Notes on Peterson, Shapiro, Facts, Feelings

That’s just another instance of the naturalistic fallacy / essentialism – these guys are so incredibly stupid. Unfortunately they seem to have millions of followers.

What that rank speculation reminded me of was the speech Weston makes to Ransom at their first encounter on Perelandra–which, finding it’s available online, I could quote chunks from; but, finding it’s available online, I won’t bother.

Why no one in Plato or Aristotle (at least the texts I was assigned) says “let’s ask what an excellent woman would be” or “an excellent slave” says more, I think, about the conceptializatipn of “woman” and “slave” as negatively-human than about the concept of excellence. I was certainly never taught that Plato meant what we mean as “virtue” and would probably have failed a philosophy paper if I’d claimed he did.

Alastair MacIntyre argues “virtue” as “manliness” is an early modern conception. But I wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of modern men told they’re synonyms by insisting on facts!

It’s interesting, from a more theological, and Jewish direction, that Shapiro says you find facticity, essentially, and that’s God. Where a liberal Jew would say you find facticity but you know God transcends that.

And I suppose a Christian would point at the Trinity and say but . . . . Peterson doesn’t, though, does he? There’s some room for a jerk like him to make fun of the Jew who says things any boy who went to Sunday School would know is awful nonsense, but he doesn’t go that way. He just follows.

#4 & 5

I’m not certain “success” is the right equivalent — it’s tainting. Excellence fits better.

# 4 and 5

“Success” is not a happy translation. How about “excellence”?

To be fair, Peterson doesn’t claim certainty. But, to be fairer: the whole thing seems so transparently Just-So-Story-ish wishful and (to spin it in the most charitable way) wildly indulgent in rank speculation. (And Leibniz!) The conspicuously uncritical quality of it, especially in light of Shapiro’s famous catch-phrase?

Speaking of jumping to conclusions about masculinity, the APA Guidelines for Men and Boys are a more significant case, even if less grandiose.

Also: when it comes to speculations about the evolutionary origins and role of religion, I’ll take Robert Wright any day over these guys.

The Latin word ‘vir’ means ‘man’ (whence the English word “virility”) so for instance Machiavelli, who links virtue (‘virtu’) and masculinity, had the etymology in his corner. But although Machiavelli was right on the etymology, he was wrong on the substance. Or more precisely, his argument was circular: he defined virtue in terms of qualities that most women of his time, even if they possessed them, would not have had an opportunity to display, and then he concluded, in rather circular fashion, that ‘virtu’ is connected to men.

Maybe I’m just not a Philosopher, but Peterson’s statements never seem to have any bottom at all. I can’t parse his worldview in any terms other than pure sophistry. There’s a consistent pattern where he explains one thing by analogy to another thing that is also an analogy for another thing that is maybe an analogy for the first thing. It’s funny that a man who consistently hides behind scientism and the veneer of rational inquiry only seems capable of constructing his arguments in pre-Enlightenment terms. Everything comes back to metaphysics and the various Platonic and Judeo-Christian ideals that he has recoded as Jungian archetypes. He follows an ancient pattern of projecting his internal constructions of reality onto the material world, but transposes it into a modern language of scientific inquiry that insists that the external, material, and objective must trump the internal, ideal, and subjective. It’s completely incongruous, but people eat it up.

I’ve entertained various hypotheses on why he is like this. Maybe his battles with post-structuralists (who have been very up-front about challenging the boundaries between subjective and objective) prompted a “gaze into the abyss” moment where he adopted much of their style without grasping their substance. Maybe he’s a troll or provocateur deliberately spinning fallacies to see if people will catch him. Maybe he got sucked into a social sphere where everyone he respects agrees with his nonsense and his worst intellectual impulses are constantly rewarded. Maybe he’s just dense. Whatever happened to him, I think it’s made him worthy of study as a socio-political figure, but completely irrelevant as a public intellectual. I just don’t think he has anything new to say. All his “fresh” arguments come back to the same old dead white guys and only seem new or interesting because they’re so deeply reactionary that most intellectuals stopped using them a century ago.

Peterson is a smarter Trump, but only smarter because he has a larger vocabulary due to some real association with the history of ideas. His goal though is the same–produce attitudinal agreement with the audience, facts and ideas be damned. With that one can go ahead with the real project–furthering oneself in more pragmatic ways, like fame, fortune, and all things self-aggrandized. I have elsewhere called this functional emotivism in Charles Stevenson’s classic sense. Peterson uses what appear to be more sophisticated speech acts, but it’s all in service to him, just like Trump.

Some people approach religion as a way of trying to change their own behaviour. Some people approach religion as a way of trying to change the behaviour of others. Of these, the first obviously smacks of self-help, but the second doesn’t, at least not in the same sense of self-help. When taking the first approach, religion can be something each uses on the own self: I on myself, you on yourself. When taking the second approach, religion can be something that some use on others: I or we on them. When Peterson says ‘There is this notion that Haidt and Lukinoff are also pursuing … that you ennoble people, and encourage people, by challenging them. You ought to optimally challenge people, make them braver and stronger’, it seems he’s talking about the second and not the first.

These people are so stupid, and yet so many young men love them. Our culture is so fucked…

On religion.

I remember an sf short story where people on a distant planet used psychically controlled corpses to do civil engineering: one of the workers went to a corpse brothel where they became convinced that their corpse-fuck-machine still displayed sentience.

No, you’re the operator, say the other workers. It’s just your own thought reflected back at yourself.

Peterson: That’s so hard to address, let me try this way. There’s a line in the New Testament. Christ says no one comes to the Father except through Him. Which is a hell of a thing for anyone to say. There are lots of statements in the New Testament that are strikingly strange in this manner. I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. What could that mean? Here’s the idea and it bears on your question. It’s as if there’s a spirit at the bottom of things, involved in the bringing-to-being of everything. For example, people talk about evolution as random. But it isn’t. Mutations are random. But the selection mechanisms are not random. So what are the selection mechanisms? Here is one. Human females are very sexually selective. Male reproductive failure rate twice that of females. How do males succeed differentially? On what basis do females reject? It’s something like competence. How is competence defined? Men put themselves in hierarchies and decide who is competent. Counter-intuitive, from an evolutionary perspective. Why would men put themselves in positions in a hierarchy, in which they are disadvantaged, and give some other man a reproductive advantage? But there are reasons. Let’s say you follow the best leader in battle. He might get all the women but you don’t die, so you are still in the game. Same for best hunter. Best at bringing down game but also at sharing and organizing. So men will organize themselves into groups and privilege certain men and that puts them ahead in the reproductive hierarchy. So what that means is that there is a spirit of masculinity that is shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history. That’s what that means! That might just be a biological epiphenomenon. But it would be the spirit of positive masculinity, manifesting across epochal ages. Millions of years, perhaps. It actually has shaped our consciousness. Think about that as a figure, the figure that emerges – the essential spirit of all the great men who defined what greatness constitutes. That’s a spirit. That’s a purely biological explanation. That’s God, for all intents and purposes. You have an image of God built right into you. Even the sense that you can experience something divine and paternal might be merely a reflection of that evolutionary process. That would be a biologically reductive argument for what we experience as God. But there’s another possibility, too. That’s [the masculine image] actually reflective of a deeper metaphysical reality that has to do with the nature of consciousness itself. I think that’s true. I believe the biological case but I don’t think that exhausts it. I think there’s a metaphysical layer underneath that, that the biology is a genuine reflection of. The macrocosm above and the microcosm below. We are reflective, including in our consciousness, of something about the structure of reality in itself. That might involve whatever it is that God is.

Really? Sounds pretty addled to me.

Of all the articles I’ve read about Peterson, the most damning merely quoted him at length. As best I can recall he talked at length about moistness and witches.

Robert I don’t think I’d call it addled, but it is a string of uncertain inferences, and the probability that all of the elements of that string are true is the product of the probabilities of the individual inferences being correct. So the final result is highly likely wrong, but a description of the real truth, if it were attainable might not ring too differently.

I think something missing is the fact that these evolutionary pressures are dependent of the external environment and the social structure of the society. What would have been selected for when the struggle was sinew against nature raw in tooth and claw, is likely quite different from what is was in an early agrarian society, which differs quite substantially from what the majority of our species has experienced during the last few hundred years. Now that social environment, especially as regards what it takes for male reproductive success is again changing.

After giving Peterson’s ‘thinking’ my version of a fair hearing, I rubbished him as a Tony Robbins-type salesman who had found the marks for his con, anxious white men of a certain demographic and, not to knowingly break any rules of this forum, but, and I’d understand someone ‘slapping me about abit’ for this link, this person, took him apart in a way that he can’t be put back together except by an apologist for him. The point being anything Peterson talks about is always better in the classic original that he is distorting….
Cheers……. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas

hal

I liked one of the comments under that Youtube video:

“Dr Peterson, what’s your favorite color?”
“Well that depends on what you mean by favorite. And it also depends on what you mean by color. This is a very difficult question. One must acknowledge the underlying verisimilitude that is irrevocably nested within a multi-layered metaphysical substrate that many people fundamentally conflate with their ideological presuppositions with no uncertain irregularity, and not dissimilar to Jung’s extrapolation of the archetypal and axiomatic juxtaposition of Raskolnikov’s Neo-Marxist existential nihilism…”

“So what that means is that there is a spirit of masculinity that is shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history. ”

And, also, there is a spirit of femininity. A god and a goddess. Obviously he is a neo-pagan.

No?

I actually read his “Maps of Meaning” about a decade ago, long before any of this current nonsense could ever have been anticipated. It was interesting, and not wholly without merit, but if I recall correctly, in it he admits to some challenges with mental instability in his youth.

He was also a recurrent guest on TVO’s “The Agenda” where he came across as earnest, if somewhat brittle or rigid. Almost suddenly he disappeared from regular appearances there, and then when he did appear one time it was remotely from his home, where he was visibly unwell.

I believe that both he and his daughter have undertaken a very stringent diet to address aspects of their health issues.

All of which is to say that I suspect the muddled nature of his thinking in evidence of late, despite its success in attracting a large, if less than critically capable audience, may be associated with less than optimal physical and mental health.

Is it my imagination, or are Peerson and Shapiro saying opposite things in that excerpt?

Peterson seems to be saying that his God-figure is the result of iterated biological functions. He even calls it “a biological epiphenomenon.”

Shapiro, on the other hand, says his (and Aquinas’s) God is “a force that lies behind the combined logic of the universe.” Shapiro’s God is the force that causes biology, while Peterson’s is caused by biology.

Thank you, Raven Onthill. There’s no better way to mock him than to quote him.

That’s a spirit. That’s a purely biological explanation. That’s God, for all intents and purposes. You have an image of God built right into you.

I try to keep up with the fire hose of biological discovery, our genome, our microbiome. I subscribe to Science, but I don’t read every issue cover to cover. God must have been in one I missed.

@39

No. All of the neo-pagans I’ve spent time around laugh. And dance.

I really like the idea that we are biologically determined to stress about status. seems highly plausible and pleasantly depersonalizes my own experience with bullies bosses and buddies. That our notions of god(s) might be projections of this neural program about top to bottom who does rule who should rule what should ruling consist of. So culture then becomes a way to relieve (or exacerbate) the stress.

I would just go in the exact opposite direction of JP. what i can get from his council boils down to “masculine doing will lead to mens’ success quicker and better than reflection and support” (in my figuring, therapy is the contemporary institution which most closely resembles a socially relevant manifestation of feminist threat to people. NOT college.) I just think JP’s is disastrous advice for both healthy and psychologically-suffering people…pouring cultural flame on the biological fire.

I think nowadays alot of people could do early modern european natural philosophy as good as JP if they tried, and get to very different places politically. but JP’s relevance needs to show up empirically to really move the debate forward. Like, can we test out therapy modules that are explicitly masculine and/or petersonian and use current standard of care for depressions and anxieties as the control?

Is there any way out of this speculative muck? what’s the empirical import of “a masculine spirit has guided us, and is now under attack”? doesn’t the question itself reveal a degree of vapidness, when applied as analysis, at the very time when we are faced with the subtlety and complexity of neurology, psychology and sociology?

I wouldn’t say this exchange is like anything I’ve seen from Shapiro and it’s quite baffling.

It’s silly to call Shapiro stupid. Unfortunately, Shapiro is amazing at being completely logical and rational but basing it on one non-logical and irrational premise.
Start from ‘God exists and is fair’ and his whole neo-con framework becomes entirely logical and rational.
Why pay taxes if everything is fair?
Why promote equality if god created inequality (apparently for a reason)?

@48
”Because the woke left is structurally incapable of offering positive meaning making to which young straight white men can relate without offending existing constituencies or upending cherished shibboleths”.

WHAT??!

”The Left” –
(at least ”The Left” of my parents generation) –
invented the ”Kommune 1” with – supposedly – inventing all kind of ”positive meaning to which young straight white men can relate to – and the ”offending existing constituencies or upending cherished shibboleths” was an important part of it.

And can you imagine??!
I read your:
”But their efforts were carefully circumscribed”
as…
But their efforts were carefully ”circumcised”?

That could have something to do – that you really – REALLY seem to confuse ”fundamentalist Christians” with ”the Left”?

You know ”fundamentalist Christians” tend to tell young men:
“You need to stop going to sex parties and stop masturbating and let me tell you about this Jesus guy you’ve obviously never heard of” doesn’t work on teenagers who haven’t ever been to a sex party, don’t feel guilt about masturbation, and know full well what a Jesus is”.

”The Left DOES NOT DO THAT”!
-(at least ”the Left” that I know)
”The Left” that I know tells young men:
”Go to the Beach” – and please without being a ”mixture of hate filled and nonsensical”.

AND – please – PLEASE:

”Don’t be a… rapist”!

Patrick@48:

Thank you for articulating what I was also trying to say in a far more succinct and frank manner.

JD@40

It’s actually quite easy to see how someone could hold both points of view without requiring cognitive dissonance.

If you’re expected to fulfill a particular social role, and the parameters and expectations of that role were defined before you were born but in accordance with the structure of society at that time, and you live in a time when society has changed and is visibly changing in ways that make those roles less viable, you can understand that the role you are expected to fit into fit into the world that you never lived in even if you have no way of knowing whether you personally would fit in.

When your role model for masculine behavior is your father, but your father is wants his wife to be “more traditional” than he wants his daughters to be, there’s going to be problems. Young men can see roles and expectations for young women changing to reflect social changes, but they do not see clearly articulated changes to their own roles and expectations – and “traditional” roles and expectations for men prominently included assumptions about female roles being subordinate in a social hierarchy. The mainstream proposal for young men is a vague”don’t be ‘traditional'” even as their fathers and grandfathers are still trying to be “traditional”. The JPs and other IDW types recognize this is not a stable situation and something must change, but their solution is to double down and re-affirm the correctness of traditional roles, and argue that the change needs to be in social structure (back to how it’s “meant to be”) rather than in social roles (to reflect how it actually is).

b9n10nt, #39: “I really like the idea that we are biologically determined to stress about status.”

Studies of non-sapient social apes seem to show this. I caution, though, against taking instinctive ape tribalism as a model for human ethics. Instinct is a brutal teacher. This doesn’t mean sapient apes can or “should” ignore their heritage but ideally they would strive to add something to it.

Me, I go as the crow flies.

Adam Roberts, i really don’t understand why you think it’s harder for young men today to agree to do things a certain way “because it’s the right thing to do” than it was for young men in previous generations. Young (Aussie) men of my generation would prowl the streets looking for gay men to beat up, and would joke about it openly; now they don’t do it or joke about it. Young men of my generation thought rape in marriage was impossible, and now they don’t. The fact that a small (?) group of (apparently primarily American) men can’t get with whatever the latest “right thing to do” isn’t the fault of the left. And are you arguing that it is only left wing people who are arguing men shouldn’t rape? Because that’s a big tell right there, isn’t it?

We see this vagueness from idiots like Shapiro all the time: “the left” somehow has the power to enforce a new norm on all of society, and all of society accepts this new norm, but somehow “the left” has failed to teach young men why they should do this thing that they have forced on society. How exactly does this work? That only old people accept “the left”‘s new norm? That only young women do? How is “the left” simultaneously so all-encompassing and omniscient, yet so weak?

I remember 25 years ago when feminists were winning battles about the right for women to wear short skirts, to work and send their children to childcare, to not be raped or beaten by their husbands/boyfriends, and to love who they want, and idiots of that generation like Bettina Arndt and Camille Paglia were whining on about how this meant men couldn’t be men anymore and feminists need to do more to convince young men not to rape their wives and harass women in short skirts. Fast forward 25 years and those battles have been (mostly) won but we have a new battle about asking young (American) men not to rape strangers or first dates, and we have a new generation of concern trolls whining that feminists aren’t telling young men why they should follow these new and super challenging rules. The answer is simple: don’t be a dick. The people turning to charlatans like Peterson and Shapiro are doing so because they want to keep being dicks. Peterson and Shapiro, obviously, are utter dicks. None of this is complicated and none of it is feminists’ fault.

JD@52:

Stating things you don’t readily see must be made up is an odd strategy, and adds nothing to the conversation. Here, it suggests a lack of candid exposure to activists WRT my statement you find incredible, and a lack of close reading of posts related to the subject under discussion WRT the statement of Patrick’s you find incredible.

JD@58:

You’re simultaneously being too literal and engaging in all-or-nothing thinking. It is possible to understand something without having first-hand knowledge of it. Imperfect knowledge is almost always a necessary component of social discourse. Being born after the era when the role you are expected to follow was predominant does not make it necessarily inconsistent to conclude that the role worked better in the bygone era.

I will say your incredulity at the idea that activists center on issues that directly impact them is odd in light of this assertion, though – if one must have first-hand knowledge to be able to meaningfully appraise something, then of course activists will center their activism on personally impactful issues. This is a straightforward logical corollary of standpoint epistemology, and it’s one that is borne out in practice by adherents thereof, but also quite frequently by identitarian activists even when they don’t explicitly embrace standpoint epistomology.

Adam you said repeatedly that the left has to offer men a way to “do the right thing”. Why are you suddenly pretending you don’t think it’s feminists fault?

The bad rhetoric is a power play. It’s like a speaker who mumbles and then berates the audience for not getting it, but on an unthinkably vast scale and over unbroachable distances. It also lets a select group of listeners believe that, if they met the speaker in person, he’d be as indulgent of them as they imagine him to be.

What pulls in the supposedly neutral, rational observers, most likely, is how effortlessly Peterson manages to have it both ways. The way I suspect it goes is something like this:

JP: Hello, young man! I surmise you’d like some advice?

YM: I like to sit in my pajamas and play video games, and people don’t respect me.

JP: No, you have to get a job. In our society, men are expected to earn a living. Only liberals think it’s okay not to have a real job. People who deserve respect have jobs and aren’t liberals.

YM: OK, I got a job, but my boss keeps telling me what to do. It seems like he doesn’t respect me.

JP: No, you have to listen to your boss. In our society, men are expected to earn a living, and that means obeying the boss and not worrying about feelings. Only liberals think it’s okay not to obey your boss as if he were God.

YM: That’s really hard and it makes me feel like less of a man. Someone I think is a homosexual told me I had to do the job even though it makes me feel bad, and that felt so hateful.

JP: Yes, it sounds hateful. A man does his job, and it should make you feel like more of a man. In our society, men form hierarchies, because that’s how women like it. Your manager should be like Christ in your life and in a few years you’ll have become him. Women will recognize you as the Father’s representative in this world. Women and black people have to follow instructions because they’re not awesome. You have to follow instructions because you *are* awesome. That gay person should not have made you feel bad by treating you like a woman or a black person.

YM: I’ve been in this job three years and I only got a minor promotion and they still expect me to follow instructions and they put a woman over me. They don’t respect me even though I did everything right.

JP: You need to learn something about how the world works. Masculinity is power and when women have more power than men the system is out of whack. Women are swampy witches and all progress is due to men. People who don’t share the dominant culture’s Mythos are a danger to everyone around them. When things don’t seem right, you have to break everything down and start again. People who say bad things about me are especially bad people.

YM: Yeah, that makes sense.

Supposedly neutral observer: Isn’t it terrific that Peterson got that young man off the Internet, where he could only meet hateful feminists and liberal activists, and channeled his innate sense that men are awesome onto a productive path? We should really make sure we only hire people who follow his rules from now on, though we’ll whine about mean liberals who think “karmic justice” should be inflicted on us unmercifully if they do the opposite. It’s unpossible after all that our rules don’t actually work. After all, when I bully someone enough, they do what I want! Q.E.D

Yet we’re endlessly and breathlessly subjected to narratives rooted in alpha hunters and alpha warriors – Orange Watch@18

Which are themselves completely without evidence. Current and recent foragers (hunter-gatherers) appear mostly to be rather non-hierarchical or even anti-hierarchical, and don’t go in for war, although interpersonal violence is not rare. We don’t of course know that ancient foragers were the same – and very likely, they themselves encompassed a wide range of social setups.

To which I will add that, if one models ones ethics or conduct on non-sapient behavior, one is discarding sapience, and what’s the point of sapience, then?

“From a purely logical point of view, the eternal hero business runs up against the existence of each one of us who rejects it. How do you explain us?”

He might explain you by saying that although you appear to exist, you really don’t exist because you lack the proper metaphysical foundations. I’m not saying he would do that, but he might.

Adam @64

The reason there is no “woke” Peterson of such notoriety is entirely rooted in Peterson’s wide divergence from just about everyone else.

The whole of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” like Peterson, Sam Harris and the rest of that sorry crew is widely known because it’s pretty much them versus everyone else in their fields.

You might as well ask where is the ‘woke’ PUA, or InCel folks on the left. Peterson has set himself aside from the mainstream of thought, which actually tracks fairly well with so-called ‘woke’ viewpoints, there are a multitude of people on the other side; so it’s not entirely surprising that there isn’t one with the same kind of name recognitions…

As a psychedelic relic and modern meta-mystic, I have a different view. I think there is a wordless transcendent state of being that lies underneath religion that Peterson hasn’t experienced and that Plato did. Most people today are unaware of this, or have a vague imagination, or pass it off the reports as hallucination. Unfortunately Peterson relies upon an ur-text (the Bible) that isn’t very direct and then brings in his own “scientistic” observations from psychology and anthropology, leading to the sort of gobbledegook quoted in John’s OP.

The holy books of the various religions contain differing amounts of direct instruction in the basic mystical path which underlies their chiefest experience. The path and its end-state are more or less the same of course. There are emotional or intellectual instructions in it, but they all lead to more or less the same wordless experience: It transcends the individual’s everyday state of being; it is ego-less; there is an enhancement in the individual’s perceptual field; the new state may be transient, but there is a lasting change in the individual’s felt relationship to the world.

The holy books themselves differ in the amounts of direct instruction because the societies which produced the books had different cultural knowledge and expectation of the experience. For example, some early Buddhist texts are wholly concerned with explicit instruction in the transcendent path, perhaps because Gautama was a radical reformer of the entire method; indeed he threw out any reference to divinity. On the other hand, there is very little instruction in the Old Testament (although that function was sometimes claimed to be present in the heavily affective Song of Songs), perhaps because that culture assumed that the experience was possible and took its occurrences for granted, and so the Bible’s narrative is of the cultural pronouncements of prophets, coming as transmissions (“the Lord said”) from the experience, which are accompanied in the other books by the history of the corresponding travails of the desert and of political bondage. Later Jesus was cast from the same tradition as the actual messiah (the ultimate prophet who would deliver the Jews from bondage) in a renewal, and this helped to differentiate the accompanying freedom movement from the polytheistic “civil religion” of the Romans (see the first ten books of Augustine’s The City of God, a strange amalgam of sociology, politics and theology).

In another example, I imagine Plato to have written his works in order to piece together the shape of plain Greek knowledge after his own transcendent experience. The Greeks are assumed to have been less religious and more scientific than other ancients, but I suspect that this is a big mistake. Historians of religious ecstasy may not possess a lot of evidence for the cultural status of transcendent mystical experience in ancient Greece, but the “allegory of the cave” suggests that it may have been as commonly acknowledged and integrated into society as in ancient Judaism or in medieval Christendom. Each era and locale puts it into a different language of course. Accordingly Greek “virtue” always strikes me as referring to an attribute that inheres in the individual after the wordless change in being. It is not knowledge that can be taught. It is knowledge of how to act, on account of having experienced the state of grace. So the Meno is about how such a word as “virtue” must apply to its referents in order that anyone else, even an inexperienced person, can form, and will form, an exoteric inkling of what the word means, in order to continue participating in a verbal conversation. It is apt and clever to link this to our inherent knowledge of the attributes of geometrical figures in order to explore the epistemology of absolute, perfect ideas. Even in a nameless boy who was an uneducated slave (yet via Plato, now immortalized).

Our ability to understand the inklings of absolute ideas allows us to latch onto, say, the Bible, and to start our own interpretations. But it also allows an inexperienced person to self-invent the path to higher consciousness without knowing the whole idea or what he is doing or how to get there, and therein lies danger. A person who comes as a scientist with psychological lab results, but unaware of the well-established mystical paths, can be most dangerous to himself and to others.

Peterson is undoubtedly helping some young people to straighten up and to become good producers and consumers. But he risks harming some others because he self-reinvents only a few steps of the mystical path, and then cuts it short and brings things to a conclusion when he falls back upon clinical psychology and the discourses of archetypes and self-improvement. This could, for some of his auditors, amount to bad and confusing advice. In a video conversation with Russell Brand, Peterson discusses Jung’s interpretation of the call to “more consciousness” beyond pleasure and pain that is implied in the story of Job — but he doesn’t emphasize and perhaps doesn’t know the primary, and finally stand-alone, necessity of the personal practice of wordless contemplation that leads to more consciousness (yet to which the Bible alludes in about a thousand ways). Finally, meditation and contemplation discard all word structure; there is no gabbling on about clinical psychology. The full path has been trod many times to this destination and there is clarity to be gained from the best expositions in full, some of them quite short, by writers such as Patanjali, Buddhaghosa, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, John of the Cross, Shunru Suzuki. Not mention these writers is tantamount to malpractice.

Indeed Peterson’s discussion of story, archetypes and hierarchy ought to be recognized as standard introductory mystical preparation. Between the wordy baloney of our daily lives and the moment of ineffable change, there is the mid-level work of ideoplastic unification to be performed in the brain. (For the mystic writers listed just above, it is an implicit and minor stage of the path.) This work is performed both emotionally and intellectually. Intellectually it looks like archetypes when ascending, and it looks like the necessity of hierarchy when descending. Archetype & hierarchy are opposite directions on the same transformative ladder. From this discourse a modern audience will feel plenty of inklings of course. However, taking hierarchy for the natural order of the world, or of the sexes, or making it an excuse for the sorry condition of the economic system, is just wrong, though a common and typical reification error of mystical seekers.

Peterson implicitly adopts Jung’s therapeutic separation of the cosmos into pleroma and creatura, the inert and the living (although I am not sure that Peterson ever uses these words). But to go further in a scientific way, a discussion of archetypes and their cultural transmission must make use of all the biological and social sciences from embryo ontogeny up to anthropology. Because it is all about the transmission and transformation of pattern. You have to find someone who has attempted to study it all, and the first and perhaps still the only scientist who attempted it and indeed addressed rather directly the connection between lobster physiology and archetype generation is Gregory Bateson. (He used crabs.) Bateson found himself developing a new set of scientific fundamentals (concerning the concept of “information”) to cover the empirical observations in a new pattern science for creatura, to stand alongside the matter-and-energy physics of pleroma. As a good scientist he was careful and hesitant about taking such a bold new direction. It placed him outside the contemporary academy, yet everyone who now tries to think synthetically about these questions appears to reinvent his wheels. Bateson went further and started to assemble a whole vehicle from the wheels upward. His observations of the formal similarities of the “two great stochastic processes” of learning and evolution, and of the tandem hierarchy of calibration-and-feedback that is immanent in all forms of explanation and interaction, are chapters in his book, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Peterson would do well to memorize them before commenting further.

Peterson also puts himself at self-developmental risk, because he has acquired an audience. Expatiating upon the ineffable is always a social phenomenon, insofar as there is always a portion of the population that is in the same boat, i.e. is looking for a change in life. He starts with assertiveness training so you can find a good job and a good mate. He goes further to reinvent fragments of the mystic path while zinging his audience with the thrash of ideas. In essence he is collecting an audience while collecting his own thoughts. But such transmissions to other individuals are unreliably received even from the better expositors, always spurring more questions and more extrapolations. An unremarked lost virtue of the old established religions was that the archetypes came prepackaged in story structures that were tested and elaborated by very long empirical experience, and also there were preachers and counselors TRAINED in the tradition. This was far, far from perfect, and none of us would want to go back in time to the accompanying fear and abuse, but the good idea in it was to keep things unified in an inclusive path that was tailored to many different individual circumstances. What we have nowadays, at best, are clinical psychologists who themselves are without full experience (and/or mistake the results from statistics and psychology to be steps toward complete knowledge). And at worst we have individual proprietors who self-invent or reinvent the archetypes and practices in a smorgasbord of ideas. Given the social need, the thrashing spiritual entrepreneur of the smorgasbord can gain an audience and even gain big box office at Ticketmaster. This might appear to that entrepreneur to be truth validation. But spiritual guidance from someone who is not Self-realized (to use a Vedantist term), i.e. who has not left all the words behind, is far more dangerous than guidance from an old religion, however much it is scientized with lobster dramas etc. Peterson runs the grave risk of finally misleading himself and others in an epidemic of explosive logorrhea.

Peterson should get out of the lecture racket. The best route forward at this point in time is to study a short manual of mystical practice such as the Yoga Sutras or The Cloud of Unknowing, followed by a few stiff doses of psychedelic therapy with an experienced guide (do NOT do this by yourself !) in proper set and setting, followed by lifelong Zen meditation. And it has to be lifelong: people think they know something, but then they lose it again, in fact can be unaware of the loss within a few weeks. Then, maybe, come back and lecture in about 5 years.

Asked why he stopped writing, Aquinas is reputed to have said, “Everything that I have written seems like straw to me compared to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me.”

Adam Roberts
Orange Watch
My apologies. I did not consider the possibility that ‘a … Peterson’ should be interpreted as meaning somebody who has achieved the same prominence as Peterson. On reflection, that’s an obvious interpretation which could have occurred to me. But it didn’t. Now that it has, I agree that there is nobody with the same prominence and who otherwise matches the description given in an earlier comment. I have no answer to the interesting question of why this should be so.

I do notice that BruceJ has suggested an answer to the question, which might be the correct one.

Also, although it doesn’t answer the question in this specific case, there is nothing novel about the general phenomenon of mountebanks, charlatans, and quacks achieving more prominence, and receiving more credit, than people who better deserve it, although I don’t have an answer to the general question of why this should happen as often as it does. Is it because there’s one born every minute? or because a lie travels halfway round the world while truth is putting on her boots?

Patrick

We all can, with a few clicks, access 1) angry feminists insisting that misogyny is the only possible explanation for why men sometimes don’t realize that women are sometimes afraid to be unexpectedly alone with them, such as on elevators or on secluded streets, and 2) comedy sketches and other media mocking white women as racist for being afraid when they’re unexpectedly alone with black men, such as on elevators and secluded streets.

Can we? Pics or it didn’t happen.

And the arguments are prosecuted selectively and via shaming and by papering over the conflict by pretending it’s not there and going after anyone who mentions it.

Are they? Pics or it didn’t happen.

So Peterson tells young men that what society is telling them about how to be a good person isn’t worth caring about (like I used to tell Christians, YOU ARE NOT AS COUNTER CULTURAL AS YOU TELL YOURSELF YOU ARE, ESPECIALLY WITH RESPECT TO YOUNG PEOPLE IN YOUR POWER), and instead they should care about a bunch of hybridized cultural conservatism and Jungianism (hey, Academy- why is this still a thing, and does the fact that it’s still a thing suggest any structural deficiencies you might have that relate to these culture wars in a broader sense?).

Is the Academy promoting Jungianism? Pics or it didn’t happen.

And importantly he offers them a community of people who will affirm them, at a time when the biggest cultural competition among young people is offering only an ever shifting target of privilege policing that is so disconnected from real life impacts that it neither produces measurable value nor has any capacity to tell someone that they’ve done their fair part, or are doing it, and can stop feeling insecure. It just offers endless memes and shareable clickbait about how this or that disfavored group is trash for ever more difficult to follow reasons.

Is that the biggest cultural competition among young people? Pics or it didn’t happen.

@Patrick #74

I was with you until…

And importantly he offers them a community of people who will affirm them, at a time when the biggest cultural competition among young people is offering only an ever shifting target of privilege policing that is so disconnected from real life impacts that it neither produces measurable value nor has any capacity to tell someone that they’ve done their fair part, or are doing it, and can stop feeling insecure. It just offers endless memes and shareable clickbait about how this or that disfavored group is trash for ever more difficult to follow reasons.

I don’t think that the environment you describe is as hegemonic as you characterize. In fact, I think to the extent that your description holds true one would do well to ask why individuals (young and male or not) choose to spend their time in a way that is easy to characterize so glibly. Isn’t the internet vast enough to include spaces that satisfy the myriad human interests without also incentivizing terrible behavior? Is there something about this particular landscape that makes it very difficult for a young white man not to be regularly exposed to the extremities of the overzealous enforcers of particular social norms, on the one hand, and the overzealous breachers of those norms on the other? Are there reasonable choices that a young white man could make to enjoy the internet more eudaimonically? Why instead of staring at pictures of puppies do they choose to stare at the Peterson inkblot and see in it a self-gratifying narrative consistent with the overzealous breachers crowd?

Perhaps I’ve meandered a bit.