Smaug is Real, and Strong, and He Is My Friend--On Jordan Peterson
There is a conservative line of argument that goes something like this: "Sure, I get it, you hate religion and think it is bad and retrograde. But, you haven't thought about what will replace it--that's going to be much worse!" Now, I happen to think there is merit to this line of inquiry. I think that people are religious on a fundamental level, and so will find some sort of religious cause or content, no matter what label that content is given.
The problem, and this is where the conservatives get sideways, is in the examples of what that would look like. In the conservative narrative, the nightmare scenario is something like gay couples living in the suburbs and going to the PTA meetings of their adopted kids, or women flying airliners and having economic autonomy. Oh, the humanity! No, the real danger is replacing the (flawed and often not consistent with their own principles though they may be) account of human dignity and the inalienable rights of all people which come to us from Western religious traditions with an ideological system that justifies fixed, rigid hierarchies in which those propounding the hierarchies are (surprise!) the only people that truly matter, while everyone else is subhuman and instrumentalized and unworthy of serious consideration. Godwin's Law notwithstanding, this is a pretty good one-sentence description of Nazism. In such a situation, the religious philosophy and ontology (often mocked as backward and only fit for the naive or feebleminded) is replaced with an equally complex and unfalsifiable philosophy and ontology which (again, surprise!) provides a "just so" story for why the particular agenda at issue is the Real True Way the world works.
All of which leads me to Jordan Peterson. There was a profile piece on him a while back in the New York Times that was a true tour de force. It is absolutely worth reading in full, but I wanted to hit a few highlights, because they point out how deep the Bad Ideas rabbit-hole can take you.
Wherever he goes, he speaks in sermons about the inevitability of who we must be. “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”
The underlying conceptual move here is that there is some sort of non-material structure that anchors and informs the reality of the tangible world. This is a very old idea, going back as far (at least in the Western canon) as Plato. In every iteration of which I am aware, this non-material structure is what is "really real," with the material world as a more or less limited projection of the truth of the non-material world. Plato famously expressed this in The Republic through the Analogy of the Cave--the world of Forms are the real figures, and the material world is the shadow of those forms on the walls of the cave.
Like Plato, Peterson justifies this reference to an unchanging non-material principle or principles by pointing to the similarities between expressions in the tangible world. How is it, Plato wondered, that there was a consistency between things, such that you could call two things "chairs," even if they looked different and were made by different people? Because all of them participate in and are derived from the Idea of Chair-ness, which is distinct from any specific incarnation of a chair. Likewise, why is it, Peterson asks, that chaos is always (he says) feminine? Because chaos is feminine in some essential way, and thus the manifestation of femininity, actual human women, are derived from this ontological chaos.
I suspect around the time Plato first articulated his ideas, someone raised the obvious objection--is it really the case that the world we see is the way it is because of these pre-existent abstract concepts? Or are the abstract concepts a product of the reality found in the world we see around us? In other words, instead of things being similar as a result of their common reference to some non-material principle, we group things into categories because they have common tangible qualities that we then abstract into intellectual concepts. And so back and forth this argument has gone throughout the history of Western philosophy.
Now, you might be thinking, "it is really any better to say that we use feminine metaphors for chaos as a product of the fact that women are naturally chaotic, as opposed to Peterson's framing that some transcendent feminine chaotic principle is at the heart of women's behavior?" Well, no, not really. But the claim that "women are naturally chaotic" is subject, at least in principle, to empirical analysis and is capable of being falsified. We would have to define what we mean by "chaotic," but we could use the tools of the sciences (physical or social) to look for evidence for or against that thesis. We might note, and here I am just spit-balling, that there is a strong argument that the most chaotic person alive by most reasonable definitions of that word is the current President of the United States, and he is, well, not a woman. The fact my sister Katie is orders-of-magnitude less chaotic in her personal and professional life than Donald Trump by any objective measure is, at least, a data point tending to refute the theory that she is naturally chaotic on some fundamental level in a way that he is not.
By contrast, the inductive model Peterson employs here is by definition not falsifiable. You have a non-empirical claim (there is a transcendent feminine chaotic principle), an axoimatic claim (we should be organized in a manner consistent with transcendent reality), which then goes directly to a normative judgment (society must be run by men because they lack this principle). There is literally no way to call Peterson on any of his bullshit, no way to penetrate into the system that justifies his views. Which, not for nothing, is why Western thought moved in large measure from inductive to deductive approaches, as seen in, among other things, all of modern science. It is seen as useful to many people to be able to figure out whether your ideas actually conform to the real world around you.
Unless, of course, you are not all that concerned about the real world.
But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say.
"Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”
People have focused their attention on this portion of the interview, and rightfully so, since it makes him sound utterly daft. There is however, a way to express a portion of what he is getting at in a not completely out-there way. There is a bad habit in our culture to be excessively literal, with a corresponding failure to acknowledge the role that narrative and story play in how we understand the world. There is a tendency to dismiss fictional stories, especially fictional stories that traffic in or remix long-established fictional elements, as things for kids, when in fact they can be potent and necessary vehicles for communicating truth and meaning.
The thing is, though, that Peterson seems to get the order of operations wrong. Stories come about as we attempt to explain the significance of concrete events that have happened. We tell stories as a way of making sense of and contextualizing the events that we experience. Once we have done so, those narrative structures then define the way we experience future events, as we slot them into the broader meta-narrative that we have collectively created. But the arrow still points from the concrete to the conceptual. Peterson, consistent with his neo-Platonist worldview, seems to be suggesting that dragons exist in some meta-conceptual space which forms our concrete reality. But I don't think there is any such meta-space.
If you want to say that the stories we tell are "real" because they form the horizons of our understanding in a way that doesn't allow us to simply ignore them when we choose, then I am 100% with you. But the stories are still our stories. We create them, we don't receive them from some nether-realm, nor are they part of some "superordinate category." And because we create them, they can be the products of bias and prejudice and misperception and other forms of error and wickedness. To turn back to Peterson's example, the best explanation for why women were historically described as being a chaotic principle is that the people telling the stories were almost all men, men who saw "order" as the embodiment of the values they felt were superior. Talking about the "feminine chaotic principle" is a complicated way of saying "men are awesome and women suck." Which is the kind of thing you get when the stories are all being told by men. One of the simplest, but most universally applicable, ideas of Rene Girard is that stories are almost always told from the perspective of, and to the benefit of, the people who are on top of the situation described; indeed, it is precisely in the ways that this is not true of Judaism and Christianity that Girard locates their divine character.
Now, Peterson would no doubt conclude that, having advanced the thesis in the last paragraph, I am well within the ranks of the "Cultural Marxists." That's fine; I'm not particularly interested in changing Peterson's mind here. This is because, in part, that it is usually a futile effort to convince someone of something that is not in that person's economic interest--and Peterson is clearly making a ton of cash off peddling his theories. It is also futile to change Peterson's mind because, again, he has set up a wholly unfalsifiable model. But, for what it is worth, I would say that my model has greater explanatory power, one that allows us to take seriously the power of stories without being shackled to some unalterable meta-narrative.
This meta-narrative is in service of a very specific world view about the relationship between men and women. More specifically, men are a put-upon class that are constantly being dumped on by evil women. And even more specifically, men are suffering from women refusing to put out.
“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”
I laugh, because it is absurd.
“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”
But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.
He agrees that this is inconsistent. But preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes, is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that.
In situations where there is too much mate choice, “a small percentage of the guys have hyper-access to women, and so they don’t form relationships with women,” he said. “And the women hate that.”
Another one of the serious problems with the neo-Platonism of Peterson and his fellow travelers is the way it removes genuine freedom of choice. If everything is ultimately derived from Jungian archetypes or whatever, then our only real choice is to submit to the divine plan or not. There is no real room for finding one's own way, for improving one's own situation. You are not in control of your own life, but instead under the dictates of cosmic forces.
Removing freedom of choice seems like it is a limit, and it is, but is also is a liberation from any responsibility for outcomes. These so-called "incels" are never responsible for their own situation, but are instead the product of other people failing to follow the cosmic plan. If only women recognized their own ontological role in the world and accepted that their chaotic feminine principle needed to be paired with the ordered masculine or whatever, then everything would return to its primordial harmony--and more importantly the incels would get laid, because that's what this is all about.
Let me be very direct here, and speak to these incels. So, you don't have a women who is pretty by your standards who will have sex with you whenever you want? Guess what--neither do I. I'm single, and I have been single for the vast majority of my adult life. Does that bum be out from time to time? Yes. Would I wish it were otherwise? Yes. But do I whine and cry and act like the world owes me something, and turn to ridiculous crack-pots like Jordan Peterson to tell me that actually nothing is my fault? Never in a million years. Where I might be missing something in the romantic department, I turn to friends and family and build other kinds of relationships to meet my affective needs. I engage with activities that are fulfilling and rewarding to me. I work on improving myself where I can, through exercise and therapy. It try to build as complete a life as I possibly can under the circumstances I find myself in.
By the way, you know who else isn't in a situation where they get to have sex whenever they want? Men (and women) in healthy romantic relationships. This is because a relationship means that you consider and take seriously the needs and wants and circumstances of the other person. And taking those things into account means that there are times when you want sex and your partner doesn't. A man in a healthy relationship is OK with that because, and this is might be tough to believe but trust me when I tell you it is true, he has actual concern and caring and love for the female component of the relationship, and will sacrifice some of his desires for her well-being. If you want sex whenever you want, you better get in line for one of Douthat's sex robots.
So, yeah, incels--I, and we collectively, are laughing at you. I am laughing at you because you are ridiculous and pathetic in your narcissism and entitlement and self-imposed impotence. Women are also laughing at you for the same reasons, or at least they would if they weren't afraid you are going to shoot them or run them over with a van. Either do some work on yourself to improve you inter-personal skills and situation, or don't. But shut up, and stop shirking responsibility for your situation. And stop taking out your problems and lack of willingness to change things on others, especially women, especially through violence.
One last point--this idea that the Sexual Revolution causes women to only get with "high status" males and leave "low status" males out in the cold is simply not true. What has happened as a result of the Sexual Revolution is that people increasingly tend to get with people in their own socio-economic bracket--"assortative mating" is the technical term. In other words (assuming for purpose of this exercise you equate "high status" with high socio-economic status, which is pretty reasonable) high status women are increasingly getting with high status men, and low status women are increasingly getting with low status men. Now, you can raise questions about whether assortative mating is a good thing or a bad thing, but the thing that Peterson is claiming--that all women are going to the high status men--is not a thing.
[One of Peterson's followers, speaking about his college education] “They were teaching in classrooms things like Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported violent rebellion, and marriage is an institution that is designed to control the sexuality of women,” he says.
I would note, dear reader, that in the last quoted portion Peterson advocates for mandatory monogamous marriages in order to . . . control the sexual activity of women. Perhaps Mr. Nestor's Berkeley professor had been watching some Jordan Peterson Youtube videos.
[Speaking of one of his patients]“She had a radical-left boss who was really concerned with equality and equality of outcome and all these things and diversity and inclusivity and all these buzzwords and she was subjected to — she sent me the email chain, 30 emails about whether or not the word flip chart was acceptable,” Mr. Peterson says.
One of the slogans of Second Wave feminism of the late 60s and early 70s was "the personal is political." It seems to me that the slogan of whatever you want to call this thing is "the political is personal." Early on in adulthood, most people internalize the truth that people have lots of different views about things. Plus, some segment of people, spanning every side of every conceivable debate, are crazy and/or obsessive about their particular issue. Normal people learn various strategies for managing this reality in their daily life.
Taking this story at face value for a moment, a 30 email thread about the propriety of "flip chart" as a term seems ridiculous and annoying. But the normal response to this sort of thing in a workplace environment (or with your friends, or family) is to roll your eyes and move on. Bosses have had weird quirks and obsessions that irritate their subordinates for as long as their have been bosses and subordinates. What is relevant about this story is how this sort of thing seems to really cause an existential crisis for these people. The fact that people have political perspectives, even if they are wacky political perspectives, is taken as a personal attack and a source of dislocation and confusion.
It is a standard feature of conservative discourse to mock progressives for having thin skin and talking about "micro-aggressions" and seeking "safe spaces." Whether or not that criticism is fair on the merits, the fact of the matter is that these guys are way more sensitive than the most touchy Oberlin undergrad would ever dream of being. No one, no one is more obsessed with "safe spaces" and creating them than these Peterson disciples, who apparently seek to be free of anyone and any circumstance that conflicts with their world view or preferences.
Needless conversations about flip charts is not harassment and it is not damaging to your emotional well-being unless you allow it to be. If you are "triggered" by this, the problem is you. Again, take some responsibility for your own life.
Lion Arar, 22, a theater student in Montreal, says Mr. Peterson’s discussion of gender brought him back to religion.
“It made sense in a primordial way when he breaks down Adam and Eve, the snake and chaos,” Mr. Arar says. “Eve made Adam self-conscious. Women make men self-conscious because they’re the ultimate judge. I was like, ‘Wow this is really true.’”
You know, conservatives never hesitate to break out the phrase "moral therapeutic deism" to describe mainline Protestantism or some other Christian tradition that they don't like. And yet, this kind of stuff, where God is basically absent and religion is a tool to advance some weird psychological agenda, this kind of stuff gets a pass from those same people. Note here that in Peterson's reading via Mr. Arar, not only is Genesis entirely allegorical (which, I agree with), but it is an allegory without God. If "the judge" is the chaotic feminine, then all this stuff about God in the story is . . . what? The collective unconscious? I have no idea. But I do know that it has nothing to do with any Christian exegesis of Genesis 3 of which I am familiar.
The lesson here, and it is the core lesson of the last two years, is that Christian conservatives will cheer for anyone who says mean and degrading things about women and/or LGBT people, no matter what other weird and anti-Christian stuff that person says or does. We might call this the Trump Principle, but we could equally (and with more alliteration) call it the Peterson Principle. The very same people that lose their minds whenever anything even adjacent to their faith is repurposed for some other purpose by the broader culture (such as, for example, the Met Gala) are perfectly fine chopping up their religion for parts and selling it off to goofy hucksters, as long as said hucksters confirm them in their disdain for women and other minorities. No matter how dumb, crass, or implausible the vehicle, the lesson of Trump and Peterson is that conservative "Christians" are willing to ride this train all the way to the bottom, no matter how far down it goes.
W.C. Fields once advised us to "never give a sucker an even break." Jordan Peterson is clearly living that principle to its fullest, making a significant amount of money off of these schmucks. This would be OK, and even on some level admirable, if it weren't for the fact that the people Peterson is creating and fostering are actively destructive, especially as it relates to women. Peterson seems from the article to be getting "high off his own supply," as they say. This doesn't make the problems it creates go away but at least it moves him from actively malign to dangerously disturbed. Because if he is selling people on this nonsense and laughing at them behind their back, then he is ruthlessly exploiting clearly damaged people for his own gain. And, if so, fuck that guy.
The problem, and this is where the conservatives get sideways, is in the examples of what that would look like. In the conservative narrative, the nightmare scenario is something like gay couples living in the suburbs and going to the PTA meetings of their adopted kids, or women flying airliners and having economic autonomy. Oh, the humanity! No, the real danger is replacing the (flawed and often not consistent with their own principles though they may be) account of human dignity and the inalienable rights of all people which come to us from Western religious traditions with an ideological system that justifies fixed, rigid hierarchies in which those propounding the hierarchies are (surprise!) the only people that truly matter, while everyone else is subhuman and instrumentalized and unworthy of serious consideration. Godwin's Law notwithstanding, this is a pretty good one-sentence description of Nazism. In such a situation, the religious philosophy and ontology (often mocked as backward and only fit for the naive or feebleminded) is replaced with an equally complex and unfalsifiable philosophy and ontology which (again, surprise!) provides a "just so" story for why the particular agenda at issue is the Real True Way the world works.
All of which leads me to Jordan Peterson. There was a profile piece on him a while back in the New York Times that was a true tour de force. It is absolutely worth reading in full, but I wanted to hit a few highlights, because they point out how deep the Bad Ideas rabbit-hole can take you.
Wherever he goes, he speaks in sermons about the inevitability of who we must be. “You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”
The underlying conceptual move here is that there is some sort of non-material structure that anchors and informs the reality of the tangible world. This is a very old idea, going back as far (at least in the Western canon) as Plato. In every iteration of which I am aware, this non-material structure is what is "really real," with the material world as a more or less limited projection of the truth of the non-material world. Plato famously expressed this in The Republic through the Analogy of the Cave--the world of Forms are the real figures, and the material world is the shadow of those forms on the walls of the cave.
Like Plato, Peterson justifies this reference to an unchanging non-material principle or principles by pointing to the similarities between expressions in the tangible world. How is it, Plato wondered, that there was a consistency between things, such that you could call two things "chairs," even if they looked different and were made by different people? Because all of them participate in and are derived from the Idea of Chair-ness, which is distinct from any specific incarnation of a chair. Likewise, why is it, Peterson asks, that chaos is always (he says) feminine? Because chaos is feminine in some essential way, and thus the manifestation of femininity, actual human women, are derived from this ontological chaos.
I suspect around the time Plato first articulated his ideas, someone raised the obvious objection--is it really the case that the world we see is the way it is because of these pre-existent abstract concepts? Or are the abstract concepts a product of the reality found in the world we see around us? In other words, instead of things being similar as a result of their common reference to some non-material principle, we group things into categories because they have common tangible qualities that we then abstract into intellectual concepts. And so back and forth this argument has gone throughout the history of Western philosophy.
Now, you might be thinking, "it is really any better to say that we use feminine metaphors for chaos as a product of the fact that women are naturally chaotic, as opposed to Peterson's framing that some transcendent feminine chaotic principle is at the heart of women's behavior?" Well, no, not really. But the claim that "women are naturally chaotic" is subject, at least in principle, to empirical analysis and is capable of being falsified. We would have to define what we mean by "chaotic," but we could use the tools of the sciences (physical or social) to look for evidence for or against that thesis. We might note, and here I am just spit-balling, that there is a strong argument that the most chaotic person alive by most reasonable definitions of that word is the current President of the United States, and he is, well, not a woman. The fact my sister Katie is orders-of-magnitude less chaotic in her personal and professional life than Donald Trump by any objective measure is, at least, a data point tending to refute the theory that she is naturally chaotic on some fundamental level in a way that he is not.
By contrast, the inductive model Peterson employs here is by definition not falsifiable. You have a non-empirical claim (there is a transcendent feminine chaotic principle), an axoimatic claim (we should be organized in a manner consistent with transcendent reality), which then goes directly to a normative judgment (society must be run by men because they lack this principle). There is literally no way to call Peterson on any of his bullshit, no way to penetrate into the system that justifies his views. Which, not for nothing, is why Western thought moved in large measure from inductive to deductive approaches, as seen in, among other things, all of modern science. It is seen as useful to many people to be able to figure out whether your ideas actually conform to the real world around you.
Unless, of course, you are not all that concerned about the real world.
But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say.
"Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”
"Dragons are real. Smaug is real, and strong, and he's my friend."— MuseumMichael🌹 (@MuseumMichael) May 18, 2018
People have focused their attention on this portion of the interview, and rightfully so, since it makes him sound utterly daft. There is however, a way to express a portion of what he is getting at in a not completely out-there way. There is a bad habit in our culture to be excessively literal, with a corresponding failure to acknowledge the role that narrative and story play in how we understand the world. There is a tendency to dismiss fictional stories, especially fictional stories that traffic in or remix long-established fictional elements, as things for kids, when in fact they can be potent and necessary vehicles for communicating truth and meaning.
The thing is, though, that Peterson seems to get the order of operations wrong. Stories come about as we attempt to explain the significance of concrete events that have happened. We tell stories as a way of making sense of and contextualizing the events that we experience. Once we have done so, those narrative structures then define the way we experience future events, as we slot them into the broader meta-narrative that we have collectively created. But the arrow still points from the concrete to the conceptual. Peterson, consistent with his neo-Platonist worldview, seems to be suggesting that dragons exist in some meta-conceptual space which forms our concrete reality. But I don't think there is any such meta-space.
If you want to say that the stories we tell are "real" because they form the horizons of our understanding in a way that doesn't allow us to simply ignore them when we choose, then I am 100% with you. But the stories are still our stories. We create them, we don't receive them from some nether-realm, nor are they part of some "superordinate category." And because we create them, they can be the products of bias and prejudice and misperception and other forms of error and wickedness. To turn back to Peterson's example, the best explanation for why women were historically described as being a chaotic principle is that the people telling the stories were almost all men, men who saw "order" as the embodiment of the values they felt were superior. Talking about the "feminine chaotic principle" is a complicated way of saying "men are awesome and women suck." Which is the kind of thing you get when the stories are all being told by men. One of the simplest, but most universally applicable, ideas of Rene Girard is that stories are almost always told from the perspective of, and to the benefit of, the people who are on top of the situation described; indeed, it is precisely in the ways that this is not true of Judaism and Christianity that Girard locates their divine character.
Now, Peterson would no doubt conclude that, having advanced the thesis in the last paragraph, I am well within the ranks of the "Cultural Marxists." That's fine; I'm not particularly interested in changing Peterson's mind here. This is because, in part, that it is usually a futile effort to convince someone of something that is not in that person's economic interest--and Peterson is clearly making a ton of cash off peddling his theories. It is also futile to change Peterson's mind because, again, he has set up a wholly unfalsifiable model. But, for what it is worth, I would say that my model has greater explanatory power, one that allows us to take seriously the power of stories without being shackled to some unalterable meta-narrative.
This meta-narrative is in service of a very specific world view about the relationship between men and women. More specifically, men are a put-upon class that are constantly being dumped on by evil women. And even more specifically, men are suffering from women refusing to put out.
“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”
I laugh, because it is absurd.
“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”
But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.
He agrees that this is inconsistent. But preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes, is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that.
In situations where there is too much mate choice, “a small percentage of the guys have hyper-access to women, and so they don’t form relationships with women,” he said. “And the women hate that.”
Another one of the serious problems with the neo-Platonism of Peterson and his fellow travelers is the way it removes genuine freedom of choice. If everything is ultimately derived from Jungian archetypes or whatever, then our only real choice is to submit to the divine plan or not. There is no real room for finding one's own way, for improving one's own situation. You are not in control of your own life, but instead under the dictates of cosmic forces.
Removing freedom of choice seems like it is a limit, and it is, but is also is a liberation from any responsibility for outcomes. These so-called "incels" are never responsible for their own situation, but are instead the product of other people failing to follow the cosmic plan. If only women recognized their own ontological role in the world and accepted that their chaotic feminine principle needed to be paired with the ordered masculine or whatever, then everything would return to its primordial harmony--and more importantly the incels would get laid, because that's what this is all about.
Let me be very direct here, and speak to these incels. So, you don't have a women who is pretty by your standards who will have sex with you whenever you want? Guess what--neither do I. I'm single, and I have been single for the vast majority of my adult life. Does that bum be out from time to time? Yes. Would I wish it were otherwise? Yes. But do I whine and cry and act like the world owes me something, and turn to ridiculous crack-pots like Jordan Peterson to tell me that actually nothing is my fault? Never in a million years. Where I might be missing something in the romantic department, I turn to friends and family and build other kinds of relationships to meet my affective needs. I engage with activities that are fulfilling and rewarding to me. I work on improving myself where I can, through exercise and therapy. It try to build as complete a life as I possibly can under the circumstances I find myself in.
By the way, you know who else isn't in a situation where they get to have sex whenever they want? Men (and women) in healthy romantic relationships. This is because a relationship means that you consider and take seriously the needs and wants and circumstances of the other person. And taking those things into account means that there are times when you want sex and your partner doesn't. A man in a healthy relationship is OK with that because, and this is might be tough to believe but trust me when I tell you it is true, he has actual concern and caring and love for the female component of the relationship, and will sacrifice some of his desires for her well-being. If you want sex whenever you want, you better get in line for one of Douthat's sex robots.
So, yeah, incels--I, and we collectively, are laughing at you. I am laughing at you because you are ridiculous and pathetic in your narcissism and entitlement and self-imposed impotence. Women are also laughing at you for the same reasons, or at least they would if they weren't afraid you are going to shoot them or run them over with a van. Either do some work on yourself to improve you inter-personal skills and situation, or don't. But shut up, and stop shirking responsibility for your situation. And stop taking out your problems and lack of willingness to change things on others, especially women, especially through violence.
One last point--this idea that the Sexual Revolution causes women to only get with "high status" males and leave "low status" males out in the cold is simply not true. What has happened as a result of the Sexual Revolution is that people increasingly tend to get with people in their own socio-economic bracket--"assortative mating" is the technical term. In other words (assuming for purpose of this exercise you equate "high status" with high socio-economic status, which is pretty reasonable) high status women are increasingly getting with high status men, and low status women are increasingly getting with low status men. Now, you can raise questions about whether assortative mating is a good thing or a bad thing, but the thing that Peterson is claiming--that all women are going to the high status men--is not a thing.
[One of Peterson's followers, speaking about his college education] “They were teaching in classrooms things like Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported violent rebellion, and marriage is an institution that is designed to control the sexuality of women,” he says.
I would note, dear reader, that in the last quoted portion Peterson advocates for mandatory monogamous marriages in order to . . . control the sexual activity of women. Perhaps Mr. Nestor's Berkeley professor had been watching some Jordan Peterson Youtube videos.
[Speaking of one of his patients]“She had a radical-left boss who was really concerned with equality and equality of outcome and all these things and diversity and inclusivity and all these buzzwords and she was subjected to — she sent me the email chain, 30 emails about whether or not the word flip chart was acceptable,” Mr. Peterson says.
One of the slogans of Second Wave feminism of the late 60s and early 70s was "the personal is political." It seems to me that the slogan of whatever you want to call this thing is "the political is personal." Early on in adulthood, most people internalize the truth that people have lots of different views about things. Plus, some segment of people, spanning every side of every conceivable debate, are crazy and/or obsessive about their particular issue. Normal people learn various strategies for managing this reality in their daily life.
Taking this story at face value for a moment, a 30 email thread about the propriety of "flip chart" as a term seems ridiculous and annoying. But the normal response to this sort of thing in a workplace environment (or with your friends, or family) is to roll your eyes and move on. Bosses have had weird quirks and obsessions that irritate their subordinates for as long as their have been bosses and subordinates. What is relevant about this story is how this sort of thing seems to really cause an existential crisis for these people. The fact that people have political perspectives, even if they are wacky political perspectives, is taken as a personal attack and a source of dislocation and confusion.
It is a standard feature of conservative discourse to mock progressives for having thin skin and talking about "micro-aggressions" and seeking "safe spaces." Whether or not that criticism is fair on the merits, the fact of the matter is that these guys are way more sensitive than the most touchy Oberlin undergrad would ever dream of being. No one, no one is more obsessed with "safe spaces" and creating them than these Peterson disciples, who apparently seek to be free of anyone and any circumstance that conflicts with their world view or preferences.
Needless conversations about flip charts is not harassment and it is not damaging to your emotional well-being unless you allow it to be. If you are "triggered" by this, the problem is you. Again, take some responsibility for your own life.
Lion Arar, 22, a theater student in Montreal, says Mr. Peterson’s discussion of gender brought him back to religion.
“It made sense in a primordial way when he breaks down Adam and Eve, the snake and chaos,” Mr. Arar says. “Eve made Adam self-conscious. Women make men self-conscious because they’re the ultimate judge. I was like, ‘Wow this is really true.’”
You know, conservatives never hesitate to break out the phrase "moral therapeutic deism" to describe mainline Protestantism or some other Christian tradition that they don't like. And yet, this kind of stuff, where God is basically absent and religion is a tool to advance some weird psychological agenda, this kind of stuff gets a pass from those same people. Note here that in Peterson's reading via Mr. Arar, not only is Genesis entirely allegorical (which, I agree with), but it is an allegory without God. If "the judge" is the chaotic feminine, then all this stuff about God in the story is . . . what? The collective unconscious? I have no idea. But I do know that it has nothing to do with any Christian exegesis of Genesis 3 of which I am familiar.
The lesson here, and it is the core lesson of the last two years, is that Christian conservatives will cheer for anyone who says mean and degrading things about women and/or LGBT people, no matter what other weird and anti-Christian stuff that person says or does. We might call this the Trump Principle, but we could equally (and with more alliteration) call it the Peterson Principle. The very same people that lose their minds whenever anything even adjacent to their faith is repurposed for some other purpose by the broader culture (such as, for example, the Met Gala) are perfectly fine chopping up their religion for parts and selling it off to goofy hucksters, as long as said hucksters confirm them in their disdain for women and other minorities. No matter how dumb, crass, or implausible the vehicle, the lesson of Trump and Peterson is that conservative "Christians" are willing to ride this train all the way to the bottom, no matter how far down it goes.
W.C. Fields once advised us to "never give a sucker an even break." Jordan Peterson is clearly living that principle to its fullest, making a significant amount of money off of these schmucks. This would be OK, and even on some level admirable, if it weren't for the fact that the people Peterson is creating and fostering are actively destructive, especially as it relates to women. Peterson seems from the article to be getting "high off his own supply," as they say. This doesn't make the problems it creates go away but at least it moves him from actively malign to dangerously disturbed. Because if he is selling people on this nonsense and laughing at them behind their back, then he is ruthlessly exploiting clearly damaged people for his own gain. And, if so, fuck that guy.
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