That Jordan Peterson is held to such esteem by the Alt-Right as well as those who might otherwise be identified as neo-liberal or progressive says something about the state of The West, and it’s not good. Both sides have more in common than either side would ever be willing to admit. This isn’t a judgment on Peterson. It’s a judgment on us.
Prove me wrong.
Please.
What rough beast 
Jordan Peterson’s fans on both sides of the political spectrum have one thing in common: they’re overwhelmingly male. Peterson makes misogyny an inarguable part of his spiel and that appeals to something in men beyond an academic criticism of out-of-control political correctness: their latent fear of being unnecessary in a rapidly changing world. As the feminist philosopher Kate Manne says, he rationalizes “a patriarchal social order” and that is vastly appealing to many men fearful of losing their power. Case in point: read Bill Hicok’s recent essay about being replaced as a poet by other, younger poets (who just happen to be POC and women).
In short, Peterson dog-whistles misogyny. That short circuits all other neural circuits in the brain which might make an otherwise rational progressive man treat his “theories” with the critical eye they deserve. Or the disdain they REALLY deserve.
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I am 100 percent certain he would have an entirely different philosophy if he had a daughter instead of a son. Or maybe not. He doesn’t seem so self aware.
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It’s a toss up, plenty of men with daughters are sexist pricks. Just look at your president.
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And he’s plenty self-aware just like many men of his bent. What he lacks is empathy, humility and any sort of regard for humanity because he is so in love with the sound of his own voice and the machinations of his mind. He believes in himself as intellectually superior to almost everyone else around him. He is supremely aware of any slights to his sense of self, his world view, his unconcious or conscious certainty that the world with its hierarchies that places him, the white straight male, at the top, is the correct system for the world. That arrogance gives rise to these howls of betrayal (see: Bret Stephens and the bedbug fiasco) so beloved of Peterson, Sam Harris, Dawkins, and any other number of mediocre white men who consistently failed their way to the top.
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I’m not saying he is not responsible for his bad ideas. I am saying he has a diagnosible disorder. And whether or not we like his ideas on top of that, to call him mediocre is simply false. Morally flawed yes but intellectually flawed, absolutely no.
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Let us say that many of the arguments Harris et al make do not stand up to real critique. You only have to go as far as Harris’s defense of torture (Mehdi Hasan is very good at dismantling Sam Harris’s particularly bigoted arguments) or look at Kate Manne’s review of Peterson’s 12 Rules to see how weak and inconsistent those stances are. Factor in the sexism and racism, multiply it by the hissy fits and threats to sue that they have unleashed on any serious critic (trying to remind them that they are higher on the hierarchy than those critics) and any possibility that these people are true intellectuals with any integrity at all just fades away like mist.
That’s my opinion, formed by my years of reading these men, observing their popularity, and one nasty run-in with Sam Harris and his Twitter trolls a couple of years ago (His response to my NYT article about Afghan women and the failure of Western development and aid programs to help them: “Ugh”)
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Well that’s the irony, isn’t it. When an intellectual moves beyond an idea and starts pimping it as a prescription for better living then it instantly becomes religious dogma and puts it on the same level of biases and prejudices and moral failings as the religions they’re criticizing. But refer back to my earlier post on Peterson. It’s easy to think he makes sense until you put yourself in the shoes of one of the groups marginalized by his ideas.
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And really, the only things Peterson, Harris and Dawkins have in common is they are critical of religion and putting science before religion hardly connotes mediocrity.
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Oh no, they have a lot more in common than that, but I will save that for another day.
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Indeed, Peterson’s post-modernism is at its strongest when it comes to being anti-feminist. Like when he makes a female client doubt that she was date-raped five times because “there was no way of knowing the objective truth.”
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