He's a University of Toronto clinical psychologist who first earned his fame standing up for free speech. Or maybe he stood up for hate speech if you want to call it that. A consistent commitment to absolutely free speech doesn't seem very tenable these days, so I guess we're seeing how far we're going to allow that ball to roll.
The bottom line was that there was a bill mandating gender neutral pronouns, and Jordan Peterson didn't like that. He called them the artificial constructions of radical ideologues. So he testified before the senate, debated it, and protested the issue on talk shows.
So the guy found some popularity. Tens of thousands followed the matter. But it wasn't until his interview on Channel 4 News conducted by Cathy Newman that his popularity jumped into the millions.
My interpretation of the interview is the same as many people's. Cathy tries to cram words into his mouth, argue with a fabricated picture of Jordan, and because like so many she has sacralized gender equality, she's unable to engage in nuance, statistical literacy, or intellectual empathy.
In contrast how did he come off? Well, he calmly and comprehensively rebutted her. Though you can see both of them becoming increasingly uncomfortable as the interview went on.
Afterward, a dozen awful articles were written framing him as a bully, and her as a victim. But my sense is that for every one person who thought he was a villain, there were 20 who thought he was a hero.
And this is very interesting because we never hear from those people who are annoyed with the radical PC left. If they're anything like me, they're not exactly conservatives. But they keep quiet because their friends to the left are so damn hostile about these sorts of things. I mean, on Facebook if I even suggest that men and women are biologically different, and that might have something to do with differences in the gender pay gap, the reaction will be pure fury.
So people like me who would love to vote for the liberal side, instead votes for Trump, or votes third party, or doesn't vote at all. I suspect there are a lot of people like this, and Jordan Peterson's following demonstrates it.
I also found it interesting that Trump ran not on racism, but on anti-PC, and garnered immense popularity as a result. Peterson does not have much in common with Trump, but the nerve they hit into was the same.
The video above was actually my first introduction to Jordan Peterson. I watched it for Jonathan Haidt, not for Jordan Peterson, but Peterson still made an impression on me. He was able to have such a "psychological geek conversation" with Jonathan Haidt, and then the overlap with Paul Bloom's psychology lectures lent Peterson even more intellectual credit in my eyes.
Put Steven Pinker in a room with Jon Haidt, Jordan Peterson, and Paul Bloom, and my world might explode.
Jordan Peterson also has a series of lectures on the psychological significance of biblical stories. These lectures are long and packed. An idea I found especially interesting is that knowledge can be embedded in our subconscious before it's fully articulated or even cognitively recognized. This kind of background knowledge can manifest itself in behavior or even dreams. Maybe it's not true, but it's really interesting.
The other big idea that I took away from these lectures is this: because these biblical stories were handed down verbally for many many years, they had to be remembered. This mechanism weeded out unmemorable aspects of these stories. What's left is only the most memorable aspects, and that's how these stories get their psychological power. That's why we find such depth in even the shortest of passages. That, to me, is fascinating.
The best article I've read about Jordan Peterson is called, How Awful is Jordan Peterson.
But Mr. Peterson is not the leading public intellectual of our age. He can be turgid. Much of what he says is not terribly original. A lot of it is a skillful summation of the science – not the science taught in gender-studies courses, but the science taught in evolutionary psychology. His strength is that he tackles important subjects in an accessible way.One insightful criticism of Peterson is that he has gained a lot of stature by attacking post-modernists who are intellectually weak. The same blogger mentioned that,
There is something disconcerting about the fact that his ideas seem to come across better in a format that allows for less editorial polishingThat seems fair to me.
Conservatives tend to frame things with a civilization vs. barbarism story (as opposed to the oppression frame of liberals). Looking at things this way, it seems like Jordan Peterson is on the right. His warnings of civilization's degradation also fits him into the right wing according to the thrive/survive theory of the political spectrum. Jordan Peterson also believes in God and is something like a Christian, albeit not a traditional or fundamentalist one - another right wing quality. But Peterson seems nothing like the far right. Making him one of the few right wing intellectuals I can stand.
