To the first point, it seems that many of Peterson’s talking points are either platitudes or else they’re muddled and confused. This article from Current Affairs does a good job exploring some of Peterson’s confused talking points. But my favorite breakdown comes from the always amazing Contrapoints. In her video, Natalie shows that many of Peterson’s positions are historically and philosophically incoherent. One major area she focuses on is how Peterson loves to accuse his targets of ‘postmodern neo-Marxism.’ Natalie, with characteristic nuance and absurdist humor, shows how deeply confused that jumble of buzzwords truly is. In short, postmodernism and Marxism are inherently in conflict with another, as Marxism is a deeply modernist political philosophy. Peterson also demonstrates an impressive cocktail of ignorance and confidence in his first podcast with Sam Harris. This podcast is insufferable, so to save people the time, Harris and Peterson spend about an hour bickering about their respective understandings of ‘truth.’ Peterson’s confusion is thrown into sharp relief when he’s against a thinker as clear and articulate as Harris. Peterson attempts to appeal to American pragmatism (which just so happens to be one of my primary areas of study) in order to argue that Truth is determined by what is morally right for the human species. Peterson (incorrectly) cites Rorty here, which is extra-ironic since Rorty was very sympathetic to postmodern philosophy. Indeed, Peterson seems completely oblivious to the fact that his theory of truth is about a turd’s length away from being full-on postmodernism. He also regularly misrepresents and/or misunderstands the work of Nietzsche and James. I’m all for public intellectuals bringing in a wide range of ideas, even those that are outside their expertise, so long as appropriate qualifications are made. But Peterson presents these caricatures as true, without a lick of humility or nuance. This makes him appear not so much as an earnest public intellectual, but more of a cash-grabbing charlatan who uses obscure catchphrases to lull his audience into a state of reverential confusion.
This is connected to the second major worry I have for Peterson. His politics, while presented as cool-headed and moderate, are, in practice, riddled with deeply sexist and archaic pseudo-philosophy. These articles from The New Yorker and Vox do a good job exploring some of this. There’s also a collection of Peterson’s most misogynistic moments from the always delightful and strange Vic Berger. The New Yorker article identifies Peterson’s work as ‘Gospel of Masculinity,’ and that seems like a very fitting moniker. He regularly preaches about the destruction of masculinity, expressing catastrophist prognoses about the trajectory of leftist culture and academia. This aligns Peterson with many of the other political-correctness-cum-apocalypse prophets such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Jon Haidt, and a bevy of other middle-aged white men who are struggling with radical shifts in the political landscape. (Once again, Contrapoints has a crushing analysis of these worries in a two-part series). At any rate, Peterson presents himself as a voice of reason in this era of suffocating political correctness. He rails against the nightmare of identity politics on the regular. He argues that women’s underrepresentation in positions of power is due to their passive natures. He unleashes too many fallacies to count by arguing that humans should be monogamous because… lobsters? Or that we should look to other species as proof that we ought to be hierarchical? It’s all very confusing. And, as many of the articles and videos linked above will point out, that’s kind of the point for Peterson. His political and philosophical positions are really difficult to pin down. He’s either saying something obvious or unoriginal, like that we ought to take responsibility for ourselves, or else he’s making vague and provocative declarations about the state of humanity. Due to this ambiguity, however, as soon as he’s pressed to clarify he’s able to sidestep and evade. These are not virtues in a public intellectual. Indeed, it is precisely this tendency that is so important to fight against. It’s snake-oil dressed up in a suit and Canadian accent. What we need is clarity, precision, humility, and accessibility. There are plenty of better options for that. I recently devoured Robert Sapolsky’s new book Behave, which is a magisterial exploration of human behavior. It covers a lot of the terrain that Peterson attempts to discuss but does it with so much more nuance, wit, and humility. I couldn’t recommend this book enough.
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