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On Nailing Jell-O to the Wall
Apr. 9th, 2018 06:48 pmOr, Why You Can't Win a Debate with Jordan Peterson or His Fanboys
Back when I was a kid—contrary to what my students believe, this is well after dinosaurs roamed the earth—the idea that said earth was flat was laughable. To say that someone was a Flat Earther tended to be hyperbole; it was to state that they believed in something so outlandish that they might as well claim that the earth is flat. Now, of course, in this post-truth age, Flat Earth theory is treated in the media as a valid theory to be debated right next to the conventional, verifiable fact that the earth is round, because Round Eartherism is one extreme and Flat Eartherism is another extreme, and the truth must lie somewhere in the middle.
I was not a kid when evolutionary psychology passed from a fad to a joke, and remember the process well. It was as though the chattering class realized, all at once, that this bizarre construct made no sense whatsoever and let's never talk about the time we decided that The Flintstones represented an accurate portrait of the lifestyles of prehistoric man and for some reason it was also the natural default for gender dynamics. This was likely around the time that the guy who popularized the Paleo Diet dropped dead of a heart attack at 51. The two might have been related, actually.
A lot of ideas seem like they make some kind of intuitive sense, but fall apart upon further examination. Eugenics, for example, probably made sense at one point. A binary theory of gender linked to chromosomes, now disproven by science and the fact that there are humans who have something other than XX or XY chromosomes. One would dearly hope that the end of chattel slavery, World War II, and the Civil Rights era might have put the question of whether the Aryan race was the best one, or even existed as a discrete thing, to rest once and for all—and for some time it was the case that only a fringe minority of whackjobs believed it was still in question.
Sadly, we do in fact live in a post-truth era, and harried schoolteachers find themselves having to deal with the phenomenon that is Jordan B. Peterson, pop-psychologist to the stars, Alt Reich gateway drug, and lobster aficionado. Friends outside the education field, or those who are lucky enough to not have white 16-21-year-old boys as their primary demographic, keep asking me why I keep harping on this guy, but all the TAs, contract faculty, and high school teachers in primarily white schools nod their heads. This is a guy who has a lot to say about subjects that he knows nothing about, and perhaps because of this, is wildly popular amongst people with just a little bit of knowledge.
Now, Lobster Boy himself is not a neo-Nazi, but like fellow Canadians Paul Fromm and Ernst Zundel, he has a lot of rather horrible ideas hidden behind facades of FREEZED PEACH and JUST ASKING QUESTIONS. The official line from him and his followers tends to be that they were Classical Liberals (whatever that means) until some Social Justice Warrior hurt their feelings, and this has made them question the consensus of eggheads in ivory towers re: whether you get to oppress other people or not. And to be honest, he's not that many degrees away from Fromm and Zundel, both in real life associations and in ideology. I shy away from slippery slopes, but his YouTube videos are basically a mudslide down a steep cliff in a tsunami into an ocean of Pepe icons and triple parentheses.
Recently, I posted this rather excellent review of Lobster Boy's latest opus to Facebook (if you haven't read it, go do so now. I'll wait. The review, I mean. Not the book.). A fellow (left-leaning) teacher seemed upset at this, and other attempts to silence Peterson's Right To Free Speech, saying that if he was so popular, didn't it make sense to read what he had to say?
To which I responded, no, not at all. There is no point. I've listened to some of his videos and read some of his articles, and I've come to the conclusion that reading any more is acutely counterproductive, particularly if money or clicks are involved.
His philosophy, such that it is (and political philosophy is not his field; his doctorate is in psychology and he's not actually good at that), is a cobbled-together rehash of many different ideas that are self-evidently bullshit and have been debunked by brighter minds than I. No one with any intellectual credibility really takes evolutionary psychology seriously anymore. Same with the gender binary. Western chauvinism is taken seriously by lunatics like white supremacists and the President of the United States, I suppose, but philosophers and political scientists have by and large rejected it. Woo sells well, but you're unlucky to find a reputable doctor who advises sticking jade eggs up your twat. And no one with a grade school understanding of the evolutionary tree would buy that lobster behaviour is an accurate predictor of human behaviour.
But Peterson's very perniciousness is that he is such a slippery fellow, and such a sloppy writer, that it's impossible to discern exactly what he believes. That's Just Asking Questions in action; push too far in a reactionary direction and you were merely intellectually curious. This, I think, is part of why he is so popular—he is good at wise-sounding aphorisms that appeal to the sorts of men who see themselves as deficient or oppressed, but his politics are deniable and vague enough that his fanboys can fill in their own meanings.
And such a person is useless to debate. I'm curious to watch his face-off with Zizek, who actually has a lot of the same problems despite being more to the left, because a) it's going to be a hilarious shitshow, b) they'll probably both be coked up going in, and c) Peterson is almost certainly going to win despite being much, much stupider. (Confession of a former Zizek fangirl: I was wrong, mea culpa.)
As I explained to my colleague, the primary reason for this is that the liberal and the reactionary have very different victory conditions in a debate. (The hard left no-platforms someone like Peterson, which is where I'm coming from.) The liberal believes she is engaging in a war of ideas. She will win the debate by making more points, supported by more facts, that adhere to more rigorous logic. Her goal is to prove herself right and her opponent wrong, and lest you think that I'm bashing liberals here, I will admit to a tremendous amount of sympathy with this goal. That really ought to be the goal of a debate. That's how it was when I was a kid learning how to win debates.
But the reactionary—be it Nazi Classic or Alt Reich—does not share this goal. The reactionary knows that his ideas are illogical, because the reactionary believes in the primacy of emotion over reason. That's why he's a reactionary—because he rejects the Enlightenment tradition. He knows that in a free market of ideas, if such a thing ever existed, his ideas would be unpopular. His goal is to have his ideas accepted as ideas worth debating in the first place. He is like a Flat Earther in that respect; he wants his feelings to be put on a level playing field with empirical science. Once that happens, it doesn't matter if he wins or loses; his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream.
So the second you fall into a debating trap, be it with JBP or one of his followers, you have lost. It doesn't matter how logical you are. It doesn't matter how correct you are. You have acknowledged that a bunch of debunked hokum deserves to be considered along with serious political philosophy, that Deepak Chopra (either one, really) can share a stage with Stephen Hawking and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You have gotten into a shit-flinging fight with a baboon, and whoever wins, you're both going to get covered in shit.
Sadly, we as a society are already sliding down that slippery, shitty slope. Ignoring Lobster Boy and the crustacean trend he represents are not options. The only valid responses seem intuitively wrong to the logical mind, and of these, the only viably non-violent ones are no-platforming and mockery. You cannot engage his ideas as ideas any more than you can engage a debating partner who hasn't done the background readings and instead of formulating an argument, pulls down his pants and farts in your face.
("But Sabotabby! Isn't viciously mocking the fash and/or suppressing their FREEZED PEACH what turned Classical Liberals such as JBP and his acolyte Lindsay Shepherd into Alt Reich darlings?" If you believe that, dear friends, I have a bridge to sell you. They were like that already, and carefully constructed the narrative they spin. Besides, aren't these guys all about Manly Masculinity and the primacy of the brave individual? Can SJWs like me have such an impact on their feelings as to make them cry and drive them down a dark path?)
You can't throw shit better than a baboon. You can't nail Jell-O to a wall. And you can't win a debate where you don't understand the other side's victory conditions.
Back when I was a kid—contrary to what my students believe, this is well after dinosaurs roamed the earth—the idea that said earth was flat was laughable. To say that someone was a Flat Earther tended to be hyperbole; it was to state that they believed in something so outlandish that they might as well claim that the earth is flat. Now, of course, in this post-truth age, Flat Earth theory is treated in the media as a valid theory to be debated right next to the conventional, verifiable fact that the earth is round, because Round Eartherism is one extreme and Flat Eartherism is another extreme, and the truth must lie somewhere in the middle.
I was not a kid when evolutionary psychology passed from a fad to a joke, and remember the process well. It was as though the chattering class realized, all at once, that this bizarre construct made no sense whatsoever and let's never talk about the time we decided that The Flintstones represented an accurate portrait of the lifestyles of prehistoric man and for some reason it was also the natural default for gender dynamics. This was likely around the time that the guy who popularized the Paleo Diet dropped dead of a heart attack at 51. The two might have been related, actually.
A lot of ideas seem like they make some kind of intuitive sense, but fall apart upon further examination. Eugenics, for example, probably made sense at one point. A binary theory of gender linked to chromosomes, now disproven by science and the fact that there are humans who have something other than XX or XY chromosomes. One would dearly hope that the end of chattel slavery, World War II, and the Civil Rights era might have put the question of whether the Aryan race was the best one, or even existed as a discrete thing, to rest once and for all—and for some time it was the case that only a fringe minority of whackjobs believed it was still in question.
Sadly, we do in fact live in a post-truth era, and harried schoolteachers find themselves having to deal with the phenomenon that is Jordan B. Peterson, pop-psychologist to the stars, Alt Reich gateway drug, and lobster aficionado. Friends outside the education field, or those who are lucky enough to not have white 16-21-year-old boys as their primary demographic, keep asking me why I keep harping on this guy, but all the TAs, contract faculty, and high school teachers in primarily white schools nod their heads. This is a guy who has a lot to say about subjects that he knows nothing about, and perhaps because of this, is wildly popular amongst people with just a little bit of knowledge.
Now, Lobster Boy himself is not a neo-Nazi, but like fellow Canadians Paul Fromm and Ernst Zundel, he has a lot of rather horrible ideas hidden behind facades of FREEZED PEACH and JUST ASKING QUESTIONS. The official line from him and his followers tends to be that they were Classical Liberals (whatever that means) until some Social Justice Warrior hurt their feelings, and this has made them question the consensus of eggheads in ivory towers re: whether you get to oppress other people or not. And to be honest, he's not that many degrees away from Fromm and Zundel, both in real life associations and in ideology. I shy away from slippery slopes, but his YouTube videos are basically a mudslide down a steep cliff in a tsunami into an ocean of Pepe icons and triple parentheses.
Recently, I posted this rather excellent review of Lobster Boy's latest opus to Facebook (if you haven't read it, go do so now. I'll wait. The review, I mean. Not the book.). A fellow (left-leaning) teacher seemed upset at this, and other attempts to silence Peterson's Right To Free Speech, saying that if he was so popular, didn't it make sense to read what he had to say?
To which I responded, no, not at all. There is no point. I've listened to some of his videos and read some of his articles, and I've come to the conclusion that reading any more is acutely counterproductive, particularly if money or clicks are involved.
His philosophy, such that it is (and political philosophy is not his field; his doctorate is in psychology and he's not actually good at that), is a cobbled-together rehash of many different ideas that are self-evidently bullshit and have been debunked by brighter minds than I. No one with any intellectual credibility really takes evolutionary psychology seriously anymore. Same with the gender binary. Western chauvinism is taken seriously by lunatics like white supremacists and the President of the United States, I suppose, but philosophers and political scientists have by and large rejected it. Woo sells well, but you're unlucky to find a reputable doctor who advises sticking jade eggs up your twat. And no one with a grade school understanding of the evolutionary tree would buy that lobster behaviour is an accurate predictor of human behaviour.
But Peterson's very perniciousness is that he is such a slippery fellow, and such a sloppy writer, that it's impossible to discern exactly what he believes. That's Just Asking Questions in action; push too far in a reactionary direction and you were merely intellectually curious. This, I think, is part of why he is so popular—he is good at wise-sounding aphorisms that appeal to the sorts of men who see themselves as deficient or oppressed, but his politics are deniable and vague enough that his fanboys can fill in their own meanings.
And such a person is useless to debate. I'm curious to watch his face-off with Zizek, who actually has a lot of the same problems despite being more to the left, because a) it's going to be a hilarious shitshow, b) they'll probably both be coked up going in, and c) Peterson is almost certainly going to win despite being much, much stupider. (Confession of a former Zizek fangirl: I was wrong, mea culpa.)
As I explained to my colleague, the primary reason for this is that the liberal and the reactionary have very different victory conditions in a debate. (The hard left no-platforms someone like Peterson, which is where I'm coming from.) The liberal believes she is engaging in a war of ideas. She will win the debate by making more points, supported by more facts, that adhere to more rigorous logic. Her goal is to prove herself right and her opponent wrong, and lest you think that I'm bashing liberals here, I will admit to a tremendous amount of sympathy with this goal. That really ought to be the goal of a debate. That's how it was when I was a kid learning how to win debates.
But the reactionary—be it Nazi Classic or Alt Reich—does not share this goal. The reactionary knows that his ideas are illogical, because the reactionary believes in the primacy of emotion over reason. That's why he's a reactionary—because he rejects the Enlightenment tradition. He knows that in a free market of ideas, if such a thing ever existed, his ideas would be unpopular. His goal is to have his ideas accepted as ideas worth debating in the first place. He is like a Flat Earther in that respect; he wants his feelings to be put on a level playing field with empirical science. Once that happens, it doesn't matter if he wins or loses; his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream.
So the second you fall into a debating trap, be it with JBP or one of his followers, you have lost. It doesn't matter how logical you are. It doesn't matter how correct you are. You have acknowledged that a bunch of debunked hokum deserves to be considered along with serious political philosophy, that Deepak Chopra (either one, really) can share a stage with Stephen Hawking and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You have gotten into a shit-flinging fight with a baboon, and whoever wins, you're both going to get covered in shit.
Sadly, we as a society are already sliding down that slippery, shitty slope. Ignoring Lobster Boy and the crustacean trend he represents are not options. The only valid responses seem intuitively wrong to the logical mind, and of these, the only viably non-violent ones are no-platforming and mockery. You cannot engage his ideas as ideas any more than you can engage a debating partner who hasn't done the background readings and instead of formulating an argument, pulls down his pants and farts in your face.
("But Sabotabby! Isn't viciously mocking the fash and/or suppressing their FREEZED PEACH what turned Classical Liberals such as JBP and his acolyte Lindsay Shepherd into Alt Reich darlings?" If you believe that, dear friends, I have a bridge to sell you. They were like that already, and carefully constructed the narrative they spin. Besides, aren't these guys all about Manly Masculinity and the primacy of the brave individual? Can SJWs like me have such an impact on their feelings as to make them cry and drive them down a dark path?)
You can't throw shit better than a baboon. You can't nail Jell-O to a wall. And you can't win a debate where you don't understand the other side's victory conditions.
