Surprise! The New Yorker has a mostly positive article about Jordan Peterson
The following quote is in line with something I’ve observed as well, which is that Peterson speaks in an unusually measured, solemn way that comes across as exceedingly thoughtful. His every utterance appears to emanate from a very deep place inside. You may agree with him or disagree, but you never get the sense he’s saying anything he hasn’t thought about long and hard, with every fiber of his considerable intellect and emotional insight. Like Horton, Peterson says what he means and he means what he says:
Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In “Maps of Meaning,” he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, “You don’t believe that. That isn’t true.” To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful. In “12 Rules for Life,” Peterson recounts a similar experience when, as a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia. He says that such patients are “almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood,” and so he redoubled his efforts to say only what he meant. “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
Kelefa Sanneh, the author of the New Yorker article, indulges now and then in a bit of doubt and ambivalence about Peterson (as well as the obligatory Trump-bashing), but never quite manages to segue into real criticism of Peterson. It’s my sense that Peterson really impresses him, although he may have started out not wanting to feel that way.
it’s “positive”, but since the review article skims surfaces, it does not (ofc) substitute for a JP riff. Therefore, don’t use it as an intro if you have not dipped into a lecture or podcast or two. Very often, JP goes on and on and on about one particular point or definition or way-to-see “things” so much that even a devotee might say, “move on, JP, move on.” But he does not. He picks up a stone and turns it over and looks at it from many angles and then goes on and on about the implications of looking this way or that way and only after several minutes of that does he POUNCE on his conclusion–having earned the right to state it dramatically as in, e.g., “Well, NO.” or, “Well, YEAH.”
Sanneh being open to Peterson’s rigorous critical thinking, however superficial the examination, is a positive sign in an increasingly unhinged world.
Peterson may turn out to be important. I hope so.
New Yorker: During one debate, recorded at the University of Toronto, he said, “I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.” Then he folded his arms, adding, “And that’s that!”
Neo: Like Horton, Peterson says what he means and he means what he says:
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When my kids were in grade school, I would read to their classes fairly regularly — in costume, with props, and having the kids participate (they had time for such frivolous pursuits back then).
One of their favorites was “Horton Hatches the Egg” — so now I am forever going to see Jordan Peterson sitting on a nest perched on a perilously bent limb, being menaced by three opportunistic shooters (his leftist opponents would happily use the weapons they want to deny to others, because, h8ter!!!).
I thought this was an astute and accurate observation:
“Peterson’s goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: “You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.” Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide. He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.”
New Yorker: “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
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Well, much of the population may well be paranoid by now, given the state of our government and culture.
But then, are you actually paranoid if “they” really are out to get you?
New Yorker: But his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members.
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Should be cross-posted to the “fatherless shooters” thread.
And BTW, many “liberal progressive leftist” persons DO object to this old-fashioned advice IF they can twist it to become anti-feminist or sexist or homophobic or …
This is a tactic that is similar to the one I noted on the Schiff memo thread, about proclaiming something to be important just before they declare it to be the opposite.
NY: (as Neo observed) But Peterson does not live in Donald Trump’s America;
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BUT his philosophies and current popularity stem from the events prevalent in Barack Obama’s America.
NY: Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. …The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.
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Another example of why Peterson’s work resonates now: this looks very similar to the discussion about Neo’s liberal friends who genuinely see limiting gun rights as being the way to end violence, even if it means the draconian suppression of Constitutional rights and personal freedom of the many, many people who aren’t now and probably never will be violent attackers.
While many of the same people (I suspect) likewise deplore limiting the “personal dignity” of the mentally ill and unrehabilitatable criminals who DO kill others (with or without guns).
Interesting article. I’m so used to black writers being wannabe-Ta-Nehisi-Coates’s — therefore useless IMO as honest intellectuals — I looked up the author, Kelefa Sanneh.
Sanneh’s father is a black Gambian, practicing Roman Catholic, current Yale Divinity School professor of World Christianity. His mother is white South African linguist teaching at Yale.
Sanneh is also a musician whose early articles were pop-music criticism.
In 2015 he wrote a shockingly even-handed article for the New Yorker, “Don’t Be Like That: Does black culture need to be reformed?” in which Sanneh, to a point, defended the 1965 Moynihan Report’s concerns about the deterioriation of the American Black family.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/dont-like
I’ll keep an eye out for Sanneh. I doubt he’s picking up a subscription to National Review any time soon, but he isn’t a one-sided polemicist either.
NY: Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before. In the case of gender identity, Peterson’s judgment is that “our society” has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn’t quite an argument that we shouldn’t. And this judgment isn’t likely to be persuasive to people in places–like some North American college campuses, perhaps–where the singular “they” has already come to seem like part of the social fabric.
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I think the author makes some good points, but overlooks the extent to which Peterson’s work does, in fact, “assess which changes we should favor” — that’s really the point of the “12 Rules” book: here are the personal and cultural recommendations that will make life better for you and everyone else.
There’s also a recent article on him in The Chronicle of Higher Education that has some interesting stuff, like this:
The article says that “health problems that have long plagued him, including bouts of debilitating fatigue, have resurfaced.” Not surprising, I guess, because he always seems very tightly wired to me, even when his surface demeanor looks somewhat relaxed.
NY: His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. (1)
This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: “Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not.” No doubt there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. (2)
The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies–when it comes, in other words, to politics–our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent. (3)
The “highly functional infrastructure” he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent. We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn’t mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else. (4)
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The most critical part of the article, this reveals the author’s leftist mind-set, which is a topic in and of itself.
(1) I think Peterson would agree that many religious theologies include the recognition that people can discern right and wrong; they then add that God makes the distinction explicit, and dispenses advice on how to act on that distinction, with reward and punishment based on one’s behavior relevant to that recognition.
(2) very much so, and liberals even favor that nudging, so long as the person’s “own moral intuitions” line up with their dogma.
(3) “Our intuitions” have been good or bad depending on whose were implemented; the results are usually mixed, but the main contention between Left and Right is who the “our” is going to be: elite experts with dictatorial power, or individuals acting on their own behalf.
(4) See number 3. Maybe we shouldn’t be in the business of sorting out everyone else at all.
So, when gentiles, not having the Law, still through their own innate sense behave as the Law commands, then, even though they have no Law, they are a law for themselves. They can demonstrate the effect of the Law engraved on their hearts…
–Romans 2:14,15
I once answered the phones after midnight for a suicide hotline. Not what I expected. Most callers were odd, lonely people in no particular crisis who just wanted to talk to someone who would listen and the hotline was a lot cheaper than therapy. Some called every night.
However one night I found myself speaking to a bright articulate woman who believed her father and brother were following her from city to city, spying on her. I’ve forgotten the details but it wasn’t hard to conclude she was paranoid.
It was an interesting dance to discuss her delusion and occasionally probe just a tiny bit while maintaining rapport. She wasn’t crazy-crazy at all. She was calm and lucid but her ideas about her father and brother were immovable.
JP’s advice exemplifies my own choice when I came upon the ultimate crux of the issue.
Do you want to change the world or do you want to change yourself.
Upon that choice, the destinies of individuals and nations dwell.
Just as Milo was to the college generations, and Sam Harris was to the new era of thinkers on atheism or beliefs, new era thinkers like JordanP fulfill a demand. Often times the result of a combination of reactions to the Leftist ideology as well as the anticipation of solutions.
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2018/02/27/believe-god/
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/02/jordan_peterson.html
Well, much of the population may well be paranoid by now, given the state of our government and culture.
But then, are you actually paranoid if “they” really are out to get you?
Aesop: People have been calling me paranoid since about 2007, online. I’ve gotten used to being out of the mainstream.
People walk around with masks and human deceptions while pretending to be valid. This is called human nature. A potential enemy, eh.
The ironic part is that wannabe therapists like the NYT, think it’s the paranoid people who have issues with masks and exterior and interior conflicts. All of humanity is living in a kind of simulated reality or Matrix, and they think paranoia is a mental problem. If anything, paranoia is the beginning of waking up to the Matrix, the paranormal, and the supernatural.
To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice
Apparently he is not the only one that hears such voices.
I sent a copy of “12 rules” to my leftist, but very bright, daughter wondering if she would even read it. She called me three days after she got it to tell me how much she loves it. He seems capable of reaching people who are of a very different ideology.
His comments about talking to paranoids remind me of my days as a medical student working in a VA psych hospital. I could talk to psychotics and, as my professor told me, to talk only to the part that was not crazy. Never get involved in the patient’s delusions. It was exhausting but some psychotic patients became more lucid and able to discuss matters more sanely.
Ymar Sakar Says:
March 1st, 2018 at 7:19 am
.. new era thinkers like JordanP fulfill a demand. Often times the result of a combination of reactions to the Leftist ideology as well as the anticipation of solutions.
Mike K Says:
March 1st, 2018 at 9:34 am
… He seems capable of reaching people who are of a very different ideology.
..talk only to the part that was not crazy. Never get involved in the patient’s delusions. It was exhausting but some psychotic patients became more lucid and able to discuss matters more sanely.
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I think you are both describing the underlying problem with the Left’s victim-group tribalism, and the enabling of “snowflakes” and the gender multi-verse.
They are eroding the “part that is not crazy” in so many people who might otherwise be able to work their way out of their delusions, if enough people helped them see that they WERE delusions, instead of confirming their warped view of reality.
The suffering of the mentally confused (whether from physiological or ideological sources or both) is real, but true compassion sometime requires a treatment that temporarily “hurts their feelings” until they become more firmly grounded.
“To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it” –JP
People who are sure of what they believe fall on all sides of the political / ideological spectrum, and aren’t necessarily correct (aligned with reality) even if they are confident.
However, I think that some of the inconsistency / hypocrisy on the Left (and some of the Right) stems from a subconscious recognition of that internal ambiguity in belief.
Those that are doubtful to some extent can be reached through the part that is still unsure (“not crazy”), which may be what Peterson’s own assurance, and clarity, is doing.
Peterson seems to be one of those rare showmen with morals other than “power for me, servitude for thee.” With more people being swayed by feelings instead of facts than ever before, it will take libertarian propagandists to have any hope of defeating the organization of authoritarian propagandists we call the mainstream media.
I interpret JP’s inner voice as being equivalent to Socrates’ daemon/muse (an elohim basically, a non physical or non human entity), which is equivalent to the Christian Holy Ghost.
Those 3 things have something in common. They always adhere to the truth, will despise lies/self deceptions, and will steer the human towards the divine truth.
Whether the actual entity in question is the same or not doesn’t matter for us so much as what kind of behavior it inculcates in us.
The behavior that is in common amongst all 3 sources, is the sheer stubborn unwillingness to submit to this reality’s lies in order to avoid negative physical consequences. JP does it with Leftist indoctrinated thought police patterns. Socrates refused to bow down and submit before the Athenian death assembly, thus receiving a death sentence rather than a slap on the wrist. And the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene is already famous (or infamous) to the West.