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January 14, 2019, 2:37am
233
Did I see this headline months ago and subconsciously absorb it, or is it a coincidence?
If you want to understand why some people attack JP for vagueness, this article is for you!
The multiplicity of possible interpretations is very important. It makes it almost impossible to beat Peterson in an argument, because every time one attempts to force him to defend a proposition, he can insist he means something else.
I think I got accused of the same thing the other day.
It’s very long. Highlights:
Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? … Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Note: perfect. And since one’s house can never be in perfect order, one can never criticize the world. This is, most obviously, an invitation to total depoliticization and solipsism. But it’s also a recipe for making miserable people even more miserable. Blame yourself. Why haven’t I fixed this? I suck.
No wonder Peterson is so popular: he comes along and offers rules and guidance in a world of, well, chaos. Just leave it to Dad, everything will be alright.
This is a fruitless path, though. That’s not just because Peterson is a charlatan. If he was just offering up his brand of “hearty intellectual stew ,” as the Chronicle of Higher Education called it, going around “sprinkling in ideas from philosophy, fiction, religion, neuroscience, and a disturbing dream his 5-year-old nephew had one time,” we could just laugh at him. But the Peterson way is not just futile because it’s pointless, it’s futile because ultimately, you can’t escape politics. Our lives are conditioned by economic and political systems, like it or not, and by telling lost people to abandon projects for social change, one permanently guarantees they will be the helpless victims of forces beyond their control or understanding. The genuinely “heroic” path in life is to band with others to pursue the social good, to find meaning in the collective human striving to better our condition. No, not by abandoning the idea of the “individual” and seeing the world purely in terms of group identity. But by pooling our individual talents and efforts to produce a better, fairer, and more beautiful world.
My favorite part:
The book’s epigraph is comically grandiose (“I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” — Matthew 13:35) and Peterson even includes in the book a letter to his father in which he tries to convey the gravity of his discovery:
I don’t know, Dad, but I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about, and I’m not sure I can do it justice. Its scope is so broad that I can see only parts of it clearly at one time, and it is exceedingly difficult to set down comprehensibly in writing…. Anyways, I’m glad you and Mom are doing well. Thank you for doing my income tax returns.
(It’s fun to read the letter for yourself and imagine being Peterson’s dad trying to figure out what his son is doing with his life.)
What do you think about that, @ChewDawg ?
Still, I disagree with Nathan’s thesis. Current Affairs bills itself as “a magazine of politics & culture”, so no surprise that its editor sees JP primarily in political/sociological terms and therefore finds it easy to dismiss most of what he says as nonsense. Yet JP is a psychologist, and a heavily Jung-influenced psychologist at that, so I don’t think he can really be understood without an analysis that takes Jungian psychology (/philosophy) seriously.
How does one even address material like this? It can’t be “refuted.” Are we ruled by a dragon of chaos? Is the dragon feminine? Does “the ‘state’ of preconscious paradise” have a “voluntary encounter with the unknown”? Is the episodic really more explicit than the procedural? These are not questions with answers, because they are not questions with meanings.
See what I mean?
Nathan also has a book out, whose cover shamelessly mocks JP.
More about the lobster thing:
The pop star comparison isn’t about stage presence (much less common sense). He may well want to retire soon, but I’m betting he will still have a following devoted enough to be willing to spend money on his products/services in future decades, regardless of cultural trends. Not as big, but still something.
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