Peterson deconstructed

Last week I participated in the Tour de Lorraine in Bern. This yearly anti-globalist gathering happens the week before the ominous WEF begins in Davos. It aims to be a counter-event protesting the meeting of the global “elite” in the Swiss mountains. On Saturday afternoon there were plenty of workshops to chose from. For the first session I went to a seminar on urban planning and density, which was pretty meh. For the second session I went to a workshop called “Feministische Stadt” (feminist city) lead by an unspecified group of “queer feminists”. With the recent movement surrounding the #metoo hashtag (among others), I thought it was important to be one of the men showing his solidarity – by listening.

I was one of three men attending, the rest were maybe thirty women (plus some people who chose a non gender specific pronoun) – attendees of all age groups. During the workshop, lead in inspiring, participatory fashion, a safe space was quickly established. Even though my own experience is quite different, I was blown away listening to the accounts of women on how they experience city. For me as a man walking through a city usually represents very little threat, at all times of the day, in most areas. Not so for women and queer people, for whom the threat of sexist behavior and worse looms on every corner. I was deeply moved and left with the strong resolve to intervene, if I noticed sexist behavior in public spaces and to try and do my part to make all people feel safe in our cities.

The next morning I woke up early, still thinking about this experience, got up to check twitter and found a tweet by Rene:

I have tons of educated guesses. https://t.co/ZztXafS7dx

— NERDCORE (@NerdcoreBlog) January 21, 2018

I had somehow missed the controversy surrounding Petersons Channel 4 interview, so I decided to watch it. So far I have not read much by Peterson, nor watched many of his videos. The few times I did he had always struck me as very angry in a reactionary way. The way he seems to blame the ills of our times on a bizarre concoction of “cultural marxism” (whatever that is, more on that later), postmodernism, radical feminism, political correctness and identity politics has always struck me as deeply reductive. I find Petersons message revolting, his tone just barely acceptable. And this interview was no different, I had trouble watching it to the end, but I forced myself to do it anyway.

Again Peterson was really hard to take in his debate with Cathy Newman. The barely contained, almost threatening aggression, the Asperger like attention to absurd levels of detail, the knit picking over terminology, the sarcastic laughs, the changes in pitch in his voice. Yes, Peterson may have dominated the conversation, but only if you allow him to define the terrain. This was not as a conversation among equals, not an exchange between two respectful human beings, Peterson distorted the exchange to his advantage. He dominated the conversation like any bully ever would.

My partner, who watched the video later, was disgusted by his attitude, “he creeps me out, he’s not the kind of guy I would like to encounter late at night in a dark ally” was her first gut reaction. Later she added, he is manipulative in his communication, pretending to be reasonable, but actually spewing thinly disguised misogyny. He gives himself this academic air, but abuses it to impose superiority, talking down to people. In actuality he is just spewing hatred, feeding code to his followers, the bloodhounds, who will then do the dirty work for him. And as we know, this did happen again with Newman.

Watching this upsetting interview after the beautiful feminist workshop the day before inspired me to write the following thread on twitter on my experiences in the early 90s in a then unequivocally pro-feminist men’s movement:

In den frühen 90ern in SF war ich Teil der sog. mythopoetischen Männerbewegung. Anhand von Mythologie, Märchen und Folklore wurde in jungianischer Manier untersucht, was es heisst ein starker, stolzer Mann zu sein. Vieles davon wirkt heute lächerlich. Doch eines war immer klar:

— Anti. 🐘 (@janzuppinger) January 21, 2018

In the thread I mention Peterson only briefly as one bad example how the men’s rights movement seems to be defined these days. In the end I express my hope, that a pro-feminist men’s movement can emerge again soon. Let’s make this happen, guys!

A few days later Rene posted an article regarding the Newman ~ Peterson interview on his blog. In it Rene – not for the first time – defends Peterson claiming that he was later deliberately misrepresented in the media (a point he had already hinted at in his tweet) and by unspecified “feminists”: Frosch aus postmoderner Vorhölle debattiert Feminismus.

I found this position untenable. Rene and I have talked and disagreed fundamentally about Peterson before. So this time I reacted to this blog post with the following provocative tweet, claiming that Rene had been redpilled by Peterson. The discussion got quite heated, but ultimately amounted to nothing:

File under: There goes another one. He puts the René into Renegade, so far so maybe.

But red pilled by (of all people) Peterson?

OMG. https://t.co/5Ov0Mdbaei

— 🐭 (A)nticapitalist(A) 🐭 (@pieceoplastic) January 23, 2018

In our discussion Rene had several times accused me of criticizing Peterson without actually having read him. I responded what I had read and seen was enough to understand that the premises Petersons based his theories on were flawed, and that I didn’t need to delve into it further.

But in a way Rene was right, I did not have the means for a deep critique of Peterson, and it would have been presumptuous on my part to do so. Neither am I an expert in Jungian psychology, postmodernism nor in Derrida/Foucault. This is why I was very exited to a few days later find an article by one Shuja Haider: Postmodernism Did Not Take Place: On Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life that offered a deep critique.

So here then is the deconstruction of Peterson teased in the title to this blog post. In the fantastically concise article Haider debunks it all. If my critique of Peterson had been vague and instinctive so far, my aversion to him guttural, the precision of this article has given it substance.

Here Haider shows where the theoretical base of some of Petersons thinking stems from:

Its origins were surprisingly deliberate, emerging from a paleoconservative Washington think tank called the Free Congress Foundation. The FCF was founded by Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and namer of the so-called Moral Majority movement. Weyrich also created a TV network called National Empowerment Television, a short-lived predecessor to Fox News, which aired a documentary in 1999 called “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School.” Hosted by a pipe-wielding human bleach stain named William Lind, it presents an account of the origin of what we now call “identity politics.” These came, Lind tells us, from the Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School. There, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and their cronies created a school of thought called “critical theory,” which the FCF gave the name “cultural Marxism.” This frightening idea fused the impertinence of Marx with the indecency of Freud, producing a new threat to Western values far beyond those posed by Copernicus or Darwin.

Here Haider debunks Petersons claims on postmodernism and Derrida:

Derrida and Foucault are indeed associated with trends varyingly described as “poststructuralism” or “postmodernism,” not just by reactionaries, but by liberals like Mark Lilla and leftists like Noam Chomsky as well. The former term may have some correspondence to reality. It shows how Derrida and Foucault followed and responded to a trend in French intellectual life known as “structuralism,” based on the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and epitomized by Lévi-Strauss’s studies of myth, and departed from its basic orientations. But neither thinker ever advanced a theory of “postmodernism” or claimed it as a theoretical practice — in fact, they hardly ever used the word.

Here Haider shows how a supposed relation between marxism and postmodernism is not as clear cut as Peterson likes to present it:

Specters of Marx is unequivocally loathed by Marxists of a certain persuasion, for whom there is only one true Marx. Even those who found something of value in Derrida’s reading were surprised by it at the time, given the prevailing opposition between Marxist and deconstructionist camps in the academy. Peterson’s fantasy of neo-Marxist wolves in postmodern sheep’s clothing has little bearing on actual debates in 20th-century political theory.

If Derrida’s work was appropriated by American academics to simply express a banal form of suspicion of all forms of objective truth, in service of some kind of moralizing politics of identity – and indeed, this did take place throughout the 1980s and 1990s – it is an appropriation which completely misses the point.

And finally the slam dunk [spoiler alert?]:

Peterson’s attempt to buttress these reactionary positions with readings of contemporary philosophy, now preserved for posterity in the pages of 12 Rules for Life, is not without precedent. But the tendency finds its most thorough realization in his zealotry. Peterson goes beyond Lilla, Chomsky, and Buchanan, arguing that what he calls “postmodern philosophy” is not merely a symptom of social unease, but its cause. By charging this poorly defined discourse of postmodernism with shaping contemporary society and bending the arc of history, he is doing precisely what he has accused his adversaries of doing: imposing a world of ideas upon the actually existing world, one which is more complex than he has the ability to grasp.

Please do read the whole thing. For anyone with questions on Peterson (and on his appeal on the so called alt-right), I cannot recommend this article strong enough.

Peterson deconstructed: √

And now let us work on building a pro-feminist men’s movement. In the so called “last battle of patriarchy” one simply cannot be caught on the side defending the moot order, what is asked now is unwavering solidarity with women in their fight against sexism and patriarchy.