Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Is meditating on death like putting on a fur coat in summer? (spoiler alert: no)
The History and Psychology of the Orgy.
The language of strategic planning (doesn’t make it any more meaningful of an exercise…).
The only thing you ever really need to read about (and, as bonus, by!) Jordan Peterson.
Particle physicists begin to invent reasons to build the next larger particle collider.
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Please notice that the duration of the comments window is three days (including publication day), and that comments are moderated for relevance (to the post one is allegedly commenting on), redundancy (not good), and tone (constructive is what we aim for). This applies to both the suggested readings and the regular posts. Also, keep ‘em short, this is a comments section, not your own blog. Thanks!
Footnotes to Plato 
Massimo, frankly, as a long time Stoic and follower of your blog and someone who’s recently started reading Jordan Peterson and watching lectures he puts on YouTube (which are his university courses), I have to say that I think you are caricturing Peterson, and I think you share much more in common with him than you realize.
Im not about to say Peterson is perfect. He’s got flaws. For one, I think he often exclusively attributes certain ideas to the West and Christianity that have clear parallels in other traditions. For another, he generally sees individualism as a mostly unalloyed good, and a unique product of the ‘Christian’ tradition which came up with the idea, (he claims) that we each have a piece of the divine in us. Of course, as you well know, that’s a basic Stoic claim that some scholars think Christians may have lifted from Stoics. (Eg we have divine reason inside us rather than Jesus Christ inside us.) And I’ve got some other gripes too, but that’s for some other time.
I think that while Peterson uses a more or less Christian-Existentialist-Jungian framework, he advises fundamentally Stoic conduct. Select exemplary role models through stories. Experiment with their pattern of behavior. Accept personal responsibility. Don’t claim to know more than you do (he invokes Socrates on this point.) Always try to learn from others. The belief that evil is the result of ignorance. Again and again Peterson advocates moral responsibility. You can of course debate whether you agree with all his values, and one should do so I think.
But I think your coverage of Peterson (here and on Twitter) does not rise to the level of nuance you otherwise regularly achieve. And I think that if you decided to examine either his written works or lectures in full you would find something much more nuanced (and frankly Stoic) than the soundbites of his lectures, or him being interviewed somewhere. At a very minimum, one major reason why Peterson is a respectable intellectual is that he constantly lays out his fundamental assumptions so we can debate them, and constantly tries to present his philosophy as a practical guide to conduct I the 21st. Concerns and methods I know you share!
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Plutarch,
thanks for your feedback, but I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree on Peterson. I have read and listened to him, and I concur fully with the linked article: he’s a crackpot. The fact that there are superficial similarities between what he says (when it is actually clear what he says, which isn’t often) and Stoicism or Christianity is not very helpful. He is pushing a toxic brand of illiberal machism that, unfortunately, very much goes with the zeitgest we are experiencing now. But it is highly unfortuate.
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Fair enough. Thank you for your reply. I fully agree with you that toxic illiberal machismo is a problem in the Zeit Geist today.
Though I do not feel Peterson is contributing to the problem so much as he is suggesting solutions to it that encourage self and societal cultivation through the growth of personal character by following the example of moral role models (which does not at least in the rest of your posts constitute a superficial aspect of Stoicism, but rather a central part because virtue ethics can’t provide one size fits all rules like consequentialists or utilitarians.)
Furthermore, many of the criticisms I see made of Peterson are given in the same unjust spirit I see criticisms made of Stoicism (eg mystical, reactionary, quietest, apolitical, individualist). And I feel that those criticisms are neither warranted about Peterson or Stoicism, and that this kind of reductive criticism reflects a limited knowledge of both sources.
At a very minimum, as a major representative of Stoicism in the 21st century, it seems unlike you and uncharacteristic of you as a Stoic to call Peterson a crack pot. That seems like exactly the kind of name calling Marcus reminded himself as a Stoic to avoid doing when he encountered someone he found unhelpful. And I think that, we would both agree, that the belief that people do bad things out of an ignorance of what is truly good is a central stoic belief, and not a superficial one.
Anyway, thank you for your reply and continued work bringing Stoicism to general audiences in a way that makes it so applicable and obviously about people’s daily life and relationships that hopefully an uncharitable critic of yours could accuse you of teaching obvious things in an un profound way. I genuinely mean that compliment. You write well and to people’s concerns. Which I also think Peterson does (at least in his new book.) I just think criticizing someone for writing about things in such a way that makes their ideas obvious applicable to their life (which you do) is a compliment, not a moral fault.
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The Peterson article is a gem. Finally, someone with enough patience took his work seriously and calling it like it is. Thanks for sharing. Wondering if you’ll be writing about him too. I won’t be holding my breath though.
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Sp I took the time to check out who this Jordan Peterson is, given that his name has started appearing more and more frequently. It seems that his fame has more to do with his views on gender politics than on any of his academic works. He may very well be a crackpot, a charlatan, or worse. i don’t know. But it’s very noticeable that the left has no actual answers to his gender critiques, but chooses to play ad hominem with academic career.
The current affairs article illustrates this nicely. His academic work may be rubbish, and he may attract the alt-right, but how is this related? Does Nathan Robinson actually believe that alt-right nutjobs are getting wrapped up in Peterson’s theory of meaning?? Everywhere I looked on the internet, his supporters are discussing his views on gender, and nothing else. They discuss his brave stand on Canada’s pronoun law (which I must admit I know nothing about), not any of his academic writings.
So why this hysterical craze to damn him with ad hominems, while carefully avoiding any discussions on gender? It seems to that this exactly the reason for his popularity. The attacks make it look as if his views on gender are correct and unassailable.
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I was prejudiced against Peterson because lobsters, and so I deliberately focussed on the extracts given of his work, rather than on the critique inwhich they are embedded. What I seem to find is the New Conservative’s Deepak Chopra, deepity after deepity.
With a beautiful example (“What shall I do with the poor man’s plight? Strive through right example to lift his broken heart.”) of what JK Galbraith called “one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
The term “intrapsychic” occurs seven times in the extracts given from Peterson. This moves me to ask Plutarch, who has seen something of merit in Peterson that I have not, what the word means, and, in particular, what Peterson mdeans by “intrapsychic spirits”,as opposed to extrapsychic spirints (or intrapsychic non-spirits?).
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I would suggest that the article is a good overview of the characteristics of a “crank.” It brought to mind a similar personality in the field of finance, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, although Taleb lacks Peterson’s ability to appear rational in response to critics (a talent on display in that Channel 4 interview). His strategy of taking a simple idea (Taleb has made a career out of elaborating on “shit happens”) layering it with obfuscation, defending it with non sequiturs and misdirection, is similar. Eric Falkenstein has written some good critiques of Taleb – this one touches on the crank idea and leapt to mind when I first tried to gag down a Peterson lecture: http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/review-of-talebs-black-swan.html
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If anyone is interested in a study of the gender pay gap that is part of that Peterson controversy, here’s an intelligent and thorough article that goes through the evidence:
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-and-is-it-real/
Sorry for sharing an entire article instead of summarizing, but I don’t see any other way. The article goes through the statistical evidence for every consideration available, the type of “multivariate analysis” Jordan Peterson is saying accounts for the gender pay gap. He’s simply wrong. But he and other conservatives have a point, a lot of feminists don’t go through the evidence properly and just shove simplistic statistics in people’s faces and say you’re blind if you don’t see discrimination against women. I won’t blame the average citizen, but if you consider yourself a passionate feminist (or spokesman for any progressive movement) and go on air without presenting the best possible case for it, you’re doing a disservice to your cause.
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Bunsen Burner
I’ve seen your type of criticism of that Current Affairs article and I am puzzled by it. The article is discussing Jordan Peterson and the type of intellectual he is. If you wanted a thorough analysis of certain issues that is in contention between conservatives and liberals, look into other sources. It’s already long for what it is, what do you expect from a magazine article?
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Just to make it clear – the Canadian law in question does not mention or allude to pronouns, as far as I can see. A lot of people seem to think that it does.
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Plutarch,
You have summed up the matter in your usual clear, pithy and insightful way. Thank you for that. I had just been reading Pope Francis’ latest Apostolic Exhortation, On Holiness, where he urges us to strive for holiness in a multitude of ordinary, every day acts of goodness and kindness. It is a beautiful document. And then from that I moved on to read the review of Jordan Peterson. It was an astonishing contrast. Does it have to be like this? As it happens I have been reading Jordan Peterson’s book and I find a much more charitable interpretation is possible. The book is a mixed bag with much to like and much I disagreed with. But the disagreements I find to be a creative force, motivating me to seek deeper insights. Invariably the disagreements leave me richer and more deeply informed. I find his forceful rhetoric to be a little unsettling but then learnt to make allowances for it.
On balance I came away from his book feeling that I had learnt a lot from him and had learnt just as much or more from the areas where I disagreed with him. Disagreement is a creative force if practised with the charitable desire to learn from it.
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Interesting that Peterson, who is regarded as the champion of the view that gender is determined by our biological sex, seems to keep saying that gender is not determined by our biological sex.
But I suppose his fans would say I have misunderstood him and he is saying that gender is determined by our biological sex.
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Disagree, Bunsen.
The article makes it clear from the get-go that the author is responding to an intellectual climate in which Peterson is held up as a profound thinker, which obviously isn’t incidental to the consumption and appraisal of his work. Robinson gives plenty of examples of this and then proceeds to critique Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, his lectures and interviews. I doubt Maps has much to do with his fame, but the latter are undoubtedly part of the Peterson hype machine, and Maps still gives us insight into his style and hobby-horses, to the extent that these are lucid enough to characterize. That isn’t an ad hominem at all, but a judgment of his work and reception, particularly of the notion, held by many, that he’s been misinterpreted, that he’s a clearheaded thinker and that he offers an antidote to our age. There’s also some dissection of the character that he’s projecting, but I don’t see how that isn’t fair game when we’re as much talking about a charismatic brand here as we are a set of beliefs. If you just want criticisms of his stance on trans pronouns and identity politics, it’s not like you can’t find anything with a simple Google search:
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/3/26/17144166/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life
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Dwight, I find much of interest in Taleb, who makes a living by statistical analysis of the extent to which people ignore the error bars on their error bars. I like his idea of antifragile systems (those that are strengthened by being placed under stress) and have applied it to scientific theories (which Taleb, who believes in falisificationism, mistakenly regards as fragile): https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/antifragility-and-anomaly-why-science-works/
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(Though nothing I say there that hadn’t been said better, decades earlier, by others)
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Saphsin:
I have read some other articles on Peterson. They are all much the same whiny crap about what a horrible academic he is. Look, I don’t know that much about what he does, but lets be honest, he is being excoriated not because he is a bad academic but because of his political stance. Why not just critique the political stance? I don’t find the guy sympathetic but I can see how in today’s climate he can gain popularity by taking the stances that he does. Lets also be honest, current affairs could also have written a similar article about a multitude of left wing academics, but for some reason chose not to. Why?
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Zachary:
If anyone holds up Peterson as a profound thinker its because of his political stance. I have not encountered one example of the various discussions I’ve found on him where his supporters actually care, of have even read his academic works. Also, I’m certainly not against critiques of the man’s work, but I find it dishonest to make such a big deal about the guy without ever pointing out that he owes his current moment in the spotlight due to his political opinions.
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Plutarch,
“he is suggesting solutions to it that encourage self and societal cultivation through the growth of personal character by following the example of moral role models”
But lots of people have been doing, and are doing that, including the Stoics. If that’s all Peterson were doing it would be entirely unremarkable. The problem is with the mixture of obfuscation (several examples in the linked article) and pernicious notions (also several examples in the linked article).
“many of the criticisms I see made of Peterson are given in the same unjust spirit I see criticisms made of Stoicism”
Well, as a Stoic I am going to say that they are unjust in the second case; as a philosopher and scientists, that they are on target in the first case.
“seems unlike you and uncharacteristic of you as a Stoic to call Peterson a crack pot.”
Why? Epictetus called his students “fools.” I have called Deepak Chopra a crackpot. Because he is. Stoicism is also about speaking the truth, as best as one sees it. Especially when it affects people.
“the belief that people do bad things out of an ignorance of what is truly good is a central stoic belief, and not a superficial one.”
Correct. I do think Peterson is suffering from amathia, or lack of wisdom. That doesn’t mean he is not a crackpot (or a fool).
Will,
“Wondering if you’ll be writing about him too. I won’t be holding my breath thoug”
It’s possible, but the present take down is thorough and well done, so I’m not sure it’s worth my time to do it again.
bunsen,
“it’s very noticeable that the left has no actual answers to his gender critiques, but chooses to play ad hominem with academic career.”
The answers have been provided, multiple times. As for ad hominem, I consider “crackpot” a descriptive, which applies to people like Peterson, Chopra, and so forth. An ad hominem is such only if it is the only argument one brings to bear. This is definitely not the case here.
“why this hysterical craze”
Because the guy is charismatic and influential. and Not in a positive way. Heck, even Sam Harris agrees with me on this one!
labnut,
“Disagreement is a creative force if practised with the charitable desire to learn from it.”
While in general I agree, disargeeing with Deepak Chopra has taught me exactly nothing. Other than the fact that so many people can be taken in by nonsense, if delivered charismatically. But I knew that already.
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Zachary:
Also… The Vox article is appalling. I’m surprised you consider it a valid news source in fact. I consider Vox below Twitter on the ‘this is someone trying to shit in your brain’ scale. Stuff such as
‘Peterson is also particularly appealing to disaffected young men. He’s become a lifestyle guru for men and boys who feel displaced by a world where white male privilege is under attack;’
are pure cringe. The article is more of an excuse to insult the guy and his supporters, rather than an honest attempt to discuss his views. It makes only a trivial effort to support some of its’ view by facts – usually involving random link to some other dodgy news source – but spends entire paragraphs on nothing but pejoratives with no attempt to demonstrate their veracity.
Vox is a much the problem with today’s intellectual climate as Peterson.
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Massimo,
“disargeeing with Deepak Chopra has taught me exactly nothing”
Yes, I must agree with you on that 🙂
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It actually sounds like Peterson is in a fair number of ways like the stereotyped academic leftists he likes to attack.
I mean, that bullet-pointed material is, IMO, New Agey dreck that could easily have been said by Joseph Campbell.
That said, on race and related issues, Campbell also was not that enlightened. Just like some guy from Switzerland. (New Ageism, like Gnu Atheism, is not the exclusive provenance of the left or even close to it.)
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Bunsen Burner
“hey are all much the same whiny crap about what a horrible academic he is.”
Yeah if we want to know how much of a fraud a person is, that clearly is important to read about in evaluation in looking into what he has to say. You seem to think this is a problem, I happen to think that as an obvious appraisal of someone’s work.
“Look, I don’t know that much about what he does, but lets be honest, he is being excoriated not because he is a bad academic but because of his political stance.”
He is being criticized for what he says, and that is in connection to his supposedly respected academic approach, no? There are other IV League Professors who hold similar stances, but it doesn’t seem like we’re talking about them, we’re talking about Jordan Peterson, someone who has a very popular youtube channel with many followers.
“Lets also be honest, current affairs could also have written a similar article about a multitude of left wing academics, but for some reason chose not to. Why?”
It has critiqued other left-wingers. For instance, it has written multiple articles criticizing AntiFa and its supporters and how the issue is covered, and has many articles criticizing other leftists and liberals. I don’t mean that you can find many such articles if you dig for it, but that they come out pretty regularly. So you don’t know what you’re talking about and be honest you haven’t read much of the magazine. Some of its articles that have went the most viral have been about targeting particular right-wing pundits, but what do you expect when we live in an age where we do have horrible right-wing pundits that are influencing public opinion.
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I was looking and the gender pay study that saphsin had provided, and came across the following curious statement.
‘The gender wage gap described above and referred to in this primer has the virtue of being clear and simple. It provides a good overview of what is going on with typical women’s earnings relative to men’s. But it does not tell us what the wage gap is between men and women doing similar work, and whether the size of the gap derives in part from differences in education levels, experience levels, and other characteristics of working men and women.’
Am I missing something? Isn’t it vital to be able to tell if men and women in the same company, in the same role, with the same experience, and the same length of service earn the same amount or not? How else can you tell if there is any discrimination going on?
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I thought his Harvard lectures were pretty interesting.
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Massimo: “The problem is with the mixture of obfuscation (several examples in the linked article) and pernicious notions (also several examples in the linked article).”
There’s the point. As I was trying to read those excerpts, my brain kept saying “Critical thinking! Critical thinking! Critical thinking!” As the saying goes, you don’t have to eat a whole egg to know that it’s rotten. How have things gotten to the point that such obfuscation passes for philosophy? Is this the heritage of the postmoderns? (I know I’m committing a fallacy: “I find both A and B unintelligible; therefore A = B”).
Peterson should be sentenced to 5 years of reading nothing but Orwell and Mark Twain, two writers who have shown that clear and articulate prose is not only compatible with profound insight, but essential to it.
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Paul,
“I find much of interest in Taleb”
Indeed, Taleb is in a different category. Although he appears to be a nasty character, and although his criticism of the “academic establishment” is overblown, his actual writings are clear and usually interesting.
bunsen,
“he is being excoriated not because he is a bad academic but because of his political stance”
Those two are not mutually exclusive. It is particularly bad when an academic does shoddy (or obscure) scholarship in the service of a nefarious political agenda.
The same goes for the left, of course. I don’t have a high opinion of Derrida, for instance, and Peterson is more or less correctly being called the Derrida of the right.
“without ever pointing out that he owes his current moment in the spotlight due to his political opinions.”
He is being criticized a lot precisely because of the influence of his political opinions. If his work were obscure in the sense of unknown then people wouldn’t waste their time criticing it. As my friend Spider-Man says, with great power (influence) comes great responsibility…
Dan,
“I thought his Harvard lectures were pretty interesting”
I did not watch those. Could you give us some examples of what you found interesting in them?
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The article on next accelerator is pretty nasty. I’ll read it more carefully tomorrow.
Of course we build new accelerators because we don’t know what we’ll find or not. Funding agency insist on reasons, but it is all speculative. Not finding things also advances science but is hard to sell, esp. once the ‘natural’ cost unit to measure it becomes aircraft carriers.
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Hey, Bunsen. Still disagree.
Peterson’s 12 Steps for Life is a bestseller on Amazon, and the self-help stuff is deeply tied to his appeal. The political stuff is largely boilerplate laundered through this and (what the author argues is) his pseudo-prophetic style. Hence, every time anyone criticizes him, there are always defenders that try to push the argument towards his utility as a guru. It’s happening even here. That makes it an obvious topic of discussion and critique. What’s more, the article does veer into his political stances, particularly by way of his defenses of hierarchy and conservative views of masculinity. Your claim that it’s purely an ad hominem doesn’t hold water.
As for the Vox article, there are some things I disagree with (French intellectuals have had no appreciable influence on US universities?), I can’t really speak to your criticism because you’re only talking at the level of generalities. You cite one quote which you take to be manifestly objectionable, but I don’t see it. You’ve agreed that he’s getting gobbled up by the alt-right, correct? Isn’t much of the alt-right “disaffected young men […] who feel displaced by a world where white male privilege is under attack”? Do you not think that this is part of the bedrock for why they find his political arguments so appealing? This is undoubtedly part of the Peterson phenomena, and simply wishing it away won’t cut the mustard.
That aside, what parts do you think fail to hold water? His slippery slope arguments from trans pronouns to the gulags? (Peterson accusing Trudeau of supporting a “murderous equity doctrine” because the guy called feminists “inspiring” is pretty embarrassing.) The arguments against his lobsters and the naturalistic fallacy? His simplistic pomo-Marxist conspiracy? (Anecdotally, my first introduction to takedowns of postmodernism was from a Marxist — Terry Eagleton’s “The Illusions of Postmodernism”.) Again, all of these sound like fair game.
You, yourself, said you aren’t informed on the Canadian hate speech law and yet you say he’s taking a brave stand and that people are misrepresenting him. I can’t say you’re coming at this in good faith. As the article says, the law was never a danger to him and he’s willfully mischaracterized it to set himself up as a martyr. If anything, restrictive policies at universities are the most immediate danger to him (he’ll probably be more than alright), and he’s free to call them out if wants to. Of course, everyone else is also free to call him out as well because that’s how free speech works.
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Bunsen Burner
The article explains what it’s trying to do in the very next sentence.
“To round out our understanding of the disparity between men’s and women’s pay, we also consider “adjusted” measures of the gender wage gap—with the caveat that the adjusted measures may understate the wage disparities.”
and then clarifies later on….
“But switching to a fully adjusted model of the gender wage gap actually can radically understate the effect of gender discrimination on women’s earnings. This is because gender discrimination doesn’t happen only in the pay-setting practices of employers making wage offers to nearly identical workers of different genders.”
and then
“…it would not be accurate to assume that discrimination explains only the gender wage gap that remains after adjusting for education, occupational choice, and all these other factors. Put another way, we cannot look at our adjusted model and say that discrimination explains at most 13.5 percent of the gender wage gap. Why? Because, for example, by controlling for occupation, this adjusted wage gap no longer includes the discrimination that can influence a woman’s occupational choice.”
In other words, the gender pay gap is different from the adjusted measures that takes into account some of the factors you mentioned, but explains how the adjusted measures can be misleading.
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synred,
but the point seems to be that some physicists are promising things they have no business promising, in exchange for the public forking billions. That’s a bit unethical.
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