What was off-putting was his tendency to be categorical about his positions, reminiscent of his lectures where he presented personal theories as absolute truths. I rarely challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that were hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful than I, and had a much quicker mind. Also, again evocative of what I saw in the classroom, he sometimes appeared to be in the thrall of his ideas and would not, or could not, constrain himself and self-monitor what he was saying.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I should note that my wife has a strong, automatic distrust of any charismatic person. She senses danger in that.
But otherwise the piece does not deliver such a heavy blow to Peterson, at least as I read it.
I get the feeling that what progressives dislike about Peterson is that he uses their own strategies of emotional appeal and intellectual sleight of hand, directed to their own audience of the young and socially insecure, in support of anti-“progressive” conclusions that were near universal common sense (outside of certain academic circles) two generations ago.
Did your wife have a strong, automatic distrust of Obama? Bill Clinton?
He is a excellent speaker but he does sound like somebody that likes the sound of his own voice. So he is really great preaching to the choir but a complete turn-off for anybody who disagrees with him. (Say I can easily listen to Tyler Cowen.) Some of this is probably because he spent a lot of time as a motivational speaker.
I still don’t see him much beyond Self-Help 101 and his theories do sound a lot like anti-feminism from the early 1970s.
I have no way of knowing whether Jordan is aware that he is playing out of the same authoritarian demagogue handbook that he himself has described. If he is unaware, then his ironic failure, unwillingness, or inability to see in himself what he attributes to them is very disconcerting.
Geez. You know who else was a charismatic leader who played the demagogue handbook? First it’s 12 Rules for Life and before you know it it’ll be 12 Rules for Avoiding Death in Peterson’s Concentration Camps.
This part:
and thinking about my own exposures to ‘ethics’ committees, made me think of Scott Alexander’s My IRB Nightmare.
It’s best to view the typical mandated ethics committee as a typical regulatory office. In the name of preventing a few, rare, obviously horrible things, they end up throwing sand in the gears of everything, 99.9% of which is obviously fine, and often in an arbitrary, capricious, and prohibitively costly and burdensome manner. And that’s not even getting into their frequently effective role as partisan ideological filters.
Nightmarish is no exaggeration. Obviously it’s counter to Schiff’s purposes here, but that part actually made me like Peterson more.
Reminds me of your observation that for any given rule of thumb that works well for 99% of people, progressives always go out and find some weird fringe case and go, “see, this incredibly useful and utility maximizing rule for the vast majority of society is inconvenient for this freak fringe case, therefore we need to throw the baby out with the bath water.”
How much of the difference in opinion is between “who cares about freak cases, either they fit in or don’t make it” versus “all of society has to twist itself up because of some weird circumstance.”
Stuck with just the first three of his rules to get the maximum effect.
Why yes, someone who does a good job at refuting leftists is dangerous, dontchya know?
I couldn’t get through the whole piece. The author reveals upfront that he failed to confront Peterson back in the day because … he wasn’t quick enough a thinker, etc., but he now pens a hit piece because he believes that Peterson is too charismatic a lecturer and is dangerous? My impression (from the part that I read, and I’ll willingly grant I’m not the most perceptive reader) is that the author is eaten with envy at Peterson’s public success, and tries to counter that with notions like “I did this for him,” and “I did that for him,” and “but for my efforts, he wouldn’t have even gotten to the starting line.”
I’ve only watched maybe two videos of Peterson, and his 12-Rules book is on my stack but still unread, but even I am aware that Peterson noted that if a student had requested he use a particular pronoun in addressing the student, he would have happily complied — but that it was government compulsion to do so that was the basis for his objection. …as it would be mine. Schiff must not have listened to that whole YouTube vid. (That’s being generous.)
Schiff’s focus seems to be that Peterson’s charisma is … Hitlerian (oh my good Godwin!) and the next thing we know he’ll be leading SS squads to round up LGBTQs.
Give me a break.
He criticizes Peterson for being eccentric and a maverick, and for refusing to subject his work to the oversight of an ethics committee (which, I assume, is staffed with un-eccentric and un-maverick-y liberal academics who are likely to find fault with anything that Peterson might submit.) I’ve not had the pleasure of experiencing an ethics committee review, but I do have a bit of experience with S.E.C. auditing of financial firms — in the absence of actual rule violations, there is nothing too minor for them to find fault with in order to justify their existence.
Perhaps it’s in the part that I didn’t read, in which case my bad, but where in this piece does the author effectively argue that what Peterson SAYS is wrong?
He says Peterson is wrong (briefly) in this quote
” It was an abuse of the trust that comes with his professorial position, which I had fought for, to have misrepresented gender science by dismissing the evidence that the relationship of gender to biology is not absolute”
but this is a mis-characterization of Peterson’s position. Overall the piece is weak and its strongest point is “I know him extremely well, he is dangerous”, which is of course meaningless unless you know the author very well and trust his judgement.
I read the whole article through once, not carefully but did actually read it. It’s hard to tell what to think of it.
I learned more about the author than I learned about about Peterson.
In Schiff’s article are a bunch of unexamined assumptions about various issues (teaching, research, conformity, the risks of popularity and fame to academics).
A month ago over a beer I suggested to my nearest drinking companion that people think Charles Murray is a dangerous, freakish, right wing fascist because they haven’t read Aristotle (Murray, to me, seems deeply influenced by Aristotle). These days, most people don’t read Aristotle and they don’t read Thomas Aquinas either, and so their ideas come across as bold and threatening.
Part of Schiff’s article, perhaps, demonstrates that the Overton Window has shifted far enough to the left that ideas that would have seemed common-sensical 100 years ago are now dangerous and threatening.
Ask yourself–what does Peterson say that your grandmother would be shocked by?
1. Men and women are different.
2. Individuals must struggle to advance themselves. Men must struggle to “get the girl.” Women will benefit by choosing their mate with a certain cold-blooded prudence. All’s fair in love and war.
3. Societies are characterized by a certain inequality of outcomes that cannot be easily made to go away. Virtues are valuable because they help us to achieve, and the most valuable virtues are those that make us useful to others. Some of us have difficulty being useful to ourselves or to anyone else, and this outcome is painful but common. Don’t let that happen to you.
4. Talents are distributed unequally.
5. The world is a dangerous place. Some people wish you harm.
= – = – = – =
On a final note, Peterson may very well end up being ruined by success. Time will tell. Success and fame can lead to calamity and bring out the worst personality traits. This is also not a new idea.
Academics are as prone to envy and jealousy as everyone else. They tend to labor in obscurity, and it is difficult to see a peer become exceptionally successful and well known. This is also not a new idea.
For what it’s worth, the article made me think of Bruce Charlton’s primer on Hans Eysenck’s view of “creativity and psychoticism.”
To find the article try an internet search for “Creativity and Eysenck’s Psychoticism Trait”, which you should find at the blog Bruce Charlton’s Notions.
Does that sort of person sound like Peterson? Note the claim in the Charlton article that such a person will have trouble fitting in in academe and may be viewed as troublesome.
Jordan Peterson himself says that he may slip up sometime in the (near) future and crash. He sees the danger himself and I like that. His 12 rules book is one of the least irritating conservative books that I’ve read recently and that’s quite a feat. What I don’t like is how sure he seems of his own ideas and his lack of nuance. – One valid critique of his “be a worthy man” theory, is that throughout most of history women didn’t choose the men, but their family did. – Finally I still don’t know if he sees gays and lesbians as fully equal to hetero couples.
I have a hard time understanding a person who thinks “dangerous” means “using an impolite pronoun”. I can’t help but think that most people who have strong opinions about Peterson couldn’t manage to be dangerous if you put them in roller skates with chainsaws strapped to their hands.
Guffaw!
I didn’t think the article was a strong refutation of JP. The part about JP chafing at the IRB, which was supposed to be a negative, was actually a positive for me. I’ve had to go through lot of IRBs and have very little respect for what they do.
Having said that, a lot of 12 Rules for life was of the following format:
Fact + Fact + Fact , therefore Conclusion
The “therefore” part didn’t always follow logically (to me at least). The biggest example of this was his discussion with Sam Harris on Truth. It’s possible I’m missing enough background knowledge to understand the logical leap, but if that’s the case, as a popular writer/thinker, JP should try a little harder to walk people through his thought process.
Another revealing Schiff excerpt:
Right, Stalin was the only bad Marxist Communist, and really, just a perversion, not even a True Marxist, like all the other Communist leaders and states, which weren’t at all murderous. (cf. Bryan Caplan’s review of the subject, in which it turns out that Stalin et al really did spend their lives and time in power trying to be the truest True Marxists they could be.)
The whole point is the question of why Marxism is still a “respectable philosophical tradition” among leftist academics, when it has such a comprehensively deadly and tyrannical track record any time or place anyone attempts to implement it politically.
I mean, where does Jordan Peterson get such crazy, eccentric idea, like:
And the funny thing is, it’s actually easy on practically any campus to come across those criticisms of Christianity, or, more commonly Nationalism, as something that is inherently suspect, hazardous, dangerous, inevitably aggressive and murderous, etc., and despite have a much, much better track record than Marxism.
Indeed, these days, maculinity and European heritage are usually deemed to be more suspect than ‘respectable’ Marxism. Talk about ‘ridiculous’. One might think lot of people were growing increasingly frustrated at that pernicious nonsense. If only there were someone around willing to publicly ridicule the genuinely ridiculous.
Agree. Stephen Kotkin (author of the Stalin biography and a very nice speaker on YouTube) also confirms that Stalin and his colleagues tried to be über-Marxists and that this was one reason for the famines they caused. – I also agree with the unfair treatment of Christianity. It’s time for new generations to rediscover Dante, Merton and Chesterton. Maybe this is a first positive sign: a JEsuit book that feels quite modern (IMHO more solid than Peterson’s 12-rules): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6829199-the-jesuit-guide-to-almost-everything
Handle beats me again to the key weakness of Schiff, where
“He characterized them as left-wing conspiracies rooted in a “murderous” ideology — Marxism. Calling Marxism, a respectable political and philosophical tradition, “murderous” conflates it with the perversion of those ideas in Stalinist Russia and elsewhere where they were. That is like calling Christianity a murderous ideology because of the blood that was shed in its name during the Inquisition, the Crusades and the great wars of Europe. That is ridiculous.”
One thing I very much like about JD Peterson is his implacable hostility to Marxists.
Anybody who thinks Marxism is other than murderous is, in Lenin’s terms, a “Useful Idiot”. Even if they’re smart enough to lie to themselves and believe that Marxism is respectable, so their false belief is not quite a lie (knowing something is untrue).
Pol Pot, the “respectable Marxist” murdered 25% of Cambodians. Hitler, too, was a “National Socialist”, that is a form of Marxism. The implicit idea that because Hitler attacked Stalin, he was “on the right”, is one of the great Leftist lies. Just as Irish Catholics were fighting and killing Irish Protestants, in the most sad & embarrassing Christian fighting in my lifetime, Pol Pot’s Marxist genocide was the worst evil killing in my life, supported by the commie Chinese whose Cultural Revolution & Great Leap Forward were also evil.
Pol Pot was stopped by the commie Vietnamese, supported by USSR, who both had their murderous gulags.
Today, most WW II movies demonize Hitler, who was evil — but now I believe the US Democrats have put all the evil of humanity on Hitler, only, and falsely called him a “far right”. He’s not far right, supporting minimal gov’t and maximum personal freedom. He’s nationalist Marxist.
And like all Marxists, he needs some class, or group, to hate. The PC Marxist haters have been hating all Reps running for President since … Romney (hated), McCain (hated while running), Bush 43 (BDS was coined by PC haters), Bush 41 (um, disliked, but also a wimp), Reagan (hate hate hate), Ford (disliked, but never elected), Nixon (hate hate), Goldwater (hate), Nixon (hate) … 1960 (maybe we got our first TV then, I wasn’t yet in school).
I am sure that for most PC cowardly academics, what is most off-putting is Peterson’s ability and willingness to fight back against PC untruths.
(I decided to read comments here more than the whole article there, as soon as I saw this silly support for Marxism.)
Any ideology that has lasted more than a few hundred years will be able to adapt to and thrive in wartime. Kamikaze pilots were Buddhist, after all.
Most of my points about the linked piece have been discussed above, but I thought this wording (used several times by Schiff) was oddly awkward:
As if he was perfectly aware that this was some mass email blast with only tangential attachment to Mrs. Peterson or her husband, but still wanted to associate the content with their names.
That, and the whole comparison of a hypothetical website to evaluate the Marxist content of course descriptions to McCarthyism and silencing of speech was just so strained. And when Peterson backed down from that idea, Schiff just says, “I have no idea why he did that.”
I think this was a good criticism:
I also agree with Schiff that Peterson is too interested in and perhaps enamored of politics, and perhaps that depression has colored his views over time. He should have left it at that, which may have sparked some discussion and perhaps some soul-searching from Peterson if they were truly as close as this article portrays. However, all the other breathless indignation and creative scare-quoting nearly obscures the good points.
Schiff lost me when he called Marxism “a respectable political and philosophical tradition”, denied it was “murderous”, and was offended that Peterson – or anyone – would label it so.
Raymond Aron called Marxism “The opium of the intellectuals.” His point was a good one then (France in the 1950s) and is probably still a good one now.
It *is* a respected political and philosophical tradition for many intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences. Even if it’s wooly headed, or an intellectual dead end, in some fields it’s hard to ignore. Important scholarly works are written in a sort of “code” derived in part from Marxian or Marxoid theory. It was a surprise to me.
As long ago as the 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter discussed the difficulty of striking Marxism any sort of killing (intellectual) blow. It’s in the very first pages of his _Capitalism, socialism, and democracy_.
I don’t know if Marxism always leads to the killing fields. I consider it to be obvious that it doesn’t provide useful policy instruments.
Matt White in his _Great Big Book of Horrible Things_ had a quip about Marxist theories for social improvement and transformation. To paraphrase, “Well, it obviously doesn’t work in practice, but let’s see if we can show why it doesn’t work in theory!”
Presumably a big problem is that Marx’s theory of value was wrong. This doesn’t bother many intellectuals because (am I being harsh?) they don’t worry about the production of wealth. What tends to interest them is social organization–how to understand it, how it might be changed.
This isn’t peculiar to Marxists. A lot of people (not just Marxists) have bone-headed ideas for how to change society, and are convinced that their reforms will either be nearly costless or “will pay for themselves.”