Kate Manne on 12 Rules for Life

I’m still struggling to find anything remotely new in this or in the whole IDW thing. Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, has made a lifetime career out of being heckled on university campuses. Here’s a piece from 2002 that’s indistinguishable from the NY Times puff piece the other day
https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0506/p11s02-coop.html
Peterson just seems to be recapitulating Camille Paglia from 1990 (repeated more and more boringly after that). And so on.

I must second what John Quiggin said. It is recapitulation of the same culture wars, and Paglia’s arguments in particular. Many books and articles on the phenomenon are virtually indistinguishable from ones written at that time, right down to the fretting about the inevitable backlash to identity politics on the part of some leftist men.

It is weird how similar it is–did everyone forget? But the person who likely remembers them is Jordan Peterson, and his audience are people who were babies or yet-to-be conceived at the time.

However, I don’t remember this level of semi-organized violence in response. That part is new, isn’t it? I can only remember the one attack on feminists in Canada. The narrative in the first version of these culture wars was also about the need to pay attention due to the threat of white male anger. Now we have a rash of mass-murder so our attention is assured.

Manne says maybe Peterson could have talked them down instead–but of course she sees that’s not going to fly. If your problem is that you are not special in the sense of being better than others, talking you down requires explaining why you should not expect to be special in that way. Who wants to hear that? What disgruntled person is going to pay to hear that their rage is not justified? A newish aspect of Peterson’s version is that he relies so much on the concepts and techniques of psychotherapy–including those that promote transference. Egalitarian ideals seem like the terrible parents in his particular version. They get the blame, anyway.

Peterson reads almost as self satire; a well crafted send up of motivational speakers and the more pernicious schools of self improvement (est, Scientology). Descriptions of his home, filled with Soviet-era propaganda art as constant reminders of the link between politics and atrocities, suggest that Peterson is earnest about what he preaches rather just hustling the rubes. But so what? It’s still gibberish. But his performances are selling out with a lively market in scalped tickets so I guess he’s winning!

Even from a layperson’s perspective, the logic of social Darwinism seems wildly incoherent.
When I win, it is evidence of my natural and inevitable superiority.
When I lose, it is evidence of society’s failure to recognize my natural and inevitable superiority.

I wouldn’t think that natural and inevitable superiority would be so hard to spot.

@2

The issue here is that once you get to a certain age, you realise that the latest Intellectual Furore is just a reheat of one that was going on when you were at college. Just like the latest, hottest indie bands are just recycling moves that were vaguely original in about 1991 but not any later. And you’re noticing the same haircuts as well.

We’re just old. Let’s try to be graceful about it.

@10 You’re right. I was just thinking about writing some more stuff on various issues, and decided it would be simpler to post links to what I said five or ten years ago.

@7

Kate Manne writes ‘cis’ twice.

Not ‘constantly including ‘cis’ in her analysis’ exactly.

I liked Manne’s review, but this one might be more to the point – funnier anyway.

“a Messiah gum surrogate dad for gormless dimwits”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-messiah-cum-surrogate-dad-for-gormless-dimwits-on-jordan-b-petersons-12-rules-for-life/

I’ve got to agree with William @ 15: Manne’s review is lacking in content, if not brio. My main problem with it is her harping on the privilege of the losers she so deftly profiles. No, they are not privileged. They are losers. They may be white cis straight men, but they are losers: socially awkward and generally not too bright. They may believe that their white male cis straightness should give them privilege, but it does not, and they know it. Hence their rage.
Not all conservatives have something to conserve. Some of them just think that they should be entitled to something they don’t have.

@Emma: I share your misgivings about being openly contemptuous of the creeps on the Peterson/Paglia side of the culture wars. I don’t think being kinder or more respectful or polite would change their response, though–they hate us and want us dead, and not because they find us unmannerly. The only question seems to me to be whether restraining our contempt might be good for us, and as to that, I don’t know.

Manne makes the profound point that Peterson’s acceptance of the psychology of hierarchy leads him to characterize, or mischaracterize, the mass killer’s status-aggrieved, narcissistic homicidal megalomania as something else, an existential crisis that sends the killer into an apocalyptic lustration. He offers no effective antidote to toxic masculinity and status grievance, other than to suck it up, clean your house and read the Bible. As I wrote at length under Henry’s post “Witches” https://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/18/witches/#comment-732973, I think the propaedeutics of archetype & hierarchy, the odd diagnoses and weak prescriptions are indicators of Peterson’s own parcellated and incomplete reinvention of the perennial mystical path. This is not uncommon among psychologists who branch out; there is a pop reading list that goes back decades — although why they keep stumbling into it piecemeal and unaware is perhaps the more interesting question. Anyway if you are going to try to solve these problems without starting another pernicious school of self-improvement (quoting Dr. Hilarius #6 above), you really ought to study the greats, then get serious and go the whole lobster yourself.

Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.

‘Privilege’ is a relative concept that is highly contextual. Much of what is coded as ‘white privilege’ is really more middle class and higher white privilege. Poor white people get beaten by the cops, have their kids taken away for bullshit reasons, and have trouble making ends meet. The Wachowskis in their everyday life are privileged in any realistic comparison to a poor cis white male, despite being trans.

One thing that struck me in the last discussion here on ‘incels’ is that we are really letting the tiniest minority of people with a problem really radicalize the whole issue in ways that trigger our tribalism. This lets/makes us want to trivialize real problems just because the self appointed spokesmen are so unappealing/violent. We need to be able to separate, at least in our minds, this self appointed vanguard from the people who they pretend to represent. If we trivialize the people they claim to represent, we are pushing rather into the arms of the radicals who triggered our tribalism in the first place.

On any reasonable metric Manne, and many of the women and men she appeals to, is far more ‘privileged’ than many of Peterson’s fans. And from a broader perspective they’re both part of an oppressive, if fractious, elite whose escalating physical and verbal lashings out are a hopeful sign of its impending downfall. That doesn’t make his politics any less horrible but it does make this whole debate inane.

re Sebastian H and engels

The grief, anger and violence is not about absolute position/privilege. It’s about perceived challenge to what privilege one has (however little), from below, and about fear of the loss of position. The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky observes that testosterone is not about aggression or violence, it’s about response to challenge (and interestingly noted observing three instances of baboon “rape” – all done by males who had just suffered severe loss of status).

The US social codification of race sets up strong markers of status – setting whites on an eroding pedestal. Hence Obama derangement. Couple this with misogyny and it’s a powerful trigger. Peterson’s blather offers no escape: only some social re-arrangement that set up other distinctions could do that.

I think Sebastian @26 (and Gabriel @7) are correct on an important point. Mass shootings are an objectively very, very low frequency event, and that should matter for any reasonable analysis of what they mean.

Quick googling indicates Peterson has maybe a million odd fans committed enough to buy his book. The US has had around 150 mass shootings (4 or more people) in the last 50 years. Even if you assume ~every one~ was from a Peterson-type (very dubious) that still leaves an individual Peterson fan with a .0015% lifetime chance of committing a mass shooting. For reference, the maternal death rate in the USA is .0185%, or roughly an order of magnitude higher. If you looked at a randomly selected pregnant woman and said “she’s going to die giving birth,” you’d be right more than ten times more often than when you took a random Peterson fan and said “he’s going to shoot up a mall,”–even under the most generous assumptions about how high that latter number was.

To the extent that Manne (or Harry’s) explanation of mass shootings is that “socially widespread ideologies of racist, toxic masculinity and status loss anxiety lead otherwise coherent and rational people to murder”–those explanations are going to struggle with the fact that they posit that the ideologies are supposed to be widespread, at least as widespread as Peterson’s-fan-types and probably wider, and yet almost no one is going out and doing the things that the ideologies are supposed to cause. They are at best a weak, situational, or very partial cause. For another comparison, “eating red meat,” which is a real but partial risk factor for bowel cancer, is the likely cause of 1/6th of such cancers. Given that around 4-5% of people will experience those cancers in the US, that leads to an absolute risk level of around .6%–two orders of magnitude higher than the generous assessment of the likelihood of a Peterson-fan going on a mass shooting. The causal power of red meat with respect to bowel cancer is mostly such that no one cares about it, and, pace caveats about rigor of establishing actual causal relations, it looks unlikely that the causal power of Peterson’s ideology wrt mass shootings could be anywhere near as high as that. Alternately, I guess: have a talk with your friends who eat red meat!

But none of that’s really the point, is what I suspect. Peterson wants to exaggerate the causal power of the ideology of mass shooters because he wants to suggest an existential crisis only he can solve; Manne wants to exaggerate it because she wants to suggest that Peterson himself is a crisis that only her brand of feminist social progress can solve. I am personally much more sympathetic to Manne’s brand of feminist social progress than I am to Peterson’s Neanderthal “winning” mentality, but with respect to claiming mass shooters for ideological points both strike me as hewing closer to slanted opportunism than straightforward assessment.

Mrmr have you heard of the reverend Thomas Bayes? I think he wants to have a word with you about your flawed logic.

As for your last paragraph: Manne shows by quoting mass shooters that Peterson’s explanation for mass shootings is bullshit. That’s kind of a problem, don’t you think? Feel free to address it.

Haven’t been following this closely but wasn’t one recent shooter a trans woman? How does that fit into the ‘entitled people throwing their toys out of the pram when they can’t have everything on a plate’ analysis?

(Iirc Mark Ames’ ‘Going Postal’ had a lot of testimony that didn’t fit that narrative…)

This is poignant and devastating. The author helped him get his job, hosted his family, but doesn’t seem to care for him any more:

I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous

Marc, have you heard of bruce Springsteen? This notion that “large sections of the economy withering” is unique tot he current era is kind of silly. It’s been a constant of American politics and cultural debate for 40 years. But the inception uprising is a phenomenon of the last five.

@40. The article in The Star on Petersen is somewhat concerning. Especially the bit about him objecting to ethics committee review of experiments.

(now, ok, there’s an argument to be had if your request for IRB approval gets turned down not on the grounds that the experiment is dangerous, but because the hypothesis it seeks to test is uninteresting)

Thomas Beale #41: “* accept that everyone’s starting point in life is different and unfair, get over it, and do your best from where you start
* accept that a major unfairness in life is the existence of hierarchies, and that you need to know how to operate in them”

The substantive debunking of these: 1. These excuses were used historically as oppressive tactics against others, and this still happens. 2. Much of current social hierarchy is phony; it depends upon economic material scarcity for its existence, yet material scarcity is ending due to technological innovation. Some of the scarcities in the present market economy are fictional, imposed by the fictional scarcity of money. The fictional scarcity of money in turn is tied to property scarcity especially intellectual property (which keeps being extended in tenure) and real estate. Currently some of this property is fair and some of it is unfair. But given the fact that artificial intelligence will be able to epitomize any kind of rational game-playing including technological innovation in goods and services as well as pure science research, it isn’t clear whether intellectual property should be protected by long tenures in the future. So hierarchy is nonsense, or it is turning into nonsense, and shouldn’t be preached as if it were eternal reality. Yet Peterson keeps returning to a blanket condemnation of “equality of outcomes” even though the modern advanced economy around him already assures it by socializing certain goods and services (e.g. healthcare except in the US) and there is an increasing number of other market goods and services which are no longer truly scarce — they could be produced to satiety yet are kept fictionally scarce. A substantive debunking of Peterson could start from the fact that he doesn’t understand economics.

“accept that a major unfairness in life is the existence of hierarchies, and that you need to know how to operate in them”

My experience with people (mostly but not all men) who believe something like this is that they end up either perceiving hierarchy as benefiting themselves or become consumed with resentment that they have to participate in a hierarchy headed by people they don’t feel they have to respect. These aren’t “bros,” they’re educated, married of divorced parents who apparently struggled with social settings that didn’t seem right to them, and settled on trying to impose rules something like what Peterson preaches.

In the first case, they are always on top, relative to people they don’t believe they have to respect. If they aren’t in a higher position themselves, they always know more about how to operate in the relevant hierarchy. They are always in a position, as far as they are concerned, to wield power without respect to the hierarchy, because they believe they understand the hierarchy and they equate a difference of opinion with themselves with rebellion against the hierarchy itself.

In the second case, a hierarchy headed by a woman or a nonwhite person or a non-Christian or a foreigner just doesn’t count as a hierarchy. They still figure they have to learn how to “operate within them,” but they feel no moral compunction about cheating in those cases.

And even if they end up in a lower position in a hierarchy, Peterson tells them that culture should exist only for the purpose of telling them men’s lives are a heroic struggle against the female.

Lee A. Arnold @ 46
The substantive debunking of these: 1. These excuses were used historically as oppressive tactics against others, and this still happens. 2. Much of current social hierarchy is phony; it depends upon economic material scarcity for its existence, yet material scarcity is ending

spoken like a true eco-warrior! Ok, your website has some interesting things on it, but your comment is forward-theoretical, not current reality. If you stick to the practical view of everyday life for most normal people, it is pretty much hierarchies everywhere. Nearly all of the working world works on that principle, and that’s the one thing that affects anyone who has to actually work for a living. Socially? Well, it’s more of a debate, but I think Peterson’s idea is that society seems like a status hierarchy, particularly to the young and inexperienced. For many people this is the experience.

Peterson’s condemnation of equality of outcomes is clearly an argument against trying to control the output variables; e.g. as affirmative action programmes try to do. He clearly doesn’t know much about the subject, because if he did he’d mention Sowell or someone similar in his arguments. And in socialised healthcare, the argument is not solid. But he’s not completely wrong either – affirmative action is a terrible idea in 99% of cases – it ruins normal human systems, including universities and political parties.

Bianca Steel @ 48
My experience with people (mostly but not all men) who believe something like this is that they end up either perceiving hierarchy as benefiting themselves or become consumed with resentment that they have to participate in a hierarchy headed by people they don’t feel they have to respect.

I don’t think this is a general description of reality. I think most people simply experience the world of work as hierarchical management structures (that’s what it is in corporations and the public sector) in which the Peter principle operates constantly, with the general feeling is often somewhere between the Dilbert zone and Kafka’s The Castle. It’s probably true that men are on average more interested in status, but I’d say most people experience the full spectrum of wisdom to idiocy fairly evenly distributed over the sexes. Hierarchy isn’t innately evil either; you can’t run a large organisation without it.

And even if they end up in a lower position in a hierarchy, Peterson tells them that culture should exist only for the purpose of telling them men’s lives are a heroic struggle against the female.

Well, see, I don’t want to defend Peterson, but he’s clearly not saying that.

I repeat myself, but why are we even talking about this lazy charlatan:

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/

engels @ 49

And of course, they’ll call the woman or non-Christian who dares to say her place in the hierarchy gives her the right to make decisions, an “authoritarian.” They, of course, aren’t authoritarian when they tell people their “place in the hierarchy” requires them to do what the white man says. They’re just following the natural course of the universe.

One of the great things about being gay is learning early that the grind you up hierarchy system won’t work for you and you have to do something else. It’s a lesson that’s true for a lot of straight people, but sometimes they don’t notice it u til they are much older.

Sure, but think more systemically: it’s not only true for gay people, it’s true of any [sociocultural-sense] minority. Net result, straight white middle-class and above men systemically don’t understand, and don’t need to understand, the nature of their society.

Which is to say, “privilege”.

@Faustusnotes: “Yes the objection to ethical review is very surprising.”

It’s not surprising at all, though. It’s tediously predicted by my “they all have theory-of-mind impairment”: external review isn’t necessary because there’s nothing important other people know or care about that I don’t, and the subjects aren’t me so they aren’t real people anyway. Put yourself in the mindset of a profound narcissist and it becomes inevitable, not even a choice.

[again: “All As are B” is not “All Bs are A”]

Thomas Beale fundamentally misunderstands Peterson. Peterson isn’t arguing that heirarchies are an unfortunate reality and offering tips to survive them, as Beale suggests. If this were true Peterson would be harmless blather. Instead, Peterson is arguing that heirarchies are good and necessary to keep chaos at bay, and that the reason his followers feel they are failing in life is that attempts to subvert this good and necessary natural order through affirmative action have pushed them out of their place in the heirarchy and denied them their natural due. This is pretty obvious in his writings, it’s not even subtext.

It’s also worth noting the bright line through all Peterson’s rhetoric that connects these good and necessary heirarchies to the exclusion of women from them. He defines the feminine as chaos and the masculine as order. He tells his followers that heirarchies exist to protect them against chaos; he presents his rules as an antidote to chaos. It’s a pretty obvious subtext, isn’t it? Except that in his most recent interview he appears to have dropped the subtext and straight-up argued that men should be assigned women. That should keep the chaos harpies in line!

Mario

Your second link seems to be broken.

I watched the clip at the first link. In it he talks about suffering caused by unemployment. I can agree with him about that being a terrible problem without agreeing with his underlying analysis, but what are his suggested remedies (whether they come from that analysis or not)? In the clip he explains why he thinks it’s a terrible problem and why he thinks it’s going to get worse, but if he has any suggestions about remedies they aren’t in that clip. Even if it’s true (which it may not be), ‘It’s very bad and it’s going to get much worse’ is not a constructive comment.

I can’t stand Jordan Peterson or the cultural forces he’s exploiting for his personal vainglory, but Manne’s piece is dreadful in its own way. Other commenters have pointed out her smugness and apparent lack of concern for the unformed souls at risk of being drawn into the Peterson orbit but who could be reached in other ways. What bothers me most, however, is her pernicious and, I have come to think, dishonest use of the word “privilege” to frame her critique.

This is a highly unequal world, and we should try to do something about it. The starting point is distinguishing between two types of inequalities, those that can be rectified (more or less) by extending to everyone the benefits that only a few currently have, and those that can’t be addressed without taking those benefits away. A fairly pure example of the first is the right to not be arbitrarily brutalized by the police. This right is unequally distributed according to race and class. To equalize it, we don’t need more brutality visited on anyone, just less for those now at greater risk. This is a positive-sum move.

An example of the second is class exploitation as understood in Marxism. (This is not about whether we agree with the analysis, just its logic.) The wealth of capitalists is viewed as derived from the surplus value extracted from workers; you can’t end the exploitation of the latter without dispossessing the former. At least in this sense (admittedly static), capitalist exploitation is zero-sum.

This distinction is the starting point for political strategy. We can overcome the first type of inequality by moral appeals or a little bit of horse-trading (we’ll give you more esteem about this in order to compensate you for your loss of esteem about that) because, in principle, no one needs to be diminished in order for the inequality to be rectified. The second has an intrinsic antagonism built into it; there will be unavoidable aspects of confrontation and power struggles. Of course, many inequalities have aspects of both, and strategy needs to be nuanced about how it juggles these two options.

Happily, the English language (I don’t know about other languages but would be interested to find out) gives us a word that has historically applied specifically to the zero-sum inequality: privilege. The slogans about rights versus privileges appealed to this: rights were things everyone could have and were good, privileges existed only because of inequality and were bad. The civil rights movement, for instance, could truly preach a form of universal love, since it was about rights that should be for all of us. The battle against male privilege in housework and child care, on the other hand, while it appealed to elements of solidarity, understood from the beginning that men would have to yield their advantages for women to have more opportunities in life. That frames the politics.

The abuse of the word privilege to refer to all forms of inequality, whether positive or zero sum, is poisonous. It is used as a justification for disdain and silencing, even though, if inequalities are not zero sum, the diminution of those with more may not do much to improve the lives of those with less. This is true, for instance, about inequality of respect: less respect for whites, men etc. does not in itself generate more respect for people of color, women etc.

I never thought much about this issue until I saw first hand how much damage a blanket use of the “privilege” frame could cause at my own place of work. Now I can’t read diatribes like Manne’s without getting upset. Hence this rant.

ps: Jordan Peterson has figured out how to wrap social darwinism in Jungian archetypes. Big deal.

The comments are getting better…

Lee A Arnold, Faustusnotes and others…

Thomas Beale fundamentally misunderstands Peterson. Peterson isn’t arguing that heirarchies are an unfortunate reality and offering tips to survive them

It seems to me that significant occurrence of hierarchy is likely to be in the natural order, and it seems pretty likely that it is heavily biologically determined (after all, avoiding hierarchies and still creating a functioning, sophisticated society is going to require some serious mental work), but in any case, this is at least the kind of substantive argument that detractors need to put forward, with evidence, to be successful. You have not done it yet, because you’d need to disprove any biological link, but at least we are now talking about one of the salient points.

BTW Peterson’s use of the schema men=order / women=chaos is from mythological archetypes, and in the book it is not clear why he even brings it up other than that it chimes with the book title. I didn’t see where he talks as if that is how he sees modern society. If he really was thinking that, it would obviously be problematic for his stance.

Re: engineering equality of outcomes: I’m personally very much against affirmative action, for the very basic reason what trying to control output variables means you break the system they belong to, and this is indeed what usually happens. But a proper debate on that topic would be interesting as well.

Re Mario @ 57, it’s clear that Peterson considers actual outcomes important, it’s just that to achieve them you have to work with input variables, not the outcomes themselves. This is very obvious indeed, and I see no easy argument against Peterson’s exhortations against engineering equal outcomes. Example: if you want more women in politics, you could fix selection lists in some seats to be women-only (the UK Labour Party, uniquely in the UK, does this), but this then creates the obvious problems of a) blocking men who happen to be the better candidate in those seats, b) putting at least some women into parliament who don’t have the competencies, c) creating resentment more generally and d) running into the trans debate i.e. ‘who is a woman anyway?’.

And it fails to answer the fundamental question of why there should be more women in politics. Maybe the natural ratio in politics isn’t 50/50; maybe it’s 30/70, or 80/20? Maybe it’s variable over time, depending on what the current issues are? Who really knows? Peterson’s claim with respect to this is that men and women self-sort unevenly in various sectors in the most free societies, so it’s probably natural. And that is the evidence. Primary school teachers are 90% women across the EU; in secondary school, it’s 65%; and some sub-domains of medicine and law have many more women. Are these ratios all wrong too? This is the kind of question people have to look at if they want to make assumptions about how everything should be 50/50.

Then there is the related question of the ‘gender pay gap’, which is mostly objected to by people without the faintest grasp of statistics (= most journalists). There is indeed a difference between the average pay of women versus men in some sectors, but this doesn’t prove anything with respect to the ‘equal work equal pay’ principle. In business for example, there are more men, better paid, near the top. Most people complaining about that endlessly repeat phrases like ‘most women are blocked from the top’, the ‘glass ceiling’ etc, without thinking that, in reality, most men are blocked from the top, as well. It’s pretty clear that those running corporations are more aggressive, more focussed, more ruthless. Sure, they may benefit from historic networks of power, and may be outright sexist, but those are far from the only reasons for getting to the top. The people who get there know how to work the hierarchy – that’s a given in the business world, and my academic and public sector friends tell me the same.

My sense is that Peterson’s ideas are far less controversial than his detractors would like to think, and probably far less coherent than he himself would like to think. Nevertheless, critics need to work a lot harder on points like hierarchy if they want to knock him down on principle.

I had a conversation with a friend today, a native American man who grew up on a reservation. He one day discovered that his rich white college friend used to go into supermarkets in his rich white area and eat the produce as he was shopping – grab some grapes and eat them, or open the biscuits and eat one before he paid. My friend was flabbergasted, because where he grew up that would get the police called on you. Noone would be so stupid! His rich white college friend couldn’t understand his disbelief. That right there is privilege. It’s not about zero sum or not zero sum, it’s about how some people live in such a protected bubble that they can’t even conceive that the oppression happening around them is real; or they get to live in the world in a cluelessly easy way because the world gives them what they want without even asking. See also: free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t. It’s not just about rights denied, but about the way people who have never had to think about the threat to their rights belittle, ignore or fail to understand which rights are denied, where, how or why.

(I also have problems with the blanket use of the term to describe other things, and with the miniscule policing of it in some American discourse. But misusing a term or overusing a concept doesn’t make it wrong)

Faustusnotes, your story is a great example of how to use the term privilege correctly. A world in which everyone just took stuff and didn’t pay for it would be impossible. Long before total breakdown the police would start nabbing people. But a few folks with status or connections can break these rules; it’s exactly because they are relatively few that they can get away with it.

Yes, it’s absolutely a privilege. There’s no way to do away with this inequality (some rip off with impunity, others have to follow the rules) except by taking away some of the “freedom” of the folks in the bubble.

OTOH, should I, a white middle class male, consider myself privileged because I can go shopping without the feeling that security personnel are monitoring my every movement? It’s outrageous that millions of people have to put up with this scrutiny every day, but the solution doesn’t involve my having to give up anything.

Why invoke zero-sum antagonism when you don’t have to? What motivates writers like Manne to bring down their wrath on people simply because they have rights that others haven’t yet been allowed to share?

Faustusnotes @ 67
You are making the ‘statistics idiot’ mistake yourself in that line of argumentation (and with an N=1 example!), and you are clearly far too intelligent to be doing so. Again: the ‘gender pay gap’ as characterised in the media is about the difference in average pay v gender (you could make up an ‘ethnic pay gap’, or a ‘gender-preference pay gap’ in the same way, as I’m sure Identity politicians are going to do at some point). But that difference doesn’t tell you anything about e.g. your example of ?sexism, or whether equal work is systematically unequally paid.

In medicine, it turns out that there is strong evidence for equal work being paid equally w.r.t. sex. And yet the gross average pay in e.g. the US or UK is skewed toward men. Why? It’s because they occupy higher-paying executive and managerial positions, e.g. HOD positions in hospitals and HMOs. Why? Maybe there are more career- and wealth-driven men than women (for which there are some obvious reasons)? Maybe upper managerial / exec pay is (far) too high? These are the kinds of real underlying reasons that would have to be investigated to put any meaning into the term ‘gender pay gap’. You are now gunning for profit and capitalism as organising principles – which would be a much more interesting thing to do.

Peterson asked the question in the Cathy Newman epic fail interview: why just look at pay v sex? Why not other variables, such as education, birthplace etc? Perfectly good question. In the UK accent has a pretty good correlation with pay / access to jobs in many professions.

On hierarchy, I may have misread Peterson, and I’d have to go take another look to see if he really is claiming that hierarchies are (?always) innately good, and that women should be excluded from them, because I certainly don’t remember that. Those are strong claims about him, so you’d need to be able to quote from primary material to support them. (I did just read the latest NYT article – ‘enforced monogamy’? How amusing – well at least that clarifies that he’s some sort of patrician traditionalist, so maybe that comes close on the hierarchies-are-good point).

In any case, to prove that a) hierarchy in human societies is somehow just an accidental state of affairs with no relation to biology, when so much evidence points the other way, and b) that it is innately bad in all / most cases, your work is truly cut out for you. Anyone who has suffered through the consequences of the 80s/90s pseudo-scientific alternative non-hierarchical management theories will know that proving hierarchy inherent wrong is really much harder than it looks. Maybe hierarchy is like democracy – the worst possible system, except for all the others that have been tried…

Sebastian, Collin

The right to have a job at the bottom or middle of a “grind you up” hierarchy is privilege, and the ability to make an upper middle class living without having to deal with that BS is the opposite? Odd. (I guess Engels said this already.)

It seems to me that significant occurrence of hierarchy is likely to be in the natural order, and it seems pretty likely that it is heavily biologically determined

And it fails to answer the fundamental question of why there should be more women in politics. Maybe the natural ratio in politics isn’t 50/50; maybe it’s 30/70, or 80/20?

You keep bringing up the “natural order” of things, seemingly unaware of how ridiculous such essentialist arguments are: there is no “natural order” – and if you don’t want open yourself to accusations of racism, sexism, classism then I would suggest dropping this line of thought.

With all this talk of hierarchy, I’m surprised that the distinction between the “prestige” and “dominance” varieties hasn’t come up yet – to me, this is crucial.
I am willing to give respect and deference to someone who has a high level of skill or expertise in a given domain that is meaningful to me; this has an aspirational aspect, as I can hope to learn from them. I can accept lower prestige in this context, and I don’t see a person with higher prestige as globally “superior” to me. For this form of hierarchy to work, a mutual understanding is necessary.
In a dominance hierarchy, there is really only power. Those who are superior are just superior; the external referents are only window-dressing and theatrics. Here, a marker of power is the ability to conscript the unwilling into it – no lobster left behind.
I believe that prestige hierarchy is often useful and perhaps inevitable (Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head has some very interesting thinking along these lines), but I have no interest in defending human dominance hierarchy anywhere.

I had a conversation with a friend today, a native American man who grew up on a reservation. He one day discovered that his rich white college friend used to go into supermarkets in his rich white area and eat the produce as he was shopping – grab some grapes and eat them, or open the biscuits and eat one before he paid. My friend was flabbergasted, because where he grew up that would get the police called on you. Noone would be so stupid! His rich white college friend couldn’t understand his disbelief. That right there is privilege. It’s not about zero sum or not zero sum, it’s about how some people live in such a protected bubble that they can’t even conceive that the oppression happening around them is real; or they get to live in the world in a cluelessly easy way because the world gives them what they want without even asking.

Er, the point of the story is really that if a supermarket in a poor area was tolerant of grazing (or shoplifting), they might as well just close. While a supermarket in a rich area can tolerate the occasional douchebag. If there were lots of grazers, the store would probably crack down. Is free riding on the good behavior of others really the same thing as “privilege?” I guess, but isn’t it an ersatz form of it?

For completeness, here is the video I wanted to link to above.

The statement “marriage is restricted to the rich” is not absolutely correct but not far from the truth, as we can see here (search for “marriage rates”): link. The rich clearly marry much more often than the poor do.

Faustusnotes:

He does this because he is pandering to an audience who need to feel aggrieved.

This is a really strange statement. You can’t possibly have read or heard much of his material. I suspect you suspect him of doing that because that is the way you look at the world.

I would venture the hypothesis that his audience rather is people who do not want to be aggrieved, preferring to have a nice life instead, and soon, if possible. If you need to be aggrieved, having someone telling you to sort yourself out instead is probably rather annoying.

This idea that men can’t get laid or get married is tied directly to the weird logic of “hypergamy” rife in the once culture and also underlies his suggestion in the NYT interview that women should be forced to fuck ugly men. Contrary to your assertion, this is Peterson in his own words.

Really? Do you have a link or can you point to the passage? In the NYT article I can’t find those very own words of him.

my partner tried to negotiate her salary and was turned down on the basis that the company couldn’t afford it; only to discover a year later that a less qualified man was offered the maximum possible salary without negotiation.

But you are aware that there are a lot of other possible reasons for this, no?

Novakant @ 74
You keep bringing up the “natural order” of things, seemingly unaware of how ridiculous such essentialist arguments are: there is no “natural order” – and if you don’t want open yourself to accusations of racism, sexism, classism then I would suggest dropping this line of thought.

‘Natural order’ means emergent order in a complex system. It’s all around us.

The two people who have responded to my friends anecdote have completely missed the point, assuming the privileged white guy was stealing even though I made very clear he wasn’t. Is that because you wanted to assume the native American dude was stealing? Hmmm…

Thomas Beale please don’t waste everyone’s time with the “I’m not conservative” shtick. You are still laughing off something Peterson said, because you can’t take it seriously. If you laugh off all the things he says that are actually offensive and dangerous and then insists we only fouxa on the bland bits, you are the one not engaging with what he is writing. And dismissing things said in interviews is stupid. That’s the kind of attitude (“it was just a tweet! We don’t have to take such a ridiculous view seriously!”) that got Williamson hired and then fired at the Atlantic.

This is a consistent theme amongst conservatism’s faux-centrist defenders in the us. Dismiss all their dangerous and vindictive stuff as simply provocative nonsense; ignore their lies and hypocrisy; and then get offended when their critics use what they actually said and wrote to criticize them. Then accuse their left wing critics of misrepresentation. It’s the tactic of people who agree with what these people say – or think it’s good when applied to everyone else – but don’t want to be accused of supporting it. Show some spine and admit to what you believe.

Thomas

More kindly, you are confusing the general “hierarchies are how we organise things” (more or less natural, taking the term elastically) with the particular forms of hierarchy around us. That we have a hierarchy to manage a factory or a football game says nothing about the place of women, the Irish or black people in those hierarchies.

Thank you JD
Thankyou arctostaphylos

We are wired for the game
Some teachers teach us to win the game*
Others teach us to see through the game.**
Rare are those who can win anddeconstruct.***

Knowing which is your teacher
Is all.

*Petersen
**Love
***Ursula Le Guin’s Physicist, for example

Peter T @ 83
Well, the Eurostat statistics for teachers are 85% women in primary, 65% women in secondary, across the EU with remarkably low spread across the countries. But teaching is not paid equally across the EU, and the spread is huge (Business Insider UK). And teaching was not once well-paid and prestigious in all those countries; it was in some and still is, and yet in all, the mix is nearly the same.

Even if you take just the best paid primary teachers in the EU (second link above), they still sort heavily toward women. There’s no coercion, and for those countries there are surely a wide enough variety of other interesting jobs, and yet it still happens. Not only that, but the percentage has risen over the last 40 years in nearly all countries. There are all kinds of theories about the state of affairs in teaching, and I’m sure some of differences of prestige, salary, comparative salaries and so on have some weight. Some people want to paint everything as wall-to-wall sexism or whatever. But the EU statistics don’t support that.

You can make an equivalent study of sub-domains in medicine; women occupy vastly more positions in nursing, obs/gyn, immunology, and a number of other areas. The imbalances are not all sexism, or lack of choice.

Are you advocating ‘the perfect world’, with equal pay for equal work everywhere, equalised prestige (how do you achieve that?), and equalised everything else? The only way to get a gender split of 50/50 across all professions is by social engineering. The same analysis can be applied to other demographic splits, e.g. gender preference. Should the proportions of straight, gay, etc people in teaching be the same as those measured in society as a whole? How about LGBTIQ proportions across engineering or black/white/Asian/etc in market gardeners? It gets ridiculous fast. Making pieces of society (organisations, professions etc) constantly mirror the (currently known) demographics of a whole society isn’t even vaguely workable, and certainly not desirable.

Faustusnotes @ 84
You seem very keen to paint people you don’t know into enemy categories because they say things you don’t like. I simply made some mildly devil’s advocate challenges to various people’s easy and in some cases ideological attacks on some of Peterson’s points, nothing more.

Following on from Novakant’s point (@52) I hope that in the future CT will be having a symposium on the historiographical thinking of Erich von Däniken?

Like Peterson, he says the unsayable and writes the unreadable.

Thomas Beale, that’s not what you’re doing. You’re offering apologia for Peterson’s lies and sexism, refusing to read what he wrote or listen to what he says while accusing others of the same, and it is you who repeatedly stakes a claim to an ideological position (“not conservative”) to cover up your apologia. I’m simply pointing out the flaw in your arguments and the real purpose of them.

The same thing could be said probably of your divergence on equal pay. The issue isn’t whether more women are clustered in lower paid jobs – though that’s also an issue – but that women don’t get equal pay for equal work. You know this – you even dug up the stats I already knew and cited them, showing you know this – but you simply refuse to accept it. It’s right there in text you bolded but you deny it. You then use this to launch a completely weird and spurious straw man against Peter t, asking if he wants enforced equal representation of every group in society in every job. What kind of argument even is that? It’s the kind conservative liars use to cloud the water and ensure the issues can’t be clearly debated.

Mods FYI the reason you’re suddenly seeing so many double posts is that ct interface no longer shows a comment has been put into moderation after we post it, so people think their comment has been eaten. I guess this is a change to the hosting website due to that dumb EU rule. I guess you mods can’t see this effect, since you don’t use the site as guests, so here’s a heads up.

‘Natural order’ means emergent order in a complex system. It’s all around us.

But there’s nothing unnatural about my anti-misogynist beliefs or actions, Thomas. They also arise out of the emergent order of the complex system the same as anything else does: why do you object to my acting upon them?

Thomas Beale #82: “‘Natural order’ means emergent order in a complex system.”

I think this is one of Hayek’s ideas but it must be discarded. There are two problems with it: 1. Almost everything that exists in society was at one time a new emergent, and 2. such an emergence wasn’t “natural”: somebody made a new rule on a date certain. It may have been two million years ago, so we don’t know who did it. We have followed the rule since then, or else we discarded it, but all social emergents were formulated by somebody somewhere. They weren’t “natural”.

Now of course a new rule may become incorporated into other rules, or else other circumstances adapt to, or adopt the rule, or other new circumstances are formulated on account of the rule — and so the whole thing becomes part of a complex or layered social system.

But all of this just means that ideas of “social justice warriors” or “equality of outcomes” may be instances of NEW emergence that are arising spontaneously because the system is having bad outcomes and needs a new rule. Why not?

After all, rules emerged many times before, into a whole system that presumably already had “natural order”. Yet the systems stability that had emerged from complexity needed a fix.

Some species evolved themselves into stagnant culs de sac and were eradicated.

Thus there’s just no way to lay down an abstract “general systems law” about whether stabilities and emergences, whether micro or macro, are good or bad.

It’s important to understand that “emergence”, “stability”, “order”, “change” (and similar words) describe parts of our descriptions. In systems thinking they are NOT states of systems, they are more like the syntactic grammar we use to describe systems.

It’s better to get into the details of the real debate without trying to predetermine whether something is “natural” or not.

Adding to TM, there’s sometimes an insinuation that the upper and lower classes are different cultures, and it would be unfair to ask the lower classes to give up ethnonationalism. The only other option seems to be that the lower classes will all move up as they get acculturated to the new times, and be replaced by lower class immigrants who will move up in turn, until everyone’s upper class and the hard work is done by robots.

The alternatives are all glib and assume everything is the same everywhere and everyone who has a problem has the same problem. They don’t understand hierarchy and therefore can’t work in a modern organization where they can’t wing it 24/7, or they don’t understand hierarchy and don’t understand why an imperfectly masculine person like themselves should ever be listened to. They don’t understand other minds and therefore can’t comprehend the true Christian way of life, or they don’t understand other minds and therefore freak out when they have to talk civilly with a lesbian. They had a bad education and therefore don’t understand science, or they had a bad education and therefore don’t understand literary culture. Their job is unsatisfying because they thought liberals and freaks could have a place in the corporate wold, or their job is unsatisfying because it brings them into contact with liberals and LGBT people and they never learned to cope. Their workplace would be better if everyone listened to the gunts who know what they’re talking about but can be brusque, or their workplace would be better if everyone listened to the charismatic VP who didn’t finish college and can’t work with anyone as a peer. JBP looks like he’s raising questions but in fact he’s closing off possible answers, and that’s why he’s, as Manne, put it, irresponsible.

What an incredibly arrogant and offensive (*) claim

Engels is the nice guy.

I’ll say it. Sure there are sincere and altruistic exponents, but for instance the feminism and anti-racism of Obama, Clintons, Coates and much of the Democratic Party leadership is entirely weaponized and instrumentalized in service of personal wealth and power. This does not mean that the poor and oppressed might not get some trickle down benefits and psychological comfort from charismatic opportunism but this is very far from leadership’s purpose, and the first thought when designing the ACA for instance was how they use this to make themselves and their friends more money. They are pretty smart about it.

As far as the next or several levels down, like us, I presume some are seeking tips from the grifters in the very complicated forms of clientalism that are suffusing current society. Or just tribal pleasures.

But the poor and abject are still suffering, the rich keep getting richer, and the wars go on forever while engels is castigated for not caring enough about Trump’s gold toilets. I expect no real social change until species extinction.

The two people who have responded to my friends anecdote have completely missed the point, assuming the privileged white guy was stealing even though I made very clear he wasn’t.

You only thought you made this clear. When you wrote that the guy “eat the produce as he was shopping – grab some grapes and eat them,” that’s going to sound like stealing to anyone who’s familiar with American supermarkets, since generally speaking “produce” and “grapes” are items which you can’t pay for once you’ve eaten them, since you have to weigh them. Of course sometimes you can buy a pre-weighed bag or package of fruit also, usually a large amount.

The other part, where the guy would “open the biscuits and eat one before he paid,” would depend on context – if he was standing in line at the check-out, fine, if he was anywhere else in the store, then again it sounds like stealing. (And as the Tracey Thorns character in Death Proof would say, biscuits my ass, those are [bleeping] cookies).

I was actually trying to take your story – which sounded kind of dubious – at face value, so I assumed the guy was getting a real privilege, they were turning a blind eye to a little grazing. Now that’s it’s not a privilege, it’s just the “privilege” of getting to eat some of your food a few moments before you pay for it, having carefully established that you are going to be paying for it – you’re in line, the employees can see you’re in line, you’re not eating any weighed items, you don’t suddenly walk away – I think my original point still holds up pretty well. If a store is particularly intolerant of this, quick to call the cops, then I’d guess they have a high number of relatively impoverished customers – supermarkets near reservations or colleges come to mind as possible examples. And again, if this behavior were common – if everyone was tucking in before paying – stores in wealthier areas would probably crack down on the practice also, if for no other reason than cleanliness. Again, this is better seen as an example of free-riding, not privilege.

By the way when it comes to better-off Americans vs. worse-off Americans, there’s the real, not ersatz, privilege of being able to shop in better stores, often with better prices.

Is that because you wanted to assume the native American dude was stealing? Hmmm…

You’re too generous to people who take exception to things you write, Faustusnotes, too generous by far! Toughen up! Show some spine! Let the bastards have it! Don’t be such a wimp.

J-D @ 97
What would you suggest is the appropriate reaction to the discover that somebody is a pontificating mountebank?….. What would you say that it demonstrates about me if I describe Jordan Peterson as a pontificating mountebank?

By all means call him that if you want. If you have good reasons maybe there’s no problem. But you need better reasons (mostly) than the TLS reviewer. I’m not saying there aren’t any, indeed the link supplied @40 implies there almost certainly are; that analysis is far closer (I suspect) to the truth.

Regardless, there is an interesting phenomenon going on here. Here is a Psych professor out there ‘pontificating’ and certainly saying some things that can’t be taken seriously (even if he takes them seriously) who is getting a lot of traction. Sure, real charlatans succeed at that as well. But not everything this one says is nonsense – he’s clearly hit a nerve, and it’s not just or even mainly to do with some asserted following of rich white ‘incels’ – an easy but wrong excuse for total dismissal. Some of the things he objects to – identity politics, moral relativism, excesses of PC, snowflake-ism (no-platforming, safe spaces etc etc) – should be objected to, and he’s far from the only one to do so. (His reasons may of course be wrong, but that’s a separate question). Maybe he’s a sexist and bigot too – if it’s the case, criticise away.

It’s convenient to dismiss 100% of what someone says/publishes because 50% of what they say is incoherent or rubbish, to avoid the tricky 50%. Another example of someone dismissed by those too lazy to read and understand was James Lovelock. He suffered somewhat because lazy reviewers took the hippy / earth mother / crystal power following that coalesced around him for a while as indicating what his Gaia books were about. But they were about formally described and modelled cybernetic control systems, something they couldn’t be bothered to engage with.

I guess Beale’s “emergent properties” isn’t what someone who knows the meaning of “emergent” would think it means. He means that if you let nature take its course, the superiority of some people will “emerge” or become visible. Hierarchy doesn’t mean creating social systems by means of human will, it means obeying natural qualities of superiority. How do you know you’ve let nature take its course? When you get the results “science” predicts you ought to get.

“Science”, you’ll have guessed, doesn’t mean for them what someone who knows what science is would think it means, either. It just means identifying powerful people and agreeing with them.

Adding to what fn said, I am having to retype my name and email every time I post, as well.

Faustusnotes @ 94

You then use this to launch a completely weird and spurious straw man against Peter t, asking if he wants enforced equal representation of every group in society in every job. What kind of argument even is that?

It’s simple enough: Peter T’s response suggests that no such thing (more women teachers) can be ‘natural’, since I previously pointed out that gender imbalances occur naturally, and that average pay in a profession may well be higher for one sex or the other even when there is (very nearly) equal pay for equal work, for reasons clearly provided (read the bold parts a few more times, it’ll become clearer).

There is a standard line of argument that every profession, government etc must be 50/50 gender distribution. I was simply showing how a) that’s not the real world and b) that as an ideological approach it doesn’t even work when extrapolated to the other usual identity categories. It’s another version of the moronic argument that xyz movie wasn’t ‘black enough’, as if every artistic work has the responsibility to reflect the demographics of its society. Not complicated.

It’s the kind conservative liars use to cloud the water and ensure the issues can’t be clearly debated.

Well, we know one thing, you really hate conservatives ;)

Sorry that was in response to #95.

Faustusnotes:

sorry for the misformatting. But I’d really like to know your source for your claim that J. Peterson says that “women should be forced to fuck ugly men” (you even claim that these are his words). That’s a pretty grave accusation, and I think it best to have it substantiated or retracted.

Mario

I watched that video, and in it he says, in exactly these words, ‘There’s no answer to that. It’s a really difficult problem.’

Even if his analysis completely correct (which it may not be), what does he have to offer? ‘Things are tough all over.’ Well, thanks so much for that, is that what you call helpful?

And then, at the end of the clip, after giving a description of how awful it is working on oil-rigs in northern Alberta, he starts talking about how people attribute the problems he’s talking about to social structures and don’t consider the role of nature. He affirms that the problems are not the product of social structures, or only to a minor extent.

Oil-rigs

in northern Alberta

are a product of nature

and not (or hardly at all) of social structures

Really??

Not that it’s very important, Faustusnotes , but I’m curious about the “beefalo” bit. Do you mean the word for a cross between a buffalo and a cow? In the US that’s not a very uncommon word, and not, I’m pretty sure, a “native American” one – it was introduced by people who intentionally crossed them in the 19th century. Since neither “cow” nor “buffalo” are of native American origin, that would be an especially odd word to be a native American word. But maybe you meant something different? Again, not that important, but curious to me.

Peterson is following a well worn path from the academy to the motivational speaking circuit. It’s a living, usually a better one and Eli knows some others who have taken it usually when they got bored with what they were doing.

Mario, Peterson says (in the NYT interview):

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,”

(about the Toronto killer) and then

“The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

So here we have a direct statement that all men need to get laid, and that women should be forced to have sex with them to ease their anger.

Now, if you think what I have accused him of saying is so terrible that a retraction and apology are needed, what does it mean about Peterson, now that I have shown he said it?

J-D it’s pretty clear from the work of all these kinds of dudes that they consider any conservative social order to have arisen from spontaneous nature, and only progressive social orders are due to human intervention. Oil rigs are a natural product of social structures, but women being able to choose who they marry is social engineering.

Well, I see that Beale has cut me off at the pass by saying he ISN’T deriving the “ought” from the “is”. But he is, and consistently has done. His argumentative technique consists in denying that he has said everything that he has said.

Anyway, I like to read, not engage in disputations. May the good folks here (fn, J-D, LA, Matt, novakant, TM, bianca, et al, you know who you are) keep up the good work of holding back the darkness.

Oh, and mustn’t forget the FPers. Keep up the good work all.

Arnold @98:
But all of this just means that ideas of “social justice warriors” or “equality of outcomes” may be instances of NEW emergence that are arising spontaneously because the system is having bad outcomes and needs a new rule. Why not?

After all, rules emerged many times before, into a whole system that presumably already had “natural order”. Yet the systems stability that had emerged from complexity needed a fix.

A thousand times, YES.

As someone said on an earlier thread – Peterson’s work displays a clear reification of traditional social strictures or hierarchies… and that is why he is so damn popular.

No surprise there – if you are invested in particular social hierarchies or structures that appear to be under threat, you will really like a writer who provides a defence of the ‘natural’ or ‘scientific’ nature of those threatened structures.

All very clear, and not surprising. We all do this.

But this marshalling of ’emergence’ as a concept to support specific social hierarchies is arrant nonsense. You can argue that life itself is emergent – and thus a cosmic joke, because it could so easily have not emerged. That’s the point of emergence – it the process by which particular system states emerge unpredictably from earlier states.

If a patriarchal social system is truly emergent, then it will keep changing. Emergence is not a process that magically stops the minute the system reaches some situation that you are comfortable with.

New system states will keep emerging – the marshalling of ’emergence’ to defend a socially conservative position is beyond contradictory….

When Harry posted this, what really struck me was that Manne’s argument would convince absolutely no one who didn’t already agree with her. It was also thick with assumptions and jargon, which is a major reason why it was so unconvincing to those outside of the charmed circle.

What we’re seeing in the discussion here really just reinforces this. The definition of a losing political issue is one that unites your enemies and divides your allies. People from a working class background resent the devil out of wealthy people lecturing them about their “privilege” (from their skin color). This need not have anything to do with racism (although the latter certainly exists, and motivates some people.) Of course, actual racism and sexism exist. People still deeply resent being called sexists or racists casually, which is a routine tactic in identity politics: for example, common claims such as that everyone who voted for a candidate that I oppose is a racist. Marxists (actual ones, not Peterson’s confused ideas) or leftists who prioritize class issues get upset when they’re called bigots, especially in defense of the status quo; e.g. if you object to Hillary Clinton getting massive payments for speeches to bankers, the only thing that could be motivating you is misogyny.

At the root, I fear that we’ve lost the ability to even understand what motivates those who disagree with us – and the ability to recognize friend from foe, or persuadable from not. Digging out of the current political disaster is going to require changing minds, and changing tactics. What’s the alternative?

Thanks for the clarification, Faustnotes. As it turns out, if you grew up in Idaho, as I did, you’d very likely know what pemmican is, as it’s discussed heavily in grade school when people learn about Lewis and Clark “exploring” larger parts of the N. American continent, as they were provided it by the American Indians they came into contact with. (It’s also discussed in a lot of other discussions of Indians.) It’s a mix of animal fat (maybe from deer, but not necessarily), nuts, berries, and the like, kept in leather pouches. I’m told it’s not so tasty, but have never tried it. It does have the advantage of not needing a lot of work to keep for a long time and being very high in calories for the weight. But, I can totally believe people from the East and South not knowing the word.

Thomas Beale #117: “weaknesses of human character are more likely to confound these somewhat Utopian predictions”

Let’s talk dystopia. Do you think that the economic distresses of the last few decades and especially the crash are a result of human weakness? It appears to me that the overwhelming number of people get an education and play by the rules, to try to fit into the system. Yet still they got hurt, some of them badly. What are the “weaknesses of human character” that led to the crash, and that have continued to increase inequality even since then?

casmilus @ 130
at least now we are off Moore and onto Kant, so that’s a good thing …

Lee @ 131
well I am thinking more of negative aspects. For example, at its best reading, one might blame hubris for the disaster that is modern capitalism (on the part of the masters of the universe who designed and control the machine), coupled with acquiescence on the part of consumers. A more cynical reading says that most of what is happening is due to Enron-like thinking – commerce as mining the economy + escape to gated communities, islands, and eventually Elysium, and damn the masses.

Good/thoughtful/visionary people get thrown by the wayside and their calls for sanity ignored by those with more power and baser motives. I have no answer to that, perhaps just a tiny hope that consumption fatigue might spread sufficiently that the younger generation invert the usual priorities and act accordingly.

Thomas Beale: I did say also that hierarchy as a structural form is very likely to arise, as it nearly always does in natural and social systems (and Lee A Arnold made various points about how this might change in the future), but that the specific construction of social hierarchies will be quite arbitrary and variable.

This isn’t true. Hierarchy is one structural form of many. In certain situations it’s stable, in other situations it’s very unstable. It doesn’t seem to have been a factor in human societies until farming took hold.

Also if you want people to take you seriously – stop using the word ‘natural’. Your use of it is confused and fails even the most elementary of philosophical critiques.

Casmilus #130: “‘Emergent properties’…Call them ‘structural'”

I can think of two different concepts referred to by emergence. The early systems theorists identified “emergent properties” in the physical sciences; e.g. “water” is the stable, emergent property of two hydrogens & one oxygen. This is “structural”, i.e. a valid form of weak holism, a kind of irreducibility. But it’s less clear when applied to the evolutionary and social sciences. As soon as we’re off into fields of evolution, learning, innovation, creativity, and society, it’s hard to characterise a system’s apparent coherence as some sort of long-term state like “water”. For society, the best it gets is “invisible hand” or “spontaneous order” but the “invisible hand” is just Smith’s metaphor for specialization and trade compelled under circumstances of scarcity, while “spontaneous order” evaporates for lack of real general referents — except to say that we try to make things work together and there is a LOT of this to be found, like traffic circles together with allnight greasy spoons. Moreover the living system may not have a stable state: it got to where it is now, by changing from something before; and maybe later it will change into something else — or else, meet a dead end. And as we know he not busy being born is a-busy dyin’. So we need a word for specific new developments coming after a complex system has already formed, developments within the system in response to it, or in response to changes in its outer environment, — and somewhere along the way in the 1960’s or ’70’s this was called “new emergence” or “novel emergence” — phrases which never caught on. I vaguely remember a systems theorist who distinguished synchronic emergence (i.e. a structural holistic property) from diachronic emergence (i.e an evolutionary change) but maybe that is uselessly alembicated.

Cian 136, your dishonesty deserves to be called out. fn has by no means misrepresented mcmanus. Here’s the quote from 102:

“the first thought when designing the ACA for instance was how they [Obama and the Democratic party leadership] use this to make themselves and their friends more money. They are pretty smart about it.”

It’s an egregious lie in the service of a reactionary political outlook that is de facto aligned with the Extreme Right. Why are you covering for that BS?

115 Anon/portly, you’ve moved from misunderstanding my story to doubting it and also to saying any difference in reaction in the supermarket must have been because lots of native Americans are thieves.

84 The two people who have responded to my friends anecdote have completely missed the point, assuming the privileged white guy was stealing even though I made very clear he wasn’t.

66 He one day discovered that his rich white college friend used to go into supermarkets in his rich white area and eat the produce as he was shopping – grab some grapes and eat them, or open the biscuits and eat one before he paid. My friend was flabbergasted, because where he grew up that would get the police called on you.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. It’s “very clear” to me now that these were grapes in a pre-weighed package, not grapes that had to be weighed, and it’s “very clear” also that the guy was not just eating them in the produce section or as he was wandering the aisles, so that it would be possible for him to ditch the package at some point. Clearly from the context provided in comment 66 it should have been 100% clear to me (and the commenter in 68) that the guy was not doing anything that could be interpreted by store personnel as “stealing.” Where I got the idea the idea that “as he was shopping” meant that he was eating the grapes as he was shopping, not as he was paying, is a mystery to me now. What was I thinking?

More seriously, was I wrong in thinking that since your Indian/NA/Tribal/FP (*, hereafter INTF) friend was “flabbergasted,” plus his certainty the cops would always be called, made it sound like more than just eating a cookie while your items are being scanned?

Here’s a question. If 100 INTF persons went into 100 supermarkets (or grocery stores) located in or near INTF areas and ate 100 cookies while their items, including the package of cookies with the bar code intact, were being scanned (because it’s “very clear” no really very, very clear that no stealing is involved here), how many times would the cops be called? I admit I have no idea – there’s a lot of variables. For example, in some cases “the cops” would be Tribal Police and in some cases your standard issue local cops/sheriffs. For another example, the extent to which the INTF persons would in general be considered by store management as well-off, highly respected, locally politically powerful, etc etc, I believe varies greatly. For another example, in some cases the store operators and/or employees might be INTF persons and in other cases not.

Not that I’m suggesting for a moment that “where he grew up that would get the police called on you” isn’t already “very clear,” all by itself.

84 Is that because you wanted to assume the native American dude was stealing? Hmmm…

I made the mistake of mocking this comment, because I had to read it two or three times before I finally understood it, and then it genuinely made me laugh – where in either the other guy’s comment (68) or my comment (78) does any hint of the idea “the native American dude was stealing” come up? There’s nothing in Faustusnotes’ own comment, or in 68 or 78, about his friend stealing anything, or wanting to stealing anything. I mocked it because it was so bizarre.

Unfortunately, when I said “you are too generous – too generous by far” it didn’t occur to me that Faustusnotes would take this not as mockery, but as good advice. Oh well. Anyway, now supposedly I’m saying that “any difference in reaction in the [two] supermarket[s] must have been because lots of native Americans are thieves!”

Here’s what I actually said:

If a store is particularly intolerant of [eating groceries that haven’t been paid for, but it appears that they will be paid for], quick to call the cops, then I’d guess they have a high number of relatively impoverished customers – supermarkets near reservations or colleges come to mind as possible examples.

Obviously my real point is not that INTF people (or college students) are “thieves,” it’s that they’re more likely to be “relatively impoverished.”

Let’s focus on the “college student” case – I know more about their culture anyway. Am I saying that “lots of” college students “are thieves?” No, I’m saying because their finances are often precarious – they tend to be young, new to managing on their own, in debt, drinking to excess, and so on – they have a greater incentive, I believe, to engage in a little pilfering or petty thievery in local supermarkets. I lived in a college town for awhile and heard a lot of stories about such practices. Maybe this statistical fact (if it is one) is misleading, and has over-influenced my thinking.

But I believe that in general if I go into a grocery store or any store near a relatively impoverished area, there is a greater emphasis in those stores on preventing shoplifting and theft – more stuff behind the counter, more bars on the windows, that sort of thing. Is this wrong? I thought it was obvious, but maybe it’s wrong.

So it seems to me that the point of Faustusnotes’ Indian/NA/Tribal/FP friend’s experience is that the stores where he lives really wants to crack down on anything that is even suggestive of theft, because they’re (legitimately or otherwise) worried about this problem. Meanwhile the store in the rich area doesn’t think letting one guy eat his cookie in the check-out line is going to lead to problems, apparently.

But maybe that isn’t the point – maybe the point is that the store operators and/or employees where the INTF friend lived just didn’t like, or didn’t trust, INTF people. Or just didn’t like or trust people in general. Or maybe the point is just that they’re hard-ass types where the INTF friend lived, they like everything done by the book, something more like that. Maybe Faustusnotes could ask his friend for some interpretation or gloss, and report back….

(*) I’m using every term I can think of so Faustusnotes can’t jump on me for using the wrong term – it would seem obvious that I could just use “native American” like he is and be okay, but you have to admit he’s pretty cunning about this sort of thing, and that may be just the slip-up he was trying to bait me into.

Given how much we know about the connection between male angst and the relationship of boys to fathers, I wonder why Peterson didn’t talk about “enforced fatherhood” instead of “enforced marriage”.

Cian I guess that this is the thread where quoting what people write is triggering for them, but I think TM has shown you exactly what McManus said. If you have any quibbles about that then feel free to read between those very clear lines. In the meantime I will remind you that, since mid 2016, I have been trying to call out the bullshit you Putin fluffers spread here, and this really is a prime example isn’t it? We all know that Clinton got rich selling pizzas to paedos from her foundation but how exactly did Obama get rich from the ACA? how did he benefit personally from extending heath insurance to 40 million people? Did he take a dollar for each of the 25 million covered by the Medicaid expansion, the largest expansion of the us welfare state in fifty years? Did he get a percentage of the subsidies that helped 10 million working people get insurance? There must be a mechanism and McManus must know it to be able to make such a claim. Or do I have to go to the Alex Jones website and endure his spitttle to find out? Perhaps I should just ask Putin directly instead of going through his conspiratorial intermediaries?

It’s remarkable hereabouts the number of Putin fluffers and conservatives and faux centrists who jump to the defense of one of their own on the basis that he “couldn’t possibly have said that,” only to discover he did. You guys are so sure of your own purity even as you spew volumes of the worst kind of bile. A little self reflection would serve you well.

If the Yang piece describes Peterson as arguing for “religiously based values” that “liberals have a responsibility to make sure…is available”, I’m not finding that.

Mannes:

But notwithstanding the mere existence of such great heights, we should ask: who in the world is likeliest to be experiencing vertigo at the moment? Peterson does not consider this question, but its answer is not far to seek: those with furthest to fall, given their historically great expectations. Privileged white men, all else being equal, who also happen to number disproportionately among Peterson’s loyal readers.

This article claims otherwise regarding the “privileged white men”. I don’t know how people know this, in either direction.

anon/portly will now tediously dissect every anecdote about arrest for driving while black, smoking while black, looking funny at people while being the wrong sort and arrive at the conclusion that every anecdote is false because what if we all did it.

Marc

I’m not clear on how these remarks are supposed to be relevant to this discussion. Presumably you have in mind examples where wealthy people have been lecturing people from a working-class background about the privilege they derive from their whiteness and/or where practitioners of identity politics have been casually calling people sexists or racists and/or where leftists who prioritise class issues have objected to Hillary Clinton getting massive payments for speeches to bankers and been told that the only thing that could be motivating them is misogyny; but I am not familiar with any of these examples so, in a strictly literal sense, I can’t tell what you’re talking about.

Cian @ 136
This isn’t true. Hierarchy is one structural form of many. In certain situations it’s stable, in other situations it’s very unstable. It doesn’t seem to have been a factor in human societies until farming took hold.

You appear unaware of how primate groups / tribes function.

faustusnotes @ 122, engels @ 125 et al.

““He was angry at God because women were rejecting him […] The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges. […] Half the men fail, […] And no one cares about the men who fail […] You’re laughing about them, that’s because you’re female. […] [In situations which afford unrestricted mate choice] a small percentage of the guys have hyper-access to women, and so they don’t form relationships with women, and the women hate that”

Peterson is evidently staking out a vision in which a human society with sexual license tends to polygyny. There is no reference to individuals, only aggregates, so we cannot assert that he is referring to ‘formal’ ‘harem-style’ polygyny (the same effect can develop if neither women nor men are expected to observe any kind of sexual exclusivity, but the pool of potential partners that women will consider is narrower, and that of men wider, such that, without the property- or coercive- implications of a harem society effectively ‘owned’ by an individual man, a pool of, say, ten men have informal, noncoercive sexual access to a pool of , say, twenty women, and vice versa).

Peterson asserts that this is a problem from the point of view of society, giving two reasons: the lack of sexual relationships accessible to men at the ‘bottom of the heap’, causing them evident frustration, and the inability of women, faced with an overabundance of rival candidates, to leverage sexuality into relationships with men at the ‘top of the heap’.

Likewise, because there is no reference to individuals, only aggregates, we cannot go so far as to say that Peterson enjoins as a solution that any particular woman be compelled to sleep with any particular man. ‘Enforced monogamy’, I think, must be read as indicating the use of coercive force to discourage or punish those seeking access to multiple simultaneous partners (what constitutes simultaneity is an obvious question – two tinder dates in the same week?) — though I don’t think it sensationalist, given the context, to refer to the formulation as a ‘dog-whistle’; its purpose is certainly to only afford, under close scrutiny, this more ‘modest’ interpretation, whilst giving members of his audience with, ahem, ‘stronger views’, aid and succour.

All this by way of saying that I think that a close reading comes closer to vindicating engels than faustusnotes, but that an analysis of context and motive gives reason for greater alarm than engels allows. engels spoke of reading Peterson ‘charitably’ but it seems to me that this is precisely what Peterson is relying on. He is speaking in a context, and he is articulating extremely questionable presuppositions. What he wants is for the precise wording of his prescription to come under scrutiny and then to be found to be more modest than his opponents supposed. In the meantime, we’ve granted that human societies tend naturally to polygyny, that we are now living in just such a polygynous society (??!?), that men and women only have relationships when women are in a position to require it of men in return for access to sex; that women feel undisguised amusement and contempt for ‘undesirable’ men etc. etc. etc.

Whilst we squabble over a formulation that he has carefully massaged into a perfect admixture of the ambiguous and the restrained, he articulates the worldview which solidifies the vague and emotive grievances of his ‘incel’ followers into a questionable and dangerous diagnosis of contemporary society.