What is your opinion on Dr. Jordan Peterson?

What is your opinion on Dr. Jordan Peterson?

I think, much like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson represents the idolatrization of superficial erudition.

This is one of the rare occasions where I disagree with Dan . However, this answer is not meant to undermine his existing answer in any way. Rather, I have entirely different opprobrium against Jordan Peterson’s rhetoric.

To begin my argument, I will cite one of the most famous contemporary Indian scholars- Dr. Abhijit Banerjee who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year. The day he won the Nobel, he was asked in an interview[1]- how did he evaluate the economic turmoil in Latin American countries …

This was his reply —

In some ways I think one of the ways in which we distinguish ourselves is by not answering those questions. I think we'd like to answer these questions after we do the homework. I having a one answer for all of Latin America based on never having really studied Latin America that would be irresponsible. I think that would be bad advertisement for our particular style of work so that's to say I won't answer it!

What’s so fascinating about it?

Dr Banerjee knows -what he doesn’t know- with a surgeon’s precision, and has no shame admitting his limitation. This is called, being a scholar, being erudite, being an expert.

Why is that relevant?

When I began writing about Dr. Peterson, I did not want my readings of his book- 12 Rules of Life (I’ll come to that, later) to cloud my judgment of him. So, I began my research by browsing through the actual peer-reviewed research Peterson published.[2]

According to his ResearchGate profile, he has published 132 articles. Upon glancing through their abstracts, I found that only one of them was vaguely about gender.
1 out of 132!

Thus, it won’t be an overreach to conclude that, ‘gender’, is not Peterson’s area of expertise. Yet, he won’t stop blabbering about gender, ever.

What am I getting at?

Unlike actual scholars like Banerjee, Peterson oversteps his expertise. Too much, Too often. There is nothing more unscholarly than this.

Now, I have no problem with a normy writing self help books and selling them. I have no problem with a normy publishing and selling problematic opinions about gender and politics either….. as long as ….. those opinions are not prefaced with- ‘World renowned psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson says that.. ’

Because, his opinions have nothing to do with his claimed expertise. He is expressing his opinions as a normie.

This, is my first major quibble with Peterson.

Peterson’s statements lack novelty. Everything he says (regarding self-help) had been said and repeated N number of times all through the world.

Self-help books are common in Indian culture. In fact, one of the oldest self-help books was compiled in India. I took two couplets from that book and it lines up perfectly with whatever vague life-lesson Peterson preached through in his rule no 7 in his book 12 Rules of Life (2018) when he said—

Pursue what is meaningful … not what is expedient

Those couplets along-with my attempt in translating those shown in the figure below—

Figure: Excerpts from Karma-Yoga Bhagavad-Gita and translation

The book, of course, is the Bhagavad Gita[3] . The Shlokas are from the chapter Karma-Yoga, written 5000 years back. What Peterson is saying, is hardly novel. Starting from a 5000 year old scripture/epic (as mentioned already) to the 1998 best-seller by Shiv Khera[4] — ‘You Can Win’ — I have read traces of the same exact message in a lot of places . In fact, Khera’s next book Living With Honor (2003) presents arguments almost identical to some of the dialogues presented in Rule 1 (Stand up straight with your shoulders back), Rule 3 (Make friends with people who want the best for you), and Rule 6(Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world) found later in Peterson’s 2018 best-seller.

Figure : The recitation of Bhagavad-Gita by lord Krishna

What I am getting at is — Peterson did not even resuscitate a forgotten message here. He just reiterated, in a real pontifical fashion. This does not make him a genius. Perhaps Nathan J Robinson summarized[5] him the best —

First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured.

This is what Peterson is all about. Superficial erudition. A non-popular academic pursuing popularity via shallow messaging.

But so far (at best) we’ve only gotten two things against him…

He is not really an expert
He’s vague in his messaging

Nothing worse than that. This raises the question— In that case, why are some people so agitated toward him?

This question brings me to the third and final part of my argument. Peterson was never about knowledge, self-help or psychology-research. He was, is, and will be about a single thing— politics.

His rise in fame came … not after his first (of two) book Maps of Meaning. It came only after his statements on C-16 bill[6] (which related to some workplace laws relating gender expressions, gender identity, preferred pronouns, whatever… not important).

Figure : Jordan Peterson’s popularity on Google Search and YouTube search as logged by Google Trends

What’s important is — Politics is what made Peterson the internet pundit that he is today. And if that politics is overtly superficial gender politics, and at times … blatant whining … then so be it.

And thus, came his unhinged tweets like this one —

What in the name of Russell Crowe’s scruffy stubble, does this mean?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. First let us address, what superficial gender politics, was I referring to earlier?

In his first book Peterson equated masculinity with order and femininity with chaos — which is superficial, reductive, and utter horse-sh*t. But what makes him problematic is, the title of his next book - ’12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos’. This bares his latent antagonism towards women. Specially so, because this book has little to do with — ‘dealing with chaos’. The ‘antidote to chaos’-part was utterly unnecessary in the title.

To make matters worse, in the book he constantly explains how order is good, virtuous and necessary, where as chaos is evil and dangerous. Kirri Quad did an excellent job summarizing those thoughts here.[7]

After three sentences about the positive chaotic feminine
as opposed to 11 looong sentences and a full two page paragraph about the wonders of the masculine Order....
he's got about three pages of the negative parts of the chaotic feminine. And not the least of his whining is about how human females are excessively picky about who they'll have sex with.
The negatives for Order contain all of TWO sentences. Now, he goes on about the greatness of males for another few paragraphs …

If that is not gender-biased, I don’t know what is.

In support of his weird hypotheses he often brings in absolutely nonsensical (yet factually correct) examples like lobsters[8] to clusterfuck diagrams like this (diagrams from his first book Maps of Meaning).

Or this …

What clusterfuckery are these?

Similar clusterfuckery can be seen in his political rhetoric where he classifies everything from corporate HR, to gay people, to poor people, to feminists, to actual communists — into an amorphous blob of - ‘Post-Modern Neo Marxists’[9] .

The term Post-Modern Neo Marxism is an oxymoron in itself, as post-modernism is contradictory to Marxism. But, at this point, we’re pretty sure that scholastic accuracy was not Peterson’s operandi to begin with. So, let’s not get into that.

The point to note here is essentially, if you are a traditionalist, you might find some ephemeral validation in Peterson’s hypotheses, you might find an easy catch-phrase for a 4chan post. But, these rhetorics would fail miserably under any careful introspection.

A similar writer from sci-fi genre comes into my mind in this context- Dr. Michio Kaku. His pop-science writings featuring futuristic physics, alien civilizations or space-travel are vastly speculative and imaginary. Much like Peterson’s hypotheses, those articles would be fantastic conversation-materials in social gatherings, or foods-for-thought on a lonesome lazy afternoon. But, that is where their elegance ends. Those pieces do not offer a deeper understanding of physics, the nature of the universe or anything of that magnitude. But there are two crucial differences between Kaku’s and Peterson’s respective rhetorics.

Kaku being a physicist, knows where science ends and science-fiction begins.
Kaku’s arguments, even the speculative ones, have precisely zero political relevance

This makes Peterson controversial, and Kaku interesting yet benign.

To top all these off, Peterson’s victimhood complex[10][11] is virtually unmatched. His constant scaremongering of — ‘attack on masculinity’, is insufferable. What is ironic is, he is so ‘oppressed’ that he can easily reach out to the biggest media-platforms on the planet and whine like an alarmist Karen about some non-existing form of oppression. Laughable !

In summary, I must say two things