Jordan Peterson Accidentally Helped Me Realize I'm a Post-Modernist

Can it really be less than 24 hours since I began to read Derrida? Yes. It be.

About a week and a half ago, I first started to notice the existence of Jordan Peterson, in the remarks of otherwise seemingly sedate and reasonable people expressing extreme distaste for him. I soon heard Peterson, on YouTube, describing what he asserted was postmodernism. I was hazy about what exactly postmodernism was, but not so hazy that I couldn't see that what Peterson was saying had to be inaccurate.

More precisely: Peterson is warning us all about neo-Marxist postmodernists. He claims neo-Marxist postmodernists want to destroy Western civilization. That they say people belong in groups determined by their ethnicity and gender, and that all these groups are condemned to war against each other forever.

So I did what I could have done decades ago: I turned to actual Marxists and postmodernists for their definitions of Marxism and postmodernism, and learned that, outside of the imaginations of people like Peterson and his fans, neo-Marxist postmodernists don't exist: a defining characteristic of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all meta-narratives, and Marxism IS one of those very meta-narratives.

Now: Marxists and postmodernists will agree about SOME things. Such as that Jordan Peterson is constantly making stuff up and selling it at high prices as invaluable truth. But any reasonable person of any political or philosophical tendency will see that, if he or she takes a little time and effort to examine the matter.

A huge bell went off in my head, because, for decades, I had been skeptical toward all meta-narratives. I'm always insisting that things are more complicated than that. You know that episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa is reading some Buddhist literature, and has a sudden epiphany and yells, "I'M A BUDDHIST!" Same thing happened to me, except I didn't yell, and I realized I'm a postmodernist, not a Buddhist.

Yesterday, I began reading the 40th anniversary revised edition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's English translation of Derrida's On Grammatology, with an introduction by Judith Butler and a new Afterword by Spivak, and, people: these are my peeps.

And we don't want to destroy Western civilization or war against all other groups. Derrida is a total Western-civilization-phile from Homer to Heidegger.

My advice, besides checking out Derrida and Spivak and Butler, is to not believe anything Peterson says. About anything. At all. Ever. When Peterson disses a dead writer like Derrida or a living one like Butler, READ THAT WRITER.

Man, wouldn't it be a huge irony if Jordan Peterson, of all people, unintentionally caused people to read more good books?

It was with some reluctance that I sought out an English translation of a book by Derrida, rather than the French original, but undergraduate French classes were a long, long time ago. In the case of Of Grammatology, I was fortunate -- we all are fortunate -- because Spivak, the translator of Of Grammatology, is a tremendous writer in her own right. I have no idea, yet, what the quality of other English translations of Derrida or other French postmodernists might be.

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.

Jordan Peterson and Young Love

The top panel is an actual political cartoon by a conservative political cartoonist, portraying today's young men as the tragic victims of political correctness run amok. I have a strong suspicion that this cartoonist and Jordan Peterson would get along just swell.

In the bottom panel, the same cartoon has been just slightly revised, in order to explain to Peterson and the rightwing boneheads who revere him that things really aren't all that bad for young buckos who can reasonably expect to be up for big promotions 30 years from now.

If you're not sure: ASK.

If you're not interested in whether or not it's okay with the other person: YOU'RE A PREDATOR AND A CRIMINAL.

Very simple. Very straightforward. And young men are not being oppressed by it.

Jordan Peterson Is a Climate-Change Denier --

I'm trying to find something Jordan Peterson has said or written which isn't both erroneous and right-wing -- including his claim that he's not right wing. You see all those wingnuts praising him? Me too. You see any Leftists claiming him as one of our own? Me neither.

There's climate change: Peterson said it isn't happening. He compares people who say that climate change is happening and that humans are making it worse and that it we don't make major changes it will kill us all -- that's most of the people on the planet, right? Most of the people on the face of the Earth, and well over 90% of the experts on climatology, agree that climate change is happening, and that we humans are making it worse, and that if we don't make major changes it will kill us all -- Peterson compares those billions of us to old men walking around in robes with bald heads and long beards, carrying signs proclaiming "THE END IS NEAR!" Peterson's insults, like his take on the climate, are decades out of date.

Peterson claims that smart women want smarter men as mates, and that strong women want stronger men, because they want to be dominated and controlled. ...Eh, res ipsa loquitur. It's hordes of frustrated young men who are flocking to Peterson, not great crowds of women who think that he is stronger and smarter than they are, and therefore find him irresistible.

And by the way: Peterson claims that he's not anti-LGBT+, but this and other positions he has taken, much like a lot of the worst stand-up comedy of the past few decades, fail to account for the existence of non-heterosexuals.

If Peterson is an actual expert in anything, it's mythology: he's studied many myths. He can tell you the stories -- it's when he tries to tell you what they mean that the familiar right-wing gasbag appears again. Peterson, like Jung, insists that myths lead us to universal truths, when the truth is closer to the opposite: myths distract us from uncomfortable truths which we are in danger of learning. Peterson wants the truth? He wants me to tell him the truth?! HE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

And that's the truth!

Lobsters and dominance and serotonin, anyone? Peterson says we share ancestry with lobsters, the most recent shared ancestors having lived 350 million years ago, and that lobsters get a nice serotonin rush by dominating other lobsters and maintaining the lobster hierarchy.

Our most recent shared ancestors with lobsters lived more like 500 million years ago, or more, than 350 million years ago. Our most recent shared ancestors with chimpanzees and bonobos lived several million years ago. Lobsters and chimpanzees and bonobos, in their natural states, live outside. Chimpanzees throw their poo. Humans and chimps and bonobos and lobsters and bananas and some single-celled organisms all have serotonin, and humans eat lobsters and bananas. The wide range of social structures and hierarchies among chimpanzees and bonobos, who are much more closely related to us than lobsters, would tend to suggest that lobsters having one particular sort of hierarchy is irrelevant to understanding human sociology.

Some leftist critics of Peterson say that he will soon go from revered guru to universal laughingstock, as it becomes understood that his supposedly deep understanding of various branches of knowledge is mud-puddle deep at best. I hope so. The more broadly-dispersed and deep scientific and other academic forms of literacy are, the more quickly will come the time when it is generally understood that Peterson was never more than a charlatan posing as a multi-faceted intellectual. I had at first feared that Peterson might pose a great challenge to my ambitions for Leftist intellectual credibility. Now, after two short posts about him, it feels as if my work on him is just about done. There's no substance there with which to grapple. The man is quite simply a raving loon.

Jordan Peterson, Marxism and Postmodernism

Jordan Peterson is a horse's ass, a pseudo-intellectual, someone that stupid people can follow and believe that they're engaging in intellectual discourse.

One of Peterson's favorite topics are the neo-Marxist postmodernists who have taken over our campuses and are busy enslaving the minds of our youth. Peterson goes into very great detail about the history, motives and goals of this movement of neo-Marxist postmodernists, as if he were a great authority on the subject of neo-Marxist postmodernism.

Here's an example of how far Peterson is from being a real intellectual, or a real authority on anything at all: there is no such thing as a Marxist postmodernist, neo-Marxist or not, and there is no such thing as a postmodernist Marxist. One of the most central and basic features of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all-encompassing theories of society. Marxism IS such an all-encompassing theory: namely, the theory that all human history has been the history of economic class struggle. Marxism insists that it all boils down to that. Postmodernism, in response to Marxism and to any other theory which insists that person A responds in manner X because of condition 1, for example, Freudianism and its insistence that all human behavior can be reduced, ultimately, to the sexual impulse, says that people are free and can respond differently, that they are not bound by economic or sexual forces or by any other universal conditions. Postmodernism is always insisting that things are a little more complicated.

As for historical context, postmodernism arose in the form of philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida in opposition to a Marxist domination of certain parts of French academia in the 1960's. At the time, the Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was about as popular as Peterson is in the US right now. Fortunately for France, Sartre was very far from being a horse's ass.

But why take my word for any of this? Some Marxist works written in opposition to postmodernism include Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: The Cultural logic of Late Capitalism, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity, and Alex Callinicos' Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critque

As to Peterson's assertion that we can learn from the social hierarchies of lobsters, if you're not already laughing out loud, you can ask an evolutionary biologist about that one. Probably just about any evolutionary biologist would do.

Kellyanne Conway Mentions -- TODAY -- That She was Sexually Assaulted

A couple of hours ago, if you had asked me whether I'd ever immediately be suspicious of a woman who'd claimed to have been sexually assaulted, I probably would've said no. Then, on this Sunday morning's political-talk TV, Kellyanne Conway said she'd been sexually assaulted.

The woman who over the past 2 years has been the 2nd most-notorious, most-shameless, most-obvious and most-disgusting liar in the entire world, closely following the man she's been working for for those 2 years, The President of the United States, who has bragged about assaulting women, and then lied and said he never bragged about it, after we all heard him on tape bragging about it.

You may have heard the story of the boy who cried wolf. The point of the story is not whether wolves actually showed up or not. Wolves do show up in the story. The point of the story is that when they did show up, nobody believed the boy who was trying to warn them about the wolves, because the boy had proven himself to be a lying sack of crap.

On CNN this morning, on Jake Tapper's "State of the Union," in a conversation about Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court, Conway said, “I feel very empathetic, frankly, for victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape. I’m a victim of sexual assault.”

First and foremost: if Kellyanne said that the sky is blue, I'd have to go outside and check, because it had been Kellyanne who said it. Secondly, she's claiming NOW that she has been assaulted. The same woman who has been trotted out over and over by the Trump administration during their frequent sexual-harassment and assault scandals in order to criticize the press for using the issue of sexual harassment and assault politically.

But she didn't stop by claiming, TODAY, that she has been sexually assaulted. Tapper, quite naturally, pointed out that this is the first time that she has publicly mentioned being assaulted, and that she works for a President who says that every single woman who claims that he has assaulted them is lying. Conway responded by saying:

"Don’t conflate that with this and certainly don’t conflate that with what happened to me. It would be a huge mistake, Jake. Let’s not do it. Let’s not always bring Trump into everything that happens in this universe. That’s mistake number one."

This is another example of the sheer head-spinning depth and shamelessness of Conway's dishonesty. If she didn't work for Trump, you and I would never have heard her name. If Kavanaugh, the President's nominee for the Supreme Court, weren't under very serious suspicion of multiple acts of sexual assault, the same as the President himself and many other men close to him, nobody would've been talking about sexual assault on the Sunday-morning political-talk shows today. Tapper didn't bring Trump into this conversation: Trump was already right in the middle of it, of his own doing. But today, as always, no matter what the topic, Kellyanne tried to make it sound as if Trump and those with Trump were being persecuted for reasons of unfathomable, unreasonable, fanatical partisanship. As if his critics, and not Trump, were the one doing violence to truth and integrity.

Well, you know Kellyanne: just chock-full of shit, right up to her chin, today as always.

Ronald Syme Redux

Seven years ago, I published on this blog a post in which I declared, among other things, that I found the prose of Ronald Syme to be unreadable.

In that post, I jokingly speculated whether there had been something wrong with Syme's medulla oblongata, and mocked his prose style thusly:

"Syme irritates me with the over-use of periods. Which unnecessarily breaks up medium- to long-sized sentences. Into smaller ones. Which in turn leads to the above-mentioned conjecture. About the poor man's lower brain stem. A medical speculation not necessarily to be taken seriously. And not the only stylistic affection of Syme's which annoys me. But to find the others, I'd have to read more Syme. Which I really don't want to do. So suffice it for now to say that the turnip would use twelve periods after the last semicolon above. By the time I would use one. If I were not mocking him."

Ronald Syme, for those of you still wondering, lived from 1903 to 1989 and was among the the 20th century's most prominent Classical scholars and historians of ancient Rome. In fact, in the years since writing the above-mentioned dismissal of him on the grounds of unreadability, I kept coming across his name in the work and footnotes of other scholars, so often and with such positive remarks that I finally decided, quite recently, that I had to try again to read his work, that I had no choice, that surely the problem was with me and not with the way Syme wrote.

Whatever my problem was, it's now gone, to my amazement. I now find that my above-quoted satire of his prose is quite unfair, because far from all of his sentences are extremely short, and those which are I now find to be justifiably so. I now find Syme's prose quite good, witty, extremely erudite, polished, elegant -- in short, suddenly, my opinion of his writing now much more closely resembles the opinion of the rest of the world, and my earlier distaste is now mysterious to me, as it surely must have been to anyone else who'd noticed it.

I had two of Syme's books laying around, The Roman Revolution, first published in 1939, and Ammianus and the Historia Augusta, first published in 1968. I devoured the former with great delight and am now struggling, with just as much delight, with the subtleties and many, many footnotes of the latter. I had already begun to, as Edward Gibbon put it, "dive into the ocean" of the Historia Augusta. Now, unlike Gibbon, I have the very best guide to the flora and fauna of that ocean.

As has the rest of the world, for the past half-century. I apologize to the rest of the world, and to Syme's memory, for taking so long to catch up.

In case you're wondering what the Historia Augusta are: they are a collection of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, purported compiled by six authors writing in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine. Or, as the world has gradually been figuring out since Hermann Dessau had a major breakthrough in the late 19th century, they are a parody of biographies of 2nd- and 3rd- century Roman Emperors, written by one jokester in the late 4th century or later. Back when they were considered to be historical writing, the more perceptive of later historians, such as Gibbon, were constantly cursing them for the many errors they contained. Now, when they're seen as historical fiction with a satirical bent, as many papers and volumes and conferences are devoted to them, as speculation rages about who actually wrote them and when, we're able to see more and more delicious jokes in them. They are, as Syme says, a "garden of delights."