Hugo Newman
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Hey Bobby. Thanks very much for reading and for your response.

Regarding your first point about the appeal to authority: In general of course you’re correct that trying to defend a claim or theory by appealing to the authority of the person making it is fallacious. However, my point was not intended to be that, because Peterson is a Professor of Psychology with hundreds of peer-reviewed articles who has worked at Harvard, therefore Fluss’s criticisms are incorrect. I agree that if that was all I was claiming, it would be fallacious. However, here is the point I was trying (evidently not very well!) to make: IF you are going to claim that someone is engaging in pop psychology, despite the fact that that person appears to have all the professional bona fides and credentials of a person who you would not expect to be engaging in “pop psychology”, then the burden of proof is on YOU to carefully document where this person has in fact engaged in pop psychology. If you fail to do that, then the benefit of the doubt reasonably is given to the person who has achieved the professional bona fides and credentials until such a time as it is proven otherwise that he/she does not merit them.

Granted, you go on to claim that “theist infused Jungian psychology” just is pop psychology. I have to admit that I find that definition of pop psychology (or perhaps, more charitably, that characterisation of theist infused Jungian psychology) highly contentious and not at all uncontroversial. When it comes to establishing a good provisional definition of a phenomenon or concept, a reasonable starting point is either the dictionary definition or, as a more substantive (yet still highly provisional) starting point, looking at an encyclopedia entry. I link here for example to the Wikipedia entry on Pop Psychology. Notice that, throughout the entire entry on Pop Psychology, neither Jung nor Jungian conceptions are mentioned even once. Does that prove that Jungian psychology is not an example of pop psychology? Of course not. But, once again, it does mean that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim that it is. As it stands, neither you nor Fluss has met that burden of proof. As I indicated in my article above, ‘Fluss explicitly says nothing more on this [attribution of pop psychology], and hyperlinks to no documentary evidence that Peterson has been engaging in “pop” psychology.’

Your next criticism is as follows:

“As for the backlash for the newscaster, you cite a male advocacy website that openly say they omit sexist words because they focused on violent terms. You used that to make this comment:

Much to the contrary, there’s some reason to believe more vitriole and “threats” were aimed at Peterson post-debate than Newman”

I find this especially puzzling in light of your first criticism, as it seems you are engaging in precisely what you charged me with in the first paragraph —namely, a version of the genetic fallacy! You seem to dismiss what I say on the basis that you (apparently) do not approve of the source, because it is a “male advocacy website”. Well, let’s grant for the sake of argument that it is. And I’ll even grant for the sake of argument that male advocacy itself is wrong-headed and morally reprehensible (I do in fact have misgivings about male advocacy movements, for what it’s worth). Even granting all that: how does that render what the source says valid or invalid? It’s totally irrelevant. You draw attention to the fact that they “openly say they omit sexist words because they focused on violent terms”… Well? So what? How does that undermine what I say subsequently (“…there’s some reason to believe more vitriole and violent “threats” were aimed at Peterson post-debate than Newman”)? I never tried to claim that Peterson was the victim of more sexism than Newman. Now perhaps you’ll want to say that sexism is itself a form of violence. Or that sexism is as serious and morally problematic as violent threats. In the former case, I think that would be a highly unreasonable and unnecessary stretching of the meaning of the word “violent”. In the latter case, though I grant that sexism is morally reprehensible, I think it’s reasonable to maintain that direct violent threats ought to be taken even more seriously than sexist remarks.

Your next criticism is the following:

“You cannot fathom why Fluss charges Peterson as an aristocrat, disregarding the explanation of neo-Marxist postmodernism.”

I don’t think this is fair. Firstly, I explained why (with specific references) Peterson is not aristocratic — in several instances he makes statements that are explicitly anti-aristocratic. In that context, the burden of proof shifts to the person making the charge. And once again, Fluss comes up short. Perhaps, PERHAPS, neo-Marxist postmodernism might reveal why and in what precise sense Peterson is aristocratic. But Fluss gives no indication in his article as to how exactly Marxism or his preferred theoretical framework would demonstrate how Peterson is aristocratic. He doesn’t even mention or hyperlink to further reading that might support his charge. Again, in the absence of any such supporting evidence, I can only go on the explicit statements of Peterson. And as I said, they appear to be diametrically opposed to an aristocratic perspective on humanity — assuming non-controversial definitions of the term “aristocratic”.

You say that my article “was filled with these basic failures of critical thought”. Apart from those alleged failures listed above, I’m not sure what else you are referring to. If it is only three failures, that hardly constitutes “filled”.

Hugo Newman

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I hold a PhD in Political Theory from University College Dublin. I'm co-founder and director of an eLearning company and currently live in Madrid, Spain.