Jordan Peterson is Not an Intellectual, He Just Plays One on YouTube

PZ Meyers sez we should call Jordan Peterson what he is: an anti-intellectual. I'm down with that. (And it's nice to be able to agree with PZ Meyers about something for a change.)

This takedown of Peterson by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs is wonderful. I take exception with Robinson referring to Peterson as an intellectual. But Robinson makes it clear that he uses the term very loosely:

"In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. But we do not live in a reasonable world."

And I also take issue with Robinson's... okay, I was about to say that I take issue with Robinson's characterization of Peterson as "the intellectual we deserve," and giving some of the responsibility for Peterson's success to the sorry state of the Left -- but then I remembered the Occupy movement and their position that "it's okay not to have goals" and how that has always struck me as a particularly poor attitude for a (supposedly) political movement to take.

But in this post, I'm about accentuating the upside. I see intellectuals (real ones) being energized by Peterson. If anyone ever could energize and unite Marxists, postmodernists, intersectional feminists, philosophers in general, English teachers, evolutionary biologists, comparative mythologists and other (real) intellectuals who normally don't necessarily all get along so well with each other, then surely it's Mr Go Clean Up Your Room There Bucko. If any one person ever could inspire us to go grab the public by its mental lapels and explain to them just who really does and does not deserve to be called an intellectual, it's Peterson, with his constant and thorough misrepresentation of who we are and what we do and say and want.

Oh and by the way, let me take the opportunity to address the reason I've seen most often proposed by writers on the Right for the Left's hostility to Peterson: the amount of money that he makes. That's absurd. George Clooney has made over a billion dollars so far, many times as much as Peterson, and we're not pissed off at him. Because Clooney isn't constantly talking out of his ass.

I'd also like to address the excuses so often being made for him by critics on the Left: he's not so bad, they say. Yes, very many of his fans are alt-right and antisemitic and brimming with toxic sexism and otherwise atavistic, but he's not far-right. How much longer will the non-Right keep giving Peterson this thoroughly undeserved concession? Wake up and smell the barbed wire: he's far-right. That's why all of those fans of his are far-right (and very often deny that they are, perhaps oftener than not). I know of only one admiring description of Peterson from the Left -- except, to be precise, it's from an author, a fellow mythologist, who sez "I'm a Leftist and I like Peterson." I'm not sure whether anyone else sez that that guy is a Leftist.

Someone Suggested That We "Ban The Cross"

The more I think about that rallying cry, "Let's ban the cross!" the more aggravated I get.

Unless the dude was just satirizing things like "Let's ban burkas," in which case, good one, he got me! Or if he means that crucifixion should be banned. I'm down with that, because crucifixion is a particularly cruel method of execution. But I don't think that's what he means.

I'm afraid this guy really meant it, but what exactly does he have in mind -- confiscating things, smashing them up because they don't coincide with his world view? I'm assuming that this, unfortunately, isn't a joke. New Atheists, not all of them, but a few of the more excitable ones, do say things like this now and then. When the Taliban or ISIS actually do things like that, they're first in line to denounce it, but they rarely if ever seem to see how much their words have in common with some of the deeds they denounce.

And they're also first in line, whenever Islamist extremist make headlines, to demand things like "banning Islam," which of course is about as stupid as trying to "ban the cross."

Are we talking about crosses on government property, or everywhere? I assume the crosses on rosaries would be included -- how many millions of those crosses are there? Plus all the non-rosary crucifixes on necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc.

does this maniac want to destroy only 3-D crosses, or is he also going after depictions of crosses in paintings, and in books about art which have reproductions of those paintings?

I can't imagine that this guy has thought this through.

It's clear that I'm against the suggestion of banning the cross, right? I think it's a completely cuckoo-bananas idea. And even most New Atheists, I believe, would not go along with it.

Well -- maybe most of them would. It's not as if they ever do anything practical or meaningful, in their capacities as New Atheists.

There are pictures of crosses on this blog, does this bozo want to come after my blog? You know what, there's a picture of a cross in one of his online avatars as well. I wonder whether he'd make an exception for satirical and/or obscene or scatological anti-religious pictures. If not, he'd not only have to destroy his own avatar somehow, he'd have to go after a lot of images made by and for other New Atheists.

When someone suggests destroying every copy of the Koran, New Atheists don't generally get upset and say Sit down and shut up you idiot. As a matter a fact, although, obviously, they're incapable of destroying every Koran, they have destroyed a few, and acted very proud of themselves, like they think they accomplished something. At least one of the leaders of New Atheism, PZ Myers, piled garbage and excrement onto a copy of the Koran and took pictures of it and put them on the Internet.

Often New Atheists claim that they're against all religions equally, and that may actually be true in some cases. Often they'll come right out and say that they're more against Islam than any other religion. Typically, they'll add that Islamophobia doesn't exist.

And, they often look at public opinion polls saying so-and-so-many percent of Amurrkins would never vote for an atheist for President, and they wonder why. The atheists who are currently most famous for being atheists are fanatically, stupidly Islamophobic, and generally crude and clueless on other religions too. They don't go around demanding that the cross be banned, but they're not that far from such stupid public statements either. They've bred the subculture where a call to ban the cross generates hardly a batted eye or a Hey what do you mean you moron. They don't denounce stupid anti-religious statements, they make constant excuses for them. And they are, for worse, for much worse, currently the public face of atheism. Vote for Myers or Sam Harris for President? Neither one could get elected dog-catcher of Portland. If either of them ran against a jihadist for POTUS, the jihadist's chances would be good.

Atheists who aren't idiots need to stand up to the idiots. For our own good. Having the answer to one question in common with them isn't enough to overlook their stupid, hare-filled fanaticism.

Atheists Need To Stand Up To New Atheists

If you don't know who I mean by New Atheists, if you read this post all the way through, you will.

Hundreds of years ago, some of the people who didn't believe that God or any gods existed were afraid to call themselves atheists, and so they called themselves skeptics instead. Sadly, it's happening again.

Today, there are atheists who are choosing not to publicly refer to themselves as atheists, because they're afraid that if they do, people will assume that they agree with Richard Dawkins when he compares Trinity College in Cambridge to "the Muslim world" and tacitly assumes that Nobel Prizes are an objective measure of a culture's achievements; or with the late Christopher Hitchens' assertion, important enough to him that he made it a subtitle of one of his books, that "religion poisons everything;" or with Sam Harris when he says -- just about anything; or admire PZ Myers for covering a copy of Koran with garbage and feces. Or maybe they're afraid that people will assume that they share the Islamophobia or the large gaps in the education in history of all four of the above... They choose not to call themselves atheists, to behave as if the word does not mean what it meant when the big atheist superstars were Russell and Sartre instead of Dawkins and Harris, because they're afraid.

And so they're hiding behind less clear labels like "skeptic" or "non-believer" or, if they're even a little bit more cowardly than that, they just keep going to church, and claim on Facebook they if they come out of the atheist closet they'll be lynched. In the last instance I'm not talking about atheists living in countries where atheists actually have been killed, sometimes by the authorities. I'm talking about the cowardly atheists in the US who claim that if they publicly acknowledge that they're atheists, they will be risking their lives.

But back to the "skeptics" and "non-believers" : the thing is that "atheist" does -- for the time being, anyway -- still mean what it meant back when Bertie and Jean-Paul were kicking ass and taking names and winning Nobel Prizes in Literature (Ai kan also haz??) "Atheist" still refers, for the vast majority of the population, to anyone and everyone who thinks that God and gods and miracles and resurrections and so forth are all make-believe.

But even beyond that -- what has ever been the point of anyone calling him- or herself an atheist? Outside of the Communist bloc, it hasn't ever been done in order to increase one's chances of winning political office. It's been done for the sake of honesty. For the sake of clarity. For the sake of good sense. (I've stopped using the phrase "common sense," because as time goes on it becomes more and more clear to me how uncommon good sense is.)

And so, in order to be as clear and precise as possible, if you're an atheist who realizes that a phenomenon that has included billions of people over tens of thousands of years is far, far too complex to be referred to as all bad, an atheist who's noticed both all of the Muslims being killed by majority-Christian nations and all the Muslims fighting ISIS and fighting extremism in general and just can't go along with the fearmongering Islamophobic bullshit of Dawkins and Harris and Hitch, an atheist who finds it disgusting and counter-productive when someone literally craps on books, or who knows several things wrong about describing authors of the Bible as "Bronze-Age goat herders" -- if you're all or any of those kinds of an atheist, the thing to do is to say so. And not to surrender the label "atheist" to the fans of Dawkins, Hitch, Harris, Myers, Dennett, Coyne & Co.

It occurs to me that the situation may already have grown so ridiculously confused that not only some atheists, but also many religious people may agree with Hitchens' slogan "religion poisons everything." without agreeing with Hitchens or me or any other atheists (or skeptics or non-believers, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to) in any particulars whatsoever. I'm talking about the so-called "spiritual but not religious." Like the "skeptics" and "non-believers" who are actually atheists but prefer to be obscure, to hide from the danger of association with the barbarian New Atheist hordes, the "spiritual but not religious" have differences with people who share certain metaphysical beliefs with them (the set of beliefs known as "religion"), and instead of directly confronting those specific differences, whether they have to do with hierarchy in religious organizations, or corruption in religious hierarchies, or with politics -- instead of dealing with those specific issues, the "spiritual but not religious" have preferred to pretend that the term "religious" suddenly does not mean what it means. There are a lot of Buddhists who suddenly are pretending that Buddhism is not a religion and never was, and that Buddhism who think or thought it is or was a religion are or were doin' it wrong.

I think that we atheists should leave this sort of semantic nonsense to religious people, along with their metaphysical nonsense. If you don't believe God exists and you do believe Dawkins has become a huge jackass since he stopped studying biology a decade ago, or you have differences with Harris or Hitch or Myers -- or with Russell or Sartre or Nietzsche or Twain, or with me, or with anyone else who identifies as an atheist -- I think you should call yourself an atheist and talk directly and clearly about your specific differences with those other atheists.

Why? Because if you correctly identify yourself as an atheist, there's a greater chance that others will understand what you're talking about. Abandoning the term will only lead to confusion -- it has only led to confusion. Simple and plain as that. And again, what ever has been the point of any of us (outside of the Communist bloc) opposing religion and exposing ourselves to so much aggravation, if it has not been for the sake of greater understanding and greater clarity, and for the sake making more sense and speaking more plainly than those others in their churches and temples and mosques, and for the sake of striving to be better than those who know better but would thrive on the confusion of others?

Someone Asked Me What "New Atheists" Are, And How They're Different From "Old Atheists"

Dawkins, Harris, PZ Myers and their fans are New Atheists. Hitchens and Victor Stenger were New Atheists. They combine a cluelessness about history and religion and the humanities with a propensity for making sweeping inaccurate statements about them, and don't seem interested in ideas concerning religion which are more complicated than sound bites. Some prominent examples:

Dawkins started the "Bronze Age goat herders" meme. (Coincidentally, he also coined the term "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene, back when he was doing something he did exceptionally well: writing about biology.) Point out to a typical New Atheist that the oldest parts of the Bible were written in the Iron Age, by town-dwellers, and that the Israelites' primary livestock animal was sheep, not goats, and the typical response is "So what?" So why do you keep repeating Dawkins' meme, that's what.

On p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins approvingly quoted GG Simpson's pronouncement that we should completely forget about all attempts made before 1859 to answer the question, "What is man?" That should have warned me that neither Simpson nor Dawkins knew very much at all about things written up to 1859, and led me to expect things like Dawkins' activity since 2004, when he's published very little work in biology.

More recently Dawkins tweeted the fact that there were more Nobel prize winners from Trinity College than from "the entire Muslim world." Immediately I and a whole bunch of other people pointed out cultural bias, duh! in the awarding of Nobels. Last I heard Dawkins hasn't felt the need to reply to any of us about that. It's getting more and more difficult to take him seriously except in a very negative way.

Hitchens created a very popular meme in the subtitle of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.



But of course it doesn't poison EVERYthing. Life's much more complicated than that, billions of people's lives over the course of tens of thousands of years, and yes, I'm saying that if you want to say something deep about religion, you have to have at least an inkling of all of those billions of people's lives, or at the very best you're only going to say something deep every now and then, completely by accident.

Michael Paulkovich is a New Atheist, and the editors of Free Inquiry demonstrated quintessential New Atheist behavior when they published an article because they liked the sound bite: "126 ancient authors who should've mentioned Jesus but didn't," without seeming to care at all about checking into whether or not Paulkovich is making any sense. He's not.



Sam Harris is a peculiarly mid-19th-century sort of New Atheist: his moral philosophy is utilitarian, like that of John Suart Mill, as if he hadn't heard of how Mill had been thoroughly dismantled by the late 19th century by people like Nietzsche.



Dawkins has a lot of credibility in the filed of biology, richly deserved, but he's helped to give an undeserved credibility to New Atheism. It's very bad luck that these people are currently the public face of atheism, but we atheists who actually know something about history, philosophy, the arts and religion -- about the humanities -- just have to speak up louder and more persistently. That's the only way that an intelligent and informed public discussion of religion will get underway.

If You're An Atheist, That doesn't Necessarily Mean We're Pals (Maybe You Noticed That Already)

AN ATHEIST-BUT-NOT-NEW-ATHEIST MANIFESTO

About like-mindedness: there is so much more to people's minds -- well, to some minds -- than that one freaking issue of whether God exists. Over the past several years I've met so many atheists online whom I do not like at all. There's at least one, Richard Dawkins,



whom I used to like quite a lot, until I started to read what he had to say on religious topics. Well, there were warning signs already in his work on biology. Right there on p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins announces,

"We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"

Besides warning me that I probably wouldn't like G G Simpson either, Dawkins gave a big hint there that he might turn out to be the kind of moron who'd go around making sweeping statements about Islam while admitting that he hadn't read the Koran and didn't plan to.



There's so much worthwhile stuff which was written before 1859.



And it makes my head whirl that I need to point that out because somebody as brilliant in biology as Dawkins is so fucking stupid about so much else. And yet here we are. The fish which is New Atheism stinks from the head, which is Dawkins. I agree with them about atheism. I agree that humans invented God and not the other way around. But that's just one question. Answering it correctly doesn't necessarily mean you're a genius, and getting wrong doesn't necessarily mean you're not. Dismissing so much written before 1859 as glibly as Dawkins and Simpson is a pretty good sign (I saw it, I saw the sign, it's right there in black-and-white as big as day p 1 of The Selfish Gene) that they might have other remarkably stupid things to say.

And Dawkins has been saying and writing stupid things for a living for over a decade now, having given up what he was good at, biology. And he's been so hugely successful at it that millions of people are now following the 2nd part of it, saying stupid banal inaccurate uninformed things against religion, without having emulated the more honorable 1st part, having become brilliant at something else first, be it biology or what have you. Coyne and Myers are accomplished biologists like Dawkins, but Harris skipped straight to the stupid, banal, inaccurate and uninformed anti-religious part, and is probably the 2nd-most commercially successful New Atheist behind Dawkins.



I have no problem with them saying things against religion, I say things against religion myself all the time. It's the stupid banal inaccurate uninformed part that annoys me, and which should concern any atheist who wishes to see the influence of religion wane and die its natural death at long last. I don't think this stuff is helping. And I don't think that I'm being excessive when I say that what Dawkins and Coyne and Myers and Harris have to say about religion is stupid. Ignorance is one thing. It's simply not knowing, and it can be remedied. But stupidity is not knowing and not wanting to know, it's being ignorant and proud of it. And stupidity is tenacious.

If you want religion to go away you have to know what it is, you have to study it like an epidemiologist studies disease. Otherwise you're just jerking off and getting in the way, like Dawkins, Harris & Co.

I'd love to talk to Dawkins about biology. Sadly, he doesn't seem much interested in biology anymore. It's a waste and a shame.

So much for atheists whom I dislike. Now to religious people I love: I don't see the problem here, I don't know why it should surprise anyone that there are religious believers with whom I get along very well, with whom I love to talk about all sorts of things -- even religion, sometimes. The most interesting people to talk to on any subject tend to be the ones who know the most about that subject, duh. And on the subject of religion, those people aren't the New Atheists, big duh. You want to talk about the Council of Nicea or the Merovingians or the Templars or the origins of the Grail myth with someone who knows more about them than



Dan Freaking Brown, there's a good chance you're going to end up talking to some very interesting and well-educated Christians. (And enjoying yourself, perhaps to your shame, if you're used to hanging with New Atheists.)

If you want to talk to some experts about Tolkien and Harry Potter and



Spider-Man, a gathering of New Atheists might be an even better place to look for them than a Comic-Con. They'll probably be well-above average in their knowledge of biology and physics, too. Credit where credit's due.