notorious jbp
Hell Arrives Step By Step
Unfortunately, people often act in spite of their conscience—even if they know it— and hell tends to arrive step by step, one betrayal after another. And it should be remembered that it is rare for people to stand up against what they know to be wrong even when the consequences for doing so are comparatively slight. And this is something to deeply consider, if you are concerned with leading a moral and careful life: if you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?
— Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
The Lady of the House was recently stunned when a longtime friend of hers, whom I will call Rubashov, talked about a recent incident in which his favorite podcaster from Slate was “indefinitely suspended” over a Slack conversation in which he used that word, the N-word, the Slur Which Shall Not be Named, in the context of a quotation, while debating what he naïvely thought to be the open question of whether or not there were any contexts in which it was appropriate. She wasn’t stunned by the incident, which is all too typical of the infantile moral panic possessing the media-academia complex these days; it was the fact that Rubashov, rather than offer some mild dissent in defense of his favorite podcaster, was supportive of his canceling. He didn’t actually quote the old line about breaking eggs to make an omelette, but he might as well have.
What appalled her the most was how quickly Rubashov had internalized the Orwellian imperative to judge even the recent past by the shifting political standards of the present. When did this rule about not being allowed to speak or write certain words, regardless of context, come into effect? Five minutes ago? Isn’t it a bit harsh to ruin someone’s career over that? Doesn’t matter. The Committee of Public Safety has decreed it to be an offense at this moment, so it is. (Until ten minutes from now, when the new head of the CPS, having taken power in a coup, reverses the directive and orders everyone fired for supporting the former head, who stands revealed as a sexist saboteur, racist wrecker, transphobic Trumpskyist, and on and on.) Many people, forgivably or not, might be cowards in public, or in their place of employment. But it takes a special level of invertebracy to echo the party line even among friends, even when there is no risk. One wonders whether our Rubashov will go willingly to his own cancellation, secure in the knowledge that it’s all for the best that he become one more egg in the Social Justice Omelette.
Carry Zeroes Over Till They Add Up
As millions of Americans escape home quarantine to the great outdoors this summer, they’ll venture into parks, campgrounds and forest lands that remain stubborn bastions of self-segregation.@devindwyer reports. https://t.co/Xzmouf4bwM pic.twitter.com/e8PckJcVqn
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) July 1, 2020
I don’t have any special prophetic powers, but I would suggest taking note of that term, “self-segregation.” It may sound like a weaponized strain of parody that escaped from a lab, but as the demand for racism continues to dramatically exceed the supply, I’d be willing to bet that we’ll soon be hearing a lot more of it in earnest. Anyway, I sure don’t want to be a racist hiker, so it sounds to me like the logical conclusion here is to round up some blacks, Hispanics and Asians, load them up with camping supplies, and march them off into the wilderness to decolonize the outdoors. Sorry, what? Well, no. Why would I ask them if they want to do it? Who cares what individuals want to do? The point is to make the demographics fit on this Procrustean bed of ours. Numbers! Numbers are what we care about, not subjective experience!
Speaking of which:
The great Thomas Sowell, whose books should be on every intelligent adult’s bedside table, just celebrated his 90th birthday on June 30th. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, and you’d like to hop on the bandwagon while he’s still around, and if you had to pick one book relevant to our current topic, I’d recommend Discrimination and Disparities, in which he labors heroically to dispel precisely this fallacy, that all disparities in outcome are the result of malicious discrimination. That thread, if tugged upon, really does unravel the whole progressive ball of yarn. We’ve all heard conservatives claim to be in favor of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Progressives see this as a strawman, claiming that, if anything, they’re in favor of true equality of opportunity, which can’t exist as long as privilege, systemic discrimination, etc. exist. In practice, this amounts to being in favor of equality of outcome, because anything less is assumed to be illegitimate. Individual black people may claim to simply not be interested in hiking through national parks, but what if they’re only saying that because they’ve been imperfectly shaped by their history, both personal and collective? What would they choose if we could redo the past?
Is it fate?
Or is it just a cold heart?
Did I win the race?
Or was it just a false start?— The Obsessed, “Touch of Everything“
Many of us can recall discussions of free will in philosophy class. We probably all discussed the possibility of what it means to “choose” under coercion. If a criminal holds a gun to your head and commands you to do something appalling and/or illegal in order to save your life, is it truly a choice? Can you reasonably be faulted or blamed for not choosing death?
For progressives, history is that gun held to our heads. The circumstances into which we were born, the limitations placed upon us by genetics and upbringing, the imperfect choices we make with limited information throughout our lives — all of these infringements upon our ability to truly, freely choose from all possible options are seen as coercion. Like all virtues, liberalism can be taken too far and turned into a vice. It’s not enough to remove as many overt obstacles as possible in order to allow individuals as many options as possible; we have to imagine what the world would look like had none of those obstacles ever existed, and then work to realize that utopian vision here and now. Until all past injustices have been negated through enlightened policies, no one can ever be truly said to be free to choose. Had transatlantic slavery never existed, then…black Americans would constitute 13% of outdoors enthusiasts, in keeping with their proportion of the general population. Something like that. I know, I know, there are so many fallacious assumptions and counterfactual fantasies at work here that it doesn’t even bear taking seriously. Crudden’s one tweet could spawn a thousand questions attempting in vain to clarify all its implications. But while you may not be interested in philosophical incoherence, this virulent strain of philosophical incoherence is very interested in you and the many ways you’re oppressing people simply by existing.
Speaking of Jordan Peterson, as Ms. “Hard Scientist” was earlier, he wondered about an interesting question some time ago: What is the limiting principle of the left? We all have a clear idea of what it looks like when the far-right goes too far, but why have their mirror images on the left failed to equally serve as cautionary tales? Why isn’t it a cliché on the right to say that “real fascism has never been tried,” the way it is among apologists for communism? With the events of the past month fresh in my mind, my provisional answer to his question would be “disaster.” Disaster is the limiting principle of the left. Nothing else ever stops them from pushing in the direction of what they imagine to be “progress.” No matter how many times their ideas lead to the same predictable blood-soaked cul-de-sacs, they will only rest, regroup, and try again. The best we can hope for is that most of those ideas die before reaching adulthood. I fear that “disparities=discrimination” has already become an obnoxious adolescent, though.
What a Strange Game. The Only Winning Move Is Not to Play.
Me, 21.39, 15.02.20: Wow, we need more kindness on social media. End the culture of cruelty.
Me, 21.40, 15.02.20: Look at this obscure idiot. Complete loser with bad tweets and probably no life.
— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) February 15, 2020
On that note, two recent articles I noticed but refused to click on:
From a video that his daughter posted, I already knew that Peterson’s wife had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that the medications he was taking for his depression had caused him to suffer through physical dependence and withdrawal. What point is there in an article that adds nothing to this sad story but disgust at the spectacle of people behaving horribly on social media in reaction to it? If a writer simply wanted to express sympathy for Peterson, it would have been fairly easy to do. But that would lack spice. It wouldn’t have the necessary frisson of righteous anger. For that, we need to add, “And look at all these horrible people gloating over his suffering. Look at this tasteless comment in particular. Remember, these people are on the Other Side. That’s the sort of degenerate character they have over there.” That’s what gets the clicks, and that’s what guarantees a steady supply of more of the same. Rush Limbaugh’s recent lung cancer diagnosis brought more of the same gloating, which was amplified and magnified even more by people who were appalled by it. It’s ironic to see people on social media worrying about the slim possibility of contracting coronavirus while not thinking twice before passing along intellectual bacteria like this. Another, even better, irony is that if social media were to be “saved,” it would have to find a way to incentivize not antisocial but asocial behavior — people who couldn’t care less about site stats, follower counts, clicks, likes, and retweets. Writing for money, performing for attention — these are the livestock chutes which funnel the content-providing cattle toward the inevitable lowest common denominator.
Your Words, Once Heard, They May Place You In a Faction
I realize that I will probably be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel here. Admiral McRaven doubtless means well in a tough-talking sitcom high-school assistant principal sort of way. If he were working in a vacuum, I would say live and let live. But Make Your Bed is only one example of a flourishing genre of pseudo-hardass commentary that is exercising a massive influence over young men in the English-speaking world. Like McRaven, the Canadian academic psychologist-turned-YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson seems to be under the impression that rote performance of mundane tasks (“Clean your room” in the professor’s case) coupled with a kind of vague meta-obsession with purpose for its own sake is a catch-all solution for any number of postmodern afflictions. Joe Rogan, the tattooed podcaster whose stock-in-trade is telling his followers what they should think about whiskey and the keto diet, is another.
I have no doubt that the Petersonists are responding to a real need felt by their audience. The question is whether their answers are the right ones. I am not at all convinced that what lonely disaffected male millennials need to hear most is that performative masculinity will make them feel happy or fulfilled. As I write this, there are hundreds of thousands of American men who, under the influence of these no-BS masculinist gurus, have learned to confuse selecting the perfect razor and using it correctly with a sense of vocation. It is all of a piece with the alt-right; indeed as far as its political ramifications go, it might as well be considered the same phenomenon — a retooled social conservatism in which the issues at stake are not abortion or same-sex marriage but complaints about whining SJWs and “political correctness.” The average Petersonist is teaching himself how to use tools and getting really into evolutionary biology and lifting and will tell you all about it over a cigar or a glass of bourbon in his backyard (assuming that he has one).
One of the most tiresome things about the age of “hot takes” is what I think of as “performative quibbling” — making the most of trivial disagreements in order to distinguish oneself. As far as I can tell, the only thing that truly unites these, uh, “Petersonists” is that they put too much emphasis on the necessity and benefits of personal discipline for Walther’s taste (though they also have large audiences, which naturally stirs envy, especially among hack writers for online political tabloids). If that makes them “alt-right” — a term which has clearly become utterly worthless due to rhetorical hyperinflation — then I fear a lot of us will find ourselves classified as Nazi-adjacent before long. At any rate, Walther goes on to assure us that he does have concerns about the robustness and capability of young men today, but if he has a better answer for them than the, uh, Petersonists, he couldn’t squeeze it in under his word count. Milquetoasts to the left of him, meatheads to the right; in between, in the “reasonable middle ground,” stands our hero, thoughtfully stroking his chin, gazing off into the middle distance, sighing over the sheer complexity of it all. I’m reminded of an old XKCD punchline: “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”
Whistling Past God’s Grave
As long as so much of what we see is unnecessary suffering, we cannot be content with the world as we find it. Of course we should keep Gray’s cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. But even if we can’t set the cosmos right, we can’t leave our corner of it the way it is. Whatever else may be an illusion, other people’s suffering is not.
I read Scialabba’s book What Are Intellectuals Good For? early last year. I only remembered the title because I looked it up in my Goodreads history. I had totally forgotten it was still on my shelf until I just went and checked a moment ago. Glancing through it, I don’t see any of my telltale marks in red pen for calling attention to thought-provoking passages. In other words, the book didn’t leave much of a lasting impression on me. Lionel Trilling once famously described mid-20th-century conservatism as a collection of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas;” my vague memory is that Scialabba’s essays were full of potentially interesting ideas which were offset by the irritating rhetorical gestures toward a left-wing sensibility.
Granted, that may well say more about me than him, but I felt the same way again after reading this review of John Gray’s latest book, Seven Types of Atheism. After a fair and respectful consideration of Gray’s argument, the concluding paragraph above just feels perfunctory. Having acknowledged Gray’s point that much of left-wing politics is just crusading Christianity in disguise for people who pride themselves on feeling superior to religious believers, Scialabba simply turns around and reasserts the same perspective as a moral imperative, as if the ongoing metaphysical earthquake which undermined much of the confidence in the old Christian worldview never happened. I’m sure that’s good enough for the choir, but why are the rest of us supposed to be convinced? This is just a refusal to even face the challenge squarely, preferring the comfort of platitudes.
As it happens, I think Scialabba is actually correct, even if the sentiment is shallow. I agree with Anthony Kronman that the tragedy of the human condition is our self-contradictory nature, our inability to ever stop trying to usurp God’s throne and bring every aspect of human existence under our conscious, willed control. The apple cannot be uneaten. Pandora’s jar cannot be resealed. Westerners as a rule cannot stop seeking to abolish the entire painful spectrum between discomfort and agony, even if we understand on a cerebral level that a life without pain would actually be undesirable, not to mention impossible. But Jordan Peterson, to name one contemporary example, also names suffering as the undeniable fact about human experience, the inescapable truth he salvaged from his own period of extreme Cartesian doubt, and yet he has derived a much different (and more interesting) stance toward politics and values than the generic democratic-socialist outlook that Scialabba seems to take as a given. The entire point of Gray’s book is that there is more than one way to disbelieve in God. Likewise, there is more than one coherent perspective to take on the brute facts of existence.
Old Age Should Burn and Rave at Close of Day
There are plenty of reasons for individual readers to dislike Jordan Peterson. He’s a Jungian and that isn’t your cup of tea; he is, by his own admission, a very serious person and you think he should lighten up now and then; you find him boring; you’re not interested in either identity politics or in the arguments against it. There are many legitimate reasons to disagree with him on a number of subjects, and many people of good will do. But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?
It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.
It’s a very interesting article about the rise of podcasts and vloggers and the threat they present to the media status quo, especially by appealing to ordinary people who aren’t interested in the Twitter wars or other cerebral junk food. By temperament, I’m not optimistic that the Peterson phenomenon, for example, is heralding a bright new cultural dawn in which citizens gather around the smartphone to listen to in-depth, respectful, three-hour discussions of philosophy and history while blithely ignoring the increasingly hysterical diktats from the cultural clerisy about how there are fifty-seven genders but politics is binary, and if you’re not with us, you’re against us. But I agree that there is indeed something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, so I am slightly hopeful. I myself am not really one for podcasts, but I’ve said before how enthralling I found Peterson’s interviews with Joe Rogan, and I’m starting to enjoy listening to more of Glenn Loury’s interviews while working, so who knows, maybe I’ll get there eventually.
As for the identity-politics left being on its deathbed, well, we’ll see, but that is surely an obituary I would read with great pleasure. Given that it was largely coterminous with the baby-boom generation, and given how gracelessly that cohort has resisted the natural progression toward senescence and death, I think we can assume that identity politics will likewise jettison every last shred of dignity in an attempt to cling to life indefinitely. A pillow over its face would be more merciful than it deserves, really.
Noteworthies (39)
• Lance Morrow, “Return of the Notman”
• Derek Robertson, “Why the ‘Classical Liberal’ Is Making a Comeback”
• Yoram Hazony, “Jordan Peterson and Conservatism’s Rebirth” (alternate link)
• Vladislav Davidzon, “In Memory of Isaiah Berlin”
• Joseph Heath, “Social Constructivism: The Basics”
• Wesley Yang, “The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson”
• Mmm-hmm.
You Will Be a Restless Wanderer On the Earth
Peterson had been noodling some ideas about this question: How do we know when the Left goes too far? He made the point that on the right, everyone knows Nazis are evil. They’re something bad and something we don’t want to be and this moral judgment was clearly illustrated at the Nuremberg Trials, but that there is no such limit on the Left.
It was one of those rare instances of serendipity. On June 25th, 2015, I read an essay by George Santayana, “Josiah Royce,” in which he wrote:
Yet that is what romantic philosophy would condemn us to; we must all strut and roar. We must lend ourselves to the partisan earnestness of persons and nations calling their rivals villains and themselves heroes; but this earnestness will be of the histrionic German sort, made to order and transferable at short notice from one object to another, since what truly matters is not that we should achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptuously called ideal) but that we should carry on perpetually, if possible with a crescendo, the strenuous experience of living in a gloriously bad world, and always working to reform it, with the comforting speculative assurance that we never can succeed. We never can succeed, I mean, in rendering reform less necessary or life happier; but of course in any specific reform we may succeed half the time, thereby sowing the seeds of new and higher evils, to keep the edge of virtue keen. And in reality we, or the Absolute in us, are succeeding all the time; the play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.
Suddenly, I understood. I saw, vividly, what I had only understood abstractly before: that the crusading would never stop. There was no limiting principle to left-wing political efforts, nothing that would serve as a reasonable goal or endpoint. Today’s vanguard will be denounced as tomorrow’s reactionaries by a new group of radicals demanding more, faster, better.
The very next day was when the Obergefell ruling was handed down. And Freddie deBoer, whom I had previously held in high esteem as an intelligent alternative to orthodox leftists, immediately tweeted, “Now on to polygamy. (And no, I ain’t kidding.)” He followed that up with, “Y’know, fellow left types who say today’s not a good day to start talking polygamy, ‘slow down’ is a derided stance for a reason.”
I have no problem with gay marriage. And I don’t think that poly-anything will ever be more than a fringe fad. In other words, my road-to-Damascus moment wasn’t motivated by any visceral fear or loathing of the newest phases of the sexual revolution. Like Roger Scruton as a student in Paris in 1968, watching the rioting of the soixante-huitards, I simply realized that regardless of the merits of any particular culture-war crusade, in the grand scheme I was watching “a kind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy.” Nothing would ever be good enough. Nothing will ever satisfy people whose anger and misery is existential, not situational. Like Scruton, I realized that these people would eagerly tear down many of the imperfect things I loved about the world in pursuit of unattainable perfection, and that I was tired of being associated in any way with their endless complaints and histrionics.
Ever since Bacon and Descartes, we’ve been increasingly accustomed to shaping the world to our preferences. As our technical mastery increases, we find it harder to accept the existence of anything which impedes “progress,” whether personal or political. How do we know when the Left goes too far? To answer that, we’d have to be capable of envisioning a world of “good enough,” and I’m not sure if human nature even allows for that. What sort of epochal revolution would have to occur in order for humanity to envision an alternative to progress that didn’t involve some romanticized past? Individuals will continue to have private epiphanies where they make peace with an imperfect world and resign from the crusades, but the species as a whole will continue to be what Nietzsche called “the unfinished animal,” endlessly striving to bring more of life under its control, forever dissatisfied with what actually exists.
Noteworthies (38)
• Frank Brownlow, “Thank You, Auden!”
• Troy Senik, “Civilization, If You Can Keep It” and related, John Davidson, “The West Isn’t Committing Suicide, It’s Dying of Natural Causes”
• David French, “Critics Miss the Point of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’”
• Pedro Blas González, “Hoffer and the True Believers”
• Allen Guelzo, “Nuanced Patriotism”
• Christian Gonzalez, “Inequality and the Intellectual Dark Web”
• Jonah Cohen, “The Shameful, Unethical Smearing of Jordan Peterson”
• A circus made by circumstance.
Noteworthies (37)
• Tim Rogers, “Jordan Peterson and the Return of the Stoics”
• Wesley Yang, “The Passion of Jordan Peterson”
• Kyle Smith, “Ezra Klein’s Intellectual Demagoguery”
• Theodore Dalrymple, “Reading the State of Britain with Roger Scruton”
• Ben Sixsmith, “My Favorite French Intellectual”
• Patrick Freyne, “Where Do Atheists Get Their Values?”
• Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The Church of Grievance”
• Joe Berkowitz, “If You Think You Hate Puns, You’re Wrong”
• David Thompson, “Annihilation Of Bourgeois Life Delayed Somewhat”
• Songs I’m enjoying this week: while listening to Google Play’s “Psychedelic Indie” station, I discovered “Comb My Hair” by Coast Modern (sorta like Tame Impala sharing a ride and a singalong with the Flaming Lips), and “Boys Latin” by Panda Bear (sorta like techno-Gregorian chanting)
I Wish It Was the Sixties, I Wish We Could Be Happy, I Wish, I Wish, I Wish That Something Would Happen
Some “encountering” enthusiasts blamed the only-partial success of the social movements of the 1960s for their turn away from politics. Many asked what the point was of critiquing a system so thoroughly corrupt. They decided to seek personal empowerment instead of political empowerment, and freeing themselves of their emotional “baggage” became their preoccupation.
Others saw turning inward as a natural extension of New Left philosophy. If the personal was political, then it made sense that in order to change the world they first had to find out who they were. Identity, as I have shown, has always been a critical part of movement rhetoric, whether it was the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, or the antiwar movement. The me generation took the 1960s emphasis on identity one step further (or backward, depending upon one’s perspective).
— Eva Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment
I’ve said before that the Great Awokening of our time can’t be understood merely as a reprise of ’60s political radicalism; the self-help/therapeutic/recovery movement ran parallel to it, and continues to do so today. As we’ve all seen, hashtag political gestures like BLM and MeToo are now seamlessly interwoven with demands for safe spaces and the abolition of “hate speech.” Many people have observed that activist politics is becoming more like a religion, and while there’s some value in that comparison, I think it’s probably more accurate to say that those parallel tracks have converged, and activists today treat politics as a form of group therapy, and vice versa. Righteous political action makes the world a better place while also healing the personal wounds suffered under oppressive conditions. If nothing else, it alleviates ennui.
In reflecting on that unholy combination, it also strikes me that perhaps the main reason why the left-wing clerisy has reacted with ambivalence at best, if not uncharitable hostility, toward Jordan Peterson, is because he challenges both aspects of this Janus-faced worldview at the same time. Not only does he insist that egalitarianism is merely a softer, slower totalitarianism, but his phenomenally-popular “self-help” book advocates a stoic, tragic ideal which encourages personal responsibility and self-confidence rather than narcissistic navel-gazing and finger-pointing. The fact that young men in particular have taken to his message with voracious enthusiasm is maddening to those academics who would prefer them to be “deconstructing masculinity” under their expert supervision instead. How many of these useless middlemen would be out of work if the general public finally stopped being receptive to their message? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? No wonder they’ve moved on to associating Peterson with Nazism; to them, it’s like he’s trying to commit intellectual genocide.
Noteworthies (34)
• James Hankins, “How Not to Defend the Humanities”
• Lydialyle Gibson, “The Mirage of Knowledge”
• Sohrab Amari, “The Disappearance of Desire”
• Joanna Baron & Jerry Gibbon, “Good Luck With That”
• Tanner Greer, “Jordan Peterson Saves the World”
• Marc Lewis, “The Addiction Habit”
• Meng-Hu, “Four Juxtapositions”
• Bradley Campbell, “The Intellectual Source of Victimhood Culture”
• Tiptoeing through the comedy minefield (a lament in four tweets).
Somethin’ Happenin’ Here
The culture wars will continue to be marked by both sides scoring an unrelenting series of own-goals, with the victory going to whoever can make their supporters shut up first. The best case scenario for the Right is that Jordan Peterson’s ability to not instantly get ostracized and destroyed signals a new era of basically decent people being able to speak out against social justice; this launches a cascade of people doing so, and the vague group consisting of Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, etc coalesces into a perfectly respectable force no more controversial than the gun lobby or the pro-life movement or something. With social justice no longer able to enforce its own sacredness values against blasphemy, it loses a lot of credibility and ends up no more powerful or religion-like than eg Christianity. The best case scenario for the Left is that the alt-right makes some more noise, the media is able to relentlessly keep everyone’s focus on the alt-right, the words ALT-RIGHT get seared into the public consciousness every single day on every single news website, and everyone is so afraid of being associated with the alt-right that they shut up about any disagreements with the consensus they might have. I predict both of these will happen, but the Right’s win-scenario will come together faster and they will score a minor victory.
The Lady of the House was telling me the other day about an article that explored why fandom can become so toxic. For example, the barrier to entry for becoming a Harry Potter fan is very low. To differentiate themselves from the herd, hardcore fans basically have to create tiers within their subculture to make it more exclusive for them. There’s no status in having and enjoying the same thing as every teenage mallrat. By contrast, a higher barrier to entry makes it easier for a niche group to be more welcoming to newbies, as they can trust that anyone who’s here has earned the right to be here.
Listening to her, I remembered some webcomic from several years ago which amusingly noted the differences between the social-justice left and the far right with regards to their outreach programs, shall we say. Basically, it’s easy and trendy to be on the left, and you see this reflected in the contemptuous attitude that hardcore SJWs hold toward anyone who isn’t already part of the in-group. Outsiders were frequently treated with hostility from the start, as I witnessed countless times when the social-justice virus first spread through online atheism. People who earnestly tried to engage in discussion were accused of “JAQing off” and told that it was a sign of privilege to expect answers to their stupid questions. There already existed an elite caste whose main concern was to demonstrate their higher social rank by competing to see who could be the most excoriating toward the outgroup. The highly-stigmatized far right, on the other hand, was more than happy to oblige curiosity from newcomers. Oh, you got attacked for your “white privilege,” huh? Yeah, that’s typical leftist hypocrisy, enforced by the liberal media. Would you like to learn more? Here’s some information, and oh, by the way, there’s a group that meets on Wednesday nights if you’d like to come by and hear so-and-so speak! Bring your friends!
Like I said, I saw that comic several years ago, so it seems especially prescient in hindsight, now that most of us have had occasion to rub our eyes and wonder where all these outright neo-Nazis came from all of a sudden.
In any event, right-wing politics, even of the moderate, mainstream variety, has long had a higher barrier to entry for most people. It often seems too pessimistic, too unsympathetic, too severe, too demanding. There’s no cultural status to be had in being conservative. People often age into it with experience rather than get argued into it with facile reasoning. It has struck me, though, as it has likewise apparently struck Alexander, that the shifting tectonic plates in the domestic political landscape seem to be opening up some fissures which could perhaps be filled by a more reasonable, approachable center-right coalition typified by individuals like Peterson, Harris, Haidt, Pinker, etc. With a generous helping of good fortune, maybe this trend might develop from a cultural faction into a new conservative party, leaving the big two to continue becoming more extreme. Granted, that’s only if-this, then-that, unless-this, in-which-case-that speculation. I’m certainly not holding my breath for a viable third-party option anytime in the near future. But as the Republican party continues to accommodate Trumpian populism and adapt to it rather than tame it, I can’t help but wonder where the newly-homeless conservatives are going to end up. Are they going to continue to wait out what they hope is a temporary spell of madness, or will they eventually walk away and possibly encounter the refugees from the left somewhere in the middle?
The Long Way Home
Later on, he publicly wondered why so many people care what some random psychology professor thinks about anything. More than likely it’s his ability to articulate things that people half-know, things they’ve picked up bit by bit from books, teachers, TV, parents, friends, but never explicitly grasped.
When I was younger, I dabbled in several different martial arts. One guy whose self-defense videos I enjoyed was Paul Vunak. His innovation was to delineate three different “zones” in which fighting takes place. Basically, he said, fights either happen at arm’s (or leg’s) length, i.e. punching and kicking, or in a clinch, i.e. grappling and wrestling. The third zone was in between the two. Most fighters just treat it as an empty transition zone between the other two, but Vunak taught a number of techniques, mainly involving the elbow and knee, to take advantage of this space where you’re too close for your opponent to take a full swing at you, but not close enough to grab and pummel yet. The key was to consciously recognize the potential of this zone rather than treat it as a meaningless transition. As an all-purpose metaphor, this approach has been even more useful to me outside of its original context.
I watched Joe Rogan’s engrossing recent interview with Jordan Peterson yesterday. Again, I rarely do any video-watching or podcast-listening. If I have an hour or two of free time, I’d almost always rather use it to read, and if I want to know what an interview is about, I’d rather read a transcript, which is much faster for me than watching it play out in real time. But I have to say that I was especially impressed with the uninterrupted, free-flowing conversational structure of the talk, as well as Rogan’s exceptional skill as a host and a listener. They briefly mentioned their shared belief that YouTube and podcasts will eventually be the death of the standard TV model, with its inflammatory soundbites, moronic shouting-heads format of “conversation,” and constant commercial breaks, and I fervently hope they’re correct. A few times, Peterson would pause to collect his thoughts or phrasing, and I quickly became aware that I was tensing up when that happened, because I’d been conditioned by media to expect that the slightest pause for breath or reflection was an invitation to intercept the conversation and run the other way with it. Thankfully, Rogan has the calm patience and attentiveness of a meditating Buddhist. As with most things, I’m probably way behind the curve here, and this is all incredibly obvious to those of you who have been watching vloggers and listening to podcasts for years already, but I just had to express my gratitude that such a wonderful format exists. Long may it continue.
Anyway, there were also a couple of times when Rogan and Peterson expressed their shared surprise over the response to his work. Rogan in particular noted that astonishing numbers of people were obviously ravenous for this message of responsibility, dignity, and self-development, so, he wondered, why was there such a void in the first place? Why did it take this obscure Canadian academic to fill that void, and what were people responding so passionately to about the messenger? There are other books that tell people how the smallest things like making your bed can help change the world, and there are other attempts to present a sort of upper-middlebrow approach to self-help, but those never seem to become mainstream phenomena.
Obviously, Peterson in particular came to prominence for his outspoken opposition to the infamous Bill C-16, at a time when the majority of typical pusillanimous liberals were going along with it, and all the other trendy transgender absurdity, out of their ever-present fear of “looking conservative.” The hero we needed, and all that. But his broader message just happens to fill one of those overlooked “zones” that most people ignore. The liberal clerisy have always considered themselves too sophisticated to take self-improvement seriously, and — here I have to agree with someone like Patrick Deneen — the internal logic of liberalism seems to lead many of them to believe that there’s always something gauche or even sinister about a popular movement with a charismatic leader, as if all such roads inevitably lead to Jonestown. See, for example, this ambivalent piece, which tries to imply something religious, or cultish, or both, about Peterson’s message and fanbase without ever being brave enough to say it outright. “Moralism,” even the common-sense variety, is apparently for religious-right televangelists, and they’re all hypocrites, as we know.
Some of these pieces are no doubt motivated by professional envy, as a bunch of accredited hair-splitters wonder why their monographs weren’t the ones to escape the academic ghetto into the bestseller lists, or why their pedantic critiques of the illiberal left didn’t go viral. But in general, there’s a long-standing assumption on the left-of-center that there’s something inherently suspicious about a man who dares to act as if he might have some answers for other people when it comes to the “how should we live?” philosophical questions. Conservatism has always insisted that our best sources of that wisdom come from cultural tradition and our ancestors. Liberalism has always insisted that we, as separate individuals, should be lamps unto ourselves, only accepting that which we’ve rationally verified by our own experience. It seems like the time was just right for someone to synthesize the two into an accessible package — things we all used to know as “common sense” have to be rediscovered via lectures delivered by a faraway stranger, mediated by technology and social media.
What You May Have Heard and What You Think You Know
My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.
First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.
I remember, many years ago, reading an article about Queens of the Stone Age which mentioned an incident at a show. A heckler in front of the stage was shouting something derogatory at Queens singer Josh Homme, whereupon Homme, speaking into the microphone for comedic affect, pretended to decline the offer of various gay sex acts. The crowd laughed, of course. Homme followed up with, “You know, moron, no one can hear you but me, whereas I have a mic and a P.A. system.”
Most of us have had the experience of seeing a topic we happen to be especially knowledgeable about become the focus of a news article or program. And most of us would agree that we’re often appalled at the superficial, misleading impression an uninformed reader/viewer would get, and we wonder briefly how much else of the news is like that, on topics we don’t know much about, where we rely on the reporter to give us a fair summary. At that point, we generally turn our thoughts away hurriedly rather than continue to stare into that abyss. Still, up until social media mildly reduced the power and information disparities, many people knew what it was like to be in the position of a heckler shouting in vain to be heard, as those with the microphones, bylines and TV cameras enjoyed the freedom to misrepresent them to a vast audience. Far from being a “trend,” this game of malicious Telephone has long been the norm for the media, and contrary to Friedersdorf’s partisan naïveté, it isn’t only social media and Fox News who play it.
As a rule, I despise watching videos. I wasn’t going to watch the Newman/Peterson interview until I decided to write about it, at which point due diligence required me to know whereof I spoke. I had seen a few people whose opinions I generally trust mention what a fiasco it was, but I had to see for myself, so I watched the entire thing. Yes, it turns out that their descriptions were accurate (though I hope no one reading this is so duncelike as to accept my word for it either). I’m afraid there are no dignity-saving options for Newman here. She’s either breathtakingly dumb or shockingly dishonest, perhaps both. On second thought, there is the possibility suggested by, I believe, Nicholas Christakis: somehow, Newman made it through an Oxford education and a media career and arrived at the age of 43 having never been directly exposed to anyone whose ideas ranged beyond the shibboleths and bromides of her left-wing media class. Whatever the case, the only things that make this incident unusual are, one, Peterson’s remarkable ability to stay calm and coherent when faced with a hostile, incompetent interviewer, and, two, the fact that he has enough of a devoted following to keep the clerisy from having the final word. He did his part by keeping cool and being reasonable, and they did their part by making the interview go viral, where even media figures like Friedersdorf in a sad excuse for journalism like the Atlantic are forced to take notice and say, “Wow, that was really awful.”
But there is a way to reduce needless division over the countless disagreements that are inevitable in a pluralistic democracy: get better at accurately characterizing the views of folks with differing opinions, rather than egging them on to offer more extreme statements in interviews; or even worse, distorting their words so that existing divisions seem more intractable or impossible to tolerate than they are. That sort of exaggeration or hyperbolic misrepresentation is epidemic—and addressing it for everyone’s sake is long overdue.
Well, yeah, assuming people want to understand better and communicate more honestly. They don’t. There are various incentives that keep it that way, from the economics of viral clickbait and monetized outrage to the psychology of tribalism, boredom, and mischief-making. And on the personal character side, many if not most people are intellectually lazy. “Read the whole thing? Watch the whole video? Hell with that; what does the social media telephone say?” It takes a lot of time and effort to be informed. Most people would prefer to keep churning out ephemeral “content” to keep up with the attention-deficient news cycle. Yes, social media frequently makes people nastier and stupider. But, people being people, they don’t care, because, as W.H. Auden wrote:
We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
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