May 2, 2022·edited May 2, 2022Liked by The Living Philosophy
It's interesting reading this. Funny enough, many of the things you're pointing out about Peterson's faults and examples of his shadow are things that he himself has acknowledged about himself and that they are valid criticism of him.
In fact, he's been speaking especially recently about the whole idea of "render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." You point this out as something he needs to do or people should be doing, but he himself has said some variation of this numerous times. So it's not as if he's not aware of it.
I also take issue with your suggestion that because Solzhenitsyn's book was released in 1974 and in 1978 the communist party in France had an increase in the vote for them as evidence that his view that it didn't work is faulty. By that logic, the fact that the Soviet Union didn't fall immediately is evidence that it had no effect on the country. Of course, the Soviet Union did eventually fall in 1991, in large part because of Solzhenitsyn and his publishing of the book. While things happen at break neck speed today, at the time it took a lot longer for things to get around. So the fact that the increase in support for a communist in France is evidence that it didn't become unreasonable to support it simply is faulty.
Also, your assertion that people didn't know in the 1940s simply isn't true either. Solzhenitsyn himself in The Gulag Archipelago pointed out that it was pretty well known within the first few years of the Soviet Union that it was true. Knowledge of it existed although there was some debate about the extent of it necessarily. Many of the people in power in Western countries like the United States and Britain and others were aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union before World War 2. It was part of the reason they weren't so keen on an alliance with Russia in the run up to and during World War 2.
Even Germany knew about what was happening in the Soviet Union in the run up to the Second World War. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn points out that after the war, the leaders proclaimed of what happened in Germany "Never again", but that all they had to do was look at what was going on in the country of their own ally, the Soviet Union, to realize how hollow that proclamation was.
So it was fairly well known by the West that horrible things were happening in the Soviet Union very early on and yet the Soviet system persisted for 70 years. And despite the collapse of it, this idea is still going on in China and Cuba.
There are a number of problems with your assertions of Jordan Peterson, only some of which I have outlined here.
May 5, 2022·edited May 5, 2022Liked by The Living Philosophy
The evolution of philosophic thought is a fascinating topic. I think because Peterson had spent his entire life in academia, he is particularly sensitive to the intellectual changes in the academic environment. After trying to put the pieces together he found what he thought was a likely culprit for what he saw happening around him.
I am not well versed on this subject, but the little I do know leaves me in agreement with many of your points regarding a Neo-Marxist conspiracy driven by postmodernist thought. That doesn't mean, however, that there were no other intellectual movements that drove much of what you outline in point 2 of Peterson's argument. Gramsci was *very* explicit about infiltrating schools with the new socialist religion. The Frankfurt School has had a much larger influence in America than the French philosophers, and I think they are the more influential predecessors of today's SJW movement.
That being said, I very much agree with your point to focus on what it is to be human rather than on the battle between Aries and Artemis. If there is such a battle, it will not be resolved by getting angry and shouting at the sky.
Im sorry, on some issues it's hard to be an evenhanded dispassionate intellectual, and for me it's fooolco and derrida...
They were/are the termites of civilization and their mission was to destroy reason, logic, truth and beauty, even if their wrecking ball managed to also take out a few load-bearing walls. and if that sounds overheated, just behold the works of their acolytes, not one lasting work of interest among them (certainly nothing remotely beautiful or compelling), only mountains of unreadable jargon discovering newer and more obscure forms of oppression.
And the worst part is that the French Theorists didnt mean any of it, the nihilist pose was just a way to look cool and edgy and become celebs for status-conscious american academics who swoon over anything stamped Parisian.
Derrida's project was to cut the tongue out of Western man, to brew a nihilistic acid to be poured over any statement so nothing means anything, anything can mean anything, and so now academics can teach about the opression embedded in comic books and tv shows, because hey one text is the same as any other text, only a fascist would say there's any difference bw Tolstoy and Betty & Veronica.
The signified and the signifier are like 2 ships passing in the night, words have no inherent meaning or any possible connection to ideas or concepts, the ideas true/false right/wrong smart/stupid are just oppressive binaries inflicted by the ruling class on the mute and helpless oppressed, and nothing exists but power and who holds the whip hand. The deconstructors couldn't have done a better job destroying american arts and letters than if they'd used dynamite!
Fooolco was Nietzsche's ape and dingleberry, when he really wanted to be another Sade, a sexual outlaw and rebel. What a poser!
He is beloved now because he launched a thousand conspiracy theories that turned into academic industries: hey, there are satanic structrures etching their invisible power-knowledge into everything and everyone--what does this tell us about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He is certainly the most overrated intellectual in the history of thought.
It is obvious that they both appealed so much to Americans because their work is founded on poses of juvenile rebellion, on making sure no one can ever call you Bourgeois, and signaling your radical Leftism while never leaving the faculty lounge and always making sure the government-backed check clears.
I don't care much about Peterson, but if he hates those 2, he is my friend for life.
Interesting essay. I agree with your overall assessment of JBP fighting with his shadow. He's clearly a very post-modern thinker himself, and I think his tying post-modernism with Marxism has rendered him unable to wrestle honestly with that fact.
I do take issue with your characterisation of JBP's 'post-modern neomarxism' thing has a conspiracy theory, though - apologies in advance for the lengthy response.
On 'neo-Marxism/cultural Marxism' - we know that Marxism took a 'cultural turn' in the second half of the 20th century. This is supposed to have started with Gramsci, who (to simplify somewhat) recognised that the Marxist approach up the that point had failed, and 'cultural hegemony' was needed for progress to occur.
We also know that mid-century Marxists were influenced by this idea and began a 'long march through the institutions' to achieve cultural hegemony. This is not a secret or a conspiracy theory - and we now see very clearly the outcomes of this. Surveys of the political opinions with these institutions show that the majority of university academics, journalists, teachers, etc. hold left or far-left political opinions. These people are well versed in the methods of 'critical theory', 'critical pedagogy', etc., which they learned from their own teachers and professors, and they quite openly apply these methods in their work.
On post-modernism - what does 'critical' refer to in critical theory? Essentially, it refers to the methods of Deconstruction. I'm by no means an expert on this, please correct me where I'm wrong, but my understanding is these terms refer to the methods used by post-structuralists and post-modernists to 'deconstruct' language, cultural beliefs and institutions, etc., with the goal of highlighting underlying power processes. Privilege/oppression and all that jazz.
So there's a positive vision for society and its future - Marxism, and/or a culture-focused version of it - and a method of deconstructing the old vision, which I'll just summarise as 'fascistic Western colonial capitalist patriarchy'. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there is a significant portion of people in 'the institutions' that have this as their explicit goal.
Whether this is a good thing or not is left to the reader - certainly some aspects of Western culture need to be criticised! - but to say that everything above is a conspiracy theory is simply untrue. And while JBP can get pretty melodramatic when speaking on politics, I don't believe he's ever claimed anything more than what I've outlined above. There are no 'shadowy cabals' in JBP's work.
It's interesting reading this. Funny enough, many of the things you're pointing out about Peterson's faults and examples of his shadow are things that he himself has acknowledged about himself and that they are valid criticism of him.
In fact, he's been speaking especially recently about the whole idea of "render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." You point this out as something he needs to do or people should be doing, but he himself has said some variation of this numerous times. So it's not as if he's not aware of it.
I also take issue with your suggestion that because Solzhenitsyn's book was released in 1974 and in 1978 the communist party in France had an increase in the vote for them as evidence that his view that it didn't work is faulty. By that logic, the fact that the Soviet Union didn't fall immediately is evidence that it had no effect on the country. Of course, the Soviet Union did eventually fall in 1991, in large part because of Solzhenitsyn and his publishing of the book. While things happen at break neck speed today, at the time it took a lot longer for things to get around. So the fact that the increase in support for a communist in France is evidence that it didn't become unreasonable to support it simply is faulty.
Also, your assertion that people didn't know in the 1940s simply isn't true either. Solzhenitsyn himself in The Gulag Archipelago pointed out that it was pretty well known within the first few years of the Soviet Union that it was true. Knowledge of it existed although there was some debate about the extent of it necessarily. Many of the people in power in Western countries like the United States and Britain and others were aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union before World War 2. It was part of the reason they weren't so keen on an alliance with Russia in the run up to and during World War 2.
Even Germany knew about what was happening in the Soviet Union in the run up to the Second World War. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn points out that after the war, the leaders proclaimed of what happened in Germany "Never again", but that all they had to do was look at what was going on in the country of their own ally, the Soviet Union, to realize how hollow that proclamation was.
So it was fairly well known by the West that horrible things were happening in the Soviet Union very early on and yet the Soviet system persisted for 70 years. And despite the collapse of it, this idea is still going on in China and Cuba.
There are a number of problems with your assertions of Jordan Peterson, only some of which I have outlined here.
The evolution of philosophic thought is a fascinating topic. I think because Peterson had spent his entire life in academia, he is particularly sensitive to the intellectual changes in the academic environment. After trying to put the pieces together he found what he thought was a likely culprit for what he saw happening around him.
I am not well versed on this subject, but the little I do know leaves me in agreement with many of your points regarding a Neo-Marxist conspiracy driven by postmodernist thought. That doesn't mean, however, that there were no other intellectual movements that drove much of what you outline in point 2 of Peterson's argument. Gramsci was *very* explicit about infiltrating schools with the new socialist religion. The Frankfurt School has had a much larger influence in America than the French philosophers, and I think they are the more influential predecessors of today's SJW movement.
That being said, I very much agree with your point to focus on what it is to be human rather than on the battle between Aries and Artemis. If there is such a battle, it will not be resolved by getting angry and shouting at the sky.
Im sorry, on some issues it's hard to be an evenhanded dispassionate intellectual, and for me it's fooolco and derrida...
They were/are the termites of civilization and their mission was to destroy reason, logic, truth and beauty, even if their wrecking ball managed to also take out a few load-bearing walls. and if that sounds overheated, just behold the works of their acolytes, not one lasting work of interest among them (certainly nothing remotely beautiful or compelling), only mountains of unreadable jargon discovering newer and more obscure forms of oppression.
And the worst part is that the French Theorists didnt mean any of it, the nihilist pose was just a way to look cool and edgy and become celebs for status-conscious american academics who swoon over anything stamped Parisian.
Derrida's project was to cut the tongue out of Western man, to brew a nihilistic acid to be poured over any statement so nothing means anything, anything can mean anything, and so now academics can teach about the opression embedded in comic books and tv shows, because hey one text is the same as any other text, only a fascist would say there's any difference bw Tolstoy and Betty & Veronica.
The signified and the signifier are like 2 ships passing in the night, words have no inherent meaning or any possible connection to ideas or concepts, the ideas true/false right/wrong smart/stupid are just oppressive binaries inflicted by the ruling class on the mute and helpless oppressed, and nothing exists but power and who holds the whip hand. The deconstructors couldn't have done a better job destroying american arts and letters than if they'd used dynamite!
Fooolco was Nietzsche's ape and dingleberry, when he really wanted to be another Sade, a sexual outlaw and rebel. What a poser!
He is beloved now because he launched a thousand conspiracy theories that turned into academic industries: hey, there are satanic structrures etching their invisible power-knowledge into everything and everyone--what does this tell us about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He is certainly the most overrated intellectual in the history of thought.
It is obvious that they both appealed so much to Americans because their work is founded on poses of juvenile rebellion, on making sure no one can ever call you Bourgeois, and signaling your radical Leftism while never leaving the faculty lounge and always making sure the government-backed check clears.
I don't care much about Peterson, but if he hates those 2, he is my friend for life.
Interesting essay. I agree with your overall assessment of JBP fighting with his shadow. He's clearly a very post-modern thinker himself, and I think his tying post-modernism with Marxism has rendered him unable to wrestle honestly with that fact.
I do take issue with your characterisation of JBP's 'post-modern neomarxism' thing has a conspiracy theory, though - apologies in advance for the lengthy response.
On 'neo-Marxism/cultural Marxism' - we know that Marxism took a 'cultural turn' in the second half of the 20th century. This is supposed to have started with Gramsci, who (to simplify somewhat) recognised that the Marxist approach up the that point had failed, and 'cultural hegemony' was needed for progress to occur.
We also know that mid-century Marxists were influenced by this idea and began a 'long march through the institutions' to achieve cultural hegemony. This is not a secret or a conspiracy theory - and we now see very clearly the outcomes of this. Surveys of the political opinions with these institutions show that the majority of university academics, journalists, teachers, etc. hold left or far-left political opinions. These people are well versed in the methods of 'critical theory', 'critical pedagogy', etc., which they learned from their own teachers and professors, and they quite openly apply these methods in their work.
On post-modernism - what does 'critical' refer to in critical theory? Essentially, it refers to the methods of Deconstruction. I'm by no means an expert on this, please correct me where I'm wrong, but my understanding is these terms refer to the methods used by post-structuralists and post-modernists to 'deconstruct' language, cultural beliefs and institutions, etc., with the goal of highlighting underlying power processes. Privilege/oppression and all that jazz.
So there's a positive vision for society and its future - Marxism, and/or a culture-focused version of it - and a method of deconstructing the old vision, which I'll just summarise as 'fascistic Western colonial capitalist patriarchy'. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there is a significant portion of people in 'the institutions' that have this as their explicit goal.
Whether this is a good thing or not is left to the reader - certainly some aspects of Western culture need to be criticised! - but to say that everything above is a conspiracy theory is simply untrue. And while JBP can get pretty melodramatic when speaking on politics, I don't believe he's ever claimed anything more than what I've outlined above. There are no 'shadowy cabals' in JBP's work.