So I read a transcript on Jordan Peterson's website.
https://jordanbpeterson.com/uncategorized/the-moral-obligation-of-the-moderate-leftists/
There are some good ideas here. But there are also a number of idiotic ones. So let's get into it.
No narrative, no value structure that is canonically overarching, so what the hell are you going to do with yourself? How are you going to orient yourself in the world? Well, the post-modernists have no answer to that. So what happens is they default—without any real attempt to grapple with the cognitive dissonance—they default to this kind of loose, egalitarian Marxism. And if they were concerned with coherence that would be a problem, but since they’re not concerned with coherence it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Who actually
are the "post-modernists" here? What does the term even mean?
But the force that’s driving the activism is mostly the Marxism rather than the post-modernism. It’s more like an intellectual gloss to hide the fact that a discredited economic theory is being used to fuel an educational movement and to produce activists. But there’s no coherence to it.
It’s not like I’m making this up, you know. Derrida himself regarded—and Foucault as well—they were barely repentant Marxists. They were part of the student revolutions in France in the 1960s, and what happened to them, essentially—and what happened to Jean-Paul Sartre for that matter—was that by the end of the 1960s you couldn’t be conscious and thinking and pro-Marxist. There’s so much evidence that had come pouring in from the former Soviet Union, from the Soviet Union at that point, and from Maoist China, of the absolutely devastating consequences of the doctrine that it was impossible to be apologetic for it by that point in time.
So the French intellectuals in particular just pulled off a sleight of hand and transformed Marxism into post-modern identity politics. And we’ve seen the consequence of that. It’s not good. It’s a devolution into a kind of tribalism that will tear us apart on the Left and on the Right.
All of this basically indicates that Peterson doesn't understand any of the things he's criticizing: Marxism, identity politics, or the work of Derrida and Foucault. We've been through all of this stuff earlier on in the thread.
I am curious what he means by "the consequences" of the 'transformation' of Marxism into "post-modern identity politics."
And that’s been a puzzlement to me because I regard the communists, the totalitarian communist regimes, as just as murderous as the Nazi regimes.
This is relatively unimportant but this is a good example of the kind of thing
@Traitorfish is talking about with "soft Holocaust denial" (at least I think it is, correct me if I'm wrong)
Peterson however then proceeds to make an actually interesting point, arguing that society has done a better job of identifying when the right goes too far and passes into what he calls "pathological extremism," and then makes a case that this isn't being done on the left. Well, I actually see myself as doing this on the left. In fact, my very existence throws a wrench into the conceptual scheme that Peterson is laying out here, because I am what he would call a Marxist, who nonetheless despises Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and other ideologies that I see as perversions of Marx.
Anyway, I think we on the left do have a more well-developed tradition of doing this than Peterson realizes, which is not exactly surprising considering how little he seems to know about the things he criticizes. Most people on the left that I know for example have no trouble identifying tankies and ostracizing them. That is one "boundary" of the kind Peterson talks about.
Of course, I think Peterson is actually wrong when he says we have become better at policing the boundary for the right. The election of Donald Trump should surely have demonstrated this fairly conclusively. And the example he gives is laughable...
On the Right, I think we’ve identified markers for people who have gone too far in their ideological presuppositions. And it looks to me like the marker we’ve identified is racial superiority. I think we’ve known that probably since the end of World War II, but we saw a pretty good example of it in the 1960s with William Buckley, because Buckley, when he put out his conservative magazine, the David Duke types kind of attached themselves to it, and he said, “No, here’s the boundary. You guys are on the wrong side of the boundary. I’m not with you.” And Ben Shapiro recently did this, for example, as well in the aftermath of the Charlottesville incident.
...considering that William Buckley was certainly an overt racist who believed that white people were superior to black people.
So then he proposes that "equality of outcome" should be the "boundary" for where the left runs into "pathological extremism" territory.
But then here is what he identifies as a good example of this:
An example of equality of outcome are attempts being made now to implement the legislative necessity to eliminate the gender pay gap. That’s a good example. I mean you think, “Well no, that’s not—like there’s nothing pathological about that.” It’s like, “Oh yes there is!”
You have to set up a bureaucratic inquisition to ensure that that’s the case. It’s like—it’s not good. And that’s actually a relatively—like, of all the things that you could push for with regards to equality of outcome, that’s rather simple and definable. It’s not even murky. Once it starts to get murky it’s just complex beyond any rectification. You cannot win if you play identity politics. There’s a bunch of reasons like—here’s one: “Let’s push for equality of outcome.” All right, who measures it? That’s a big problem. It’s not a little problem. It’s not like, “We’ll figure that out later.” Oh no, no, no. The measurement problem is paramount. So you don’t solve that, you don’t solve the problem at all. Who measures it? “A bureaucracy.” Okay, which bureaucracy? “Well, a large one that has its fingers everywhere.” Okay, that’s problem number one. And it’s staffed by exactly the sort of people that you don’t want to staff it, by the way.
What I'm wondering is, where does this logic stop? A lot of the people in this thread seem to be under the impression that Peterson is "left-leaning" somehow, but this rhetoric is
exactly identical to the same kind of rhetoric I see from right-wing people in the United States who openly want to get rid of all government attempts to address inequality. I consider the belief that we should do
nothing to address the gender pay gap to be "hard right" if not far-right. I also find this scaremongering about "bureaucracy" to be typical of people who don't understand that corporations are bureaucracies and that what they call the "free market" is actually the single greatest source of bureaucracy in the world today.
And now finally he finishes up with more demonstration that he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to the left:
Next problem. Which identities? That’s the intersectional problem. The radical Leftists have already hit the problem of intersectionality. It’s like, “Well, we’ve got race and gender, let’s say.” Well, okay, what about the intersection between race and gender? That’s a multiplicative intersection, right? So you might start with three racial categories and two gender categories. But you end up with six intersectional categories. And then you’re just getting started. How many genders? Hypothetically there’s an infinite number. What about racial groupings? Are you going to include ethnicity? Do you want to add class to that? Do you want to add socioeconomic class? How about attractiveness?
And every time you add another category to the singular entities, you increase the multiplicative entities in a multiplicative fashion. What are you going to do? Are you going to equate across all those categories? Really? And across what dimensions? What are the dimensions of equality that you want to establish? It’s just socioeconomic? Is it just salary? What about all the other ways that people are unequal? Are you just going to stop with economic inequality? Are you? It’s a complete bloody catastrophe. It’s an absolute mess.
And intersectionality, the discovery of intersectionality on the Left, is actually the radical Left’s discovery of the fundamental flaw in their identity politics ideology. Groups can be multiplied without limit. That’s not a problem; that’s a fatal flaw. And they’ve already discovered it, they just haven’t figured it out.
The reason that the West privileges the individual is because we figured out 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, that you can fractionate group identity appropriately right down to the level of the individual.
This kind of nonsensical thinking is just a consequence of his apparent belief that "identity politics" were invented by French intellectuals in the late 1960s, and the fact that he is simply not familiar with left discourse on these issues. Leftists in fact have a fairly lively debate about the issue of intersectionality and which identities to focus on in terms of social and political action. Different identities have had different levels of social importance in different historical times and places. We don't need a coherent conceptual scheme that explains all of this in one go in order to organize to change and ultimately abolish the systems of inequality in which we find ourselves.
" is the pinnacle of left-leaning policy activism
