1. By Jordan Greenhall.
It might very well be the case that 2018 will be known as the “Year of Jordan Peterson”.
. . .Sovereignty is the capacity to take responsibility. It is the ability to be present to the world and to respond to the world — rather than to be overwhelmed or merely reactive. Sovereignty is to be a conscious agent.
Peterson reminded me that civilization is fragile.
…Because of Peterson, I read The Brothers Karamazov, a big hole in my reading history. What an extraordinary book. Part of me is amazed and ashamed that I’d never read it. The other part of me is thrilled. I don’t think it would have nearly the impact on me in my teens and twenties as it did reading it now. Deeply thought-provoking on questions of good and evil and theodicy, on the dark side of human nature and on the potential for goodness to be redemptive despite that dark side. I’m thinking of inviting Peterson back to EconTalk just to discuss The Brothers K.
The non-point-missing description of Jordan Peterson is that he’s a prophet.
. . .prophets are neither new nor controversial. To a first approximation, they only ever say three things:
First, good and evil are definitely real. You know they’re real. You can talk in philosophy class about how subtle and complicated they are, but this is bullshit and you know it. Good and evil are the realest and most obvious things you will ever see, and you recognize them on sight.
Second, you are kind of crap. You know what good is, but you don’t do it. You know what evil is, but you do it anyway. You avoid the straight and narrow path in favor of the easy and comfortable one. You make excuses for yourself and you blame your problems on other people. You can say otherwise, and maybe other people will believe you, but you and I both know you’re lying.
Third, it’s not too late to change. You say you’re too far gone, but that’s another lie you tell yourself. If you repented, you would be forgiven. If you take one step towards God, He will take twenty toward you. Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.
My own thoughts:
For those of us who gaze at college campuses and see students being taught to conform and to bully rather than to think, Peterson offers a rallying point.
He does have some ideas that are intellectually provocative. Scott Alexander points to the theme of chaos and order, which is important in Peterson’s thinking. Russ Roberts points to Peterson’s ability to derive insights from classics in literature.
I still think that he is better as a performer than as a writer. I am inclined to recommend binge-watching him on YouTube over reading his books.
This will be posted in the middle of Passover (note that, as usual, I schedule my posts in advance). The substance of the holiday is progressive, celebrating freedom from slavery. But the form of the holiday is order–doing things in a traditional way. The very word “seder” can be translated as “order.” One could have a discussion at the seder table that takes off from Peterson’s view of the need to preserve order while exploring chaos.
For those of us who gaze at college campuses and see students being taught to conform and to bully rather than to think
Sounds like college is good at preparing students for corporate life! To be successful at corporate life you have learn when to conform and when to bully.
I agree more with Josh Barro, that Jordan Peterson is mostly states Self Help 101 and there is far worse things than Self Help 101. In terms of Jordan speaking, he really does sound a lot like someone corporation pay $25K to give a 90 minute speech to their Sales Meetings to get them to sell and negotiate better.
Speaking of “progressive” Passover, American progressives started suggesting the inclusion of additional symbolic foods to represnt modern social justice / liberation movement progressive causes (and juvenile signalling of “enlightened” rebellion against tradition) about 35 years ago: crusts of bread (chametz!), orange slices, olives, and even oysters. This has led to decades of of weary eye-rolling and unnecessary strife from battles of wills when newly and insistently woke daughters come back from college. Just another example of how insidious, invasive, and inescapable these culture war matters have become, leaving no demilitarized zone, refuge, or “safe space” from them.
They did? I’ve never heard of this.
Oh, this is satire! Bravo!
John David Ebert’s videos on Peterson are good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaqiXDgi0QU
Scott Alexander writes: “First, good and evil are definitely real.”
Actually, evil does not exist. There is only the illusion of evil.
[Quote]
“Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.”
—Franz Kafka
[End Quote]
Incidentally, Kafka was Jewish. He wrote these words in the full knowledge of the past suffering of the Jewish people.
People can be divided into atheists and believers. Believers can be further divided into deists and occasionalists. Evil only exists in the minds of atheists and deists. For occasionalists, who see the Hand of God in everything, there is only good.
[Quote]
“Occasionalism is a philosophical theory about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. (A related theory, which has been called “occasional causation”, also denies a link of efficient causation between mundane events, but may differ as to the identity of the true cause that replaces them. The theory states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God’s causing of one event after another. However, there is no necessary connection between the two: it is not that the first event causes God to cause the second event: rather, God first causes one and then causes the other.”
—source: Wikipedia
[End Quote]
The problem with BS is while it may be used for ends justifying the means, used enough and repeatedly, people do end up believing their own. All doubt vanishes. They really do and anything else becomes fake news.
Just as success is all their own effort while failure is someone else’s fault.
Most of the discussion about Peterson seems to be cautiously orbiting around what you might call the Straussian Catch-22. In order for a society to be “philosophically grounded” and avoid various Social Failure Modes and going completely off the rails and in the direction of some signalling spiral or ideological singularity – that is, the kind of pleasant, productive, and functional society most people want to live it – it needs some ideologically stabilizing framework, and the tragic nature of the human condition is that this simply cannot be provided by any story, narrative, mythology or philosophy that can empirically justified.
That’s the ugly truth. And if everyone recognizes the ugly truth, or at least it’s clear to everyone that high status elites believe the ugly truth (e.g., in a “God is dead” pseudo-empiricist society), then the possibility of social grounding disappears, but then the possibility of a society where any kind of truth prevails contrary to desires of the powers that be also vanishes.
So one have have philosophical perfection and finds oneself in the philosophically unfortunate but unavoidable position of having to perform “constrained optimization” and having to choose which unjustifiable claims to tolerate as the least harmful and most noble lies.
But you need every influential person in the society to consistently pay lip service to those noble lies, even if they know better, and to follow The Basic Social Rule of rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors.
But the Catch-22 is that this rule can’t be discussed in public, because that would “break the spell.” So one has the problem of how, in a free society with semi-open ability to speak on any topic, how to get all influential people on board with the lip-service / no-criticism-or-demands-for-justification rule, and to let them all in on the inside joke and get them to obey, without intimidation, threats, terror, or overt penalties for heresy and blasphemy.
Well, it probably can’t be done, so one has to make other compromises or accept that there is no alternative way to approach it except with evasions, inconsistencies, and “strategic ambiguities” (like the Fed’s communications philosphy) and in more intellectually loose and sloppy manners.
Of course it helps if the very fact of a society going through the early stages of an increasingly severe ideological nervous breakdown is sufficiently upsetting to enough of your audience that they immediately and instinctively grasp that the story you’re telling serves as a good-enough potential rallying point that “basic social rule” protective instincts kick in about it, and also about the “prophet” giving the sermons.
Peterson’s real trouble is that he is trying to do this in the midst of a progressive social order in which volunteer auxiliary thought police patrol the streets and corridors of every mass medium and are extremely sensitive to any potential threat or new focal point of opposition. They are most certainly on his case, and he is savvy enough to understand his very delicate task in tactfully avoiding all their attempts at personal ruination, while at the same time not alienating his core project recruitables.
Thoughtful comment. I read it a couple of times. You are undoubtedly correct that EVERY moral philosophy is in the end a mater of faith. Sometimes that faith is bolstered with facts and more or less internally consistent thinking, but still ultimately rests on faith. I am a conservative Christian and I find that most of the Christians I know are more accepting of this fact than my Leftist (Universalist or atheist) friends who like to just assume their moral positions are “obvious”.
He is better in the original Canadian.