Jordan B. Peterson: My heroes have never been cowboys
And they are never, ever perfect
I have admired many people and none them have turned out to be perfect.
Dammit.
I admired Louis C.K. You all know how that turned out. I still admire his comedy. He’s a genius. I especially liked the way he treated women in his monologues. Yes, he was occasionally crude but there was a kernel of respect that is absent in a lot of comedians.
I once admired Woody Allen and yet, a long time ago, I noticed that he kept getting older and older and his wives kept getting younger and younger. Then he married his adopted daughter and my stomach heaved. However, some of his movies are so luminous, beautiful, and funny — Midnight in Paris! — that I just have to cross my fingers and ignore that this art was created by a very flawed man.
I cried when Christopher Hitchens died. Yes, he basically drank himself to death. He supported the Iraq war (really, Hitch? How could you!) But I never missed an article he wrote. For one thing I always learned new words and that doesn’t happen very often these days. But his writing was (is) powerful and he was absolutely right a lot of the time. His talk defending free speech gave me goose bumps. And you have to love a man who once said “If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
Hitches once said about Michael Moore: “Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.”
Yes, that about covers it.
Jordan Peterson, his lobsters and his alt right
And I love Jordan Peterson. Again, he is right way, way more than he’s wrong. He’s brilliant, he is curious, he’s careful. He’s a scientist and he’s … not.
I wish he would give up that lobster thing.
His point with the lobsters is that humans naturally make dominance hierarchies. Like apes do. We are apes and thus it would follow. He tries to enhance his point by saying that lobsters have dominance hierarchies and therefore our tendency to make them is a bajillion-katrillion years old and we can’t fight that. Except for one little detail: we are not in any way descended from lobsters. They are arthropods like spiders and butterflies which do not have dominance hierarchies. To humans, lobsters are cousins not just once removed but a bajillion-katrillion removed.
Apes make dominance hierarchies and humans are apes. I’m all good with that. It leads to the next question which is “What do we want to do about that?” Me, I’m good not being at the top of the heap. I can lead if the group needs that or if someone else wants to lead I can hang back and write the press releases. Humans don’t need to fight to arrange their hierarchies. We are apes but we aren’t chimpanzees (who ARE kissing cousins). We can talk out how we want to be with each other.
No lobsters necessary, unless that’s what you serve at the discussion dinner.
Peterson and the alt-right
When he first burst on the scene about a year and a half ago (I was enjoying his psychology lectures a year or two before that) the white supremacists and the men’s right’s activists, a couple of groups that strongly overlap, got very excited because they thought they’d found a champion.
Their hopes were dashed when they discovered that he was no fan of Hitler and he didn’t hate women.
Most Hitler devotees are big noisy proponents of free speech. They have to keep you focused on that topic because if they talk about their goals and ideas most people will puke into their hat. The only way they can get a platform is to yell about free speech.
Peterson, a Canadian, is a big supporter of free speech. That makes sense because he’s a natural teacher and he has a lot of stuff people would do well to learn. Unlike the US, Canada doesn’t have a 1st Amendment. Canada has laws against “hate speech” that the US could never have. Then, right before Peterson became infamous, Canada passed a law that you MUST address people a certain way. For Peterson that was a bridge too far and he complained loudly. It made him famous and that’s why the Hitlerians got so over-excited.
What got the attention of the men’s rights advocates (MRAs) was the fact that Peterson is concerned about the deterioration of men in our society. He is not the first person to worry about that. There are more women in the workforce than men. Women now complete high school at greater rates than men. Women go to college more than men and they get more degrees than men. Men are staying home and playing video games. They are “failing to launch.”
The MRA movement has formed in response to that shift in our society. I feel their pain, but they want to fix the problem by reanimating John Wayne’s dead body. It’s not going to happen. They are going to be bitterly disappointed if they keep trying to bring back the sexist world that ceased to exist decades before they were born.
Peterson says important things to them. He says “stand up straight!” “get your house in order!” “fix yourself and then you will have value!” Those are fantastic messages for anybody.
Flawed heroes
So, Peterson isn’t any more perfect than any of my other heroes. Or any other human being, for that matter. He doesn’t think “white privilege” is a thing. When he talks about it I want to find him and shake some sense into him. Whenever he puts out a video I’m going to watch it. I’m reading his book, 12 Rules for Life, although I cringed during the lobster chapter.
Nobody is perfect. Bertrand Russell was a womanizer and so was John F. Kennedy. Eric Clapton dumped his wife for “Layla” and then got up off his knees and dumped her for another woman. And Bill Clinton, nuff said.
If we require perfection of our heroes we won’t have any. And we need them.
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