I would be hard pressed to take JP’s lack of engagement with postmodern work as evidence he doesn’t know it. I’ve seen him provide short explanations of some of their views and even quote their books. There’s little doubt that Peterson has read the work.
I’ve read some of Peterson’s work and it’s generally bad. Like… really bad. His theories in Maps of Meaning are just a bad copy of Joseph Campbell’s work. If you want to understand myth making read him and not Peterson. As for his other work, he’s well cited in psychology but not in philosophy. His primary focus is on individuals wrt to his work. Google Scholar doesn’t show him as a major source of philosophical or social psychological work.
Maps of Meaning is psychology. Peterson has never published any work in philosophy. And Maps of Meaning has been received exceptionally in academia. Published by Routledge, hundreds of citations, lavish academic reviews. In fact, Maps of Meaning formed the basis of Peterson’s undergraduate classes at the University of Toronto. You’re in needing of revising your understanding of JP’s work, since your interpretation of its validity is in direct contradiction to how actual psychologists and the academy have received it.
Coincidentally, having just watched a few of Jordan Peterson’s online videos, I cannot fathom why the man is hated so much by some people. You may disagree with some of his positions, but generally he seems like a centered kind of guy who is worried about the current trends in academia, social studies, and the such. This labeling of him as “evil”, and attempts at ridicule, seem totally undeserved. And seeing someone I perceive as a good person be attacked by a mob, results simply in me hating the mob, not the person.
If only I wasn’t an intellectual masochist (is that even a thing?). I swear I just enjoy making arguments against hucksters and kooks. It’s like a drug to me.
A lot of it boils down to his pandering to the alt-right to build his public profile and fanbase. He also seems to be bigoted against trans people. Many people here don’t consider those things to be the hallmarks of a good person.
I didn’t think it was hilarious, just a bunch of obligatory progressive comedy that isn’t really as funny as people think. I don’t care if left or right, comedy is comedy and I just didn’t laugh. I also don’t get bent out of shape that Jordan Peterson sold a book, plenty of college professors do on all sides of the political spectrum, Peterson has just been put on a pedestal by various media groups either attacking him or praising him. Having said that, we need to go clean our rooms.
You forgot something about a nutty and/or offensive assertion being “taken out of context”
I remember when I was about to finish college, someone* in the student paper was complaining about all the irrelevant electives on offer, and why doesn’t the university focus on Western philosophy instead of Marxism? I wrote back that that’s why they’re called electives, and god forbid someone should pick an interesting one. (I’d reached a point where, except for two courses, all I had left were electives.) But someone more astute than I pointed out to that writer that Marxism is a Western philosophy.
*I’m remembering the person being a Plan II major; the paper would put the writer’s major in the byline. We had a joke that Plan II meant “‘Plan II’ write bad editorials for the student paper.” (Also, “I haven’t picked a major but I Plan II.”)
My pet theory is that this is the end stage of capitalism rather than getting socialism we get a continual atomization/erosion of any sense of community/belonging to the point where we’re forced to form communities as much as possible to cope until the system breaks down due to lack of any cohesion. Basically without any kind of social identity how do you build a complex social/economic system? You really can’t if you think about it. All you get is folks grabbing whatever they can and screw everyone else over. Eventually it breaks down ever further until you get something like Mad Max. The world won’t die from lack of resources. It’ll die from lack of human empathy.
But there’s only so much megalomania and mindless hero-worship I can process before my eyes start to automatically glaze over, and my brain just tunes out…
Until some marketing jerk that looks like Patrick Bateman figures out how to monetize it while you’re still broke and can’t even afford rent. Yay, capitalism! /s
As I’ve made clear elsewhere, I don’t think he’s an adherent of the alt-right despite his pandering to them and despite his opinions on gender that would be right at home in the manosphere.
In addition to only acting on supposed “coerced speech” when trans people were covered by Canadian bill C-16, his former mentor and academic champion mentioned that’s more or equally concerned about trans people in this article. Key quote:
Not long afterwards the following message was sent from his wife’s email address exhorting recipients to sign a petition opposing Ontario’s Bill 28. That bill proposed changing the language in legislation about families from “mother” and “father” to the gender-neutral “parents.”
“A new bill, introduced in Ontario on September 29th, subjugates the natural family to the transgender agenda. The bill — misleadingly called the ‘All Families Are Equal Act’ — is moving extremely fast. We must ACT NOW to stop this bill from passing into law.”
This is not a free-speech issue so Jordan is wearing a different political hat. And what does a “transgender agenda” have to do with a bill protecting same-sex parents?
Those on the far right who are open about their bigotry give their real view that more circumspect conservatives won’t: that it isn’t a Western philosophy but an (((alien))) philosophy. Same goes for postmodernism.
Exactly, because that’s not what he says. Some … specific lefties… will have you believe that JP is “pandering to the alt-right”. Nevermind that alt-right.com claims that Jordan Peterson is a Jewish stooge planted by the Jewish media given his highly pro-Jewish views. Nevermind that Jordan Peterson has bragged about stopping thousands of people from joining the alt-right. Nevermind that Richard Spencer claims that Peterson “hit a wall” and failed by … well … failing to support the alt-right.
The truth is that trying to associate Jordan with the alt-right is just a scare tactic played by specific individuals who are saddened by the fact that they don’t have any real criticisms to much of anything Jordan says. That’s the totality of it. The evidence is on one side. That’s why Peterson is a major academic, and all his critics are almost all … not. That’s why some leftists on leftist discourse websites like to imagine that they’ve brought real takedowns of Jordan to the scene, and every time they actually debate with him, one on one, they always lose. Cathy Newman. Philip Dodd. Anne McElvoy. Some Vox reporter. Especially see the recent Munk debate with Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry against Michelle Goldberg (ouch) and Michael Dyson. Their arguments are confident in claim, and always don’t work when put to the test. That’s how you distinguish intellectuals from reactionaries.
I see the guy as a traditionalist. He has traditional views on gender, marriage, society, and parenting. Just as my father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, and many more people I love and respect, who are good people by any angle you want to look at them.
Labeling such people as alt-right, “Nazi enablers”, trans-phobic, “hate criminals” or whatever other extreme tags you want to throw at them makes me want to separate from such crowd immediately, and defend the person. This is really non negotiable to me.
