A friend recently sent me this link: The Importance of Being Ethical, with Jordan Peterson.I clicked and watched and was moved. What I saw and heard was a conversation on Uncommon Knowledge between Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution and Jordan Peterson, eminent Canadian psychologist and author now being persecuted by the Ontario College of Psychologists and threatened with being disbarred for his intellectual sayings and political commentary, unless he submits to a re-education process we associate with the Chinese Communist Party and its Soviet predecessor. The move by the Ontario College of Psychologists is, as the Yiddish saying goes, a scandal and a disgrace, but exemplary of the mindset of the West in its age of decline.
In a far-ranging discussion, Mr. Peterson advanced a number of ideas which made eminent sense. He explained how free speech was more than a right; and even if one thought it a right, it was not a right among others, but one that guaranteed all the rest. Free speech is like free movement, a constituent part of being human. For human beings are conscious beings, which means we talk to ourselves in our heads when we think. Speaking aloud is but the continuation of thought. Take it away and we are no longer who we are. Take it away and we can no longer make sense of the world, create order out of chaos, bring the horizon of the future into the present, a lovely phrase of his if ever there was one.
That’s why democracy is important. It fosters a marketplace of ideas, cacophonous though it may be and however much stupidity may circulate, because it is through this tremendous exchange that we come to those choices which may resolve the problems we face together. That’s why democracies are more functional than tyrannies, be they of the autocratic ancien régime style or of the modern totalitarian kind. Complex modern societies have to deal with risk, with a future that is only partially knowable; hence no omnipotent centre can possibly deliver on its claims. Instead, it is more likely to produce a mess, a deadly mess in fact, which means China run by the Communist Party is no model of anything. Nor is anything the woke academics have up their sleeve. They may want to end all lopsided power arrangements by an endless parade of policies designed to achieve social justice for all. In fact, they are haunted by power, misunderstand it, would dearly like to exercise it.
Their obsession with power as the chief determinant of social relationships and the driving force of history is, for Peterson, misplaced. Speaking as a psychologist, he suggests that human beings cannot live without values, among which there are far more worthwhile criteria than power. How about truth? he asks. How about goodness? How about figuring out our place in the universe and learning to adapt? These, he suggests, are important motivations because they enable us to know. Science itself cannot be undertaken without the presumption there is truth out there. One must presume the mind of God is knowable, said Peterson. Which is what Einstein meant when he said God does not play dice with the universe. And so Mr. Peterson also had quite a bit to say about religion. By which he meant the divine, or what others like me might call the God story.
There are stories and there are stories, Mr. Peterson suggested. The most important stories are the stories with depth. Some stories simply entertain, but the deeper stories are those which tell us some important truth about life and about ourselves. That’s why some literature is more profound, part of the classics which we ought to cherish. So too with ideas, such that the divine can be considered the deepest idea in the hierarchy of our ideas. It is the realm of our most fundamental ideas, those which structure our social relationships. Hence the importance of the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. Take the first stories in the Book of Genesis, Mr. Peterson said. What is the first thing God does in the beginning? He creates order out of chaos. Then He creates man and woman in His image, but they are not Him and so have to figure out the meaning of their existence bearing that in mind. They are mortal. They are separate from the deepest structure of the cosmos and yet they are part of it, and access it through their consciousness. Hence the expulsion from the garden. The difference is painful, humbling, and revealing, but only if they take God, the divine, seriously. If not, they have only the will to power, which leads to mayhem and murder. Cain and Abel. The Flood. The Tower of Babel. But when they take the divine seriously, they structure their lives around other values: the sanctity of every individual, goodness, kindness, the search for truth. These are the values which enable us to live, to structure our lives, bring order out of chaos and adapt to the challenges our environment throws up.
But the story woke culture spins does not acknowledge any of this. In the name of diversity, equity and inclusion its proponents advocate censorship and dismissal of those who disagree. In the name of concern for the planet they tell the young not to have children. In the name of restorative social justice, they support murderers and terrorists and totalitarian governments. Worst of all, they rob people of the will to act ethically. And when he says that, the realization drives Mr. Peterson to tears. How noble is this man who spends his time now talking to millions of the importance of acting ethically, explaining what that means, how without it we jettison what it means to be human. He deserves our applause, not the condemnation of the discipline he so valiantly serves.
My discipline is sociology, but the story there is unfortunately much the same. Mr. Peterson thinks post-modern literary criticism bears much of the blame for our intellectual mess. I think the critical theorists in the social sciences and humanities, what used to be called the liberal arts, are the chief culprits. But it amounts to the same thing. Marxism has worked its way into all the soft disciplines, morphing from a theory of economic determinism into a theory of domination that, as its adherents like to say, colonizes all aspects of social life, masquerading at times even as liberation, sexual or otherwise. As sociology, it is bad theory, misreads completely how modern society works. Modern society is functionally differentiated, inclusive by necessity. Its valued goods circulate widely, in both the marketplace and the bedroom. Everyone says I love you, as Woody Allen put it, and everyone can become President, as Donald Trump proved. Difference, far from being disparaged, is prized. So why condemn our society for doing exactly what the wokesters claim they would like to bring about? Unless of course you know not what it does and so know not what you do.
Mr. Peterson is right to bring up the religious tradition of the West. Without it, modern democracy would not have come about. No religious tolerance, no civic pluralism, no abolition of slavery, to name a few significant historical achievements. For the critical theorists, however, religion was but the form of domination that befit feudal society and its pre-modern knockoffs. And so it too had to go, along with every other vestige of the aristocracy. Atheism, wrote Marx, was the first step toward communism. It was also the first step to the vanguard of the proletariat’s permanent seizure of power. Only by undermining the legitimacy of the divine story that is the Hebrew Bible could the doctrine of history as various forms of oppression take hold and replace it. The secularists think they are emancipating humanity through science – scientific socialism was the revolutionary catchphrase a century ago – when all they are doing is revamping messianism in a guise more ruthless than the Inquisition. Or as Peterson put it talking about Milton’s Paradise Lost, the secular intelligentsia, like Lucifer, think they are obliged to replace God in Heaven and in their revolt create hell on earth. Their sociology is bad sociology, their psychology bad psychology, and their understanding of religion and literature downright abysmal.
As Peter Robinson suggested in his conversation with Jordan Peterson, we may well be witnessing the downfall of western civilization. The successful indoctrination of thousands of story tellers by left-wing western academics has now parleyed itself into a cultural ethos that reigns even in the corporate marketplace. The parallel with the cultural penetration of the Roman Empire by Christianity two millennia ago is hard to ignore. A friend of mine writes me these days of Der Untergang des Abendlandes. We both have a sense of impending doom and wonder what can be done except to watch in wonder. I know from sociology that power defined as the ability to enforce compliance is what circulates in the political sphere. I also know the function of politics is to make collectively binding decisions. In a complex society this requires considerable wisdom and judiciousness on the part of our leaders, and enough of both on the part of the electorate to choose such talented people. Nothing in the current cultural malaise augurs well on either front. One gets the sense – I get the sense – there is little to do but to stop talking to people. And here comes Jordan Peterson to remind me that such a stance is not an option. Even in the worst of times it is not an option. And we are not yet in the worst of times, even if we are heading there. Mr. Peterson, with ten million people watching this conversation, is a credit to his profession. The last thing he needs is to have his license revoked and be sent for re-education. He deserves our thanks. He has mine.
He especially has mine for his moving and insightful remarks on the inescapable relationship between being and consciousness that is our lot. I had been thinking about this lately as a friend of mine was dying. I wrote a text about his dying that got mixed up with other people I had lost and the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray. The text ended with my perplexed amazement at how our search for delight continues apace along with the consciousness of our death, at which point I could only invoke the God story. Mr. Peterson’s wonderful conversation with Peter Robinson shed some light on why I had done so and brought me some consolation. The man must be an excellent psychologist.
Not so his colleagues at the Ontario College of Psychologists who act more like the commissars and apparatchiks who delighted in ruining the professional careers of Soviet citizens. The college’s actions against Mr. Peterson are as baseless as they are vindictive, typical of the narrow-minded and the ignorant who now people Canadian institutions from coast to coast to coast. Remember how the CBC fired Stockwell Day for daring to say that Canada was not a racist country? Remember how Telus chimed in, firing him from their board of directors for the same reason? What about the doctors whose licenses were revoked for daring to dissent from the prevailing wisdom of Canada’s public health bodies? I used to think that the rot occurred only in those liberal arts disciplines without ongoing licensing bodies. Now I see otherwise. Intimidation is the name of the game and the country will not be lacking in stooges willing to cancel people who dare to think differently on matters dear to the woke agenda. The federal Liberal-NDP government has also pitched in with bills designed to monitor and control what citizens wish to place on the internet. All for our good, of course. The effect will be just the opposite. Trust in public institutions will decline. Eventually no one will believe even scientific authority. Moral Lysenkoism will run rampant. And only courageous people like Jordan Peterson stand between us and the whirlwind. Where are his colleagues in the psychology profession? Why are they not raising a hue and cry over this preposterous over-reach by their college? And where are the citizens of the true north strong and free? Busy chanting at hockey games now played on the unceded territory of the Iroquois Confederacy?
Modern society has yet to acquire a self-observing ego, one that will adequately describe how it functions in fact rather than in the woolly-minded and obsolete ravings of nineteenth-century socialists now embraced even by the Vatican. Sociologists are supposed to specialize in that task, but most are too busy trying to overthrow the society they are studying. Not all, though. The late Niklas Luhmann broke with tradition and through his writings brought some of us over to his way of thinking. And then there are people who are not sociologists, but come to similar conclusions because they too run up against a wall and have to think through an issue. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist who was interested in how ordinary people engage in sadism and researched the question. He also sought to give insight and comfort to patients who seemed lost and adrift in this modern world of ours. Himself hounded for rejecting the pronoun fetish that has swept through the academy, he spoke up and spoke out. And now his words too become part of that enterprise by which society gets to understand itself. But will that occur before our society implodes and perishes like the dinosaurs, as Musil once warned, from its grandeur?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/chatgpt-ai-language-human-computer-grammar-logic/672902/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
It’s amazing how prescient you were. I liken you to the Peterson of your day.
Didn’t you begin your career as an anarchist and leftist?