Freedom of Taunting — Canada’s Jordan Peterson

“EDITORIAL: Jordan Peterson targeted for wrongthink,” shouted the online banner for the Toronto Sun, which has long been the tabloid-conservative news voice of the part of Canada I live in.

Recently, the Sun, which since 2015 has been majority-owned by an American investment consortium called Chatham Asset Management, has made a significant turn away from centrist Canadian conservatism. It has started repeating lines straight out of the Trump-mouth, like “The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized.” (HANSON: Who will say ‘no more’ to the current madness? Aug 13, 2023) That may not be surprising, since Chatham, which also owns the National Enquirer scandal rag through an intermediate company, has long been accused of doing favours for Trump such as suppressing sex scandals he was vulnerable to being written up about.

Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson, many readers will know, is the recently retired clinical psychology professor who has constantly been in the news as a firecracker-thrower for Trump-aligned Canadians, such as the Convoy movement. His inflammatory pronouncements tend to ricochet right up the alley of the kind of politics the Sun is getting into these days.

Now, about Peterson being ‘targeted for wrongthink.’ Many people, it’s true, strongly disagree with things Peterson has said (sample: “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence”). These people, however, are not the group ‘targeting’ him in this instance. The group that is being referred to in the Sun’s headline is small and specialized: it’s the Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee of the College of Psychologists of Ontario. The College is one of several regulatory bodies upholding professional standards for anyone associated with the medical professions in our province. I was once a member of a parallel body, the College of Medical Laboratory Technologists of Ontario, since this was necessary for doing medical laboratory diagnosis in my erstwhile workplace even for those of us who were PhD-level experts. I know how such complaints and ethics panels work.

Peterson’s history leading up to being scrutinized by the College is, again, fairly well known. He started small as a political hero/villain by fighting back when the University asked him to use the chosen pronouns of a transgendered student in 2016. He refused to yield to this, even though it had just been embedded in the Canadian Human Rights Act, and spoke out against ‘political correctness’ mandated by authorities. In the ensuing years, he decried many cultural trends he considered to be politically-correct infringements. He even went so far as to published a self-help book in 2018, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, that was aimed in part at inspiring young men to straighten up their moral backbones after the supposed coddling effects of feminism and socialism had caused them to hunch downward. This wokebuster volume sold over five million copies. Becoming emboldened, if not unhinged, as a public guru, Peterson ratcheted up his pronoun objection into assertions like “We have this idea in our culture that you can be a woman born in a man’s body, and that’s not true” and “Ellen Page [a deadname for transgendered actor Elliott Page] just had her [his] breasts removed by a criminal physician.”

The word ‘criminal’ in the last quote suggested that physicians giving gender-affirming care should be subjected to forcible treatment by the state; this strain of barely cloaked violence was reflected in related statements like one where gender-affirming surgery was said to be “Auschwitz and Nazi medical experiment-level wrong.”

The College noted complaints received against the Page statement and several others in their review of whether Peterson had made public statements that, while by no means illegal, were problematically unprofessional for a member of the organization. The remedy they had on hand, if they made a finding of unprofessional behaviour, was to require Peterson to take a media training course “regarding professionalism in public statements” as a condition of keeping his authorization to practice as a clinical psychologist. Peterson hadn’t actually practiced for a few years, and had turned his cultural iconoclasm into a serious source of wealth, but his dignity was at stake. When they did make a finding of unprofessionalism and ordered the training, and then supported this order even as it survived a court challenge, Peterson screamed blue murder, and has been doing so ever since. “Canada is trampling on my God-given right to free speech,” was his headline quote in the National Post, largely owned by the same group of companies as the Sun.

His most recent piece in the Post, ‘Trudeau and the equity tyrants must be stopped,’ connects his unfree agony to an emotional rampage about ‘diversity, inclusivity and equity’ stealing the rights and belongings of anyone who owns anything, like Chinese Communists taking all your property. This is a repeat theme for someone who was noted in 2018 as having “more than 1.1 million (YouTube) subscribers who tune in to hear him speak about the “Marxist lie” of white privilege and how millennials need to drop the idea of “social justice.”

Out of all the possible wrongthink motifs that Peterson has embraced, one of the ones that’s listed in the College’s review seems to be the most revealing about where he’s coming from. I’d like to focus on that one and leave the rest, at least for now.

g. Peterson’s tweet posted in May 2022, in which he commented on a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover with a plus-sized model, tweeting: “Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”

Peterson quote-tweeted (that is, retweeted, with overarching comment) a New York Post tweet noting that songwriter/model/clothing designer Yumi Nu from the U.S. was “shaking” with excitement at finding she’d been featured on the cover of the magazine Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. Sports Illustrated had a long tradition of featuring models its editors thought male readers would find attractive, and seeing Nu in that spot, a dark-skinned, ‘plus-sized’ model of mixed Japanese-Dutch descent, triggered Peterson’s political-correctness gag in a big way.

“Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that,” was his reaction — presumably not just said on his own behalf, since libertarian politics was being invoked, but on behalf of all heterosexual men whose predilection for true beauty was being curb-stomped by this imposition. Since Peterson does not issue blatantly racist statements, we can charitably assume that his reaction was against Nu’s dimensions.

As a matter of personal taste, ‘not beautiful’ is something that can hardly be held against someone, since everyone has different ideas of what is beautiful, especially when it comes to sexy-beautiful. As a gay man, I could disclaim getting a sexiness buzz from anyone female, and it would be folly for anyone to try to persuade me otherwise. I’d never try to persuade anyone to give up their own notions of sexy-beauty, since these perceptions seem to be pretty hard-wired, even when disadvantageous. As for finders of physical sexy beauty in Nu, however, there must be plenty. I lived for six years adjacent to Amsterdam’s ‘red light’ district, and often headed out to the shops via the Oude Kerk (‘old church’). The storefronts across the plaza from this church were the epicentre for sex trade workers who were ‘plus-sized’ women of colour. There was no shortage of takers, clearly. Further back in my history, a former university housemate of mine, who is a ‘plus-sized’ white woman, found to her joy that many middle-eastern students in particular seemed to be completely at ease with her Breughelesque figure; eventually, she married a guy named Akbar. If Peterson thought he was speaking for all of malekind with his remarks that “authoritarian tolerance” would be needed to rate Nu as attractive, he couldn’t be more wrong.

Could a psychologist be that naïve? There must be more to the story, right?

Certainly, the Sports Illustrated concept, in the popular mindset, was that the swimsuit issue catered to the heterosexual mainstream. Here, apparently, is where Peterson began to feel he and his social identification group had been squeezed out of something by an authoritarian decision, robbed as if he lived in Communist China. A conventionally, and maybe even statistically, less common idea of what constituted the North American archetype of young female beauty had been stuck on the front page, sidelining his comfortably dominant esthetic. And now we were all supposed to pretend this was normal! Where was there social room to breathe if the hidden stratum of Oude Kerk cruisers had the front page of Sports Illustrated to oooh and ahh at?

If that had been the sum of Peterson’s objection, though, he could have said so in a less insulting and less presumptuous way, rather than just blurting “not beautiful” (thus imposing his esthetic on the crowd as if he was Chairman Mao). He could have composed a relatively civilized and non-wounding tweet that said ‘I’m one of many who regrets this magazine has given up the consensus ideal that guys like me find beautiful, and you know what I mean.” But there, he would have been speaking for himself as if he were only the holder of an opinion. Instead, we see that he shoves back brusquely on behalf of a tacit consensus he has assumed a leadership position for.

The one forum where we’re all accustomed to such tactics is on the schoolyards we grew up in, where the bully’s cry of, “No, you’re ugly!” was unassailable and always pitching for its creepily extorted social consensus. But then again, the bully could be completely arbitrary, picking on whomever he or she had at a disadvantage, and I’d suggest that Peterson’s comment had a context that was more broadly culturally reinforced than that.

All indications from his books and sayings, you see, suggest that Peterson’s views are largely rooted in the practical philosophy I call Victorian militarism. That philosophy, which has roots that go back well before Queen Victoria, is the ‘chin-up, eyes-forward, work hard, innovate for advantage, don’t indulge’ ethic that was promoted as the motivating backdrop to worldwide colonization by competing European nations. It has two interlinked concerns, personal power, that is, a suitably soldierly (or soldier’s-bridely) physique and mindset, and uniformity, an avoidance of unnecessary departures from the norms that hold everyone together as a mutually identified fighting unit.

Anyone who went to gym classes in the 1960s, as I did, knows that being fat was a grave militarist infraction. My own middle school gym teacher, a peppercorned fellow of Khoisan stock raised in the British-style schools of Cape Province in apartheid South Africa, had zero tolerance for my weightier schoolmates, giving them extra pushups to do and laps to run. My heavy-set classmate surnamed Hodgson was told, “Hodgie-Podgie, you’re too fat!” and made to sweat without mercy. (By the way, as a friend of the late ‘fat lesbian’ activist Christine Bearchell, I’m not afraid to use that dreaded word in reclaimed dignity). Being fat, being heavy, being obese — it’s connected with several militarist sins: being inefficient, being vulnerable to illness, being sweaty/unclean, and, based on the primitive idea that relatively heavy weight is solely due to overeating, being indulgent and failing to exert willpower. The authority with which Peterson shouts “Not beautiful” is clearly the same as that underlying “Hodgie-Podgie, you’re too fat!”

Yumi Nu offends Victorian militarism’s concept of the ideal by being, by adverse cultural chance, a traditional emblem of sloppy indulgence. Moreover, she and her devotees, the men who find her attractive, offend militarism by being non-uniform, by being deviants, a group of ‘Others’ with values contrary to the long-standing North American prescribed consensus of finding skinny women beautiful. Since sex, in militarism, is the most feared source of indulgent weakness, given that it exerts the strongest draw towards personal pleasure, it is particularly strongly constrained to remain uniform. “The family is the fundamental building block of society,” stated one of the key 19th century phrases of militarist social strategy, demanding perfectly squared-off sex lives. Being homosexual, traditionally, is especially offensive (though Peterson, to his credit, seems not to harbour this trope), but being unfit and raising indulgent, lumpy, depressed (because they can’t function ideally and look unattractive), sickly children is extremely bad. The modernistic insight that many women’s metabolisms are set to keep them on the plus size if they eat enough to keep their energy at normal levels is not an accepted argument. When it comes to promoting ideals, like the Sports Illustrated ideal, the model needs to be sleek. If we were an ancient Mediterranean culture, she would need to be steatopygian (‘big booty,’ as they say in rap), and Yumi would be a natural; but here, we have Barbie. Sticking a woman perceived as less dietarily self-controlled into the cover photo is a socially weakening turn-off that invokes the ultimate dread of the militarist philosophy: causing the Roman Empire to fall. This icon is now, of course, conceived of as the Western Empire or simply as America, though the current Russian Empire is a strong, anachronistic parallel.

A fat woman, in Peterson’s ethos, is an unmade human bed, and Peterson is famous for advising young men to make their beds. There is a cultural betrayal in calling Nu beautiful, as well as a threat. ‘Weak people are stealing the empire out of our hands.’ Alter one pronunciation slightly: ‘woke.’

The College of Psychologists, not particularly devoted to the militarist persuasion, sees a person posing as representative of their profession who has abandoned his responsibility to build up the self-esteem of people who suffer from being different through no fault of their own, or who differ via a trivial issue that is best left alone or dealt with using strategies other than shaming. Insisting on his right to shout, from his million-subscriber podium, “no, I’m sorry, this object (that I’m not going to treat like a human being with a claim on dignity) is NOT beautiful” like a schoolyard bully, Peterson departs from any conceivable professional standard. Accentuating the comparison with bullying is the fact that archetypical bullies, at the young ages we all get to know them at, are often enforcers of versions of militarism they were taught at home, and are dedicated to discerning who is weak or different and trying to provoke combat where their own relative power can be triumphant. The whole reason why schools remain so ineffective at dealing with them, even in this pink-shirt, no-bullying age, is that they represent, in a crude, juvenile form, a prevalent sociological ethos shared by many teachers and parents. Peterson shares not only the visceral elements of their culturally acquired power philosophy, but also their tactics. Insisting on this bullying as a matter of God-given free speech has a larger dimension, since for Peterson, such things are not merely personal. He is insisting that his concept of the social mainstream — which is some not-very-divergent avatar of 1950s white America — shares his right to bully the weak and atypical, loudly and in public. That kind of agitation on behalf of cultural bullying rights, although it was once the mainstay of movie Marine sergeants, is now considered professional behaviour only in a mafia.

I can understand Peterson’s viewpoint that his beloved mainstream cabal, the people he feels are like him, need to insist that free speech includes their right to taunt certain minorities unmercifully. I understand that he thinks they should feel that freedom is being ripped from their hands when some weak/woke social schoolmarm insists that they be fair to the fat girl. Their viewpoint, however, is a kind of fanaticism, and although free speech in general may allow it, along with its criticisms, it cannot form part of the ethical basis of an even-handed, fair-minded service profession within the framework of medicine.

I can hardly imagine that Peterson will not be discharged for being unprofessional by the College of Psychologists.

I assure everyone that this is by no means a sign that our Ontario Roman Empire has fallen to Marxism.