SimpleDon
Veteran Member
Jordan Peterson
Since this on its fifth page when I first saw it and it is on whatever page this is on, I am going to try an experiment. I have never heard of this gentleman and don't think that a ten-minute slice of a 90-minute talk is enough to tell 'where it's all coming from'. I have not read any of the posts beyond the original. (correction, I saw posts 2 and 3, unavoidable when speed reading to the end of the original post.) And I did watch the video. I haven't searched my favored sites for dirt on him. I haven't contacted any hostile foreign governments to see they have any dirt on him.
Let's see how I am able to do within these constraints. How close can I come to explaining this gentleman and the right's attraction to him?
As to what he said on the video I can say that he is correct that post-modernism did develop from the century-long effort to justify the failures of communism to achieve the Marxian wet dream. This was a wide-ranging effort which touched on many possibilities except for the most obvious, that Marx's theories were fatally flawed.
Marxism has this in common with the other idealized theories of better ways to organize society than the tried and true way that we do now, such as the self-regulating free market as the best way to organize all of society oranarchism libertarianism as a better way by not organizing anything, except to enforce contracts, of course.
He is correct that post-modernism is flawed. It cannot escape its origins. But you don't have to understand its origins to realize that it is flawed. Its major tenets, as I understand them, are that there is no objective truth or morality, that what is perceived as truth or what is moral has to be viewed through the lens of culture, cultural relativism. That modern science is not objectively true, that it is only one narrative among all of the possible narratives. That an author's text can't have a single meaning fixed by the author. These are seriously flawed.
Where he goes off of the rails a little bit is his assertion that post-modernism is at the heart of the philosophy of liberals, especially in the US. I seriously doubt that many liberals in the US have even know the name of a post-modern philosopher, much less having read one, just as I seriously doubt that Donald Trump has caught up on his Friedrich Nietzsche or Ernst Haeckel.
I cut academics a lot of slop. Their job is to push to the very edge of knowledge and to expand that knowledge. Most, of course, fail to do this. But we can't expect them to stop trying. This goes for both Mr. Peterson but also for the person who wrote the paper advancing the theory of white privilege. The odds that either of them is right are astronomical.
This is why we shouldn't take them very seriously. This is also why we shouldn't put up academic research as proof of the failure of society because it shows us the depravity, the depths which the other side has drug our country. If all that you have as proof of your theory that conservatives or liberals are going to ruin the country is an academic research project, then you have no proof, at all.
If Mr. Peterson is a rising guiding light of the right and is going to enter the political sphere, he is going to have to rethink his talk. He is correct for example, that cultures are formed around the majority of the population, but this fact doesn't doom a concept like white privilege to failure nor does it mean much, cultures as not static, they change to changing stimuli. Cultures that don't disappear.
He is right that race shouldn't be a consideration because there are so many other ways of looking at people and race is a minor one, which should doom white privilege. But doesn't because the right keeps the issue of race foremost to alternately scare and then to rally themselves. The right sows the idea that the black and the brown people together with the foreigners want to destroy the American culture, which according to the right, supported by Peterson, is a white culture. There is very much wrong with this.
As Peterson has pointed out, race isn't a valid point of differentiation, it makes the idea that the American culture is a white culture a bogus one. The American culture is based on many different cultures, accumulated across four centuries. The American culture predates this country, it has always been a multi-culture, but the countries that we came from and race have precious little to do with our American culture. It has much more to do with the way the land, its resources and its challenges and a shared view of our abilities and our destiny as a nation that has shaped our culture. At least to most of us who are not obsessed by race, the not-a-conservatives.
The right is going to be very happy that Peterson says that white privilege has no basis in fact, but not in the way that most of the right is going to want to hear it. So they will do what they always do, not think through what he is saying and he won't make a point of empathizing the natural conclusions of the facts he presents as long as the right pays him to present them.
Thinking through what he has said, that race is a minor differentiation in people, would not only doom white privilege, it also dooms the idea that there is a white culture, the hallmark of the right's white nationalism so on display in Trumpism.
The right seems to believe that the blacks and immigrants want to change our culture. And this scares them, to the point that they recede into what is most important to them, their racial identity and nativism.
Blacks aren't challenging our culture, they don't want to change our culture, they are a part of it, they have always been a part of it. What makes white privilege real to them is the idea that they aren't a part of the culture, a concept neatly wrapped up as white culture. The two bogus concepts are intertwined almost to the point that they are the same idea viewed from the different sides.
Immigrants also don't want to change our culture, they want to be a part of it, as immigrants have always been apart of it. They don't move to the US with the intention of destroying the culture, that is idiotic. They don't come to the US to rape and murder. They come here to become Americans like so many have before.
The right is afraid of blacks and immigrants. We have established this here beyond any question. The right is afraid that blacks and immigrants will take their jobs, take their women, take their white culture, etc. Irrational fears build and multiply. Why? Because race and the fear of immigrants are still being used as it always has been used throughout our history, to divide the people who otherwise have a shared interest apart from one another artificially to advance the interests of a third group.
Mr. Peterson can't insist race is just one of many possible trivial determinants of differentiation of people to declare white privilege invalid when in front of an audience who believe that race is so important, that non-whites pose such a threat to our culture. He would be run off of the stage.
Who am I trying to kid? Of course, the right won't notice such inconsistencies. After all, they listened to Donald Trump and they still voted for him. They still believe that tax cuts for the rich pave the way to prosperity for all, starting just any day now. They believe that climate change isn't real, why would the scientists at the coal and oil companies lie about this?
This ability of the conservatives to believe in comfortable lies to justify their largely indefensible but tightly held beliefs leaves them susceptible to an entire collection of conmen like Donald Trump, propagandists like Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, and oligarchs like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson.
American conservatives have a libertarian bent. The combination of the various influences providing conservatives with their needed lies have firmly solidified the control of the American oligarchy and their attacks on American democracy and American workers and placed us on the verge of fascism. Fascism had its beginnings in the early 19th century France primarily as a reaction to the enlightenment and its championing of the rights of all men. The very opposite of the libertarian ideal.
Since this on its fifth page when I first saw it and it is on whatever page this is on, I am going to try an experiment. I have never heard of this gentleman and don't think that a ten-minute slice of a 90-minute talk is enough to tell 'where it's all coming from'. I have not read any of the posts beyond the original. (correction, I saw posts 2 and 3, unavoidable when speed reading to the end of the original post.) And I did watch the video. I haven't searched my favored sites for dirt on him. I haven't contacted any hostile foreign governments to see they have any dirt on him.
Let's see how I am able to do within these constraints. How close can I come to explaining this gentleman and the right's attraction to him?
As to what he said on the video I can say that he is correct that post-modernism did develop from the century-long effort to justify the failures of communism to achieve the Marxian wet dream. This was a wide-ranging effort which touched on many possibilities except for the most obvious, that Marx's theories were fatally flawed.
Marxism has this in common with the other idealized theories of better ways to organize society than the tried and true way that we do now, such as the self-regulating free market as the best way to organize all of society or
He is correct that post-modernism is flawed. It cannot escape its origins. But you don't have to understand its origins to realize that it is flawed. Its major tenets, as I understand them, are that there is no objective truth or morality, that what is perceived as truth or what is moral has to be viewed through the lens of culture, cultural relativism. That modern science is not objectively true, that it is only one narrative among all of the possible narratives. That an author's text can't have a single meaning fixed by the author. These are seriously flawed.
Where he goes off of the rails a little bit is his assertion that post-modernism is at the heart of the philosophy of liberals, especially in the US. I seriously doubt that many liberals in the US have even know the name of a post-modern philosopher, much less having read one, just as I seriously doubt that Donald Trump has caught up on his Friedrich Nietzsche or Ernst Haeckel.
I cut academics a lot of slop. Their job is to push to the very edge of knowledge and to expand that knowledge. Most, of course, fail to do this. But we can't expect them to stop trying. This goes for both Mr. Peterson but also for the person who wrote the paper advancing the theory of white privilege. The odds that either of them is right are astronomical.
This is why we shouldn't take them very seriously. This is also why we shouldn't put up academic research as proof of the failure of society because it shows us the depravity, the depths which the other side has drug our country. If all that you have as proof of your theory that conservatives or liberals are going to ruin the country is an academic research project, then you have no proof, at all.
If Mr. Peterson is a rising guiding light of the right and is going to enter the political sphere, he is going to have to rethink his talk. He is correct for example, that cultures are formed around the majority of the population, but this fact doesn't doom a concept like white privilege to failure nor does it mean much, cultures as not static, they change to changing stimuli. Cultures that don't disappear.
He is right that race shouldn't be a consideration because there are so many other ways of looking at people and race is a minor one, which should doom white privilege. But doesn't because the right keeps the issue of race foremost to alternately scare and then to rally themselves. The right sows the idea that the black and the brown people together with the foreigners want to destroy the American culture, which according to the right, supported by Peterson, is a white culture. There is very much wrong with this.
As Peterson has pointed out, race isn't a valid point of differentiation, it makes the idea that the American culture is a white culture a bogus one. The American culture is based on many different cultures, accumulated across four centuries. The American culture predates this country, it has always been a multi-culture, but the countries that we came from and race have precious little to do with our American culture. It has much more to do with the way the land, its resources and its challenges and a shared view of our abilities and our destiny as a nation that has shaped our culture. At least to most of us who are not obsessed by race, the not-a-conservatives.
The right is going to be very happy that Peterson says that white privilege has no basis in fact, but not in the way that most of the right is going to want to hear it. So they will do what they always do, not think through what he is saying and he won't make a point of empathizing the natural conclusions of the facts he presents as long as the right pays him to present them.
Thinking through what he has said, that race is a minor differentiation in people, would not only doom white privilege, it also dooms the idea that there is a white culture, the hallmark of the right's white nationalism so on display in Trumpism.
The right seems to believe that the blacks and immigrants want to change our culture. And this scares them, to the point that they recede into what is most important to them, their racial identity and nativism.
Blacks aren't challenging our culture, they don't want to change our culture, they are a part of it, they have always been a part of it. What makes white privilege real to them is the idea that they aren't a part of the culture, a concept neatly wrapped up as white culture. The two bogus concepts are intertwined almost to the point that they are the same idea viewed from the different sides.
Immigrants also don't want to change our culture, they want to be a part of it, as immigrants have always been apart of it. They don't move to the US with the intention of destroying the culture, that is idiotic. They don't come to the US to rape and murder. They come here to become Americans like so many have before.
The right is afraid of blacks and immigrants. We have established this here beyond any question. The right is afraid that blacks and immigrants will take their jobs, take their women, take their white culture, etc. Irrational fears build and multiply. Why? Because race and the fear of immigrants are still being used as it always has been used throughout our history, to divide the people who otherwise have a shared interest apart from one another artificially to advance the interests of a third group.
Mr. Peterson can't insist race is just one of many possible trivial determinants of differentiation of people to declare white privilege invalid when in front of an audience who believe that race is so important, that non-whites pose such a threat to our culture. He would be run off of the stage.
Who am I trying to kid? Of course, the right won't notice such inconsistencies. After all, they listened to Donald Trump and they still voted for him. They still believe that tax cuts for the rich pave the way to prosperity for all, starting just any day now. They believe that climate change isn't real, why would the scientists at the coal and oil companies lie about this?
This ability of the conservatives to believe in comfortable lies to justify their largely indefensible but tightly held beliefs leaves them susceptible to an entire collection of conmen like Donald Trump, propagandists like Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, and oligarchs like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson.
American conservatives have a libertarian bent. The combination of the various influences providing conservatives with their needed lies have firmly solidified the control of the American oligarchy and their attacks on American democracy and American workers and placed us on the verge of fascism. Fascism had its beginnings in the early 19th century France primarily as a reaction to the enlightenment and its championing of the rights of all men. The very opposite of the libertarian ideal.
