Identity Politics & The Marxist Lie Of White Privilege?
In this lecture, Jordan Peterson argues that the leftist control over cultural and educational institutions in the West has led to the widespread belief in identity politics, White oppression, Patriarchy, conflict between the have's and have not's. These beliefs are pernicious and act towards breaking our social unity.
So please have a listen to the lecture when you have some time, and post your thoughts.
Personally, I agree with Peterson, and it is something that I have been saying for 2-3 years or so. I think we all have disadvantages and handicaps - it's nobody's fault. We have to become stronger and learn to deal with it. As the Buddhists say, life is suffering - there is no escape from that. I think this is the point that many of the leftist radicals don't get - suffering cannot be eliminated completely, and seeking to eliminate it completely, merely makes it worse. Instead, we should train people to be psychologically stronger, much like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, who can say "di capo!" every time.
Comments (393)
I disagree. Life is tough for everyone, even for the billionaires. Money may get you the best doctors and the best services, but apart from that, you still get old, you still get sick, your wife still leaves you for the guy with more muscles than you, your friends still betray you (perhaps moreso than before), people are more likely to steal from you, you still suffer defeat and humiliation, etc.
Money doesn't protect one from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ;)
Yeah, Augustino, life arguably consists of suffering. But there are undeniable examples of gratuitous forms of suffering that have been mitigated or eliminated in time, thanks, in part, to the very identitarian movements which you and Peterson denounce.
Apparently the left-wing political ideologies are this brute mush that are the same thing and composed of people who assume and argue the same things. Useful way to (mis)construe your opponents, maybe I should start doing likewise.
What about securing the right to life of newborn babies, has that been taken care of by identity politics? Or only issues of those groups who have a loud mouth are taken care of?
Ironical that Peterson said you should take your opponents at their strongest and not strawman in the video.
I chose the title based on the title of the video, which is the subject of this thread.
With regards to Marx's theories, Peterson takes the underlying fault to be the fact that he pits the proletariat against the bourgeois, making one into the oppressed and the other into the oppressor. This sort of language is precisely what allows all faults and sufferings of the world to be cast at the feet of the oppressors - they are responsible, that's why the world is bad. Whereas Peterson's point is that life is suffering, and we are not responsible for that - it's just the nature of life.
So Marxism ends up in totalitarianism because it thinks there is a way to end the suffering present in the world, and throws all its resources towards achieving this ideal state. However, this is actually impossible to achieve, and trying to achieve it merely leads to worse suffering.
Oh that's just nonsense. I'm not a Marxist (anymore; we all have our oddities at uni), but the fact that in Marxism the bourgeois are against the proletariat (and thus one the oppressor & the other oppressed) is not mere language, it's intended to make an assertion about the actual state of affairs. Whining about the language of it is exactly the kind of weaseling complaint that conservatives lay at the feet of liberals ("Why don't you just say what it is?")
And then to justify rejecting this assertion about the relationship between 2 defined classes on the basis that "life is suffering" is pure sophism. The claim in Marxism is not that "all faults and sufferings in the world" are the fault of the bourgeois, but rather that a number of social and economic ills are largely caused and maintained by the bourgeois because it maintains their style of life, and is even necessary for them to live as they do. Claiming that no one is responsible for economic disparities - not even the people (according to Marxists, the bourgeois) who create and guide and maintain the laws and relationships the engender these disparities - is just an attempt to avoid responsibility (somewhat ironic since leftists are often given this charge by those on the right).
Kind of obvious. Good night.
He does man, but you know, you get bored, must do something, no? >:O
Goodnight ;)
Sure, the point is that it's a lie. There is no state of affairs as Marxism describes it.
Quoting MindForged
Yes, the Marxists claim that the bourgeoisie maintain a certain social and economic structure because they are the ones who have power, and since it benefits them, they use their power in that direction. But as Peterson explains in the video, it's not power, but competency, that allows them to be the privileged social class. There is a hierarchy, hierarchies cannot be eliminated, and that hierarchy is based on competency. The bourgeois are at the top because they have shown themselves to be the most competent at taking care of their society. In a way, excluding at the moment corruption, the way to get rich is by selling a lot of goods to a lot of people - which means adding value to the world, giving people what they want.
What is the fabric of society that everyone's so worried about destroying?
Since when do newborn babies lack the right to life? And is that really all you have to say?
Quoting Agustino
Circular and laughably naive, no wonder you readily subscribe to Peterson's vapid "self-help" philosophy.
White privilege is simply not having to wonder whether a stranger will suddenly start to abuse you on the bus, just because of what you look like. In the US it is also not having to fear a police officer every time one comes near, that they may stop and search you, or even shoot you, because of what you look like. One would have to live under a rock to think that such a privilege does not exist.
Where claims about white privilege become silly is when they start to imply that ALL white people are better off than ALL non-whites, and there do seem to be plenty of extremists that say or imply such things. But the fact that the notion of white privilege may be misused by silly people does not imply that the notion itself is flawed.
You know, I get into this same kind of silly nonsense when I see a naive Marxist making an argument. Just asserting the thing doesn't make it so. "Well my opposition is just espousing a lie" is not convincing tbh.
Again, that's interesting and all, but have you never considered possible objections to your view? Just off the top of my head from what you said there, I can think of a few:
-How do you know the hierarchy is based on competency? Most people stay within their income bracket (and near where there parents were). So it could be that nearly everyone is incompetent, but it seems more likely that those who held power (whether political or economic) in the past has a strong relationship with who has it in the future. I'll just let you know that white people did not eliminate nepotism, not from politics nor in economics.
-Even if it is in fact the case that hierarchies cannot be eliminated, that does not entail that no specific hierarchy cannot be eliminated. Nor does competency need to entail privilege unless you are just something like social Darwinist ("those who succeed are the ones who are competent" seems to fit the bill)
-So wait, you do acknowledge the existence of the Bourgeoisie??? Marxists define (it's not the full definition) that as the class which by whatever means necessary perpetuates their ownership of the means of production.
-Oh, lol, so we just exclude corruption? Hm, I guess when businesses (all of the most successful of which) sprinkle campaign donations on dozens of politicians we can just exclude that as counting against the idea of them being competent (otherwise they needn't manipulate the political process to their benefit by using their money).
You're just positing a naive and even ad hoc view. Counter-examples to your assertions are dismissed by fiat. As I said before, pure sophistry.
Can some vague "Left" claim credit for all of this? No. The suffrage movement is about as old as Marxism. The women's movement never needed leftist guidance. They had their own thought-leaders. The modern gay rights movement started partly as a result of large number of gay men and women being evicted from the armed forces at 3 different port bases during and after WWII: L.A., San Francisco, and New York. The navy created the concentrations of gay people who starting developing a gay culture.
Racial Minorities didn't need the left to tell them they were oppressed, either. They learned that directly from life. I don't think disability activists were ever characterized as leftists: they were just tired of not being able to live in a society which made zero accommodations for the large number of disabled people.
It isn't clear to me exactly where transsexualism came from. You know, the first one (on record anyway) was Christine Jorgensen who had sex remodeling surgery in 1951 in Denmark. CJ grew up in the Bronx in New York--not a hotbed of radical ideology at the time.
The left didn't invent all the trans nonsense. It bubbled up among transsexuals, and the POMO left found it particularly attractive. given their own weird posturing.
Somehow, I don't think most members of "the left" who you consider to be behind all these identity schemes would recognize a communist or a socialist if their lives depended on it. It's a strange kind of Marxism, if you ask me -- perverse.
Another thing we have to take into account about Peterson is his milieu: Peterson is a college professor. College campus are exactly the kind of place where one would expect ideological excess because on campus are thousands of students (well... hundreds, anyway) who are anxious to try on radical new theories in a relatively safe environment (they are, after all, paying customers).
The wannabe radicals may be right, wrong, or not even wrong, but they can't, don't, and won't affect society very much. Once they get out of college and get hired to work in a large corporation, they will find they are not allowed anywhere close to the levers of power. If they attempt college stunts at work they are likely to get fired.
Peterson has perhaps been overly influenced by what happens on his (and other) campuses. It's a very lively but unrepresentative school playground.
EDIT: I should not minimize the spread of POMO-type thinking. The Obama administration issued a directive to schools which bent over backwards to kiss the ground beneath its feet that trans students could use whichever toilet they identified with, whichever locker room they identified with, and that to protect their privacy, parents should not be notified of the decision in a given school. The Trump administration withdrew the directive. So, I approve of at least one act of the Trump administration.
I find it's often instructive to see who are the thought leaders for these kinds of things; pretty much always people benefiting from it directly (book sales, talks, cachet in their movement etc.) or indirectly (attention). It doesn't mean they don't believe it, and it doesn't mean what they're saying is false. What it means is you should treat what they say for what it's worth: inherently suspect.
Can you expand on this?
In an election filled to the brim with weird and unexplainable phenomenon, that might have been the weirdest.
Perhaps, but Sanders (arguably more social democrat than socialist, despite the self-epithet) nevertheless lost the Democratic candidacy to the decidedly non-Marxist, non-socialist Clinton, who herself lost the presidency to a racist populist with no political experience whatsoever. So the delusion that "Marxism is ever more threatening", now, is still an enigma to me. Regardless, what the right-wing fears isn't Marxism per say, but a sort of Stalinist/Maoist state-lead economic militarization, as Peterson suggests in the video, and the idea that this is feasible threat within America is eye-rollingly laughable.
I do have difficulty connecting Karl Marx, the man of the 19th century, to spawning post-modernism, or that Karl Marx is responsible for Lenin's, Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, or the North Korean's horrible acts. In his name, yes, really really bad things were done. But other people managed to do very, very bad things without Marx -- like slavery and genocide in the western hemisphere before Marx was even born.
Also, the US led the way in nuclear terrorism. Given the relatively loose control that was actually exercised over the many thousands of atomic and thermonuclear bombs (never mind the alleged sole authority of the POTUS to use them) it is miraculous that a totally ruinous nuclear war didn't happen by accident. Of course, it's not too late to have that war, since we have enough atomic weapons ready to launch (but far fewer than before the nuclear reduction treaties) to bring about a nuclear winter. Can't blame that on Marx.
I could use more knowledge on just how POMO did come about. The topic is about as attractive as figuring out exactly how a fat berg stuffed up the London sewers, but if anybody has a suggestion for a BRIEF discussion of POMO's history, please post it.
The idea itself is but a red-herring. Its object is to legitimize the Right again against a myriad of progressive issues. Funnily enough, and contra their polarizing titles, there is not necessarily that much left that does not divides only artificially the american Left and Right. Nothing that you could lay at the feet of the original Liberal - Conservative ideological war. There is thus the need to legitimize the apparently conservative effort against - what? New pronouns? Trans People going to some bathroom over the other? Feminism? Jesus. Peterson and his ilk sure didn't stop to think for a second that little defines a person's character as much as who they decide to fight...
The War of Ideas. It has such a nice ring to it. But which fucking War of Ideas??? There's been no such real War, no struggle on the political intellectual plane in the last 30 years. POMO is insanely fringe. Depending on the Uni you are in, you can do any form of studies without ever having to encounter it. The idea that Litterature departments have somehow managed to infect the Western world with acute marxism would be funny if it was not shared by so many. Now it is just sad.
Jean Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979) is the 1st text using the term, but Pomo will ark backwards to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Lacan. French Pomo's side, the poststructuralists, became especially ensensed after 1968's student riots in Paris, and also added Marx to the pantheon.
Lyotard's text is fairly amenable. “I define postmodern as incredulity toward meta-narratives,” (Lyotard 1984 [1979], xxiv)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_WcK7WdttxqX0lFWmx5ZGRyQjA/view?usp=sharing
9 pages brief?
If you have a version of the argument that can be put in a few paragraphs, I'd be happy to read it, but my time's too precious to waste on that video, delightful though his accent may be.
PS It doesn't help his case at all that the lectern he's at has a big sign saying 'TRUMP Hotels'. It's not his fault, just bad luck, but it reduces his chances of changing anybody's mind to just about zero.
It was an irony, since behind "reproductive rights" hides oppression of the weak and downtrodden, who cannot speak (literarily all aborted babies). Seems like you're not very good with figures of speech.
Quoting Maw
For the most part, since you didn't address the substance of the video. You tell me identity politics is not recent. Peterson didn't claim it is. Neither did I for that matter. Then you proceed to go on a tirade that is besides the point and illustrates that you haven't watched even half of the video.
Quoting Maw
This is just finger-pointing, you don't explain how Breitbart, Fox, etc. are identity politics.
Quoting Maw
The point isn't whether politics is reducible to identity or not. The point is that some of them, like Hillary Clinton, campaigned on the fact that she's a woman, Obama campaigned on the fact that he's black, etc. What the hell is "breaking the glass ceiling" huh? Isn't that effectively telling a segment of the population "you will be able to do whatsoever you want if I'm President, so vote for me", thus trying to bank on greed, self-interest and divisiveness to get elected?
Effectively, they did run sexist and racist campaigns - "vote for me because I'm like you, a woman" - "vote for me because I'm like you, a black man, and I will be the first black President - after me, you too will be able to be President". Those are racist and sexist grounds for running a campaign - a campaign which is essentially divisive. And sure, there is identity politics on the right side too, though not as prominent. But there are right-wing groups which do seek to get the votes of white evangelicals, etc. Ideally, a campaign should be conciliatory, not bringing up more and more divisions. In this regard, Trump also failed, though part of his failure is due to the cognitive dissonance of the left who just refuse to come to terms with reality.
Also, you seem to think that Peterson (or myself) is your regular conservative who doesn't care about environmental protection, free healthcare, and other such goods. You are deluded mate.
From the list you named, Sanders is probably less focused on identity politics than the rest, though he is also with the 1% vs 99% that he speaks of literarily every single time he opens his mouth.
Quoting Maw
Yeah, only that I was saying all this for quite a few years already, seems like you haven't been reading what I was saying on PF. As for Peterson's self-help - well, some of it I found helpful. You should try it, it might bring good results in your life. If it doesn't, then just don't use it.
Rest of the comments will be addressed later.
It is flawed, and racist. The concept of white privilege itself is an unfair generalization of a certain group based on the color of their skin.
Everything you said is true actually. Certain people fear and wonder about some unseen boogie-man that is out to get you because they were raised in an environment of fear. But that is all it is - a fear, not reality. How can anyone even rationally think that the concept of white privilege holds any water when we have so many successful minorities, and the way minorities are now held up on a pedastal while being white is now seen as detriment to one's character. I've been mistreated by cops and I'm caucasian. The fact is that there are some cops that are just assholes, not racists. Yes, there are some racists cops. There are also racist minorities. Your job or color of skin doesn't seem to have an effect on how you view other groups. How you are raised does.
I had the same distraction factor of seeing the TRUMP brand. Plus the fake decor behind the lectern.
Oh dear, what's wrong with the TRUMP brand now?
Quoting Bitter Crank
I thought the setting looked quite nice and fancy, though I don't know the place.
Oh dear... So now we know what your mansion will look like. Hint: if you're going to go for the ruling class look in decor, go all the way: fako wood paneling, fako styrofoam beams in the ceiling, fako oriental-type carpets, fako leather/oak/horsehair-stuffed chairs, etc. No visible florescent lighting, use period colors, no anachronistic brand names on anything.
The fake decoration wasn't hideous, certainly, but it was the wrong fake decoration for the space. A modern hotel conference room isn't entitled to (possible, but probably not) marble statuary (too white, bright for one thing), books that look leather bound (either fake or bought by the ton by interior decoration supply companies) and fako 18th-19th century woodwork. There were too many other signals that this was merely a conference room in a hotel -- the chairs, lighting, walls, paint, etc.
The decor has nothing to do with what Peterson said or didn't say -- it was just off-putting on its own.
Quoting Agustino
As a hotel brand, nothing I suppose. It's just that the eponymous developer of the brand happens to be POTUS, and as such is disturbing in ever so many ways.
I guess this would go in another thread, but why is it off-putting if it's fake? The point of the decoration is to look nice, not to be original, no? I guess it would need to match with the rest of the hotel, but then I don't know how that looks.
Quoting Bitter Crank
So, what about that makes it disturbing? If he wasn't POTUS, would that not be disturbing?
No. Then God would be in his heaven where he belongs and all would be right with the world, sort of.
Yes, decoration is supposed to look nice. It aimed high but missed. You can't "legitimately" glue some veneer onto wallboard and call the job done.
Part of the problem was that the camera angle was too wide. Had it narrowed in on Peterson, the podium, and the fako backdrop, it would have come off better. As Oscar Wilde put it, "Only shallow people do not judge by appearances".
One should buy real oriental rugs of course, made by suffering children under horrible working conditions, but they need to be old oriental rugs, slightly threadbare. After all, they were bought when Wilson was president. And so on.
>:O - well, I personally think having Trump as President is infinitely better than having Hillary as President. The difference is between having visible problems, and having invisible problems. The latter is worse.
I never understood why some people think this way, to me it just seems some uncalled for snob-ism. If it looks nice, it looks nice, who really cares whether the carpet is "authentic" or not? Like what difference does it make, if it looks the same? I may be an uncultured barbarian, but this seems self-evident to me.
So if a white man leverages his identity to connect with and inspire people of his own skin color and gender in order to get voted into office, can you imagine what the left would say? Oh, Neo-nazi! White Supremacist! Patriarchy! Oh dear...
How do you do that? You probably don't have a pedigree which would win you admission (no recent tzars, dukes, or earls in your family tree). Being white isn't privilege enough. Academic degrees definitely won't cut it. What you will do is fake a background. There are standardized methods of doing this. You live in the right kind of mansion, wear the right kind of clothes, go to the right church, give generously to the right charities, volunteer your services on the right committees, and in 30 years you might be accepted, grudgingly. Then your sons and daughters will reap the reward. They will be accepted as scions of money old enough not to still stink.
And per George Bernard Shaw, you also talk the right way. Very important to get the accent and idiom down cold.
Agustino Jr. can then marry the daughter (or son, if they turns out gay) of the leading family. It's a long range project. Good luck.
Are you incapable of seeing the asymmetry of power, both historical and modern, of women and blacks between white males in America? For fuck's sake, America has still never had a woman president, and a large voting block would nevertheless rather have a vile misogynist instead; one who also claimed that the previous president, a black man, was not born in America, among other vile racist things. In America, these identities are not equal.
No, I don't like double standards. If the black lesbian woman is allowed to rightfully connect with and appeal to people like her, so should the white, straight man be allowed to appeal to people like him. That's real equality.
We must now act according to current times, when things aren't as they used to be 200 years ago.
Right, America has also still never had a Chinese president. Should that worry us?
In a society where the equality of all before the law exists, it is not relevant that the President is black or white. As Deng Xiaoping said, who cares if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice? People should be President based on competency, not on sex, gender, etc. Some people on the left today really have a distorted view of things. It's really sick to think about putting someone to do a job, when you know that that person is less competent than the other options available, just because that person comes from a minority group. If a President does a poor job, it affects everyone - competency is really important.
There is a difference between being a white male, and putting that status forward in terms of blood, virility, fatherland, and all that. As Peterson pointed out, white people and male people have certain advantages (and disadvantages). A minority of white people hold a good share of the power in society, so being white is an indication that one will have enough power to carry out at least some parts of one's political platform.
Barack Obama's single greatest liability was that he was a successful black man, something that conservatives found terminally irksome. The conservatives probably would have liked him better if he used poor grammar, mumbled, and had a couple of drug convictions and a robbery or two on his record. That he was a lawyer, college professor, crisp English speaker, cool calm and collected, crime record free, and more cultured than them was just... intolerable.
Rightly or wrongly, men have occupied a lot of leadership positions, and seeing a male in a leadership role is comforting to many people, in a way that seeing a woman in the same position is not. One doesn't have to "leverage" white, male; it's already been done.
The white supremacists, on the other hand, explicitly put forward their race, gender, heterosexuality, uncircumcised dick, and so forth, against blacks, gays, Jews, and whoever is on their list of unwanted. They don't attempt to appeal to a broad spectrum of society -- anything but.
I agree, I did not say that being a white male and appealing to other white males is the same as being a Nazi.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Personally, I think that the way BO tried to implement his healthcare reform in the US was wrong, and also his approach to the economy, including the bailouts, were very wrong. In many regards, he was a career politician, who did what the establishment wanted of him, and now he opened a foundation (to receive some more money that is still owed to him) and things will go on from there. He's living the basic, traditional life of someone successful.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well yeah, but that's a different thing from what I was describing. I was just making a point that the left does not want to acknowledge that there are reasonable ways to appeal to voters who have the same identity as you (for example white male), without being a white supremacist, neo-nazi, etc.
I don't know, I don't think I'd like many of those things or be interested in them tbh. I don't like spending non-work related time around or talking to rich people.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well, my whole life I have fought against hypocrisy & convention, it would really be a shame to become one myself.
But, unlike with regards to Bush, I don't have a lot of negative things to say about Obama, precisely because he was a career politician who stuck to the party line. What can I say? He did what Presidents usually do. That's it. The problem, of course, is that it's rare to have a good President.
He first attacked The Enemy on the grounds of freedom of speech - noting that upon aggregation into the True Form of Cultural Marxism, they attempted to suppress free thinking scientifically rational thought and clear, intuitive philosophy through the organon of Political Correctness. They didn't even represent scientific progress in his field and the Elect Academics which were enshrined in his Worldview with charity and citation. The Enemy pretended to be kind, but was in reality an interposition on all thought because of its cancerous ideologies expressed in fey words incomprehensible to his image of the Modern Man.
He then attacked The Enemy in their infernal residence - the Tumbler. As soon as the Tumbler was cut open with his mighty e-peen of Enlightenment and Common Sense, the carrion shrieks of "TRIGGERED " resonated throughout the infernal bowels of The Tumbler. Upon destroying the Tumbler, the throat of The Corrupted Academy's voice in the world was silenced, and Cultural Marxism was no more
So political qualifications don't stem simply from skin color or gender, but the latter can contribute to it? Is that what you mean by the use of the word "simply"?
Quoting Maw
That would be worrying, yes. As worrying as voting for a woman President or a black president regardless of qualifications and competency.
Quoting Maw
Why do you think a successful businessman is unqualified to be President?
Quoting Maw
Sure, but you know why that is? Because much of the left media has been hypocritical for many years, and the voters are just sick of it.
Otherwise, both Hilary and Obama were imminently qualified, so, again, I'm not sure why you are angry at imaginary issues, when, in reality, a qualified woman lost to a racist, misogynistic, and repeatedly failed businessman, whose biggest success was beguiling the American public into thinking he was a competent business owner.
Okay, I see. That's reasonable, but then it's a double-edged thing, since every demographic has its own problems. So even white people would confront problems that other demographic groups don't, etc.
Quoting Maw
I don't think Trump is racist or misogynistic or a failed businessman. Out of those three, the most disputable one is the racist one. That one is debatable because it is plausible to say that at minimum he disconsiders African nations, though probably many US Presidents did that, whether they openly said so or not. For example, Obama called Libya a "shit show", very similar to Trump's "shithole" remarks.
But I don't think he disconsiders black Americans though. I have not seen evidence for that. So I would say even in that case Trump is more nationalist than racist.
The misogynistic - I don't really buy that. Trump has a view of women that is typically portrayed in popular culture. He doesn't see women as inferior, but he does buy into the popular image of the rich man being successful with women, and just the popular and ubiquitous way of viewing sexual issues. I don't think Trump has sexual morality though, and that's probably the biggest negative about him for me.
As for being a failed businessman, I find that one to be definitely and indisputably false. A lot of people say this, but many are not aware of just how difficult it is even to maintain one's wealth while actively investing it and managing it yourself. So if all Trump did was keep up with the S&P500 and beat inflation over his life while actively being engaged in the management of his fortune (which he did), he would be classified as successful, though not incredibly successful.
Fire and Fury the book about Trump's campaign and arrival in the White House, elaborated on 3 characteristics which are alarming:
1. Trump doesn't, and apparently hasn't, read much.
2. He watches a lot of television.
3. He has a short attention span.
Thee are worrisome flaws; in my mind they are worse than being racist, misogynistic, and failed in business (that last? don't know. ) Watching a lot of television (particularly, commercial cable shows) and not reading widely leaves one's knowledge about many national and world issues either impoverished or invisible.
He doesn't seem to have surrounded himself by people who can step in as competent content providers when content is needed.
Having a short attention span is obviously troubling, because there are so many problems which any national executive has to deal with which require sustained thought.
Trump isn't uneducated. but he wasn't recently educated. Maintaining intellectual vigor requires ongoing wide study, reading, engagement, and so on. He doesn't seem to have done that. Now, a lot of people fail to remain intellectually vigorous, but they aren't The President, either. Ronald Reagan suffered from this condition as well, in addition to sliding into dementia.
His abrupt withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and withdrawal from some important trade negotiations suggest the sort of thing that happens when "uninformed impatience" guides the ship of state.
I hope you didn't miss fdrake's brilliant interlude to the interlude.
I am not sure I agree with him regarding the post-modernists. For one thing he says that Postmodernism does not agree with the "Great Narrative" and yet what is Marxs' Narrative if not grand? Not sure I understand how he explains their apparent complicity/duplicity.
I like Deleuze's adventure, what he has to say about the structure of reality. He is not really into arborescent heiarchies as far I can see, he is contends that it is more a rhizomatic structure, like a map with interacting points. He seems very biologically orientated.
Postmodernism is really post structuralism. Where structuralism develops interpretations out of narratives (many statements) by suggesting meaningful structure, postmodernism deconstructs these same narratives utilizing their own concepts as well as those of the structuralist to determine new meanings.
I don't mean to pick on just you here with my rambling, Crankus, but what bothers me the most about the idea of white privilege, and indeed privilege in itself, is the tendency of those who believe in it to focus almost entirely on macro examples. Leftist sociologists and political scientists will gaze at the ratios of men and women in political power throughout history, the degree to which white skinned males sit atop the social pyramid, or how much economic power is dominated by the same sorts of people, thus concluding that it is one's maleness, or whiteness, or their "Europeanness" that supplies them their power - their privilege. This characterization is one I'm not fond of, and for as much as modern academia is obsessed with culture and all that may emanate from it, there seems a great deal of ignoring going on with regard to "micro culture." What I mean by that is this: I went to a 95% black elementary school when I lived in South Carolina. I was only one of two white students in my class of about a hundred or so and I found it mightily difficult to translate my life living in Florida to this new one in the deep, deep American South. In the beginning my family was certainly more well off economically than the rest of my black classmates, but as years went by that stopped being the case as my family fell apart in more ways than one.
So, where was our white privilege then? Why didn't our whiteness or my father's maleness save us from bankruptcy, the inability to pay bills, me going to bed hungry, my being bullied for being being shy and not from there? Where was my father's white privilege when he himself grew up in relative squalor, when he went to bed hungry, when he had to degrade himself to such a pitiable level just to get the simplest of jobs? When I was a little white boy among an army of black classmates I didn't feel welcome, I didn't feel like my skin color or my genitalia did me any favors. But, what did do me wonders? My willingness to be kind, to be loving and compassionate, to be patient with those who hurt me. That was my attitude from the beginning and that's what I credit as being the catalyst for me fitting in. It wasn't the color of my skin or whether I was a male.
I suppose the basic truth I'm getting at is that correlation mustn't always entail causation. It isn't as simple as, "Oh, that guy is white, he must be privileged." If anything, my whiteness and maleness has become an immense detriment to me and my future, just as it was to my parents. I've seen black slums, white slums, Latino slums, whites doing good and bad, blacks doing good and bad, everyone doing good and bad. Does ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation play a part in one's treatment in the world? Of fucking course it does. But is that all there is when looking into a person's life and how they got to where they are? Absolutely not. To me, one's gender, skin color, whatever are among the least compelling aspects of a person when I meet them and begin to know them. I'd much rather know where they've lived, what they like to do for fun, what their thoughts on morality are, if they're religious, what their thinking is about truth, what they think about peanut butter on waffles, and so on and so forth. That's how I treated my classmates in South Carolina and it's how I treat people around me now and I do so not because I'm white or that I've got a cock and balls - it's because I strive to be a more moral person every day. If people want to view me and what I've accomplished through some intensely cynical and envious lens like many leftist folks do, so be it. I can't stop them. If that view keeps me out of a job, fine. It won't stop me, being the white male that I am, just as rejection and prejudice of the same kind didn't stop a black male like Frederick Douglas.
You aren't seriously suggesting that left sociologists and political scientists have ignored poverty or consider it a "micro-culture" or an exclusively minority experience?
People who make use of the concept of privilege don't argue that people of some specified privileged class don't face issues, or that particular members of that class don't have bad circumstances (even bad circumstances rooted in their (broadly) advantageous class membership). Rather, they're pointing out a general advantage and preference society gives to certain members, even before they could have ever demonstrated their superior competency or whatever (think: job offer preferences depending on perceived ethnicity or race of the applicants name, for example)
And what makes Peterson's argument hilarious (and where I think your point has some merit) is that being poor can negate much of one's privilege, and conversely, being wealthy or rich can overturn much of one's lack of it. This is a point I often see Marxists make, which is why this thread's OP (and linked video) is so stupid in its insistence in lumping together "the left" and the various ideas and beliefs held by those within various different ideologies that make up the left. Modern feminism is not an off-shoot of Marxism, Marxists are not "3rd-wave feminists". Oh feminists do make some of the same points as Marxists (and vice-versa), but what they believe and why they believe it are largely distinct. Anita Sarkeesian is a favorite complaint among those who despise 3rd-wave feminists, and she has asserted that capitalism plays a role in these issues. But many other such feminists never assert this, they just talk about these other sociological issues but do not connect them to the economic system of the day.
Not quite, only that they've largely ignored what matters most which is the human condition, not the white, black, tan condition.
Quoting MindForged
I said that there was a great deal of ignoring going on, which I stand by. I didn't say that there was no micro analysis of poverty and the like.
As for the validity of my anecdotal evidence, I only shared a fraction of my thoughts, which ended up being a rather long ramble. I don't pretend that my experience is set in stone, but having lived a life, they're antithetical to the accusatory and mean spirited derision that I think underpins ideas like white privilege in the academic world.
Quoting MindForged
This is a description of privilege, plain and simple. White privilege is the assumption that there exists some monopoly on power by white males in particular and that their dealings in the world are first and foremost because of their skin color and genitalia. Are there other factors? Yes. But the genesis of power seen through the lens of the concept of white privilege is skin color and sex. My use of anecdote was my attempt at being more human in my dealing with an often inhuman and vague position, showing that whiteness or maleness is not always the mover of suffering or achievement.
Quoting MindForged
I didn't really get far into his video, to be honest. My comment was more left field than a reply to the OP. Besides, Peterson tends to sound like Kermit the Frog, so I can't listen to him for very long.
Bullshit on stilts. I can't believe people write this stuff with an apparent straight face.
One of the arguments presented was that the fragmented partisans in identity politics cannot talk to each other.
But I participate in conversations between these supposedly incompatible interest groups regularly - disability, sexual preference, wealth, race...
Who is it that is not participating in the discussion?
Middle age middle class white men in suits?
But hey, that's me.
So I'm left to conclude that it must be Peterson and his audience that are having trouble participating in the discussion.
To echo you, that is bullshit on stilts. How can you say that with a straight face?
Saying "Group X generally has certain advantages (often even when measurable competencies are taken into account) and are given preferences at least in part because of what makes them a member of Group X" is not politely or in any other way being racist to white people.
How naive. Naturally, when challenged, the claim is asserted by proponents to be innocently descriptive, but not a single person who uses it fails to either implicitly or explicitly advance various prescriptions.
-Yawn- OK. It's a great way to insulate your position from falsity by impugning the motives and declare what they actually intend beforehand. Neat.
Disputing the claim would be easier by means of a counter-example, and yet I see you have chosen to go for the pedantic retort instead, which I think we both know is much less interesting. Shame.
Also, noted that when caught out making a ridiculous, insulting assertion, your response was not to apologise and correct yourself but to instead claim pedantry/
To be clear, do you really want us to understand that you believe that wishing something was different is 'prescriptive'? Does that also apply to when you wish recovery of a friend or family member from a horrible illness?
Does this link up with the buses? Asians are being racially abused on buses at epidemic levels?
Quoting andrewk
Sorry, but racism isn't anywhere near the most significant factor in why police shoot some black people. It's noteworthy, however, that you attribute the mere fact of a black man being shot by a police officer to racism. Do you realize how insane that is?
Quoting andrewk
I said you were prescriptive enough. Your position with respect to white privilege is normative, not merely descriptive. A merely descriptive claim would be that the sky is blue. You don't wish to eradicate the blueness of the sky, so there is no normative or prescriptive content to your advancing the claim that the sky is blue like there is in your advancing the claim of white privilege.
Now you're just making things up:
Nobody but you said anything about epidemic levels.
Nobody but you said that racism was a factor, let alone the most significant one. FWIW I think the major factors are fear, poor training and lack of psychological screening.
Find where I said that and quote it back to me, with link. You won't be able to find it, because I didn't say it. In fact I don't think I have used the word 'racism' at all in this thread, prior to this post (where I mention, but do not use it).
You are not listening to anything anybody says. You project onto their posts what you think somebody that disagrees with you might have said, and attack that instead.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/where-did-the-bernie-sanders-movement-come-from-the-internet.html
You're right he's more of a social democrat than a socialist. In fact, his proposed policies were just barely fit in the category of social democrat, it's basically just what most of the 1st World already had. But he's emphasized a new language into the mainstream political consciousness, and that's the stark class differences. He's also bit more of a socialist than informed critics seem to think because he supports the Worker Cooperative movement.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/01/the-nice-cop
I tend to think of how people act in terms of incentives, and if people in authority are positioned with too much instruments and opportunities to control others, there is going to be abuse all around. There just needs to be a better way to organize security in general.
I'm too armored in white male privilege to fell any slings and arrows from your response. Just kidding.
It is not possible to address macro and micro aspects of society at the same time. Thank you for your helpful personal anecdote.
Privilege comes as a package. Those who really have a lot of privilege have it because of their wealth, education, social connections, physical appearance, personality, heritage, and race and sex. When I was last in Chicago (before the 2016 election) I stopped in to survey Trump Tower. I wandered around looking for whatever there was, and quickly noticed that I was being followed. I clearly didn't belong there, despite being white and male.
The school I attended was 100% white, and there was a hierarchy of white males. The "privileged" white males were on the basketball or football teams, had lots of friends, (got good grades, I guess; don't know for sure), were good looking, and so on. There was also a hierarchy of white females. Most of the students were excluded from the higher reaches of the hierarchy. It was simply not open.
I'm well aware that many blacks are systematically excluded from... all sorts of things. It isn't just that they are black. They often present as poorly educated, not well versed in standard English (which is spoken by all races in English speaking countries), not dressed in standard business attire, and so on. Their deficiencies may not be their fault; their language usage and attire may be culturally inflected. None the less, they will get the brushoff if they are too far from the mean -- and so will whites, asians, hispanics, and native americans.
It is always a question for the excluded whether, and in what, they really want to be included. Being an outlier has its advantages. By being excluded in the past, gay men were able to put together community for themselves. I've been excluded and I've been accepted; acceptance feels better. But exclusion is one of the possible things that can happen.
So you've probably taken a few anecdotes and extrapolated from them some grave problem, though not grave enough for you to label it an "epidemic." Okay. So what? I imagine there is Asian privilege on the buses in Asian countries, wherein non-Asians are made to feel uncomfortable. Why don't we talk about Asian privilege, then? Or African privilege? Or Hispanic privilege?
Quoting andrewk
Good, progress. Notice these things have nothing to do with being white.
Yes, on most issues of American politics apart from healthcare, environmental policies and some economic issues.
I suppose it's futile to hope that at some stage you'll actually start to engage with what people have written, rather than what your feverish imagination tells you they might have written.
Let's make this simple. In police fatal shootings, civilians from “other” minority groups were significantly more likely than Whites to have not been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians and that Black civilians were more than twice as likely as White civilians to have been unarmed.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1745-9133.12269/abstract;jsessionid=8BFE5F45677070AA9A729F26B245D853.f02t03
Are you suggesting that despite a 99% confidence in the statistical significance, the fact that they're black is just a coincidence?
Sure, it's just clickbait, just like my own thread title - a marketing element.
Quoting andrewk
The problem here is that I don't think that being white, in and of itself, prevents a stranger from abusing you on the bus. First of all, it depends on the geographical area we're talking about. And it also depends on many other features - if you have something that stands out - a weird looking nose, etc. - you may get people abusing you, regardless of your skin color. If you're a super big, muscular, strong and tough-looking black guy, you most likely won't get people abusing you on the bus. That's why I say that it really depends - we can't frame it as "white" privilege, as if this sort of privilige belonged only to whites and not people of other skin colors too. I think that, instead, it ought to be framed as being a decent human being and not abusing others, regardless of why the perpetrators claim to do it.
Quoting andrewk
Yeah, that is probably right, the US is a strange society in that regard.
There was an article by ProPublica a while back that really captured the difference in behaviour this kind of thing incurs: https://www.propublica.org/article/yes-black-america-fears-the-police-heres-why. An except:
"The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.
...Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.
“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”
My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it. We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons .... As far as we could tell, no one had been hurt. The shooter was long gone, and we had seen the back of him for only a second or two. On the other hand, calling the police posed considerable risks. It carried the very real possibility of inviting disrespect, even physical harm. We had seen witnesses treated like suspects, and knew how quickly black people calling the police for help could wind up cuffed in the back of a squad car."
I think this resonated with me in particular because I'd be that person calling the police (I'm not exactly white, but these are issues that remain somewhat removed from me). I don't think I would have thought there would be any reason not to.
I would say that over time the hierarchy always shifts towards competency. This doesn't mean that there cannot be cases, some of them even for hundreds of years, when incompetent people maintain positions of power. That is quite frequent - look at Justin Trudeau - no competency, he's there just because of his father.
Many people look at things in this way, but it's just a short-term thing. It's not sustainable - and when I say sustainable, I'm referring to the fact that it's not sustainable over many generations.
Regarding the concrete example you provided. Statistically, people may stay within their income bracket, but that isn't what interests me. What interests me is the possibility of moving from one income bracket to another. That isn't something that you can assess statistically because it presupposes that all people (or at least most people) are willing to do what it takes and desire to move from one income bracket to another. And of course, this just isn't true. Most people grow comfortable in their income bracket over time, and this is a personal observation I've made.
Quoting MindForged
Hierarchies cannot be eliminated, but sure, they can be changed.
I never said competency entails privilege. But competency naturally translates in greater power to influence your surrounding environment. That's why things fell apart in the Eastern Soviet bloc, because people were promoted solely based on political connections and ideological reasons, and not on competence. Such a structure cannot survive in the long-run.
Quoting MindForged
Sure.
Quoting MindForged
Yeah, I excluded it because corruption is a problem and needs to be addressed separately from whether or not someone is successful in their business. Someone can be successful without being corrupt.
Actually, he held the dialectical view, that advances in thinking and advances in production go hand in hand, and one spurs the other. Quantitative progress leading to qualitative progress in a loop sort of way. And sure, I agree with that view. When new possibilities of behaviour open up (that's what new technology does), then thinking changes to take those into account, which again opens up new possibilities of technology, etc. etc.
Quoting Bitter Crank
The issue is precisely that the left campaigns on these points - they may not be responsible for them, but they certainly create unrest and add fuel to the fires. The left as it exists today, not the left in principle, because remember, I am somewhat left-leaning too as the many political tests I've done 1 year or so ago illustrate.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think that the underlying issue is that people have grown accustomed to (or perhaps are forced to?) sell their labour instead of sell what they produce. For many, that is because they never learned how to produce anything. The social environment does a lot of harm here since it trains people to be handicapped. Basically, from the moment you enter the gates of your school, you are trained to sell your labour, not the products of your labour. You are told to stay in the schooling system, follow the path they lay out for you, get that degree, or get that job they help you to get, etc. You are never told "listen, you have useful things to give for society. You must concentrate on producing what is useful for your fellow human beings" - no, the message is always to trade your labour for money, instead of your products for money.
So the issue that many on the left don't get is that it's not business and the trading of commodities, goods and services that is problematic. It's the trading of labour. So the entrepreneur is actually the person who most often understands this - that the so-called exploitation happens when one trades their labour for money instead of their production for money. Labour is intrinsically tied to time - you need to spend time to labour. But production isn't. Production can happen without spending time, thanks to automatisation, or in the case of software, reproducing your product is essentially free, regardless of the number of copies you sell. So in the decoupling of production from labour, therein lies the "surplus value" that the entrepreneur takes for himself. And this decoupling is done at multiple chokepoints. One of them is in terms of means of production directly (the factory is owned by you, and your workers effectively pay you rent to use it to sell their labour), or in the distribution channel, in connecting client with product.
So all good entrepreneurship runs on the "rent" model. Getting paid for "renting" some means of production or means of distribution. Entrepreneurship is premised on the idea of passivity - all entrepreneurs want passive income, it is almost the Holy Grail. Passive income is determined by the amount of time required to make it. Rent, software, and money itself are very passive. Rent, you don't have to do much to collect it. Software, easy to reproduce, and resell, takes almost no work. And money, well, if you have lots of money, you give it to the speculators, and they breed it, so that it produces lots of babies for you.
What enables this kind of entrepreneurship is simply the fact that not everyone is an entrepreneur. If everyone became an entrepreneur, and nobody sold their labour, but rather the products of their labour, then there would be no problem. Hence distributism. So entrepreneurship is the solution, not the problem, which is what the left of today doesn't understand.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I wouldn't say that those people aren't destructive once they exit University. Their attitudes influence elections, they influence workplace environments, and so on.
How do you know the hierarchy "shifts towards competency"? You didn't really answer my question, you just told me what you believe is the case. How is incompetency unsustainable? This isn't the interplay of man vs wild, where failure means death, so I don't know what you're appealing to to justify this belief. The political process is not remotely free of nepotism.
Well it should interest you because it suggests that success isn't fully determined by competency. Like I hate to use a cliche example, but Trump is mega rich, as was his father (not to mention the question of just how much he actually improved his finances after his inheritance). His extreme affluence is directly a result of what his parents had.
Bro, you literally said that competency entails privilege:
Which sounds hopelessly naive for reasons I went over before.
Except, as the example I gave shows, the corruption is at least in part how businesses become more successful. If bribing political officials under the hilarious moniker of "campaign financing" to net economic moves beneficial to the business in question isn't corruption assisting success, I don't know what it. The point isn't that success is impossible sans-corruption, the point is the most successful businesses are usually the ones who fuel corruption for their own ends, meaning it's not all (or even mostly) competency based. Your response to corruption just ends up being a choice to ignore the counter-examples to your view.
Have some more pomo marxist propaganda chaps.
You can't read your own writing? Look at what I originally quoted of you:
Quoting andrewk
If you can't see the implication here, in addition to the explicit meaning of what you wrote, then I can't help you.
Yeah.
By the way, your article's authors assume implicit bias, but that's been debunked: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Can-We-Really-Measure-Implicit/238807
Did you even read the article you cite? Here's a few quotes.
"... casts doubt on the supposed connection."
"... the correlation between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior appears weaker than previously thought."
"... there’s not necessarily strong evidence for the conclusions people have drawn,"
Note 'doubt', 'appears' and 'not necessarily'. Hardly 'debunked'.
In addition to the excessive certainty you've given this study, it is only about the relationship between visual bias stimuli and behaviour. It doesn't have any bearing on the issue of whether prejudiced behaviour actually exists.
Well, it's a difference of attitude. One claims that suffering is part and parcel of the nature of existence as we experience it now, and thus cannot be eliminated completely (it can only be fought against, held at bay, etc.) while the other party thinks that someone is responsible for the badness of existence, and if those people or agents are removed, then existence will be good.
Why horrified at Peterson's speech?
This is a lecture version of fake news.
This is a towering straw man of bollocks.
It was how he kept looking to the ceiling.
No one doubts that prejudicial thinking and behavior exists; no one doubts that people are biased; we can observe biased behavior. Still, we can and do sometimes misattribute a given bias to behavior. When examined very closely, thinking and behavior have a not altogether straightforward relationship. We can misinterpret observed behavior.
Tests (like Project Implicit's) attempt to get closer to the truth of the matter by measuring behaviors in an artificial, controlled setting. The tests employ interesting and possibly valid strategies, but the results may or may not seem individually congruent with one's own self-knowledge. Drawing a strong relationship between these kinds of tests and results on the one hand, and real-world behaviors is difficult at best.
You are never going to be able to conduct a sensible discussion if you keep on telling people that they said or meant something that they didn't. You are not a mind reader.
You can bold my words as much as you like. That won't make an accusation of 'racism' appear amongst them. 'Racism' is a concept that I find deeply unhelpful and avoid using wherever possible.
Identifying a harm that a person suffers is not the same as blaming somebody for that harm. If that's the way you look at the world then that's your misfortune, but it's just silly to assume that everybody else looks at the world the same way.
My position has not changed one iota. The only thing that has changed is that maybe you are finally starting to realise that all the conclusions that you leaped to about what my position was were ridiculous and unfounded.
Why do you find it so hard to just say 'Sorry, I got it wrong.'
If I recall correctly the initial 'talk' was from an Asian father to his son. The 'talk' became known as something that went on in ethnic families, I think even Eric Holder indicated his father gave him the talk.
White fathers worry about their children too but they don't have this kind of worry. White people are largely invisible to themselves in a way that different toned ethenticities can never be. I don't think many white people consider themselves privileged because their view of themselves in aggregate is too entwined in the culture they dominate.
Coventry University and the University of Illinois visited five cities across the US and spoke with over 400 people who identified themselves as white working-class (10/2017). Conclusions follow:
1)classic definitions of white working-class communities, framed around ethnicity, income, education and occupation, are narrow and outdated and not accounting for their lived experiences and economic realities;
2)participants identified with being white working-class based around values through which they differentiate themselves from other groups - including being hardworking, honest and not dependent on welfare;
3)economic insecurity (living "paycheque to paycheque"), rather than traditional class credentials such as education or occupation, underpins many participants' identification as white working-class;
4)'fairness' was frequently emphasized by participants, who feel that it is not being applied equally and that racial minorities are supported through welfare and social services while they are left in the slow lane;
5)the concept of white privilege was rejected by many participants, who felt their whiteness was a disadvantage in terms of "reverse racism" existing in the labour market and lack of representation of voice;
6)whiteness was mostly unspoken, with participants preferring to refer to themselves as "working" or "working-class", with communities of colour, conversely, framed not by class but by ethnicity;
7)use of racialised language was common, particularly when participants referred to concerns around neighbourhood change, economic decline, welfare dependency and blame for societal problems;
8) immigrants and racial minorities are seen as being outside the working class and a racial "other", even if they share a similar economic position to those in white working-class communities.
After the civil rights movement, affirmative action, and the rest, America expected that its racism problem would dissolve away, but that has not happened and to quote John Derbyshire
Is this a virtue or a fault? Do you really want white people to be white conscious?
Yeah, that's actually a really fascinating point, the idea that white identity - to the extent there is one - ends up often being sublimated into class or even 'attitude' categories ('hardworking, etc'). I wonder if this is a kind of socio-psycho response to a phenomenon that might be called the particularization of white identity, that is, the creeping acknowledgement that 'white' no longer stands for a universalist non-ethnicity (as when 'ethnic' simply means 'non-white'), and is coming to be seen as one ethnic identity among a circle of others (complex and problematic as it might be). And I mean this in the most banal way as when TV shows or memes now speak of 'white people things'.
There's a moment in one of my favourite recent films, End of Watch, when Michael Peña's Latino character jokingly tells Jake Gyllenhaal's white character to leave him alone and enjoy his 'white people stuff' - an evening at the symphony that Gyllenhaal had planned with his girlfriend. I don't think this is a joke that could have been made - or even thought-up as a joke - 10 or so years ago. And there's a kind of lovely dialectical implication in the joke too,insofar as, as a joke it pokes fun of there being 'any-color-people stuff' at all.
But if you couple this emergent particularization of whiteness with (a) the problematic historical discourse of 'whiteness' (often associated, for good or ill, with racism and bigotry), and (b) the complex political dynamics of racial history in the US, and you get a recipe for just the kind of sublimation, I think, described in the report you link. So it's definitely the case that white people negotiate race too, in a way specific to them, and in a way definitely worthy of study as well.
Yes, because the rest was a pile of unargued manure.
Just what planet are you from? You are a native English speaker right?
No. It's a privilege.
Privilege isn't an action done to someone by another, it's an aspect of social being, a meaning of states or actions present in society. In the context of the police, for example, this is defined in being of a racial groups associated with crime. Even if the police have no racist intentions, the mere fact of a society in which manifests (for various reasons), as association between race in crime defines the presence of other racial groups over this one. It's defined in the social situation of belonging to a race associated with crime, including in instances of just policing. (i.e. cops have no racist intentions, but people for that community are justly subject to police actions, as a result of acts of crime in that social context).
The question of privilege is one of describing a social relationship, not just pointing out some act of injustice. Many acts of injustice are a part of it, but sometimes, maybe even quite often, privilege is a feature of states and actions that are, for that moment, just or valuable. In these cases, it not question picking out some individual action, telling people to stop and then killing home for it. It's about a wider social context. The injustice and change being the circumstances which produce the disadvantage in the first place (e.g. remove poverty within a community, so they don't turn to crime, etc.).
But why is suffering "just" the nature of life? That's a cop out.
Because we don't control every bad thing that can happen to us, nor can we control it. Obviously.
Quoting MindForged
Well let's see... suffering. You love someone, they don't love you back, you get sick, you suffer pain, you get bored, there are diseases, illnesses, handicaps, there are accidents that can occur, you lose loved ones, etc. Need I go on? This has nothing to do with society, it's suffering that is intrinsic to the nature of existence.
Where does "Peterson and co." say if anyone caused suffering, it's the people who are being hurt by it causing it?
I'm asking why life is suffering, if that is indeed the case. I think there's an argument to be made for the idea, whether or not it's correct, and that argument would presumably be important within the discussion, but Peterson doesn't seem to make any argument about why life is suffering.
Quoting Agustino
See above.
One explanation is provided in Genesis: Adam and Eve were expelled from the G of E for their disobedience, and because they were no longer innocent. Life went downhill very fast once we were expelled. Of course, if they hadn't been disobedient, we wouldn't exist.
Another explanation is provided by various: Life is unsatisfactory; happiness is not in the cards.
Yet another explanation is that people are neurotic: we can find ways of being miserable even when we have everything we need.
Hobbes pointed out that life can be nasty, brutish, and short.
Finally, we have limited capacity to make silk purses out of sows' ears. Many of the bad things that happen to us just can't be papered over. The truth that life often sucks shines forth from within the compost heaps of our existences.
The Garden of Eden seems to be the only explanation there; the other options are just observations or descriptions. The question is what the source of individual human suffering actually is. I think it's fundamentally not in our control, as Agu and Peterson say, but that's because developmental factors like parents, teachers, socio-economic status, etc., are not in our control initially. The question now is how personal autonomy is developed/attained. If someone is never given the tools to develop autonomy, then who has caused the suffering they experience because of a lack of autonomy, for instance? Are all individuals unequivocally responsible for their own actions 100% of the time, and thus for their own suffering, or no? This is where I think Peterson goes too far; or rather, doesn't consider the deeper issues there. Autonomy is achieved from a specific kind of conscious awareness of personhood, which is not something everyone develops fully, I don't think.
The G of E story is the prime explanation of all our misfortunes, and since it is archetypal, everything else is going to seem like a footnote. That life is unsatisfactory or that we are neurotic is as foundational as the story of Adam's and Eve's expulsion from paradise. It only lacks the nicety of narrative form.
Bad things happen in life because we are fragile and nature is rough. We are neurotic -- slightly crazy -- and we create at least some of the unsatisfactory reality from which we suffer. Our fears and fantasies can lead us into very bad decisions which create suffering. The war on Iraq strikes me as neurotic on our part. We had been stabbed in the World Trade Center and somebody, by God, was going to pay dearly. It might have made more sense to attack Saudi Arabia, since most of the 9/11 terrorists had connections there. But, since when did crazy make good decisions?
Quoting Noble Dust
Yes, autonomy is an important issue, as is how we attain it. But autonomous individuals are as subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as any one else is.
Those phrases don't "only" lack narrative form, they lack narrative form. There's a huge difference between an archetypal story that illustrates experience, and a simple observation that "life is unsatisfactory". Anyway, that's all I meant by mentioning that the Garden of Eden story was the only explanation that you offered.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I guess I'm engaging in this thread at all because I actually want to ask "why are we fragile?" and "why is nature rough?" I'm having a toddler moment. I'm not satisfied with these placations and admonishments about how "shit happens", etc.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Agreed. But that relates to the issue of autonomy/development. When we create our own suffering, are we doing it because of developmental lack, or does everyone do it, no matter how "developed" they are? What the fuck does it mean to be "developed"?
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, but the idea is that they're better equipped to handle the barrage. If that's so, then judgement of actions can't be universal.
There's a very simple empirical argument against this kind of apologism.
P1. Stress, great displeasure and depression are evolved responses.
P2. Stress, great displeasure and depression are very harmful to the survival of the individual.
P3. Humans evolved through a process of evolution through natural selection.
C1. From P1-3, if the natural state of humans was high levels of stress and depression we would either have died out, or e would have had to evolve ways in which they were not so harmful to our survival.
C2. It cannot be the case that states which cause high levels of stress and depression are the 'natural' state for humans.
Of course if you want to discard an entire planet's worth of empirical evidence in favour of some black magic mumbo-jumbo designed to subjugate the uncritical masses, then carry on, I apologise for the interruption.
So what?
Quoting Pseudonym
So what?
Quoting Pseudonym
So what?
Quoting Pseudonym
What does natural mean here, in relation to evolution?
Quoting Pseudonym
So what is the "natural" state?
Its a logical argument disputing the idea that we've 'always' struggled against the cruelty of nature and 'always' will, there is no "so".
Quoting Noble Dust
The state in which we evolved, hunter-gatherers.
Yeah I know; so what?
Quoting Pseudonym
So what? Hunting and gathering for what purpose? To promulgate more hunter gathers, to promulgate more hunter gathers? So what? They all die.
I don't understand what you mean by "so what?". One could reply "so what?" to every proposition. Is there some reason you've singled out my propositions for such treatment?
Much of individual life is 'fragile'. Toughness and resistance to nature's roughness is found in groups more than individuals. It isn't just us. Everybody in the animal kingdom can't be the top-predator, can't be extremely resistant to being eaten, can't be impervious to every run-of-the-mill threat that comes along. We may be strong and really tough, but some little virus comes along and cuts us off at the knees. All of us species have survived because we reproduced abundantly enough to keep ourselves in business over the hundreds of millions of years we have been around, in one form or another.
Monarch butterflies can't be at once light, beautiful, and strong enough to migrate many hundreds of miles YET be armored enough to not be eaten.
Some people think we are "no longer animals". We transcended all of that stuff by becoming very smart, and having language, and philosophy, and all that stuff. We certainly are an odd animal in our specialization.
Quoting Noble Dust
We are indisputably animals, and "no longer animals as such". The rock bottom core of our "human problem" is that we are animals who imagine that we have transcended our animal nature. Tech, bio, and [b]mens[/b] don't always jive. Most of us spend at least some of our time in a fantasy world. I'm not knocking it--it's a necessary retreat from life-as-we-know-it. But then, in the middle of our happy fantasy, we get rudely jerked back into reality.
It's such a pain in the neck.
I just meant to highlight that the promulgation of hunter-gathers is meaningless if there's no telos that gives promulgation a purpose beyond itself. Sorry if I was uncharitable.
But if you consider uncharitability to be undesirable, then promulgation can't be your main motive.
I hear this kind of argument so often and yet have always failed to understand it properly. I have little hope that an Internet forum is going to break decades of mystery for me, but on the off-chance - what do you mean by "meaning/purpose"?
It always seems when people use these terms against naturalism they seem to be looking for something other than happiness (on the grounds that we can just ask "well, why persue happiness?"), but when we find that something (let's call it X, but quite frankly it's almost always God) it seems inexplicably we can no longer ask "why persue X?".
A meaning or a purpose is inherent to any argument, fundamentally. So you can't even make whatever argument you're trying to make here without one. Meaning or purpose is inherent, but not always acknowledged.
Quoting Pseudonym
Now, that's actually interesting. I've thought for awhile now that I and others with similar views don't actually want "happiness". But, what might we want, other than happiness? Is there something else to desire, other than happiness?
Yes, I'm making the argument here because it makes me happy to clarify things and arguing with intelligent people is one way to do that.
I could construct an evolutionary story to explain why clarifying ideas is likely to make me happy - clearer ideas are more likely to lead to innovations which could increase the chances of my tribe surviving in a changing environment. Having an evolutionary story helps to reassure me that the happiness I could get from this objective is the best, and there isn't greater happiness to be had from a different set of objectives.
I seek this reassurance because it makes me happy to know that my objectives are likely to provide me with significant happiness in the long term. Again, the story I can use to explain this is that some objectives require periods of unhappiness to achieve them, in evolutionary terms, it makes sense to assign at least some effort to checking that there is likely to be some reward at the end of the process.
Quoting Noble Dust
Well exactly. If you don't even have an alternative, what is it that makes you think happiness isn't it?
So evolutionarily obtained happiness is your meaning or purpose? Within your moral life, which will end in your death?
Quoting Pseudonym
I didn't say I don't have an alternative.
Yes.
Quoting Noble Dust
I'd be interested to hear what it is (unless it's God, I've heard that one already).
What good is an evolutionarily obtained happiness if it ends at around 70 years old? Who gives a fuck?
Quoting Pseudonym
Nvm then.
What good is happiness if it doesn't end? It's the fact that we're going to die that makes it worth doing anything. If we were to carry on eternally, what would be the point in doing anything, you'd always be able to do everything an infinite number of times anyway, there'd be no point in 'now' at all.
>:O It's a fucking scam.
That's the classic mortal view of eternity; eternity viewed through a mortal lens; "heaven would get boring!" 6-year-olds understand that, and ask that question.
An actual eternity might very well be something else entirely (to begin with, onotologically, a realiy that exists outside of time, where "boring", for instance, would have no meaning). It requires an intuition and an imagination to consider the possibility.
But we're not talking about a 'possibility'. The 'possibility' exists that after my life persuing evolutionarily derived happiness I somehow spend an eternity in bliss. That would be lovely. I don't see what that's got to do with meaning or purpose. Both 'meaning', and particularly, 'purpose' suggest their opposites exist. If your 'purpose' is an eternity of bliss then how do you know you're not going to get that anyway? How do you know that any particular set of activities are going to bring about that objective?
So now, when we get to religion, we're no longer talking about a 'possibility' requiring 'imagination'. We're talking about an actual human being claiming to know what people 'should' do in order to achieve this bliss. Doesn't sound very imaginative to me, sounds pretty determined.
I was, just then.
Quoting Pseudonym
You're confusing the points of my argument. Meaning and purpose only obtain teleologically; otherwise it's just a nihilistic sham.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not making those claims; sounds like you're assuming I'm "religious", whatever that means to you. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If you live your life assuming there's no afterlife, and then come to find that you do have a "heavenly" afterlife awaiting you, then obviously I would be as happy as you would be, for you. And presumably, I would have the same life. We would be buddies in heaven. I'm hopeful this is the case. That's both a sarcastic and sincere comment at the same time.
This is familiar territory. I get the feeling I'm never going to understand this. "Meaning and purpose only obtain teleologicallly" - what does that mean for what we actually think?
I have certain desires - this is something I take to be self-evident brute fact.
Those desires are not always clear and are often contradictory, but the fact that I want to understand them, and achieve fully as many of them as possible again seems to be undeniable brute fact.
My meaning and purpose in life therefore seems to be unavoidably the clarification and fulfilment of these desires.
One of those desires might well be for an eternity in bliss, but I have no idea what this might be like, nor how to go about ensuring it happens, so it is irrelevant to my meaning and purpose in life.
I've (erroneously) attributed religious claims to your argument because it seems to me that only by making religious claims can the persuit of anything outside of our sensory experience become meaningful. Unless we just guess?
This is familiar territory; I get the feeling I'm never going to understand this. It means that meaning relates to something outside of time. For starters.
Quoting Pseudonym
Of course; no one knows what an eternity in bliss would be; why would this lack of knowledge mean that the concept is irrelevant to your meaning or purpose in life? Lack of knowledge, apophatic concepts, are key. Regardless of your worldview.
Quoting Pseudonym
With all due respect, this just seems insane to me. Even something so simple as the distinction between religion and spirituality, with all of it's stigmas, would, at the very least, clarify your confusion here.
OK, so what is this 'something' outside of time to which it relates, and how do you know that meaning relates to something outside of time, is this a guess, intuition or rationally derived?
All the while it seems we're no closer to the idea of 'purpose' which is much more clearly defined. Purpose is the reason why we do something, the goal (either ultimate or proximate). I'm suggesting that goal is unavoidably the satisfaction of those desires which are self-evidently present. No further 'purpose' seems to be justified.
Quoting Noble Dust
Because if we do not (and cannot) know anything at all about how to achieve this objective, how could it possibly be our 'purpose', the reason for our actions? We cannot act in such a way as to bring about an objective we have no knowledge of.
Quoting Noble Dust
I don't see any distinction between religion and spirituality apart from how many people believe you. They are both essentially descriptions of the world, and prescriptions for behaviour based on those descriptions, neither of which can be measured in any way (otherwise they would be science). So religion/spirituality are both ways of satisfying a set of desires using guesswork rather than observed successes perceived with our senses.
And I'm suggesting that your "purpose" is meaningless because it dies once you die.
A purpose that actually is purposeful is a purpose that exists outside of time; outside of one's lifetime.
Why though? Why does a purpose cease to have meaning simply because it is achieved at some point. My purpose is to live 70 happy years. At some point in time I will have achieved that objective. I'm not seeing how the fact that I will achieve it removes meaning.
How will you preserve that meaning in posterity, for yourself, personally, after your own death?
I don't think I will, I'm not at all concerned about meaning after I die. If, after I die, it turns out that I have some kind of conscious awareness, then that will no doubt present its own set of challenges. Maybe I will still have desires, maybe there will be some form of 'action' I can take to bring about those desires, in which case there will be a whole new set of meanings and purposes after I die, but I can't possibly know any of this, so any action taken now to affect my existence in this theoretical state would be purposeless.
Preserving meaning in this world, after I've left it, is not really something that concerns me, that would be up to those still here.
Hi. I agree that our purpose is just clarifying and satisfying a host of desires. But I think Noble Dust has a point too. One of those desires is the desire to build something permanent, to escape time.
If we are along down here without a god (and I live as though we are), then apparently all we can do is build sandcastles between tides. If I compose some great piece of music, write a great novel, or invent some useful device, then I build a relatively more durable sandcastle. But this doesn't compare to building an endless afterlife through faith and/or works and/or innocence.
The itch to build or melt into something deathless intensifies perhaps with aging. But I for one felt it as an adolescent. I wanted to write a poem that humanity wouldn't willingly let die. This would be a permanent proof of my status. It makes sense that we would want to invest our effort in pursuit of long-lasting rewards. We are future oriented beings.
Finally, I don't think we overcome the itch too easily. I think we settle for semi-permanent. And we mostly just scratch other itches. It's a particular mood that obsesses escaping time. It may be that we would like to be alive and dead and the same time that way. Our representative (our permanent status token) can do our living for us while we sleep. The fear of death might have a strange relationship with the desire for death. Deathless tokens may be attempts to navigate our ambivalence towards the hassle/opportunity of life.
I find that I have less and less itch to melt into something deathless as I age.
I thought some of you might be interested with those two recent pieces about Peterson, the first one by Žižek:
Why do people find Jordan Peterson so convincing? Because the left doesn't have its own house in order
And the second one (a little bit older), by Gyrus, packs an amazing number of insights, especially towards the end, not just about Peterson but also about the ways in which both the right and the left often tend to problematize humankind's relation to nature:
The Black Truths of Jordan Peterson
I agree that such a desire exists, but I don't think it's as mysterious as some branches of metaphysics make out. It's simply the expression of our evolutionarily derived desire to rear children and leave then an environment in which they will thrive.
I can agree that the desire to create/be the deathless object is plausibly an evolved trait that succesfully reproduces itself. Future orientation is impressive if not mysterious. (From a certain perspective, everything is mysterious, but we are too busy/immersed most of the time for the wonder-terror of finding ourselves alive. We can't easily turn such wonder-terror to profit, so it's written off as an indulgence.) We humans work and suffer now for rewards in a distant future. The same calculating mind that supports this also shows the futility of all human endeavor, relative to this desire at its most absolute.
Hi. I can relate to that. But what of our presence on this philosophy forum? Why do we get pleasure from studying science or history? I understand that the 'small self' is something that we let go of as we age. But don't we find consolation in objectivity itself? What I have in mind is the subjective or idiosyncratic self dying into the objective or universal self. We can leave our little stories behind as mere permutations of the one shared story.
An overstatement of this idea might be that all good men and women are essentially alike, having evolved a consciousness of this essential similarity. The 'bad' man or woman still insist on their identity as an irreducible novelty. 'I am like no one else ever.' But there are new things under the sun, and both the 'good' and 'evil' perspectives have their truth. 'Evil' is necessary for novelty, even if most novelty is either trivial or illusory. This is closely related to economic specialization, I think.
Why futile? In orienteering we will almost always find our way by compass direction "head North" is our objective. Does it matter that we will never get to "North", is it not sufficient that we are further North than we were yesterday?
Don't forget that I wrote "relative to this desire at its most absolute." At its most absolute, the desire wants something that lasts forever, something indestructible, something outside of the cruelty and bounty of time.
Some religious people have this. But others (often with critical/scientific minds) determine that no individual human and seemingly not even the species at large can escape the hand of time. If you tell me that most of life involves other non-futile desires, then I agree. My purpose was to clarify what I see as the essence of nihilism. The 'nothing' involved is that which escapes time.
In my view, we are usually sufficiently satisfied with medium-range objectivity. If I have a community now with standards that more or less mirror my higher ideas/values, then I can find my effort non-futile. I can imagine an unrecognized artist, too, thinking only a generation or two ahead, which will recognize him posthumously. One function of God has arguably been satisfy the unruly itch to transcend time and chance, or attain permanent status and security for one's essence if not one's body.
I disagree. I think that religious people are no more satisfied by the idea of an afterlife than someone who has raised children that they are proud of and has left a positive legacy in their community.
I think religious people mistake an increased longevity of their legacy (stretching out to infinity) for an increased quality of their legacy (albeit forshortened). I don't honestly think people can actually get their heads round 'infinity', and most people when they talk about it are really just imagining 'a very long time'. I think when it comes to the practicality of satisfying this desire, doing something really positive that will last a very long time is far more satisfying than doing something incredibly selfish (such as religious practice) even with the conviction that it will last for eternity.
Religion may play into the desire to strive for something that goes on beyond death, but I'm highly doubtful that it actually satisfies.
I think of it simply as the negation of the finite. No end. No death. So instead of thinking in terms of duration, we can think in terms of the absence of a threat that is otherwise present.
Quoting Pseudonym
I personally don't believe in God and/or afterlife, but I think the idea itself offers satisfaction to some people. In any case, I think that's what the nihilistic longs for --the eternity that he was possibly taught to expect by a childhood exposure to religion. Or the nihilist is just experiencing the same itch that helped inspire religion in the first place.
Of course I see that raising children and working for the benefit of the community is a medium-range satisfaction of this itch for objectivity or durable value. I understand this to be educated, liberal common sense. Heaven is now just participation in Social /Moral Progress, including Parenthood. That's fine. I'm not in the business of complaining about the world. I'm in the business of understanding how I can effectively live in the world I actually have --the only one I believe in.
Dear Mr Maw,
For the past 6000 years of human history the societies of every successful civilization have been structured as pyramidal, patriarchal hierarchies of dominance - oi polloi have always occupied the broad base level of the structure, while the most intelligent and competent members of the polis have always naturally ascended to occupy the highest "executive" levels of the hierarchy as the rulers and leading authorities, etc. of their empires'/civilizations' affairs.
Why do you find this "laughable", and what exactly do you mean by saying that Augustino is being "circular" and "naive" in stating the scientific fact that human and animal societies have - for millions of years in the case of certain animal species - organized themselves socially in the form of patriarchal hierarchies of dominance, competence and authority?
Please explain.
Regards
Dachshund
Please, call me Maw. Mr. Maw is my father.
Agustino's comment pertained to hierarchy tout court. "Patriarchy" wasn't a qualifier, so I'll ignore it in order to better point out why I find it "laughable" and "naive".
I'm not excluding the fact that citizens in a democratic republic, market-based economy can rise above previous levels of social class, successfully enter politics, etc. But given the ebb and flow of social mobility across developed countries, most particularly, America, the notion that only the competent rise is "naive". Or are younger generations simply more "incompetent" than older ones? Agustino, and yourself, naively ignore or discount corruption, nepotism, favoritism, racism, sexism or any other form of corruption or discrimination within politics or capitalism that enables incompetent people to succeed or stay on top, or competent members of society to stagnate.
Nope, this is more propaganda because it's not qualified. White people may be largely invisible to themselves in SOME parts of the Western world, but you try going to the Middle East and see how "invisible" to yourself you are there. If you think that what is going on between whites and other races in the West is racism, just have a look at some places in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and you'll be horrified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia_and_racism_in_the_Middle_East#Saudi_Arabia
And you don't even have to go to the Middle East - just head over to mostly black neighbourhoods as a white man, and you'll see how fast you become aware of your skin color.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-leimert-park-joggers-discussion-20170315-htmlstory.html
Racism seems to be a knee-jerk response that occurs across cultures in groups that are mostly of one skin color against others of a different skin color. If you want to deal with racism, then you must be aware of this, and not consider racism as a "white-only" problem.
Quoting Agustino
I think this exemplifies a flaw in the English language. I read Cava's statement as meaning 'invisible to each other' - ie their skin colour is invisible to other whites, not as each person being invisible to themself. When you think about it, the way the language works, it can be read either way. But I think in this case, from the context, it meant the former, in which case the response is not applicable, as one's colour being invisible to other whites does not entail its being invisible to non-whites.
English is not the only language with ambiguities like this. I had a strange moment reading Harry Potter in French, in which it said of the students at Smeltings Academy, to which Dudley Dursley goes:
'Les élèves de Smelting avaient également une canne dont ils se servaient pour se taper dessus quand les professeurs ne les voyaient pas.'
That reads as 'the Smeltings students also have a cane which they use to hit themselves when the teachers are not watching', which would be an odd thing to do if one is not an Opus Dei. The original, English version says 'They also carried knobbly sticks, used for hitting each other while the teachers weren't looking.' But in French it is said in the same way as 'hit themselves'. More here.
First of all, what Marx has to do with this, I have no idea. I dislike conspiratorial thinking, whether it is from the left (Noam Chomsky) or right (Alex Jones).
Quoting Agustino
No. One could argue that one of Buddhist tenets is that desire is the main source of suffering and the strategy of life ought to eliminate desire, which will eliminate suffering.
But Buddhism also preaches the importance of being grateful, something underrated among young progressives.
Now, I haven't watched the video in full, but I have heard Peterson. He is a good psychologist, but his philosophy is mediocre at best. His love your Jung is something I don't get. His beef with post modernism is something most agree, even Chomsky.
I doubt he even addressed such issues as regulatory capture, which helps to explain sluggish growth and rising inequality. The left typically overlook this issue, which involves the government intervening in free-markets to help the wealthy, because the left looks to the government as a solution, and the right also overlooks this problem, because they think whatever a so-called free-market produces, must be optimal, despite no such realistic proof ever having been established. I have a hard time believing that a guy who does not even know what Marxism is would get this right.
The only solution to that is socialism which is not possible without proper education.
LOL - most of Peterson's fans have already graduated college and are men who are struggling to find a job or fit in the workplace, or know what to do with their lives.
Are you for real????
The bourgeois is at the top because they pull all the strings to make sure no one else gets a fair share of the pie. Hierarchy is inherited to a great extent thanks to nepotism and corruption. Patrimonial capitalism makes sure that inheritance remains the main source of wealth, and it has nothing to do with competence, productivity or creativity.
:ok:
Quoting andrewk
A written statement? Shit, when's his sentencing?
There's nothing wrong or unprofessional with professors influencing or guiding students. Often times, they should act as mentors. What's wrong is influencing students while using dishonest arguments, faux facts, summoning illusory enemies, and adding fuel to the 'culture war' flames, under the guise of "self-help" psychology.
Which part of my sentence do you have a problem with?
I am saying it is possible given proper education.
To answer how is actually quite simple. Basically it's because political correctness etc. are the prevailing cultural zeitgeist and values of society - or at least the relevant segments of society. Why are they the prevailing zeitgeist? I don't think there is much reason - it's like fashion. There's no reason why pink hats are fashionable now, or why it was fashionable to wear a wig 200 years ago, etc. It's just what it happened to be. If we played history again, it would likely be different.
I think to a certain extent (but not completely) it is random. It's not something that can be explained by a deterministic theory. A series of ideologies compete against each other, and the one that emerges as victorious isn't something that can, prior to the fact, be determined. That is exactly why we can't predict history or say what will happen next.
I am aware that you will take this response as a copout and a refusal to think more deeply about the problem, but I have thought deeply, and looking back at history, I see that it is pretty much impossible to predict what will happen next. This impossibility to predict means either that the solutions are intractable or that the phenomenon isn't entirely deterministic. I think maybe both factors are relevant.
If you have an alternative explanation, I'd be curious to hear what that is, and why you think so.
I have no explanation, because I don't believe that post-modernism, "Marxist Identity Politics", or however you want to label it, is "dominating" these various institutions or the "cultural zeitgeist". This is a talking point from Quillette, Peterson, Sommers, et al, and I'm asking you to explain it.
The present was once the future no? If we didn't know how it came about as it was happening, what makes you think we'd have anything more but the illusion of knowing anything (rationalisations) after the fact?
http://www.openculture.com/2018/03/the-entire-archives-of-radical-philosophy-go-online.html
The issues Peterson takes aim (gender identity, PC cult) at do not strike me as having to do anything with Marx in any meaningful sense. It comes across as an attempt to label things he doesn't like as "Marxist". This then plays into the cultural idea that Marx = Communism = Stalin/Mao = evil, which is a mischaracterisation but is in fact the "prevailing" cultural value in that sense.
Judith Butler's "Can One Live a Good Life in a Bad Life" (RP176) is unmissable, and Jason Moore's "Nature in the Limits to Capital" (RP193) is great too. Otherwise Linda Martin Alcoff's "Philosophy and Racial Identity" is an oldie but a goody. (RP 75)
Daaaaaaaaayuuuuuuuuuuuuum! Das mah $*%@# right there!
Is there a transcript I might skim? Or perhaps a short section of the video that's especially instructive? I'm not in the habit of sitting through hour-long speeches before I have some indication that they're likely to be worth the time. I've been through the first ten minutes. So far there's been no hint of a significant claim to support the headline, only what strikes me as shifty and philosophically irrelevant stage-setting.
Perhaps you can say something more about the speaker's view yourself, since you're here and he is not.
Quoting Agustino
This rhetorical stance strikes me as absurd.
Of course the fact that "we all have disadvantages and handicaps" is nobody's fault. But some disadvantages -- some injuries and injustices -- are in fact the fault of one or more human agents, and it's a foul thing to deny responsibility for injuries one has caused to others intentionally or negligently, and to refuse to compensate the victim. Moreover, any of us can make it his responsibility, and for that reason arguably each of us has a moral obligation, to aim to live and act so as to promote social justice, to correct socioeconomic imbalance, to improve the lot of others along with his own lot, to labor for the sake of others no less than for his own sake, to share his inheritance or the proceeds of his own labor with the others in his community, the community of human beings. One might say it takes greater strength of character to make that sort of sacrifice, than to pursue narrow selfish interest without a hint of compassion like the worst sort of dog.
It's extremely misleading to speak as though the aim of leftist politics is to eradicate all forms of human suffering. What authors would you site, or does Jordan site, in support of the claim? If this is the premise of the argument, I expect it never gets off the ground.
There is a clear difference between ideals of political and socioeconomic equality, freedom, and prosperity on the one hand, and the ideal of the cessation of suffering on the other hand. I'm not aware of any leftist thinker who has conflated such distinct concepts along these lines.
How does Peterson's account, or your account of his account, proceed from this tendentious misconstrual of the leftist's point of view?
I wonder how they did this tracing.
You mean, ... conspiracy is as bad as...
BTW, Chomsky is God.
Quillette, like another earlier, lively, and defunct magazine, Lingua Franca, focuses on the affairs of the Academy. Peterson does too -- he being an academic. What goes on in parts of the academy (like English Departments) looms large because they are there, up close.
Now, how post modernism became a popular approach in English Departments is beyond me. I graduated before its perversity penetrated those previously quiet precincts. As for activism on campus, students are going to be exercised about something, and young people tend to be extremists. There is also the principle of "The less there is at stake the more vicious is the internecine warfare." There's not all that much at stake here.
Take transgenderism as an example:
Transgender issues are very hot right now--have been for a while. Transsexuals (as they were then referenced) in the early 1970s were something of a novelty. Mostly they hung out in the gay community. That seems to be still true, even though many of them say they are not gay. Transsexualism, therapy for transsexualism, and advocacy for transsexualism (later referenced as transgender) grew steadily over the years.
The legitimacy of transsexualism rested on the strength of individual assertions. "I AM A WOMAN TRAPPED IN A MAN'S BODY" or visa versa. They were convinced. They are convinced. "Believe me, God damn it -- I know what I feel." I would have to do some extensive research on this, but I don't know that a biological basis for transsexualism/transgenderism has been established. Of course, some people have indeterminate genital structures, indeterminate sex/genetic signatures, and so on.
We junked Freud a long time ago, so the possibility that transsexualism might actually be the conscious expression of an unacknowledged (and possibly unacknowledgeable) fear or wish isn't given much consideration.
Most people have no contact with the turmoil in academia; they either didn't go college or graduated some time ago.
But none the less, the thinking that goes on in academia (as screwy as it might be) does leak out as people graduate and take their college experiences with them. This is nothing new, and is normal. "Screwy as it might be" is nothing new. In Gulliver's Travels Swift depicts some academics trying to figure out what food went into a pile of dung
According to wiki the earliest known examples of writing are 3100BCE, which is 5100 years ago.
I suppose they must have found a clay tablet from 3100BCE that said something like '8000 years ago, Ug made up this story about a mermaid, which I am now writing on this cuneiform tablet'.
Or something like that?
[quote=Time magazine]Not just a lovely story about sisterhood? [/quote]
[quote=Peterson]No, not just a lovely story about sisterhood. No, ‘fraid not. No, you don’t spend tens of millions of dollars on a carefully crafted narrative that’s just a lovely story unless that’s what you’re trying to tell[/quote]
Um, no, you spend tens of millions of dollars on a lovely story, and catchy songs to go with it, so that you can make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office and in video and music sales, to people (most of them not politically engaged at all) who enjoy the story and the songs.
I thought this guy saw himself as a prophet of capitalism. Yet he doesn't seem to understand how it works.
He's less a prophet of capitalism than he is a travelling salesman of the status quo. It's why he can feel so disproportionally threatened by a kids movie which simply doesn't fit his palaeolithic conception of 'how things should be'.
If anyone should doubt it, let them consider this latest UK scandal.
We're raising a militia in Cornwall as I speak.
That is a scandal? :rofl: Man, people certainly have a lot of time on their hands...
I assume the militia will be well regulated and the jam and cream will be in the proper order on the scones which, according to constitutional scholars, are a clunky biscuit.
It's also not exactly clear what political propaganda Frozen is attempting to get across. Peterson doesn't explain. he's just saying that it undermines an archetypal trope used in Sleeping Beauty.
Just let it go.
I always presumed that's what a well regulated militia meant, one which knows the correct order in which to add one's condiments to one's baked goods.
So far, the best review of Peterson's book (and critique of Peterson) I've read yet.
He regards the concern of many on the non-conservative side of politics with identity politics to be a major driver of the election of Trump. OK, so far, so coherent.
But then he starts saying how terrible Marxism is, and conflating identity politics with Marxism.
But hang on, out of the two potential Democratic candidates, it was Bernie Sanders that was closer to Marxism, not Clinton. Sanders talked about class rather than identity politics. It now appears that Clinton lost because she did not talk about class enough, ie that she was not Marxist enough!
To conflate identity politics with Marxism, as Peterson does, is to deny the very dilemma that is arguably the biggest problem facing the non-conservative side of politics in the US, and likely the reason it lost the 2016 election.
I feel that Peterson generally comes across as quite reasonable, just a bit too ready to interpret laws (like C-16) and viewpoints as much harsher and more prescriptive than they really are. But it seems that 'Marxism' is a trigger word for him that suddenly switches him from cool-headed, rational academic to hysterical ideologue. As soon as the word enters his talks, he abandons reasoned argument and makes only unsupported assertions. He is happy to say that all the terrible things that have happened through the exercise of insufficiently constrained capitalism were issues of implementation rather than fundamental flaws in laissez-faire philosophy, but refuses to apply the same principle of charity to Marxism. He insists that every terrible thing that has happened in a Marxist context is indicative of the fundamental wickedness of Marxism rather than an implementation problem.
BTW I heard this interview yesterday with Peterson. It was pleasant to listen to and Peterson came across as an interesting, fairly charming, chap - largely due to the skill of the interviewer who mostly kept Peterson away from his hot-button issues. Even so, Peterson was quite self-relevatory at one stage when he said that he had an epiphany when he realised that the opposing cold war ideologies of capitalism and communism were not morally equivalent because capitalism had a wonderful value (individualism) at its heart whereas the other one did not. It occurred to me that, if one wants to romanticise like that, one could equally argue that communism has the wonderful value of Love at its heart - love of one's fellow humans, wishing to see that none of them have to suffer terrible poverty and exploitation. The fact that he could so extremely romanticise and idealise one philosophy while refusing to even consider the possibility that one could do the same to its alternative seemed indicative of a remarkable lack of self-examination - something that is a bit surprising in a professor of psychology.
With regard to identity politics - discovered a very interesting word in connection with little-known German philosopher Georg Hamann:
Ain’t that the truth! Written so large into identity politics.
[quote=AndrewK]one could equally argue that communism has the wonderful value of Love at its heart...[/quote]
Such a romantic notion.
Yes, I'm not advocating the adoption of such romantic views of one's preferred political philosophy. Just pointing out that if one wishes to assert that some lovely, romantic notion drives one's preferred political philosophy, one should allow that other political philosophies may be driven by equally lovely, romantic notions.
Thanks for drawing attention to it. It's pretty good, and spot on, if only, maybe, a bit too unrestrained (in respect of style, not content).
As a general critique of Peterson, and finer analysis of the multifaceted ideological fault lines that he exploits, I still find The Black Truth of Jordan Peterson more insightful, though. It's also more charitable even though it is, in the end, similarly unforgiving.
Canadian academic preparing for
tutorial discussion of Jordan Peterson.
I thought about this while reading through some of Peterson's ideas. I'm not an expert on Marxism but it would seem as though one who subscribes to the communist worldview would necessarily eschew identity politics, at least forms of it based on anything other than class identity.
There may be possible points of convergence between Marxism and identity politics on occasion (e.g., when one's racial identity strongly correlates with a socio-economic class), and hence some sort of alignment is not totally unreasonable under specific conditions, but conflating the two as necessary allies - or as essentially the same - as Peterson does seems unwarranted and unfair.
This seems such an obvious oversight that I'm sure he must have noticed it, and this being so one can only assume there must be some deeper explanation for his tendency to lump them together without making the proper distinctions. I can't imagine that it's nothing more than a dishonest attempt to discredit both in one fell swoop by purposely conflating them. Perhaps TPF posters who are more familiar with and more sympathetic to Peterson's views can clarify this issue for those of us who are confused by it.
Anyway, I can definitely see how others may dislike almost everything about Marxism but IMO there's one significant advantage it has over other leftist rivals: it transcends racial, national, gender, and ethnic identities (along with others I may have missed) in favor of class-based ones. This in turn makes it much more inclusive than identity politics as typically conceived today; the two seem theoretically incompatible in fact.
I personally think the term white privilege is aggressive and alienating, and therefore on the whole counterproductive if the goal is to get as many white people as possible to recognize and sympathize with the struggles against discrimination of non-whites.
So keeping the focus on instances of racism - which clearly and unfortunately exist in abundance - without also introducing the notion of white privilege as a necessary corollary of racism, would be more a more effective strategy in pursuing that aim IMO. Racism can exist without most white people receiving tangible and recognizable benefits from it. Unless you lower the bar so much as to make (e.g.) not getting randomly pulled over by police because you're white, or not getting followed around in a store while shopping because you're white, examples of privilege. The one strategy immediately puts white people (regardless of class background or personal struggles more generally) on the defensive while the other is, at the very least, more likely to open them up to the challenges facing minorities - many of which we as white people may be oblivious to.
That's my hunch and it's mainly based on my own experience. The very idea of privilege conjures up ideas of absolute advantages one receives through no effort of their own, whereas many disadvantaged white people cannot fathom how they are privileged in any meaningful way. This seems true even if we acknowledge that poor white people, despite their challenging socio-economic predicament and limited opportunities, are still relatively privileged in significant ways compared to non-whites.
It would be like telling a woman who gets physically and/or mentally abused by her husband once a week that she's privileged, because this other lady down the street gets beat up by her husband every single day. Lame analogy perhaps, but I think it hits on the potential misuse of the term privilege. In a (relative) sense it's true that the first woman is more "privileged," but in an absolute sense that doesn't seem true at all and, more significantly, it would be an extremely insensitive thing to say. Average (i.e. non-affluent) white people do not have it easy these days, and this is true even if non-whites typically have to deal with even more serious obstacles than they do.
I've presented similar "arguments" elsewhere and have often been met with something akin to "figures you'd say that since you're a privileged white guy," (as in lame social media arguments with complete strangers where the only thing you notice about the other is their profile pic) and, as mentioned, these experiences have influenced my feelings on the topic. It's hard to sympathize with others when they generalize and demonize you based on something you have no control over; and since it's wrong to do it to non-whites then it should also be wrong to do it to whites. De-emphasizing racial identity is an ideal to me and anything which runs counter to this goal is met with resistance.
I will admit one thing, though: I have had the privilege of discounting the significance of my racial background in large part because I'm white, whereas it seems much harder to do this for black people and other POC living in countries like the USA, since they're often reminded that they're the inferior "other" through the actions of narrow-minded bigots. Again, it's those actions (e.g., being passed on for a job, not being allowed to rent an apartment, etc.) based on negative stereotypes that should be the focus of our attention IMHO.
This! This is - or should be - the import of what 'privilege' is about: it's acknowledging that one's experience is not universalizable, and that one cannot proscribe injunctions on the basis of that experience. One always approaches the world from a certain point of view, with different motivations, worries, and cares. 'Privilege' is the - perhaps misnamed, or at least underdeveloped - notion that those motivations and cares cannot be extrapolated to others without loss or without skewing their experience. The idea of 'checking one's privilege' (racial or otherwise) refers to nothing other than this: that one can't say 'well I don't have to worry about that, so no one else should make it an issue either".
:up: Well said.
Then you agree completely, I suggest, with the impetus behind claims of privilege.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Do 'they'? Last I checked, the notion of intersectionality - much derided by those like Peterson - was developed precisely in order that minorities recognize the specificity of their own experiences so as to acknowledge the broad tent under which fights against opression take place.
As the author of the above review I linked to observes, Peterson isn't as "avowedly extreme nor as daft as Milo Yiannopoulos", who is (or was) a major public figure of the "alt-right" similar (albeit, not explicitly) to Richard Spencer or Steve Bannon. While there are undeniable differences between avowed white supremacists, ethno-statists, neo-Nazis etc. and "Lobsterians", Jordan Peterson is not as innocuous as some may think. He continually promotes (bunk) biological essentialism that serves to accentuate the supposedly psychological trait differences between men and women, or between ethnicities (e.g. IQ), providing a "scientifically valid" platform with which the Alt-Right can leverage to further justify their racism, or misogyny. Peterson is a gateway thinker to more nefarious right-wing ideologies.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve
Not bad. Uses some unfair tactics though like ridiculing and drawing unfair inferences from the transcription of a single lecture excerpt, and could have been more balanced in emphasizing JPs positives. I think it's important to recognize that he probably has helped many people motivate themselves to lead better and more productive lives. And also to draw more attention to where he has been vilified and misrepresented. I do agree, now that I've seen parts of his books, he's not much of a writer, and he apparently hasn't demonstrated a great degree of intellectual weight or originality during his career. And it makes me cringe when he compares today's left-wing activists to Mao and so on. So, overall, he's a relatively mediocre thinker philosophically (at least on the global stage onto which he's been suddenly catapulted) with some decent, if not ground-breaking, psychological advice to reel off that has struck a chord with many young people, particularly young men. And that's about it beyond the media circus. At this point, I doubt his fire justifies much more oxygen from the left.
Why should it?
I mean, they all seem lovely and that today, but Mao, Lenin and Stalin all wrote lovely things when they weren't in power too (and even when they were in power).
They talked up a storm about the evils of capitalism, about having a true social democracy, about the end of oppression and alienation, about production for need not profit, all that good stuff. You read early Stalin, it's almost like listening to a more intelligent version of the sort of thing a young, enthusiastic Left anarchist would say today on campus.
So what went wrong? And how do we know the mild-mannered Leftists of today won't turn out the same?
(But of course, some of them are not so mild-mannered, are they? In fact some of them are quite violent sometimes, quite street-thuggy - just like Lenin, Stalin, etc., were when they stopped writing and got a bit of the old praxis going. Funny thing that ... )
I'd agree that Peterson isn't absolutely top tier, but he's not that far off, he's better than 90% of the conformist pikers in academia today.
Because Mao was a savage psychopath who killed millions of his own people. It's a transparently silly and unhelpful comparison. Like comparing conservative activists to Hitler would be.
It's what's known in the business as hyperbole. Good for selling books. Not so good for making intelligent arguments.
Now there’s a rogue metaphor right there....
From that review:
Notice ‘unfalsifiable’ being slipped in there? I wonder whose psychological theories of archetypes might be ‘falsifiable’?
Failing to see the cause of either adulation or condemnation with Peterson. I think the reason he’s become popular is because he is talking values and meaning in a culture in which both are regarded with deep suspicion. But having not read ‘maps of meaning’ and having no intention nor need to, I already like it a lot more than the review.
"I wonder whose psychological theories of archetypes might be ‘falsifiable’?"
My personal opinion is that there are no such psychological theories of that sort that can be falsifiable and that is part of the reason why they are scientifically suspicious.
"I think the reason he’s become popular is because he is talking values and meaning in a culture in which both are regarded with deep suspicion."
Which is what the article alluded to, and what serves as a terrible reason for liking him. (and at the end of the article, the author admits that Peterson is popular because he offers something for this void while others have not, and so simply scoffing at Peterson is insufficient)
"But having not read ‘maps of meaning’ and having no intention nor need to, I already like it a lot more than the review."
So apparently it is proper to like a book more than the review if you've never read it, I don't see the sense in that. I think the offered snippets offer suggestive bits that are sufficient to make a rational judgment on what to suspect, but I could go the Pyrrhonian route and read the whole book before I have any modicum of confidence in that judgment. I just don't think I will.
Is it? In the article that Saphsin provided, the author mentions a Peterson video titled, "Would I Ever Hit A Woman?" While Peterson does not condone hitting a woman in the video, top-rated comments include:
And while Peterson has explicitly distanced himself from Richard Spencer, the latter, in a tweet, stated, "I respect your work. And we share a lot of common ground and philosophical starting points."
It's good, not excellent. I broadly agree with Baden's assessment. It succeeds best in exposing Peterson's rhetorical tricks and his methods for concealing both his ideological intentions and the shallowness of his arguments. I have two main reservations, though.
The first one is that some of the criteria by means of which Robinson categorizes Peterson's intellectual system as vacuous (such as excessive use of jargon and lack of strict empirical falsifiability) are a bit naive and overly formal. Peterson's method, for sure, doesn't conform to the stereotypical canons of empirical scientific research. But the main reason why he fails, intellectually, is because of lack of rigor, lack of consistency and, more importantly, shockingly poor scholarship or fidelity to sources. By the stringent criteria offered by Robinson, not only Peterson's own system fails the test of intellectual worthiness, but so do lots of perfectly good scientific and philosophical paradigms that are equally ambiguous (in many respects) and couched in difficult vocabulary. What makes the apparently indecipherable works of Kant, Einstein, Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty nevertheless valuable is their being firmly enmeshed in antecedent research traditions, sensitive to broad ranges of problems that arose from them, and sensitive to the criticism that obvious responses to those problems are likely to meet. Peterson's output, by comparison, whenever it strays from common sense advice, is freewheeling and completely unmoored from any critical tradition. It is, in short, sophomoric.
My second reservation is that the author laments the leadership vacuum that has enabled Peterson to construct a niche that appeals to people on the left. Zizek's two pieces in The Atlantic and Gyrus' piece on Dream&Flesh appear to me much more successful in pointing out the specific lacuna in current mainstream left-wing political movements that Peterson is exploiting. They do so without resorting to lamenting the absence of an alternative full blown ideology, or calling for an alternative charismatic Messiah-like rallying figure for the left.
One of the bloggers on the Partially Examined Life made an extended critique really hitting home Peterson's poor scholarship as far as anything 'postmodern neomarxist' goes. It's very thorough.
some highlights:
That's true. In another video with Stefan Molyneux, who also is a libertarian alt-right guru, they lament how tragic it is that mainstream academia doesn't acknowledge the (alleged) racial biological basis of IQ variations between ethnic groups, while also insisting on the (alleged) pointlessness of educational efforts that aim at ameliorating individual cognitive competences.
Incidentally, one of the the YouTube comments that Robinson reproduced, but that you didn't yourself quote, had been posted by me! It was intended sarcastically, though. I fear that I didn't word it carefully enough for the sarcasm to be apparent. I was actually shocked by the fact that Peterson couldn't seemingly fathom that there might be good reason to refrain from hitting women other than just because some men can, if they are angry enough, badly injure or kill women that they hit.
Thanks. I very much like this concluding sentence. It also highlight the never-ending character of genuine philosophical inquiry as well as that of sensibly grounded political thought.
I don't know where the author advocates for a messiah of the Left (he just says Peterson succeeded by filling a gap that the rest of the Left visibly does not fill for American consumers, that's not advocating one figure to fill the gap) and I don't know where the author says there is the absence of an alternative full blown ideology (whatever that means)
Yes, Peterson often does 'postmodernism' without being aware of it rather in the way Monsieur Jourdain was unknowingly talking prose. The pragmatist anti-'metaphysical realism' feature of so called postmodern thinking, which permeates Peterson's own conception of pragmatic truth, led to an infamous clash with Sam Harris. Their protracted exchange was an intellectual train wreck. Both Peterson and Harris are regarded by their largely shared fan bases to be experts on the topics of metaphysics and objectivity. Yet, to the dismay of their fans, they took two contradictory stances -- pragmatist and metaphysical realist -- without displaying much understanding of, or acquaintance with, either one of those philosophical traditions.
By the way, I had commented in another thread about one source of Peterson's mongrel assimilation of Marxism and postmodernism.
It's a casual conversation on an Internet forum. So far everything I've heard about Peterson, which is not much, seems agreeable enough. Can't see what all the fuss is about.
Yes, I also understood this to be the point of the author. There are good (needed) and bad (obfuscatory) uses of jargon. But good uses of jargon oftentimes are required in order, precisely, to convey the subtle distinctions that must be made in order to justifiably protect a theory (or paradigm, or hypothesis or philosophical idea) from merely apparent falsification. So, what is it that can serve as a criterion of demarcation between unfalsifiable pseudoscience (or pseudo-philosophy) and jargonous falsifiable albeit unfalsified science (or philosophy)? There is no shortcut that bypasses some moderate level of acquaintance with the topic at hand. That was my main point since the complaints put forward by Robinson seemingly mirror the complaints routinely leveled against philosophy (from friends of empirical hard science), and also against specific fields of mainstream science (by 'skeptics'), on the basis of naive falsificationist epistemological principles. (The idea being: if you can't state your thesis in an way that's easily understandable by a five year old such that it can be immediately falsified or corroborated by 'raw' experience, or common sense, then it is BS).
To concur again with Banno, one thing that infuriates me with Peterson is that he often happens onto some genuine insight, philosophical of psychological, because he seems to be rather well read and intelligent. Hence, he offers some analyses of stories or real life anecdotes that seem to hit at what is indeed important about the psychological dynamics and, indeed, the salient ethical feature of the situation. And yet this insight is not so soon expressed that it gets entangled in the crudest possible forms of sociobiological thinking or loosest kinds of Jungian archetype analysis.
Harris/Peterson debate was painful, I think the criticism that they were both out of their field of expertise; or at least out of their fields of preparation; is well placed. That they were attracted to this interstice of conflict was pleasant though; at least it highlighted that Peterson's aware that most of his generalisations about morality/normativity aren't true in a scientific sense (he calls them 'meta-true' in his lectures sometimes) and that Harris' neuroscience inspired ethical naturalism has some fairly presumptive balls in it. Though I'm not that familiar with Harris (certainly not read the Moral Landscape), so this might be unfair on my part.
I don't think it's really necessary to situate Peterson in the alt-right mileau as a means of undermining him; he's undermined quite throughly in that he sees no need to locate why and how 'postmodern neomarxism' infiltrated the universities, how its pernicious ideology actually propagates etc. Also he's not done even cursory homework on postmodernists or Marxists, I don't think he could acknowledge these errors without significant public backlash at this point.
Also, @Maw, in my experience 'look at how the alt-right or other reactionary blowhards have appropriated him' isn't the kind of thing you can use as a counterpoint to the alt-right against Peterson and that discursive strategy is something they're primed to see as leftist drivel. At best it works when someone is already suspicious of a target, or when you're speaking to someone that's ideologically closer to you than the worst excesses of Youtube Peterson fans. Just because Peterson does it all the time with Stalin and Mao doesn't mean we get to play with the ideological finger paint too. Though, I agree that it's concerning that Peterson's worldview - or what is implicit within it - is so easy to reconcile with bigots.
Some people are using Peterson to legitimate viewpoints which should under no circumstances be legitimated. This isn't wholly Peterson's fault, and is more of an ideological enemy mine situation imo.
Yes, he may not be saying those things explicitly. That had struck me as being implicit, maybe, because he is clearly lamenting the lack of *something*, that the left has itself to blame for, and which enabled Peterson to find his popular niche. The lack of a well developed alternative political ideology, or of an effective alternative leadership, had seems to me what Robinson was pointing to maybe because the other pieces that I mentioned (by Zizek and by Gyrus) themselves complain about those alleged lacunas being red herrings that distract from the necessity of more radical criticisms (some of them actually agreeing with some strands in Peterson's conservative thinking!) of the current liberal and progressive movements and institutions.
I don't think he did - at least he hasn't yet, if you're referring to the video I recently uploaded.
Yes, I agree. No contest there.
This resonates in particular with me because I think what strikes me more and more about Peterson is just how he decontextualizes - consciously or unconsciously, I don't know - so much of what he talks about. And in the absence of context, alot of what he says can indeed come off as eminently reasonable. But then when you realize what he's trying to do with those comments, what they are aimed at - once they are recontextualized, the comments take on a much darker hue. Hence:
"I think it’s worth remembering here what anti-discrimination activists are actually asking for: they want transgender people not to be fired from their jobs for being transgender, not to suffer gratuitously in prisons, to be able to access appropriate healthcare, not to be victimized in hate crimes, and not to be ostracized, evicted, or disdained. Likewise, the social justice claims on race are about: trying to fix the black-white wealth gap, trying to reduce racial discrimination in job applications, trying to reduce race-based health disparities and educational achievement gaps, and reducing the unfair everyday biases that make life harder for people of color. This is the sort of thing the left is focused on." But you wouldn't know this, listening to Peterson.
You're missing the point, all the big Commies turned out to be savage psychopaths, sure, but that wasn't obvious from their writings and doings before they got power. Before they got power, they wrote nicely, just like modern Leftists do.
So how can we be sure that some of our nice modern Leftists aren't nascent savage psychopaths?
IOW, the comparison is not at all absurd, because the expressed ideology is virtually identical.
You're right. To be on the safe side, we should murder Leftists who write nicely. Harsh, to be sure, but we can potentially save millions of lives by being proactive.
Not really, have you read what Lenin, Stalin, and Mao said and did before they took power? They displayed authoritarian tendencies and methods, which btw, was taken noticed by and condemned by other Leftists before they took power.
In addition to being empirically wrong, as Sapshin highlighted, what you said doesn't even have the concepts right.
Western Maoists, Leninists etc... hate identity politics, intersectionality, discourse analysis etc etc. The Marxist or Marxism inspired left dislike identity politics; in that it fractures the interest of the proletariat in some way, or is entirely irrelevant to any class struggle in other forms of Marxian doxa. Particularly dogmatic ones, like any contemporary third worldists, get really pissed off if you start trying to locate an oppressed class or sites of struggle which aren't fundamentally reducible to economic class. They think along with Peterson that the contemporary liberal left is engaged in useless virtue signalling partisanship and the third worldists (read: those with Maoist heritage) hold this belief especially strongly.
Does this make Peterson a Maoist or a Marxist? No. Does this mean that the majority of these leftists with Maoist sympathies are actually engaging in revolutionary violence? No, the majority of them are blogging from good universities in the US (in my experience).
We don't have to be for the generalized comparison to be absurd just like we don't have to be sure that some nice modern conservative writers aren't nascent savage psychopaths for the generalized comparison of them to Hitler to be absurd. Anyhow, you don't have to look further than the population at large to find a significant proportion of budding psychopaths—or at least the kind of potential for savagery that we would identify with the extremes of fascism and communism etc.—as Milgram and others have demonstrated. So, it would hardly be less valid or useful to compare us all to Pol Pot.
Quoting gurugeorge
Except it's not at all.
That part. I don't see what your graph has to do with what I said. It's the same as saying Islam equals terrorism because there were a few Islamic terrorists. Then we can also conclude Christianity is evil due to all the wars fought in its name. It's not an argument.
How could Peterson possibly know what drove Mao to his destructive end?
According to your report, it seems that Peterson asserts that it was Mao's Marxist ideology. Yet no shred of evidence is offered to support such an assertion.
I could with the same level of justification assert that it was Anders Bering Breivik's Christian ideology that drove him to murder seventy people.
Both assertions would be as baseless and nonsensical as each other.
If, as some of his supporters on here have suggested, he has claimed that Marxism leads to mass murder, then that is a sufficient reason for condemnation. It's effectively proposing a relaunch of the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, and CIA activities like the assassination of Allende, supporting Suharto's murderous regime and fostering Fascist coups in goodness knows how many developing countries, all in the name of protecting us from Marxism.
I don't know whether Peterson has actually said such things, because he seems very careful to confine his more controversial utterances to video talks, rather than setting them down in writing where they are readily accessible to all, and less protected by a 'heat of the moment' or 'taken out of context' defence.
I'm not going to waste time suffering through his long videos. If his political opinions are not important enough to set down in writing, they are not important enough for me to waste time sifting through an endless video to find.
So my criticism - it would be OTT to call it a condemnation - is that when it comes to politics he is a trivialising, anti-intellectual lightweight that is not worth serious people spending their time on. If he has written a book giving helpful life advice to young men then good for him. But it is his hysterical condemnation of Marxism that is the subject of this thread, not his life advice to young men.
There were indubitably acts of mass murder conducted by Sovet Russia and Communist China, among others. Doesn’t warrant hysteria but the fact remains.
But this is obviously not just about facts. JP is not presenting a history lecture, he's making a political argument, so what matters is not the veracity of his facts, but the validity of the argument he draws from them.
So saying that communist regimes have had bad records on mass murder is just emotive rhetoric without the firm argument that all left-leaning politics will lead to communist regimes of the type previously seen.
Ironically, its a fairly Marxist interpretation of societal change to say that anything has an 'inevitable' direction.
Do you think the measure of the validity of that issue can be ascertained scientifically?
To the extent that it can be ascertained at all, yes. Hypotheses can be formulated, based as much as possible on existing knowledge, and these can be tested. Where that can't be done, it's anyone's guess, we might as well toss a coin.
But it is. For example, there's the same mangling of language - the modern Left's rhetorical tricks are identical to those that enabled bastards within older Leftist ranks to rise by kafkatrapping their "useful idiots" (the starry-eyed idealists) using the same rhetorical methods that were formerly used against to kafkatrap the "oppressors."
There's the same atttribution of collective guilt to individuals (formerly via socioeconomic class, now via race and gender). The same pseudo-scientific sense of base-to-superstructure determinism (that if you're part of that group you must therefore necessarily behave in such-and-such a way), and the same impossibility of redemption other than by toeing to the party line.
And above, all the same uncritical idealism, regarding the same unquestioned absolute ideal (equality), that nullifies ordinary moral qualms, because the goal is so beautiful that any means are justified in its attainment.
No they don't, they practice identity politics in terms of socioeconomic class - they're just a bit too stupid to realize what the modern Left realized: that race and gender gives you a much bigger pool of people you can entrap.
IOW, it's true that the old, hard Leftists are pissed off with the identity politics of the modern Left, but that's only because they think it's focussed on the wrong type of identity.
If war is diplomacy by other means, mass murder is social policy by other means. No one approves of it, but mass murder seems to have been a handy tool which has been reached for when more deliberative processes don't seem to be getting the job done.
That said, Stalin and Mao are both stand head and shoulders above the crowd of mass murderers, along with Hitler, and some others. But it wasn't communism, as far as I know, that led the US to pretty much wipe out native people. They were in our way, camping on valuable ground that, in our humble opinions, was not being put to its highest and best purpose--i.e., making America Great the first time around. The Japanese empire wasn't a communist operation either, as far as I know. Neither was the British Empire (killed a few, here and there) or the Spanish Empire (killed a few, here and there).
For that matter, it probably wasn't communism as envisaged by Marx and Engels and a batch of other early socialists/communists that drove Stalin and Mao. It was paranoia and bad policy
Have you not read @gurugeorge's comments in the other JP thread (The politics of responsibility). Apparently early Americans didn't massacre the native population at all, they just all died mysteriously but completely unsuspiciously shortly after voluntarily handing over their land. Those damn commies however...
Communist states feature highly in both massacres and deaths from avoidable famine. Fascist states have committed the largest single atrocities. Colonialism features most highly if you take the upper estimates (estimates are wide because no-one really knew the starting population). But they're all outweighed quite significantly by the advertising and commercialisation of cigarettes at a massive 79 million.
I wonder if a complete ban on cigarette advertising has figured highly in JPs agenda?
One might almost think that there is a commonality of regime change, and fragility of power structures that leads to massacres. As if those in power do not relinquish it voluntarily...
Quote?
It is a historical observation. Just as the facts of the many acts of mass murder conducted by Christian regimes and by Western capitalist colonial powers 'remain'. Facts are not arguments. Further, unless connected to an argument or proposal they are meaningless.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy That's not even a sentence. If you have a proposal or argument to make, then make it. If your proposal is that people should study the horrors of Mao's China and Stalin's USSR, you're a bit late. People have been writing dissertations on them for decades. As they have also been for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the many genocides of aboriginal people, mass atrocities conducted under the motivation of Christianity and Capitalism.
I do not regard modern-day Christians and Capitalists as proto-mass murderers on account of those past atrocities. Neither should anybody regard modern-day Marxists as such.
So you see class politics as an example of identity politics?
I see party politics as identity politics.
I vaguely remember that you see all politics as identity politics.
Guilty of not having read this thread thru (it’s long!).
But i wanted to talk about this subject and this thread is what presented itself.
I’ve had a crisis of faith w/r/t identity politics these past years. I believe wholeheartedly that there are deep deep eternally-scar-leaving traumas attendant on growing up within-yet outside- a culture.
As a young guy, I had body dysmorphia, bad, which made me feel unfit to take up the symbolic mantle of personhood offered me. I couldn’t, because i couldn’t bear people looking at me.
I won’t diminish or not take seriously my suffering just bc im white and male, bc that suffering was very real. It rent and cobbled me for the entirety of my twenties. BUT i will say that I imagine that the suffering of others, even more peripheral to the dominant culture, is much much more acute than mine, in ways i only have dim imaginative access to.
I don’t scoff at it, but i do question the logic of identity politics qua formal political movement. There are incredibly important actual benefits to being formally recognized, none of which i want to minimize or discount.
What bothers me is when identity politics becomes not a means to flourishing, but an end in itself. When the end is to be recognized as having been wronged. Now, again, i think there are innumerable real, systemic wrongs . And they should be brought, writhing and ugly, into the light of impartial condemnation and rectification.
I’m talking about the fostering of a way of thinking about self which holds as an ultimate goal the recognition by an external authority as being someone with a legitimate plaint. That authority can be the administration of one’s university or the twitter community.
As a kid in college, i had misshapen ambitions that revolved around being recognized as ‘clever.’ The university and its faculty, directly and indirectly, both sanctioned and perpetuated this tendency. Maybe i got in at the end of the baby boomer model of education as self-actualization vs self branding. It doesnt matter bc both models are terrible. The point here is the gold star/ no good conditioning i internalized shaped my way of going into the world. To this day - and even here - i want to be seen as a clever, good guy. (Maybe unelightnened can sympathize, as a true-blue baby boomer - The smart guys seem like the hindu guys + the hard-stuff known passably well + alan watts.) This stuff goes deep.
So the question is how does that play out when we turn good, deep, felt and real literature of oppression (take your pick, my favorite is Baldwin) into a model of being. We know slender well-moneyed boys who like beckett are absurd, and we’re right. Is that the extent of absurdity? When literature of oppression is offered as a model, the way beckett once was, when an auhority figure nods or scoffs, in this way or another, what happens?
Well, people will be incentivized to simulate oppression even when they’re actually oppressed. And the flimsy film of performative oppression will fire up detractors and lend credence to their false cause.
This is the problem of teaching expression of oppression. The form itself corrupts and devalues the very real content. If everyone who reads the nyt loves the bluest eye, then the bluest eye had been castrated.
If you are content with letting someone recognize your suffering (even if you hold that they cant actually recognize it, and are constitutively incapable of it) you've ceded something.
You make your worth dependent on someone recognizing your suffering. That’s a good means but its a terrible end. Look at ‘fearless girl’ commisoned by wall street. We’ll recognize your fearlesness all day, it says, just dont try to change, you know, business
Indeed, but what stood out for me looking at the figures, was how the genocides were eclipsed by the famines. Simple inequalities of resource distribution still killed more people than any of these regime change initiated slaughters, but then that does sound a little left-wing ... just... trying to resist... the inevitable urge to murder thousands of people...
"The decimation of Native Americans was a result of diseases accidentally brought from the Old World, they weren't murdered by Whitey." - gurugeorge
" ... violence is part of the story, but a relatively minor part." - gurugeorge
"... most property comes via inheritance and exchange, and if you trace it back to its origins, it's some form of original acquisition out of the state of nature." - gurugeorge
:clap:
Do you think there's something inherently spectacular - as in spectacle - about identity politics? Your description of it seems to paint consciousness raising as similar to watching a horror movie; look at how the little ones are suffering, isn't this horrible? Irrelevant of the good intentions - wanting some basic things for oppressed identities - it seems that this transforms some aspects of any concrete person who is subsumed under the identity as a public display.
Solidarity within identity politics, then, has a perverse aspect; the oppressed are identified with their image, and people take your voice for purposes of the movement, or recognise it was already theirs all along...
as you were already equivalent to the soundbites generated about you.
Does that seem sensible? I've been going through Society of the Spectacle recently and it's probably colouring my response.
Yes. It seems to me that what is objected to is always the identifications of the oppressed. It is not confederations of business people, gated communities, millionaires clubs, armies, nations, etc.
Quoting csalisbury
There is a danger to identification as oppressed, and the man to go to for its deep analysis is Franz Fanon. But to put it into a handy slogan, I could say, "there is no virtue in being oppressed".
This means that whenever the oppressed come together to resist and end their oppression, they are aiming to dissolve their identity - the basis of their own collective power. And if they are not intent on undermining their identity as oppressed, they are intent on maintaining it.
I feel as though the idea that there could be virtue in it is some projection from an un-oppressed out group. That the meek will inherit the Earth makes it tempting to emphasise your meekness. This is a retrojection which gives rise to the perception of political activism as 'virtue signalling' - those who are seen to 'virtue signal' are judged simply because their expression indicates a lack of virtue in those applying this judgement. The whole game is somewhat pathetic, as if, say, Christian gays were not protesting some real cause of marginalisation when rallying for their right to marry; they were just signalling their moral superiority to those who disagreed with them.
In this broad sense of identity politics - identity politics as the politics of rights elevation of a somewhat homogenous group - all political action concerned with the differential treatment of groups can be cast as identity politics.
I think a common error along the way, which (fairly or unfairly, I can't say at this point) I'm seeing as exemplified in @gurugeorge's responses, is to make this conceptual generalisation of identity politics while still treating identity politics in a more derogatory sense. All politics as identity politics, all identity politics as mere identity politics.
By 'mere' identity politics I mean political acts whose entire purpose is to produce recognition of an identity's plights - the kind of thing which can be seen in the worst excesses of Twitter and tumblr -. A pseudo-politics of goalless representation. Popularisation - carving out a place in public discourse for some issue affecting a group - is necessary but insufficient for producing social or economic change about that given issue.
Those people who practice this address such 'mere representation' to a invisible guarantor of social justice. Those who criticise politics as such on this basis express nothing but a need for recognition by this vanished God of political change. As if the point of politics was to produce a cancellation of marginalising ideas within public discourse rather than to impede or circumvent the conditions - politico-economic-legal structures - which continuously create this marginalisation in the first place.
Well I think it is more so exemplified in the oppressed themselves, at least that is where it becomes paradoxical. One can say that women are underrepresented in positions of power without claiming that women are better than men, or that a woman politician cannot e a bad politician. One can support the decolonisation of Africa without pretending that Idi Amin was something other than an insane genocidal tyrant.
The difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich have more money, not that they are more greedy. There is something to the notion of virtue signalling when, say, people claim that Hilary Clinton has a claim to the presidency by virtue of being a woman - that is no virtue.
But that is not to deny also the virtue signalling of those who identify as 'responsible individualists who do not whine all the time'.
Obviously disease is not mysterious or suspicious, and I never said they voluntarily handed over their land.
I've treated the variety of identity politics that's taught in universities in a derogatory sense, but that's not the only kind of identity politics. All politics is indeed identity politics in one way or another - whether it's good or bad depends on the way it's used.
So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?
Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism; anything based on analyses derived from Critical Theory, or any other blend of Freudianism and Marxism; anything based on Feminist analyses, or derived therefreom as a template; anything grounded philosophically in Post-modernism or Post-structuralism; anything based on Intersectionality and/or Standpoint Theory.
Basically, all "xxx studies" need to be thrown into the bin and the humanities need to be cleaned up, university identity politics is a mind-virus and a pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious cult, as well as a scam that's at the root of the multi-billion dollar NGO/Diversity Industry. The whole mess is just a giant leech on the body politic that's created a generation of periwigged, pompadoured "elites" who've been living off the backs of the common labourer, and who are about to lose their heads if they're not careful.
How about the so-called 'silent majority' in the US, who've had their freedom of speech oppressed by the politically correct dictates of the wicked and evil postmodern neo-Marxists?
You just described an incredibly heterogenous bunch of.. well.. everything. Absolutely not worth aggregating them into a coherent whole... They aren't a coherent whole, never will be, and were never intended to be.
A set of distinctions that allows the equation of Freud with Foucault is not very accurate.
Regardless of theoretical confusions; when you see something like gays banding together for gay marriage to be a thing, people advocating for and setting up needle exchanges in drug infused areas, the end of apartheid, setting up free evening classes in impoverished areas, the entry of all races into most parts of the workforce; would you agree these changes are in part attributable to 'identity politics' in the broad sense?
Well, blame who you will, but I don't think "old-fashioned Marxism" is a very good culprit. It's more likely new-fangled Marxism that is source of the nonsense. That and critical theory, POMO, and all that stuff.
Marx wasn't a 'splitter' he was more of a 'lumper'. He looked at 'lumps' like the bourgeoisie and the working class; he didn't split up the 'lumps' into all of the imaginable divisions like white working class, black working class, hispanic working class, female working class, male working class, undocumented working class, jewish working class, urban working class, suburban working class, rural working class, young working class, middle aged working class, old working class, lazy working class, ambitious working class, and so on and so forth.
The current fixation with identity is the province of obsessive-compulsive splitters. It isn't enough to separate out homosexuals and heterosexuals; there are gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queers, and don't-know-their-ass-from-their-elbow-sexuals. Transexuals magically split into... 10? 50? 100? different versions, some comprising less than 1 person (some twit who has mixed feelings). Every conceivable ethnic, racial, or geographical feature can be used as a wedge to further split things down as far as possible.
Have you heard of "games of uproar"? I think the SJW types, so called, like games of uproar. The splitters expose many new surfaces on which conflict can be imagined, if not observed, and by exaggerating everything, they can fuel their needs for excitement in these games of uproar.
Thus shall the universities be remade in your image and your clones shall inherit the earth. Praise be, we are saved.
Wouldn't it be better though to continue to argue for your point of view in a free marketplace of ideas rather than to try to forcefully suppress those you don't agree with?...Which suggests a lack of confidence in your own position. (Not that real Maoists the world over wouldn't in principle applaud your book-burning ways. Maybe y'all should get together.)
Take the gay marriage issue. It wasn't part of the initial gay liberation agenda, even if a few gay people tried to marry as early as 1970. It didn't get major traction until much of the "acceptance" items on the agenda had been won. Gay advocacy could have stopped there. "Advocacy" is beneficial, but it is also a raison d'être and if the gay agenda had been met, what further need would there be for advocates? Little to nothing. Marriage was pushed to the fore, and grafted on to the liberation agenda, even if this sort of assimilationist move was contrary to the original "liberation" idea. As gay marriage became acceptable, transsexuals became the cause-celebre. It has never seemed to me that transsexuals seeking a medical solution (drugs, surgery) to their alleged problem were ever a natural part of gay liberation. None the less, here we are.
Needle exchanges? Night classes? Ending apartheid? No, I don't think these are identity-motivated. For one, a good deal of the drive to implement needle exchanges comes from the public health agencies. Many of the workers in these programs are not IVDU, though some are, or were. Rather than an identity movement, I see it more as "applying social marketing technology". Some people who start free evening classes no doubt below to the target audiences, but a lot of those programs are staffed by people who don't belong to the target group. Again, it's a well practiced social up-lift strategy with a history back into the 19th century. Apartheid? Most of the people I've seen agitating against apartheid were white Americans who didn't have much connection to South Africa. It is a good thing that white activists opposed apartheid, but I don't think opposition was based on identity.
Self Help programs generally are ethnicity based--because they arise out of a specific community. The gay response to AIDS was identity based self help. Organizing west coast agricultural workers and the grape boycott was self help with an ethnic base. The National Farmers Organization (now long gone) was a rural white-ethnic based agricultural self help drive. The civil rights movement was a black ethnic self help movement.
I didn't believe that the examples I gave could be accurately described as identity politics, save perhaps how gay marriage was strategised. The point I was trying to make was that when 'identity politics' becomes 'the politics of extending rights of or de-marginalising a group' it's already lost most of its meaning. An incoherence that comes from misunderstanding what identity politics is rather than from any incoherence in identity politics.
I was hoping that you'd chime in and provide some decent historical context, it was why I included the needle exchange thing as an example.
I agree with that characterisation, I don't think identity politics has anything but a pejorative sense. Politics is usually about some group or another being subjected to blah, trying to stop or circumvent blah and the conditions that keep blah happening; in this sense it's about the differential treatment of groups coupled with the imagination of specific ways things can be improved. (and then trying to do these things)
In that regard, even intersectionality and standpoint theory make some kind of sense. The insight that people from different backgrounds are likely to have different experiences is something that needs repeating; even if the theoretical tenets of standpoint epistemology are disagreed with.
Linked genealogies? You mean like what they produce in post structuralism? Bloody French, coming over here, codifying the trope of the genealogical critique of ideas.
What're the shared things? How Marx tackles problems is quite a lot different from how Foucault tackles them, Deleuze is different again... Post-structuralism and 'pomo' in general are really the name of a historical moment rather than any shared set of ideas. Perhaps in general they were reacting against - with sympathetic criticism - enlightenment scientific ideology (da big bomba), structuralist linguistics and the existential/phenomenological traditions.
I don't think that anyone is sitting there believing society is structured to fuck over individuals with certain properties; people are marginalised through omissions, legal restrictions, or accumulated advantages. These structural problems usually have suffering as a blind consequence rather than as a conspiratorial drive. If you notice that people in category X have in rough in way Y, you produce a schism between X and not X, effected by Y and not effected by Y. How else are you supposed to locate sites of historical struggle and of the resistance of individuals to their societal conditions than by coupling those effected with the reasons they were effected? What's so wrong with that?
Oh for heaven's sake. Universities have the right to have whatever programs and courses they see fit. They can change their minds, and they can be persuaded. The State also has an interest in what it pays for.
Mainly an unquestioning belief in equality, which is especially amusing in the context of relativism - but then it can always be excused as a "leap of faith," and by God the lemmings have going for it :)
Quoting fdrake
It's a possible analysis, oppression does happen sometimes, just as exploitation happens sometimes.
But it's not the only lens through which we ought to understand history and the relations between human beings. The reason it's become a cult, is because the relevant forms of "oppression" have been defined into existence, rather than found.
You don't have to look hard for instances of actual oppression in the world. They're verifiable, falsifiable, one can be accused of oppression, and be innocent of it, and show one's innocence.
Again, comparing and contrasting with Marx is instructive: actual instances of what people ordinarily call "exploitation," (which is falsifiable) he wasn't all that interested in. What he was interested in was definining capitalist relations as intrinsically exploitative. Something of the same kind of linguistic folderol is at work with the geneological descendants of Marxism (a lot of these schools of thought were created by ex-Marxists, or disgruntled Marxists): relations between man and woman or between blacks and whites are understood to be intrinsically oppressive, in a way that's lost touch with falsifiability - IOW, you are kafkatrapped into being an "exploiter" simply by virtue of belonging to the group defined as exploitative, and you cannot demonstrate that you are not an exploiter, you have to "confess your privilege." It really is quite like Original Sin, and taken in a very Calvinist sort of vein at that.
On the other hand, suppose there are lingering traces of oppression, cobwebs of it here and there in our institutions and working life, should we do nothing about them at all? Sure, you could have, for example, a "Nightwatchman Feminism" to stick around and tidy up the loose ends. But what we have instead is a Feminism long past its sell-by date trying to justify its keep by proposing ever more absurd, made-up categories of human interaction as "oppression of the wamenz." And it's the same for the race-baiting machine, the Diversity Industry in business, etc.
I think you're confusing the scope of structural properties. On the level of a society, certain groups will probably have more advantages afforded to them; sometimes this is ok (like citizens), sometimes it's not ok (like citizens being unable to vote), sometimes there's a lot of ambiguity and horrible shit (treatment of asylum seekers).
Insofar as someone is saying people from different categories can never have genuine relations, send them to the Gulag; insofar as they're highlighting that different groups are treated differently in some ways and that maybe this isn't always a good thing -or an acceptable thing- in some instances, don't Gulag them.
There's always housework to do. Equating political activism with the worst excesses of social media and the worst bastardisations of Theory is easy to score points with. Just make sure you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; it's not all pointless because some of it is crap.
The general idea is that whenever two or three are gathered together there will be conflict. And this is the nature of society, world without end amen. But in a stable society, which is about as good as it gets, the conflict is largely internalised. This can happen because the individual has many identifications, of religion, class, ethnicity, etc. So in the stable society, these identifications are orthogonal to each other; they are independent variables. So you and I might have the same religion, but different ethnicity, and class, whereas me and Mr Smith, share the same ethnicity, but differ as to religion and class, and you and Mr Smith share the same class but differ in religion and ethnicity. In this situation, all our alliances are conflicted, depending on the issue, such that one's opponent in one thread is one's ally in another. And this, believe it or not is a recipe for peace and tranquility, because no one wants to destroy another, because everyone is an ally on some issue.
Rather, it is when these identities are aligned with each other, and the classic case is N Ireland, that violence breaks out. In this case, if you are protestant, you are middle class, loyalist and ethnically Scots, whereas if you are catholic, you are working class, republican, and ethnically Irish. And this is a recipe for civil war, precisely because the identities are so aligned and produce a loyalty that is undivided, and a conflict that is completely externalised.
Now what seems to have happened to us recently is that all our conflicts have been either aligned or reduced to a single conflict (wealth). "It's the economy, stupid". Identities are becoming polarised, and this is the recipe for internal harmony and external conflict, we all know who our friends and enemies are, and they are always the same. One of the signs of this alignment is the multi-dimensional epithet: 'Alt-right Christian fundamentalist neo-liberal' vs pomo neo-marxist identity obsessed bleeding heart atheists.
IOW, political movements today are like soldiers marching in a parade. There is no war. They're just marching to keep their skills up.
Thanks for your confidence, but it has been quite a while since I have observed much about needle exchange.
What I saw, public health outreach, was welcome by IVDUs, because they recognized the risk (not always, but quite often) and it was offered without judgement. It's surprising to me that needle exchanges aren't common place, even ubiquitous. At least I see needle and other 'sharps' disposal units in a lot of washrooms where one wouldn't expect to find them. The last iteration of needle exchange I witnessed was a mobile operation where drug users could either visit the needle exchange van and get what the needed (plus testing, at certain times) or could arrange a visit somewhere with the van driver.
The better approach is "safer shooting galleries" which also are generally a public health approach and which run into more legal barrier than needle exchanges do. The safer shooting galleries do not offer drugs, they offer clean works and a safe place to enjoy the high, and someone on hand with Naloxone (or similar opiate receptor antagonists), should it be needed--which it quite often is.
The final approach to safer drug use is providing the kit and caboodle--works, drugs, setting--the whole thing. This relieves the addict of health risks, and avoids the criminal activity often required to get money for drugs. I don't think anybody in the US is doing this at this point. There are at least a few groups that would offer all this if they could get approval and funding.
Peer generated efforts are difficult because the peers are engaged in criminal activity to start with, and can't just show up at a city, county, or state health department and ask for money to start a program. They wouldn't be considered creditable by themselves. The health departments themselves are staffed by understanding, thoughtful professionals who none-the-less have their limits. The relevant staff may not want to get too deeply involved with IVDUs. Non-profit agencies have to be recruited, and there one finds the same reluctance to get too involved, and fears of PR disasters.
The take-away message on AIDS prevention is that it isn't going well. It isn't that nobody knows how to do HIV prevention education, doesn't know how to reach vulnerable groups (like young black gay men), isn't capable of creating effective messages (or finding someone who can), or can't find people willing to do the leg work on the street and in neighborhoods.
This limp wrist or limp dick approach starting appearing in the late 1990s with just really very mediocre education efforts replacing what had been more vigorous efforts; Then under George Bush doing education got more difficult because of more scrutiny and oversight demanded by the federal government. Material, for instance, had to be reviewed to make sure it wouldn't offend anybody. A fatal requirement. Sexual health messages that get to the point will definitely offend someone.
It's like there is a "failure of will" on the part of both public health people and communities. The statistics are clear that new infections are occurring regularly, despite there being reasonably effective to very effective methods of preventions -- condoms or a daily Truvada pill, an AIDS drug that when taken by the uninfected, prevents infection by the virus by suppressing reverse transcriptase). The cost of prevention is always less than the cost of treatment when someone gets infected.
I must admit that if I were 30 and sexually active, (sigh) I would hesitate to commit myself to taking Truvada every day for maybe 20 or 30 years. It isn't terribly dangerous, but it can have serious side effects, and it doesn't eliminate the need for condoms--for either HIV or other STDs.
Here's a CDC bar graph on 2016 infections:
Oppression isn't falsifiable in a relevant sense. The definition of a social reaction is a logical definition a priori definition which must be known before any analysis or observation of the social context can be performed. Before one can tell whether or not a sun is present, they need to know what a sun looks like.
These are the definitions which Marxism, Feminism, etc. deal with. The a priori definition of an exploitative social reaction which we must have before we can even deal with the question of whether a given society is exploitative or oppressive. If we take Marxism, the "inherent exploitation" only goes insofar as the social context of capital is exploitative. Marx's point then being, within observed capitalism, there are these feature of exploitation, values expressed and power relationships. In these respects, they are descriptive of the social situation being spoken about, not independent notions which are true no matter how society might be defined, people might exist, etc.
Some of those movements (e.g. gay marriage) I don't see those as natural movements of opinion and feeling, they're mostly astroturf. I'd say the same about most supposedly grassroots Left-wing movements.
Sometimes they take reasonable, legitimate claims and put them through the mincer of PC cult ideology, whereupon they come out as claims for special privilege disguised as redress of legitimate grievances; more often they don't even bother doing that, and the claims are absurd in the first place. The "representatives" of such movements weren't voted for by the group they represent, they thrust themselves forward as representative, gather some well-meaning followers and some noisy followers, and then the asses in the media focus attention on them because it's supposed to be the cool thing. All pure rhetoric and persuasion, not an ounce of reason in it anywhere. Even when there's a kernel of validity to some of the claims, it's co-opted by the ideology, and ends up doing nothing but reproducing the ideology, the particular causes cancel out.
(Obviously I have no problem with evening classes; as far as race goes, I'm color blind and I believe meritocracy should rule - no barriers against, but no affirmative action for.)
But yes they're based on identity politics: among other things, identity politics gives people an excuse to claim special privileges and disguise them as legitimate redress or (that laughable oxymoron) "social justice."
I think we can agree that someone trying to represent a social movement, in the sense of stealing its voice for their own valorisation, is a bad thing. I very much doubt most instances of people speaking for a whole group of people who're effected by an issue, for example people with fibromyalgia or CFS in the UK struggling to get disability and unemployment benefits complaining about it in public, are doing so out of anything but the best intentions.
Or, if not the best intentions, it might be an example of solidarity becoming a form of viral content. It's worthwhile to ask if, historically, movements have been seen as self aggrandising viral content as soon as they become perceived as a threat to established political organisations and ways of thinking. The best model of this I can think of is the civil rights movement (and its historical predecessors and antecedents) in America.
Here's what a critic has to say about Marcus Garvey:
my bolding.
What about MLK? He was obviously a covert Marxist-Leninist, as the FBI believed. Conflating a civil rights movement with Marxism is a very old trick and oft repeated to this day. By people who have demonstrably no understanding of the conceptual distance between, say, King's thought and Maoism, Foucault and Marcus Garvey - these figures would all be contemporaries and ideological allies if your set of distinctions was approximately true.
The 'cliffnotes' of post modernism, and probably 'post modernism' in its current conceptual form wasn't created by the philosophers and socioeconomic theorists who are usually united under the designator. Extreme relativism, naive adherence to equality of outcome, the fetishisation of the role power plays in discourse are histrionic projections which create 'postmodernism' as a intellectual monolith whose real development was never a unified whole or even focussing on the same set of themes. You have to do quite a lot of intellectual gymnastics and speak in extremely broad strokes to unite themes present in larger subsets of postmodern thinkers.
Chomsky was instrumental and very vocal in generating this perception. It's usually rooted in a transparent sleight of hand. If someone's analysing narrative structures, social forces - how things come to be believe and enacted en masse, whether the content of the ideology is true is a largely separate question. How ideas shape movements and how movements shape ideas, these actions operate irrelevant of the truth of the ideas shaping them; of course truth ideally guarantors more difficult refutation. Chomsky does acknowledge this distinction but then pretends it's the incoherent form of moral relativism. The academy in the UK reacted in much the same way. It's very formulaic and is regurgitated every time some self-perceived (rightly or wrongly) outgroup gets too big for their boots.
Rick Roderick has a series of introductory lectures, for a popular audience, about postmodern themes. It does an excellent job of cutting through the bullshit smeared all over post modernism. If a guy can make post modernism accessible (which he very much does), these charges of meaninglessness are more a function of incomprehension or refusal to engage than any dearth of meaning on postmodern thinkers' parts.
The hysterical criticism of social justice movements and the conflation of their ideologies with Neo-Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-EconomicDeterminist-Trotskyist-Foucauldian-Poststructuralist-Derridean-Geneological-Deconstructionist-Syndicalist-Anarchism* is just intellectual laziness with a sprinkle of reactionary zeal. It has a sordid history, and crops up in much the same manner whenever there are popular movements about anything.
This is not to say that if you found a real example of a movement that obeys the ridiculous construction in the previous paragraph that it shouldn't be criticised; or better yet sent to the flames.
*Which I'm sure you can tell is not a thing when it's written like that.
You're taking a lot for granted here (for example the desirability of a universal franchise, equality, etc.). But at least we can agree that where there's verifiable oppression, people should act - even if it's vague and diffuse, that's still worth talking about, and possibly doing something about (depending on the cost/benefit calculation).
I probably am taking a lot for granted. Though, I don't see the point in chasing ghosts. You should really check out Roderick's lectures!
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This seems circular to me.
Well yes, and that's what's often done - by those leading the movements.
But I respect that you're trying to "clean house." However, I fear that you're the exact kind of hopelessly idealistic "useful idiot" who would be first up against the wall, come the revolution ;)
IOW, the problem is always that the rhetoric you are using can be turned against you, and will be. The scum always rises in the Left - and that's never been a coincidence.
It's more often a rhetorical strategy to delegitimise a movement. Especially since, when taken at face value, it literally makes no sense.
Yeah. I'm pretty sure that when I get old I'll be one of those grandpas whose grandchildren recognise as prejudiced in ways I can't possibly understand. A life, hopefully, spent being employed to understand stuff ending in a poverty of the intellect.
If you could stop trying to get your black belt in passive aggression that would be swell, thanks.
How would you tell the difference between that and an actual wolf in sheep's clothing? Or don't the people in your tribe do that kind of thing? Always the good guys, huh?
It's always a bit tricky dealing with someone who has a measured position that I could probably agree with on some points, but who reflexively stands by the "no enemies to the Left" trope.
[quote=fdrake]So which examples of identity politics do you think of as irredeemable rubbish and why, then?[/quote]
[quote=gurugeorge]Anything modeled on the Marxist type of societal analysis (of oppressor/oppressed groups, with the groups marked by their closeness to, or distance from, "power", arbitrarily defined). So: anything based on good, old-fashioned Marxism; anything based on analyses derived from Critical Theory, or any other blend of Freudianism and Marxism; anything based on Feminist analyses, or derived therefreom as a template; anything grounded philosophically in Post-modernism or Post-structuralism; anything based on Intersectionality and/or Standpoint Theory.[/quote]
All of this is rubbish:
But you namechecked everything in my list except for anarchism and syndicalism. I'm very surprised that you think you successfully conveyed the following idea:
[quote=gurugeorge] I'm not one who says that literally everything that's ever come from any of these schools of thought is crap. [/quote]
Hmm... I look for things like mass murder of civilians, enforced curricula, book-burning, the collusion of police and military. Y'know, concrete indicators that everything is going to or has already gone to shit. 'Nother good one is when people are holding AK-47s in-front of schools in Bangla and asking Westerners for money (true story).
I'm not defending the circular firing line of the left. I think there are legitimate criticisms of all the movements and theoretical constructs you have referenced: I just think you think you advanced coherent criticism of the doctrines when you kinda just blah'd generalities and conflations into the comment box.
If any of these ideas are crap, I want them to be shown to be crap, you aren't doing that.
Here is a very curious interview (or snippet of a longer interview) with Jordan Peterson. I thought the host did a (mostly) good job of articulating his skepticism towards Peterson's views on activism, and forcing Peterson to explain his convoluted and controversial remarks (pay no attention to the hyper-partisan, moronic video title).
However, when confronting Peterson's disdain towards activism, and his belief that one should "clean up one's own room" before engaging in political activism, I thought the interviewer committed a huge misstep when bringing up Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of one who had personal issues, but was nonetheless committed to political activism. Peterson easily waves this away because while he can't say no, MLK was not right to commit himself to social justice when he should have worked out his personal problems first, he can uncontroversially admit that Martin Luther King Jr. was an exception to the rule, and no one is going to argue that run-of-the-mill activists are comparable to the venerated Martin Luther King Jr.
rather, the interviewer should have offered the example of those civil rights activists generally, who marched with, worked with, and protested alongside MLK. Martin Luther King Jr. played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement, but he didn't work in a vacuum, he had hundreds of thousands if not millions of activists who were there with him. If asked pointblank, I'm sure Peterson would argue that most of these activists had personal problems as well, but if they heeded Peterson's advice, then the Civil Rights Movement would have likely failed. In fact, the Civil Rights Movement would very much likely have been successful, one way or another, without MLK. Taking Peterson's advice would have made any activist movement a non-starter.
Anyway, it's an interesting conversation that taps into Peterson's view and exposes his limitations as a serious public intellectual. He stumbles quite dramatically near the end of the video when discussing climate change.
Then why elevate criticism of people using bastardisations of theory in incoherent ways to criticisms of the theory? I'm with you insofar as people really are using theory as a cudgel, like 'Oh you wouldn't understand this, you haven't read Negative Dialectics!', but I hardly ever see that.
I've seen more, or used to see more, bastardisations of standpoint theory; I don't agree with it when it's interpreted that I have to put all of my beliefs into suspension because someone I'm reading is a woman, trans, etc - but I rarely saw that too (and it was typically confined to one sort of debate, angry standpoint theorists vs angry marxist radfems). Sometimes I probably should have because all of my beliefs about a topic were bollocks misinformation, and I got my ass handed to me by a few talented interlocutors. In general I think being wrong is ok, but being not even wrong about a topic is shameful.
So I still appreciate this kernel of insight from bastardisations of it: shut up and listen for a bit if you're unfamiliar with the terms of discussion, that's just giving your conversation partners charity and respect. It gives an opportunity to learn new ways to see from people. In my experience if you can make your points in terms of someone else's conceptual apparatus (including standpoints), you conduct yourself with respect and charity, and you don't treat the negation of their standpoint as a condition of possibility for correctness. Remember, if they're wrong, you can explain why in their standpoint*!
edit:* if the terms don't make sense, being socratic and asking for clarification without using it as a rhetorical strategy of undermining their view was generally successful.
hey, uh, are we the postmodern neomarxist academic left dominating courageous intellectual dissent against our pompous and overly verbose whining?
You misunderstand. There is no question of "essences," just a defitnions of a particular instance social relation and significance. The a priori definition is nothing more than an understanding of the feature of the world being looked at. If we cannot distinguish a car from the road, we cannot observe it and understand it is there. The same of is true of these social relations.
If we are to observe the particular relationships of significance and power in our society, we need to understand their definitions so that we can recognise when they are present. Without understanding this meaning, we won't be even be able to notice these social relationships when they are sitting in front of our nose.
There is no circularity. The a priori definitions in question aren't the basis for "proving" what is true. They are the basic understanding of the definition of relationships of status and power which we need recognise if we are able to observe when they are occurring in our society. Just as I need to know what a book is before I can point out in observation, I need to understand the meaning of social relationships, statuses, power relationships, etc. if I am to make the dissection of where they are present or not.
So in Marxism for example, I need to understand what constitutes an oppressive relationship, an organisation and control of capital, how is amounts to exploitation, before I can even observe instances where it occurs in the world. After that is defined in my understanding and observe whether or not a present society has those relationships. If it then so happens that I find those relationships are present (which Marx did) in society, it's a feature of the world as it exists, not some assumption of essence. The facts of those power relationships and exploits are defined in how that capitalist system is working, not by definition magic. If the capitalist system were to avoid those relationships, it'd got to step up and define a social organisation in which these facts of social relations are not present. Marxism is defining its position based on observation of what present capitalist society is doing.
All identity politics derived from that sorry lot is rubbish - there's some philosophical/political value here and there in the originators, the leading thinkers, as I said. There's food for thought in Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, even someone like Habermas (if you can make it through a page of him without falling asleep) - heck, even a minor light like Shulamith Firestone on the Feminist side (a particular old flame of mine when I was a socialist in my youth) can have sparky, interesting things to say.
But identity politics as it's taught in universities now is a complete mess, a Frankenstein's monster of cobbled-together bits of intellectual arse juice from all those sources.
The problem isn't with the schools of thought in terms of their ideas necessarily - ideas are ideas, you can consider them or not - rather the flaw is in the tic, the automatism, of seeing everything through the lens of "oppressor/oppressed" group analysis. It's the unexamined (un-criticized) water in which the fish of academia swim, and it's polluted.
Plus also the obfuscatory language - if you need your man Roderick to simplify it, something's gone terribly wrong. Nobody needs to simplify Hume ;) But even that wouldn't be so bad on its own - idiosyncratic language use is kind of charming in the greats, it's like a musical jingle - but when it's garbled third hand and fourth hand in academia so that sons and daughters of the Great & Good can get a high paying job sucking the life out of society by working in an NGO or the [s]Stasi[/s] HR department of a big law firm - then you've got trouble.
Quoting fdrake
I thought I did up-thread somewhere, then we went around the houses: I want to see real, verifiable instances of oppression to fight against, I'm not interested in apriori ideological candy floss designed to kafkatrap political opponents.
If you want to dig deeper at a theoretical level, the problem is social constructionism, of the kind that goes back to Rousseau. The fact that our ideas come from our side, or subjectively (as a Kantian might say) as opposed to being directly perceived in the traditional Realist sense, doesn't mean they can't be objective. We bring the tests to the table, we project possible ways of being, sure: but Nature answers yea or nay.
So social constructionism - what's the motive behind that? Well, in the context of a secular version of Protestantism, with its notion of the equality of souls before God, the general idea is that Man is born innocent (with everyone equal) but corrupted by social structures (particularly property). If you want the real root of the poison, that's it right there, in that Rousseaian idea (or rather the idea that Rousseau made immensely popular).
You cannot possibly be serious that you think this is any way to conduct an intellectual conversation.
Again, I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but from my point of view what I perceive is a smidgin of cognitive dissonance, and you trying to reconcile what you'd like to think are the elevated, noble thoughts of some of these schools of thought, with the reality of how they're increasingly being used to browbeat people - particularly White males, in what is becoming an increasingly blatantly racist and sexist manner (as those terms used to be used, when they actually meant something verifiable).
"Recognize" = "proving." Otherwise there's no point to the exercise, and it's indistinguishable from the confabulation of a lunatic, an LSD trip, the idiosyncratic backyard sculpture of a naïve folk artist - or something true.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Sure, but how do you distinguish ideological hallucination from reality? Was it ever possible for capitalist relations not to be intrinsically exploitative?
In fact it's the other way round from what you say: Marxism is a plain old possible explanation for verifiable, noticeable bad things happening, not an identification of bad things happening that nobody ever noticed before. Very good: but what's the test? In what way could it be a wrong possible explanation?
Marxism describes what is happening, but if we describe anything we are doing so from a state of detachment; the implication is that things might be otherwise. What is special about Marx is that he doesn't accept any particular set of economic relationships as being somehow the natural state of affairs; things have changed in the past and can therefore change again. Famously: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
So the fundamental argument against Marx would be that we have reached the end of history.
"It's just a social construct" in meme form is sophomoric bollocks. Find me one example of anyone you're throwing under bus trying to say something isn't important or is entirely specified by noting that it is a social construct. I mean the thinkers, not first year first semester social anthropology undergrads speaking to their friends on Facebook.
Find me any example of social constructionism being operative in the day to day lives of people who're supposedly so beleaguered by it.
I'm pretty sure this is less of an all pervading force in culture and academia and more of a ghost conjured by histrionic proclamations.
You mean like... the growing awareness of how horrible clothing supply chains are, anything to do with the TTIP, people starving to death due to austerity measures... How disproportionately violence effects trans people, the growth of racist populist movements in the wake of 2008. There is a lot of housework to be done. In the case of trans people and the growth of racist populist movements there really are disproportionately effected groups. Or is that too close to a typology of oppressors and oppressed for your liking?
No. The thing which went terribly wrong was that people saw all this theory coming from the European continent, the states and the academy identified it with Marxism; all under the presumption that just because someone's Marxist means they have nothing important to say; and it became incredibly fashionable to ignore and misrepresent any continental thinker instead of putting in the god damn work to understand technical philosophy translated out of its mother tongue.
Also your idea that no one needs to clarify and reinterpret Hume is ridiculous. Look at all the secondary literature clarifying, reinterpreting, applying ideas etc. Every popular thinker leaves a giant cloud of secondary academic literature.
Do you really think it's surprising that social constructionism is useful methodologically in the humanities? They are literally studying social dynamics. If there's a theory which facilitates the crystallisation of social processes into representative chunks, then looks at those chunks in motion, would you NOT use it? Oh wait, you already are.
The entire argument you're making is a geneological critique! You're taking ideas, interpreting them as social forces, then applying those social forces ceteris paribus to easy, sophomoric epigones who have little to no education in the supposedly 'underlying' theory. You're literally interpreting the production of theory in the humanities as a social construct. There's even a bloomin' Marxian element in what you're doing - you've made a schism between the parasitic elites of this movement, those people in false consciousness who serve them (the SJWs) and regular Joes who are having their freedom (reality itself?) attacked by the canon questioning canons. You even interpret the role of post modernism as the ideology of the fucking ruling class.
Peterson responded with an entertaining twitter meltdown, where he threatened to slap the author, which is totally not a hyper-masculine response.
Yah, not a great response to be honest.
Bugger... Whenever I'm trying to look away from the Peterson circus and keep to more serious readings, one of those crop up.
I don't like the hit-piece all that much. I don't like Peterson's reaction even more though. He lost that round far too easily.
Maybe because of its lopsidedness? I think the piece is informative in identifying most of the unsavory strands in Peterson's thinking and many of his unsavory and oft forgotten recent historical progenitors. Unlike the equally harsh criticisms by Žižek and Gyrus, though, it fails to enlighten the reader about some of the good reasons why many people get attracted to Peterson, and hence fails to promote self-critical reflection for liberals and progressives.
What @Pierre-Normand said, and the fact that if you're going to go after someone partly on the basis of their hyperbolic, inaccurate and uncharitable attacks on your side, the best strategy is to do the opposite. Seize the higher ground. Not doing so makes your opponent look bigger than they are. (Although in this case, JP's inability to control his inner child mitigated that negative.)
There's nothing wrong with these things per se.
Nor is there anything wrong with masculinity or hierarchical based politics. Taken to extremes, they can can be wrong, of course, but there is no evidence that Peterson does so take them. It's funny to me that the left is busy painting Peterson as an alt-right reactionary, when the right views him, correctly, as a left of center Millian liberal with a fondness for Jung. If Peterson is, as you suggest, a right winger and even an "outright fascist" what the hell do you consider someone like myself, who is in fact to the right of Peterson? What of the people to the right of me? You have obliterated all meaning from political categories in your tinfoil capped frothings about Peterson. In your Overton window, virtually all of humanity must be consigned to the right.
I don't think it's incumbent upon the critic to delineate "good reasons" people might be captivated by Peterson's message (and not just because I don't think there are really any "good reasons"). I can understand (and I'm sure the author understands), that many young people, particularly men, may feel lost and displaced in modern capitalism, within a highly volatile job market, where, mostly white men, feel they are losing cultural power to minorities and women. Of course that's not a "good reason" to become a Peterson acolyte.
Quoting Thorongil
Of course not. However, as the author points out, they have also been used, historically, to bolster a Fascist volkgeist.
In regards to Peterson's politically leanings, I never said he was an "outright fascist". I said he is part of a intellectual lineage, and some of whom, within said lineage (e.g. Julius Evola) were highly influential fascists, and who leveraged national myths etc. to promote their fascism. No, I certainly don't think Jordan Peterson is a fascist, or part of the white supremacist alternative-right. But if you advocate a socio-political hierarchy that's based on social Darwinism, and criticize social activism in abstract, or believe that women's inherent psychological traits mean they are unsuitable to work with men, or take positions of political power, and conduct lectures criticizing "Identity Politics and The Marxist Lie of White Privilege", etc. etc. etc. then I don't know what to call you, other than right-wing, and disturbingly far enough on the spectrum to warrant concern. Richard Spencer, by the way, while disagreeing with Peterson on a range of views, has nevertheless said that he and Peterson "share a lot of common ground and political starting points".
That's as thin a claim as saying that the occurrence of trains running on time has been used, historically, to bolster fascism. Yes, and? If there is no essential relation between the two things being compared, you're just poisoning the well.
Quoting Maw
A distinction without a difference. If I told you that person X is "part of" a particular sporting lineage, some of whose members (e.g. Michael Jordan), were highly influential basketball players, then I am talking about a basketball player. What else is "part of" supposed to signify here? If Peterson isn't a fascist, then he isn't "part of" fascism. Everything shares at least something in common with something else, so again, you need to make an essential connection between the two.
Quoting Maw
These are all hilariously uninformed caricatures.
Quoting Maw
So? Slavoj Zizek finds things to admire in him, too. You're just peddling guilt by association. If it's true that Hitler was a vegetarian and came to his vegetarianism by means of the same rational and ethical starting points that I have, does that make me a Nazi or "part of" Nazism?
As Umberto Eco wrote regarding "Ur-Fascism", incidentally also in the New York Review of Books:
There is no doubt, to me, that some of Peterson's views harbor "family resemblance" to Fascism, which aren't "hilariously uniformed caricatures" (seriously...have you even read Peterson's work, or watched a single video? And he literally has a video titled "Identity Politics and The Marxist Lie of White Privilege", as posted in the beginning of this thread).
I am not claiming Peterson is a Fascist. 'Y' might overlap in several key conceptual ideas with "X", without being considered "X", outright. What I found most interesting about Pankaj Mishra's article is how Peterson's thought fits into a larger intellectual history, and how this history can help explain Peterson's sudden prominence and influence. I don't see how you can consider his views innocuous, but I suppose if you position your own political views to the right of Peterson, well then that would explain quite a bit.
Ah yes, the courtier's reply, right on cue.
Quoting Maw
Genetic fallacy. Address the arguments on their own terms and merits or do not address them at all.
Quoting Maw
More than you have, I suspect.
Quoting Maw
Such as your own political ideas, I would be willing to bet.
But if you locate your own politics to the right of Peterson, and if you believe there is "nothing wrong" with natural hierarchy or masculine politics or that, perhaps, these aren't right-wing, then I seriously question how we can have a meaningful conversation on where Peterson fits politically when our own political views are so unaligned. I think the really important question here is whether or not you think we (or rather Mishra) can appropriately discuss mysticism within Fascist or Quasi-Fascist thought, by bringing together several key thinkers and epigones and their overlaps, or "family resemblances" (pace Eco), while acknowledging that differences exist as well. It's called nuance. No one is "refuting" Peterson's ideas based on such casual observations, especially since Peterson's views can be easily refuted without such appeals.
No, of course not. It's not a good reason all things considered. All things considered, Peterson's calls for action only are worthy of being ignored. But I was rather thinking about something like the good reasons why Trump voters were discontent with a political establishment that had betrayed them. Some people focus on all the reasons why voting for Trump was a bad idea (which it was) and don't pause to reflect about the sources of the vacuum that he opportunistically filled. And so is it with Peterson's brand of populism.
If it's not incumbent on Peterson's critics to point out also how mainstream left-wing ideologies and political institutions generate discontentment, them some of the best critics (such as Slavoj Žižek and Gyrus) are going beyond the call of duty. A side benefit from such "even handed" critiques is that they're more philosophical. They seek to dislodge the flawed assumptions that not only animate Peterson's thinking, but that tend to be ignored because his main critics share those assumptions. Another side benefits of those critiques is that it tends to diminish rather than increase the polarized intellectual and political climate. This is a polarization that Peterson himself promotes and strives on.
Yes, and the point is that such overlap does not constitute a refutation of the view in question. You're playing the part of historian at best, not philosopher, when you harp and carp on about these alleged "overlaps."
Quoting Maw
I haven't ever seen such a refutation, curiously enough. Just variations of the guilt associating and courtier's replies witnessed above.
I literally stated in the previous post that, "no one is 'refuting' Peterson's ideas" simple because they overlap with historically vile politics (which you subsequently quoted yourself). And yes, I, or more precisely, Mishra, is playing the role of historian over a philosopher. That's essentially the main crux of the article, within which he states:
That is, as I have stated multiple times now, he is contextualizing Peterson's thought within a larger intellectual tradition of combining mysticism and "right-wing pieties". Of course, that's not to say that the article is "not philosophical", but if you think that the intent of Mishra's article is to "refute" Peterson's own philosophy, you have severely misread it.
Quoting Thorongil
Well if you position yourself on the right of Peterson, I daresay you never will.
I haven't. The intent is clear: to smear him.
Quoting Maw
Meaning what? I've read critiques of him, but none of them has successfully refuted him, at least with respect to his practical advice and critique of the left. I myself have disagreements with him, but none give rise to the level of smug vitriol those like yourself proffer.
Neither does economics. Of course relations change all the time (over longish periods). The laws of economics don't change though, they're praxeological, they just fall out of agency, rationality, etc.
On the other hand, in a sense Marx does talk about an unchanging factor throughout history - those who control the means of production set the terms for society.
I like The American Scholar. Good mag. I also like this response to the article to which you linked. Thanks.
It's Prager U.
It's like, some kind of conservative video production group founded by a religious American conservative pundit who panders to pro-American Christians by providing rebuke to the evil amoral nihilist atheist humanist democratic hordes intent on voting away your right to spiritual virginity.
This holy alliance between Peterson and Prager is a matter of convienience: both Peterson and Prager employ religious and Christian foundations in their ideology (although Peterson's actual religious ideology exists in the context of clinical psychology (therapy) while Prager's is philosophically Christian) and both of them are against "the radical left". Prager just hates foreigners and non-christians, while Peterson does have a couple fair points.
Prager's style of cartoon based indoctrination does make the video a bit ironic given Peterson begins by speaking about indoctrination.
Wait and see how much envy and jealousy the deluxe and full trophy case engenders compared to the shabby and nearly empty case.
Absolutely astonishing how fucking stupid Jordan Peterson is in this video. When asked why academics gravitate towards Socialism, Peterson responds that, "they don't get paid enough and they are resentful... adjunct professors don't have tenure, they get paid abysmally, they live in their damn cars, they teach four courses, they have no power, they make $16K - 21K annually...that's a place where plenty of resentment can be generated."
Resentment? That's his interpretation? Fucking really?
Starting premises:
1. Race relations were cooling during the 80's 90's and 2000's, however the underlying problems like police brutality and employer racism didn't go away.
2. Race relations exploded into upheaval and divisive politics during and after the Obama Presidency.
Hypothesis:
[(Why would this be?)
While race relation conversations were quelling prior to the Obama administration, many americans assumed the problem would correct its self after a long enough time. Contrary to this belief, Many black americans still felt discriminated against but didn't have the political will to push their issues such as police brutality or employer discrimination. When the Obama administration and social media viral video conveying racism entered the scene, the political will increased enough to bring these issues to the forefront of public discourse.
(Is this a good or bad thing?)
While I first held the belief that if we don't discuss race relations, somehow they would harmonize. I thought that the recent upheaval in race relations was detrimental to decades of race relation improvements. My recent personal observation has since changed my view. I think that for true equal opportunity and race relation harmonization to occur, race related issues must first be discussed. Even though race relation and politics might seem decisive or even hostile at the moment, perhaps it is necessary in order for the United States of America to optimally improve its race relations and related issues in the long run. In essence... it is a "good" thing.
I'm a 71 year old gay white man; I've worked in education and social service, and have followed the discussions around various liberation, equality, and civil rights groups since the 1960s. Some of the discussions have become incoherent to me--the transgender one, for one. I've heard an on-going discussion about race; I don't think it has every stopped entirely. It also hasn't been well informed, a good share of the time.
For instance, most people (white or black) are not aware of how discrimination against black people was structured from the 1930s forward. During the depression the Roosevelt set out to organize a vast housing project -- now known as the FHA. Whatever Roosevelt had himself intended, southern congressmen demanded that blacks receive minimum assistance for private housing. For blacks, money could be used to build 'communities of apartment blocks'--the projects.
A massive amount of urban renewal was conducted by the FHA, especially after WWII. The FHA financed most of the housing in new suburbs, and blacks were explicitly excluded. The very good quality suburban housing would hold up well and become a source of equity for millions of white families. For blacks, renting of course led to zero equity.
The 1930s scheme remained in force until around 1980, and no compensatory program was ever proposed. Nor were housing policies actually changed very much. The result was the permanent poverty to which most blacks were consigned.
All this was never a secret, but except for a couple of years in the 1980s when redlining (discrimination by banks) was an issue, most journalists didn't cover it. So most people never knew much about the details.
We can discuss race relations until the cows come home (I think we have). Conversation isn't the missing ingredient. What are missing are the means to bring populations who have experienced long-term economic discrimination into prosperity. This is going to be quite difficult to accomplish -- assuming there was a general consensus that we should. What are the barriers?
1. The US is not longer the single dominant economy that it was in 1950. We will probably never experience another boom as long or as intense as the post WWII boom.
2. Income and wealth have become increasingly concentrated among a few percent of the population. The super wealthy are in a position to either promote or scuttle any redistributive justice effort.
3. Building the suburbs was in most respects an ecological disaster and an economic success that can't be repeated (in any practical sense).
4. The structure of the economy has changed hugely since 1945, with large categories of workers being declassed as "unnecessary" thanks to automation, computerization, and shifting production work off-shore. The supply of well-paying low-skill jobs has pretty much disappeared, and even white collar jobs are being affected.
5. Even good education can not guarantee success at this point, because of economic and technical changes. (Education is certainly worth while, but it doesn't have quite same efficacy it once had.)
So, bringing disadvantaged people into meaningful and rewarding employment, decent housing, excellent communities, and so on is going to be extremely difficult to engineer.
What applies to disadvantaged blacks also applies to disadvantaged whites. 1973 was the end of the post-war boom. The 1973 Israeli-Arab war resulted in the Arab oil boycott which sent a shockwave through the world economy. The Arab freeze on oil sales didn't cause the next 40 years of gradual but pretty much continuous economic decline. Several factors drove the decline. The result is that most white working class people have lost most of the economic share they once held. The same is true of the more affluent "middle class" -- people who are better employed, better paid working class people.
I hate the thought that the present economic structure is going to be permanent, with 5% at the top, 20% in the middle, 50% slowly sinking working class, and 25% lumpen proletariat who can't get much poorer. But I suspect that that is what's going to happen.
We should all be talking about it. It's time for revolution. Set up a guillotine in Central Park and let's start liquidating the richest 5%. (Well, they can avoid the guillotine by handing over ALL their wealth.)
For example, if you are from a third world country, one will have become indoctrinated in third world behavior. This does not mean one is not a good person. However this conditioning may not prepare one for an optimized life in the first world. For example, simply retaining a native language, that is different from the majority, will shut one out a lot of opportunity. This adds dysfunction to dysfunction.
Where the left does a disservice is blaming higher functional cultures, like the white male, as the problem, because its culture is better geared for first world opportunity. That particular culture sets a pace that is too fast for many dysfunctional cultural identities. White guilt is an attempt to shame a faster paced culture into a slower pace, so the identity illusions appear to work better.
It makes more sense for dysfunctional identities to evolve themselves toward group identities which works the best. This was called the melting pot.
The modern left got rid of the melting pot, by persuading people to assume their native or newly defined cultural identities. This creates social dysfunction, which makes more and more people dependent on big Government, to make it fair, for everyone, via a regulated slow pace; quota system. The better solution was assimilation into that which works the best.
Teaching in 20 languages will put many people at a disadvantage, in the long term, even if it helps some in the short term. It could pigeon hole some into having to stay in a tight knit community where opportunity gets saturated fast. The left tends to think short term, while the most functional cultures are in it for the long term.
Politicians, corporations, and anyone trying to sell or push anything, will use race to divide up people into factions (or emphasize this "dumb" tendency). The style of politics that use race is a pretense designed to represent virtue.
Obama achieved zero for positive race relations although his zero result was his personal achievement.
There will always be uneasy universal race relations because too many individual persons identify themselves as a particular race or particular mixes of race.
It is all just typical, everyday, common garden variety, narcissism.
If they stay alive they are right in their own rights. Why should one burden oneself with problems when the alternative is causing someone else problems?
The organization of groups seems to be an appropriate strategy when trying to make things someone else's problem. We see this everyday in changing legislatures, court rules and so on.
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I have something to note about Peterson's lecture:
If a state, the modern institutionalization of souvereignity would declare itself Marxist you already know that the principle to side with the oppressed was left behind. Note that this never happened. Socialism is the first step of degeneration of capitalism when it get's realized that the rule of money alone is leading to a disaster and the freedom of the capital gets restricted. Communism is it's complete collapse when the starving majority of people starts raiding markets having all the needed goods they cannot afford and/or the violent takeover of the means of their production.
Recently I saw a documentary on TV about a project of the EU to support economy in Africa. Seemingly humanitarian the declared intent was to settle up industry to strengthen economy and this promote welfare in poor regions. What they got was a huge, super-modern farm complex that can operate with an absolute minimum of human work. What this did for the people is that for a few weeks in a year some helpers get hired with absolutely no chance of a longer employment. The majority of the time all that is needed is a few overseers that keep the machinery intact - which cannot be done by locals as these are generally unqualified to do so. Needless to say that the food produced is not sold locally (where should these people have the money from?) but on the world market.
The USSR did support some seemingly "backward" forms of existence like sealers in Siberia. Now these are dying out, forced into civilization where they and their families typically have a hard stand if you would call the life of a sealer in Siberia "easy".
The death toll is not just composed of murder.