While I agree with the thesis (Peterson is indeed a shallow intellectual), I disagree with the author's position that there are no deep intellectuals left. Without naming names, the reason we don't hear from them is because of the current state of the internet, where communications is so democratized that it is impossible to curate effectively. In short, the noise exceeds the signal, and so we only hear about the demagogues, whose one-note message can be amplified sufficiently to rise above the rest. More nuanced voices offering complex opinions are difficult to distinguish amid the sea of uninformed opinions and criticisms.
The author bemoans that intellectuals have failed the general population by being afraid to dumb down complex messages for general consumption. The only flaw with this theory is that modern life itself is rather complicated, irreducibly so. Simple explanations are often wrong, and since true intellectuals pride themselves on being factual and correct, it would be beneath them to offer such solutions.
What we really have is a society that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and is outright hostile to reasoned discourse. Until society holds itself to a higher standard, we will get the intellectuals we deserve.
> Until society holds itself to a higher standard, we will get the intellectuals we deserve.
Until society matures. We have a critical issue with adult immaturity. That's why quality intellectuals are scant and missing: they don't sling mud, and our immature public society is all about slinging shit disguised as mud.
As boring as it sounds, we need an intellectual promoting basic maturity, pointing out the critical foundation it forms in which all worthwhile human activity can be built. As well as the deterioration of everything worthwhile when maturity is lacking.
Joscha Bach came to my mind, as a sort of anti-Peterson. Deeply materialistic, systematic though also not easy to grok. I think he's making sense, but at times he alludes me.
> I disagree with the author's position that there are no deep intellectuals left
Well, there is the problem of the author trying to distance from liberals by calling them "left."
Slavoj Žižek is many things, but also deep, left, and not liberal.
If the claim had been "no deep intellectuals of the politics of the middle," I could have agreed. It's difficult to think deep thoughts while drinking the Kool-Aid.
Easy to critique the man, but the author's political angle gets in the way of his own ability to reckon with why JP is popular: he unabashedly speaks core truths we know in a time filled with half-truths and an attack on binary meaning.
What is fascinating is how his detractors are annoyed with how simple, old advice can ring true but are missing that no one with such digital reach is saying these "12 Rules for Life" out loud any more.
I don't agree with Peterson's angles always but his ability to contend verbally with the pompous, blithe elites who have never been so disconnected from the middle class values is like a glass of cold water for his followers, or so I imagine.
As the article points out, Peterson's use of words does more to position himself as a pompous elite than to contend with them in some intellectual sense. It's also nonsense to say that no one repeats old conventional wisdom anymore. It's pervasive in everything from our fiction to other public speakers to kitschy little home decorations or memes on social media. Peterson doesn't differentiate himself by having the "bravery" to say cliches - this doesn't even make sense as a premise, they have to be pervasive to strike us as cliches. He differentiates himself through targeting culture war issues to build a rabid fanbase and using any press he can get to build a cult of personality, and plays a little bit of intellectual defense through the plausible deniability of obscurantism. That last bit is most of what the article is trying to say (though it really does do so in a way that is a bit hypocritically long-winded)
>What is fascinating is how his detractors are annoyed with how simple, old advice can ring true but are missing that no one with such digital reach is saying these "12 Rules for Life" out loud any more.
Great point. I've heard many of his critics in passing criticize the "shallowness" of his advice of focusing on the self before going outward. They will then embrace highly complex (mostly political) theoretical non-advice simply because it embraces the individual spending time solving everyone else's problems. Already an easily identifiable red flag from these types. I think JPs fans unfortunately have through him been introduced to fringe characters that have advice only applicable to a small percentage of men and is far less simple and practical though, but which is a shame
This is a content-free critique. With minimal effort, anybody can reduce any issue to some binary; the choice of which binary framings we accept is virtually all the intellectual work, and appeals to "acknowledging binaries" are just ways of saying "I'm right because I obviously am" --- a rhetorical gambit ably wielded by any 9 year old.
Jeez, how many words does it take to say "pop psychologists are like pop musicians - they are made important by how they make their audience feel. The only thing to take seriously is how people are responding to the manipulation. Any attempt to engage with the material as if its constitution results in the reception is an effort in futility. Just hit me, baby, one more time."
> First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible.
While Peterson may have its issues, at least I assume what he writes is sort of interesting to read because otherwise he wouldn't have so many people reading his stuff. So, it may not be a true intellectual, whatever that means, but at least it has some value.
On the other hand, the author of this article thinks of himself as an intellectual, yet it looks like he actually has nothing of value to say, and his writing is pretty bad.
I don't know why HN is so anti-Peterson. He has been tremendously helpful to me, and 12 Rules for Life helped me a lot when I was going through self-inflicted tough times.
The article derides him for for stating platitudes, truisms, and cliches (I am actually surprised that the article didn't include that word) in new and interesting ways. However, that is exactly what he is popular for in the first place. A more charitable way to put that, might be to say that he restates old-timey wisdom in new and interesting ways. Of course this is going to appeal to conservatives, and bring struggling young people to the conservative side.
Between Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis, I rediscovered a lot of wisdom that my parents tried to teach me. I learned to respect old and ancient ideas. Ideas aren't "wrong" because they're old, and also they aren't right or good because they're new. People throughout history was smarter and wiser than we give them credit for.
Maybe if more "serious" intellectuals (whatever that means), moved past the "new=good and old=bad" groove, they might start enjoying some popularity too.
My point is that Jordan Peterson is re-introducing some very true, but old ideas. These old ideas are very helpful to a lot of people, especially disenfranchised young men. These young men then use the old ideas to get their lives together, and that is why Jordan Peterson is popular.
> "He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle."
No, he shows us the gold that our intellectuals threw on the rubbish heap, because they thought it was junk. And just because they still think it is junk, doesn't actually make it junk.
> Jordan Peterson is re-introducing some very true, but old ideas
The problem is that these "very true" ideas have gone out of fashion for a reason: they don't scale. It might all be well and good to say "be civilized or I'll kick the shit out of you" when you're trying to sort out a neighbourhood dispute; but when you scale them up to, say, foreign policy, you're just courting armageddon. Our world is getting bigger and bigger, trying to fit it into old ideological boxes is only going to generate more misplaced (literal) crusades.
The really good and true methodologies actually scale properly in every direction, but they're harder to dumb down.
I don't follow. We absolutely have scaled that simple line of reasoning.
And I strong argument can be made that world is more peaceful in part because of the threat of violence (and the potential for violence to be more expensive than diplomacy).
Ans yes, the threat of nuclear armageddon is real.. but there is also good reason to believe that violence is declining (see Better Angels - Stephen Pinker).
I'm not saying that we don't learn from the mistakes of the past. There were many misplaced wars and crusades in the past, and we should learn from them.
However, the author of the OP article is throwing shade on JBP because he is rehashing old ideas like "tell the truth, be true to yourself, see challenges as opportunities, set a good example." Those won't exactly lead to a crusade, would it? Even if you scale it up, that's some good and true wisdom. The author shows his folly by discarding these "old, stale" ideas for no other reason than them being old, stale ideas.
Also to quote the article:
> He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom
Yes, because fatherly life-advice is straight-up wisdom. Wisdom is remarkably mundane at times.
Also, if you look at these ideas in their abstract:
clean your room -> take care of what you have, even if it is little
stand up straight -> have some self-respect
These abstract ideas also scale up well. That's also not exactly crusade material.
> The problem is that these "very true" ideas have gone out of fashion for a reason: they don't scale.
Well, it isn't clear whether the new ideas that have replaced them actually will "scale" for the long-run. Look at the demographic collapse of secular progressives, while countercultural religious conservatives breed like rabbits – Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, as Eric Kaufmann's book asks
In a way, initially, a case could be made for Peterson having the merit of shepherding the InCels of today’s world into something less destructive than outright fascism / alt-right - perhaps even something civilized: like Conservative Democratic Liberalism(in the European sense).
However, judging by the bizarre moments, it seems fame got a bit to his head…
Peterson's book Maps of Meaning is actually a really interesting read and based on an incredible amount of research.
That book is as old as a stash of Y2K water though, and the Peterson I've heard interviewed or on his own podcast in recent years sounds like a very different person. He's gone through some shit so I do get it, but he doesn't seem able to analyze topics these days without being heavily influenced by his own ideas and opinions. I guess the same can be said for Sam Harris as well.
I think there is a clear distinction between early Peterson, the Canadian psych professor who took exception to a law that impinged on his free speech rights, and the wealthy media juggernaught he has become. His early appearances were nuanced and interesting - a liberal professor fighting the excesses of the left, and coincidentally reintroducing Carl Jung to a wide audience!
He changed, of course. He started saying nice things about Trump a lot, which is difficult to understand, especially when considered in light of his seemingly wise statements about ego and narcisism. I think it was at this point Peterson became more of a symbol than a man, not a liberal fighting left-wing dogmatism but an actual Man of the Right. Money and fame were at the root of this transition, I believe, as well as a reaction against the extreme vitriol of the left. When it comes to political celebrity, the pragmatic truth is that you've got to be on one side or the other - nuance be damned. (I liked him early on but have long since stopped paying attention.)
This piece, by the way, reads like one of a thousand left-wing hit pieces against him, and not particularly well written (In particular the statement "It does help if you are male and Caucasian" sort of gives it away with the performative self-loathing). This piece focuses on Vagueness - but vagueness is part and parcel of the psychological movement - Jung himself was rather vague, and so is most philosophy. To hold Peterson to a non-vagueness standard when his source material is also vague is unfair. If you reject psychology and philosophy, that's fair, but don't pretend like Peterson was somehow introducing vagueness that wasn't there.
My main grip with Peterson is that he brought the worst of European (franco-german) philosophy and pseudoscience to the US.
I despise continental philosophy, it isn't actionable, it's nice if you want tenets, but useless if you want thinking. I despise the Frankfurt school for that reason. Which makes me dislike Peterson even more, because he dislike it too, but use the same kind of continental philosophy techniques, strawmen and overall a very bad critics of it (and mix it with post-structuralism, which, well, makes me believe he at most read Wikipedia pages on the works, and not the works themselves).
But truly, what I hate is him bringing Freud and Jung to the US. Psychoanalysisand 'dream interpretation' already did enough damage in France ffs, why would you bring _that_ to the anglo-saxon world.
His political opinions, I do not care about. I think he was mistreated by academics in his country, mostly because they do not respect him, and because he showed how flawed their system was (like the Bogdanov brothers in France did for physics)
My favourite is people dubbing Jordan Peterson over command and Conquer [0]. It is quite funny.
There isn't much mystery to Peterson, he didn't became famous for his academic credentials and nobody cares much for psychology anyway. And I think the message is pretty simple, or it was the last time I checked, in broad strokes it is just a call for people to keep doing what they're doing.
But the important part here is there is enormous demand for public intellectuals who (1) have something nice to say about white men and (2) have something nice to say about capitalism. The economists say nice things about capitalism, I suppose, but they tend to be boring. Which brings me to my other point... Peterson's style.
Peterson has a similar style to Trump's for similar reasons. Average people don't seem to follow or be persuaded by logical arguments. If the plan is to communicate with them, the effective approach is a weird kind of strobe-ing emotions at them. It is easy to laugh at, but it is also effective so it keeps cropping up.
> enormous demand for public intellectuals who (1) have something nice to say about white men
There is a huge demand for public intellectuals to have something nice to say about men. I do not see which part of his message was specifically aimed at white people.
What is the problem with saying positive things about men?
Maybe I do not read enough anglo works. I do read anglo-saxon philosophy, because it's the only culture that takes it seriously, but I avoid linguistics and history (I think the last American historian I've read is Paxton) . Anyway, in Europe and Africa, academics who you think would use the words 'white men' pejoratively the most, historians, do not. It might be different in the US, do you have a book on post-17th century that does it, as an example?
> It's not novel; it's just blatantly false for large swaths of men, young and old alike.
Having kids absolutely gave me purpose in life which I did not have before. It gave me something worth living and dying for, beyond my own pointless momentary whims.
And I now know that happiness is a choice: I can choose to find happiness in the midst of life's challenges, or I can choose to be unhappy instead.
If you'd asked me 20 years ago, I doubt I would have agreed with any of that. But I chose to take a leap into the unknown, before knowing where I would land, and I would never wish to have not taken that leap. Sometimes I wish I'd made better choices in the aftermath, or that fate had dealt us better cards – but the leap itself I could never regret
The author bemoans that intellectuals have failed the general population by being afraid to dumb down complex messages for general consumption. The only flaw with this theory is that modern life itself is rather complicated, irreducibly so. Simple explanations are often wrong, and since true intellectuals pride themselves on being factual and correct, it would be beneath them to offer such solutions.
What we really have is a society that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and is outright hostile to reasoned discourse. Until society holds itself to a higher standard, we will get the intellectuals we deserve.