The last couple of weeks have really been interesting to watch in the free thinker and intellectual dark web space largely as a result of the pseudo left's dogmatic reaction to Jordan Peterson's speaking tour and his criticism of political correctness.
I am just over half way through the book and have found it to be fairly vanilla and non-controversial. The book advocates historical enlightenment and heroic values which fall within various traditions of the Western canon of literature, science, culture and politics.
Peterson's emphasis on truth telling, self-respect, genuine friendship, personal development, compassion and order building really are repetitions of traditional values and norms espoused over nearly 2800 years of Western Culture.
These transcendent lessons or 'truths' are easily found in Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, Plato's Republic, the Bible, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's works, Machiavelli's Prince, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, the whole Enlightenment and Romantic periods as well as the establishment of modern democratic and civil rights movements which emphasized the sovereignty of the individual.
The reaction by post-modern activists that these age old lessons are somehow radical or simply outmoded(1) demonstrates the intellectual hollowness and fragility of his opponents.
Peterson has built a social media platform based on re-telling these old truths in an accessible format. The sheer accessibility of these stories and the demonstrated audience they have found scares post-modernists because it demonstrates that there is value in returning to history, individualism and cultural traditions.
The book portrays a world molded in the image of Hobbes' state of nature - "nasty brutish and short" but refreshingly asserts that it is every individual's responsibility to try and build some semblance of order in their lives starting with making their own beds.
The fundamental problem of the pseudo left post-modernists and their adherents is that they fail to generate a single solution to a single problem. Instead they posit, that everything is tribal and power dynamics distort every relationship to oppressor and oppressed while ignoring obvious timeless truths like friendship, compassion, meritocracy and humour.
Their intellectual bankruptcy has not surprisingly resulted in desperate attempts to discredit and even outright lie about Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, James Damore and other critics of the toxicity of post-modern values.
Nellies Bowles in the New York Times recently went so far to claim that Peterson is the "Custodian of the Patriarchy" and apparently supports the implementation of a patriarchal system similar to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale because of her misinterpretation of Peterson's reference to "enforced monogamy".(2)
Western and other developed societies do impose "enforced monogamy" standards to discourage, prohibit and even criminalize polygamous practices.
Society through governments choose to enforce these monogamous standards for a number of reasons some of which are based on evolutionary biology and others for cultural values. Ironically, entrenching monogamous relations by law serves to protect women's rights, stabilizes society, reduces masculine violence and social ills created by throwaway males (3) - something which has been investigated and demonstrated in depth in reporting on radical Mormon fundamentalists' operational need to cast out males so as to purposely skew sex ratios.
But, apparently, critics of the Toronto Professor have entirely conflated the idea that enforced monogamy is somehow a tool of oppression when the legal establishment binding two individuals and their long term interests together offers significant incentives for both parties to invest in the successful outcome of their partner's future through empowerment, education, task sharing, child rearing and other mechanisms.
But, apparently research and a nuanced analysis of his writing and comments is too much for the New York Times when you can simply lay accusations that your subject of criticism supports the mass oppression of women.
Dr. Peterson and Stephen Fry recently defended these perspectives in an excellent debate on May 18 at the Munk Debates in Toronto.(4)
More to be continued once I have finished reading the book.
(1) https://newrepublic.com/article/148473/jordan-petersons-tired-old-myths
(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html
(3) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/14/usa.julianborger
(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxYimeaoea0
