It's interesting reading this. Funny enough, many of the things you're pointing out about Peterson's faults and examples of his shadow are things that he himself has acknowledged about himself and that they are valid criticism of him.
In fact, he's been speaking especially recently about the whole idea of "render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." You point this out as something he needs to do or people should be doing, but he himself has said some variation of this numerous times. So it's not as if he's not aware of it.
I also take issue with your suggestion that because Solzhenitsyn's book was released in 1974 and in 1978 the communist party in France had an increase in the vote for them as evidence that his view that it didn't work is faulty. By that logic, the fact that the Soviet Union didn't fall immediately is evidence that it had no effect on the country. Of course, the Soviet Union did eventually fall in 1991, in large part because of Solzhenitsyn and his publishing of the book. While things happen at break neck speed today, at the time it took a lot longer for things to get around. So the fact that the increase in support for a communist in France is evidence that it didn't become unreasonable to support it simply is faulty.
Also, your assertion that people didn't know in the 1940s simply isn't true either. Solzhenitsyn himself in The Gulag Archipelago pointed out that it was pretty well known within the first few years of the Soviet Union that it was true. Knowledge of it existed although there was some debate about the extent of it necessarily. Many of the people in power in Western countries like the United States and Britain and others were aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union before World War 2. It was part of the reason they weren't so keen on an alliance with Russia in the run up to and during World War 2.
Even Germany knew about what was happening in the Soviet Union in the run up to the Second World War. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn points out that after the war, the leaders proclaimed of what happened in Germany "Never again", but that all they had to do was look at what was going on in the country of their own ally, the Soviet Union, to realize how hollow that proclamation was.
So it was fairly well known by the West that horrible things were happening in the Soviet Union very early on and yet the Soviet system persisted for 70 years. And despite the collapse of it, this idea is still going on in China and Cuba.
There are a number of problems with your assertions of Jordan Peterson, only some of which I have outlined here.
Hi Andrew thanks for the great response! Could you elaborate on this bit about Peterson and the rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's bit? I'm curious to hear the meaning behind it (I mean I know the old Jesus bit but curious to hear what Peterson means by it)
The point I wanted to make with the Solzhenitsyn bit is that Peterson's claim that Communism had become an untenable position in 1970s France wasn't true. Politically and intellectually speaking Communism didn't disappear and as I mentioned this wasn't just in the 1970s but up to the early 1980s presidential election. So the point I wanted to make was that these thinkers weren't forced to take their Marxism underground. It's just that there was an outgrowing of Marxism and a growing disillusionment with it in the French intellectual scene from the 60s onwards. It continued strong among the Frankfurt school apparently but I've yet to study that in depth. My point wasn't to deny that the West didn't know about what was going on in the USSR. The point was quite the opposite that even when this was very explicit public knowledge it didn't render anyone holding the position a pariah. As you say over time the support for it collapsed but that's not the extreme picture that Peterson paints on the subject. The motivation for Neo-Marxism (aka Cultural Marxism) was that Marxism could be publicly espoused. The falseness of this claim was what I was trying to illustrate in the article
Well, I haven't heard everything he's ever said but I've noticed that he has spoken repeatedly about the whole "render unto Caesar" thing as the most important philosophical thought in many ways. More often than not, it's in regards to the role of the government in people's lives. For instance, he's spoken about how the President in the United States often gets thought of as a messiah like figure in the country. Whereas if you look at countries like Britain and Canada, they have the Queen of England as their head of state who has something of a religious figure. She's considered "chosen by god" in some sense. So while the Prime Minister is the Chief Executive, they're not the head of state. And this is beneficial to society and people's view of government because it separates "Caesar" from "God" philosophically.
He's also spoken of it in regards to individuals as well. That they shouldn't see themselves as morally superior to others or to consider humanity or the government as "God like". He uses that same concept in that sense. He includes himself in people who should heed that call to separate themselves from such thinking.
But part of the point of him talking about Marxism becoming more "underground" is to suggest that supporters of Marxism realized that it was a problem to try and continue to view themselves as on the right side. So they had to look for another way to go through with their belief that Marxism was the best way to go about things. Which is part of what he's talking about with "post-modern neo-Marxism".
If you're looking to learn more about the Frankfurt school, I recommend the work of James Lindsay and his New Discourses podcast. What he does is basically read the entire books of some of the foundational texts of Marixists as well as people who don't necessarily identify that way but are supportive of it and comments on them as he does. He was actually critical of Peterson's use of words like post modern neo-marxism. Then he started going through the books deeply and realized that he was probably right. He still has criticisms of some of the things Peterson says but with regards to that term, he's less critical of it.
The evolution of philosophic thought is a fascinating topic. I think because Peterson had spent his entire life in academia, he is particularly sensitive to the intellectual changes in the academic environment. After trying to put the pieces together he found what he thought was a likely culprit for what he saw happening around him.
I am not well versed on this subject, but the little I do know leaves me in agreement with many of your points regarding a Neo-Marxist conspiracy driven by postmodernist thought. That doesn't mean, however, that there were no other intellectual movements that drove much of what you outline in point 2 of Peterson's argument. Gramsci was *very* explicit about infiltrating schools with the new socialist religion. The Frankfurt School has had a much larger influence in America than the French philosophers, and I think they are the more influential predecessors of today's SJW movement.
That being said, I very much agree with your point to focus on what it is to be human rather than on the battle between Aries and Artemis. If there is such a battle, it will not be resolved by getting angry and shouting at the sky.
Good point Stephen and I'm very curious to get into Gramsci. There's a name that keeps cropping up and seems like a solid trail of breadcrumbs on this path of understanding how we got where we are
Im sorry, on some issues it's hard to be an evenhanded dispassionate intellectual, and for me it's fooolco and derrida...
They were/are the termites of civilization and their mission was to destroy reason, logic, truth and beauty, even if their wrecking ball managed to also take out a few load-bearing walls. and if that sounds overheated, just behold the works of their acolytes, not one lasting work of interest among them (certainly nothing remotely beautiful or compelling), only mountains of unreadable jargon discovering newer and more obscure forms of oppression.
And the worst part is that the French Theorists didnt mean any of it, the nihilist pose was just a way to look cool and edgy and become celebs for status-conscious american academics who swoon over anything stamped Parisian.
Derrida's project was to cut the tongue out of Western man, to brew a nihilistic acid to be poured over any statement so nothing means anything, anything can mean anything, and so now academics can teach about the opression embedded in comic books and tv shows, because hey one text is the same as any other text, only a fascist would say there's any difference bw Tolstoy and Betty & Veronica.
The signified and the signifier are like 2 ships passing in the night, words have no inherent meaning or any possible connection to ideas or concepts, the ideas true/false right/wrong smart/stupid are just oppressive binaries inflicted by the ruling class on the mute and helpless oppressed, and nothing exists but power and who holds the whip hand. The deconstructors couldn't have done a better job destroying american arts and letters than if they'd used dynamite!
Fooolco was Nietzsche's ape and dingleberry, when he really wanted to be another Sade, a sexual outlaw and rebel. What a poser!
He is beloved now because he launched a thousand conspiracy theories that turned into academic industries: hey, there are satanic structrures etching their invisible power-knowledge into everything and everyone--what does this tell us about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He is certainly the most overrated intellectual in the history of thought.
It is obvious that they both appealed so much to Americans because their work is founded on poses of juvenile rebellion, on making sure no one can ever call you Bourgeois, and signaling your radical Leftism while never leaving the faculty lounge and always making sure the government-backed check clears.
I don't care much about Peterson, but if he hates those 2, he is my friend for life.
Thanks for the input Clever Pseudonym it's always a great read! I have to say though I disagree when it comes to Foucault (I don't know enough about Derrida to really defend him so I'll leave him off for now). I've been studying him a lot recently and have been very aware of the perceptions around the destruction of truth etc. And while that may have been something that was made of his philosophy I'm not sure that I see it in his thought at all. That's not what he was doing in his work and so I think to hold him accountable for what later people have made of his work is like holding Nietzsche accountable for being the national philosopher of the Nazis.
Foucault's initial work around science and epistemes was very much a Continental version of Thomas Kuhn. It wasn't a denial of truth but a reminder that science is not ahistorical and what is salient is determined by the cultural backdrop.
Of course the real part that would have to be examined isn't the Foucault of the 60s or 80s but the Foucault of the 70s and the discourse around knowledge/power. And while I'm still putting together Foucault's point here and trying to fully digest it I strongly feel that he has been caricatured and again the discourse around power is again not a denial of truth but an argument about the context within which what is true is determined. Think about the disinformation campaigns online and how you see both right and left, east and west forming their own notions of what is misinformation and what is truth. This is Foucauldian power/knowledge operating in plain sight. At least that's what I'd argue. It's not a denial of reality or truth or logic but a warning about the uses these things can be put to in the service of certain power games. Again I'm not at the end of my researches but I don't think this representation of Foucault which has become quite common is accurate. I imagine it's much the same with Derrida. Anyways I appreciate the detailed input as always!
Hey, thanks for your response, and I want to apologize if I got a bit overheated. I try not to comment if i'm only bringing heat not light, but when it comes to the French post-everything philosophers, I totally lose my cool.
(Not to drag this too much into the personal, but I was a Lit major in the 80s at a snooty liberal arts college, so I was there when the Marxist phoenix was reborn in American academia, and I guess I still have some "unprocessed trauma" (as the kids say these days) from the first time I read that I only loved Shakespeare and Tolstoy because of capitalist false-consciousness or however it was phrased, and at the time it struck me as both ignorant and even vaguely evil, I guess it was akin to a spiritual molestation;))
Anyway, i have to confess to only hate-reading Foucault and not really finding anything in him that I hadn't already chewed and savored in Nietzsche, but maybe someday I will be able to cool off and give him another chance.
Either way, appreciate your work and enjoy your posts.
Ah well I can totally see how you got there and I can see how that would totally spoil your impression of them. I guess I have the distance to interact with them alone and as such with as much charitableness as possible. I imagine if I had been in your situation I would have just as much of a sour taste left in my mouth towards them. Hopefully my future stuff on Foucault can go some way to redeeming him a little in your eyes though I must admit a total redemption is almost certainly not possible. There are things that a charitable reading cannot erase
Interesting essay. I agree with your overall assessment of JBP fighting with his shadow. He's clearly a very post-modern thinker himself, and I think his tying post-modernism with Marxism has rendered him unable to wrestle honestly with that fact.
I do take issue with your characterisation of JBP's 'post-modern neomarxism' thing has a conspiracy theory, though - apologies in advance for the lengthy response.
On 'neo-Marxism/cultural Marxism' - we know that Marxism took a 'cultural turn' in the second half of the 20th century. This is supposed to have started with Gramsci, who (to simplify somewhat) recognised that the Marxist approach up the that point had failed, and 'cultural hegemony' was needed for progress to occur.
We also know that mid-century Marxists were influenced by this idea and began a 'long march through the institutions' to achieve cultural hegemony. This is not a secret or a conspiracy theory - and we now see very clearly the outcomes of this. Surveys of the political opinions with these institutions show that the majority of university academics, journalists, teachers, etc. hold left or far-left political opinions. These people are well versed in the methods of 'critical theory', 'critical pedagogy', etc., which they learned from their own teachers and professors, and they quite openly apply these methods in their work.
On post-modernism - what does 'critical' refer to in critical theory? Essentially, it refers to the methods of Deconstruction. I'm by no means an expert on this, please correct me where I'm wrong, but my understanding is these terms refer to the methods used by post-structuralists and post-modernists to 'deconstruct' language, cultural beliefs and institutions, etc., with the goal of highlighting underlying power processes. Privilege/oppression and all that jazz.
So there's a positive vision for society and its future - Marxism, and/or a culture-focused version of it - and a method of deconstructing the old vision, which I'll just summarise as 'fascistic Western colonial capitalist patriarchy'. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there is a significant portion of people in 'the institutions' that have this as their explicit goal.
Whether this is a good thing or not is left to the reader - certainly some aspects of Western culture need to be criticised! - but to say that everything above is a conspiracy theory is simply untrue. And while JBP can get pretty melodramatic when speaking on politics, I don't believe he's ever claimed anything more than what I've outlined above. There are no 'shadowy cabals' in JBP's work.
It's interesting reading this. Funny enough, many of the things you're pointing out about Peterson's faults and examples of his shadow are things that he himself has acknowledged about himself and that they are valid criticism of him.
In fact, he's been speaking especially recently about the whole idea of "render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." You point this out as something he needs to do or people should be doing, but he himself has said some variation of this numerous times. So it's not as if he's not aware of it.
I also take issue with your suggestion that because Solzhenitsyn's book was released in 1974 and in 1978 the communist party in France had an increase in the vote for them as evidence that his view that it didn't work is faulty. By that logic, the fact that the Soviet Union didn't fall immediately is evidence that it had no effect on the country. Of course, the Soviet Union did eventually fall in 1991, in large part because of Solzhenitsyn and his publishing of the book. While things happen at break neck speed today, at the time it took a lot longer for things to get around. So the fact that the increase in support for a communist in France is evidence that it didn't become unreasonable to support it simply is faulty.
Also, your assertion that people didn't know in the 1940s simply isn't true either. Solzhenitsyn himself in The Gulag Archipelago pointed out that it was pretty well known within the first few years of the Soviet Union that it was true. Knowledge of it existed although there was some debate about the extent of it necessarily. Many of the people in power in Western countries like the United States and Britain and others were aware of what was going on in the Soviet Union before World War 2. It was part of the reason they weren't so keen on an alliance with Russia in the run up to and during World War 2.
Even Germany knew about what was happening in the Soviet Union in the run up to the Second World War. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn points out that after the war, the leaders proclaimed of what happened in Germany "Never again", but that all they had to do was look at what was going on in the country of their own ally, the Soviet Union, to realize how hollow that proclamation was.
So it was fairly well known by the West that horrible things were happening in the Soviet Union very early on and yet the Soviet system persisted for 70 years. And despite the collapse of it, this idea is still going on in China and Cuba.
There are a number of problems with your assertions of Jordan Peterson, only some of which I have outlined here.
Hi Andrew thanks for the great response! Could you elaborate on this bit about Peterson and the rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's bit? I'm curious to hear the meaning behind it (I mean I know the old Jesus bit but curious to hear what Peterson means by it)
The point I wanted to make with the Solzhenitsyn bit is that Peterson's claim that Communism had become an untenable position in 1970s France wasn't true. Politically and intellectually speaking Communism didn't disappear and as I mentioned this wasn't just in the 1970s but up to the early 1980s presidential election. So the point I wanted to make was that these thinkers weren't forced to take their Marxism underground. It's just that there was an outgrowing of Marxism and a growing disillusionment with it in the French intellectual scene from the 60s onwards. It continued strong among the Frankfurt school apparently but I've yet to study that in depth. My point wasn't to deny that the West didn't know about what was going on in the USSR. The point was quite the opposite that even when this was very explicit public knowledge it didn't render anyone holding the position a pariah. As you say over time the support for it collapsed but that's not the extreme picture that Peterson paints on the subject. The motivation for Neo-Marxism (aka Cultural Marxism) was that Marxism could be publicly espoused. The falseness of this claim was what I was trying to illustrate in the article
Well, I haven't heard everything he's ever said but I've noticed that he has spoken repeatedly about the whole "render unto Caesar" thing as the most important philosophical thought in many ways. More often than not, it's in regards to the role of the government in people's lives. For instance, he's spoken about how the President in the United States often gets thought of as a messiah like figure in the country. Whereas if you look at countries like Britain and Canada, they have the Queen of England as their head of state who has something of a religious figure. She's considered "chosen by god" in some sense. So while the Prime Minister is the Chief Executive, they're not the head of state. And this is beneficial to society and people's view of government because it separates "Caesar" from "God" philosophically.
He's also spoken of it in regards to individuals as well. That they shouldn't see themselves as morally superior to others or to consider humanity or the government as "God like". He uses that same concept in that sense. He includes himself in people who should heed that call to separate themselves from such thinking.
But part of the point of him talking about Marxism becoming more "underground" is to suggest that supporters of Marxism realized that it was a problem to try and continue to view themselves as on the right side. So they had to look for another way to go through with their belief that Marxism was the best way to go about things. Which is part of what he's talking about with "post-modern neo-Marxism".
If you're looking to learn more about the Frankfurt school, I recommend the work of James Lindsay and his New Discourses podcast. What he does is basically read the entire books of some of the foundational texts of Marixists as well as people who don't necessarily identify that way but are supportive of it and comments on them as he does. He was actually critical of Peterson's use of words like post modern neo-marxism. Then he started going through the books deeply and realized that he was probably right. He still has criticisms of some of the things Peterson says but with regards to that term, he's less critical of it.
The evolution of philosophic thought is a fascinating topic. I think because Peterson had spent his entire life in academia, he is particularly sensitive to the intellectual changes in the academic environment. After trying to put the pieces together he found what he thought was a likely culprit for what he saw happening around him.
I am not well versed on this subject, but the little I do know leaves me in agreement with many of your points regarding a Neo-Marxist conspiracy driven by postmodernist thought. That doesn't mean, however, that there were no other intellectual movements that drove much of what you outline in point 2 of Peterson's argument. Gramsci was *very* explicit about infiltrating schools with the new socialist religion. The Frankfurt School has had a much larger influence in America than the French philosophers, and I think they are the more influential predecessors of today's SJW movement.
That being said, I very much agree with your point to focus on what it is to be human rather than on the battle between Aries and Artemis. If there is such a battle, it will not be resolved by getting angry and shouting at the sky.
Good point Stephen and I'm very curious to get into Gramsci. There's a name that keeps cropping up and seems like a solid trail of breadcrumbs on this path of understanding how we got where we are
Im sorry, on some issues it's hard to be an evenhanded dispassionate intellectual, and for me it's fooolco and derrida...
They were/are the termites of civilization and their mission was to destroy reason, logic, truth and beauty, even if their wrecking ball managed to also take out a few load-bearing walls. and if that sounds overheated, just behold the works of their acolytes, not one lasting work of interest among them (certainly nothing remotely beautiful or compelling), only mountains of unreadable jargon discovering newer and more obscure forms of oppression.
And the worst part is that the French Theorists didnt mean any of it, the nihilist pose was just a way to look cool and edgy and become celebs for status-conscious american academics who swoon over anything stamped Parisian.
Derrida's project was to cut the tongue out of Western man, to brew a nihilistic acid to be poured over any statement so nothing means anything, anything can mean anything, and so now academics can teach about the opression embedded in comic books and tv shows, because hey one text is the same as any other text, only a fascist would say there's any difference bw Tolstoy and Betty & Veronica.
The signified and the signifier are like 2 ships passing in the night, words have no inherent meaning or any possible connection to ideas or concepts, the ideas true/false right/wrong smart/stupid are just oppressive binaries inflicted by the ruling class on the mute and helpless oppressed, and nothing exists but power and who holds the whip hand. The deconstructors couldn't have done a better job destroying american arts and letters than if they'd used dynamite!
Fooolco was Nietzsche's ape and dingleberry, when he really wanted to be another Sade, a sexual outlaw and rebel. What a poser!
He is beloved now because he launched a thousand conspiracy theories that turned into academic industries: hey, there are satanic structrures etching their invisible power-knowledge into everything and everyone--what does this tell us about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? He is certainly the most overrated intellectual in the history of thought.
It is obvious that they both appealed so much to Americans because their work is founded on poses of juvenile rebellion, on making sure no one can ever call you Bourgeois, and signaling your radical Leftism while never leaving the faculty lounge and always making sure the government-backed check clears.
I don't care much about Peterson, but if he hates those 2, he is my friend for life.
Thanks for the input Clever Pseudonym it's always a great read! I have to say though I disagree when it comes to Foucault (I don't know enough about Derrida to really defend him so I'll leave him off for now). I've been studying him a lot recently and have been very aware of the perceptions around the destruction of truth etc. And while that may have been something that was made of his philosophy I'm not sure that I see it in his thought at all. That's not what he was doing in his work and so I think to hold him accountable for what later people have made of his work is like holding Nietzsche accountable for being the national philosopher of the Nazis.
Foucault's initial work around science and epistemes was very much a Continental version of Thomas Kuhn. It wasn't a denial of truth but a reminder that science is not ahistorical and what is salient is determined by the cultural backdrop.
Of course the real part that would have to be examined isn't the Foucault of the 60s or 80s but the Foucault of the 70s and the discourse around knowledge/power. And while I'm still putting together Foucault's point here and trying to fully digest it I strongly feel that he has been caricatured and again the discourse around power is again not a denial of truth but an argument about the context within which what is true is determined. Think about the disinformation campaigns online and how you see both right and left, east and west forming their own notions of what is misinformation and what is truth. This is Foucauldian power/knowledge operating in plain sight. At least that's what I'd argue. It's not a denial of reality or truth or logic but a warning about the uses these things can be put to in the service of certain power games. Again I'm not at the end of my researches but I don't think this representation of Foucault which has become quite common is accurate. I imagine it's much the same with Derrida. Anyways I appreciate the detailed input as always!
Hey, thanks for your response, and I want to apologize if I got a bit overheated. I try not to comment if i'm only bringing heat not light, but when it comes to the French post-everything philosophers, I totally lose my cool.
(Not to drag this too much into the personal, but I was a Lit major in the 80s at a snooty liberal arts college, so I was there when the Marxist phoenix was reborn in American academia, and I guess I still have some "unprocessed trauma" (as the kids say these days) from the first time I read that I only loved Shakespeare and Tolstoy because of capitalist false-consciousness or however it was phrased, and at the time it struck me as both ignorant and even vaguely evil, I guess it was akin to a spiritual molestation;))
Anyway, i have to confess to only hate-reading Foucault and not really finding anything in him that I hadn't already chewed and savored in Nietzsche, but maybe someday I will be able to cool off and give him another chance.
Either way, appreciate your work and enjoy your posts.
Cheers!
Ah well I can totally see how you got there and I can see how that would totally spoil your impression of them. I guess I have the distance to interact with them alone and as such with as much charitableness as possible. I imagine if I had been in your situation I would have just as much of a sour taste left in my mouth towards them. Hopefully my future stuff on Foucault can go some way to redeeming him a little in your eyes though I must admit a total redemption is almost certainly not possible. There are things that a charitable reading cannot erase
Interesting essay. I agree with your overall assessment of JBP fighting with his shadow. He's clearly a very post-modern thinker himself, and I think his tying post-modernism with Marxism has rendered him unable to wrestle honestly with that fact.
I do take issue with your characterisation of JBP's 'post-modern neomarxism' thing has a conspiracy theory, though - apologies in advance for the lengthy response.
On 'neo-Marxism/cultural Marxism' - we know that Marxism took a 'cultural turn' in the second half of the 20th century. This is supposed to have started with Gramsci, who (to simplify somewhat) recognised that the Marxist approach up the that point had failed, and 'cultural hegemony' was needed for progress to occur.
We also know that mid-century Marxists were influenced by this idea and began a 'long march through the institutions' to achieve cultural hegemony. This is not a secret or a conspiracy theory - and we now see very clearly the outcomes of this. Surveys of the political opinions with these institutions show that the majority of university academics, journalists, teachers, etc. hold left or far-left political opinions. These people are well versed in the methods of 'critical theory', 'critical pedagogy', etc., which they learned from their own teachers and professors, and they quite openly apply these methods in their work.
On post-modernism - what does 'critical' refer to in critical theory? Essentially, it refers to the methods of Deconstruction. I'm by no means an expert on this, please correct me where I'm wrong, but my understanding is these terms refer to the methods used by post-structuralists and post-modernists to 'deconstruct' language, cultural beliefs and institutions, etc., with the goal of highlighting underlying power processes. Privilege/oppression and all that jazz.
So there's a positive vision for society and its future - Marxism, and/or a culture-focused version of it - and a method of deconstructing the old vision, which I'll just summarise as 'fascistic Western colonial capitalist patriarchy'. I don't think it's controversial to suggest that there is a significant portion of people in 'the institutions' that have this as their explicit goal.
Whether this is a good thing or not is left to the reader - certainly some aspects of Western culture need to be criticised! - but to say that everything above is a conspiracy theory is simply untrue. And while JBP can get pretty melodramatic when speaking on politics, I don't believe he's ever claimed anything more than what I've outlined above. There are no 'shadowy cabals' in JBP's work.