The Million Strawman March On Jordan B. Peterson
Trigger Warning: This essay may contradict your existing beliefs
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Before we dive into the belly of this whale of a botched discrediting-campaign, let’s start by zooming out a bit, and survey the intellectual landscape in which we find ourselves. As inheritors of the western philosophical tradition, we stand on the shoulders of bigots. From its birth and infancy among the slavemasters of ancient Greece, through an adolescent spent in patronage to European colonialism, all the way to its current fizzling out into postmodern irrelevance—our tradition has been steeped in bigotry.
The cases in point are legion. Aristotle was a misogynous racist, advocating slavery. Thomas Aquinas was a homophobe. Immanuel Kant and David Hume were white supremacists. Martin Heidegger was a bonafide National Socialist who used to frequent the same dinner parties as Adolf Hitler. The list goes on and on.
Against this backdrop, Dr. Peterson doesn’t seem too bad. Despite his aversion to political correctness; his climate change denial; and even his paranoid rants about non-binary gender pronouns being a slippery slope to the collapse of western civilization — he‘s in a moral league above any of these canonized “great thinkers”.
Which brings us to incidents like that of Lindsay Shepherd: the WLU teaching assistant, who sent shock waves through the public discourse, when she leaked a hidden recording of a diciplinary meeting, in which senior faculty members can be heard lamenting her as the moral equivalent of a Nazi apologist for exposing her class to Dr. Peterson. Needless to say, had miss Shepherd instead presented a work by any one of the canonized, dead bigots mentioned above, not a single eye brow would have been raised.
This is symptomatic of a general bent. As a culture, we brush the bigotry of our intellectual forefathers under the rug, while scrutinizing our contemporaries with a vengeance. Giving a lecture on Aristotle is not an endorsement of xenophobia or slavery, and everyone gets that. Giving a lecture on Dr. Peterson somehow feels like an endorsement of sexism and transphobia, and is treated as such.
On the denigration of Dr. Peterson’s fans
The rhetorical onslaught of Dr. Peterson’s fans has been ruthless. Pundits like Laurie Penny seem to revel in the sense of superiority they derive from belittling these guys as spoiled and self-entitled child-men, desperate to intellectualize their pathetic little male identity crisis. This rhetoric might score some cheap applause from fellow ideological tribesmen, but it’s no way to start a dialogue or mend divides.
Dismissing men’s emotional and existential issues as «angry white male entitlement» is not just dehumanizing and polarizing, but also misses half the picture. While men are most certainly overrepresented at the top of the social hierarchy, they are equally overrepresented at the bottom: in prisons, among the homeless and on suicide statistics. If make-pretending to symbolically slay the great mother-dragon of chaos is what it takes to motivate certain guys to get their shit together, and become productive members of society, so be it. Whatever works. Yet, as Dr. Peterson is fond of pointing out, contemporary society doesn’t care about men who fail. Caring for them is considered suspect, if not outright taboo. As if reaching out to driftless, young men by necessity implied misogyny.
The battle of the strawmen
Dr. Peterson’s conceptual critique of «white guilt» and «white privilege», gets misconstrued as racism. His critique of women’s studies, as sexism. His opposition to enforced use of non-binary gender pronouns, as transphobia. When his critics are challenged to back up these accusations by citing anything racist/sexist/transphobic he has ever said or written, they invariably find themselves at a loss. Their resorts to “dog-whistling”, “adjacency” or “his ambience”, indicates guilt of the very same sin that he himself is often accused of — saying things that feels true, at a time when a feeling of truth is more important than facts.
Having fans among the alt-right doesn’t make anyone a «darling of the alt-right». A facination for mythology isn’t «flirting with fascism». Advocating social norms in favor of monogamy is not the equivalent of supporting state-sponsored sex-slavery. This terracotta army of strawmen overshadows any serious criticism of the guy and debase it through guilt by association.
The whole shebang resembles the way liberal media’s attacks on Donald Trump backfired to pave the guys road to the White House. These thought leaders seem to share the trait Nassim Taleb describes as antifragility: They thrive and grow when exposed to stressors; instead of softening their messages to preempt criticism, they confront critics heads on, and counter-punch recreationaly. The gravity of their boldness and authenticity warps the public space around them, pulling followers into their orbits, like galaxies self-assembling around black holes.
That said, the stream of strawmen flows just as freely in the opposite direction. Equality of outcome, aka the “murderous equity doctrine of leftists», is a striking example. Despite the fact that hardly any real-world leftists endorse one hundred percent equality of outcome, Dr. Peterson has made a trademark out of knuckle sandwiching the shit out of this strawman at any opportunity. In the real world, any sensible leftist would agree that an excellent plumber deserves a higher salary than a mediocre one. Inequality of outcome only becomes an issue when the boss of these plumbers makes hundreds of times more than his employees. Which, it seems, describes the current state of the U.S. economy.
Here is a brief recap of what real-life leftists are concerned about: Since the early 1980’s, the U.S. economy has doubled in size. This gain was all but exclusively pocketed by the richest few percent, driving economic inequality to a level, unprecedented in modern times. The social and political consequences of this development have been disastrous. By investing billions of dollars in lobbyists, politicians and think-tanks, wealthy individuals and corporations have spent the past four decades steadily rewriting the rules of the game to their favor. In a vicious spiral of cronyism — economic and political inequality have perpetuated one another ever since. For ordinary citizens, the results have been wage stagnation, plummeting job security, and exponentially rising costs of housing, medical care and higher education. 78 percent of the U.S. population now live paycheck to paycheck, 40 million of which rely on food stamps. Recent research suggests that the “cognitive load” of living under such financial insecurity is akin to losing 13 IQ points [Update 26.01.2022: a 2021 replication failed to replicate the findings of the linked paper].
Pathologizing outrage against this state of affairs, as «resentment towards the wealthy», is a sleazy cheap shot. There is nothing «radical» or «murderous» about demanding the financial elite to stop hoarding the nation’s wealth for themselves. On the contrary, accepting the life expectancy of poor Americans to remain 15 years lower than those of their wealthier peers, forcing poor families to choose between their mortgage or medical care for a loved one, or condemning diabetics, unable to keep up with the surging price of insulin, to an early death is a murderous inequality doctrine.
Redistributing Americas abundant wealth, is not a slippery slope to the Gulag, as Dr. Peterson seems to imply, but rather a prerequisite for a flourishing society.
Onward, Strawmen Soldiers!
Much of the criticism raised against Dr. Peterson has been well deserved. His ideas are often pseudo-scientific, contemptuous, paranoid or just plain old flame bait. Often in combinations of several of those things. Unfortunately, the liberal pundits who set out to bring him down displayed the tactical savvy of a fleet of plastic bags, flapping aimlessly in the wind. Their efforts to vilify him accomplished nothing, except for putting his book on the top of international best seller lists, and transforming him into a public intellectual.
From the outside, their attempts to caricaturing him as this conservative old biggot by interpreting his every word in the least flattering light possible, seemed doomed to trigger the backlash it did, and thus utterly irrational. Yet like all behaviors it make some sense when its context is taken into account. In the viciously Darwinian ecosystem of online publishing you either chase clicks, or get outcompeted by those who do. The likes of Dr. Peterson presents liberal media with only three options:
I: Attack the same weak spots over and over
II: Ignore him once his weak spots are sufficiently attacked
III: Continually seek out new spots to attack
As long as readers remain interested, option III is the fittest one. Liberal pundits have to keep finding new (if evermore contrived) ways to criticize guys like Dr. Peterson, or yield clicks (and survivability) to those who do.
