Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

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Essentially, the problem with Peterson is that it's a boring rehash. It's a bit frustrating to see the guy defended along the lines of him being a victim of censorship and close-mindedness, when in fact the issue is the lack of content. This is a widespread problem in the YouTube era, where debate confrontations are inherently more popular and financially rewarding for their participants.

His ideas on Christianity and Jungian psychology are not novel. His self-help material is exactly the same fare dressed up differently. The combination of psychology, biology, and myth to redefine masculinity is not novel; Campbell and Evola and probably a wide range of previous writers treaded that ground. He doesn't bring anything insightful to the interpretation of Solzhenitsyn. His interpretation of postmodernism is an incoherent mishmash designed for Patreon support. It goes way beyond a person just making mistakes in the search for answers. His approach is conversational in the same way a Reddit thread is conversational.

If you are interested in those topics, you are better off reading Oakeshott, Nozick, Sowell, Scruton, actual Jungian books, actual theologians, actually delve into the precise ideas of postmodernism and Marxism and what the actual arguments are. After this, Peterson will seem incredibly boring.

Whilst I am willing to concede that his approach and ideas might not be novel, it is his fantastic delivery of lectures and connecting different phenomena in a network to explain/support a concept is what draws me to his stuff. As a counterpoint, I really like Campbell's a Hero with a Thousand Faces, but darn if his book isn't hard to read.

I think it's a fair argument against him, but it is not Campbell or Evola who managed to get into the spotlight and spread those ideas to millions, but Peterson. Perhaps it could be argued that it's his captivating presentational style or ability to package things well are his USP?

Thank you for the reading list, I do want to delve deeper into this stuff.

He is captivating to a certain audience, but so are televangelists. That's the whole crux of the problem. If you recognize it as being entertainment and an aesthetic/subculture, that's fine. But Peterson is presented as a leading thinker to people, which is a problem. Despite what I've written, Peterson isn't even someone I'm specifically interested in, it's more about the underlying issue of which he is a prominent example.

Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.

Imagine a charismatic professor with a large audience and who has talked at length about the worth of various programming concepts. Now imagine that it turns out the professor can't pass Fizz Buzz. Following that, his fans defend him by saying that he's a captivating explainer who is only sometimes wrong, and that the size of his audience and fantastic delivery is proof of his worth as a leading expert on computer science and programming. Wouldn't that set off alarm bells in your mind?

>He is captivating to a certain audience, but so are televangelists. That's the whole crux of the problem. If you recognize it as being entertainment and an aesthetic/subculture, that's fine. But Peterson is presented as a leading thinker to people, which is a problem. Despite what I've written, Peterson isn't even someone I'm specifically interested in, it's more about the underlying issue of which he is a prominent example.

I think that's a reasonable point. I'd still maintain that his message is useful and his ideas are, imo, interesting and illuminating. I haven't thought of JP-televangelists comparison before so I'd need some time to mull it over. But in my personal experience I listened to Peterson for a while, internalised what I thought was useful and moved on. Whether televangelists have the same effect - I don't know.

>Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.

I wish I had more knowledge on Marxism/leftists school of thoughts right now to have a more interesting discussion on this, but I don't. It does look bad on Peterson that he was so ill prepared for that debate.

Having said that, we cannot not say that there isn't a cultural shift happening in the academia and in our societies at large. Traditional cultural norms are being thrown out and in some extreme cases even shamed(not saying that's a 100% bad thing, but imo such things must not be done rashly), instead of bringing equality there are some attempts of inversing the inequality, and people are getting cancelled/silenced/fired/deplatformed in some cases simply for having a different opinion. Whether this is Marxism or not is really irrelevant, what's important is that we note these changes and act to mitigate them, and I believe this is what Peterson was referring to as "cultural Marxists". It might be embarrassing if he got the name wrong, but it doesn't change WHAT he's talking about.

It is a bit counter-intuitive, but the cultural shift you describe is a mirror image of Peterson's popularity, in the sense that both are the result of sloppy, black-and-white, and adversarial thinking and ideological repackaging.

If this cultural shift is a concern due to its effect on society and its norms, then Peterson would be a counter-productive solution, since this sort of person being considered an intellectual worth following is a step down from these very same norms. It's like putting out a house fire with a flamethrower. The problem is the breakdown in informed discourse.

The result is that the money and attention of people concerned about cultural shifts is then funneled into the pockets of people like Peterson or Shapiro or whomever, with some pretty unenviable results. You end up in a situation where people talk of rediscovering traditional norms and opposing them to new norms, without actually understanding what the traditional norms are or engaging with them beyond vague social-media ready descriptions. What could have been effective or at least thoughtful conservatism paradoxically turns into a post-modern parody of itself, with plenty of references to the aesthetic aspect (flags, slogans, freedom of speech etc.) without the substance that originally generated those symbols. And this substance and world lying outside of the Petersons and Shapiros starts to shrink because they monopolize the attention of people who would have otherwise engaged with deeper material and applied it in productive ways.

I'm sorry but I don't follow you here.

>If this cultural shift is a concern due to its effect on society and its norms, then Peterson would be a counter-productive solution, since this sort of person being considered an intellectual worth following is a step down from these very same norms. It's like putting out a house fire with a flamethrower. The problem is the breakdown in informed discourse.

Peterson DOES encourage informed discourse. Unlike some public figures that are wont to use strawman arguments and/or voice their opinions in an echo chamber, I've seen Peterson go on almost hostile interviews, keeping calm and giving accurate and measured answers to their questions whilst ignoring their jabs(see Cathy Newman or Vice interviews for example). And as was mentioned before, he's also known to change his opinion if he's convinced that he was wrong - now you show me another public figure that's willing to do that, not too many of those from what I've seen.

>The result is that the money and attention of people concerned about cultural shifts is then funneled into the pockets of people like Peterson or Shapiro or whomever, with some pretty unenviable results.

I can't speak about Shapiro since I haven't watched him or his stuff, but I have no problem with Peterson getting money or attention from his lectures, interviews, or books. I cannot find what harm his material can cause either.

>You end up in a situation where people talk of rediscovering traditional norms and opposing them to new norms, without actually understanding what the traditional norms are or engaging with them beyond vague social-media ready descriptions. What could have been effective or at least thoughtful conservatism paradoxically turns into a post-modern parody of itself, with plenty of references to the aesthetic aspect (flags, slogans, freedom of speech etc.) without the substance that originally generated those symbols. And this substance and world lying outside of the Petersons and Shapiros starts to shrink because they monopolize the attention of people who would have otherwise engaged with deeper material and applied it in productive ways.

I think it's healthy to be at least A LITTLE bit sceptical of new norms. Our society was pretty much the same for at least thousands of years and in a few decades we're changing things up very drastically. Are you that sure that it's not going to cause issues that can have dire consequences in the future? I'm not.

I'd like to reiterate again that I don't think Peterson is as conservative as you seem to be implying, he doesn't want everybody being under Sharia-like social rules of Christian propriety. He does seem to lean towards traditional family values, which I don't think is a bad thing. Otherwise he seems to champion personal freedom, especially against any form of tyranny.

With regards to him not understanding traditional norms I'd like to disagree. If you can show me some examples of where he does that please do.

To avoid confusion around semantics, I'll try to draw up a more stripped down version of the argument.

Cultural shifts linked to specific left-wing ideas underway in various parts of society → concern based on the idea of the foundations of society being weakened or changed too quickly as a result → public figure comments against the former shift in an accessible and engaging way → fanbase forms around public figure, who is then held in high esteem for their work → criticism of the figure is primarily interpreted as censorship and deplatforming

The above would be the simplified and idealized description of Peterson or another such figure from one of their supporters. The following is what I believe is happening instead:

breakdown in discourse over time for various factors → ideologies spring up based on their online marketability and accessibility instead of their depth → the change oriented/left-wing version turns into intensified identity politics that moves away from economic concerns → the conservative oriented version turns into a decaf, pretend version of what it used to be → media personalities from each camp do battle online with debates that are essentially entertainment only but are interpreted as discourse by fans on either side

From this we can see that a supporter of Peterson would see the Newman interview as an example of bravery and intellectual strength, whereas from the second framework it would look like another addition to the huge frothing pile of low-quality infotainment. This is what I meant by using a flamethrower on a flaming house. Peterson himself and others like him contribute to the alteration of traditional norms instead of defending them. Or to be more precise, the fact that they are the figures being listened to is the mechanism that accelerates this decline. This is what I meant with the Fizz Buzz analogy: Peterson and co. would have been laughed out of the room by earlier generations of conservatives for not having basic knowledge of the issues they argue about, and these would in turn have been horrified by the idea that a speaker's accessibility and popularity would be seen as a justification of their worth.

In the end, you have people who nod in appreciation when Peterson "destroys" a reporter/student/heckler in a meme-worthy contest, but don't actually know much at all about the Western canon or the traditional values they claim allegiance to or even the ideas that they claim to oppose. They repeat the words but don't actually live these values, and this is a direct consequence of decaf intellectualism taking up all of that mental space. The conservatism is then ironically no longer conservative, in the sense that it no longer conserves the norms it references.

Thank you, I understand your point of view now. I would need to get a bigger grip on the underlying issues to fully agree or disagree with it(your previously mentioned reading list), but your argument seems reasonable and plausible to me.

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