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Jordan Peterson Back on His Feet
Jordan Peterson showed up on my personal radar not too long before he wrote his best seller 12 Rules for Life. After his book came out, I bought my son tickets to one of Peterson’s lectures when he spoke in Dallas with David Rubin. We went together that night and it was fascinating. You could tell then that there was something going on with the Peterson phenomenon that warranted a closer look. The audience looked nothing like the characterization of Peterson’s following that was being touted by the media. It wasn’t a gathering of disaffected young men. Disaffected young men probably couldn’t afford the price of the tickets.
After that lecture tour, Peterson lived through several years of health and emotional crises and only over the last year or so reappeared in public and started blogging, writing, and podcasting again. Ever since his reappearance, he has seemed fragile and weaker, with less verbal command than before he got sick. At least he’s seemed that way to me.
This week he sat down with Peter Robinson for an interview at a forum at Stanford and it is maybe the most formidable interview I have ever seen Peterson do, certainly since before he got sick but probably ever. He seems to be very much back on his feet and in a take-no-prisoners mode in this interview.
One of the subjects he takes up is his view that free speech is indistinguishable from thought and thus free speech is not merely one right among many others. It is central to human existence. Peterson has thought about this idea…a lot.
Very much worth watching.
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Published in General
He would be the first to tell you that fighting the dragon can take a toll.
His battles for free speech and truth have worn him down. It was really heartbreaking to hear him describe his situation in the universities. He’s afraid that any students he might have would be somehow tainted by association with him, and furthermore, he won’t sign or write the woke statements required. He must be fighting discouragement every day. It really has gotten worse.
He began much of his life’s work odyssey in the mental company of Solzhenitsyn. He can imagine where these trends are leading.
It felt as though I was watching a man alone.
His detractors don’t get him.
Thanks. I will listen to this later.
And those who express concern for Dr. Peterson, please do drop an encouraging line to him on his YouTube channel or elsewhere in his social media presence.
Michael Walsh points this as the battle between good and evil, a battle that has existed throughout human history. It is on interesting concept that literary departments were ground zero because the heroic narrative teaches us while literary departments are eliminating these narratives using critical theory accusations , the dead man, white supremacy accusation.
He has, in fact, resigned from his tenured position at the University of Toronto. He describes the reasons in this editorial at the National Post:
And that is only small sample of the points he makes.
Precisely. The people who control our universities are the intellectual and moral descendants of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini–even of Hitler when you notice what black nationalists do indeed say.
No, his detractors do get him. They are just evil.
On the contrary: I maintain that most of his detractors do understand him. They recognize him as a genuine threat to their evil programs.
I got the opposite impression. More like what you say below . . .
He ain’t alone. He just ain’t. Blacks who happen to believe and gays who happen to believe in free speech and everybody else wants to be on his podcast and talk about how free speech is great. Feel bad for his health issues if you want but not for his loneliness
He is not completely alone, but he is badly outnumbered. (Where are all those moderate, reasonable liberals who claim to value free speech?) So “alone” is a reasonable shorthand for his situation.
Victor Davis Hanson, commenting on the Nazi takeover of academia in 1930’s Germany, has said that even in his own field of Classics the result was a generation of academic publishing which was so poisoned by ideology as to be essentially useless. (We needn’t go into the similar disasters unleashed in fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and Communist China.) The American left is doing its best to enact its own version of those horrors.
EDIT: Sorry, I do not remember where VDH said that. It could have been a recent podcast or it could have been an article in the New Criterion or elsewhere.
I watched Dr. Peterson in the interview and it dawn on me that he is gaining the Prophet Moses look. Given his life trials over the past three years is it any wonder.
Thanks. I watched it and linked on social media. The man’s dissection of the consequences of Marxism in society and politics is very good.
All true, but I mostly meant his detractors on the right.
Ah, I see. I’ll agree with you depending on which segments of the right we’re talking about: The white nationalists do, I think, understand him, but (like the left) they construct attacks based not so much on the actual areas of disagreement as upon what they think might make good propaganda. Hence, for instance, the far-right claims that Jordan Peterson is building a sinister cult movement.
One of the criticisms of Peterson that I keep running into is that he is “not original”.* In other words, he and his opinions should be dismissed out of hand not because he is wrong but because “it’s all been said before” and only entirely new ideas are deserving of our attention (much less our respect.) This is, of course, quite disingenuous giving the left’s continued embrace of old discredited ideas. It’s also quite convenient because it relieves leftists of the need to actually engage with his arguments. But suppose his insights are mostly ones that have been made before (by people like Orwell, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, etc.), so what? That does not make him wrong. And in today’s world where the left has succeeded in thoroughly corrupting academia and culture, telling a simple truth is a revolutionary act.
* Academia’s foolish obsession with being original is a topic for another day.
Quite a good assessment, there, Paul. I might quibble that Peterson’s view as a Jungian puts different emphases in his engagement with Marxist ideology and attacks it more directly as an anti-human ideology in a way that many do not.
The left does not love the new. Their Marxist war on the middle class is not bringing about progress, but regresss, creating a neo-feudal social order.
I’m currently 1/4 through Oswald Spengler’s : The Decline of the West. He speaks of the general corruption of the ethical/intellectual/philosophical thinking of the European intelligentsia and ruling classes, and their dismissal of the lessons of history when history’s lessons contradict their social and nationalistic/imperialistic fever dreams, lead to the the First World War. Academia of the period didn’t like Spengler and Spengler didn’t like them. I would like to recommend the book, but I only have enough intellect to take him in small doses only, so it’s going to take me a while to work through him. But hay, I made it through Toynbee.
I think I’d prefer Douglass Murray’s book.
Just bought it and The Great Reset..
The War on the West was the book I was referring to.
Yes, that was the Murray book I bought in addition to Beck’s Great Reset.