Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Sat Mar 17, 2018 7:11 am

Sounder » 32 minutes ago wrote:If we had a POV that integrated the two half's of our brain we would have a POV that does speaks for all of humanity. Win win.
I will re-read Raine Eisler’s book to see how she reflects on these matters.


I can appreciate ^that sentiment^, but can't pretend to be able to qualify its virtue. Even as expressed in the lyric in the following, far from perfect, there's a Peterson quality I find distasteful and pseudo-intellectual. But I'm more forgiving toward this attempt in music (as any attendee of these concerts can attest, a predominantly male undertaking):
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Sounder » Sat Mar 17, 2018 9:31 am

I can appreciate ^that sentiment^, but can't pretend to be able to qualify its virtue.


Yeah I have a hard time with that too, given that I'm feeling a bit lonely in it's pursuit.


Even as expressed in the lyric in the following, far from perfect, there's a Peterson quality I find distasteful and pseudo-intellectual. But I'm more forgiving toward this attempt in music (as any attendee of these concerts can attest, a predominantly male undertaking):


Thanks for that Spiro, perfect song for the moment.

One trouble with we humans is our fate to find deeper understanding, best or even only within the context of current conceptual categories.

As Jordan also said, music is important because it is about feeling the pattern of reality. I do not care for rock music, or at least not much after Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, partly because of the male dominance element. As it happens, I am a music enthusiast and there is a fine inclusive community built around folk revival and respect toward many musical forms and variations. At any rate, Rush can still be respected for his contributions without one becoming obliged to endorse the underlying world view. In a world indoctrinated by paternalism for many hundreds of years, it is bound to be the case that the questioning of our problems will be framed within and by that same paternalism.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Jerky » Tue Mar 20, 2018 10:24 pm

This (devastating, serious-minded, syllogistically bulletproof) New York Review of Books take-down of JP has resulted in the good professor having a humiliating public meltdown on his Twitter. - J.

Link: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19 ... mysticism/

Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism
Pankaj Mishra

“Men have to toughen up,” Jordan B. Peterson writes in 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, “Men demand it, and women want it.” So, the first rule is, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and don’t forget to “clean your room.” By the way, “consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time.” Oh, and “the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being.” Many such pronouncements—didactic as well as metaphysical, ranging from the absurdity of political correctness to the “burden of Being”—have turned Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, into a YouTube sensation and a bestselling author in several Western countries.

12 Rules for Life is only Peterson’s second book in twenty years. Packaged for people brought up on BuzzFeed listicles, Peterson’s brand of intellectual populism has risen with stunning velocity; and it is boosted, like the political populisms of our time, by predominantly male and frenzied followers, who seem ever-ready to pummel his critics on social media. It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual. For his apotheosis speaks of a crisis that is at least as deep as the one signified by Donald Trump’s unexpected leadership of the free world.

Peterson diagnoses this crisis as a loss of faith in old verities. “In the West,” he writes, “we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures.” Peterson offers to alleviate the resulting “desperation of meaninglessness,” with a return to “ancient wisdom.” It is possible to avoid “nihilism,” he asserts, and “to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience” with the help of “the great myths and religious stories of the past.”

Following Carl Jung, Peterson identifies “archetypes” in myths, dreams, and religions, which have apparently defined truths of the human condition since the beginning of time. “Culture,” one of his typical arguments goes, “is symbolically, archetypally, mythically male”—and this is why resistance to male dominance is unnatural. Men represent order, and “Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.” In other words, men resisting the perennially fixed archetypes of male and female, and failing to toughen up, are pathetic losers.

Such evidently eternal truths are not on offer anymore at a modern university; Jung’s speculations have been largely discredited. But Peterson, armed with his “maps of meaning” (the title of his previous book), has only contempt for his fellow academics who tend to emphasize the socially constructed and provisional nature of our perceptions. As with Jung, he presents some idiosyncratic quasi-religious opinions as empirical science, frequently appealing to evolutionary psychology to support his ancient wisdom.

Closer examination, however, reveals Peterson’s ageless insights as a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.

Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag. A recent example is the English polemicist Douglas Murray who deplores the attraction of the young to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and wishes that the idea of equality was “tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that heaped on the concept of borders.” Peterson confirms his membership of this far-right sect by never identifying the evils caused by belief in profit, or Mammon: slavery, genocide, and imperialism.

Reactionary white men will surely be thrilled by Peterson’s loathing for “social justice warriors” and his claim that divorce laws should not have been liberalized in the 1960s. Those embattled against political correctness on university campuses will heartily endorse Peterson’s claim that “there are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men.” Islamophobes will take heart from his speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously long for masculine dominance.” Libertarians will cheer Peterson’s glorification of the individual striver, and his stern message to the left-behinds (“Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark.”). The demagogues of our age don’t read much; but, as they ruthlessly crack down on refugees and immigrants, they can derive much philosophical backup from Peterson’s sub-chapter headings: “Compassion as a vice” and “Toughen up, you weasel.”

In all respects, Peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. The “tradition” he promotes stretches no further back than the late nineteenth century, when there first emerged a sinister correlation between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and strongmen politics. This was a period during which intellectual quacks flourished by hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism faltered. Many artists and thinkers—ranging from the German philosopher Ludwig Klages, member of the hugely influential Munich Cosmic Circle, to the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich and Indian activist Aurobindo Ghosh—assembled Peterson-style collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding, in the same way as Peterson, to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.

This new object of belief tended to be exotically and esoterically pre-modern. The East, and India in particular, turned into a screen on which needy Westerners projected their fantasies; Jung, among many others, went on tediously about the Indian’s timeless—and feminine—self. In 1910, Romain Rolland summed up the widespread mood in which progress under liberal auspices appeared a sham, and many people appeared eager to replace the Enlightenment ideal of individual reason by such transcendental coordinates as “archetypes.” “The gate of dreams had reopened,” Rolland wrote, and “in the train of religion came little puffs of theosophy, mysticism, esoteric faith, occultism to visit the chambers of the Western mind.”

A range of intellectual entrepreneurs, from Theosophists and vendors of Asian spirituality like Vivekananda and D.T. Suzuki to scholars of Asia like Arthur Waley and fascist ideologues like Julius Evola (Steve Bannon’s guru) set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. W.B. Yeats, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic Revival, pontificated on the “Ancient Self”; Jung spun his own variations on this evidently ancestral unconscious. Such conceptually foggy categories as “spirit” and “intuition” acquired broad currency; Peterson’s favorite words, being and chaos, started to appear in capital letters. Peterson’s own lineage among these healers of modern man’s soul can be traced through his repeatedly invoked influences: not only Carl Jung, but also Mircea Eliade, the Romanian scholar of religion, and Joseph Campbell, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, who, like Peterson, combined a conventional academic career with mass-market musings on heroic individuals.

The “desperation of meaninglessness” widely felt in the late nineteenth century, seemed especially desperate in the years following two world wars and the Holocaust. Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, all credentialed by university education, met a general bewilderment by suggesting the existence of a secret, almost gnostic, knowledge of the world. Claiming to throw light into recessed places in the human unconscious, they acquired immense and fanatically loyal fan clubs. Campbell’s 1988 television interviews with Bill Moyers provoked a particularly extraordinary response. As with Peterson, this popularizer of archaic myths, who believed that “Marxist philosophy had overtaken the university in America,” was remarkably in tune with contemporary prejudices. “Follow your own bliss,” he urged an audience that, during an era of neoconservative upsurge, was ready to be reassured that some profound ancient wisdom lay behind Ayn Rand’s paeans to unfettered individualism.

Peterson, however, seems to have modelled his public persona on Jung rather than Campbell. The Swiss sage sported a ring ornamented with the effigy of a snake—the symbol of light in a pre-Christian Gnostic cult. Peterson claims that he has been inducted into “the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe”; he is clearly proud of the Native American longhouse he has built in his Toronto home.

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

Nowhere in his published writings does Peterson reckon with the moral fiascos of his gurus and their political ramifications; he seems unbothered by the fact that thinking of human relations in such terms as dominance and hierarchy connects too easily with such nascent viciousness such as misogyny, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. He might argue that his maps of meaning aim at helping lost individuals rather than racists, ultra-nationalists, or imperialists. But he can’t plausibly claim, given his oft-expressed hostility to the “murderous equity doctrine” of feminists, and other progressive ideas, that he is above the fray of our ideological and culture wars.

Indeed, the modern fascination with myth has never been free from an illiberal and anti-democratic agenda. Richard Wagner, along with many German nationalists, became notorious for using myth to regenerate the volk and stoke hatred of the aliens—largely Jews—who he thought polluted the pure community rooted in blood and soil. By the early twentieth century, ethnic-racial chauvinists everywhere—Hindu supremacists in India as well as Catholic ultra-nationalists in France—were offering visions to uprooted peoples of a rooted organic society in which hierarchies and values had been stable. As Karla Poewe points out in New Religions and the Nazis (2005), political cultists would typically mix “pieces of Yogic and Abrahamic traditions” with “popular notions of science—or rather pseudo-science—such as concepts of ‘race,’ ‘eugenics,’ or ‘evolution.’” It was this opportunistic amalgam of ideas that helped nourish “new mythologies of would-be totalitarian regimes.”

Peterson rails today against “softness,” arguing that men have been “pushed too hard to feminize.” In his bestselling book Degeneration (1892), the Zionist critic Max Nordau amplified, more than a century before Peterson, the fear that the empires and nations of the West are populated by the weak-willed, the effeminate, and the degenerate. The French philosopher Georges Sorel identified myth as the necessary antidote to decadence and spur to rejuvenation. An intellectual inspiration to fascists across Europe, Sorel was particularly nostalgic about the patriarchal systems of ancient Israel and Greece.

Like Peterson, many of these hyper-masculinist thinkers saw compassion as a vice and urged insecure men to harden their hearts against the weak (women and minorities) on the grounds that the latter were biologically and culturally inferior. Hailing myth and dreams as the repository of fundamental human truths, they became popular because they addressed a widely felt spiritual hunger: of men looking desperately for maps of meaning in a world they found opaque and uncontrollable.

It was against this (eerily familiar) background—a “revolt against the modern world,” as the title of Evola’s 1934 book put it—that demagogues emerged so quickly in twentieth-century Europe and managed to exalt national and racial myths as the true source of individual and collective health. The drastic individual makeover demanded by the visionaries turned out to require a mass, coerced retreat from failed liberal modernity into an idealized traditional realm of myth and ritual.

In the end, deskbound pedants and fantasists helped bring about, in Thomas Mann’s words in 1936, an extensive “moral devastation” with their “worship of the unconscious”—that “knows no values, no good or evil, no morality.” Nothing less than the foundations for knowledge and ethics, politics and science, collapsed, ultimately triggering the cataclysms of the twentieth century: two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and the Holocaust. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a similar intellectual and moral breakdown, one that seems to presage a great calamity. Peterson calls it, correctly, “psychological and social dissolution.” But he is a disturbing symptom of the malaise to which he promises a cure.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:04 am

^^ :lol2: Is it me, or is JBP and uncanny mix of Camille Paglia & the "All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" guy?
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:35 am

I`ve been travelling for the last five days, with very little time online. Thanks for most of the contributions to this thread. Curiouser and curiouser.

Whatever this guy`s strengths and weaknesses, rightnesses and wrongnesses: Being hated and scorned by Jerky, American Dream and VICE certainly amounts, prima facie, to a strong character recommendation.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:49 am

MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:35 am wrote:Whatever this guy`s strengths and weaknesses, rightnesses and wrongnesses: Being hated and scorned by Jerky, American Dream and VICE certainly amounts, prima facie, to a strong character recommendation.


You're much smarter than to think people you consider generally wrong
can't be right about something. That's no argument. Peterson presents a mix of views, at times scattershot. But there is a through-line I can't imagine you endorse. I do endorse the Mishra article, directly above. Doesn't matter who posted it.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby Elvis » Wed Mar 21, 2018 4:17 am

I reread Solnik's "mansplainer" story, and it wasn't Peterson. But whatever Peterson's value as a thinker may be, he does strike me as a mansplainer. :D
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Mar 21, 2018 11:48 am

JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:49 am wrote:
MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:35 am wrote:Whatever this guy`s strengths and weaknesses, rightnesses and wrongnesses: Being hated and scorned by Jerky, American Dream and VICE certainly amounts, prima facie, to a strong character recommendation.


You're much smarter than to think people you consider generally wrong
can't be right about something. That's no argument. Peterson presents a mix of views, at times scattershot. But there is a through-line I can't imagine you endorse. I do endorse the Mishra article, directly above. Doesn't matter who posted it.


I hate the term mansplainer but will definitely concede its a great way to describe Peterson.

That aside, when I read the Mishra piece, I almost laughed out loud.

It's such a hit job on the kind of material that drew me to this board. I read the following paragraph as a prosaic practically Hofstadter level reductionism about the best kind of material here historically, dismissing it as self-deluded ponderings for "comforts" agains the irrational and inexplicable modern world.

Many artists and thinkers ... assembled ... collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding ... to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.


Is this really so different than a c. 2004 dismissal of 911 skepticism/agnosticism?
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:08 pm

liminalOyster » Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:48 am wrote:
[...]
That aside, when I read the Mishra piece, I almost laughed out loud.

It's such a hit job on the kind of material that drew me to this board. I read the following paragraph as a prosaic practically Hofstadter level reductionism about the best kind of material here historically, dismissing it as self-deluded ponderings for "comforts" agains the irrational and inexplicable modern world.

Many artists and thinkers ... assembled ... collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding ... to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.


Is this really so different than a c. 2004 dismissal of 911 skepticism/agnosticism?


No, you`re quite right. The same mechanism is at work. Much of Mishra`s piece is a routine canter through early-20th-century intellectual history in search of Notoriously Dodgy Characters to taint Peterson with by association. It goes like this:

A range of intellectual entrepreneurs, from Theosophists and vendors of Asian spirituality like Vivekananda and D.T. Suzuki to scholars of Asia like Arthur Waley and fascist ideologues like Julius Evola (Steve Bannon’s guru) set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. W.B. Yeats, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic Revival, pontificated on the “Ancient Self”; Jung spun his own variations on this evidently ancestral unconscious. Such conceptually foggy categories as “spirit” and “intuition” acquired broad currency ...

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19 ... mysticism/



Et cetera. So Yeats = Evola = Suzuki = Wagner = Jung = Goebbels = Peterson = ...which notoriously Dodgy Character wrote the following?

RIGOROUS INTUITION
What You Don' t Know Can`t Hurt Them

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 04, 2005

Spirit of the Beehive

"Original title Al Azif - azif being the word used by the Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons."
- HP Lovecraft, from his History of the Necronomicon.

One thing I find both fascinating and instructive is the collation of correspondences between what could be called boundary experiences. I hope to do some analysis of this in a forthcoming post - something of a follow-up to our earlier study of Fatima - but in the meantime, here's a brief data dump of one such correspondence.

Marian apparitions

...

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.de/20 ... ve_04.html


"Intuition"? "Spirit"? :shock:

"Conceptallly foggy categories", complains Panjay Mishra. Yes-I-know-it`s-terrible-isn`t-it. Vernunft Über Alles, that`s what`s made The West™ the best after all. So maybe Mishra can provide us with some examples of categories that are a) impeccably conceptually clear and unambiguous, b) not drawn from mathematics, the natural sciences, or formal logic, and c) c) useful when discussing ethical, political or (beg pardon) spiritual matters. Frankly, Mr Mishra sounds pretty damn confused himself. And I believe he is making some serious category errors to add to his own confusion, and to his readers'.

The joke is that it is not difficult to find good reasons for adjudging Peterson a very imperfect guide through the mess that is contemporary Western ethics, politics, spirit and intuition. Indeed, he is dodgy as fuck, as far as I can judge from having read no more of his writings first-hand than a handful of his tweets and a selection of one-line quotes that turn up in articles written by other people about him. Some of his statements about 20th century history, for example, are unworthy of a desperately confused and underinformed adolescent. Certainly, anyone who lauds The West™ as blindly and intemperately as Peterson has done deserves to scramble naked though a paddy field while dodging napalm shells and helicopter gunships. ("Shoulders back, Peterson! And remember to pet that cat, the headless one stuck to the wall!")

Image

Image

The same applies, of course, to many if not most of Peterson`s detractors, especially the prudently silent or openly warmongering "liberal" smugsters employed by the corporate media and quoted with gleeful approval throughout this thread. (I do not include Mishra among that number, but his article is far from good. He is in many ways as baffled and disoriented as he accuses Peterson of being.)

Image
Last edited by MacCruiskeen on Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:17 pm

For non-Brits, or for anyone who may have missed this three years ago: Here's some essential context & background to Peterson`s now-viral Channel 4 interview with the notorious Cathy Newman:

Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman apologises and quits Twitter after being rapped by bosses over her claims of being 'ushered out' of a mosque

-Newsreader visited Islamic centre in south London for community day
-She then said on Twitter that she had been 'ushered out' of mosque
-It later emerged she had gone to wrong place and was sent to other centre
-CCTV showed her leaving the mosque alone after a few seconds inside
-Today she apologised for her 'inappropriate' comments and quit Twitter
-Mosque hits out at presenter saying her actions 'endangered congregation'

By Richard Spillett for MailOnline
PUBLISHED: 11:57 GMT, 12 February 2015 | UPDATED: 15:31 GMT, 12 February 2015


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... PNQojUaook
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:24 pm

Does anything Catherine Newman does have to do with Peterson? Are you going to defend him without defending his ideas but noting that there are idiots among his detractors?

liminalOyster » Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:48 am wrote:
Many artists and thinkers ... assembled ... collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding ... to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.


Is this really so different than a c. 2004 dismissal of 911 skepticism/agnosticism?


It's very different! In that case, speculation about what happened in a single event was treated as though it could only be the product of a hidden sickness that the speculator was denying. It was simplistic move to avoid discussion on facts on context of the case. Mishra's claim you quote is about long-running philosophical lineages in general, how Peterson's thought syncs up with earlier thinkers. Categorically the two are not comparable. We can disagree about the motivations of neo-romantics (I see it more as a yearning for an imagined lost old order than the trauma of modernity) but the analogous ideas upheld by Peterson are evident to me. Mishra doesn't avoid Peterson's thinking in the article.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:25 pm

This merits more attention:

Project Willow » Thu Mar 15, 2018 8:43 pm wrote:I've said elsewhere about Peterson that I quite enjoyed having my ideology interrogated. Also, as others have noted, he cannot be contended with reductionist, inflammatory dismissals. At the same time, I think there is a blindness and darkness to Peterson that will out itself more clearly eventually. Here is one of his tweets from January:

https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/950398806054481921
God. Could this be true? The repressed/recovered memory industry is an ethical morass....
8:08 AM - 8 Jan 2018


Here's a response I wrote to Peterson's claims about the sexes self sorting into careers in the Scandinavian countries, and about the existence of patriarchy in general:

Less than 40 years is far too early to discount the effects of social conditioning and to pivot to biologically based differences, but there is more than a bit of "having a hammer makes everything look like a nail" on both sides of the argument.

This circle that has come to prominence of late, Peterson et al shall we say, talk so much about a “male hierarchy”, but consideration of female strategies rarely appear beyond brief mention, do we have our own hierarchy, how do females relate to the male hierarchy? I have yet to see recognition of the fact that a significant portion of human behavior currently labeled “feminine” is essentially submissive posturing. Girls are trained in these appeasement behaviors to maintain their safety while negotiating life among larger and far more dangerous human males. This argues that male hierarchy is not separate but extends over and includes females. Yet higher rates of depression, and "Big Five" traits like neuroticism and agreeableness are attributed to the female reproductive role rather than negotiating life among larger and more dangerous males. Likewise, there is a lot of talk about female choice in the process of mate selection, but little recognition of how patriarchal cultural systems severely limit female choice. Rape, child sexual abuse, prostitution, FGM, arranged and child marriage, these are all evidence that there is a hierarchy between the sexes and males are dominant.


Here is a philosophical critique of Maps of Meaning by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. It outlines Peterson's lack of consideration for females, something I noticed from the very beginning. How could any man who has a daughter advocate for a guiding mythology where she can see no major, positive reflection of herself? Would that not cause her psychological pain? It caused me pain when I was a youth. After reading Genesis, I threw the bible across the floor and never picked it up again. The war between the sexes is real.

http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?meaning-belief.2

14. Peterson's Maps of Meaning is on the one hand fascinating because of what it illuminates with respect to the patriarchal system it analyzes; it is on the other hand myopic because of what it fails to account for or even consider with respect to what is suppressed within the patriarchal system (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 1994b). In keeping with themes in mythology, religion, and Jungian psychiatry, the known and the unknown are personified by The Great Father and the Great and Terrible Mother, respectively, and the terrain between the two is mediated by the Hero. It is notable that in this historical/Jungian account, and equally, in Peterson's undistanced, uncritical rendition of it, daughters never enter the scene; there are only sons or the son. It is notable too that there are only heros. Heroines never enter the scene either--although a princess makes a brief appearance on p. 248 as she "waits for the kiss of the hero to wake." It is as if The Great and Terrible Mother never gives birth to females.

15. Females in fact rarely make an appearance within the analysis Peterson offers, or, if they do, it is with marginal attention, as when he writes that "rapid maturation and the naturally dramatic onset of menstruation" explain why "[initiatory] rituals tend to be more complex and far-reaching for males than for females" (p. 222); or when he writes that, following male initiatory rites, "The new environment is the society of men, where women are sexual partners and equals instead of sources of dependent comfort" (p. 224). How females come to be sexual partners in "the society of men" is not perplexing, but how they come to be "equal" in "the society of men" remains perplexing--and a challenge to this day. The question of an easy equality aside, how females make the transition from being "sexual partners and equals" to being "sources of dependent comfort" (i.e., mothers), or vice versa, or encompass the two modes--partner/equal and mother--not transitionally but simultaneously in "the society of men," is nowhere considered. Peterson's oversight is odd given the fact that having a child, for example--at the very least, a first child--is "unexplored territory," not only in the experiences of pregnancy and of giving birth, but in day to day discoveries of new meanings and potentially daily creative engagements with another being. Females are so shortly and breezily accounted for in Peterson's book that they appear to be no more than necessary but ready-made paste-ons in "the society of men"--which, perhaps, is what they are in such a society.

16. It is notable, furthermore, that while there is a Great and Terrible Mother, there is only a Great Father, even though this Great Father is tyrannical in the extreme as well as orderly, i.e., even though he, like Great Mother, has a powerful negative as well as powerful positive side. Why his negative side is not so designated in his label is peculiar--Terrible Father appears only once (p. 379). The lack of balance is particularly striking--and troubling--in light of the fact that men make war, men make concentration camps, men make prison camps, men dismember men, men rape women, and so on, and so on. Although Peterson chronicles the horrors of concentration and prison camps at length, recounting experiences described by Frankl at Auschwitz and by Solzhenitsyn at the Gulag Archipelago; although he specifically states that "Man can torture his brother and dance on his grave," that "Man exults in agony, delights in pain, worships destruction and pathology,... and constantly works to lay waste, to undermine, to destroy, to torment, to abuse and devour," that "Man chooses evil, for the sake of the evil," and that Man tortures and exults and chooses as he does out of "slavish adherence to the forces of socialization" (p. 347); although Peterson chronicles all these horrors and designates "Man" as their author, he does not seem to realize that it is specifically, universally, and virtually only males in "the society of men" who make war, who "torture," "massacre," butcher," "rape," "devour," and so on (p. 347). In short, that Peterson draws our attention to the horrors of "Man," all the while not questioning the patriarchal system itself in which Man's brutalities take place is an astonishing and puzzling omission, all the more so in light of his desire to discover the "human motivation for evil" (p. 460) and the way in which we humans might recognize "our infinite capacity for good" (p. 456); all the more so too in light of the absolute and central binary opposition he draws between male and female throughout.

17. One can legitimately wonder not only what kind of culture(s) would evolve--what kind of myths and religions would be spawned, what kind of stories would be told--but most significantly in terms of Peterson's central concern, to what degree evil would continue to "turn the world into hell" (p. 456), if females were the humans who spoke for society--for humanity--if they created myths of origin and structured cultures; or, if females and males in truth recognized each other as equals, treated each other as equals, and were thereby capable of creating culture together. In other words, if the "patriarchal kingdom of culture" were not patriarchal, and not a kingdom, and if connectedness rather than combative binary oppositions structured culture(s), then commonalities rather than differences might fundamentally motivate and define human action, and in ways that would move us in the direction Peterson tries to move us, i.e., toward "our infinite capacity for good." Taking just such a critical perspective on the "patriarchal system," Peterson might be willing to examine the structure of "the society of men" and determine how it eventuates in the morality it does. After all, if "morality, at its most fundamental level, is an emergent property of social interaction, embodied in individual behavior, implicit in the value attributed to objects and situations, grounded (unconsciously) in procedural knowledge" (p. 391-92), then whatever morality we have is a morality of the society in which we live, and an unfailingly scrupulous examination and critique of "the society of men" in which we live is mandatory. It may be that the kind of order a patriarchal system or patriarchal kingdom of culture produces is not the kind of order conducive to the morality Peterson envisions. The order the Great Father sets up, for example, is in opposition to Nature--in all Her forms, objective and well as culturally elaborated in myth, religion, and a host of other kinds of "narratives." It engenders a "dominant male" morality--and mentality--one which has evolutionary roots (Sheets-Johnstone 1994b), but one that is also unenlightened by insights into the positive moral capacities of humans that Peterson elucidates and personifies in the Hero. The question Peterson might ask himself is whether there is a connection between the opposition and the morality.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:49 pm

JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:24 pm wrote:Does anything Catherine Newman does have to do with Peterson?


You cannot be serious. She gave him the typically stupid and dishonest interview that made him a household name in the UK.

Are you going to defend him without defending his ideas but noting that there are idiots among his detractors?


What? Did you even read my post, Jack? Did you at least look at the pictures?

JackRiddler wrote:
liminalOyster » Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:48 am wrote:
Many artists and thinkers ... assembled ... collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding ... to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.


Is this really so different than a c. 2004 dismissal of 911 skepticism/agnosticism?


It's very different! In that case, speculation about what happened in a single event was treated as though it could only be the product of a hidden sickness that the speculator was denying. Mishra's claim is about philosophical lineage in general, how Peterson's thought syncs up with earlier thinkers.


Ah, yes, lineage. How Jeff`s thought syncs up with Alex Jones's. How your own thought syncs up with Horst Mahler`s. How Daniele Ganser`s thought syncs up with the Flat Earth movement and Conspiracy Nuttery in general. How Michael Ruppert syncs synced up with Anti-Semitism. (Continue ad lib.) So it goes, and so it has ever gone.

Next up: How Jesus synced up with vengeful Jahweh, how Martin Luther King`s thought synced up with Martin Luther`s, and how Karl Marx synced up with Charles Fourier.

We`re so lucky we have the liberal media of The West™ to keep us thinking straight and feeling right. What could possibly go wrong?
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Mar 21, 2018 3:29 pm

JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 2:24 pm wrote:Does anything Catherine Newman does have to do with Peterson? Are you going to defend him without defending his ideas but noting that there are idiots among his detractors?

liminalOyster » Wed Mar 21, 2018 10:48 am wrote:
Many artists and thinkers ... assembled ... collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding ... to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.


Is this really so different than a c. 2004 dismissal of 911 skepticism/agnosticism?


It's very different! In that case, speculation about what happened in a single event was treated as though it could only be the product of a hidden sickness that the speculator was denying. It was simplistic move to avoid discussion on facts on context of the case. Mishra's claim you quote is about long-running philosophical lineages in general, how Peterson's thought syncs up with earlier thinkers. Categorically the two are not comparable. We can disagree about the motivations of neo-romantics (I see it more as a yearning for an imagined lost old order than the trauma of modernity) but the analogous ideas upheld by Peterson are evident to me. Mishra doesn't avoid Peterson's thinking in the article.


I don't care for Peterson. And I do agree that Mishra has adeptly traced a lineage and convincingly connected Peterson to it in a way I did not see coming. But he is still broadly psychologizing an entire lineage of thought in a manner that is reductive, be it explained by "a lost old order" or by "trauma[tic] modernity." That's the manner in which I see a general similarity to Hofdstater - broad erasure by liberal psycgologizing. IMHO, there are alternative and very different ways that one might speculate on the psychology of the neoromantics. For instance, I think a convincing case could be made for a proletarian (even slightly anarchist) aspect to them which demanded the exotic spoils of colonialism, albeit as lurid orientalist simulacra. Or a case that there was a much older Euro/Wester undercurrent of "etheric thought" that just found greater popular voice in that time and those thinkers that followed.
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Re: Jordan Peterson with Russell Brand & Ian McGilchrist

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Mar 21, 2018 9:31 pm

I'm game. I expect you know more about them than I.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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