In a world where objective journalism doesn’t pay, does every site become Vice?
Are academics advocating wholesale monogamy? That’s usually the field of organized religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhEG69ZGwUI
In regards to academics - he taught at Harvard and University of Toronto for decades, has written books and released hundreds of hours of lectures for free.
Peterson, OTOH, seems to be a common modern conservative blend of elements from classical liberalism and classic conservatism with modern scientific-sounding rationalization for the classically conservative elements.
> My motivated critics couldn’t contain their joyful glee this week at discovering my hypothetical support for a Handmaid’s Tale-type patriarchal social structure
> “enforced monogamy” does not mean government-enforced monogamy. “Enforced monogamy” means socially-promoted, culturally-inculcated monogamy, as opposed to genetic monogamy – evolutionarily-dictated monogamy, which does exist in some species (but does not exist in humans). This distinction has been present in anthropological and scientific literature for decades.
Basically...traditional (voluntary) marriage.
You know, the millenia-old religious/societal contact "to love, honor, cherish and protect him/her, forsaking all others and holding only unto him/her"
Faced with the decision to interpret Peterson's phrase as dsytopian lobster-like social structure, or pedestrian traditional marriage, the author and others assumed the less plausible interpretation.
[1] https://jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-the-new-york-times-and-...
If you think I'm making this up or being hyperbolic, watch his 100s of hours worth of lectures on YouTube. Even if you think this is utterly ridiculous, there are millions of people who will follow this man to their deaths.
Personally, seeing the guy talk makes me feel sleepy.
He’s not right wing himself though, he’s a classical liberal with libertarian leanings. I think of him more like Bill Maher without the comedy.
As an American I can’t wrap my head around the Canadian acceptance of criminal penalties to compel speech, based on the evolving views of an extrajudicial tribunal.
It’s terrifying to have that power in the hands of the far right or far left.
I think he’s too utilitarian on family and marriage, but his position is intellectually defensible. For example, he’s pro gay marriage but believes research saying children have better outcomes with exposure to both sides of the (traditionally gender-based) parental roles. He doesn’t claim to know a solution to the latter, or even that one needs to be be found. Only that it should be researched and discussed.
It’s not hard to take that kind of view and spin it to something abhorrent if you take away the nuance and context.
That's actually not the case (just see what kind of questions he gets from his actual audiences to see for yourself). Though on a surface level some of the alt-right likes him because he pisses off SJWs. But they're mistaken to think he's any kind of ally. He's spent much of his career opposing their views and sees both the alt-right and extreme left as big problems.
The idea that he's alt-right is really nonsense. He taught for decades at Harvard and the University of Toronto. As he says himself, you can go and look through his hundreds of hours of lectures and try to find where he's promoted anything alt-right. It's quite the opposite.
It's largely a false narrative driven by the extreme left, who are trying to dismiss and ruin him because he's critical of what they're doing.
This also happened with the progressive professor Bret Weinstein - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM
They tried/are trying to destroy him. It's a real problem.
Most people on the left don't think that JBP is a nazi, or alt-right, or whatever is the inverse of the "postmodern neomarxist" boogeyman. People on the left are critical of JBP because of his blatant misreadings of Marx, Deleuze, Foucault, his confusion about Bill C-16, etc. His overly broad equivocation of postmodern critiques of power and Marxian class theory is the basis of his incredibly nasty attacks on these so-called "postmodern neomarxist feminists" yet he has published no real thesis.
He can't even be said to be critical of leftist ideologies because he never puts forward any real arguments, and all he does is signal that the left are evil.
And I'm saying all of this as a leftist who has supported Bret Weinstein from the beginning. I accept the postmodern feminist criticism of identity politics and agree that SJWs and their constant search for categories is harmful to the left. I would love for Peterson to put forward an actual, rigorous criticism of leftist ideology, but frankly he doesn't seem to have one.
I think he'd do much better if he wrote more books and had a really good editor.
Every time I've seen an article about Peterson -- which, to be fair, has been all of three times so I'm not particularly well read -- it's saying he's done something or said something horrible. When I dig up what he actually said to get the context -- something that no article has ever done -- I'm usually left with a different interpretation or still being unsure what he was trying to say. When I look for Peterson's own explanations, they make sense to me and they're still consistent with what he originally said. Now, I don't agree with, well, hardly any of his points, but they're typically consistent even though the media consistently says they're not.
It strikes me more along the lines of how once James Damore, the guy who wrote the Google memo, was labelled anti-left and anti-feminist, it was just accepted that everything he said was immediately wrong and his entire argument was assumed to be the least favorable position. Nobody tried to actually read his memo and address those arguments. It could be interpreted as anti-left and anti-feminist there for it must be anti-left and anti-feminist and that engineer must be ceaselessly attacked for not toeing the cultural line even if he had good points.
It's like someone just gets labelled as an enemy and then it's red vs blue, left vs right, up vs down, and everybody has to be hardline anti-center lest you be labelled with that scarlet letter R or D. It's so intellectually dishonest. It's exactly what we used to blame Fox News and the religious right for doing! As someone who has been liberal and left their whole life, this recent behavior of mistaking character assassination and vitriolic reprisal for criticism has been one of the most disappointing and frustrating changes I've seen.
You are apparently upset that everything turns into a team sport with the left on one side and conservatives on another. Well, you're the one doing that here. I was basing my opinion of him on his own words, written and spoken. I have pretty moderate political beliefs and I don't really see how they pertain to a conversation about a guy that writes self-help books.
Forgive me if I suspect this is essentially an admission that you've only engaged with Peterson on a drive-by level.
Of the top of my head, were you already familiar with things like:
* Who Jakk Panksepp is, or have any outline of points from his work on affective neuroscience? (say, for example, the observation that if you deprive young rats of rough and tumble play they get hyperactive and their prefrontal cortexes don't develop very well and that can be treated with psychomotor stimulants)
* Anything about the narrative in the Enûma Eliš/Babylonian creation myth, or possible relevant interpretations for present day people?
* Questions of epistemology considering whether faculties of reason or attention are more valuable, and what the difference might be?
* Some neuroscientists/psychologists don't map the left and right brain to "logical" or "creative" but more as "explored territory" and "unexplored territory"?
* Anything about biological mechanisms that might underlying different systems for incentive/future rewards vs consumptive rewards?
* Much about Piaget's life or stages of cognitive development?
That's nothing like an exhaustive list of things I was introduced to following his lectures.
I don't have any desire to defend all of Peterson's statements, there's enough he's said that I disagree with. In some cases, I believe he's misrepresented things that I already do have some understanding of and so I certainly don't think he can be trusted without reservation. Perhaps he has even misrepresented some of the things I've mentioned above. There is plenty of room for criticism of him. And a good chunk of his oeuvre is synthesizing the works of others, so maybe the charges of unoriginality stick too.
But you'd have to be part of a considerably better educated crowd that's much smarter than I am to believe that the contents of that oeuvre are simply self-evident and empty.
> He just phrases it incomprehensibly and vaguely because he's trying to make a living selling books and giving self-help talks
Perceiving people's inner motivations is hard, and unless you're better at it than you are at accurately summarizing their work, there's no reason to believe your summary is particularly good. I think anyone who's actually payed attention to Peterson would say that whether or not he enjoys the money that's come with his attention, he is also on some kind of mission and is potentially more helpful or dangerous than someone who merely wants to augment their standard of living or financial power.
> You are apparently upset that everything turns into a team sport with the left on one side and conservatives on another. Well, you're the one doing that here.
You know, one of the things that Peterson said in his lectures that I'd suppose everybody might know is that when you argue with someone, one of the first things they're likely to do is try and turn the argument around on you. Perhaps it's inevitable. But did the parent really turn it into a team sports game? Seems to me they were criticizing a team they identified with.
> I was basing my opinion of him on his own words, written and spoken... a guy that writes self-help books.
The problem I'm having here is probably the same one the person you're responding to is having -- you're claiming to have engaged with his words, but the picture you're reflecting is very different than the one others who have engaged with his work have.
Is it possible they've engaged it on a level that you haven't?
Even if you think Peterson is trouble (and he is, in some ways) is it possible you can be more effective at responding to the trouble he presents if you have engaged at a deeper level?
"I'm not right wing, or conservative!" from the man who says "Abortion is clearly wrong"
If you actually gave people answers, their quest for meaning would be complete and they wont come back next week. You lose engagement.
I don’t know the exact context for the original statement, but the linked explanation video[1], which is only three minutes long, is very straightforward and exhaustive, and not at all vague as you claim.
Mostly it just irks me, as I have seen many people I respect given this treatment, but it has always been by the intellectually dishonest, including in fact in cult literature, with which I unfortunately have some personal experience.
The fact that this is now the new norm in mainstream press is very concerning.
Then it would seem Peterson is doing poorly at being a cult leader. :/
"On the New York Times and 'Enforced Monogamy'" https://jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-the-new-york-times-and-...
https://jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-the-new-york-times-and-...
Normally I think the Times is pretty solid, but they led with this distorted claim equating enforced monogamy with female slavery (irresponsibly, I think) and seem unable to rationally parse what Peterson is saying because of his infamy for being on the “wrong” side of the pronoun debate.
It’s a symptom of the age that no one wants to do the work of thinking through what people say and it’s exactly this looseness and lack of critical assessment that, ironically, permits demagogues to say and do outrageous things.
The New York Times does profiles on White Supremacists that have more respectful tones than this.
"Rather than taking the chance of unintentionally offending someone or of being misunderstood, it is best to relinquish the old innocuous proverbial expression all together."
No one is attacking you and there is no need to defend.
Maybe just because I am from the south and old enough to remember older relatives using the word spade in an overtly racist way (“Dennis Rodman is as black as a spade,” and such), but I don’t think the etymology is particularly academic.
Anyways, sorry for the off topic tangent.
While you are correct that this was (and is) rare in a news rather than opinion piece, this does not at all pretend to be a news rather than an opinion piece.
It's overtly framed as a review, which is a class of opinion piece, and is written with first person references and other structural features typical of opinion pieces.
> The New York Times does profiles on White Supremacists that have more respectful tones than this.
The New York Times has been widely criticized for normalizing white supremacy for those profiles, but in any case, that's an overtly different class of article.
Who proposed that?
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-context-of-jordan-peters...
also
http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/incel-meaning-explained
Which isn't to say that the way we dealt with this in the past, which was keeping women out of the work force and making them dependent on men for survival and status, is something we should go back to, just that there are consequences we'll have to recognize and deal with somehow.
The "incel" community frequently calls for the state to provide partners to incels. They point to how in the Netherlands, the disabled have access to sex worker services, subsidized by the state. They claim that their inability to find sexual partners is comparable to a disability, and therefore the state should help.
Then, some portion of those incels believe that men should be able to expect that their sexual partners do not have any other partners, so suddenly this turns into believing that the state should provide incels a monogamous, long-term partner, essentially a wife.
When Peterson calls on males to improve themselves, a substantial portion of his audience hears this as an exhortation to stop bitching and moaning, get off their asses... and then learn seduction techniques, push for political changes that would guarantee them a mate, or other steps that might be considered coercive or antisocial. Regardless of Peterson’s own position, never underestimate the ability of his statements to be interpreted in various fashions due to the seething anger of some of his listeners.
Do you have any evidence for this? Or is this just your imagination?
Dunno, seems like what we can label as "incels" (outside tiny violent group that pushed this term to mainstream) could now easily represent 50% of single male population. That's pretty bad for society. Look at Japan what is happening there. Or into China where planned male overpopulation is causing massive problems in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (stealing women) and they don't do the usual way of curbing excess males by the means of war, like practiced in the Middle East.
Also what are you objecting to here? Prostitution in general? Having it subsidized by the state?
This argument:
> They point to how in the Netherlands, the disabled have access to sex worker services, subsidized by the state. They claim that their inability to find sexual partners is comparable to a disability, and therefore the state should help.
This is not absurd. In the Netherlands prostitution is legal, anyone can buy the services of a sex worker. I don't know if it's true that the state subsidizes it for disabled people. If they do I imagine the idea is that having sex is an right and if you can't get it on your own (by either for free or by paying it) the state should supply it. Extending it to incels is not a huge leap.
Reading charitably, I think you mean "being aware of the possible connection". The connection with marriage still seems speculative.
Or to make sure they are sad and not intrinsically happy alone?:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3464902
;-)