The Intellectual We Deserve (2018)

By Nathan Robinson

Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape…

NB: On October 7, 2023, Peterson asked the Israeli prime minister to give ’em hell, Netanyahu! This exhortation to indiscriminate violence has had nearly 37 million views. One would think that someone with a vast following would be cautious before using such hateful words, but it’s too much to expect of Jordan Peterson. His prolonged semi-retraction on November 1 (by which time fatalities in Gaza were approaching ten thousand, aside from injured and missing) was a verbose and self-indulgent non-apology for his hideous rhetoric. And his regret is directed at his ‘Muzzlim’ admirers, as if non-‘Muzzlims’ could not possibly be appalled by his love of revenge. By now, with nearly a hundred thousand casualties; including nearly 21 thousand dead and wounded children, I wonder if Peterson’s thirst for visitations of ‘hell’ upon Palestinians has been quenched. But I doubt it. He wears his racism on his sleeve.

Peterson’s condemnation of Iran as a totalitarian regime (I agree), combined with admiration for the Trumpian ‘Abrahamic Accords’ with Saudi Arabia, makes me wonder if I heard right. This is a country ruled by a despotic monarchy with a morality police every bit as vicious as the Iranian, and which still beheads people. And how is it possible for a much vaunted global ‘influencer’ to be ignorant of the conditions under which Palestinians have lived since 1948, including the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million refugees? And of the determination of the imperialists of global order to deprive Palestine of statehood? Either he is an ignoramus, or couldn’t care less about the history of Palestine. Either way, his utterance on Gaza was despicable. This is what we get when we confine our ethical sense and intellectual nourishment to the flutter and flux of social media and cultivate the attention span of the few seconds required to switch channels on a TV remote. This is what the ‘post-truth’ relativists in academia have brought upon the human mind. This is what moral vacuity and intellectual decrepitude look like. DS

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The Intellectual We Deserve

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. But we do not live in a reasonable world...

Obscurantism is more than a desperate attempt to feign novelty, though. It’s also a tactic for badgering readers into deference to the writer’s authority. Nobody can be sure they are comprehending the author’s meaning, which has the effect of making the reader feel deeply inferior and in awe…

If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle…

If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)

But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.”

And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect? ….

But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

This is immediately apparent upon opening Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning, a 600-page summary of his basic theories that took Peterson 15 years to complete. Maps of Meaning is, to the extent it can be summarized, about how humans generate “meaning.” By “generate meaning” Peterson ostensibly intends something like “figure out how to act,” but the word’s definition is somewhat capacious:

“Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path”
“Meaning is the ultimate balance between… the chaos of transformation and the possibility and…the discipline of pristine order”
“Meaning is an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it”
“Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose”
“Meaning means implication for behavioral output”
“Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world”

Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain “archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.

But here I am already giving Peterson’s work a more coherent summary than it actually deserves. And after all, if “many human stories have common moral lessons” was his point, he would have been saying something so obvious that nobody would think to credit it as a novel insight. Peterson manages to spin it out over hundreds of pages, and expand it into an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory that encompasses everything from the direction of history, to the meaning of life, to the nature of knowledge, to the structure of human decision-making, to the foundations of ethics. (A good principle to remember is that if a book appears to be about everything, it’s probably not really about anything.)…

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

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