Less than a week ago, we got a stormy weather alert in an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "What's So Dangerous about Jordan Peterson?" by Tom Bartlett, with the tease "Not long ago, he was an obscure psychology professor. Now he leads a flock of die-hard disciples." One might suppose, considering Mr. Bartlett's choice of words, that Peterson is a Jim Jones-style cult-leader, but instinctively, I knew I would like to find out about anybody described as dangerous by the trade paper of American higher education.
Mr. Bartlett considers Dr. Peterson a threat because Peterson deviates from the leftist academic canon - a conservative, traditionalist, moralist anti-political correctness psychologist academic. He objects to the speech police and the tyranny of the left. He [claims] that a totalitarian-speech police state is developing in Canada, and, by instinct and conviction, he objects strongly to the "good speech" laws demanding the use of concocted or inapposite pronouns and labels preferred by the little darlin's of the newly concocted gender-identity claxon, cowbell, and tin drum army.
Peterson objects to speech police tactics, and he does it eloquently. That's a threat to, and dangerous for, the academic poobahs who live and breathe censorship and intellectual tyranny. Bartlett's essay is an alert: watch out for this conservative who has a bad attitude on lots of things and opposes our new pronoun gender identity group project and our promotion of the grievance status of the newly formed sex-gender-dysmorphist deviant group.
After I wrote to others about my discovery of Peterson, I was directed by one reader to a recent Peterson media splash, a YouTube interview cum debate by a feminist firebrand interviewer Cathy Newman at Britain's Channel 4. Ms. Newman, a veteran U.K. TV personality, engaged Dr. Peterson on her claim that unequal female pay and power in business and other organizations are an example of gender persecution and oppression by patriarchal Western societies. Ms. Newman came, all armed up, shouting her flinty-edged argument that gender job inequalities are due to bias and abuse by men. Then came a well deserved Peterson social sciences buzzsaw refutation of her arguments, delivered with a smile to the visibly frustrated and increasingly desperate Newman, who seemed relieved when the 30 minute "interview" ended.
Peterson, to the delight of millions of people who watched the video (it is nearing 4 million views, 150 thousand likes to 3-some thousand dislikes) was the well prepared and skilled matador with Newman, gently, politely reminding her that sex is not the only thing to consider when there are male-female differences. Peterson took Newman's arguments in mid-flight and decimated her attack, didn't miss opportunities to point out her interrogatory misconduct. It was a rout, highlighting his rhetorical skills, command of the social sciences research literature, good sense, and overarching good humor. There was a particularly good segment where Peterson reminded Newman that her accusations and assertions were based on an incorrect and nonscientific univariate (one cause) analysis blaming sex, when good social science research requires a multivariate (multiple causes) analysis. He followed up with examples of many alternative causes for inequalities - simple things like choice, preferences, conflicts of personal and social responsibilities, female fertility time frames, emotional constitution, physical energy realities, required time commitments, and domestic and family priorities - and he pointed out that the variates list was incomplete. Game, set, match, Peterson.
Peterson's expertise as a debater and interviewee is not the place to stop this discussion. His great accomplishment is teaching, counseling, and coaching people to urge them to live the good life, the virtuous life. He has an impressive social media following consistent with his success as a revered and respected classroom teacher everywhere he taught, combined with a successful general clinical practice that has a special effort devoted to career and life coaching.
Peterson teaches people to be better, stronger, faster, and more competent and respected, including women looking for tips and coaching on how to succeed. Coaching is his deal, his nature, his forte, and you can see his intensity when he does intimate videos with just him up close to the camera, with a look that reminded me of Vince Lombardi.
Peterson is as compelling filling up a camera as he is wandering the classroom, appearing to be improvising on a theme, but doing it as musicians do a cadenza, jazz artists an improvisation. The trick to jazz improvisation is playing music on a theme that repeats with a disciplined creativity that furthers the theme. Peterson has his game in order: no lulls or empty places, a stay-awake lecturer, well aware of the theme, effective because he is insightful and eloquent, but committed to teach and modest in his attitude.
Peterson's got it and ain't gonna lose it. The only way he might be ambushed is being targeting by the destroyers of the left with their name-calling and politics of personal destruction. I never underestimate the people-shredder political correctness crowd, which has vile and vicious tactics down to an art form. I am reminded of the old saying that faculty politics is so bloody because the stakes are so small - and Peterson has a lot of natural and dedicated academic enemies.
Take a look at Peterson's website and his various lists of rules for good living, and you get the picture: he is a classical stoic, and he advises people on how to grow up and be adults with a mature and virtuous approach to life. He says honesty is the key to civil behavior, and courage and fortitude are essential. People on our side of the cultural divide would have to agree with damn near everything he says.
Peterson objects to identity politics as the product of socialist cant and ideology that wants to put people in groups based on grievance or the socialist theory of deterministic societal struggle. He considers socialism misanthropic at its core, dead to the importance of the individual. He opposes the socialist mindset that is nihilistic about the value and importance of the human spirit and human action and conduct that subscribe to a moral code. That is a mouthful, but necessary to be fully indicative of his superior intellect and good instincts about what is good, what is right.
Peterson is a traditionalist, committed to teaching people to live a virtuous life - and he thinks happiness is living the virtuous life. Pursuit of happiness is his theme, how to be your best friend in achieving real happiness, and he adheres to the Aristotelian-Stoic-Buddhist-American philosophy that being a virtuous, honest, courageous, engaged adult, a credit to society and to your friends and family, is the way to achieve happiness. Peterson has staked out his position and is at war with totalitarians and ideologues of the left in academia and society in general as an old-fashioned stoic. A fearsome sight for a leftist.
Peterson has written and lectured about rules for a good life - ten rules, twelve rules, and a longer set of forty rules for life that are discussed in his YouTube videos and other media, including books. Some rules are mother wit, commonsense reminders for the needy. Most are just wisdom, essential to a good and happy life.
The label "Alt Right" is used as a weapon against Peterson because it is an all-encompassing epithet, a flexible way to condemn anyone with a conservative lean. It is being used now by critics of Peterson to describe him, since he teaches from a conservative point of view - and his enemies would be happy to label him misogynist, racist, homophobe, dysmorphophobic, transgenderophobic, a moralistic, intolerant bigot who must be destroyed.
Stoics know these things. Marcus Aurelius said:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.I took a few days to absorb Peterson, a bright and fascinating phenomenon, an articulate, smart, eloquent man doing some public counseling as a lecturer in a classroom on a video, taking on politically correct tyrants on the side. I have read his rules for a good life, listened to his commentaries on the rules. It became evident that Peterson, who grew up in a remote, very cold Fairview, Alberta, north and west of Edmonton, and went on to great success in academia and as a psychologist in practice and then a public psychologist and teacher, exemplifies an old but important story. His life course appears to be the story of the human search for meaning, wisdom, and purpose - the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, Taoist and Confucian philosophy, Christian concepts of wisdom and virtue, the Roman and Greek Stoic meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the teachings of the Greek slave Stoic doyen Epictetus.
One thing Peterson has done is awakened a young audience, predominately male, to the value of the virtuous life, the life of a responsible, engaged, and effective adult male, or female, who is a credit and an asset, a benefit for friends and family. That's the good news. The bad news is that the academy and chattering class are opposed to such teachings as promoting values of the evil and oppressive Western tradition.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is a physician and inactive attorney living in Brownwood, Texas.
But there is also - and in sale cases in the same people, the same vengeful intent to denigrate, put down and piss on a 'destroyed' hate object - and those they hate direct toward them.
There may well also be clandestine trolling to magnify and incite a response of attempting to pacify such a response that has been used to both tar JP by association, and use that reaction to 'prove' online attacks were being mounted or threatened to Cathy Newman. JP's youtube has a short update about this - I recommend checking it out.
I invite Jordan Peterson to speak to so called followers who only see conflict to be won - and not communication to be restored - in terms of errors of thought and feeling that are no less worthy of addressing than Cathy Newman's errors - and they are no less worth speaking to. But not as presumed familiars in which he presumed the right or the responsibility to try to 'calm things down'. That was his mistake. Well meaning intentions pave the road to hell.
To first calm down and from there speak to the whole situation. No blame here.
I salute Jordan Peterson's witness - but inner calm becomes only more necessary.
He has used the term 'combative' - and there is a need to be skilfully and compassionately forceful in living from an integrity in which the other is included at heart - if not in their current alignment of thought, word and deed. But war is enacted on the death of truth and a world of war is also a world of lies given personal investment and identified as if true.
Because he CAN deliver the articulated denouement of a fallacy - does not mean that that is to be a default reaction. Listening within is too easily hijacked by wanting to win, when baited to react an overreach. Cathy Newman failed to bait him to make errors by which to focus on a kill - but the intent to do so does not abide in her, but in the agencies of social engineering via identity politics and of course the mob that has been generated as one of 'righteous hate'.
Many iconoclasts go mad because they fixate on fighting the evil rather than yield to an inner directive that is free of conflict - no matter what the symptoms present - because it arises directly from the ground of being and not from the mask.
Jordan Peterson may indeed 'bring some back from the brink' by speaking out - but it is not because he has set out to do so, but because he is standing in and extending witness to integrity the best he knows how. So walking WITH others in shared purpose - yes. Followers - no. Any good teacher knows that he can only teach well if he is himself/herself a good learner. The world idolizes leading without understanding what it is to serve. False power corrupts. True power heals and restores. Yield there!
Those who feel powerless and denied are most open to being seeded with resentment and a desire for vengeance that is then given 'power' by manipulators to run as a proxy for breaking down society in order to remake it in their own image. The compassionate response is not to respond to the weak and bitter image such a one believes and presents in the guise of power, but to the true power of their innate capacity to recognize choices that they do not know they are making, that are associated with outcomes that they say they do not want. Then they have a choice and learn by making different choices in line with what they truly want. No one wakes up alone and by themself - because the idea we are isolated and disconnected is the core issue of powerlessness that seeks power, or lovelessness that seeks to capture and dominate rather than truly share with.