A refutation of Ira Well’s Jordan Peterson profile

Ira Wells’ article on Jordan Peterson has a date stamp of November 27 2017. A day later, Peterson was active on Twitter challenging Wells’ to a debate, the result of which is up in the air as I write this. But on reading this article, short enough to be overviewed on a streetcar ride, I felt I should perhaps write a defence of Peterson’s work, considering the article is egregiously sloppy with regard to facts, and showing the shallow understanding that is typical of Peterson’s critics.

Wells:

The problem is that Peterson folds this argument into a politically reactionary and often downright paranoid world view that appears designed to curry favour with the alt-right.

The paragraph following that sentence refers to “fan-edited” videos and although I have not seen the two in question I’m familiar with the format: Peterson’s hour+ long lectures edited into soundbite clips. The two here claim that “Peterson blows all of the familiar Breitbart and Rebel endorsed dog whistles”, but having attended all of his Peterson’s Bible Series lectures in person, and having watched/listened to many of his academic class-room videos (ie, his university course content), I have no idea what dog-whistles Wells recognizes. Wells quotes Peterson via Twitter:

Islamophobia,” he has also tweeted, is “a word created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.” (Original here)

I don’t quite understand what Wells is implying, since I understood Peterson’s tweet to mean Islamophobia itself is a political boogey-man and a dog whistle to racists. In Canada at least we understand there’s a difference between Muslims and the less-than-100 terrorists whose acts over the past twenty years caused our society to invent the word Islamophobia. I’m probably wrong in my understanding; Peterson may be saying that “islamo-caution” is sensible (I’ll clarify in a sec) or, if I’m correct in understanding that it is politically manipulative, then is Wells in turn validating it?

The context around the tweet was the M103 legislation that sought to penalize “expressions of Islamophobia”, which fell into Peterson’s grander project of defending freedom-of-expression. Peterson made a video critiquing the motion with the very simple question: if I present a stick figure and say it is Muhammed, am I violating Islam’s prohibition against representing the Prophet (p.b.u.h) and therefore expressing Islamophobia? Who gets to decide? This is all reminiscent of 20th Century prohibitions against pornography, when legislation tried to regulate morality through a “I know it when I see it” tripwire.

As much as I agree with the government’s goals in trying to enable a kinder and more understanding society, I think Peterson is right to call out the government’s misguided attempts to legislate a contemporary morality of tolerance.

This being said, I acknowledge Peterson has expressed concerns about Islam as a culture, and since I’m indifferent to the idea that Islam is an existential threat I understand this concern of his to be partly generational, a result of some kind of post-9/11 trauma affecting men over fifty, and of little interest to me.

Wells follows this up with a misunderstanding of another Peterson tweet from October, around which Peterson was also being critqued for a misunderstanding of a comment he made while speaking with Camille Paglia.

The real cause of the recent wave of sexual assault allegations, he believes, is due to sex no longer being “enshrined in marriage.” In a conversation with Camille Paglia, he lamented that men can’t exert control over “crazy women” by physically beating them.

First, as a psychologist, Peterson understands what some movies also tell us, which is that sex can never really be casual. It’s a potent force. I understood Peterson’s tweet as expressing the fact that the ancients had good reason to want sex confined to marriage, most obviously because prior to birth control, sex created new people. I see no reason why it should be controversial to point out, as I am doing here, that our sexual morality is now extremely distorted, and it isn’t so much the fact that people like Weinstein exist, as that they were allowed to exist for so long. Our — let’s say appreciation — of sex outside of marriage created a climate of tolerance to what used to be called perversity. It’s a matter of fact statement which should not be controversial.

Second, do you really think Peterson could claim that “men can’t exert control over ‘crazy women’ by physically beating them” without Camille Paglia calling him out on that? The relevant video can be seen on one of the YouTube fan-edit accounts, Bite-sized Philosophy, which at-time-of-writing has 177,383 views. Peterson’s actual words are:

“I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me, and the reasons I know that is that the parameters of my resistance are quite well defined, which is, we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. That’s forbidden with discourse with women.”

Camile Paglia her nods along in understanding with a slight smile, apparently humoured. “So,” Peterson continues, “I don’t think men can control crazy women, I really don’t believe it, I feel like they have to throw their hands up … in what? It’s not even disbelief. There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances.”

What follows beyond this is a bit of Petersonian psychology, where in his other lecturs he’s taught that the measure of being a good person is in one’s self-control. If you are incapable of defending yourself with agression when it is necessary, to paraphrase him, you are akin to a dometicated pet. Your utter harmlessness means you can’t be taken seriously and lack respectiability.

This then is the context around which Peterson then says, “If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever then you’re talking to someone to whom you have no absolutely no respect”. I admit I myself found this sentence unfortunate, since I wondered what kind of interaction Peterson must have with doctors or ministers or even fellow psychologists where professionalism at the very least would prevent an escalation of aggression into violence.

Needless to say, Peterson did not say, “men can’t exert control over ‘crazy women’ by physically beating them”. The truth is more nuanced, and in the social-media flame wars nuance is the first casualty.

Wells follows this by stating, “He echoes Donald Trump on fake news, telling followers they can’t trust the media”

… which should be obvious to all of us no matter where we identify on the political spectrum, “and makes a point of admiring Trump’s intelligence and accomplishments”

… which I’ve always understood to be politic — why should he alienate Trump’s voters unnecessarily when his game is pragmatic psychology and not American domestic affairs? Wells however, takes these generalized un-nuanced misunderstandings together to conclude, “Few in the media who have lauded Peterson as being ‘right’ on free speech in universities have bothered to qualify that he is dangerously wrong about everything else, thus bringing him new followers and burnishing his brand.”

Next up Wells details how Peterson is benefiting from crowdfunding technology, as if this is somehow damning, which Wells implies by stating “His YouTube channel, where he uses material filmed during his U of T lectures to flog his fundraising programs — which should raise serious ethical concerns for the university — has more than half a million subscribers.”

Since the turn of the century universities have been making lectures available online as videos for their experimental MOOC programs, and as a watcher of Peterson’s videos, I can say that’s all these are. I see no ethical problem in Peterson publishing recordings of his lectures that happen to be popular enough to generate a large subscriber base. Also, I have never encountered an ad during or before one of his lectures, which implies that they aren’t monetized.

Wells: “It seems indisputable: Peterson is now the most famous professor in Canada. What he is not, however, is the author of any lasting work of scholarship, the originator of any important idea, or a public intellectual of any scientific credibility or moral seriousness.”

This is the next trick in the “discredit Peterson” playbook. It is arguable that Peterson’s Maps of Meaning book, the result of his scholarship in the 1990s, is a ‘lasting work’ but only time will tell. It is certainly being read by hundreds if not thousands today because of his online popularity. To say he is not the ‘originator of any important idea’ is also arguable, considering the number of emails Peterson probably receives daily from people who thank him for helping to change their lives for the better. His scholarship in marrying traditional mythology with contemporary psychology may not be a “grand idea” but it is a grand method with tangible results. To say he is not a public intellectual of any scientific credibility cause one to question what make Ira Wells, bylined as a teacher of literature and cultural criticism at the University of Toronto, a credible judge. I think it’s fair to say that Peterson’s science is the same as Steven Pinker’s but would Wells write an article on Pinker and claim that Pinker was a pseudo-scientist?

I’ll now skip to the end, to Wells’ conclusion: “We have an intellectual obligation to meet this threat directly and expose him for exactly what he is: a YouTube star who offers a wafer-thin intellectual validation for the political retrenchment of traditional hierarchies. Peterson is calling for war within the humanities. We should happily oblige.”

I am writing this in response, to call out Well’s hyperbole and distortions. Before Jordan Peterson was a YouTube star he was a tenured professor at the same institution as Wells, the venerable University of Toronto. Wells takes Peterson to task for his attacks on “the bloody neo marxist postmodernists” (Peterson’s words) which is another argument lacking the context of nuance.

I understand Peterson to be attacking the type of education I received even in the 1990s, this now typical through-put where a middle class kid goes off to school in September and uses the word “bourgeoisie” at Christmas. Natural youthful rebellion turns to complaining about capitalism … and its a very tired story, made up of generational overlap going back a century. Peterson, whose work with mythology and religion relies on the rich legacy of the Humanities, is taking a stand to say that what universities used to be for, and what their humanities department did, was to produce thoughtful, well spoken adults, who could reflect on their circumstances and in turn contribute to society.

Isn’t a fair question to ask, when was the last time you were impressed by a university student, who had been molded into an articulate and cultured human being? For every Lindsay Shepherd who lives up to this ideal, we have the nihilists who’ve turned safe-spaces universities into a laughing stock. Peterson is calling out an education system which is falling the young and as a psychologist he recognizes that the mental harm being done for what it is.

In biting this hand that feeds him, he is clumsy, and prone to overgeneralize. The purported website was aimed at giving students a way of determining whether the courses they’d be signing up for would be ideological or traditional, so that market forces could be used to fix the problem which was what Peterson meant by saying the goal would be do reduce enrolments by 75%. At the moment, Peterson understands the website idea to be too politicizing and it has been shelved.

Wells states that “What makes critical thinking ‘critical’ is the tendency to read against the grain of accepted wisdom and to question the inherited power hierarchies that structure human relations.”

Far be it from me to argue against a professor of Cultural Criticism at the venerable University of Toronto, but this is exactly the orthodoxy which Peterson is standing up against, which states this definition matter-of-factly but with the apparent historical ignorance (or historical indifference) that critics a century ago were not interested in “questioning power hierarchies structuring human relations”. They were interested in explaining, in pointing out mistakes and correction within the understood context. What I am doing right now is such an act of criticism, but my context here is fairness and truth telling. Wells has not written a fair article, and I want to explain in fairness what Wells glossed over as part of the casual libel Peterson now has to tolerate.

Wells claims that Peterson provides “intellectual validation” to traditional power hierarchies where earlier Wells claimed Peterson lacked intellectual credibility. Peterson’s simply explains how hierarchies work for us as social animals, and his work here is similar to that of Frans de Waal, who has studied the power structure of chimpanzee societies. Are we not a form of ape? And does it not follow that we would share social structures with other apes? Does it also not follow that psychological health for us is related to our social standing? If not, why did Wells pursue a PHD and a professorship? Why has he published his article in The Walrus and not on Wordpress.com? Is he not participating in a game of preeminence?

In turn I am but a blogger who is sympathetic to Peterson’s arguments precisely because a person in Wells’ position should know better. Ira Wells is just another critic glossing over Peterson’s work and presenting social-media here-say as their critique, which effectively adds up to a bigoted and libellous statement.

Jordan Peterson is not a bad man, nor a boogey man, but is in fact one of the few examples of moral decency we have at this time. As a psychologist trading in Jungian archetypes, he is a target for psychological projection, from both sides of the political spectrum, the Left and the Right.

The fact that he has Conservative/Alt-Right listeners does not in turn mean he fully participates in their ideology nor does it imply that he is one of their intellectual leaders. It only means that his message resonates with them as human beings, because what Peterson tells his listeners is the most important thing they can do is tell the truth, because that is the beginning of self-authenticity, and that in turn means you cannot be easily manipulated.