comes to deciphering the social, cultural and political terrain.
You also claim, sans evidence again (clearly a style you’ve developed), that “eighteen year old students are being told what is right and wrong by professors, and then those students puppet those same thoughts while protesting events.” As before, you’re implying that young adults have no agency and do not or cannot think for themselves. Putting aside the lack of support for your claim that most professors teach in a doctrinaire manner, your assumption that students will just “puppet those same thoughts” that come from professors is hogwash. It is not surprising, given your circumscribed conception of the individual, you would make a claim that completely overlooks the capacity for young adults to think and act for themselves, as individuals.
Your hypodermic needle model style of framing suggests students will obediently do as they are told by professors. In contrast, I agree, at least in part with Jonathan Haidt, who made an apropos statement in a recent podcast after recounting how he receives weekly emails from professors who explain how students have reported them for saying something supposedly objectionable in class. “What we’re seeing on campus,” Haidt said, “is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors” (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG6HbWw2RF4; starting around 15:17). I’d argue Haidt’s assessment there is more accurate than your fictionalized depictions of college educators exercising omnipotent influence over their student minions who go on to do the protest bidding of their instructors.
But yeah, sure John, anytime professors tell students to think and do things students of course oblige. John, seriously, if the world you concocted were reality students would diligently read everything assigned, turn their work in on time, attend class, etc. In courses with even the most captivating lecturers, that of course does not always happen. I am sure quite a few professors would be thrilled if students listened to – or often enough, just came to – lectures and grappled with the ideas discussed. Some students do. Some do not. Few – if any – I have encountered are incapable of distinguishing an analysis/critique a professor might unpack or a germane viewpoint a professor might share in class from empirically verified fact. Again, contrary to your pitiable conception of pedagogy, different modes of interpretation and various ways of rendering facts intelligible and subject to change are often debated and discussed in the classroom because that is what can make for meaningful education. And again, I suppose I have to reiterate the truism that professors just do not exert the mystical power over the minds of young adults in reality as they perhaps do in your fantasy world. In addition to rhetorically erasing the agency that young adults exercise – quite in line with your philosophy, it seems – you are also ascribing to professors some magical indoctrination power that just does not exist.
Notably, I should add, Peterson has made essentially the same claim about radical professors indoctrinating students as well, has he not? However, I know he’s not the only one to do so. When you parrot that line, though, you ostensibly discount the critical capacity of readers and expect people to accept your assertion as true. Given that you’re repeating a tired line you heard, maybe you’re just projecting a lack of your own intellectual agency and a dearth of critical thought onto the 18-year-old college students you tacitly dismiss as unable to think for themselves.
I will grant you that greater deliberation and philosophical work in university classrooms interrogating values/morality, delving into differing ideas about what “truth” and “justice” mean, and deliberating how to search for and/or realize such things could improve education and society – although you seem to want to sever the connection between the two… I’d argue analysis of how ideology functions can be part and parcel of a really meaningful curriculum, though. To be concrete, the work of people like Laura Kipnis, a contrarian cultural critic who often adds much-needed nuance to discussions in the realm of sexual politics, comes to mind as possible catalyst for that kind of pedagogy. So does the social commentary provided by comedians. Dave Chappelle, for example, has offered an historically-grounded (and hilarious) critique of contemporary struggles in a recent Netflix special that serve as excellent material for discussion in a political science, communication studies and/or cultural studies course.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Of course, we inevitably do change others, and ourselves, through the interaction that is a prerequisite for human life.”
Your comment: “You are using a self-evident proposition to refute a strawman of Peterson’s point to be wary of people whose main aim “is to change other people.” You should first explain Peterson’s whole point, before you use your self-evident proposition to make him sound silly.”
My reply: I’m not doing any extra work to make him sound silly, if that’s how you want to characterize the message his own words and ideas convey. The message in that message to millennials video he posted, which he had pinned on his YouTube channel for months, was horribly simplistic. To be fair, he might’ve simplified his ideas there to make it easily digestible for that video/audience. However, in my essay I tried to highlight the lack of nuance in the video itself. You refer to his “whole point,” but what is that? His explicit points in that video, which I referred to in the piece, seem to ignore the obvious en route to a simplistic, ideologically-laden message.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Mary Savio”
Your comment: “Mary Savio”
My reply: Good catch. I’ve asked that the typo be corrected.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Given that much of Peterson’s life is no doubt devoted to pedagogy, public and otherwise, it is safe to say one of his aims is to change others too.”
Your comment: “Obviously. Again, you are trying to refute the strawman instead of actually presenting his view in full to begin with.”
My reply: No. I’m not. Although, I’m beginning to understand your affinity with and fixation with the strawman mode of argument… I’m trying to highlight the obvious that was conspicuously missing in his video message. Maybe those nuances would’ve made it harder to distill his ideology down into little nuggets to spoon-feed young folks (millennials) under the guise of some unvarnished truth. And what would you say, in that video, constitutes his “full view”? Does his full view account for or even acknowledge some of those seeming truisms I alluded to? I don’t think so. That video – again, not an insignificant one, considering it was front and center on his YouTube channel for months – came up short and oozed an ideology I trust most millennials are fully capable of interrogating.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “As he individualizes problems that could be addressed socially,”
Your comment: “Clearly, but his philosophy is axiomatically against this.”
My reply: I tried to highlight some of the contradictions within his public pedagogy in this piece.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “smuggling in his own attempt at social change in the process”
Your comment: “Peterson is not smuggling it in; he is upfront and quite clear about trying to change the university and even opening up one of his own. Why are you trying to make him sound nefarious?”
My reply: But the point is that he decries some for trying to change the world (or to change institutions), yet he is most definitely trying to change the world (or at least institutions, as you acknowledge). There’s a touch of hypocrisy, a point of contradiction, or at least a little lack of transparency there.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “his philosophy of education seeks to separate the “true” from the “good,” even though he wants to wed the two as a crucial part of his worldview.”
Your comment: “So did Plato. Maybe you should do a follow up on him.”
My reply: Insofar as Peterson wants to have it both ways, it’s worth pointing out the contradiction. It’s also worth emphasizing because if he were to be ethically and logically more consistent, then it would negate some of the positions he takes and criticisms he’s made. I make essentially this same point in my essay. Also, I purposefully highlighted the shortcomings Dewey identified in Plato’s philosophy – the sorts of dualisms that still pervaded popular conceptions in Dewey’s day and seem to have hamstrung present-day public intellectuals.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Peterson often recounts the horrors that have emerged historically from utopian idealism, yet he commits a dangerous idealist fallacy by supposing educators ought to or even can avoid making pedagogical choices about what is important to educate students about and what the purpose of that education is to begin with.”
Your comment: “Peterson is fearful of utopian idealism because he believes utopian thought (such as Marxism, even though Engels tried to paint it as “scientific”) contributed to millions of deaths in the twentieth century. His belief in a perennialist educational philosophy is based on the fact that many different geniuses have stood on the shoulders of giants, and have credited their success to reading the “greats”. This might be idealism, but surely having students read Shakespeare is different from having them believe that they must smash capitalism, at least in so far as one avowedly encourages violence and revolution while the other does not.”
My reply: As an important addendum, it’s worth noting that fear of utopian/Marxist thought has historically been used to justify atrocities (e.g. US support for death squads in Central America, US-backed overthrow of the democratically-elected government of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile and subsequent US support for the Pinochet dictatorship that oversaw the execution and torture of thousands). Never mind the censorship and repression that fearmongering about Marxism and anti-Communist hysteria has historically engendered… A cursory study of the Red Scares, jailing of socialist dissidents (e.g. Eugene Debs), McCarthyism, HUAC, etc. also reveals the extent to which those anti-Communist, anti-Marxist responses have resulted in egregious repression and a stifling of free speech/inquiry. That’s especially true in universities, where a not insignificant number of faculty in the US and leaders of labor unions were purged in the mid-20th century for suspected socialist sympathies. For those interested in some of that history, Dalton Trumbo’s “Time of the Toad: A Study of Inquisition in America” is a nice, concise read. For a more recent historical account regarding some of the aforementioned, John McCumber’s “The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Late Cold War” isn’t bad.
Now, if folks value robust free speech and debate, then the paralytic fear (e.g. of Communist boogeymen) and ideological over-simplifications (e.g. of various critiques of capitalism) should be cause for concern, given the well-documented reactionary measures such things have catalyzed.
To more directly respond to your comment, John, I first want to set aside the Shakespearean, capitalism-smashing strawman you erected in an attempt at a rejoinder. I’m not sure I know of any pedagogical approach that prompts students to “believe they must smash capitalism,” and I don’t even really know what “smash” means in that context, though I do not doubt that you might truly fear the caricatured adversary your imagination constructed. Again, though, even if such a doctrinaire approach were attempted, the overwhelming majority of college students are intellectually capable of rejecting it. But that caricature of education is just that – a caricature, which is useful for Peterson, perhaps, and for you when trying to piece together an argument. Instead, would it be worth considering why classes in economics don’t ever question the legitimacy of capitalism and do not engage with economic analyses that deviate from the typical neoclassical model? This is something heterodox economists like Richard Wolff have asked for some time. Wouldn’t it be best for there to be robust debate, deliberation and discussion in various fields about what arrangements regarding production, allocation, ownership, decision-making at the enterprise level, etc. are efficacious, rewarding, desirable, etc. (and why)? What an invigorating curriculum that would be.
Now, let’s please also get beyond the fallacious assumption that education is either Shakespeare or indoctrination into an ideology championing violent revolution. You’re just contrasting a centuries-old literary figure with niche political theory/philosophy there, as far as I can tell. That’s not a serious comparison or a legitimate either-or frame. And again, there are myriad nuanced critiques of society and of the dominant system of production/exchange that don’t advocate the “violence” and “revolution” you referred to. Although, a proper course on philosophy and courses in other fields that ask important philosophical questions might consider what constitutes “violence,” if “violence” is ever ethically justified, what “revolution” means, when/how does/has “revolution” occur, etc. Asking such questions in the US would probably compel students to learn more about the revolution that brought the US into being, and maybe to learn more about the Haitian Revolution and its relation to the institution of slavery and to delve deeper into plenty of other historical episodes (and epochs). Asking questions like the aforementioned do not preclude reading the “greats,” even as any canon is inevitably always debated. There are plenty of “giants” who “have credited their success to reading” great scholars and writers who others might not have even heard of but nevertheless seriously influenced some of the most canonized authors.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “That is, he ignores the notions of “justice” and of what is “good” or right and of value that necessarily inform how we educate and search for the truth.”
Your comment: “Non sequitur.”
My reply: How is it a non sequitur? If he fails to acknowledge how those conceptions and commitments are wrapped up in pedagogy and in our search for the truth, then it is another apropos critique of a part of his praxis.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Dichotomizing the explicit value concerns of “social justice” from “truth” obscures why and how “truth” can be of value.”
Your comment: “Speaking of obscure…”
My reply: Lazy repartee and hapless attempt at argumentation that I assume most readers will not appreciate…
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Arguably the greatest practical rationale for valuing truth gets discarded within the Peterson-Haidt dualism because the practicality of the search for and use of truth for and by human beings is not recognized as of value.”
Your comment: “‘Peterson-Haidt dualism’? Was dualism the best word that came to your head there? To your actual point, the search for truth must be regulated by the principle of disinterestedness (even though it might not be entirely attainable) for the reason that if one is interested in getting some result, then the search for the truth will be skewed by that interest. It’s a pretty simple point they are making, yet you don’t have the decency to frame their argument charitably. Consider: a tobacco company that is searching for the truth about the health effects of cigarettes is going to get a different answer than someone who is inquiring into the same issue without any interest as to what the answer might be.”
My reply: Dualism works there. The concept/argument both Haidt and Peterson advanced is dualistic because it falsely separates the search for truth and the search for value. Your claim that “the search for truth must be regulated by the principle of disinterestedness (even though it might not be entirely attainable) for the reason that if one is interested in getting some result, then the search for the truth will be skewed by that interest” is just not true. It is incontrovertible that the specific truths people seek are in large part determined by their values and value judgments (by what they consider important or worth investigating, by what knowledge they consider valuable, etc.). That’s true when it comes to hypotheses scientists formulate and try to verify, the things people try out in the world to see if they work so as to actually make accomplishments, and the facts people concern themselves with in order to make informed decisions, among myriad other things. I am emphasizing a straightforward point that isn’t acknowledged in the formulation Peterson and Haidt offered, yet you don’t appear to have “the decency” (to recast your ad hominem aspersion) to consider the blatantly obvious.
Your position is even more annoying given that Peterson does not always adhere to that dualistic thinking on the questions of truth and value (or on questions of the true and the good). As I noted in my piece, he very much tried to wed the two in his first discussion/debate with Sam Harris.
You also claimed that “a tobacco company that is searching for the truth about the health effects of cigarettes is going to get a different answer than someone who is inquiring into the same issue without any interest as to what the answer might be.” Yet the “someone who is inquiring into the same issue without any interest as to what the answer might be” is indeed inquiring into the issue for some reason. There’s some interest involved. There’s some judgment that is made about what is worth inquiring into.
It is also worth adding that if the scientific method is earnestly applied in the search for truth, people should be able to (and in many cases do) consistently arrive at the same results/conclusions, even if their reasons for investigating and testing something differ. If a tobacco company were to fund research that was approached honestly, it shouldn’t matter if the profit-seeking motives of the shareholders – or, say, pro-tobacco views of researchers receiving funds – compel them to want the studies to produce certain exonerating findings. Their opinions and values should not automatically have a negative effect on findings, provided the opinions/values do not prompt those doing the research to conduct their study inappropriately. Of course, people’s values and the impetus of social institutions often inform people’s actions, which means people can fudge data or otherwise apply poor methodology, as no doubt often happens.
Given that your point is dreadfully flawed, I should further clarify the problem with what you wrote about tobacco research. So, consider scientists researching treatments for cancer. They are conducting that research because, presumably, they (and those funding them) would value the discovery of more effective treatments – or, to be cynical, they might value the money that might be made if effective treatments are found. There is valuation going on there. But that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the research. We don’t dismiss is it because those involved make value judgments about the research they’re doing or because they want to find certain results. We do not say, “Hey, you scientists seem to have found an effective treatment that could end the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people. Your results have piqued the curiosity of others who have found similar results, suggesting you are really onto something. But, oh sorry, you maintained values when you went about your research. It thus is meaningless to us, despite what you clearly discovered.”
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Positing truth and justice as mutually exclusive in higher education rules out a pedagogy premised on the aim of realizing the individual through democracy, and neglects the value in students learning to exercise agency and to participate in the decisions affecting them.”
Your comment: “But what this presupposes is that the justice you speak about is actually just. Again, what Peterson worries about is that in connecting justice with truth, justice will skew the search for truth. Lysenkoism might be a good example of this. Lysenko’s simultaneous pursuit of truth and, what he believed to be, justice, resulted in something that was entirely false.
“Until we can figure out the is-ought gap, then perhaps we should leave these spheres as separate domains of inquiry. The truth is about discovering accurate descriptive claims, while justice is about discovering good prescriptive claims. These certainly can be connected and can work together fruitfully. But they also must work independently of each other as well. Independent pursuits of justice and truth would, at least, safeguard against any corruption that may occur within justice-truth ‘dualism’.”
My reply: But didn’t you already note that Peterson has a vision for the university and is trying to create one of his own? Surely that’s informed by a vision for a better society, right? That is, surely that vision is based on a loose notion of what would be socially just. Point being, those ethical questions are inextricably tied to education. There are decisions made about what’s worth learning about and why. The “why” has a lot to do with the kind of individuals we want to be and the kind we want to interact with and educate. It has to do with the sort of society we want as well. My point is that there is inevitably a general sense of social justice that always informs education.
Moreover, I think it’s important to note that we absolutely must make our best determination as regards what is just and what is not. This is an issue that was central to the Chomsky-Foucault debate in the 1970s. Foucault took a postmodern position and questioned the idea of justice; his position was predicated on a point of contention not unlike the question you raised. An ultra-relativist postmodern position is just not helpful, though. Peterson rightfully criticizes that sort of thing. I agree with him that it is essential to judge as well as we can what is and right and wrong and socially desirable. To paraphrase what Chomsky said in the aforementioned debate, we at times will no doubt be quite off the mark when we make judgments about what kind of social arrangements will help us maximize our human potentials… Yet it would be a serious shame to dismiss ideas about human nature, and to fail to take into consideration what is just (or right and wrong and/or desirable) based on our admittedly limited understandings of ourselves and of the world. For that reason, I don’t think it’s reasonable to set those domains of inquiry apart. There might be degrees of independence. The advent of the experimental method no doubt helped folks maintain some distance between the process to arrive at a partial truth and the valuations that prompt people to follow that process in a line of inquiry. Yet the overarching questions of value remain. Peterson is well aware of this and appropriately foregrounds it in other facets of his philosophy, as I noted in my essay.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “And if a principal aim of education and the search for truth therein is not based on equipping students with the knowledge and skills to make those decisions,”
Your comment: “No, the search for truth is implicitly enabling students to be equipped with decision making abilities. What do you think a search for truth entails? Understanding probability, experimentation, logic, etc., to most of us. Or do you suppose we should have a decision making class where professors tell students how they should decide things? That seems to be the exact type of authoritarianism that Peterson is warning against.”
My reply: No. I disagree. There are a lot of truths in the world and innumerable truths to be discovered. A crucial part of education is learning how to figure out what truths to search for, why certain truths are relevant, etc. I’m not at all disputing the experimental method, logic, etc., nor am I proposing the ridiculous approach to pedagogy you described. You’re making an assumption and then offering a caricature based on an inaccurate presupposition. Very sloppy argumentation… At any rate, would you consider philosophy an important part of a search for truth and/or a worthwhile pedagogical endeavor? There is more to the field than formal logic… You’ve read Plato. Should we ignore the political philosophy in his work because it does not comport with your notion of the search for truth and the philosophy of education you appear to have erected around it? Now how about sociology dealing with empirical facts? History? There are reasons we search for historical facts and why we conduct sociological analyses. The reasons historians, social scientists and inquiring individuals do that is usually not just for kicks. Discovering those facts/truths enable better (more informed) decision making and action in the world. That’s the point you seem unwilling to grapple with.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Rather, what’s relevant is what and why one’s philosophical assumptions lead one to consider some issues worthy and others unworthy”
Your comment: “Again, you are trying to draw a picture of Peterson here rather deceptively. The point you want to make is that Peterson doesn’t support unions because he is a dirty capitalist. Your next paragraph doesn’t even follow up this point or seem in any way connected to it; it’s just a dangling paragraph blatantly suggestive of Peterson’s motives. And you are a professor, correct?”
My reply: There’s nothing deceptive about highlighting someone’s implicit value judgments. You claim the point I “want to make is that Peterson doesn’t support unions because he is a dirty capitalist.” I’m not sure how to respond to your gross oversimplifications and imagination run amok. Point to a piece in the essay in which I call Peterson a “dirty capitalist”. You can’t. I did try to make a point about what struggles he has championed. He considers some worthy and some far less so. It’s worth thinking about why and whether some of the struggles right there where he teaches might actually be worthy AND germane to the issues of concern. Readers can decide for themselves what Peterson’s decisions about what issues are worthy/unworthy reveal about his philosophy/ideology and public pedagogy. I provided the juxtaposition to facilitate that consideration. I did not make a sloppy assumption and use that as grist to the mill to concoct an imaginary point of view and to assert the other person subscribes to it. That, it seems, is your territory. You are clearly also keen on ad hominem fallacies in the form of rhetorical questions (“And you are a professor, correct?”). You do understand that ad hominem attacks do not qualify as legitimate argumentation, right?
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “If we learn to truly value free speech on campus as Peterson beseeches us to, then we need to create the conditions under which it can actually be exercised and valued in more than the abstract.”
Your comment : “No, the conditions are simple. A code of conduct where it says all speech is free is all that is required. That’s practical, and not abstract at all. This is what Lindsay Shepherd wanted to do with Laurier after the incident – institute a speech code like the one at U of Chicago – but it was rejected. FIRE rates free speech across universities in every state. That’s a very practical tool. Maybe you should check it out.”
My reply: That would be great, if it were true. Yet if adjuncts and TAs are still losing their jobs or are so intimidated and fearful of retaliation for saying something that challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, as is clearly the case, then freedom of speech – understood in a robust sense – suffers on campus, does it not? I’m not at all opposed to the University of CHI platform. But do you really think that simply instituting a free speech code is going to ensure that freedom of speech on campus will be righteously promoted, protected and respected by administrators and academics for all eternity? I dare say it’s not that simple.
Take a step by and look at the history of the United States, for goodness sake. In the US, the First Amendment prevents Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech. Yet, lo and behold, Congress did just that – on multiple occasions. The Alien and Sedition Acts, passed when the ink on the Bill of Rights was barely dry (well, it passed in 1798, less than a decade after the ten amendments were adopted), prohibited certain speech critical of the government. The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917/1918 made it illegal to portray the government or the US military effort in WWI unfavorably. A lot of people were imprisoned as a result of that infringement. I detailed some of that history in my piece for The Journal of School & Society (see: http://www.johndeweysociety.org/the-journal-of-school-and-society/files/2018/10/Vol5_No1_2.pdf). Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman also recounted a lot of that history in their apropos book, “Free Speech on Campus”. Maybe you should check those out. You might also take into consideration the different dimensions of free speech struggles and the fact the free exercise of speech has historically been maintained by struggle (not just codes). The free speech battles waged by the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th century are case in point.
The excerpt from my piece you selected: “Although he has acknowledged he plight of adjunct professors in higher education, he has not publicly pointed out, as far as I know, how the precarious, low-wage positions faced now by the majority of the professoriate within the two-tiered system of higher education imperils academic freedom.”
Your comment: “Nice attempt at smuggling in your own issues. I feel for you.”
My reply: I’m not smuggling in anything. I’m very explicit. It’s also not just my issue. It’s a shared experience related to widespread institutional conditions, which is why it’s an issue worth grappling with. But I gather it’s exceedingly difficult for some folks to understand that people might draw on their own experiences and use those experiences as springboards into struggles that are about way more than themselves. Contingent faculty conditions pose a threat to free speech and to academic freedom. Based on evidence, some of which I have already referred to, I think that is indisputable. I also discuss how those conditions of contingency imperil free speech on campus yet are curiously omitted from campus free speech debates in that aforementioned piece for School & Society: http://www.johndeweysociety.org/the-journal-of-school-and-society/files/2018/10/Vol5_No1_2.pdf.
The excerpt you selected from my piece: “He likened it to a pragmatist approach, but determining whether something is true on the basis of whether it allows us to survive would not seem all that pragmatic.”
Your comment: “Look into evolutionary epistemology. Peterson is heavily influenced by Piaget who wrote Genetic Epistemology. Also, from the Stanford Encyclopedia on Evolutionary Epistemology: ‘The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century suggested an alternative approach first explored by Dewey and the pragmatists.’”
My reply: I am not disputing the influence Darwin and evolutionary biology had on Dewey or on other American pragmatists. I fully acknowledge the influence. I think the influence helped shape early 20th century pragmatism. Peterson’s peculiar take on all that, though – at least in that long exchange with Harris I referenced – is not in line with any pragmatic philosophy I’m familiar with. The notion of truth he was putting forward was certainly not one many evolutionary biologists would subscribe to, and it wasn’t one many working in the tradition of American pragmatism would either.
The excerpt you selected from my piece: “Likewise, his attempt, at least in his debate with Harris, to postpone the adjudication of truth until our species becomes extinct robs it of its meaning too.”
Your comment: “Have you read any other pragmatists other than Dewey? You seem to have no idea about Pierce’s truth at the end of inquiry idea – it’s quite important to his philosophy. Hume also had a very similar idea that prefigured it. Kant, on Dorothy Emmet’s interpretation, believed truth to be a regulative principle. Peterson is getting at the same thing. It is a idea with pedigree.”
My reply: I’ve gathered Peirce’s working view of truth was integral to his system of thought, if you want to call it that. But come on now — neither Peirce nor Kant formulated their ideas in ways that really echo Peterson’s claim in that discussion with Harris. To claim otherwise is to be disingenuous. Please cite and quote from Peirce or Kant to show where either suggested truth is what allows for species survival and that “truth” can only be determined post hoc, which is exactly what Peterson claimed when deliberating on that podcast. But within your framework for understanding, I guess it makes complete sense – so long as it makes sense within Peterson’s philosophy, as you claimed previously, ignoring the myriad contradictions within his system of thought that I pointed out. I suppose it is legit to claim that humanity will have had to kick the bucket before anyone could make/check a truth claim, even though nobody would be around to make/check such a claim? Very pragmatic… Let’s move beyond imaginary land where up is down and down is up. No doubt that’s the kind of locale I suppose it makes sense to inhabit if you’re going to defend Peterson’s position in this case, especially given the “truthiness” of it all, to borrow Stephen Colbert’s phrase used to satirize discourse in which words have ceased to matter/work. Peterson’s proposition violates the most essential concepts and currents underlying pragmatism (and basic logic). It’s not “a idea with a pedigree” (you mean “an idea with a pedigree”).
Finally, you wrote: “Alas…
“I can’t go on anymore. I am disappointed by this article. The flow of the argument is very disjointed. Many paragraphs do not have any logical connection to each other. And this is what I find with most Peterson critics: at bottom, they just seem resentful. But I am sure you will get a full-time position one day, Jason.”
My reply: Alas, that was difficult for me. I’m disappointed in the commentary. The arguments were, in the main, poorly constructed. I’m not sure if most folks who unwaveringly stan Peterson accept what you wrote as serious criticism, John.
I also reject what you implied about critics of Peterson all seeming “resentful”. That’s a convenient ad hominem which I assume you hope serves to deflect criticism and prevent meaningful, critical engagement with Peterson’s ideas.
To be clear, I also made a concerted effort to show what lessons we can learn from Peterson’s public pedagogy.
I tried to highlight some of the contradictions in Peterson’s philosophy and show how if we really take some of his ideas to heart then that ought to prompt us to interrogate and to overcome the shortcomings in our own society, not just to harp on about past totalitarian regimes or to scaremonger about impending threats while ignoring what stares us in the face. We ought to learn from his public pedagogy and focus on improving and transforming ourselves as individuals, yes, but also to use some of those insights in efforts to improve and transform the society to which we belong. We can read some of the authors he endorses, like Orwell. However, we can read some of the other works by those greats that he neglects (like Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”) so as to engage with heterodox history that he and many other intellectuals too often ignore (like the anarcho-syndicalist resistance to fascism and short-lived revolution in Spain in 1936-37, which Orwell commemorated).
Perhaps we also ought to take what Peterson and Jung have theorized about the shadow element in our psyche and use that as a starting point to reexamine our social relations and to unpack the hegemonic, arguably dehumanizing methods/institutions currently used to address transgressions. As I suggested in the piece, maybe we should learn how to incorporate the shadow into our own conscious experience as well so that we can acquire the fortitude to stand up for ourselves, to challenge others when necessary and to engage in ethical struggles. To encourage that and to encourage a praxis that could cultivate social relations and a culture in which all that is facilitated is not resentment.
I don’t know if subscribing to a particular ideology akin to what Peterson proffers is what impels you to ineptly characterize all criticism as resentment, John. I know Peterson is fond of casting similar aspersions when engaging with (and usually grossly oversimplifying) ideas he disagrees with (e.g. critiques of capitalism and of so-called post-modern Neo-Marxists). Removing the ideological blinders could perhaps help clarify that some people share admittedly partial and often incomplete (yet fruitful) ideas for a better social world and that those ideas might have nothing to do with resentment of others.
Now, if by “resentment” you mean annoyance at those who support ways of thinking that render what I just explained opaque, then that’s closer to the mark. However, I assume you were not really thinking much at all when you made that accusation and wrote many of your other comments.
But I’m sure you’ll learn to construct better arguments in 2019, John. Apologies for not replying sooner. You posted your comment quite a while after the essay was first published, so I didn’t notice it until recently.
Apropos that rhetorical question regarding Dewey and the criticisms of his philosophy you offered, the latest essay I authored for PEL about Randolph Bourne might be of interest: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2018/12/18/to-be-re-bourne-breathing-new-life-into-the-prophetic-philosophy-of-randolph-bourne/. Bourne famously took Dewey to task – invoking William James in one of his essays – for Dewey’s support for US involvement in WWI. I figured you might be keen on the piece…
At any rate, a belated Happy New Year, John.
Why was there a need to do a drive-by hit on Camille Paglia in the middle of this post? How exactly does that demonstrate the compassion, charity and forgiveness that the writer stresses are so important? And of course, the irony of criticizing alleged “assertion-slinging with little time for evidence,” without actually providing any evidence for the assertion, apparently went unnoticed.
As for the main argument of the post, that also has limited evidence presented on its behalf. Where’s the Peterson statement to the effect of, “Only people whose rooms don’t need cleaning should ever participate in politics”? My sense is that a more reasonable (and charitable) interpretation of Peterson would be, “Trying to radically transform the world by taking part in one or another political crusade is not the best way to compensate for what’s lacking in one’s life or disturbed in one’s heart (i.e, having the metaphorical messy room).”
The idea that there’s something antidemocratic in that sentiment seems somewhat laughable, no?