Original Text of God Sent Jordan Peterson to ALt Right

Nov 27, 2016
God Sent Jordan Peterson to the Alt Right
JP

The video is titled “PhD gives up trying to reason with SJWs” and it begins, really, with a shot of him: standing among some nondescript college males, hands in his pockets, a crisp white dress shirt and maroon suspenders delineating his figure. I realize as I rewatch the video that his face is the kind of face I imagine on Ayn Rand characters; she would describe it with words like “angular” and “harmonious.” The person filming the video asks him a question:

“Peterson do you any comments on the Nazi presence at your protest?”

“Yeah — I don’t like Nazis.”

The rest of the video consists of Peterson and several protestors of his speech in discussion with one another about the politics of gender pronouns. The description of the video is not a description but a collection of tags meant to direct the likeminded to viewing it:

    sjw compilation, sjw cringe, far left, feminist cringe, anti feminist, anti sjw, the real sjw, feminist compilation, liberal, funny sjw, mra, motivational video, ben shapiro, douglas murray, crazy feminist, blm cringe, fat shaming, freedom of speech, rekt feminist, mgtow, political correctness, ayaan hirsi ali, rekt feminist videos, bill whittle, derek turner, buzzfeed yellow, buzzfeed, pbs newshour (tv program), bbc, musicalbethan, frequent feminist, anita sarkeesian (person), laci green, kat blaque, malala yousafzai (award winner), yazidi, human the movie, anti-feminism, anti-sjw, feminist

The first tag in the third line — motivational video — is, I hope to explain, the most accurate.

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The alt right seems to be defined more by its figureheads than by any recognizable set of principles. This isn’t to say that its various member groups aren’t connected to one another along some ideological lines — because they are — but it is to say that, by and large, the easiest way to identify the alt right and its members is by seeing who they follow on Twitter, and who they subscribe to on Youtube. Ricky Vaugn, Sargon of Akkad, Paul Joseph Watson, — a constellation of other middling planets orbiting the angry orange sun that is Trump. This is how you draw the map: you look at these figures and the people around them, and you lay down your lines accordingly.

Peterson is a recent addition to this strange and unlikely cosmos, but he’s turning out to be one of the most illuminating of its members. Put simply, Jordan Peterson seems to embody all of the things that members of the alt right’s intellectual wing would like to be or think that they are — which, of course, tells us something about the alt right itself, which in the present situation is a precious resource indeed.

This is why he deserves writing about him; this is why I will be writing about him.

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Jordan Peterson holds a Ph.D from McGill University in clinical psychology. In interviews he will explain that he started out as a political scientist, — it’s what he got his bachelor’s in — but decided that the methodology of the field in its current state was inadequate to study politics as he thought it had to be studied, which made him settle on psychology. In the broad sense. In the very very broad sense.

Jordan Peterson’s most known work is a book and class called ‘Maps of Meaning.’ On his homepage, he describes the book’s genesis as follows:

    "I started writing Maps of Meaning in 1985. I was very upset by the processes of the cold war — by the superhuman energy of the arms race, by the terrible ideologically-motivated battle taking place on the world stage. Other aspects of political and social behavior and conception appeared equally mysterious and distressing to me. I could not understand what forces drove the Nazis, the Stalinists, or the Khmer Rouge. I could not make sense of the human propensity for belief-inspired violence. I had frightening, re-occurring nightmares about the possible destruction of the world. I decided, in consequence, that I would devote myself to the alleviation of my ignorance. I have attempted to do so, ever since — while finishing my doctorate at McGill University, while serving as a faculty member at Harvard and the University of Toronto."

The approach Jordan Peterson takes towards psychology is one which seems to be from the early 20th century rather than the 21st. I don’t intend this as a dig: I mean, literally, that Peterson seems to treat psychology as it was originally conceived, as a half-philosophic, half-scientific investigation of psyche, the soul. Perhaps this isn’t clear to people involved with the discipline, but the plain fact is that in most of North America academic psychology does not begin to approach topics this sweeping or airy: the closest someone in a psych department might come to ‘understanding’ things like “the human propensity of belief-inspired violence” would be a social psychologist studying conformity or in-group identity, in a piece-by-piece, experiment-by-experiment, exceedingly prosaic and unromantic fashion.

Not so with Peterson.

To be clear: Peterson is a researcher. He has conducted studies which seem to properly focus the analytical tools of psychology onto issues of political interest; and he’s also conducted studies which deal with topics which seem just about as grand as those broached in his book, (in the above, the ability of art to ‘change’ us.)

But when it comes to his magnum opus, Maps of Meaning, Peterson turns to what — again — seems to be more characteristic of turn-of-the-century psychology, viz. Grand Systematizing. Turning to the references pages of the book, one finds plenty of citations that look like this:

    “Fox, N.A. & Davidson, R.J. (1986). Taste-elicited changes in facial signs of emotion and the asymmetry of brain electrical activity in human newborns. Neuropsycholgia, 24, 417–422.”

But one finds even more citations that simply read:

    “Dostovesky, F. (1993). Crime and Punishment. New York: Vintage Classics.”

After one scan of the reference pages I counted three Dostovesky novels, two books by the literary theorist Northrop Frye, eight works of Nietzsche’s, one dialogue by Plato, three of Shakespeare’s plays, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Milton’s Paradise Lost. There is also — as there should be, given the book’s stated topic — a smattering of references to Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, and to a variety of historical works with titles like Rousseau and his era: Vol. 1. The book, properly, seems to be a work of ethnography, or cultural anthropology, — though Peterson still seems to cover it under the umbrella of psychology.

The reason I’m needling on about all of this is, again, because of what it means for Peterson’s public image and, again, what that means about the alt right. To get to the point: Peterson has the credentials of a researcher— and indeed is a researcher— but the most pronounced part of his work is much more sweeping, much more romantic than what that discipline usually encapsulates. Peterson has about him the image of a scientist from the last epoch: he wants us to see him trudging forward, driven by actual visions which came to him in the night, seeking to find a scientific explanation for man’s self-destructiveness before it’s too late for all of us.

If Peterson is a hero of the alt-right it is, in large part, because he already narrates his career and biography as if he were a hero:

    "Raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, Jordan Peterson has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stuntplane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American Long-House on the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe."

He is Captain Nemo; he is L. Ron Hubbard if anything L. Ron Hubbard said about himself was true; he is Dr. Quest; he is John Galt. He is, more succinctly still, what the alt-right wants and needs right now.

From the most superficial to the most substantial: the clinical psychologist title dovetails wonderfully with the alt-right’s rhetoric about ‘irrational,’ ‘crazed,’ ‘deranged,’ or plain ‘idiotic’ members of the progressive left. The alt-right subscribes heavily to the stylistic dressings of strength, vitality, health, etc. which usually mark conservative arguments and writing; Peterson’s official position as a member of the therapeutic community means that discussions of him and his work slide into the alt-right’s usual rhetorical devices like a hand into a well-tailored glove.

Take the title of the video which began this article, for instance: “PhD gives up trying to reason with SJWs.” The implication is clear: Peterson isn’t addressed by name but by academic title, and he isn’t in discussion with SJWs so much as he’s trying to explain something to them — which they are failing to understand.

Titles aside, there’s the heroic bearing I’ve been going on about for the past five or so minutes. Most of the alt-right’s most visible figureheads enjoy viewing themselves as modern Burkes and de Maistres; aloof, conversant in the classical wisdom the modern world has disastrously cast aside, writing and speaking with clarity and venom about the various dooms the progressive movements of the world are calling down on themselves and their countrymen. They are the speakers of Hard Truths; the dismantlers of Comfortable Illusions. This is an enjoyable position to occupy — the writer is, himself, of the same cloistered-away, theorizing species — but it’s wanting a certain blaze, a certain publicity. It’s one thing to be an intelligent polemicist, but it’s another thing entirely to fulfill that role Buckley outlined for the conservative: standing athwart history and yelling “Stop!” even when the people don’t want you.

In this case, Peterson just happens to be yelling “Stop!” in front of a lot of TV cameras and smartphones and doing so in a way which I think a lot of my fellow Ivory Tower dwellers find exciting:

Hands held behind his back, pacing professorially, yelling to the crowd about the irreplaceable flame that is free-speech. To someone whose life is lived between Youtube upload pages and visits to their Google Adsense account, this is a vision of intellectualism that is exhilarating, to say the least.

And so he is lionized. Peterson is quick becoming one of the alt-right’s most cherished darlings, not just because he is in line with their views on this particular issue and is articulate in his defense of them, but because he’s a kind of role model: because his videos are, again, inspirational videos at heart. A lot of the alt-righters like to think of themselves as the gadflys of and rebels against what they think is a leftist conspiracy, and so conjure up for themselves images of them shouting against the storm, taking a stand, using the ultimately invincible tool of logic to defend what’s right. Except their storm is in the form of Youtube comments and response videos; their stand is a blog post; and their wielding of the tools of logic usually reduces to misplaced smugness.

Although Peterson’s arguments aren’t exactly made out of invincible logic — this is, perhaps, an issue for another essay — the storm he’s experiencing is in his real life, and his stand has the all of the engrossing trappings of a movie or a play. He likes it this way, it seems, and has worked to frame it as such; and he has now an audience who will indefatigably watch and praise each act as it unfolds.

Let’s see what gets put on next.