Jordan Peterson has already become a joke in many circles. But enough remain mesmerized by his shtick to warrant a survey of why he’s just another pseudoscientific guru running a con. He is, essentially, the Deepak Chopra of the Nones; and his books, akin to The Secret for incels, angry men, and disaffected conservatives. A comparison I’ve since found others have made. Repeated inquiries converge on a common truth.
Peterson’s woo is his own peculiar variety—but no less ridiculous; and no less baloney. To be fair, like many a crackpot making money off his madness, he might believe his own con. And not everything every critic says about him is correct. And like every religious demagogue and guru, not everything he says is malarkey. But there is enough to find among his critics that is, nevertheless, spot on. I shall zero in here on the stuff that sticks—and illustrate why.
Avatar of Moral Panic
Some things said about Peterson by his defenders are false. I’ve seen people claim he was fired for his views; but in fact he continued to hold his professorship at the University of Toronto for years (and only after I published this article he voluntarily left to pursue his media career). I’ve seen people claim he was arrested, or threatened to be arrested, for his views; but neither has ever happened, and nothing he has said or done is against any actual law in Canada. In truth, Peterson, being a crap philosopher, doesn’t know how to read a statute, and doesn’t believe in consulting actual experts in anything he pontificates on but has zero qualifications in. Everything he said about Canadian human rights law is false.
But some things said by his critics miss the mark a bit too. I’ve seen people claim he’s come out against gay rights and gay marriage; he hasn’t—though he’s come close, and one can infer it should follow from what he has argued: his rhetoric plays right into a secular homophobic narrative about the uselessness of those who “won’t reproduce.” It thus might be telling that Peterson’s wife emailed pleas to sign a petition against gay parental rights in Canada, using language that sounded a lot like Peterson.
I’ve also seen people claim Peterson “refuses” to use the preferred pronouns of his trans students and coworkers; but I’m not aware of any documented case, and he’s said himself he does use their preferred pronouns, as long as he thinks they deserve it. “If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she,” Peterson said, “my sense is I’ll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.” So, if you don’t look girly or manly enough, he gets to insult you. Or at least…so he says. There’s no evidence he’s ever exercised this “right” he claims to have. Which may be why he still keeps his job.
And yet for all that, it’s true: the bizarre event that skyrocketed Peterson from obscurity into fame was his insistence upon the right to insult his students and colleagues and not be fired for it. Which is not a rational or moral position to hold. “But, free speech,” does not authorize you to violate your profession’s code of ethics and insult your bosses and coworkers and their customers and expect to keep your job. Deliberately misgendering someone is no different than deliberately refusing to call them by their actual name. It’s disrespect. The University of Toronto has been incredibly lenient with the man. So his martyrdom legend is definitely fiction—although quite possibly because he doesn’t really do the insulting thing he’s threatened to.
But Peterson went beyond his unprofessional defense of incivility and raised such a moral panic over trans people being treated like people that he even falsely claimed he would be in danger of being jailed for misgendering them if they were given the same status as gay people in Canadian human rights law. Unanimously lawyers and legal experts explained to him he wouldn’t be (and lo: he hasn’t been). But facts are not his thing. Exhibit one.
However, because Peterson started a moral panic over non-existent laws against intentionally being a dick to trans people, he became rich and famous almost overnight. Thanks to all the people in a moral panic over non-existent laws against intentionally being a dick to trans people—who are evidently easily conned out of their money. And he has deliberately milked that cash cow ever since. Here is how…
Con Man of the People
Even hard-core anti-feminist philosopher James A. Lindsay has seen through Peterson’s con and called out the shallow philosophy he’s shilling, boiling it down to what it really is, which is, first, a salve for men’s egos who can’t adjust to social progress, and, second, an elaborate guide to “securing a woman.” Or as Lindsay puts it:
[His] view of manliness appeals to the downtrodden young man by helping him ‘straighten his back’, as Peterson puts it, so that he can make something more of himself. At least to a few layers down, this sounds great, but there’s more to it than that for our lost boys. As Peterson admonishes Cathy Newman, ‘Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful’. This is telling, isn’t it? Peterson’s message reaches these young men not only for the higher purposes at the end of his sentence, but also for the usual ones at the start of it—so they can become what women really want, which is to say so that they can get laid.
This ties in to everything Peterson argues, from his whole philosophy of Darwinian survivalism that defines even his epistemology, his abhorrence of female dominance and sexual liberation, his desperate need to correctly “sex” people, his rules-for-making-a-man-of-you. Peterson is selling a reformed PUA culture under the veneer of a sophistical, room-cleaning, tweed-wearing intellectualism. It’s basically the philosophy of Fight Club without the fight club. You’ll see some examples shortly.
Although to be clear, what Peterson really wants is everyone to undertake traditional gender roles and commit to traditional lifelong marriages committed to having as many kids as a woman can survive bearing. Seriously. He’s even floated the idea of “forced monogamy” and said women who don’t like being housewives should “just get a hobby already.” For him it’s about survival of the fittest, and going back to archetypal ways of life. Whenever queried on it, he has very harsh words for “playing the field.” Almost as harsh as he’s expressed for celibacy. What he’s selling, in other words, is the 1950s. Or rather, what everyone thinks (or wishes) the 1950s were. Right down even to the clothes he wears.
Indeed, Peterson’s first tell is that after he became famous, he now puts on an act, complete with a fake costume. As keen observers have noted (such as Nellie Bowles, writing for the New York Times), he dresses the part now, a polished 1950s professorial style, conspicuously not how he used to. Nor acts as he once did. He adds in emotional play acting (complete with, often, histrionics and tears), and populist self-help rhetoric. All to spew Deepak-Chopra-style nonsense and rigmarole, in defense of a popular hunger to feel good about a biased, shallow, reactionary take on recent social changes that are leaving certain people—with a certain mindset—behind.
Pretty much exactly like Christian churches do. In fact, there is hardly a difference between Peterson and any half-assed, over-confident preacher in a church. Other than that for sales he is purposefully vague about whether God needs to be real or Jesus really rose from the dead (for an excellent critique of this point, see Alex O’Connor’s Deconstructing Jordan Peterson on Religion). Because for a living he sells his garbled ideological snake oil to the 21st century market of nones—both religious and non. His evasiveness on such points is another deep tell. This is the behavior of a marketer, not a philosopher.
Of course you can find an extensive, thoroughly-cited, snarky critique of Peterson on RationalWiki. There are also the alarming observations of his once colleague and personal friend Bernard Schiff that pretty much reveal Peterson to be, indeed, half grifter, half crazy cult leader. There’s also a decently composed critical book by competing masculinist Jamie Wrate. And even Alexander Blum, an ex-fan who even still buys a lot of Peterson’s woo, has made some disturbingly on-point observations about his flawed philosophy.
But in no way do I rely on those for anything to follow. Though a really good critique I will cite, that lists several markers for grifting that Peterson nails point-for-point, is Nathan Robinson’s article for Current Affairs, “The Intellectual We Deserve.” Second most useful you’ll find is Zach Beauchamp’s article for Vox, “Jordan Peterson, the Obscure Canadian Psychologist Turned Right-Wing Celebrity, Explained.” I also highly recommend this Field Guide by Aaron Huertas. I’ll link to others as we go.
Bad at Science
When it comes to his ideas, the first reason we know Jordan Peterson is a crank is because he spews pseudoscience, and made up nonsense he claims is science, and too often gets relevant science wrong. And never corrects any of it.
Let’s start with Peterson’s now-iconic woo about lobsters.
First, Peterson infamously claims in his most famous book, Twelve Rules for Life, that lobster brains dissolve when socially dominated, and then they regrow new “subordinate” brains. But…lobsters don’t have brains—they have no central nervous system, only a nerve cluster called a central ganglion; and they don’t dissolve and regrow; and the paper Peterson cites as saying otherwise, doesn’t. Peterson couldn’t even comprehend a basic paper on neural plasticity, which is shocking for a supposed psychology Ph.D. It demonstrates a rather profound level of incompetence that should lead us to doubt his reliability altogether. (See Brains in Dissolution.)
Second, there is no scientifically credible connection between lobsters’ social hierarchism or its neural substrates and human social psychology. Yet Peterson famously tries to argue we’re just like lobsters. To be fair, he means, only in respect to this one feature. But he never presents any scientific research on humans to back his argument. That the same chemicals mediate the same behaviors is a trivial observation that indicates nothing about the neural systems that employ those chemicals, which differ radically between lobsters and people. Humans (and their behaviors) are vastly more complex, and have undergone enormous evolutionary change. So why can’t he find any research showing what he wants to show about humans?
You can’t study humans by studying lobsters. That’s as dumb as thinking we can study mountains by studying my pet rock. As any credible intellectual would agree. You might instead want to read what an actual scientist who studies lobsters has to say about that:
In the case of humans and lobsters, our most recent common ancestor [or]…the living animal that probably most closely resembles this ancestor is the acoel, a mostly harmless marine worm no bigger than a grain of rice. Acoels’ social interactions are limited to mating—they’re typically hermaphroditic, so each individual acts as both “male” and “female”—or sometimes to cannibalism, if a hungry acoel encounters another small enough to fit in its mouth.
I suppose cannibalism is a sort of dominance hierarchy, but acoels don’t engage in the complex displays of aggression seen in lobsters or form social hierarchies like primates. If the common ancestor of humans and lobsters lacked dominance hierarchies (which seems likely, based on what we know about living animals), then our two species’ social behavior evolved independently, and the one can’t inform us about the other.
Bailey Steinworth, “Jordan Peterson Needs to Reconsider the Lobster,” The Washington Post
In case you missed the point: humans did not evolve from lobsters. We each evolved from worms that possessed none of the features Peterson is talking about.
Worse:
[F]or a lot of animals, social interaction can be divided into ‘mating’ or ‘existing near each other without a problem’. As Peterson points out, lobsters’ aggressive displays arise from their need to fight for access to quality shelters and territory where they can scavenge for food.
Ibid.
Whereas humans are a cooperative species who do exactly the opposite: they need to congregate and work together to secure shelter and food. Humans as a species are dependent on social cooperation; they do very poorly as loners, and individual self-sufficiency is exhausting to impossible. So there isn’t even a behavioral analogy to work with here. Yes, humans, as primates, do have latent features related to dominance hierarchies, but those features evolved very differently, are more complex, and in many respects maladaptive in modern civilization. Not something to be nourished or to organize society around.
More importantly, there is a lot of science out there on human social structure (in psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and sociology) and its primate analogs (which are diverse, not singular, e.g. Bonobo society is very different from Chimpanzee society which is very different from Gorilla society, and we evolved from a common ancestor of all three and therefore cannot assume we are “just like” any one of them). A competent psychologist would survey and distill this research into a coherent, science-based understanding of the relevant human behavior he wants to talk about. Peterson instead skips all that and just finds a random article on lobsters he doesn’t understand and makes up a bunch of shit about it. This is F-grade freshman work here.
Ironically, for such a rabid anti-Marxist as Peterson, what Peterson fabricates out of this is essentially the same as a Marxist-inspired, now-falsified idea called Social Dominance Theory. The actual science of human social dominance behaviors is more complex. And its neurochemistry is actually incidental. Knowing the chemicals involved in information processing tells you nothing about how that information is being processed. A thousand different social systems are processed across millions of species using the same chemistry, just as all species’ brains are assembled out of neurons, yet their arrangement produces radically different behaviors. Bonobos and sea hares behave nothing like lobsters; yet their behavior is mediated by exactly the same chemicals. A psychologist is supposed to know this.
As Steinworth puts it, “Peterson tells his readers to draw inspiration from an animal that can’t stand interacting with its own species outside of sex,” which “illustrates far more about his own worldview than it does about human behavior.” Indeed.
A more thorough debunking of Peterson’s incompetent use of his lobster analogy was also written up by a neuroscientist, Leonor Gonçalves. But I’ve given you examples enough on the point.
It’s not just the pseudoscience he spins out of lobsters. Peterson has embraced even what is full-on pseudoscience in his own field of psychology: the totally woo nonsense of Jungian psychoanalysis. This is wholly akin to a modern Ph.D. in astronomy promoting astrology. As Phil Christman observes:
Canadian academic Jordan Peterson…bangs the table for logic and reason while basing much of his thought on the ideas of a discredited occultist. Peterson’s reliance on the work of Carl Jung is revealing: If you want to defend traditional masculinity as a kind of slaying-dragons-for-its-own-sake, but you can’t offer a rational analysis of why this behavior is necessary, or why it is good, or why you need a penis to do it, the archetype theory offers you a pretentious and grandiose way of saying “It is what it is.” It dignifies tautology.
Indeed. This is pseudoscience. Compare it to real science on masculinity—you know, the kind based on evidence and standards—and you should be laughing.
As Benjamin Goggin wrote for Digg:
Peterson’s ideas are grounded in the notion that men and women contain essential, separate and immutable personality characteristics. [But r]ecent studies have found that the idea of a consistent male personality and female personality is not grounded in reality. A 2005 analysis of 46 meta-analyses, backed by the American Psychological Association, found that men and women were alike in “personality, cognitive ability and leadership,” and that “gender differences had either no or a very small effect on most of the psychological variables examined. Only a few main differences appeared: Compared with women, men could throw farther, were more physically aggressive, masturbated more, and held more positive attitudes about sex in uncommitted relationships.”
Similarly, as Googin notes, Peterson’s claims about things like the gender pay gap are simplistic, governed more by sexist mythology than careful reflection, and show no sign of his actually studying the issue. Like most right-wing pundits, Peterson simply pounces from the armchair on the most naive and uninformed leftist ideas, as if there were no sophisticated and informed leftist ideas about the same things he should be looking at instead. As I wrote before:
[W]hen you check the science and find that even in comparable one-to-one situations, on average women get paid about 6 cents less on the dollar than men, and then dismiss that as a trivial amount we shouldn’t care about. Switch out men for women in that sentence and see how quickly your blood boils—when because now you are suddenly concerned, you actually do the math and realize that’s equivalent to an annual tax of several thousand dollars…on being a woman. If there were a tax on men of several thousand dollars, you’d be raging about it too.
So don’t get all in a huff when women, the ones actually suffering this hidden gender tax, are all in a huff about it. Even if you exclude the sexist treatment of mothers between the ages of 27-33, in which small slice of the demographic the wage gap is at its lowest, after controlling for all other factors, it’s still 98 cents on the dollar (single women to single men). An average “tax” of nearly a thousand dollars a year. I suspect the libertarians who rail against wage gap claims would flip their lid at a gendered tax of a thousand dollars a year. And that’s in the most privileged demographic. I don’t think complaining about a thousand dollars is silly. And I don’t think using possibiliter fallacies to deny this is rational.
This is even before we get to how industry rewards fathers and punishes mothers, how schools and parents pipeline their kids toward certain professions merely perceived to be “suitable to their gender,” all the science demonstrating that bias affects promotions, and so on. This puts Peterson squarely in the right-wing of cultural commentary: ignoring reality in order to deny injustice exists, by tearing down overly simplistic straw men instead, and replacing it with a conservative fiction of how you merely think the world works. That’s pretty much all things Peterson. For example, just compare Peterson’s nonsense about gender pronouns with this well-reasoned, fact-based critique.
Then there’s Peterson’s “ancient aliens” woo. I put that in scare quotes because Peterson of course never explicitly mentions aliens. When pressed, he always evades the point; “it’s a mystery,” or something. What I’m talking about here is his totally whackadoo theory that ancient humans across the earth had advanced knowledge of the double-helix structure of DNA. Which requires either electron microscopes or extraordinarily advanced biochemical theories to discover. So just, um, “how” does he think ancient humans acquired this knowledge? He’ll hem and haw, even walk back his assertions a tad, but never say.
Of course this is bullshit. And it’s bullshit born of the same error of arrogance as the rest of Peterson’s mistakes: he never actually checks with experts or researches facts; he just makes shit up, and is so certain he cannot be wrong, he just insists he isn’t. Sometimes, when cornered, he’ll rephrase his certainty as, at least, that no one else knows it’s not what he says (another tell for running a con: changing your story every time it’s convenient). Either way, he “feels” he must be right; experts and research be damned. After all, who needs evidence, when you have in your heart the properly basic knowledge of the Great Pumpkin?
For this one, you just have to watch Genetically Modified Skeptic go to town on it, in Jordan Peterson’s Most Pseudoscientific Claim Ever. Spoiler alert: all coiled snake imagery more likely just replicates snakes mating, which all humans would have seen and readily used as a symbol of fertility and harmony. He hems and haws when challenged, but it’s clear Peterson thinks (or wants his fans to think he thinks) what his crank source said, that psychedelic drugs gave ancient humans psychic knowledge of the fundamental structure of the universe. Like I said. Woo.
Peterson often does this: he makes a ridiculous claim, but adds a citation so it looks like he has an authority, one that he expects no one will read. Because when they do, this happens. Or this. Or this. Or the examples we just saw above. That’s a super big tell for running a con. It’s a filter: anyone who doesn’t read his citations but are merely impressed by them, are exactly the people he wants to gull. Everyone else he can ignore, because he can dismiss them as angry critics trying to suppress his free speech and keep you from hearing his brilliant ideas, and thus he can play on the anger of his marks, who then clamor to fund him, resulting in cash.
Bad at Facts
Peterson’s tendency to just make shit up and claim it’s a fact is not as rampant and pathological as Donald Trump’s, but it’s definitely a species of the same genus. Nathan Robinson lists as just two random examples:
He is an unreliable guide to the facts (e.g. “there are far more female physicians than there are male physicians,” which is false for the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., or his promotion of a bizarre conspiracy theory that Google is manipulating the search results for “bikini” to include plus-sized models for politically-correct reasons, which they aren’t.)
Peterson’s dishonesty extends even to books he claims to have read, indeed even claims were fundamentally influential to him. Nathan Robinson catches him at this when Peterson claims he “learned” from George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier that socialism is a bad philosophy because socialists were bad people. Robinson actually quotes the relevant passage (which actually is a defense of socialism), demonstrating it said exactly the opposite. As Robinson concludes:
Orwell flat-out says that anybody who evaluates the merits of socialist policies by the personal qualities of socialists themselves is an idiot. Peterson concludes that Orwell thought socialist policies [were] flawed because socialists themselves were bad people. I don’t think there is a way of reading Peterson other than as extremely stupid or extremely dishonest, but one can be charitable and assume he simply didn’t read the book that supposedly gave him his grand revelation about socialism.
Once again, Peterson’s fans won’t have read Orwell. They’ll just believe Peterson. The rest of us read Orwell. Or listen to those who actually did.
This tendency to fake his life story in order to craft the image Peterson wants to sell is the biggest red flag of all. Peterson even exposed himself as a dishonest bully when seriously confronted on his fake claims about himself. When a critic questioned Peterson’s repeated boast that he’d been inducted into a Native American tribe, Peterson thundered him with rage and vitriol and threats of violence. Then it was revealed the critic was right: Peterson had been lying. Peterson was named a friend of a tribe, not a member; and that tribe wasn’t pleased by his misrepresenting that. Of course all such claims have now been scrupulously scrubbed from all his books and bios. Swept under the rug. “Nothing to see here.”
Peterson also tends to misrepresent his credentials.
For instance, Peterson once said, “Consciousness plays a central role in being itself. Modern people think the world is simply made out of objects…let me tell you, as a neuroscientist, that is wrong…there’s no debate about it; it’s just wrong” (in this video at 22:14). Peterson has no publications or degrees in neuroscience. Or chemistry for that matter—his only advanced degree is in clinical psychology. He is not an M.D. and thus can’t even prescribe pharmaceuticals. And here he is presumably referring to the qualia problem, but far from there being “no debate about it,” real neuroscientists are actually not so sure qualia don’t reduce to physical systems. Meanwhile everything else he says when claiming to “be” a neuroscientist is woo malarkey not accepted by hardly any neuroscientists the world over.
On another occasion Peterson said “I’m an evolutionary biologist by the way, not a political philosopher” and therefore he thinks only in timescales of “thousands of years,” not hundreds (in this interview at 11:42). And he says that immediately after boasting of his being a “scientist” with “many publications,” thus implying he means in evolutionary biology. Again, Peterson has no publications or degrees in biology at all, much less evolutionary biology. Yet he does have a B.A. in political science! And most of what he talks about is recent socio-political change. So it’s extremely disingenuous of him to trot out this bogus claim that he only thinks in scales of thousands and not hundreds of years—much less to imply the smaller scale doesn’t matter to the evolution of ideas. Which gets us to his next area of failure…
Bad at History
Peterson’s books depend fundamentally on false claims not just about science, but also about history. Which he rarely treats competently. For him, it appears, “history” is whatever Peterson thinks happened in the past. Not what we can actually say happened in the past. (And when we get to his failure at philosophy next, we’ll see why he keeps making this mistake: his shitty epistemology.)
This extends even to what Peterson is most beloved for: his crank, neo-Jungian archetypal theory of mythology, which depends on making numerous claims about ancient texts and cultures and the beliefs of ancient peoples. But as real philosopher Alexander Douglas points out:
There is no evidence even of Peterson having learnt the relevant languages, let alone made any comparative study of the uses of various words and patterns of symbols in general use.
Instead of actually doing history (much less anthropology), “Peterson scans the great literature of history until he finds his own thoughts. Anyone can do that.” Peterson doesn’t demonstrate the stories he talks about had the meanings or purposes he assumes. Instead, he just imports his own anachronistic assumptions, in relative ignorance of what things meant in ancient times and places. That’s shit history.
By contrast with Peterson, Douglas behaves like a competent philosopher: when he wants to know what the likely mythic meaning of the Enuma Elish was to its authors and transmitters, he consults an actual Assyriologist. Not his own mind. Real history. Not shit he made up.
Another example is how Peterson doesn’t really know anything about Marxism, yet pontificates on it repeatedly as if an authority, even though he admits he has only read a single Marxist text, the Manifesto, which was just a revolutionary pamphlet, not Marx’s actual articulation of his economic vision, which was laid out in Das Kapital. Moreover, Marxism has evolved since Marx. One cannot understand contemporary capitalism by merely reading Adam Smith. So why would any honest intellectual think they can understand contemporary Marxism by merely reading Karl Marx? Well, an honest intellectual wouldn’t. (For an excellent survey of this failure, see the amusing commentary of Ryan Mallett-Outtrim. Incidentally, Peterson also doesn’t understand postmodern philosophy, yet constantly conflates it with Marxism, which is a modernist, realist philosophical system.)
Another example is how Peterson doesn’t bother to really understand Nazism and the holocaust, despite those being two of his favorite working examples he builds a lot of conclusions from. His ignorance and errors here are expertly illustrated by Dan Arrows. Of course Arrows points out that Peterson does not follow sound historical methodology—like, trying to understand historical actors in their actual context, or recognizing outcomes do not always match those actors’ expectations (therefore we can’t, as Peterson often insists, reliably infer an actor’s intensions from the consequences). But more importantly, Arrows notes how Peterson’s use of his bogus understanding of the holocaust to criticize liberals comes dangerously close to exactly how Nazis justified their atrocities. Arrows illustrates how Peterson’s alarmist, absolutist, and ahistorical reasoning is literally dangerous, and is exactly the sort of thing we need a sound understanding of history to warn us against.
Peterson also repeats over and over again (for example in his debate with psychologist Susan Blackmore) all that “revisionist history” nonsense about Christianity and the Bible bringing to the world all the West’s greatest values, such as rights, democracy, science, and individualism. Total bullshit. All those things came from Greco-Roman pagan philosophy and counter-Christian iconoclasm and were very specifically opposed by Biblical Christianity, which we’ve continually had to fight against to even bring them back into sway. The Old Testament is horrid. The New Testament is misogynistic and Stalinist. Jesus is an asshole. Anyone who doesn’t notice this isn’t actually reading this stuff. Much less hip to the history of the last two thousand years.
Yet another example, perhaps the most telling, is how Peterson doesn’t even know rudimentary facts about the history of American protest movements, yet bases his political philosophy on what he mistakenly thinks that history was. As Robinson deftly points out, after quoting Peterson’s disdain for student activism that Peterson complains all started in the 60s (just privileged kids “shaking sticks” at people):
Activism, then, is arrogant brats holding “paper on sticks,” a peculiar and appalling phenomenon he believes started in the 60s. Nevermind that what he is talking about is more commonly known as the Civil Rights Movement, and the “paper on sticks” said “We shall overcome” and “End segregated schools” on them. And nevermind that it worked, and was one of the most morally important events of the 20th century.
Peterson, who is apparently an alien to whom political action is an unfathomable mystery, thinks it’s been nothing but fifty years of childish virtue-signaling. The activists against the Vietnam War spent years trying to stop a horrific atrocity that killed a million people, and had a very significant effect in drawing attention to that atrocity and finally bringing it to a close. But the students are the ones who “don’t know anything about history.”
Clearly, it’s Peterson who doesn’t know anything about history. And then “Dunning-Krugers” his way into being sure he does. And builds a whole worldview on it. Crank.
Bad at Philosophy
Giving him every honest chance, I’ve still reached the conclusion that Jordan Peterson is a crap philosopher. Even apart from the lack of sophistication or originality or plausibility of anything he offers in the subject (and trust me, I’ve listened to many of his defenders who insist otherwise, and researched the hell out of this and tried to find any defensible example), I can confirm this even by just watching Peterson’s interactions with Sam Harris. I know Sam isn’t everyone’s favorite guy—even I think he’s a lousy philosopher, but he’s a damn sight smarter, sharper, and more informed on the subject than Peterson is. So if even Harris can run rings around this guy, that’s a red flag.
In their first podcast together Harris does an excellent job exposing Peterson’s language games and poor epistemology. What we discover is that Peterson is actually, in fact, a postmodernist. Which is deeply ironic given Peterson’s known polemics against “postmodernism.” But alas, Peterson literally thinks that truth doesn’t exist except as what’s convenient to believe. That which serves the aims of power (survival, triumph, reproduction) is “true.” Objective reality? Not relevant. Probably not even existent. That’s literally what postmodernists have been most maligned for claiming these last hundred years. They were as wrong then as Peterson is now. But he needs to hold up a postmodern theory of truth to defend his baloney worldview.
If you don’t believe me, check out the Harris interviews (particularly his first one). And also review the critical videos on Peterson completed by Rationality Rules (especially Jordan Peterson’s Truth – Debunked). Again, I think Rationality Rules is wrong about lots of stuff. He, like Peterson, confuses sex with gender; and, like Peterson, is too seduced by antiquated Jungian pseudoscience (rejected by all actual scientists today—you won’t find any of this in legitimate peer reviewed journals anymore), mistaking convergent cultural evolution as evidence of genetic inheritance, and confusing phenotype with genotype—also the common defects of Evolutionary Psychology. But sharing these errors with Peterson makes his critique of Peterson all the more persuasive. And he uses actual footage of Peterson, correctly contexted, to demonstrate his every point.
Peterson’s epistemology is uninformed, incoherent garbage. It does not interact with and shows no knowledge of any actual philosophical work in epistemology in the last eighty years. He uses words strangely, relies on equivocation fallacies repeatedly, and evades any rational critique of his bizarre idea of “truth” as that which merely conduces to differential reproductive success—and not, you know, anything that is actually the case. The rest of his philosophy is built on top of this nonsense, combined with crank ideas about science and history such as we just surveyed, to produce as ridiculous a metaphysics as anything you’ll find from the actual Deepak Chopra. Up to and including quantum panpsychism.
That’s right. Peterson is a quantum panspychist who believes in a bizarre form of Platonic idealism. Remember the cave men discovering DNA with magic mushrooms thing? Peterson even thinks his mind might live forever, because ‘physicists don’t know everything’. I’m not kidding. That’s basically his argument:
I don’t know that I even believe in death! I’m not sure we understand anything about the role of consciousness in space and time. I don’t think the world is the way we think it is. I’m not a materialist. Whatever is going on down there at the subatomic level of matter is so weird that the people who understand it don’t understand it.
Therefore we can conclude materialism is false and consciousness is eternal. This is what passes for genius.
And an Awful Writer
Peterson’s prose is also dismally bad. He writes very much like a self-important emo tween. Many have noted his writing sounds like some cute kid’s heartfelt essay in Junior High; verbose, unoriginal, pretentious, often void of anything actually significant being said but sounding like it has been. I concur. As we already saw, he conflates his own wild imaginings and scientific facts over and over again, without distinction, and asserts everything with pompous confidence. But he doesn’t even do it well.
The best example of this, illustrating every point with examples, is provided by Rachel Oates, who doesn’t pretend to being anything other than an average person expressing her colloquial thoughts and reactions to a sample of his writing. Yet I have to concur with her every observation. You can pick almost any page at random from his books and get the same florid, pretentious, barely informative sap. As Nathan Robinson put it, the most “important reason why Peterson is ‘misinterpreted’ is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is ‘actually saying’.” A textbook description of a bad writer.
Peterson’s literary analysis at least reaches college level, but not much beyond. And despite the subject of his Ph.D. and professorship at Toronto, even his psychological science is basic, immature, shallow, and often inaccurate. Just compare it to, say, the writings or lectures of Damasio or Tarico, or any other expert writer on the psychology of emotions, happiness, or social hierarchies (see, for instance, Tarico’s chapters on that subject in The Christian Delusion and The End of Christianity); he does not sound at all like anyone who actually had a graduate degree in the subject. But because his fans don’t read other experts, they don’t notice this enormous disparity.
I have to concur with Rachel Oates, who concluded that what he writes sounds like a porridge of “half-baked, half-thought-out, not-fully-formed ideas,” light on real science, and heavy on bad metaphors and crap analogies. Just like every other woo celebrity in history. My own impression is that he has no real understanding of philosophy and doesn’t even grasp philosophical concepts very deeply. He just makes up words and apes naive folk wisdom, without any coherent or informed epistemic or metaphysical foundation. His incompetence at science and history I’ve already illustrated. Those failings just add more chunks to the whole bowl of swill he sells with such passion that many buy it.
But in the domain of philosophy, Peterson plays semantic games about what words and stories mean—even, as we saw, with what the word “truth” means—that are divorced from all actual context and evidence, and pretty much the entire actual history of philosophy and all the progress it’s made on these very issues. He reminds me a lot of Ayn Rand in that respect: a mesmerizing speaker, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, out of touch with the actual advances around them in the very fields they pontificate on. His epistemology is postmodern garbage. His metaphysics unintelligible. His metaethics undefined. His politics deliberately obscure. His aesthetics an uninformed Jungian nonsense wholly disconnected from neuroscience or any competent cross-cultural study.
Conclusion
Not everything from Peterson is awful. For a rational, informed positive review of his Twelve Rules, for instance, see what Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex has to say. But the reason he’s able to isolate what’s worthwhile is that Alexander is, like Peterson, a clinical psychologist. They are both therapists. And that’s where they see eye-to-eye. Peterson by all accounts is an okay therapist—albeit crackpot, pushing all sorts of woo on his clients, and as Schiff reported, even once pretending to be a shaman. Even with regard to the therapeutic philosophy he sells, another psychotherapist who read Peterson’s book was much less impressed. Indeed, much of what Alexander notes is worthwhile is, as even he concedes, extremely simplistic stuff—maybe its precisely this simplistic stuff that many patients who end up in therapy need, at least as a stepladder out of their woes, and toward building a more sophisticated worldview. But this is also what all gurus and grifters build on: obvious, basic stuff.
If that’s all it were, I wouldn’t have much to criticize in Peterson’s work. I don’t think Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is the height of science or philosophy, either. But it’s all pretty much decent advice, well written and of use to many. It doesn’t frame its advice inside a ridiculous, toxically traditional, pseudoscientific worldview loaded with false understandings of reality, history, or epistemology. It doesn’t claim more than it honestly can. It isn’t arrogant. It isn’t flawless, either. But it’s still better than anything Peterson has written. Prose, content, everything. And its author—Stephen Covey, who came under a lot of the same criticism as Peterson—wasn’t running a con. He didn’t even evangelize in Seven Habits for his Mormon faith, or any of its awkward beliefs. His approach was universal and secular. He wasn’t trying to recreate a nonexistent 1950s white man’s paradise and selling that toxic dream for money. He wasn’t claiming to have expert knowledge in things he didn’t. He wasn’t a crank.
So why does anyone idealize Jordan Peterson? Why is he rolling in cash? He is far below par as a philosopher, scientist, and writer; evasive and obscurantist; with whackadoo theories and a simplistic worldview. He has no original theories he can support with evidence. He has no new advice for anyone; no respect for objective truth. Any reasonable skeptic would have seen through his shit and laughed him off the stage by now.
Peterson’s claims are manufactured. His citations barely relevant. His apologetics disingenuous. Even his origin story has an air of the false about it. Peterson capitalized even from the beginning on anti-left fear-mongering, positioning himself as challenging the Baalrog of Leftist Extremists on gender pronouns. Yet, as Robinson puts it, no such monster existed. We lefties actually “share the belief that government legislation requiring people to use particular pronouns would be an infringement on civil liberties,” and “since that’s a position shared by Noam Chomsky and the ACLU, it’s not a particularly devastating criticism of the left.” That controversy was fake from day one.
Even when someone later raised alarm at the Peterson controversy being taught at the University of Toronto, its completely liberal administration stood by him. Yet instead of acknowledging the political left had his back, and explaining to the world it’s not “left vs. center” but extremists vs. everyone—including almost every actual person on the left—Peterson constructs an elaborate conspiracy theory about liberal progressivism destroying the world, conflating every liberal together without distinction, playing both the apocalyptic prophet and martyr. And just rakes in the dough.
Of course, Peterson fans, like Trump fans, will fabricate any narrative to tell themselves that all these critiques are a conspiracy against the common people. Even just my conclusion, here well demonstrated by facts, that Peterson is a crank, is used as an argument that he can’t be a crank, lest we wouldn’t claim he was merely to “punish” people for hearing him out (yes, they actually claim this). They’ll say we’ve “misrepresented” him (we haven’t); that we need to read every word he’s written and watch every lecture he’s given to “really” understand him (we don’t). Why are they this irrational? Why are they so devoted to an obvious conman? What’s going on here?
I can only speculate, of course, but many others have come to the same conclusion. Robinson, for example:
Peterson is popular partly because he criticizes social justice activists in a way many people find satisfying, and some of those criticisms have merit. He is popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose, and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision.
Akin to Robinson, who correctly criticizes the left as partly to blame for this, the first hypothesis I’d try testing is that Peterson is a symptom of the same phenomenon that gave us Donald Trump as President, another incompetent loony (and vastly more dishonest and childish than Peterson could ever honestly be accused of being) whom millions worship as the nearest thing to a secular god one can conceive: these guys are the avatars of a beleaguered “identity,” predominately but not exclusively white male or pro-white-male; traditionalists and reactionaries, whether forcefully or mildly.
Such demagogues boldly and charismatically say what bigoted and misguided people are thinking; so those seduced by this feel like these avatars of their panic are “speaking truth to power.” And they feel this because they and their biased and simplistic worldviews are losing power, and the people in this beleaguered state have never done the hard work of contemplating the complexities of reality, they never seriously challenge their own beliefs and assumptions, and are easily taken in by their own certainty that their biased and simplistic point of view must be flawless and correct—a biased point of view the likes of Peterson and Trump embody in their entire message and persona.
I can’t prove it. But I do suspect—metaphorically speaking—that these guys are the id of an overly-ignorant public too overconfident even to see their own ignorance, much less recognize it as a problem they need to solve. These guys’ fans and worshipers are essentially the secular replacement for their predecessors, the Creationists and Fundamentalists. The mindset, the epistemology, the moral and existential panic, the rationalizing, the persecution complex, the outrage at being questioned or criticized, is all exactly the same. These are literally the same people…or would have been. Lately, ancient superstitions about devils and blood magic and angelic armies raining down from the sky have become an increasingly harder sell, so Creationism and Fundamentalism are declining. Those who would have been seduced by their cool-aide twenty years ago, are instead seduced by this new, more modern brew. This is where they went. And because it’s “secular,” atheists are being roped in by it, every bit as much as disaffected Christians are.
-:-
Special Rule: I do not have an open comments policy. But I actually want Peterson defenders to post comments here, and I intend to revise the text above if any errors are shown me. But if you want your comment to be published here you have to meet two rules: (1) you need to cite specific evidence of any point you make (hyperlinked article or video, or book or article title; with either timestamp or an exact quote sufficient to be found by digital search of the named text) and (2) you need to be responding to a point I actually made. Mere gainsaying will be ignored. Assertions without evidence will be ignored. Arguing against things I didn’t claim will be ignored.
Cud Petersen sue u for defamasn/libl?
wotch President Trump getting re-ilectid in 2020.
and the librals can scream at the sky and blame russia, ukraine etc.
No. The United States has excellent protections for free speech. Even under Canadian law, which is some of the most unfavorable, opinions and analysis based on researched facts are protected speech (see this and this).
Thanks for the induljuns. But it seems arbitruri – disidid by the corts:
‘x is protectid free speech; ‘y is not protectid’ ‘z is protectid’ etc it’s limitid.
wun pursun’s research cunclusiuns cud be anuthr’s libel/hate speech, I suppose.
Your English is unintelligible again. I have no idea what you are saying.
But as best I can tell, you aren’t saying anything legally relevant here. Perhaps you mean that people can ‘call’ well-researched, factually-accurate critiques of themselves ‘libel’ if they want to. But it won’t be legally or even philosophically accurate of them to do so. It will, in fact, simply be a self-rationalizing fallacy deployed to ignore all evidence their ideas are false or bad.
Turns out Peterson’s predictions on the trans issue regarding sex changes are bang on.
Thousands from the Tavistock clinic and the NHS suing after sex changes. It turns out there wasn’t enough long term evidence to initiate any of these programs. Too late for the thousands of lives ruined by the treatment, but Peterson was the right wing pseudo intellectual who shouldn’t be listened to.
Many of the arguments in your article have unraveled a few years later. Pretty much a copy and paste job of the NYT and Guardian articles on Peterson, who incidentally are distancing themselves from the self indulgence.
As usual, you have distorted the facts (the Tavistock standards of care were objectively poor; which is why only this clinic is getting this result; and there are a ton more sources here than just “NYT and Guardian” articles, including actual experts on diverse subjects, detailed documentation, and even critics sympathetic to Peterson).
And your logic sucks (one negligent hospital does not equal all hospitals are negligent; “I don’t like the Guardian, therefore all sources that disagree with me are wrong, and I don’t have to address any facts even documented in the Guardian“; and other like travesties of reasoning).
Meanwhile, that being the only example you gave of something I said “unravelling” (even though I never said anything pertaining to this; for example, I did not say there would never be any negligent clinics serving any particular community poorly who therefore need closing or reform; and even though this isolated incident doesn’t even support your generalization), your claim that “many” of the things I said are “unraveling” is typical bullshit from Peterson fans, just as I documented.
You don’t check facts. Your contact with reality is poor. And you suck at rational thought. All you have is feelings—an emotional attachment to an ideology, rather than a commitment to understand reality. Just like Young Earth Creationists and Flat Earthers.
This is a problem. You really need to see to it.
Thanks for the wonderful takedown of this charlatan. Just fyi. J. S. Mill’s middle named is spelled: Stuart.
John Stuart Mill
Fixed. Thanks!
Could it be that society is becoming too complex for the average inhabitant, explaining the growing number of followers of these -possibly unknowing–charlatans?
If so, is there a remedy or are we at the height of average-human civilization?
//Peterson also doesn’t understand postmodern philosophy, yet constantly conflates it with Marxism, which is a modernist, realist philosophical system.)// Peterson’s point is that once classical Marxism was seen as bankrupt and not usable the Marxists became post-Marxists and used postmodernism to get their totalitarian ideology in through the back door. This is one of Peterson’s more brilliant points : Postmodernism ” end of the grand narrative” functions to re-enliven the Marxist Grand narrative.
Alan Glauber: No such people exist. That’s the point. Marxists aren’t postmodernists (go look: there are tons of them around, writing tons of stuff). And postmodernists never promote Marxism (go look: there are tons of postmodern thinkers talking economics and politics).
Yuo are buying into something as made up as secret lizard people running the world. This is not a brilliant point. It’s out-of-touch, paranoid fantasy. And if you don’t believe me, go find some writings of these people Peterson is talking about, who have combined Marxism and postmodern philosophy, and link or cite them here. Warning: make sure they actually advocate those two things. “But I think they do” won’t hold water unless you will also be proving it with cited quotations.
In other words, please do some honest work, before believing alarming things.
There are plenty of people who call themselves “postmodern Marxists.” Fredric Jameson was the first Marxist political theorist to combine postmodernism and Marxist theory to bring us postmodern Marxism. Read this:
“Fredric Jameson is at the forefront of attempts to engage Marxist literary and cultural criticism with the postmodern debates. A professor of literature and humanities, his work has been a sustained effort not only to critically confront poststructuralism
and postmodernism, but to assimilate their contributions to an enriched Marxian cultural theory. Jameson’s most systematic and influential study, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism’ (1984a), is a panoramic sweep of the postmodern cultural scene and a provocative attempt to relativize postmodernism as a stage in the development of capitalism, thereby asserting
the supremacy of Marxist theory over all competitors. Of the major postmodern theorists, Jameson is one of the few to theorize postmodernism as a broad cultural logic and to connect it to the economic system of late capitalism. He sees ‘the whole global, yet
American postmodern culture [as] the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world’ (1984a: p.57) and insists that ‘every position on postmodernism in culture … is … an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capital today’ (1984a: p. 55). Following Marx’s analysis of modernity, Jameson wants to grasp postmodernism and late capitalism dialectically, ‘as catastrophe and progress altogether’
(1984a: p. 86).
[…]
Jameson’s postmodern Marxism is the first attempt to combine Marxian and postmodern positions, contextualizing postmodernism within the development of capitalism, while engaging postmodern positions in order to rethink Marxist theory and politics in the contemporary era. While this is a highly original and interesting merger, we will ask if Jameson’s commitments to postmodernism and Marxism are compatible and what advantages and disadvantages result (6.1.2).”
Dude. Jameson was a critic of postmodern philosophy. He argued postmodern thought was a tool of capitalism that therefore had to be overthrown to realize the Marxist utopia. Where are you getting this nonsense idea otherwise?
I’m getting this from pg. 182 of Steve Best’s Postmodern Theory:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=PkhdDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
He explicitly refers to Jameson combining postmodernism and Marxism into “postmodern Marxism.”
Jameson admits to being both a postmodernist and a Marxist:
“Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical, and somehow intensely unstable, so that some of them are led to conclude that, in my own case, having ‘become’ a postmodernist, I must have ceased to be a Marxist in any meaningful (or in other words stereotypical) sense. For the two terms (in full postmodernism) carry with them a whole freight of pop nostalgia images, ‘Marxism’ perhaps distilling itself into yellowing period photographs of Lenin and the Soviet revolution, and ‘postmodernism’ quickly yielding a vista of the gaudiest new hotels.”
He even acknowledges the existence of postmodern Marxism in his own writings:
“For Marxism is the very science of capitalism; its epistemological vocation lies in its unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation, which can scarcely be distinguished from the analytic ones. This is why, whatever its other vicissitudes, a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself.”
There are entire books on postmodern Marxism:
https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2031/Re-presenting-ClassEssays-in-Postmodern-Marxism
Just admit it. Postmodern Marxism is a thing.
Read the very words you just quoted from him: they are condemning postmodern thought as capitalist and anti-Marxist.
That section of the wiki article you linked is poorly sourced btw.
It isn’t just a critique, Jameson combines postmodernism with his own Marxist belief system by portraying postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism.
“Late capitalism:
A term used in Marxism since the 1930s, but brought into prominence in critical theory by the work of economic historian Ernest Mandel with the publication of Der Spätkapitalismus (1972), translated as Late Capitalism (1975). By late capitalism Mandel meant simply the latest or most current stage of capitalism’s development, namely the transformations that had taken place in the capitalist mode of production since the end of World War II, particularly the explosive growth experienced in the USA, Germany, and Japan. Fredric Jameson adopts this term and Mandel’s analysis in his account of postmodernism as the most appropriate description of the present epoch.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100052793”
Postmodernity is a distinct stage of capitalism, one unforeseen by Marx.
He even says:
“Postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order […] but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself.”
Isn’t this what you asked for? Someone who has combined Marxism with postmodern philosophy?
No. Jameson did not “combine” postmodern philosophy with Marxism. He “combined” it with capitalism, the enemy of Marxism. He is anti-postmodern philosophy. Read his own words: he is saying one of the evils of capitalism is postmodern thought. He’s condemning postmodern philosophy, not taking it up. Thus illustrating my point: Marxists are not friends to postmodernists, nor vice versa. They hate each other and see each other as part of the problems plaguing society. There is no unified “Marxist postmodernism.”
Are you sure that’s what Jameson is saying?
Then how do you explain this quote from Jameson:
“This is why, whatever its other vicissitudes, a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself.”
Isn’t he acknowledging the existence of postmodern Marxism in this passage? Not everything postmodern is bad, apparently.
Also, how do you explain all of the essays and books discussing “postmodern Marxism” as a real thing (some of them linked here) if Marxists and postmodernists are implacable enemies, as you indicate?
“Over against itself” i.e. postmodernism is destructive of Marxism. He is saying capitalists use postmodern thought as a tool to destroy and dismantle Marxism. “Postmodern Marxism” is what he means by capitalists misrepresenting Marxism to destroy it. Read what he is saying. In context. Pay attention to the words he uses.
Where is Jameson saying that “capitalists use postmodern thought as a tool to destroy and dismantle Marxism”? Tbh, Jameson never says that postmodern is a “tool” anywhere in his writings, but he does identify it as “a systemic modification of capitalism.” If I’m wrong, please show me where Jameson calls postmodernism a “tool.”
I’m not following your interpretation, so let’s look at the quote again, in its entirety:
“For Marxism is the very science of capitalism; its epistemological vocation lies in its unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation, which can scarcely be distinguished from the analytic ones. This is why, whatever its other vicissitudes, a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself.”
This passage is really an argument.
P.1: If Marxism has an “unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation,” capitalism would necessarily call Marxism into existence.
This is true for all forms of Marxism and capitalism, including their postmodern versions.
P.2: Marxism has an “unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation.”
Ergo, “a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence.”
The reason why Jameson concludes that “a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence” is because of Marxism’s “unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation.” In other words, you can’t have one without the other. If there is going to be a post-modern capitalism, there will be a postmodern Marxism.
He’s practically calling himself a postmodern Marxist in this passage, since we already know he identifies postmodernity with late capitalism.
Now explain to me where you’re getting your interpretation from based on analysis of the passage in question.
Btw, I just had to point out that the phrase “over against itself” in the passage refers to the opposition between postmodern Marxism and postmodern capitalism. It’s not referring to postmodern thought because Marxism and capitalism (and their postmodern versions) are the only subjects under discussion.
Look at the quote again:
“For Marxism is the very science of capitalism; its epistemological vocation lies in its unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality, whose fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation, which can scarcely be distinguished from the analytic ones. This is why, whatever its other vicissitudes, a postmodern capitalism necessarily calls a postmodern Marxism into existence over against itself.”
Where does it mention postmodern thought?
No, it doesn’t. Good lord man. He says capitalism calls into existence a postmodern distortion of Marxism that it then uses against it. Aren’t you actually reading him? He’s talking about postmodern Marxism being a bastardization created by capitalists to discredit Marxism. If you can’t grasp this, you either aren’t reading his works, or you aren’t capable of the requisite reading comprehension to understand what he’s saying. Here’s an example of what he’s talking about. That’s not him, that’s his enemies. This is him. Read it. Later in that same text he says:
Hence, he explains, postmodern thought is fundamentally anti-Marxist. He goes on to say he can still appreciate the aesthetics of postmodernism (its art and music, for example, though he hates what it’s done to novels), but he rejects its influence on ideology, as being destructive of Marxism and the Marxist project. He calls postmodern ideology essentially a cultural “schizophrenia.”
And as he says:
In other words, his enemies are on the left because of their excessive embrace of postmodern thought.
He concludes:
Outflank it. In other words, he is acknowledging the world has become postmodernist in its thinking and that this poses a problem for Marxism that Marxists must find a way to overcome. And they can only do so by acknowledging it and understanding it, and taking from it what might be worthwhile (e.g. its democratization of art) and abandoning what it has that is destructive of social progress (e.g. its rejection of objective history and science, its obsession with identity politics other than simply that of class, and so on).
Read the words. Who “calls a postmodern Marxism into existence”? Marxism? Or Capitalisn? He says Capitalism does. It’s a Capitalist constrict. Not a Marxist one. And Capitalism calls this bastardization of “postmodern Marxism” into existence “over against” what? Itself—i.e. against Marxism.
You would understand this if you would stop quote mining and read the actual writings of Jameson.
So why does every source I come across refer to something called “postmodern Marxism”? Where are they getting this from? Every book I’ve seen so far discusses postmodern Marxism as a real ideology and identifies Jameson’s version of Marxism as a form of postmodern Marxism.
For example, in this book, under a section entitled “Postmodern Marxism”:
“However, it is the American literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, whose reading and mapping of the dialectical tradition has produced the most interesting and stimulating results. Jameson, it can be said, has developed a postmodern Marxism
which is capable of conceptually confronting a
globalized or multinational capitalism and its
cultural logic.”
The book also identifies him as “one of
the foremost theorists of postmodernism and postmodernity.”
https://books.google.ca/books?id=Y8TeDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
And there’s more where that came from. There are numerous references to postmodern Marxism online. How could this be if there’s no such thing postmodern Marxism? Are you saying these people are all idiots?
Jameson was a renowned critic of postmodernism. That’s what they mean by a theorist of. He coined the phrase “postmodern Marxism” to refer to characterizations of Marxism formulated by postmodernists that are destructive of Marxism. He described postmodernism as a particular disease of capitalism, and likewise its bastardization of Marxism.
Try reading the actual book you are now quoting: it is discussing Jameson’s book titled “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Capitalism. Not Marxism. Jameson writes about how postmodernism has affected art and the discourse between Marxism and Capitalism, and is now a defining feature of Capitalism. He is thus an important critic and historian of postmodern thought. But he himself condemns it and only writes about it to critique and explain it and give Marxists tools to overcome or outflank it.
Which you will understand if you would just read Jameson. Instead of quote mining random things out of context.
So, we have someone–i.e., Peterson–behaving like a postmodernist … and he’s constructed a chimeric Postmodernist Marxism specifically to criticize it, which is what Jameson was describing … hmmm
Eelko de Vos: As this has been a phenomenon in every generation since time began (only the ideas sold by the process changes), I don’t see any increase in the matter to explain. We’re perfectly capable of being smarter as a people. We just don’t make any effort to be. And we, as a people, evidently aren’t ashamed of that enough to do anything about it.
Until we feel the requisite shame, we will lack the requisite motive. We already know how to be better at this. But without the motive to be, we simply won’t be. As far as I can tell, there is nothing else left to discuss.
I’ve encountered my share of people who either show a total disinterest into looking complex political, social, or scientific subjects or feel burnt out from doing so. Creating a kind of default opinion whether it fits the facts or not. Kind of the equivalent to, screw this I’m choosing answer B mentality.
Imo Jordan Peterson does good work. His opinions aren’t politically correct, but he does get people thinking by challenging their assumptions. What’s the point of believing in anything – rights, equality, feminism – if you don’t understand the reasons for believing it? People shouldn’t get so defensive when their most cherished beliefs are questioned.
Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” We shouldn’t be afraid to leave our comfort zones and safe spaces when truth is at stake.
Indeed. I believe this is a widespread problem, on both sides of the political spectrum. It’s not at all new though. Alas.
I’ve only seen Jordan Peterson in action when he was interviewed by Channel 4 (UK).
He was a brilliant performer. The female interviewer was left floundering.
I see Jordan as a classical Socratic philosopher chiselling away at our contemporary beliefs. Confounding us with our inadequate and superficial assumptions.
I think he and Richard Carrier have a great deal in common.
There is a decent critique of that interview from a Peterson supporter at Quillette. I bookmark this for anyone who wants to explore this from both points of view. Although I don’t agree with all his conclusions, I think that critic does a fair job representing his point of view.
For my own piece, I found nothing useful in that interview so had no need of referencing it. It’s typical for television journalists to suck at really getting at what weird thinkers think and why. Indeed I’ve almost never seen any television interview of anyone by anyone that was actually worth watching. That one is no different. At best, you can mine it for quotes to verify Peterson’s ideas by. But we’ll all have to critique those ideas ourselves. Television interviewers won’t be of any help.
Peterson’s dialogues with Harris, Dillahunty, Blackmore, and others who actually have a relevantly skilled and informed perspective to deploy are more worthwhile. Television journalists don’t usually have narrow enough skills for this kind of thing.
I’ve come to the same conclusion with most live debates. In my view, the majority of debates are determined by who had better charisma over who had the better facts on the table.
I’ve got mixed feelings about Jordan Peterson. On the one hand, I appreciate his push back against radical left-wing propaganda. In that regard, he’s a very logical and a breath of fresh air. Look how he exposed that interviewer’s intellectual incompetence (but to be fair, it wasn’t that hard a task).
However, when talking about Christianity and religion, he shifts into bullshit mode. And I’m 99.9% sure that he’s being dishonest in that regard – he’s main objective is to keep his Christian audience happy. He doesn’t believe that Jesus literary rose from the dead, it’s obvious. He believes that the Bible is essentially metaphorical. But when he was asked if he believed that Jesus rose from the dead, he said he was agnostic about that. The reason I believe he gave that answer is that, on the hand, he didn’t want to upset his Christian audience, but on the other hand, he was too embarrassed to say that he believed in the resurrection – he knew that would hurt his credibility as an intellectual and a scientist. In another interview he was asked if he believed in god, and his answer was “it depends on what you mean by believe”. REALLY?!
But he says a lot of things which make him look like a pseudo intellectual, such as “no one is really an atheist”, “metaphorical truth supersedes literal truth”, etc.
Moreover, I watched his latest debate on the show Unbelievable and the issue of whether there’s a correlation between a country’s religiosity and its economy came up, and his opponent pointed out that the evidence shows that the poorest countries tend to be the most religious, something which he dishonestly refused to acknowledge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syP-OtdCIho. But to be honest, I don’t know if he’s opponent was right. The US is very religious and yet a super power. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians were very advanced civilizations but they were also very religious. So I don’t know the answer to this question.
I should note I agree more of this should happen, and I do it myself (example, example, example, example, example, example).
But when people like Peterson do it, with crankery and straw manning and conartistry, he is actually making things worse, by actually convincing people he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and therefore there must be nothing to talk about. Both sides do this: liberals get right-wing ideas wrong, convincing the right-wingers their ideas must be right (a non sequitur). It’s not only not productive, it’s counter-productive. He is destroying his own cause by convincing liberals there are no real problems to solve in their communities of ideas. Just as liberals who get conservatives wrong keep convincing conservatives there are no real problems to solve in their communities of ideas.
All the examples of problems you list in his treatment of atheism and religion, all correct observations indeed, are the same things he does to fuck up his critique of left-wing ideas. And indeed that interview you mention is a prime example: he was wrong about the gender wage gap issue (just as I explain in my article above), but merely faced a straw man opponent (someone who hadn’t researched it). That’s con artistry; sophistry. Not intellectualism. Saying “I can pwn a television interviewer” does not make you smart. It just tells us you don’t take understanding the truth of things seriously, that you care more about gameplaying and appearances. Which is precisely what’s wrong with guys like Peterson. We shouldn’t be revering them. We should be laughing them off the public stage, and asking for far better intellectuals than this.
The U.S. is actually an outlier. And the model is not regarding ancient but modern civilizations.
Even in antiquity though, as Greece and Rome rose in wealth and achievement, their elite declined in religious fanaticism (with a noted rise in religious rationalism and secularism). But that’s not the model that was being discussed there. That’s instead the Secularization Thesis, further supported by Gregory Paul’s studies of societal dysfunction, which holds that as nations become wealthier and more free (it must be both: wealth and increase in democratic liberties), they become more secular, as religion becomes more useless or even maladaptive.
But what that model actually shows is that this wealth must be distributed (concentrated-wealth societies, i.e. with high income disparities—and social welfare systems, like national healthcare, public roads, etc., count as wealth distribution in this respect). The U.S. is one of the most unequal Western societies with very poor social welfare systems compared to the rest of the first world; thus explaining why it remains more religious. Thus the model actually predicts the U.S. would be an outlier. We have too much poverty and economic hardship, worse public health, and so on. And we do nothing about it.
What Paul added was the observation that there is in fact a consistent correlation between societal religiosity (measured by both mere belief and fanaticism, i.e. amount of populace committed to fundamentalist religion) and a whole array of markers of social dysfunction including poverty, crime, STDs and teen pregnancies, and several other things. And this correlation holds up not only nation-to-nation, but even state-to-state within the United States. It’s quite robust.
Thank you for the examples. I wasn’t aware that you’ve criticized the far Left. I appreciate very much your objectivity and honesty. Sadly, such qualities are becoming increasingly rare these days. This reminds me of a statement that George Carlin said: “It’s not just the politicians who suck! Everyone sucks”! Bullshit is everywhere!”
But you are right, fighting bad ideas with crankery is counterproductive, especially in this day and age where people can fact-check you in minutes and even though most people won’t, many of your opponents will. If you keep on repeating something that’s been proven to be factually incorrect, your opponents will call you out. If you want to make the claim that Trump is a racist, don’t use the media’s favorite “example” – that he called Mexicans (in general) rapists. Because that’s verifiably false, it’s right there on YT. If you want to criticize the economic system that the Left is advocating, stop using the Soviet Union and Venezuela to discredit them. That’s straw man. All these outlets and activists need to be held accountable for the social consequences their narrative has.
I believe the fanaticism we see with Jordan Petersen fans is a symptom of a larger problem. Corrupt left-wingers control 99% of the media and they are using it to push their propaganda. But what’s worse is they want to take away your freedom speech and if you dare disagree with them, you are likely to be stigmatized as a racist, sexist, Nazi, some kind of phobic, bigot, or who knows what the hell else. And when people like Jordan Petersen stands up to them, he is revered (most of his followers won’t even care that he got the lobsters wrong or whether his dishonest about his religious beliefs). So when Leftists complain about the “Jordan Petersen cult” or why many liberals are turning to Trump, they need to think a bit deeper as to what’s causing all this.
Moreover, thank you for the explanation of why the US actually supports the model. I find the notion that the more religious a country is the less economically successful it is, interesting. I’ll research it.
Trump definitely is a racist, and markets himself to racist voters. This is extensively documented (see this survey, this survey, this survey, this survey, etc.). Even in the one example you reference, Trump said:
Here he is vilifying an entire class of people (Mexican immigrants) as criminals and rapists, and allowing only “some” might not be. This is an inhuman and bigoted thing to say. It’s definitely racist. Not least because it’s false: the rate of criminality among Mexicans immigrants is no greater and by some measures lower than the natural born population of the United States. Just as almost no Americans are rapists, almost no Mexican immigrants are, too. But playing up racist fears that they’re mostly rapists to get votes, is itself racist. And consciously so.
“Corrupt left-wingers control 99% of the media” is also completely false. To make such an absurd claim you’d have to be ignoring whole television and radio stations and numerous leading periodicals, and half the internet. Moreover, none of the most-consumed left-wing media does or wants to do any of the bizarre extremist things you claimed. You are doing what Peterson does: conflating a few extremists with everyone on the left. That’s irrational. Stop doing it.
I don’t dispute that he’s a racist. That’s not the point I’m making. If he refused housing to people based on their race, then he is a racist and there’s no way around it. The point I’m making is that his comments about the Mexicans were not racist but the media has convinced everyone that they were. Here’s why I’m saying that his comments were not racist. He was referring specifically to the group of Mexicans who were crossing the border illegally (i.e. a small percentage of the population). He wasn’t referring to Mexicans in general as rapists. Racism is assigning characteristics to an entire race of people – it’s about the Race. So if he had said “Mexicans are rapists”, that would be typical racism. What he said instead was that Mexico has both good and bad people (which is true of all ethnicities), and the ones who are crossing the border illegally are the bad ones. Again the bad ones are a minority, his comments weren’t directed at the majority of Mexicans, so by definition the comments were not racist.
No, Trump’s comments about mexican immigrants were indeed racist. Racism is not restricted to Jim Crowe style legalism. One can be a racist and at the same time have given up trying to break the law or get away with legislating racial discrimination. Trump said most immigrants are rapists and criminals, which they aren’t (not even the ones crossing “illegally,” see the link I presented you), and he deliberately did so to fear-monger about the “invasion” of “another race” to gain votes from racists. That’s consciously and deliberately racist. And mainstream media covered this fairly and accurately (the link I just gave you is a prime example). That he allowed that Mexicans who stay in their own “shithole” country might not be mostly criminals doesn’t absolve him of racism. It doesn’t absolve anyone of racism. If you think most hispanics around you are criminals, you are a racist.
I accept that I made an over-generalization when I said “corrupt left-wingers control 99% of the media”. But aren’t those the ones with the most viewership and influence? You can have 100 news networks in total but 5 of those get most of the viewership and consequently will have most of the influence.
The only way I’m using the term “racism” is as it is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology:
“Racialism is the unequal treatment of a population group purely because of its possession of physical or other characteristics socially defined as denoting to a particular race. Racism is the deterministic belief system that sustains racialism, linking these characteristics with negatively valued social, psychological, or physical traits”
So according to the official definition, racism is about characteristics that apply to the race on the whole, not a small percentage of the race.
The following is everything Trump said about the Mexicans in the link you sent me:
“Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”
“But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people”
“It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”
It seems that he’s referring to the ones that are crossing the border illegally. I’m not seeing how he’s directing this at Mexicans that are coming over legally, and I definitely don’t see this being directed at Mexicans in general. This is what would make racist according to the official definition.
And you are right about the evidence showing that most immigrants (even the illegal ones) don’t engage in criminal behavior. But that still wouldn’t make his comments racist just because he got that wrong. BUT if you are the president of a country and you make such a false statement, it’s your responsibility to publicly correct it, which he didn’t as far as I know.
Moreover, you say that he deliberately said those things to get votes from racists. He probably did. But can’t the same be said for the left-wing media and politicians? When they spew anti-white rhetoric, aren’t they doing that do gain votes from people who hate whites? Racists in other words? When the media present whites as being responsible for most violent crimes, when the evidence clearly shows that by rate they don’t commit most of the violent crimes https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-43. What about when they present whites as being the most racist group of people? When by rate, whites are not responsible for most of the hate crimes https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018/tables/table-9.xls. They also say that whites receive shorter sentences than blacks for the same crimes, why don’t they also mention that that only applies to males? Since black females receive shorter sentences than white males? https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing.
There’s a constant bombardment of anti-white rhetoric by the left-wing media and politicians, but because it’s anti-white, it’s not considered racist. Replace “anti-white” with anti any other race, and everyone would have been calling it racist. What’s even worse, people who are anti-white are getting fired up and are attacking on social media non-american whites as well. These xxxxx are going to start a racial “war”.
You are wrong about grammar here. The ODS did not say it isn’t racism “unless” it applies to all members of a race. You are committing the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Because “I mistreat the Mexicans I meet because of their racial characteristics” does not entail “I mistreat all Mexicans.” Assuming a Mexican is a criminal because they are Mexican is racism. “But I’m okay with the good ones” is still racist. It does not get you off the hook that you believe that somewhere in the world there are “good” Mexicans. Thinking that any Mexican you meet here is a criminal constitutes making decisions about them based on their racial characteristics. That’s racism. Even by the ODS. And if you are unsure about that, write the editors of the ODS and have them explain this to you.
Your grammar is invalid. The ODS does not say you have to be be racist toward all members of a race to be racist. Only that you judge any person by their race. That you believe somewhere in the world far away from you there are “good ones” does not get you off the hook from racism.
You are committing here the fallacy of affirming the consequent. All that the ODS says racism requires is that you judge someone by their racial characteristics. Not by their geographic location or anything else. If you think most of the Mexicans around you are criminals because they look Mexican, you are a racist. Even if you think there are some hypothetical Mexicans somewhere who aren’t criminals. And if you don’t understand this, please write the editors of the ODS and have them explain it to you.
Meanwhile, there is no “anti-white” rhetoric that is like this coming from any mainstream media source. Facts are not racist. I challenge you to find me any mainstream media source that has said anything factually untrue about white people. And do it correctly. Please.
For example:
(1) Find me a mainstream media source that said “white people commit most violent crimes.” Violent crimes. Not “crimes.”
(2) Likewise get your facts right. Don’t confuse “racist” with “hate crimes.” Most racists don’t commit hate crimes. But your own FBI link shows most hate crimes are caused by white people. So I fail to see your point here.
(3) And don’t misstate what the media says. Black women get longer sentences than white women; and black men, than white men. Thus being black leads to longer sentences regardless of gender. Comparing white men with black women is a false comparison here, as it disregards the intersection of race and gender. When only talking about race, the only comparison that matters is black women to white women. This is a basic principle of the controlled variable.
That you make all these mistakes is telling. There is something wrong with your epistemology. You should be disturbed by that. You should be keen to fix it. So get that done. Please.
Meanwhile, that racists are gunning for a race war is not our fault. It’s theirs. Non-racist white people aren’t driven to violence by being told a lot of white people are racist. Only racists are driven to violence by hearing such facts.
I accept that my epistemology needs improving, and I am keen to fix it. But I believe that my biggest problem is my poor communication skills. Sometimes when I have thought, only half of it is expressed on paper/verbally and the rest is expressed in my head. I will do self-criticism where I believe I went wrong.
First off, I don’t believe that I’ve misunderstood the definition of the ODS. Of course you can be racist toward a specific ethnicity/race and still believe that a small percentage of that group is good. And I agree that if you assume that a Mexican is a criminal merely because they are Mexican, it is indeed racism. But for something to be considered racist it must be applicable to most of the racial/ethnical group. So if he had said “Mexicans are rapists”, although that would be a racist comment, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he is saying that every single Mexican is a rapist (saying that men are taller than women doesn’t necessarily mean you are saying the every man is taller than every woman). It’s a generic statement and these statements always allow for exceptions. So, the statement “Mexicans are rapists” usually means that “Most Mexicans are rapists” or “Mexicans in general are rapists”. In fact, the media lied that Trump said that “Mexicans are rapists”, i.e. most Mexicans are racist. This is not a matter of opinion. I remember when one of the white dudes on TYT said this and so did Whoopi Goldberg on the View say it. I will look for the videos.
Here are Trumps comments again:
“Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”
What he is saying here is that Mexico has both good and bad people (this is true of all ethnicities) and the ones who are coming over are the bad ones, or some of the bad ones. He’s not saying that the bad ones are representative of most Mexicans.
“But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people”
Here he is clarifying that he is referring to Mexicans that are crossing the border illegally.
“It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably — probably — from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”
Trump’s comments seem to be directed at illegal immigrants specifically. So on this specific point, I will have to respectfully disagree with you.
The following are my responses to your examples:
Even if the media accused whites of most “crimes” and not “violent crimes” my point still stands. Whites constitute 60% of the population whereas Blacks constitute 13%. You would expect whites to commit most of the crimes. But social scientists will look at “per capita”. If populations X and Y are both 50,000 each, and both are equally criminal in terms of behavior, you should expect them to commit roughly the same number of crimes. However, If population X is 100,000 and population Y is 50,000 and, they are both equally criminal in terms of their behavior, you should expect population X to commit twice the number of crimes as population Y. I think this is common sense. What I’m saying is that the media is presenting whites as the most criminal in terms of behavior while ignoring the huge population differences. I will run YB search and find videos that show this.
Actually, here I did commit a fallacy, since racism isn’t only expressed through hate crimes, even though hate crimes driven by racial bias is one of the worst forms of racism. And the hate crimes data I presented were specifically driven by racial/ethnic bias. So what you were implying with your statement of “don’t confuse “racist” with “hate crimes”, is incorrect. And yes, the FBI link does show that whites commit most violent crimes, but again, the concept of “per capita” is always conveniently ignored by the mainstream media. But I don’t think I communicated this very well in my previous reply. Maybe I should have said “per capita” instead of “by rate”?
I’m definitely guilty of miscommunication here. What I meant to say was that the media claims that the legal system is racist since white men receive shorter sentences than black men for the exact same crimes, but doesn’t claim that the legal system is sexist toward men since black women receive shorter sentences than white men for the exact same crime. They sweep this under the rag,
Let me give you a blatant example of open racism against whites by AOC. She said that the greatest global polluters are whites https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhV8Mx2YVOI. In fact, the greatest polluter of the planet, is China, and per capita, it’s Saudi Arabia https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions. Why did she leave them out, Richard? Should the number one polluter be left out of this conversation? Or is it because they’re not white? Of course, whites as a single race are responsible for more pollution compared to any other single race, but relative to the other races in total, whites account for less then half of the world’s pollution. If your main concern is pollution and not bashing whites, do you leave that part out? Why did she leave out China, Japan, South Korea? Also, doesn’t being technologically advanced have anything to do with how much pollution you produce? Even though she didn’t say it, she’s implying a correlation between being “white” and being a “polluter”, instead of being “technologically advanced” (or any other factor) and “being a polluter”. That is implicit racism, unless she can prove the correlation she’s suggesting. These racist and divisive comments are creating a negative environment where racism thrives. So, if we’re going to criticize Trump for making divisive comments, let’s be consistent and criticize AOC as well.
Moreover, I assume you are referring to “liberals” when you say “It’s not “our” fault that the mainstream media is gunning for a race war”. I wouldn’t make such a generalization, but many liberals are covering up for them and sadly many are even supporting them. That’s why I appreciate it when liberals such as yourself criticize the far left and I’ve acknowledged that. And this may come as a surprise to you, I’m a liberal and left leaning myself.
Regarding your last statement of “non-racist white people aren’t driven to violence by being told a lot of white people are racist”. Maybe the process of becoming a racist isn’t as simple as that, but non-racists can become racists if they are exposed to a racist environment. And the mainstream media are creating a racist environment. The irony is that they love to preach diversity.
I’m still waiting for you to present me an example of what I asked for. Blathering on about things I already refuted is not progress. It’s just an excuse not to learn anything.
I will have to respectfully disagree that you’ve refuted my points. But I don’t want this to become repetitive and I’m eager to move on from this hateful subject.
You’ve issued a challenge that I find one media source that said, “whites commit most violent crimes”. Some of the sources I will provide imply that, others state it explicitly.
In fact, I did the minimum amount of research necessary. I could have spend a few hours and would find a lot more. Especially on TYT’s channel.
I focused on “mass shootings” since that seems to be the type of violent crime the racist left-wing media loves to associate with white people.
1) This is an article by CNN from 2017 https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/03/opinions/mass-shootings-white-male-rage-modan-opinion/index.html
This is an excerpt from their article:” But this is a white man’s problem. According to an analysis by Mother Jones, out of 62 cases between 1982 and 2012 (a time period that would not include the actions of Dylann Roof or Stephen Paddock, among others), 44 of the killers were white men and only one was a woman”.
(Apparently they made mistake here, the time frame according to their source is 1982-2019)
According to the source they are citing, from 1982 to 2019, 64 out of the 115 recorded mass shootings were committed by whites, 18 were committed by blacks, 10 by Latinos, 8 by Latinos, and 4 were unknown. They are not taking into account the huge populations differences between the racial groups. And yet they are presenting mass shootings as “while male” problem. To ignore the population differences is either a sing of extreme bias or lack of basic common sense.
Here is the data in a spreadsheet from their source https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1adqcoPURQ5HNUUviKBUlyg61mSAht-hRSzFtzUr9PMI/edit?usp=sharing
The following population numbers are based on the census. There is no direct link to these data, you would need run a search to find them (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI525218):
European Whites: 60.4 %
Asian: 5.9%
Hispanic: 18.3%
Black: 13.4%
American Indian: 1.3%
Native Hawaiian: 0.2%
I don’t know how to work out mathematically what percentage of the mass shootings each racial group accounts for, but with the naked eye, it seems that whites and blacks are pretty close.
Another interesting point is that since 1982 the population disparities between whites and the rest of the racial groups were larger – the white population has been shrinking. So that also needs to be taken into account. Again, there is no direct link to these data on the census. But you can run a search. However, even if you only use today’s population differences to look at racial groups and mass shootings’ rate from 1982-2019, this still wouldn’t be a “white problem” specifically.
2) This video was published by CNN in 2014, presenting mass shootings as a “white male with mental health problems” issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1SrN2mBWD8&list=LLKmDgQoOc_3Vh4LUYKh1ShA&index=4&t=0s
3) This is an article published in 2017 by Huffpost citing the exact same study. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/read-cole-sprouses-powerful-take-on-whiteness-and-mass-shootings_n_59d27a4be4b048a443242dbc?guccounter=1
This is an excerpt from their article: “White men, in particular, have committed the majority of mass shootings in the United States ― hovering around 54 percent, according to a Mother Jones study ― even though many continue to point the finger at foreigners or religious extremists.”
Notice how they give they the mass shootings rate that whites account for but don’t do the same for any other racial group. And again, the population differences are completely ignored.
4) And this is a TYT video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-XDaUCvwao&list=LLKmDgQoOc_3Vh4LUYKh1ShA&index=3&t=0s.
Notice how Chenk is using the white governments’ and white militaries’ violent past to assign the “violent” trait to white people in general. This is by definition racism. Moreover, at the very end he says, “look at the record of who is doing most of the (mass) killings”, he is referring to whites. Again, the concept of per capita is conveniently ignored.
This is not a statement that “whites commit most violent crimes.” It is a statement about mass shootings. And it’s true.
It says “between 1982 and 2012” not “between 1982 and 2019,” indeed the CNN article dates to 2017; so what the CNN article actually said is true (it stated dates, and correctly described the data). How you think an article in 2017 could reference data in 2019 astounds me. You somehow didn’t even notice the statement in their source that says they updated their data in years after the CNN article.
So you screwed up three times here. “Mass shootings” are a subset of “violent crime” yet you conflated them. Mistake number one. Then you used data from years after the CNN article was written, which cannot convict what they said in 2017. Then you cite data that only confirms what they said: most mass shootings are by white men (by your own data: 64 out of 115; the ratio is even starker when you count mass shootings with the highest body counts).
The rest of your stuff is likewise a non sequitur. You not only failed to find any examples of the statement I asked you to find, like here above you delusionally gave me examples of completely different statements—that were true!
You clearly have no functioning epistemology. And until you fix that, nothing you believe can be trusted to be logical or sound. So you’d better get worried about how you failed here, and fix it, and then adjust your beliefs with your new, fixed epistemology, one that won’t make glaring mistakes like this.
Come back when you’ve done that.
I’m aware that just because they are saying that whites commit most mass shootings it doesn’t follow that they are saying that whites commit most violent crimes. This is common sense. I even stated in the beginning that I’m going to focus on a subset of violent crimes. So, I wouldn’t consider this a screw up.
The CNN article was published in 2017 and is citing data from 1982 to 2012 and based on that period it presents mass shootings as a white man’s problem. Just refer to the title of the article. But what I have said multiple times, they are ignoring the huge population differences. No serious criminologist will ignore that. If we can’t agree that population differences need to be taken into account, then we will obviously never agree on this.
And I don’t think the rest of my stuff was non sequitur, they are doing exactly the same thing CNN is doing – looking at the numbers while ignoring the population differences.
So going back to your challenge, you are absolutely right, I didn’t provide a media source that says that whites commit most “violent crimes”. So if this were a debate, you would have clearly won. But believe me when I tell you, this is not my main concern here. My concern is that the left-wing media is anti-wight (i.e. racist) and this the main point I wanted to put across. Whether they are presenting whites as the most prone racial group to “violent crimes” or “mass shootings” specifically, is completely irrelevant to my main concern.
What disturbs me about my self is my continual inability to communicate my thoughts clearly and I know this stems from my inability to stay focused. I don’t think my main issue is my epistemology, although I can see why it comes across that way.
Thank you for the insightful discussion, Richard.
No, you said the liberal media claim whites commit most violent crimes. That’s what you said. And you presented NO examples of that. Instead you presented examples of the media saying a completely different thing, a thing that in every case you cited was TRUE. That’s a screw up. And your refusal to admit this is indicative of a delusional resistance to evidence and reality and a failure in critical thinking. You need to see to that. Seriously.
To add on to responding to Carlo’s paranoid right-wing irrationality:
One can’t even fully defend Trump on the grounds of managing to avoid Jim Crow-style explicit racism, because he has expressly discussed immigration policy based on nationality and religion and explicitly in the context of proxies for race. He’s also endorsed stop-and-frisk, which is at best him being deliberately ignorant about the way stop and frisk was deployed with fairly explicit racial profiling.
In addition, I am willing to bet that Carlo does not think that racism is rampant against blacks. So, Carlo: Review the kinds of statements you view as anti-white. When it comes to whites, for example, it is anti-white in your mind to say that white men commit the bulk of mass shootings. Whether one can show that the data shows that or not. Whether it was said innocently or not. Given that that is your standard for whites, I invite you to think about common conservative (not even white nationalist, just conservative) claims about black communities alleging that these communities are marred by criminality, lack of focus on the family and on education, out-of-wedlock birth, welfare abuse, etc. Is that not racist? In fact, is there not quite omnipresent racist rhetoric by your own standard? (I think your standard is unduly low when it comes to whites, by the way, but that’s not the point).
Similarly, when you say that “Maybe the process of becoming a racist isn’t as simple as that, but non-racists can become racists if they are exposed to a racist environment. And the mainstream media are creating a racist environment. The irony is that they love to preach diversity”, do you also agree that perhaps phenomena like gang violence, the resentment many blacks feels against whites and against the system, etc. could be justified? If I were to point out that, insofar as the black community may have a problem with not valuing normative education (and in fact this is materially exaggerated), that can stem from the fact that many black folks’ experiences are with a system that promises them success when they get educated and then has the racial wealth gap increase after 2008 thanks in no small part to the black middle-class seeing foreclosures and loss of value to their homes, would you find that a fair point? In other words, do you extend the same compassion to angry people of color as you to do white Nazis and overt bigots?
Do you agree that when someone says “I became a racist when someone called me racist” that that is a grossly irrational response and doesn’t even count as “non-racists becom[ing] racists… [by] being exposed to a racist environment”? Do you agree that it is possible that at least some people expressing that kind of anger were actually always bigots and they’re just making excuses?
And regarding crime: Do you care that research has consistently found that, when you control for socioeconomic status and community structure, the black-white crime gap disappears? (Something that can’t be said for, say, the white collar crime gap or the disproportionate rate of white DUI)? If the media really loved diversity, wouldn’t that be constantly brought up any time we discussed black crime?
I submit to you that even when we discuss liberal media we are often seeing people more willing to have on Trump surrogates than actual leftists and we are often seeing superficial nods to diversity as a means of shoring up ratings instead of an actual defense of diversity and its values. Is that possible?
Richard, your refusal to understand my point of view is very surprising. Right, I said “violent crimes” when I should have said “mass shootings”. The point that I was making though was that the mainstream media is anti-white. One way they do that is by portraying whites as being more prone to mass shootings (I’m correcting myself). This is one of my previous quotes:
“There’s a constant bombardment of anti-white rhetoric by the left-wing media and politicians, but because it’s anti-white, it’s not considered racist. Replace “anti-white” with anti any other race, and everyone would have been calling it racist”.
This is my whole point! Nothing else. “Mass shootings” or “violent crimes”, it doesn’t matter! My point still stands!
The links that I provided show left-wing media outlets presenting mass shootings as a “white male problem”, when it’s not! White males don’t significantly commit the most mass shootings PER CAPITA than every other racial group.
If you’re going to shockingly deny the concept of “per capita”, then you need to be consistent and call AOC’s comments racist. In this video she says that the people who are responsible for the largest amount of emissions are predominantly white https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions
These are the top 5 polluters:
1. China (29%)
2. USA (16%)
3. India (7%)
4. Russia (5%)
5. Japan (4%)
First, per capita is not relevant. Because it is not what anyone said. You again found no one saying that. You keep trying to change what your sources said in order to complain about what they said but didn’t say. This is ridiculous. Stop it.
Second, even if we were to attend to per capita stats, the worst half of mass shootings (by body count) are predominately white male even per capita. Which is actually what prompted the 2017 article which nevertheless used a fortiori the 2012 data, and said it was, which doesn’t address 2019 statistics because journalists aren’t time travelers, and they didn’t claim to be using data after 2012 but explicitly said the data they were using went up to 2012. All of which you ignored.
You really need to fix your broken epistemology here. And stop making excuses for getting everything wrong and then trying to fix it by changing what you claimed and changing what your sources claimed and conflating different years.
Your cited example said this:
The thesis is that white men, as of the time of the cited study, committed most mass shootings, and yet white men are the ones doing the least to address that fact by defending the toxic masculinity version of gun culture that contributes to causing those white male mass shootings. There is nothing here about per capita. There is nothing here about data after 2012. There is nothing here about “violent crime.” White men commit most mass shootings (fact) and yet won’t take responsibility for doing anything about it (fact). Hence, a white man’s problem. White men are enabling the crime. White men are committing the crime. It is not relevant to either thesis whether minorities are also committing the crime; because fewer instances are caused by minorities, and those minorities are already calling for something to be done and being ignored.
Get right what your sources say. And stop making false statements about it. And stop using that as an excuse to denounce all media as biased. You showed no evidence of bias. Period. You either deliberately misread or otherwise misunderstood what an article said. Then kept changing your claim when you got caught doing that. That’s what happened here. You need to ask why you made all these mistakes, and thus why you had to keep changing what you and your sources claimed, to avoid being caught saying false things about both. You seem more interested in avoiding being caught making these mistakes, than fixing those mistakes. And that’s why your epistemology is broken.
Fred, right off the bat, your first paragraph is a straw man. The topic you raised was never discussed in this thread.
I bet that if you had that bet, you would lose it. Never did I deny the racism toward blacks. And no, my issue is not that the media states that whites are responsible for the bulk of mass shootings. My issue is that they present “mass shootings” as a “white male problem”. And when you take into account “per capita” (which you should, as any qualified social scientist would tell you), it is fact not.
No, I don’t believe that the resentment (this is a nice way of avoiding the word “racism”) toward whites that blacks feel is justified, unless you can provide evidence that the average white man is responsible for the current state of the black people. However, blacks have every right to feel resentment toward the system, but what they should also do is acknowledge the fact the toxic black community is also largely (if not mostly?) responsible for the state that they are in. It may surprise you that the top income earners in the US are in fact Asians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income#cite_note-byrace-1. Isn’t that a surprising fact about a system governed by “white supremacy”. Maybe white supremacy isn’t that determining a factor as the Left wants you to think.
And of course, if one says “I became a racist when someone called me racist”, it is not only irrational, but immoral, too. You are basically blaming an entire group of people for what a subset of that group has done! Why?? When have I supported this?? I don’t know why you brought this up, either. The straw men are piling up.
What the media need to do is stop being racist because they are creating a racist-producing environment. They must report facts objectively, without their anti-white agenda. But I find it ironic that you earlier accused me of being irrational when you didn’t present a single piece of evidence in your reply.
Regarding the first paragraph: Yeah, your epistemology is still broken. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t say that Trump wasn’t a racist because he wasn’t engaging in de jure racism. It’s still relevant to your argument because rational people should change how they assess a person’s statements and deeds based on other statements and deeds. It’s standard Bayesianism: your priors need to update as you get new data. The fact that Trump arguably is imposing de jure racism and is inarguably imposing de jure religious discrimination puts his original comments in greater context.
But you shouldn’t need that context. “They’re rapists” is a racist statement. It’s not hard to parse: Trump didn’t say “Some Mexicans are rapists” or “Mexicans are more likely to be rapists”, the latter of which isn’t even true; he just flatly referred to an entire group as a monolith. And your double standard is incredibly illustrative. When it comes to Mother Jones, if you (incorrectly) think that they are inaccurate about their assessment of who commits the greatest number of shootings, they are being racist. But if Trump decides to open his entire campaign with a statement where the best he can say about Mexicans is “Some… are good people”, implying that less than the majority are (that is what the word “some” means), that’s not racist. Mother Jones can’t make the claim that white culture has a problem with toxic masculinity, but Trump can routinely demonize immigrants.
If your racist uncle said any number of Trump quotes, or if I were to say “They’re mass shooters” about whites, I have no doubt you would instantly see the problem. You would see how bigoted it is to ascribe to an entire group the behavior of a tiny minority, without even trying to explain how the entire group may be responsible for that minority.
We can see this with your varying treatment of Trump and AOC. When it comes to AOC, you engage in hairsplitting levels of pedantry to try to arrive at the conclusion that she’s a racist. Yes, Saudi Arabia is the leading per capita emitter and China is the leading emitter. But neither of those data points refute her claim, and you would know this if you weren’t committed, for whatever reason, to find anti-white racism while minimizing racism elsewhere. Her point, that forcing the Third World and countries like China and Saudi Arabia to take a huge share of the work ignores that the United States and Europe are both regions with both huge populations and huge carbon footprints, is still valid. Like, do you care that Saudi Arabia’s entire economy basically hinges on its petroleum, so of course its emissions are likely to be higher than one would otherwise expect? The fact remains that if you could get one country to drastically lower its emissions, it would be the U.S., because we are the intersection of one of the highest per capita rates and one of the highest national rates. Moreover, the U.S. (and to a lesser extent Europe) are also the problem historically and in a broader context. The U.S.’ politics drive petrochemical use, and we have historically been chief emitters. Ignoring that and pretending that the world should all be equally invested in cutting back on emissions when some (namely America, Europe, the Anglosphere and Japan) were able to reap the benefits of petroleum usage for so long while others are just now developing to a standard we had decades ago just colonialism. You don’t care about any of that context when it comes to evaluating AOC’s claims, her motives or the implications of her argument.
But when it comes to Trump, he can say “They’re rapists” about an entire group and that’s not racist. You don’t subject him to pedantic hairsplitting, let alone the actually valid examination of whether his argument holds any water whatsoever. Trump can pose drug dealing or rape as a Mexican problem, flatly and clearly, and you defend that comment as not racist. He can then go on to talk about “shithole countries” and wanting Norwegian immigrants and arguing that a judge can’t preside over his case because that judge is Mexican so that judge clearly can’t be rational about Trump being mean to other Mexicans, and you don’t then go back and agree that the liberal media got him right and interpreted his comments accurately. That’s a double standard. It makes you irrational.
Now, why is Mother Jones not racist? (Not that it should matter because your double standard isn’t justified). Because Mother Jones is not saying that whites are biologically predisposed to be more violent, nor are they making a monolithic cultural claim. Mother Jones isn’t saying “Whites are mass shooters” the way Trump says “[Mexicans] are rapists”. Mother Jones is saying, “The culture of people who we call ‘white’, people of European descent, includes a problem of toxic masculinity. Some people have these issues of race and gender, but the rest of the community doesn’t seem to be doing as much as they can about it”.
Now, you could do one of two things. You could say that any discussion of group trends based on race or ethnicity or nationality is racist. Then you better admit that the Trump administration is racist, and his original speech was racist. Or you could say, as most people do, that it is reasonable to look at ethno-racial groups from a cultural perspective and make careful, measured arguments, even if one is ultimately incorrect, as long as one takes pains to avoid stereotyping. So which is it? Is the claim “Blacks are more likely to vote Democrat than whites” a racist one? You need to pick. And stop using an equivocation fallacy where you apply a definition of “racism” to Mother Jones that you don’t to Trump. (And while you’re at it, look up Bob Blauner’s “Talking Past Each Other” where he explores quite carefully and in a nuanced fashion how both whites/blacks and liberals/conservatives often talk past each other on issues of race because whites/conservatives are more likely to think of racism as an individual personality flaw, like being a Klansman, while blacks and liberals see racism as including that but also including less pernicious levels of conscious or unconscious hostility as well as systemic racism that is born at the least from the majority group that has the actual power not caring enough about not being racist to do something about it).
As for anti-white resentment: First of all, I didn’t just mean “justified” in the sense of “rational”, I meant in the sense of “understandable given the context”. But even by your ludicrous standard that the majority has to be responsible for your condition, blacks can make an argument that whites qualify. Outright majorities or pluralities of whites vote Republican. Large groups of whites admit to thinking that blacks are genetically inferior, and larger groups admit to having racial resentments and anxieties. Depending on what question you ask, either a plurality or a majority of whites admit to some overtly racially hostile sentiment. That in turn allows the racist drug war, and racist police departments, and widespread job and housing discrimination, to continue. The fact that you can’t admit that whites, especially white males, voting en masse for a fascist might make it at least somewhat understandable (if ultimately not rational) for some people of color to resent whites is pretty impressive double-think.
But your standard is bullshit. Let’s say that only 5% of whites are hardcore racists. That’s actually a reasonable level given polls. Heck, we can even make it 2.5%. But that would mean that one out of every forty cops that a black person encounters thinks they are subhuman, one out of every forty managers or employers or landlords or superintendents will be predisposed to discriminate against them, etc. That would be enough to lead to substantial difference in outcomes. And it would make it reasonable to ask, “Are the other 97.5% of white folks doing enough to deal with these racists in their fold?”
After all, even that liberal media will happily bend over backwards to apologize for Trump voters. How many think pieces have tried to claim that the people screaming “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” are actually people motivated by economic anxiety, despite the fact that blacks and Hispanics don’t respond that way to their own economic anxiety and despite the fact that Trump supporters are actually likely to be more affluent than a comparable Democratic voter? It’s not wrong, incidentally, to look at how economic changes can be a part of the puzzle, but it does become deeply questionable (and seeming to almost be white liberals coming to the defense of other whites instead of being honest) when one puts that message front and center instead of admitting that it’s also the case that a lot of whites have a problem with multiculturalism, Islam, and immigration, and are willing to vote against their own economic interests because of their religious dominionism, racism and sexism.
And, again, what a double standard. You are happy to allege widespread bias against whites, and claim that they could therefore become racist (excusing them for their own failures and problems), based on a few thinkpieces, but you won’t accept that maybe living in a ghetto may make you racist against whites. You said it: A racist environment can make people who wouldn’t otherwise be racist into racists. But apparently, you actually just meant white folks. So which is it? If liberal think pieces on toxic masculinity are enough to make whites into racists, why aren’t conservative think pieces about black folks needing to stop having kids out of wedlock and take personal responsibility and that they’re overreacting and engaging in race hucksterism when they say that cops need to do something enough to justify black folks being racist?
As for Asians: Did you know that that’s called the “Asian model minority myth” and is a famously debunked argument, which takes the tiniest bit of sociological research to confirm? Con-Fusion Ethic: How Whites Use Asians to Further Anti-Black Racism is a good primer, but if you don’t like Tim Wise, you can look up “Asian model minority myth” and see the problem. No one takes this comparison seriously in sociology. The issue is that it’s a bullshit comparison, and a result of not using proper statistical controls. Asians are more likely to be in higher-income regions of the country which also means they are in areas of higher living costs (regions like California, Hawaii and New York), are more likely to have larger families which both artificially inflates their household income and also means that even on a per-capita basis they have more people to provide for, and are much more likely to be voluntary immigrants which means that they are far more likely to have entrepreneurial backgrounds and motivations than a group that is inherently a cross-section of talents and personality types than native blacks. This is literally sociology 101. When you actually compare Asians to whites and blacks that are like them, you find that Asians actually face serious challenges. This becomes extremely obvious when you look at a group that are more likely to be immigrants of desperation, Vietnamese-Americans and other Indochinese immigrants, and find that their welfare receipt rates, poverty levels, levels of gang violence, etc. much more closely emulate blacks.
I can forgive you not knowing that, but maybe you should have done an ounce of research to see if people had responded to this incredibly obvious point. (They have, it’s a right-wing PRATT, and you repeating it shows that you don’t have the requisite information to actually evaluate the arguments). But there’s a deeper problem.
So what if Asians make more than whites?
Imagine I shoot two people, we’ll say an Asian woman and a black woman for the sake of the analogy. The black woman struggles to recover, and has her disability ruin her life. The Asian woman thrives, taking this challenge to get a new lease on life.
What does that have to do with me shooting them?
Yes, both Asians and blacks have endured systemic racism. But even if it were the case that one group endured the same amount and responded better, that doesn’t justify the racism. It doesn’t mean that shooting people is okay or benign. It doesn’t even deny, to people who aren’t moral monsters, that I as the shooter and America as the racist society owe something to our victims who didn’t thrive.
It gets worse when you realize that literally everyone who makes this argument just pretends that it’s taken for granted that Asians and blacks have endured similar amounts of racism. Maybe Asians endured less and so they thrived more. After all, Asians never had an entire system of racialized slavery targeted at them for about two and a half centuries then had an additional system of targeted apartheid at them. The Klan did not primarily form to terrorize Asians. Your argument just erroneously assumes that the issue is a binary, that you either endure racism or you don’t. That’s obviously false. But even if it’s not, it’s still a premise that neither you nor anyone else establish.
Oh, and the Asian model minority myth is also deeply racist to Asians. Why? Because it acts to push forward a stereotype of them succeeding when, even if that were to be statistically true on average, ignores all those millions of Asians who are struggling and don’t match the stereotype. Go ahead and do some research as to what Asians themselves think of the myth. You’ll find a lot of articles pointing out how much it polices their behavior.
You didn’t think about any of that. You just parroted an overtly fallacious argument that assumes facts not in evidence and premises not established that, even if true, would be irrelevant. And you didn’t do any research to see if there may be some reason that blacks and Asians are struggling differently that may go beyond the conservative mythmaking of “Blacks need to take personal responsibility”.
I know you may not think it, but you’re actually deeply entrenched in a bias that lets you view white folks as humans who can make flawed decisions and can still have dignity as a result but you don’t extend that same courtesy to liberals or people of color. When they do it, it’s racism. When you do it, you’re being taken out of context. Pick one. Be consistent. Please.
Per capita is very relevant. And I’m not trying to change what my sources are saying. Consider this quote from the CNN article: “But this is a white man’s problem”. They are racially profiling whites as more problematic than the rest of the racial groups. If you have a racial group that is significantly committing mass shootings at rates higher than the rest of the groups, then racially profiling makes sense, as that would indicate that there is something about that group’s overall behavior that’s significantly worse than the rest of the groups. However, if the rates are similar, then racial profiling makes no sense (unless you have some agenda). In this scenario, it’s more likely to be a problem with the American culture and leadership.
I actually went ahead and hired a sociologist to work out the rates at which 5 racial groups commit mass shootings relative to their population sizes and, the number of victims each group accounts for in %. I used the CNN source for this. Please note that the further back you go the larger the white population size was relative to the rest of the racial groups. These are the results:
Incidence of Mass Shootings:
Whites: 8.84%
Latinos: 7.69%
Blacks: 14.52%
Asians: 20.48%
Native Americans: 29.46%
Number of Victims:
Whites: 11.49%
Latinos: 2.96%
Blacks: 7.52%
Asians: 14.07%
Native Americans: 13.24%
I have the excel sheet with all the data but I couldn’t upload it here. I can email it to you if you want. Feel free to hire your own sociologist to fact check these data. Just go to Upwork.com and post a job request.
Moreover, consider this quote from the CNN article “But this is a white man’s problem. According to an analysis by Mother Jones, out of 62 cases between 1982 and 2012 (a time period that would not include the actions of Dylann Roof or Stephen Paddock, among others), 44 of the killers were white men and only one was a woman.” See the time period the article is looking at to qualify their statement of “But this is a white man’s problem”. So your argument of whites being accountable for the worst half of the mass shootings isn’t relevant. The article doesn’t even do that.
And yes, I’ve already acknowledged that I’ve made some very reckless claims. I never tried to make any excuses for them. I was just reckless, period. And I’ve corrected them after you pointed them out.
Regarding white men doing the least to address this problem when minorities are calling for a solution. This needs to be substantiated. I need to see evidence that the average black, Hispanic, Asian, etc., is more concerned with finding a solution than the average white.
It’s no surprise that they are blaming “white toxic masculinity”. What a shocker. To be honest, I don’t know what’s causing these mass shootings. There are probably multiple causes. But a renowned physician who is also a prolific scientist with many publications, believes that the primary cause is a nutritional deficiency in the brain (which causes mental health problems) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmcvtQ4BkZE. You can look him up. He was even nominated for a Nobel prize for his work (I forget was his was nominated for).
This is another physician who believes that this is a mental health issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4BLYPdYcdE
So I stand by my claim that the mainstream media are biased against whites and I do denounce all of them. Send me a video of any left-wing, mainstream media outlet calling out AOC for her anti-wight comments – that would definitely catch my attention.
They are not racially profiling. They are stating a true fact, backed by the data they actually cited.
Until you acknowledge this, you are wasting everyone’s time here.
Fred, not only did I not say that Trump was not a racist, but I acknowledged that he was. So again, your first paragraph is one big straw man.
What group was Trump referring to when he made those comments? Paste his comments right here. The group was Mexicans who were crossing the border illegally. Not Mexicans in general. This distinction is huge. Regarding the Mother Jones study, I repeat for the umpteenth time, I’m not disputing the number of mass shootings, I’m disputing the rate at which each racial group commits mass shootings. And whites are not committing most mass shooting by rate. If they were, labeling the issue as a “white problem” would be perfectly justified. The only thing white people are “guilty” of is being the overwhelming majority of the population.
Regarding if my racist uncle said any number of Trump’s quotes… I could reverse that on you very easily. “If the mainstream media were as anti-black or anti-Latino as they are anti-white, I have no doubt you would instantly see the problem. You would see how bigoted it is to ascribe to an entire group the behavior of a tiny minority, without even trying to explain how the entire group may be responsible for that minority”. You see how easy that was? Just listen to Cenk’s statement that whites in genera are violent people. I provided the link. Moroever, when you claim that something is a “white problem”, you are suggesting that there is issue with the entire group. That’s racist, unless you can prove it’s true. And FYI, bigoted does not necessarily equate with racism. I agree that Trump’s comments were bigoted, but not racist. You are conflating the two.
It’s ironic that you accused me of hairsplitting regarding AOC’s comments. Watch the video again. She is claiming that “Whites are predominantly responsible for emissions”. That’s a claim in and of itself and it’s false. Just look at the numbers. It’s not a matter of opinion. Then you went along to make excuses for China and Saudi Arabia which are separate statements. You are deliberately conflating the statements here to cover up AOC’s racist comments.
I don’t recall Trump’s exact comments about Africa, I know he called African countries shitholes but I’m missing the context. In this discussion Richard and I agreed that if something is true, we wouldn’t consider it racist. Would you disagree with that? To publicly call African countries shitholes is a pretty shitty and insensitive thing to say but… they are 3rd world countries and are in a mess in so many ways (I know, I have a lot of family there). Anyhow, the point you are raising here is irrelevant because I repeat, I’ve already acknowledged that Trump is a racist. I don’t cover up for racists like you shamelessly did for AOC.
Regarding the Mother Jones study, again another straw man. I never said that the study was racist. And I never said that anyone claimed that whites are biologically predisposed to anything. A race doesn’t need to be biologically predisposed to a certain type of behavior in order to share a certain behavior. Not even sure why you’re bringing up the biological element here.
Please give me examples of the Trump administration being racist and I will surely condemn them. Moreover, regarding what definition of racism I’m using, this is telling that you are not following the discussion carefully. Re-read everything from the start and make an effort to understand what I’m saying.
“Justifiable” and “understandable” are not the same thing. If you said one thing but meant something else, it’s not my fault. Moreover, you claimed that the blacks’ resentment toward whites is justified. And I said, only if you can show that whites in general are responsible for the current state the blacks are in. How the fuck is my standard “ludicrous”? If you feel resentment toward an individual or group, in order for that resentment to be morally justified, the object of that resentment needs to have done something deserving of it, right? YOU were the one who claimed that blacks feel resentment toward whites, and naturally this begs the question, are whites in general deserving of that resentment? And I know that large groups of whites vote Republican, but large groups of whites also vote Democrat. So what? For the past 70 years, there’s been almost as many Democrat presidents as there have been Republican presidents and, in terms of the House, Democrats and Republican have had the majority the same number of times for the past 70 years. This can be easily verified. I don’t need to provide a link for this. Has that made a difference with state of the black community? Also, as if the minorities’ issue is the only thing one should take into account when deciding who they should vote for. There are so many things that need to be taken into account. Then you go on to say that whites think that blacks are genetically inferior and that they feel resentment toward blacks. First off, you cite no evidence. Second, are you saying that it’s okay for blacks to feel resentment and not whites? Who’s applying the double standard now?
Then you go on to say that whites have a problem with Islam, multiculturalism, and immigration. Regarding Islam, if whites have a problem with it, I commend them! Islam is an oppressive, misogynistic, and homophobic ideology – extremely toxic and divisive. The reason why you’re bringing up Islam, is that you’ve been conditioned by left-wing politicians and the media to think that Islam is a religion of piece. Stop trying to sell this crap to me. Regarding multiculturalism, according to pew research, 55% of whites, 59% of blacks, and 60% of Hispanics believe that ethnic diversity is a good thing. Moreover, 64% of whites, 58% of blacks, and 70% of Hispanics, believe that racial and ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the country’s culture https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/05/08/americans-see-advantages-and-challenges-in-countrys-growing-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/. But for some “mysterious” reason, you are convinced that whites relative to the rest of the racial groups, have an issue with diversity. Stop. Believing. Left-Wing. Propaganda. And regrading immigration, don’t conflate immigration with illegal immigration. But I would like to see your sources for that. I would like to see sources from you in general because so far you haven’t provided any.
Yes, I said that a racist environment produces racists. However, what I did not say is that people who become racists merely because they are in a racist environment, are morally justified. I never made any excuses for them and I did not apply a double standard. Please re-read what I said very carefully and stop putting words in my mouth. And yes, the blacks who keep blaming whites for everything need to take a good look in the mirror and at their messed-up communities. And they should stop bullying their fellow blacks who try to speak out against the toxic black community and they should stop calling them “coons” and “uncle’s Toms”.
As for the Asian myth. You recommended I read “Con-Fusion Ethic: How Whites Use Asians to Further Anti-Black Racism” (congrats on providing your first citation, sort of..). If you recall, I acknowledged that white privilege exists, and I never claimed that blacks haven’t been discriminated against. What I claimed was that perhaps the system wasn’t the biggest factor that accounts for the current state that the black community is in, which is what the corrupt Left wants you to think. Of course, there are factors like education, personality types, location that account for why Asians are the highest income earners. That’s just proves my point, there also other factors that determine your economic status. So all the scenarios you gave are irrelevant. More straw men. And the idea that it’s racist to say that Asians are the highest income group is so laughable. They are the highest, it’s a fact, and therefore not racist. The left-wing media and politicians are fucking with your heads. You see racism everywhere. This is paranoia.
I have a confession to make. As soon as I saw your reply, I thought… “Holy Shit!”. I almost didn’t read it due to its extensive length. Here are a few tips to keep your replies short. Respond specifically to a point I’ve made. Don’t repeat yourself. When there’s agreement about something, such as “Trump is a racist” there’s no need to bring up another 10 examples to support that point. It’s redundant and you come across as a paranoid, virtue signaler. When an issue has been discussed with no resolution, if you are going to re-open that topic, don’t use the exact same points that were used before. I’m referring specifically to Trump’s supposed racist comments about Mexicans. You used the exact same reasons Richard gave which I had already said that I disagreed with. So there’s no point repeating them. Try something new or don’t bring it up at all. And just keep your responses short and sweet without any fluff. So, for you next reply, I kindly request that it’s not this long or else I will not read it. Unless of course you’re just looking to get a pat on the back from Richard.
And again, Carlo, I’m pointing out that even your defense of his original statement as not racist is bull precisely because we both know the man is a racist. You cannot interpret someone’s statements in a vacuum. We know that what Trump meant was bigoted, because he is a bigot. So you’re the one engaging with a strawman.
You say “What group was Trump referring to when he made those comments? Paste his comments right here. The group was Mexicans who were crossing the border illegally”. First of all, no he wasn’t. He didn’t specify illegals. He said,
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”
That isn’t specifying illegal immigration. It’s talking about all Mexican immigrants, period. Let’s say he then went on to specify illegals. Not only would his carelessness here still be racist, but the very conflation of illegal with legal immigration as if they’re one and the same is itself a racist tactic. You actually have to look further and see if someone is ably differentiating between legal and illegal seekers. His administration’s outright refusal to honor asylum laws should settle that one for you.
Look how broken your epistemology is. You had to make up a clarification that he didn’t make in order to defend him. This is done constantly. When he talked about MS-13, people had to make apologetics for him.
But even so… “All Mexican illegal immigrants are rapists” (and yes I know he didn’t say that but I’m having to handhold you to a conclusion you would have arrived at organically if you were capable of being honest here) is still a racist conclusion. It doesn’t matter if you’re only racist to some people of that race. “Oh, I’m okay with the good ones” is classic, stereotypical racism. Trump’s comment falsely stereotyped a group of people based on ethno-racial and national characteristics. It doesn’t matter if he was talking about all Mexicans, or all Mexican immigrants, or all Mexican undocumented people (even the term “illegal” is racist because it presupposes that every undocumented person is illegal rather than recognizing that some have valid asylum claims, some are waiting on documentation, etc.).
If I say “Fat black people are so stupid”, I’m still being racist because I’m talking about a monolith of black people. The fact that I specified a subset doesn’t help. It is still a racist logic.
In fact, talking about Mexicans in this context is itself racist! Because not all immigrants from south of the border are Mexican (they come from all over Central and South America), and immigrants in general include a panoply of people from China onwards! So the fact that Trump immediately jumped to talking about Mexico, in a time period where we actually have more immigrants from China, is itself an indication of racist assumptions and mythology! This is basic stuff, man.
You then say that whites aren’t committing most of the mass shootings by rate. How the fuck are you arriving at that conclusion? The central data storage for mass shooters is not that good. https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/oct/06/newsweek/are-white-males-responsible-more-mass-shootings-an/ . This is basic stuff. But most of the people who have looked have found that white men are either overrepresented or roughly evenly represented. So when Mother Jones says that white folks have a mass shooting problem, they’re right. As Richard keeps pointing out to you, every specific statistic you cited is correct. You may not like what Mother Jones is doing or concluding from the evidence, but every specific claim they make is well-supported.
In contrast, Trumpians try to claim that there’s mass voting fraud, or that undocumenteds commit more crime, or that they’re welfare sponges. They use constant PRATTS to defend their bullshit xenophobia. You don’t talk about that. You don’t contextualize Trump’s original comments in that light. Thus far, you’e focused on Trump’s overtly racist comments not being racist by engaging in revisionism, then on trying to paint AOC and Mother Jones as racists because you disagree with their characterization of data. AOC and Mother Jones don’t say anything as blunt and extreme as “They’re rapists” (which, even about undocumented immigrants, is still false), but you think Trump’s comments weren’t racist and theirs were. That’s a double standard.
And from your double standard, which becomes an equivocation fallacy in discussion because you are functionally using two different definitions of racism, you argue that progressives are anti-white bigots. So your double standard cuts to the heart of the problem. If you were consistent, applying the standard that you apply to AOC to Trump or vice versa, you would have to come to the conclusion that the primary purveyors of racism, by far, are the political right. Just like they always have been.
You then say, “You see how easy that was? Just listen to Cenk’s statement that whites in genera are violent people. I provided the link. Moroever, when you claim that something is a “white problem”, you are suggesting that there is issue with the entire group. That’s racist, unless you can prove it’s true. And FYI, bigoted does not necessarily equate with racism. I agree that Trump’s comments were bigoted, but not racist. You are conflating the two.”
But Cenk isn’t the entirety of the media, man. He’s sure as heck not the President. Moreover, notice how you don’t quote Cenk. In fact, what Cenk said (and notice how much more careful and specific this is than Trump’s broad barrage), “Let’s note that about three-quarters of the violence done by extremists and the murders done by extremists in this country over the last decade are by white right-wingers. That’s a fact. If you want to cry about that fact, that’s up to you”. Cenk didn’t say that the vast majority of whites are terrorists. He said the vast majority of right-wing terrorists are white. That’s just true. And it’s not unreasonable to ask if there is something about the community that produces that. Just like it is not unreasonable to point to radical Islam as causing violence, not to say that all Muslims are violent or anything of the sort or to argue for profiling Muslims but just to note that there is a group of Muslims who think this way, it is not unreasonable to look at the racial disproportion of right-wing extremists and try to figure out what cultural antecedents are at play.
So, again, Carlo, if Cenk makes an actually fact-based argument with a set of premises (about three-quarters of extremist violence is by the disproportionately white right-wing, people like Dylann Roof are terrorists, etc.) that happens to discuss white people at all, that’s racist. But if Trump flat out says “Mexicans” and “Mexico”, that isn’t. Pick one, Carlo. Choose which one is racist. The goalpost moving isn’t going to help you here.
And no, in fact I am not saying any such thing! Carlo, let’s say that I say that a house has a termite problem. That means that termites keep coming back. Does it mean that every wall is riddled with termites? No!
Whites have a toxic masculinity problem in the sense that the community in total has some representatives spreading toxic masculinity as an ideology, others blithely defending it, others doing nothing, and others opposing it. The group isn’t a monolith, but in total there is a problem. Some of the walls have termites in them. And insofar as there is a community that can be called “white” (and thanks to spatial segregation and macrostructural factors and ghettos and countless other issues there is), that community can be said to have a toxic masculinity problem. It affects a large enough group and is actively promoted by enough people that one can look at it as something the community needs to deal with. The very fact that Mother Jones is calling to the vast majority of decent white folks to clean up their community is a sign of them not being racist.
You then say “But for some “mysterious” reason, you are convinced that whites relative to the rest of the racial groups, have an issue with diversity. Stop. Believing. Left-Wing. Propaganda. And regrading immigration, don’t conflate immigration with illegal immigration. But I would like to see your sources for that. I would like to see sources from you in general because so far you haven’t provided any.” But, first of all, you didn’t quote me as saying that. Whites could in theory be totally fine with diversity in theory, but in practice not actually do the things that address the causes of inequity and injustice. All I was pointing to was the reality that a lot of whites do have discriminatory ideas (which is true), that many continue to vote for candidates and support policies that have negative racial impacts (true), etc. All of which you failed to address. You also failed to address my point that a small minority could cause an immense amount of damage on their own.
In fact, whites could be better about embracing diversity than blacks but still be helping to cause the problem because their power and numbers mean they have a greater influence. Let’s say that 89% of whites and 84% of blacks are pro-diversity. When the vast majority of CEOs, managers, etc. are going to be white due to prior inequalities and ongoing systemic problems, that still means that the 11% of whites who aren’t pro-diversity will have an infinitely larger negative impact than the 16% of blacks. Which would then mean that focusing on whites would still be the rational decision, because they share a higher proportion of the blame. With great power comes great responsibility. And the fact that you’re unable to think about these issues deeply enough to consider that possibility is worrisome. Again, broken epistemology.
But, of course, you’re wrong. People have done the work, man. We know that in fact it is whites who are most likely to oppose anti-racism work, to be against diversity, etc. I don’t have to point to the far right either, the disproportionately white Nazis who try to attack the idea that “Diversity is strength” and screech against diversity, or even to people like Tucker Carlson. I can point to sociologically verified facts. You can dismiss these points a priori as propaganda, but that’s just your broken epistemology, again.
*Research that finds that blacks prefer integrated communities more than whites do, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3086462?seq=1 (and that in fact white flight is overwhelmingly caused by white resentment and fear (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/welcome-neighbors-new-evidence-on-the-possibility-of-stable-racial-integration/) [and by the way I just used two sources there but that conclusion has been repeatedly confirmed over and over again]
*Polls that similarly show that blacks lead in terms of preferring diverse communities (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/02/americans-say-they-like-diverse-communities-election-census-trends-suggest-otherwise/)
*Journalism and research alike that shows how whites self-segregate (https://www.vox.com/2017/1/18/14296126/white-segregated-suburb-neighborhood-cartoon)
*Martin Gilens’ research (see Why Americans Hate Welfare) and other research done in the same vein that shows that the greatest root for anti-welfare and similar right-wing sentiment is racial anxiety and resentment (so the fact that blacks tend to be voting for welfare and for more progressive and unifying candidates shows their relative lack)
*The research that shows that whites view racism as a zero sum game in a way other groups generally do not (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=40027)
So, actually, yeah, empirically speaking whites are more likely to be anti-diversity. Your first clue should have been that whites are more likely to vote Republican.
And I don’t even need to point to, say, Pager or Bertrand and Mullainathan or the SAGE studies or the IAT studies or countless other pieces of research that indicate the depth of evidence for discrimination against blacks. That evidence, of course, in a majority white society shows that (even if whites were only as bigoted as everyone else on average) that most of the problem with discrimination will be white-on-black. Because whites have the power. Get it?
Now, be honest. Did you do any of that research? Were you aware of any of that? Gilens’ work, or the work of Oliver and Shapiro on the gaps in black and white wealth, or the work that convinced WJ Wilson that discrimination was a bigger problem than he had thought, or Steinberg’s work that includes examining white communities, are all careful sociology. And yet you a priori dismissed all of it is right wing propaganda, and then stumbled into a debate with someone who actually studied this stuff for their degree. So I am telling you, right now, that the left is generally correct, empirically and factually correct, on racial issues. We are generally correct that the power balance in favor of whites, due to historical and other factors, means that white racism and bias has much more impact. We are generally correct that dealing with racism means being open and frank about biases. We are generally correct that color-blind liberalism and conservatism fail.
You then say “Yes, I said that a racist environment produces racists. However, what I did not say is that people who become racists merely because they are in a racist environment, are morally justified. I never made any excuses for them and I did not apply a double standard. Please re-read what I said very carefully and stop putting words in my mouth. And yes, the blacks who keep blaming whites for everything need to take a good look in the mirror and at their messed-up communities. And they should stop bullying their fellow blacks who try to speak out against the toxic black community and they should stop calling them “coons” and “uncle’s Toms””. Okay, first of all, you were far from clear on that front. You never made clear that even if the media were anti-white that one should still reject racist thought.
But, again, that’s not all you did. You tried to pretend that there’s no reason that blacks could have attitudes that are motivated by white resentment for understandable, if not justifiable, reasons. You didn’t say “Okay, yeah, I can see how living in a ghetto can make someone pissed at whites for having allowed that situation to persist and creating it in the first place”.
Even now, you persist in the double standard. You never said that whites need to stop bitching about the left-wing media, stop bitching about anti-white sentiment, and focus on fixing their communities, being less racist and stopping electing Trumps. But you happily will wag your finger at another community and tell them what to do. You never were able to admit that in fact huge swaths of the media.repeat racist mythologies and don’t correct them. You were never able to focus on the ongoing problems that whites cause in these communities and tell them to fix that. For example:
*Disproportionately white politicians elected by white voters aren’t funding lead cessation approaches to get lead, that disproportionately harms blacks and the poor, out of homes and thus stop an epidemic of lead poisoning (our attempt to confront by banning lead in gas and paint, by the way, may have caused the decline in crime in the 90s, the degree of poisoning was that severe)
*Disproportionately white police officers in many jurisdictions engaging in biased policing practices
*The massive discrimination that occurred against blacks in the 2008 recession that caused the black-white wealth gap to actually increase (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-has-changed-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-and-income/), and the fact that disproportionately white CEOs and white collar criminals caused systemic failure that was born disproportionately by blacks and the poor
By the way, speaking of the media? You decided not to look into the literature that shows that even the liberal media (which you falsely claim is 99% of the media based on a methodology you pulled from your backside) is biased against blacks. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819017 is just one of many, many studies that have found that the media depicts blacks differently than whites in a deleterious fashion and thereby exaggerates the degree of black criminality.
Again, Carlo, you need to pick one and stop playing this identity politics game. If black communities need to do something about their own problems, as I agree they do, so do white communities. If it’s not racist for you to tell people to “keep blaming whites for everything”. it’s not racist for Mother Jones to tell whites to stop whining “MUH GUNS!” when another mass shooting happens.
You then say “As for the Asian myth. You recommended I read “Con-Fusion Ethic: How Whites Use Asians to Further Anti-Black Racism” (congrats on providing your first citation, sort of..). If you recall, I acknowledged that white privilege exists, and I never claimed that blacks haven’t been discriminated against. What I claimed was that perhaps the system wasn’t the biggest factor that accounts for the current state that the black community is in, which is what the corrupt Left wants you to think. Of course, there are factors like education, personality types, location that account for why Asians are the highest income earners. That’s just proves my point, there also other factors that determine your economic status. So all the scenarios you gave are irrelevant. More straw men. And the idea that it’s racist to say that Asians are the highest income group is so laughable. They are the highest, it’s a fact, and therefore not racist. The left-wing media and politicians are fucking with your heads. You see racism everywhere. This is paranoia.”
But… you didn’t read the goddamn article, man. Tim is pointing out that in fact it is the systemic factors at play. So now I’m just going to have throw citations at you, but we’ll get there after I smack you for sweeping this under the rug.
If Asian success is due to them being self-selected immigrants, being in higher-income areas, etc., and if (as Wise says) it is true that “On average, APAs with a college degree earn 11 percent less than comparable whites, and APAs with a high school diploma earn, on average, 26 percent less than their white counterparts. When Asian American men have qualifications comparable to white men, they still receive fewer high-ranking positions than those same white men. APA male engineers and scientists are 20 percent less likely than white men to move into management positions in their respective companies, despite no differences in ambition or desire for such positions”, then in fact the primary determinants of problems in community are systemic.
If you had read the damn article, you would have realized that Tim is making a very strong case for the individual success of people being determined by structural factors. You’re free to disagree with him, but what you can’t do is just concede he’s right and then keep on trying to pussyfoot about.
And the degree of sociological ignorance is staggering when you say, and I have to quote you again because it is literally unbelievable that you said this, ” Of course, there are factors like education, personality types, location that account for why Asians are the highest income earners”.
Dude. What do you think determines where you live? What education you had access to? What your personality is? What your family size is?
Society! The system!
You’re not explaining racism away, you’re just redefining terms. And in so doing, apparently failing to understand simple points like that Asians aren’t actually earning more, you doofus, that’s an artifact, you have to correct for purchasing power! They’re not doing better, they just have higher paychecks to buy more expensive stuff!
The reality is that Tim showed that there are a host of macrostructural, cultural and economic factors that are beyond the choice of individuals and even whole communities that explain where they get.
So! Shall we review the macrostructural problems that blacks face?
Pager’s study found that blacks without a felony were less likely to be offered a job than whites with one.
*Bertrand and Mullainathan’s work, followed by others, repeatedly shows that paired audit studies establish from banking to employment onwards that whites and blacks with identical resumes or applications will be treated differently in hiring, (https://economics.mit.edu/files/11449) , research that has been confirmed elsewhere showing discrimination has not declined since the 80s (https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/11/1706255114)
*Oliver and Shapiro’s Black Wealth, White Wealth establishes countless factors that indicate why the black-white wealth gap (much* larger than the black-white income gap) is intergenerational, linked to everything from prior policies like the FHA loans (that gave literal trillions to whites while using racial covenants to deprive those from blacks) to ongoing factors
*The work by Andrew Brimmer indicating that employment discrimination costs the economy tens to hundreds of billions in lost productivity
*Research that establishes the health costs of micro-aggressions (https://www.centerforhealthjournalism.org/2017/11/08/how-racism-and-microaggressions-lead-worse-health , https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363167/ , and much of this is research done in medical journals)
*Disproportionate likelihood of being exposed to lead paint and other toxins
*Ongoing school segregation – see Paul Street’s Segregated Schools
Which makes us come to a really simple point here.
Either you’re a racist or you’re not.
Blacks own 1% of the nation’s wealth. They make up about 12-13% of the nation’s population. Huge swaths of blacks are descended from slave families, meaning these are people who have been in the nation for centuries: they should be like WASPs.
If you think black folks are essentially equal to whites in terms of their predispositions to intelligence and character, you should assume that something had to go wrong to get to that 12-13%. Even if blacks had a bad culture today, that would, as the original Moynihan Report made clear, be a result of the culture of poverty imposed upon them by slavery and apartheid. Which would ultimately make whites responsible.
Or you assume that blacks, even without all the barriers I list, even without the racist cops and being sent to crappier schools and not inheriting as much wealth, would still have 1% of the nation’s wealth because they’re inferior.
There’s no two ways around it. If you don’t think that the explanations are fundamentally macrostructural, you’re being a racist. Because while individuals can screw up, to say that a group screws up means, by definition, you are saying something about that group.
And because your epistemology is broken, you recognize the humanity and diversity of whites but don’t realize how patronizing and vile it is to think that blacks blame everything on whites or that they need to just fix their communities and everything will get better, as if they are facing no barriers that whites are not. Because they are. Stop denying reality and pretending everything is leftist propaganda.
// the bizarre event that skyrocketed Peterson from obscurity into fame was his insistence upon the right to insult his students and colleagues and not be fired for it.// This is such a misrepresentation of the situation it’s hard to know whether you are just being disingenuous or actually don’t have much of a clue as to how it all unfolded..
You were asked to provide evidence of any point you make. I am clearing your comment for publication just to illustrate who I will be ignoring: people who just gainsay things but present no evidence they are right and make no effort to. You can do better than this. That you didn’t, should worry you.
“But Peterson went beyond his unprofessional defense of incivility and raised such a moral panic over trans people being treated like people that he even falsely claimed he would be in danger of being jailed for misgendering them if they were given the same status as gay people in Canadian human rights law. Unanimously lawyers and legal experts explained to him he wouldn’t be (and lo: he hasn’t been).”
I feel as though there may be some subtleties here and some room for argument. He says “If I am fined I will refuse to pay it” which he then says could send him to jail. Not that he would go directly to jail for misusing pronouns. The one legal scholar I’ve read discuss the topic seemed to admit this as a possibility.
Or perhaps he really did mean that he would go directly to jail. Hard to say really, but I’ll try and be charitable.
He did say that. But it’s twice false.
First, fines can be garnished; refusal to pay does not require incarceration and there is no evidence it ever would or ever has. This is what I mean by him not even bothering to find out whether anything he is saying is true. He not only doesn’t check facts, he ardently refuses to listen even when the real experts point these facts out to him.
Second, he cannot be fined under that Canadian human rights law for merely refusing to gender people the way they want. Follow the links I provided. The law does not cover such things. And never has. Lawyers and legislators have explained this at length.
The worst that can happen is that his employer can legally fire him if they deem his behavior contrary to the requirements of his employment—as insulting customers and coworkers definitely would be. But that has nothing to do with the Canadian human rights law in. It’s just standard commercial rights law.
What a garbage article. Pushing idiocy like “Peterson is already a joke in most circles” and “Everything he said about Canadian human rights law is false“ at the outset inform the reader that the article is going nowhere fast. Take Peterson seriously making a worthwhile critique would be a wonderful endeavor that Peterson himself would appreciate. Don’t waste your time with this superficial tripe.
You cite two statements that are factually true, and are actually demonstrated to be true in the article itself with authoritative links, as evidence the article is bad. You make no attempt to present any evidence they are false or deserve any correction, despite being instructed to.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what’s wrong with Peterson fans. You can never have a reliable grasp of reality if you act like this.
Footnote: I didn’t discuss Peterson’s actual peer reviewed scientific work because it never significantly features in any of his public writings, lectures, or philosophy. But I did recommend reading Beauchamp, who discusses this point. For convenience, I’ll here quote him on it:
He is just an ordinary guy. The fact that people expect so much from him, both his followers and those that think he is a Wacko, says more about them than it does about Peterson. He was fortunate to be able to get to the position he rose to. Publishing his book and it becoming a bestseller – who doesn’t dream of that? His life has not been easy over the last few years and he has handled himself amazingly well in my opinion. He has projected outward and helped others when he himself was feeling so much pain…instead of harming he has healed…and he is just an ordinary guy.
He is not an “ordinary guy.” He promulgates his toxic and false views with authority and commands a following in the tens of millions. He is the one who sets expectations high by declaring nonsense with rage and conviction. He is the one failing us. Not the other way around.
I rather like Jordan Peterson, though I am not sure I like the impression I have gathered, superficially, of his followers. Yet the article is just a smear, rather repetitive, about ‘Peterson’s woo’, and ‘Jordan Peterson has already become a joke in most circles’, and ‘He is, essentially, the Deepak Chopra of the Nones’, and I’m just starting out here, there is much more to wade through about ‘Peterson’s con’, and ‘his whole philosophy of Darwinian survivalism that defines even his epistemology’, which has the virtue of sounding interesting, I’m not sure where I could find disagreement with that, but I’m sure that Peterson could, especially if he is supposedly also doing ‘pretty much exactly like Christian churches do’. And also, Peterson ‘he now puts on an act, complete with a fake costume’. I don’t know what we pine for him to wear instead, but his costume is given as being ‘a polished 1950s professorial style’. I bet this really means simply fall menswear’s professorial style. Because, is Jordan Peterson really taking me through the 1950s men’s fashion? And if he is dressing the professor, then this is hardly inauthentic anyways. Unless it would be more authentic to be dressing in a flashy manner as a professor. Meanwhile, I’m just sayin’, today’s college students often come to class wearing flip-flops, band tees, and pajama pants, right? The whole issue seems a distraction anyways.
Let’s slow down to consider whether ‘the first reason we know Jordan Peterson is a crank is because he spews pseudoscience, and made up nonsense he claims is science, and too often gets relevant science wrong’.
Well, hooray for science, and even for just being interested in it, but the level of discourse here seems pretty irrelevant to Jordan Peterson, when I read that ‘You can’t study humans by studying lobsters. That’s as dumb as thinking we can study mountains by studying my pet rock.’ I guess that’s dumb, and I guess confidently. The problem here is given as being that ‘Peterson infamously claims in his most famous book, Twelve Rules for Life, that lobster brains dissolve when socially dominated, and then they regrow new “subordinate” brains.’ Does Peterson infamously claim that? The idea here, as I recall off the cuff, was that the higher up a hierarchy a lobster climbs, the more serotonin its brain produces. The more defeat it suffers, the more restricted the serotonin supply. Well, I’ll stick my neck out, again off the cuff, and reply that actually, as I have gathered about the issue, it is true that serotonin is present in crustaceans (like the lobster) and that it is highly connected to dominance and aggressive social behaviour. Indeed, when free moving lobsters are given injections of serotonin they adopt aggressive postures similar to the ones displayed by dominant animals when they approach subordinates. None of this is, I take it, remotely controversial. Now, one might take an interest in emphasizing the nuances here, like maybe that the same neurotransmitter can have contrasting effects in different organisms. Heck, maybe even say that lobsters and humans are just not a great comparison. But it is, a comparison. I don’t think Peterson is obviously out of his depth here.
Is it true that ‘what Peterson fabricates .. is essentially a Marxist-inspired, now-falsified idea called Social Dominance Theory’? No, actually, social dominance theory was first formulated in 1999, by psychology professors and researchers. I don’t think it terribly relevant to crow that this is influenced by Marxist and socio-biological ideas, but at least it is true. I am not so clear on why social dominance theory has been falsified. And no fundamental criticisms are actually given, here. Although this guy claims to be giving Peterson ‘every honest chance’. Well, but is it even controversial to emphasize that the reason that social hierarchies exist in human societies is that they were necessary for survival of inter-group competition during conflict over resources? The point is nowhere under dispute. Correct me if it is somewhere under dispute, even, because the point I am making is not that I have an opinion about it. My point is that I think it fair to assume that on this particular matter, your considered opinion is the same as Peterson’s opinion about it. You tell me.
I’ll wrap this up prematurely, with ‘Jordan Peterson is a crap philosopher’. Really, now? If that is true, then okay, hooray for the truth, but I would have tried harder not to juxtapose the point that ‘Jordan Peterson is a crap philosopher’, to the point that ‘Peterson’s prose is also dismally bad.’
It’s not a smear when it’s true. I demonstrate each of those things is true, wirth examples. You were asked to do the same, if you wished to contest anything I said. So why didn’t you? Why do you offer no examples or evidence any of those things I said was wrong? Care to try again?
Likewise, the relevance of changing dress and demeanor is that his doing it precisely when he needed to match an image he wanted to convey is evidence of conscious manipulation of the public. You offer no evidence it served any other purpose or resulted from any other cause.
You then ignore every point I made about why everything he says about lobsters is wrong and cannot correlate to humans. You even specifically ignore my detailed point about how talking about the chemistry (“serotonin”) is likewise completely inept and inapplicable. This is shit science. And a scientist should know that. Pease try again: find a specific claim I made and present evidence it is incorrect. Don’t just gainsay or ignore what I said. You want to talk about brain chemistry? Address what I said about brain chemistry.
Or else explain why you refuse to do that.
Ditto every other assertion you make with no evidence or even acknowledgement of my arguments and evidence on the point. Address what I actually said. Present evidence for what you say.
Either fix your gross epistemic misconduct here, or explain why you won’t.
Wow. That’s a very detailed criticism of him. Thanks for your insights on the issue, Dr. Carrier.
Just for context, I am a clinical psychologist, specializing in traumatized children. While Peterson’s legit scientific work was fine, his general conception of wellness is nonsense and disconnected from the consensus within psychology. Alas, my field is plagued by crackpots who approach therapy built atop anti-scientific hogwash. I am not a Peterson expert, but I’ve read nothing by him that points to any understanding about what we know leads to greater psychological functioning or well-being. Jung is a perfect avatar for Peterson—unconcerned with facts or evidence and committed to building up slippery word salad defenses around a core of mystical hogwash. I would never refer a patient to him under any circumstances.
Update: With someone’s help verifying some additional facts, I have now added a few paragraphs beginning with “Peterson also tends to misrepresent his credentials.” I give two examples, with links.
“As keen observers have noted (such as Nellie Bowles, writing for the New York Times), he dresses the part now, a polished 1950s professorial style, conspicuously not how he used to. Nor acts as he once did.”
Isn’t that completely irrelevant? And it’s also indicative of the general approach and tone of your article, mainly because you cite mostly second and third hand sources. You might get a different perspective by actually listening to at least one of his speeches and some of his UoT lectures (there pretty much all on line).
Richard, I find your analysis useful in some ways, but also very flawed. You refer to him as equivalent to Deepak Chopra, a crank and conman appealing to incels, angry men and disaffected conservatives. You imply that he is against gay marriage when one of his business partners on his speaking tours is openly gay and in a gay marriage (Dave Rubin). Moreover, you consistently portray many open scientific and philosophical questions as slam-dunks when they are at least open to further investigation and questioning. Peterson consistently presents his work as questioning many of our supposedly foundational questions and beliefs.
You ha
His main messages are as follows:
All actions and beliefs have consequences, even those we think are initially harmless and only personal. Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that is the essence of consequentialism, i.e. considering what may occur as a result of one’s actions, words, decisions, etc.
Meaning in life comes from taking on responsibility, specifically, the biggest responsibility one can shoulder. This may resonate more with young men than with older men and women in general. So what? Is that a bad thing? I happen to know a lot of young men, as I have three daughters who all have boyfriends in the early to late 20s. They’re tradesmen or learning trades, not academic scholars. I also know many of their male friends, in total at least a dozen. I was also an army officer and a sessional lecturer (undergrad and graduate), so I have contact with many of the young men in this target group. I think his work, specifically on YT, appeals to many of them and attracts them to long-form discussions and introduces them to deep philosophical ideas. How can any of it be bad when he tells them to shoulder responsibility, “clean their room,” etc.
He’s consistently criticized totalitarianism and totalizing solutions. He’s also consistently come out against violence, including that perpetrated by so-called incels and other resentful and vengeful perpetrators of evil acts (e.g. Columbine killers).
I could write more, but that’s probably enough for now. I also refer you to 2 of my own blog posts I wrote about a year ago.
In short, do I agree with everything Peterson says? No. Do I think much of what he says is part of valid discourse, open for discussion, debate, and further investigation? Yes.
https://exploitingchange.com/2018/12/17/why-jordan-peterson-is-a-thought-leader/
https://exploitingchange.com/2018/12/18/jordan-petersons-underlying-philosophy-maps-of-meaning/
Regards,
Richard Martin
Not. It isn’t.
As I remarked elsewhere in comments (and as Bowles herself explains):
The relevance of changing dress and demeanor is that his doing it precisely when he needed to match an image he wanted to convey is evidence of conscious manipulation of the public. You offer no evidence it served any other purpose or resulted from any other cause.
If you can find evidence any statement I make is false, present it. Otherwise, admit you can’t find any. To instead use this excuse (“you relied on the widespread research of other observers who document everything they say, therefore I should ignore you”) indicates an extreme epistemic failure on your part. This should worry you. That it doesn’t, is disturbing.
Do what you were told: present evidence that something, anything, I said is false.
I’ll wait.
Every guru and demagogue, even Hitler and Jim Jones, advocated shouldering responsibility and increasing one’s personal industry. Does that mean nothing else they said “can be bad”? Is your non sequitur evident to you yet?
I actually said in my article that Peterson says some useful or correct things. That cannot compensate for all the toxic and false things he does say. And the fact that you didn’t even think of this is really, really worrying. What will become of a world if people think like you do? It didn’t go well when that same exact thinking led people to follow and revere Hitler and Jim Jones. We should be opposing such reasoning, not advocating it.
And no, I am not saying Peterson is “just like” Hitler or Jim Jones. That’s not the point of the analogy. And if you can’t tell what the actual point of the analogy is, your epistemology is broken and you need to fix it before you can reach reliable conclusions about this.
As for the links you provided: can you give us any quotes here, from any of those links, that contradict any statement I made in my article? Do the work, please. Quote me, quote those articles, and thus show something I said was false. If you can’t do that, admit it.
“. [But r]ecent studies have found that the idea of a consistent male personality and female personality is not grounded in reality.”
I don’t agree with Peterson on most part, but this claim seems to be false. Read “The Truth About Sex Differences” on Psychology Today, where David P Schmitt Ph.D wrote that “It’s an elemental fact that people increasingly don’t want to hear: Sex differences in personality and behavior are real. And they have a profound effect on many aspects of health.”
Both statements are correct as written. It’s true that there are population-level differences between men and women in the various domains outlined by Dr. Schmitt. It is also true that there are no consistent male and female personalities. The differentiation matters…
Nothing in what we reliably know regarding sex differences results in a rational justification for inequitable treatment, whether in terms of law, economics, education, or any other social domain. But if one believes that men and women are fundamentally different (as Jordan and his followers appear to claim), then it follows that how we treat any given man or woman should be different as well. And this fantasy is all you need to justify misogyny.
I will say that the social justice left is doing itself no favors by claiming that there are no differences between average male and female bodies. This is a blatant error of fact that opens the door for asshats like the GoogleBro to twist what is indeed true into an excuse for, at the very least, doing nothing about the obvious discrimination that women continue to face or, at worst, justifying it.
Indeed.
Moreover, except for the examples given (e.g. throwing distance, masturbation frequency, propensity to violence), the variances between men and women that do exist (and many that are claimed don’t) never span more than ten percentiles, with wide overlapping distributions, and so are, as noted in the research, largely irrelevant, in fact barely even visible without large statistical samples. In short, using that tiny, moot difference in any instance to assess “all” women or “any” man is always pseudoscience. Men differ from each other more than they do from women on every one of those measurable traits; likewise women, with respect to men.
By contrast, the variance in propensity to violence is so enormous it does warrant different treatment, at least at the level of precaution. Men are by most measures five to ten times more prone to violence and physical aggression than women, not a mere ten percentiles more. Thus treating men with greater physical caution than women is a legitimate reaction. Even men agree there is more to worry about a group of unknown men approaching on a city street than a group of unknown women.
A more scientific approach to why that is and how we could change it is what we need. What Peterson is selling doesn’t cut it. If anything, his philosophy aims to justify it and organize society around it, rather than recognizing it as the root of most evils in civilized society today.
Read what I actually wrote. I didn’t say differences didn’t exist. I wrote a whole paragraph on this. With hyperlink. Please respond to what I actually claimed.
Moreover, Schmitt isn’t talking about just biologically innate differences; he is including culturally enforced differences as well. Which can be changed. This is not what Peterson is claiming. Schmitt is also talking about things like height and body fat index, not just personality. Again, not what Peterson is talking about. And Schmitt says nothing about cognitive competencies. So do please actually read his article and get right what he is saying.
And do also read what I linked to, as it gives context and qualifications to Schmitt’s points, e.g. noting many of the differences he claims are “strong” are actually too small and variable to allow a reliable prediction of differences individuals by gender or sex, thus refuting everything Peterson attempts to do with this information. Likewise read this article in Nature for the same point even made more prestigiously.
Call me uninformed but I’ve never even heard of Jordan Peterson until this article. Had to look him up. Don’t plan on reading anything by him.
When Peterson says “enforced monogamy,” he means socially enforced, not legally enforced. He wants societies and cultures to promote standards that are based on “monogamous social norms.” (He clarifies his position here, starting from the beginning of the video; he uses the phrase I quote at 2’48: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsMqSBB3ZTY).
If you watch the clip, you will see that his actual aim is not, as some people think, to get women coupled with unappealing men, but instead to have society foster the kinds of relationships among adults that are best for children (he says so at 8’54). In fact, the word “enforced” is too strong for what he is really talking about. He means something more like “encouragement” or “admonishment”: his example of “enforced monogamy” is a father telling a philandering son that he is not acting the way he is supposed to (12’28). All this might be poor communication on Peterson’s part, but it’s nothing sinister. The New York Times profile was uncharitable and misleading. Readers interested in an opposing view on it can find one here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-york-times-runs-comprehensive-hit-piece-jordan-ben-shapiro.
The decline of marriage—and the corresponding rise in illegitimacy—is a serious problem for children and for society. I encourage open-minded readers to consult this speech for demonstrations: https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-remarks-law-school-and-de-nicola-center-ethics. (Peterson doesn’t make exactly this argument, but the examples illustrate beautifully why concerns about monogamous norms are well-founded). See especially the parts that show how “every measure of social pathology” has accompanied America’s increasing secularization, including the ever-rising out-of-wedlock birthrate, which is astounding evidence by itself. The more disadvantaged the community, the more pronounced the statistic, and the worse things are for American society.
The quotation from John Adams is powerful: “We have no government armed with the power which is capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
He’s talking about 1950s-style social pressure to suppress human liberty toward a model of life he wants everyone to obey so men will have more sexual access to women. In other words, he specifically wants to deploy social pressure to take away women’s current freedom to have sex with whoever they want so they will be compelled by that pressure instead to marry a man for life so more men can get laid. That’s what we mean by forced monogamy. I didn’t say anything about legislation.
And his ideas about this are politically, socially, and scientifically false. We don’t need monogamy to take care of children (nor gendered hierarchies either). In fact, it’s the worst model for doing so in practice, as all evidence proves. Even if Peterson thinks he can somehow fix this by outlawing divorce, for example, forcing people who hate each other to raise kids together is not a boon to the kids.
You also shouldn’t be quoting 18th century politicians on points of scientific fact. The data show Adams was wrong: among free democratic societies, the least religious are the least criminal and the least immoral. See discussion elsewhere in comments here. But see also That Christian Nation Nonsense for what Adams really thought about this.
Typo: “Though a really good critique I will cite, that lists several markers for gifting that Peterson nails point-for-point,”
I’m pretty sure you meant ‘grifting’ not ‘gifting’.
Also, did you intentionally use ‘cool-aide’ to avoid the brand name ‘Kool-Ade’ (the original reference even though I’m told Jim Jones didn’t use Kool Ade brand drink).
Otherwise, thank you for the article. Gonna take a while to go through your links!
Stay awesome, doc.
Fixed. Thanks. And as for the drink, yes, I want to use the more colloquial, non-branded spelling.
Gud. Non brandid spelling is betr. A superiur othografi can’t possibli mean unintellijibiliti. Just read aloud. In whot possibl wurld is ‘det’ mor unintellijibl than debt? webster/oed et al belong in the bin and shud be pulpt forthwith.
If you can’t be bothered to spell English words intelligibly, you are telling me you can’t be bothered to be understood.
Jordan Peterson has always such an oddity to me. His videos were first shared to me by fellow atheists before I was more active in learning about philosophy and history of religions (I didn’t really know many atheists and so just picked up ideas from forums and comment threads). This was before his rise to fame, but when he already had a decent collection of his lectures on Youtube (so maybe late 2014). I’d love to say I simply saw through the BS and turned away, but I was more circumstance.
Listening to his lectures was just… boring. Maybe it’s because I already had a good job and wasn’t struggling with adult responsibilities. But his message seemed pointless. And where it diverged into his philosophical/psychological leanings, it seemed to go straight over my head. At the time, I just assumed I didn’t have the requisite knowledge to understand what he was saying. But if he couldn’t explain in a way that made sense, I didn’t see the point in listening.
I basically ignored him since. I was aware of his stance on the Canadian law (months after it started though), but it seemed like less than a day before I could read the actual law and thought he just happened to be wrong. That he blew up from all that was honestly confusing.
Reading this takedown was very interesting. I won’t pretend that it’s suddenly woken me up from my views on Peterson (as I didn’t have much of a view to work from), but I think it’s an excellent primer on woo-peddlers in general. This article does an excellent job of breaking down how woo-peddlers tend to act, tend to evolve, and tend to present themselves. It hammers home the importance of questioning the people who present themselves as authorities, and doing the research yourself.
Thank you for this article, Dr. Carrier.
Dr. Carrier writes:
“Deliberately misgendering someone is no different than deliberately refusing to call them by their actual name. It’s disrespect.”
It’s different.
For one, if a person “misgenders” another person, he refers to that person with an identity that he or she does not hold. But refusing to call a person by their name does not refer to a person with an identity that he or she does not hold. It does not ascribe any identity to that person. You might find both disrespectful, but they’re different with respect to what they involve.
Second, proper names (e.g., Richard or Michael) do not imply or suggest recognition of gender ideology or trans-identity. But those pronouns (xir or they, or even he or she in a trans-inclusive sense) do. That might seem like a trivial difference to you, but for people who do not want to recognize trans-ideology or identity because they fundamentally disagree with its conception of the person, it matters. But in any case, there’s some difference; and hence, it’s false that there’s no difference.
I also suspect that a person who finds trans-identity senseless or incoherent can also refuse to use trans-inclusive language or language that recognizes trans-identities on the basis that he does not want to legitimate the identity through his language use. This is not necessarily disrespectful – a person respects himself and truth itself by refusing to use language that aims to serve or legitimate ideas he finds to be senseless, or even false.
Judging from my own familiarity with the literature, it’s far from clear what it means to refer to a trans-woman as a woman, or a trans-man as a man. It’s also far from clear what it is that makes them the women or men they claim to be. I suspect that it part of what some “gender critical feminists” are trying to get at (e.g., Kathleen Stock and Rebecca Reilly-Cooper). But if it is far from clear what it means, then why impose an obligation of recognition? Indeed, how can a person be obliged to recognize an identity that he does not understand, or even one that he refuses to legitimize (think of a Republican who is told that he must recognize Elizabeth as “Your Royal Highness”).
If my name is Xinhua and you insist on calling me Ashley because you can’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce my name (a thing that actually happened to a Chinese graduate student I knew of), you were definitely referring to me with an identity I do not hold. This is what I am talking about. Not refusing to use names at all. But misnaming someone. Exactly the same thing as misgendering someone.
This isn’t a relevant difference. Deliberately misnaming a Chinese student is the same as misgendering someone in every respect relevant to the comparison. If it was identical, it wouldn’t be a comparison. Maybe you don’t know how comparisons work?
Respecting “oneself” by insulting your customers and coworkers is not defensible. It is still disrespecting them. Your excuse for doing so is irrelevant to that outcome. If you cannot perform the duties required of your job, “why” you can’t is irrelevant. We get to fire you.
It does not matter that a homophobe is “just being true to themselves” when they call their gay colleagues “fags.” It’s still an insult to them and thus disrespecting them. Likewise it does not matter that “it is true” that a professor finds pronouncing Chinese names “hard.” It is still disrespecting a Chinese student to make no effort to call them by their actual name but make up another name instead, one that isn’t theirs and insults their heritage and ethnicity.
So, no. Peterson is not treating his students and colleagues “with respect” if he refuses to even learn why gendering them correctly matters to their dignity. Refusing to care about how it matters to their dignity is precisely what is disrespectful about that behavior. And being incapable of understanding how it matters would be indicative of incompetence or insanity rendering him incapable of doing his job, even surer grounds for his being fired than deliberate disrespect would be.
Then you are either incompetent, insane, or a bigot. Because it’s pretty easy to find this out and understand it. So if you can’t, it’s either because you are too incompetent to do so, too insane to do so, or refuse to make the requisite effort to do so.
The latter is bigotry. The former is incompetence. It’s easy to understand how gender identity works. If you make even minimal effort to do so. The question is why you haven’t; or how you failed to after so much inquiry you claim to have made.
If you need help, read my article on it.
Dr. Carrier,
Thank you for posting my response and your rejoinder. I’ve been following your writings since your days at Secular Web, and though I am myself a Roman Catholic, I appreciate much of what you write. My hope is that as we continue our discussion, we remain civil and that we do not reflect the animosity that now poisons political affairs in our countries (Canada and the US). I also hope that, as our areas of disagreement become sharper, we do not villainize each other and that we see each other as two people who are sincerely committed to the pursuit of truth, however different we might see it.
You write:
“If my name is Xinhua and you insist on calling me Ashley because you can’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce my name (a thing that actually happened to a Chinese graduate student I knew of), you were definitely referring to me with an identity I do not hold. This is what I am talking about. Not refusing to use names at all. But misnaming someone. Exactly the same thing as misgendering someone.”
I don’t see why referring to Xinhau as Ashley necessarily refers to that person with an identity that she/he does not hold, especially if the motivation is just to use a name that is easier to pronounce. I mean, it’s still a dick thing to do, but I don’t necessarily see it as an imposition of an identity. It’s just, as you say, laziness. However, if the intention of the name substitution is an extension of the will to erase an identity, in a way similar to what Euro-Canadians did to Native Americans, then I can see your point. But that’s just not the case here. I can also see your point if Xinhau saw her/his name as integral to his/her cultural identity. Prima facie, in such a case, Xinhau should not be referred to with some other name.
Regarding the later sentences, you claim that you’re not talking about refusing to use names, but, instead, you are talking about misnaming someone. That’s fine. But the claim that I originally responded to said this:
“Deliberately misgendering someone is no different than deliberately refusing to call them by their actual name. It’s disrespect.”
You’ll notice that the text does not mention misnaming. Instead, the text says that refusing to call them by their actual name is no different than misgendering. But refusals to call them by their actual name does not imply any act of misnaming. I will readily grant that you meant to say something different, but that is what the text says. In saying this, I hope that you don’t think that I am being pedantic – I am trying to explain why I responded as I did.
You write:
“This isn’t a relevant difference. Deliberately misnaming a Chinese student is the same as misgendering someone in every respect relevant to the comparison. If it was identical, it wouldn’t be a comparison. Maybe you don’t know how comparisons work?”
That last sentence is an example of something I hope to avoid. In any case, what you respond to here is only part of what I said- it has a greater context. Here’s what I else said:
“That might seem like a trivial difference to you, but for people who do not want to recognize trans-ideology or identity because they fundamentally disagree with its conception of the person, it matters. But in any case, there’s some difference; and hence, it’s false that there’s no difference.”
I suspect that I could have better explained myself here. I want to say that there’s a difference in what’s at stake. Those pronouns suggest recognition of ideologies or ideas that some people find false, harmful or incoherent. Names don’t do that. They also tend not to suggest recognition of any ideology or idea that people find false, harmful or incoherent – they’re rather innocuous. Hence, that typically constitutes a difference in consequence and action. That’s a relevant difference with respect to your comparison.
“Respecting “oneself” by insulting your customers and coworkers is not defensible. It is still disrespecting them. Your excuse for doing so is irrelevant to that outcome. If you cannot perform the duties required of your job, “why” you can’t is irrelevant. We get to fire you.”
Keep in mind that I am here talking about refusing to use language that recognizes trans-identity, not “misgendering” someone. That is what my text says and that is what I meant. I don’t mean to sound rude here – I am just making it clear what I actually said. And why am I talking about this? Because I am replying to what your text said earlier.
We respect ourselves by not using language that recognizes ideas or ideologies we believe to be false or incoherent because do not betray our reason, our commitment to truth and true speak. You might claim this to be an insult and disrespect, but I don’t see any argument for it. I tried to reflect on what argument you could offer, but I can think of no good argument to think that respect for persons requires a person to use language that recognizes trans-identities.
“It does not matter that a homophobe is “just being true to themselves” when they call their gay colleagues “fags.” It’s still an insult to them and thus disrespecting them. Likewise it does not matter that “it is true” that a professor finds pronouncing Chinese names “hard.” It is still disrespecting a Chinese student to make no effort to call them by their actual name but make up another name instead, one that isn’t theirs and insults their heritage and ethnicity.”
Prima facie, I agree on both accounts. There’s no argument from me here.
You write:
“So, no. Peterson is not treating his students and colleagues “with respect” if he refuses to even learn why gendering them correctly matters to their dignity. Refusing to care about how it matters to their dignity is precisely what is disrespectful about that behavior. And being incapable of understanding how it matters would be indicative of incompetence or insanity rendering him incapable of doing his job, even surer grounds for his being fired than deliberate disrespect would be.”
If the “so” here is conclusion indicator, then I don’t see the basis for the inference that follows. We’ve thus far been talking about names, but you neither established why “correctly” gendering them matters to their dignity nor why names and gender identity are similar. In fact, it seems as though you haven’t attempted that. So far as I can see, this alleged similarity has been presumed. The authors of the Talon article you cited made the same presumption. Check it out (1):
“For example: An argument can be made that respecting pronouns is synonymous with respecting someone’s name, whether their name is familiar to someone in a particular cultural setting or not. To claim that one has the “right” or “freedom from compelled speech” to address someone by a gender-negating pronoun is equivalent to not recognizing the legitimacy of an ethnic name we aren’t familiar with (lest we again consider the implications of denying this to Indigenous people and many of their names). Consider how ludicrous and inappropriate it would be for a professor to say to a student “You can’t force me to call you Li Wei because I don’t recognize that as a legitimate name; I am going to call you Bob.” Respecting a person’s name is similar to respecting their pronouns.”
You’ll notice that there is no argument here. The “synonymity” or “similarity” has been presumed. Sure, the authors claimed that there is synonymity or similarity between the act of refusing to use names and “misgendering”, but they did not try to justify it. Neither did you.
In saying this, I hope you don’t read my tone as rude. I’m offering a critique aimed toward discovering truth, not to be a dick or denigrate you in any way. If I am wrong on this point, I’ll gladly retract.
I wrote:
“Judging from my own familiarity with the literature, it’s far from clear what it means to refer to a trans-woman as a woman, or a trans-man as a man.”
and then you replied:
“Then you are either incompetent, insane, or a bigot. Because it’s pretty easy to find this out and understand it. So if you can’t, it’s either because you are too incompetent to do so, too insane to do so, or refuse to make the requisite effort to do so.”
Again, this is the sort of language I hope to avoid.
I don’t think that I am insane or a bigot, though I might be under informed. But I doubt that, too. The literature on what it means to be a woman in philosophy, particularly trans-philosophy and feminism is considerably large, active and contentious.
For example, there’s an ongoing and hot debate between trans-inclusive feminists and gender critical feminists on this same question. This debate has been described as an “full-scale ideological war” within academic feminism. (2) I’ve also been following the semantic accounts of “gendered terms” man and woman, or some other identity, by trans-inclusive authors, finding them to be different in what they propose. (3) Yet, if they are different, then which meaning am I supposed to accept as orthodoxy? What should I presume a trans-woman means when this person claims to be a woman? It’s unclear. Instead, I learn that, according to leading theorists, there just is no orthodoxy on the matter. (4) In fact, according to Talia Mae Bettcher, a philosopher and trans-woman, as soon as we ask what it means to be a woman, matters get philosophically complicated. But don’t take my word for it, here’s Bettcher (5):
“Once we ask the question of what a woman is, things immediately become more complicated philosophically. Are we supposed to be proving we’re women according to the ordinary meaning of the term ‘woman’? Or are we defining ‘woman’ amelioratively? That is, rather than giving an analysis of the concept attached to the ordinary meaning of ‘woman,’ are we trying to get clear on what concept we should use—for the purposes of promoting a feminist project? A third way of approaching the question is to recognize that dominant meanings of political terms are contested “on the ground” through practices that give them different, resistant meanings. For example, given that the ordinary meaning of ‘woman’ includes sexist content, feminists have tried to redeploy the term in resistant, empowering ways. (This is similar to the idea that the originally pejorative ‘queer’ has been taken up with a new, resistant significance.) Indeed, one of Janice Raymond’s most interesting arguments is precisely that trans women can’t take up the term ‘woman’ or ‘feminist’ or ‘lesbian’ in any way that would be resistant to sexism (1979, 116).”
There’s also a debate about what makes someone a woman and why trans-women fall under this scope (if at all). This debate involves trans-inclusive philosophers, gender critical feminists plus various conservative philosophers such as Robert P George, Ryan T Anderson, Spencer Case, Celina Durgin, Prudence Allen, and many more. There are many positions that a person can take, but again, don’t take my word for it – check out what Bettcher says:
For example, with respect to analyzing the ordinary meaning of ‘woman’, there are different positions to consider. One is that ‘woman’ is a cluster (family-resemblance) concept (for discussion see Hale 1996, Heyes 2000, McKitrick 2007, for critique see Kapusta 2016, Bettcher 2012, 2017, etc.). Another is “semantic contextualism”—the view that the extension of ‘woman’ changes according to context in a rule-governed way (see Saul 2012, Diaz-Leon 2016, see Bettcher 2017ab, for critique). If Stock’s interested in the ameliorative approach, then she had better read Sally Haslanger (2012). She should also read Jennifer Saul (2012), and Katharine Jenkins (2016). If she’s interested in the third option, I would propose that she read some of my work (Bettcher 2016, 2017ab). And I would strongly recommend that she read Lori Watson’s excellent “The Woman-Question” (2016).
And that is just some of the scholarly commentary. There’s also popular understandings of trans-identities and gender identity, those that have been criticized by some philosophers as circular (6), or as false/unintelligible/inaccessible (7). Given this criticism, should I accept the popular understanding? If not, then which scholarly conception should I accept? Which one do trans-men and trans-women mean? It’s unclear.
So I don’t know what to think, but that isn’t because I am incompetent. It’s precisely because I am aware of the complexity and criticism, at least within academic philosophy.
If you’d like further evidence that there’s a considerable debate within philosophy, I can present you additional readings, some of which I have found to be useful. I include them below.
Regarding your own article, I scanned it (sorry it’s late and it’s long), but I didn’t see any formal and strictly gendered definition of woman/man. Again, I could be wrong. But I scanned it twice. If you think that you’ve provided that, can you do me a favor and quote it? The closest I’ve seen was when you said this:
“No, what Lana probably feels is that her personality and style and manner and preferences, the way she really would be comfortable living and being, align better with what our culture just happens to call female…. In other words, she’d be happier living and acting as a woman. And now she is. And by our actual standards of gender expression (the only standards that really matter culturally, since you almost never get to check someone’s DNA or genitals or blood hormone levels when you “gender” them), she is a woman, …”
We also use secondary sexual characteristics to help us determine whether a person is a man, or a woman. That’s primarily what is responsible for making some trans-women non-passable.
In any case, we share the same culture, though I am not aware of any standards of gender expression sufficient to make someone a woman. Up until this transgender revolution, the general understanding within our culture (and what is still dominant today) is that whatever else women are, they are sexual females. That is likely why many English dictionaries define the term “woman” that way. It’s also partially why there is a lot of resistance to trans-identities within our culture. Of course we might be wrong about woman-ness, but that is nevertheless the dominant understanding of woman within our culture and the use of the word “woman”.
I could say more, but I don’t know for certain whether you mean to define the concept woman this way, so I don’t want to waste your time. Plus, it’s getting late and this post is getting long.
Thanks for engagement, Dr. Carrier.
Here are those links I spoke about:
https://quillette.com/2019/09/06/beyond-the-hypatia-affair-philosophers-blocking-the-way-of-inquiry/
https://www.heritage.org/gender/report/sex-gender-and-the-origin-the-culture-wars-intellectual-history
https://medium.com/@kathleenstock/doing-better-in-arguments-about-sex-and-gender-3bec3fc4bdb6
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/12/gnostic-liberalism
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5893630_What_Many_Transgender_Activists_Don't_Want_You_to_Know_and_why_you_should_know_it_anyway
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/03/trans-men-erase-women
https://aeon.co/essays/do-analytic-and-continental-philosophy-agree-what-woman-is
https://aeon.co/essays/transgender-identities-a-conversation-between-two-philosophers
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/19/divide-over-scholarly-debate-over-gender-identity-rages
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2019/02/21/podcast-kathleen-stock-and-natasha-chart-discuss-the-issue-of-feminists-allying-with-the-right/
https://arcdigital.media/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999
https://quillette.com/2019/09/20/how-the-trans-rights-movement-is-turning-academic-philosophers-into-sloganeering-activists/
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/10/27/who-decides-your-gender
https://medium.com/@aytchellis/a-philosophical-perspective-on-gender-identity-9fac2dccb6fb
References:
(1) https://thetalon.ca/the-post-truth-politics-of-jordan-petersons-gender-nonbinary-pronoun-debate/
(2) Lori Watson, “The Woman-Question” (2016).
(3) Robin Dembroff, “Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender” and Talia Mae Bettcher, Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman”.
(4) https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/08/07/on-philosophical-scholarship-of-gender-a-response-to-12-leading-scholars/
(5) http://dailynous.com/2018/05/30/tables-speak-existence-trans-philosophy-guest-talia-mae-bettcher/
(6) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0fe6/61e7f3ee28f05b1cb0f2b112606e3129d115.pdf
(7) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVNxYkawao
You are here continuing to confuse sex with gender and to confuse subsets with supersets. Woman is a superset. Transwoman and ciswoman are subsets. And “woman” refers in most common use to gender not sex (because you almost never observe someone’s sex when you gender them—you have and deserve no access to their DNA or genitals and rarely use either to gender someone). Every trans advocate writing on this says this. So you have no excuse to not know this by now.
The bottom line is: you don’t get to keep calling a ciswoman a man because you think she looks manly; so you don’t get to keep calling a transwoman a man because you think she looks manly either. The one is as disrespectful as the other. And caused by identical assumptions (such as that certain physical features “entail” a cisman, when in fact they don’t, not even in ciswomen, many of whom will have those same features). You would know this if you had really read any of the literature you claim to.
“Exactly the same thing as misgendering someone.”
My sentiments exactly! Nobody deserves or has the right to claim they understand the entity that I am.* To misrepresent my entity by referring to me as mortal is a form of disrespect I cannot tolerate. I insist on being recognized as an immortal entity. Therefore, all may call me God. However, for those with religious reservations I am will be acceptable.
That’s not what gender is. Gender is not biology. You are confusing gender with sex.
Why do you transphobes keep doing that? It’s perplexing. With all these easily accessed articles now explaining the difference and what trans identity is really about (which have been linked multiple times even here), there really is no excuse to keep doing this.
So why do you keep making this mistake?
“Why do you transphobes keep doing that?”
Ha! So, is Blaire White transphobic? It is an argument that will always be circular. Deconstructionist and transphobes will be assigned to the participates and inevitably, out of frustration, name calling will ensue.
Does Blaire White say becoming transgendered means claiming a biological change of sex?
Citation please.
I should probable let her speak for herself her views are easily accessible. Until recently, gender and sex were interchangeable. Gender was redefined for those who believe the classification should be based on the individual’s personal identity (what the person believes they are regardless of biological features).
Perhaps we are talking past each other. I know Blaire White is biologically a man. However, to avoid confusion I would refer to her as a woman because she looks like a woman. If I was to describe her in a crowd of women with blond hair I would say “The woman with the black hair.”
A middle-aged bald man who is married to a biological woman, chews tobacco, smokes cigars, hunts, drives a 4 x 4 pick-up truck, and insists that his gender is female, is going to be offended by me. Because to avoid confusion I will refer to him as a man. That’s an appeal to reduction ad absurdum, but if the person does not resemble the gender they are claiming to be, some of that is on them.
I do not believe redefining words will give truth to the claim, but if it does then I’d like to be referred to as God.
So, you have no evidence Blaire said that.
So, you drew a false equation between Blaire and yourself.
And therefore did not reply at all to what I said.
And now go rambling on ignoring what I said.
Got it.
The evidence is all over YouTube and other social media outlets. She is known for these views.
Found it, starts at 3:28. I know you really admire Shapiro (whom Blaire is interviewing). I usually disagree with him, but I found myself agreeing with him (mostly) on this issue. At 6:50 Blaire makes my point. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbTwoLah2VY
No, she does not say that there. She says it boils down to “what you look like,” i.e. how you express your gender. She merely takes the position if you do nothing “at all” to express your gender, it’s inappropriate to claim it. She had just finished explaining what I did to you: gender is a social construct, not a sex characteristic. It can thus be changed the same as parental status of children—her analogy!
Dr. Carrier,
In the Talon article you cited as “fact based”, the author claims this:
“Consider how ludicrous and inappropriate it would be for a professor to say to a student “You can’t force me to call you Li Wei because I don’t recognize that as a legitimate name; I am going to call you Bob.” Respecting a person’s name is similar to respecting their pronouns.”
I won’t ascribe that view to you (since you didn’t say it), but you did claim that there’s no difference between refusing to use someone’s name and personal pronoun (or something along those lines).
Personal names are what we use to designate an individual person. These tend not to be contentious, since there’s often very little contentious ideology involved in saying them. Of course some people might still rightfully refuse a request to refer to someone with a specific name if that name suggests false family or clan allegiance, or if that saying that name or title suggests ideas that a person finds contentious. For example, a republican can refuse, with good conscience, to refer to the queen as Queen Elizabeth. Other times, a person might refuse to call a person “Mom” even if woman is her biological mother. Why? Because perhaps that name suggests a social role that the speaker does not want to own.
Likewise for transgender pronouns, though here the contentious issue is transgender identities. If a person does not recognize such identities, seeing them as false or incoherent, or perhaps is just confused about what they are, it does not seem “inappropriate” or “lubricious” to refuse to use language that recognizes such identities. Of course you might disagree, but if you make this your argument, you’ll have to argue for it.
Not calling your mother “mom” when she wants you to would be disrespecting her. That you can have a reason to disrespect her does not change that fact. That a homophobe has a reason to be disrespectful to his gay students and colleagues does not immunize them from being fired for it. Likewise misgendering someone deliberately. There is indeed thus no difference here. None that matters to the point.
Even the Queen example is relevant: if you were employed at the American embassy and then refused to call a political head of state by their formal title, we have every right to fire you—as much right as you have to go on disrespecting a foreign head of state. Both are the case. It does not become “respectful” simply because you have “reasons” to do it.
Not recognizing someone’s gender identity is the same as not recognizing their sexuality or marital status or refusing to call someone a Doctor who has a Ph.D. or Jewish who is a convert and so on. It’s simply disrespectful. It makes you an asshole. And employers get to fire you for that. What your “reasons” are for being an asshole and getting fired for it makes no difference to that.
Having a homophobic ideology does not make your disrespect of gay people okay. Having a transphobic ideology does not make your disrespect of trans people okay. Much less immunize you from being fired from a job that requires you to treat your colleagues and customers with respect.
Regarding the mom subject, I disagree. If a mother abandons and neglects her child, and then later asks to be called mother by her adult child, I’d say it’s within the bounds of reason and good conscience for the adult child to refuse. Why?
Because, for some people, being a mom involves a social relationship and commitment, something that the mother gave up. For that child, if there is no social relationship, and worse if the mother is culpable for that relationship loss, then the basis to refer to her as Mom is absent. Hence, for that child, there’s no reason to refer to her as Mom and this child rather not use language that suggests there is a mother-son/daughter relationship.
In this context, it strikes me as unreasonable, insensitive and callus to say that the adult child is being disrespectful in choosing not to refer to her birth mother with the name Mom. The mother, with her negligence, has surrendered any right to be called Mom.
You write:
“Even the Queen example is relevant: if you were employed at the American embassy and then refused to call a political head of state by their formal title, we have every right to fire you—as much right as you have to go on disrespecting a foreign head of state.”
I’m unsure why this would be a case of disrespect. You can’t presume that. If the pope asked you to refer to him as His Holiness, I’d say that, as an atheist, you are within your rights to refuse and that it wouldn’t be disrespectful (and he’s the head of state to boot).
In any case, whether the person or JP should be fired is irrelevant. That passage of the Talon article didn’t even mention firing.
“Not recognizing someone’s gender identity is the same as not recognizing their sexuality or marital status or refusing to call someone a Doctor who has a Ph.D. or Jewish who is a convert and so on. It’s simply disrespectful. It makes you an asshole. ”
This is a bald assertion.
In any case, why think it makes someone an asshole? Consider me. I am Roman Catholic. I am devoutly so. In doing so, I strive to be a good person and follow God’s law, both natural and revealed as well as Church teachings. The Church views men and women in terms of their sexual bodies and identity, refusing to accept contrary conceptions or ideas of the human person. As a Catholic, I follow this.I’m oblige to follow it. But considering what you said above, then, if you’re right, I’m an asshole. But why? Because I hold a different metaphysic about the human person and refuse to recognize ideologies/ideas inconsistent with Church teaching? Are we not allowed to view the human person differently than you without being an asshole ? Is your idea really something like, “Recognize trans-dentity and the metaphysics that undergird it, or you’re an asshole!” That’s a bit extreme.
You write:
“Having a homophobic ideology does not make your disrespect of gay people okay. Having a transphobic ideology does not make your disrespect of trans people okay. Much less immunize you from being fired from a job that requires you to treat your colleagues and customers with respect.”
You beg the question with respect to what respect involves.
People cannot simply profess an identity that are contrary someone else’s metaphysics and broader understandings of the world and then expect recognition. It’s not as if Calityn Jenner can profess to be a woman and that settles deep metaphysic disputes about the human person and identity, Dr. Carrier. That’s not how truth is pursued. It’s not truth conducive. It’s simply a bloated sense of political entitlement, some sort of radical sense of autonomy gone wild.
Please pay attention to what I said. This is still disrespecting her. That you have a reason to do so does not change that fact. Any more than justifiably killing someone does not change the fact that you did indeed kill someone. “Disrespect in this case is okay” does not make it not disrespect. It merely justifies the disrespect. Please recognize the difference. Because it is precisely why disrespecting trans people is bigotry—because it is not justified, because they haven’t done anything wrong (trans people are not “bad moms” or abusers or whatever excuse you might want to conjure to disrespect them).
You do the same with every other example: you merely present excuses for disrespecting people; that does not change the fact that it is disrespect. And there is no comparably valid reason to disrespect trans people. You do this again with homosexuality. “But my ideology compels me to disrespect homosexuals” simply rationalizes your homophobia. It does not take it away. “But I have a bigoted ideology” does not excuse you from the valid charge of being a bigot.
The rest shows me you have lied to me. You claimed to have read a lot of literature on trans issues. But now you reveal you don’t even know the difference between gender and sex, or how even trans-sexuality differs from cis-sexuality. Transsexuality and transgenderism, and cissexuality and cisgenderism, are specifically not identical—that’s why they have different names! You don’t even know that Jenner is a trans-woman, not a cis-woman or that these are different sub-categories of the generalization “woman”. Which means you lack even rudimentary knowledge of this issue.
You have two choices here: admit you don’t know what you are talking about and make an effort to get up to speed on what you clearly don’t know before commenting further; or admit you don’t care to because you are too bigoted to care to be informed about the principles of other people’s dignity or the actual factual reality that underlies it.
Start, if you must, again, with my article.
Last point about the Talon article, it says:
” Furthermore, those who state they should resist “compelled” speech around pronouns conveniently ignore how they are compelled to behave and speak in certain ways on a daily basis. At UBC, for example, a student is required to write their papers and exams in English. There is no denying this is a form of compelled speech.”
I don’t know why that would be an instance of compelled speech in any robust and politically important sense. The requirement does not force them to utter or recognize ideas, ideologies or identities with which they disagree. They can express their own perspectives, but they need to do it in English. Said differently, the imperative to write in English only intends to restrict the language that a proposition is expressed – it does not try to regulate that which the proposition expresses.
Why do this at all? For practical purposes, of course. Graders and teachers at UBC (the farthest province from Quebec) do not have academic competency in many other languages, not even in French (the other official language of Canada). Instead, their competency is in English; and so, that is the required language to express ideas. If this is compelled speech, and I don’t see why it is, I can’t see why it is the sort that we Canadians find so disagreeable.
Compelling you to write in only one language is compelled speech. The only way it couldn’t be is if you weren’t compelled to write in English. Likewise compelling you to write essays is compelled speech. The only way it couldn’t be is if you could graduate without ever writing any essays.
Nevertheless, I did not use this argument myself, for a reason (and note, only what I vetted from my sources, is repeated in my article): because it is only relevant to half the issue at hand (whether one can be compelled to do things to hold a job, for example; obviously one can; freedom is not absolute). However, Peterson’s argument is that he is being compelled to endorse an ideology with gendering his pronouns as students and colleagues require. Which as you note is not analogous to English and essays, in which you are still allowed to express any ideas you want.
A closer analogy is creationism or flat earthism: you can’t “refuse” to write an essay correctly describing the facts of evolution or a spherical earth and still get a degree in biology or astronomy, or teach either. You are compelled to understand and acknowledge, in speech, the scientific consensus in these matters. Or else we get to dismiss you from a degree-granting program, or fire you if you are a professor in it.
That is still an imperfect analogy because one can say in such essays that one doesn’t believe these things but still pass or teach if you at least correctly describe the consensus as the consensus and the facts on which it is held, thus proving you have the requisite knowledge, and can teach it, whether you accept the consequences of that knowledge personally or not.
A better analogy is the one I used: if you refuse to call a Chinese student by their actual name, and use a name you made up instead, you can be compelled to stop that and act respectfully instead. But only so far as being required to do that to hold a job that requires you to treat your customers and coworkers respectfully. Remember, Peterson’s claim that it would be illegal of him to do it was and is bullshit and always has been. He has never been and will never be legally compelled to gender people the way they ask. It’s just a requirement of keeping his job. Because it’s a requirement of his job.
Likewise, we get to morally condemn him for being a bigot. He is not “free” of that assessment if he chooses to act like a bigot and deliberately disrespect transpeople. Any more than he would if he chose to insult gay people or pregnant people or any other innocent group. If he respects them, he should treat them with respect, which means respecting their names and chosen memberships. If he doesn’t respect them, he should be treated exactly as a person who disrespects innocent people. Because that’s what he is. By choice.
You write:
“Compelling you to write in only one language is compelled speech. The only way it couldn’t be is if you weren’t compelled to write in English. Likewise compelling you to write essays is compelled speech. The only way it couldn’t be is if you could graduate without ever writing any essays.”
When JP talks about compelled speech, he is talking about the imposition to say, suggest or communicate certain ideas. The imposition to write in English doesn’t do that, since propositions are language neutral. The imposition to write or talk is not an imposition to say, suggest or communicate specific ideas. At its strongest, it’s an imposition to say something about a particular topic – it’s not an imposition to say some specific idea. So if this is compelled speech, then it’s a different sort. You seem to concede that much here:
“However, Peterson’s argument is that he is being compelled to endorse an ideology with gendering his pronouns as students and colleagues require. Which as you note is not analogous to English and essays, in which you are still allowed to express any ideas you want.”
We agree on something. Woot!
You write:
“A closer analogy is creationism or flat earthism: you can’t “refuse” to write an essay correctly describing the facts of evolution or a spherical earth and still get a degree in biology or astronomy, or teach either. You are compelled to understand and acknowledge, in speech, the scientific consensus in these matters. Or else we get to dismiss you from a degree-granting program, or fire you if you are a professor in it.
That is still an imperfect analogy because one can say in such essays that one doesn’t believe these things but still pass or teach if you at least correctly describe the consensus as the consensus and the facts on which it is held, thus proving you have the requisite knowledge, and can teach it, whether you accept the consequences of that knowledge personally or not.”
No argument from me.
You write:
“A better analogy is the one I used: if you refuse to call a Chinese student by their actual name, and use a name you made up instead, you can be compelled to stop that and act respectfully instead.”
Prima facie, I agree. I certainly think the professor would have some explaining to do.
You write:
“But only so far as being required to do that to hold a job that requires you to treat your customers and coworkers respectfully.”
What it means or should mean to treat students respectfully is part at what’s at stake here. JP’s point is that the imposition for him to use pronouns of a student’s choice, whatever they might be, extends beyond the requirements of respect, because it requires him to suggest or communicate ideas with which he disagrees. In reply to this argument, you can’t simply reiterate the legal requirements in keeping his job – that’s not the issue. The issue is this: if there such requirements, then should there be? In answering this question, I caution you not to beg the question by simply presuming that respects demands it or that names and gender identities are similar.
“Remember, Peterson’s claim that it would be illegal of him to do it was and is bullshit and always has been. He has never been and will never be legally compelled to gender people the way they ask. It’s just a requirement of keeping his job. Because it’s a requirement of his job.”
I don’t know what “illegal” means here. JP might face punitive legal consequences if he refuses to use those pronouns or “misgenders”. In addition to termination, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (what is relevant in this case, not the federal tribunal, as JP keeps talking about) can impose fines that are mandatory to pay and order training. His point is that if he refuses to pay those fines and attend that training, and he does says that he would refuse, then a possible consequence is imprisonment. Of course, in such a case, he wouldn’t be imprisoned for his refusal to use such pronouns, but, instead, for his refusal to pay fines or attend such training. I take it is that his point is that imprisonment would therein stem from the law and the legal means to enforce it.
You can question his understanding of the law, but it does have some support from professional legal council, from whom he developed his interpretation. That interpretation is offered by lawyer D. Jared Brow. It can be in the sources below:
https://litigationguy.wordpress.com/2016/12/24/bill-c-16-whats-the-big-deal/
Your analysis above did not mention this support, which is likely a point to the detriment of your analysis.
You write:
“Likewise, we get to morally condemn him for being a bigot. He is not “free” of that assessment if he chooses to act like a bigot and deliberately disrespect transpeople. Any more than he would if he chose to insult gay people or pregnant people or any other innocent group. If he respects them, he should treat them with respect, which means respecting their names and chosen memberships.”
You beg important questions with respect to what respect involves and with your frame that JP’s position insults trans-people. Recognition respect (see Stephen Darwall’s work linked below (1)) is likely the sort of respect that you are presuming trans-people are entitled to, something alleged to be different and independent from appraisal recognition. But, of course, like in many any other matters of philosophy, it can and has been doubted. For example, it can be said that recognition respect implies that people have the authority to define themselves however they wish and that other people are thus obliged to be complicit in that identity. But whether people have that broad authority of self-definition is an open question (many theists would likely judge that to be self-idolatrous and an example of autonomy run wild and apart from fidelity to truth). We can also deny that recognition respect can and should be held independent of appraisal recognition, believing that our complicity toward identity constructions must always conform with our commitment to truth, creating room for resistance if one’s proposed identity is inconsistent, false, overly vague, etc. In fact, in the case of trans-identity, one can even argue that the preconditions of recognition respect have not been met on grounds that the professed identity is incoherent or unintelligible (Jensen attacks one account of trans-identity claims in this way (2)). We can hardly offer recognition for a person’s identity if his description is unintelligible – we cannot recognize that which we do not understand, nor can we recognize that which cannot be understood.
(1) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2379993?seq=1
(2) https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/04/16/art-avoiding-definitions-review-trans-quick-quirky-account-gender-variability/
If Peterson doesn’t know that gender is an expressed preference (and is not the same thing as sex), he is incompetent and should be fired. If he refuses to allow students and coworkers the freedom to express themselves as they wish and as his employer allows, he is a bigot and should be fired. If he refuses to call them by the names they ask him to, he is disrespecting them and should be fired.
There is no way out of this conundrum. He either treats people with the respect they are due, or gets to be fired. He either treats people with the respect they are due, or we get to call him a transphobic douchebag. His choice. Anything else is just complaining about the consequences of fairness to one’s bigotries. “But it’s unfair everyone is treating me like a bigot” does not take away the fact that you are a bigot. If you don’t like being called a bigot, stop being one. Peterson hasn’t learned that lesson. And that alone, IMO, is reason enough to fire him.
I find it so hilarious how “I’m not literally asking for the state to enforce monogamy” is a defense for Peterson but Peterson defenders will say “I don’t care that he can’t be fined or imprisoned, no one should fire him or should even criticize him”. Cult behavior indeed.
Thanks again for the reply, Dr. Carrier. I wrote a larger reply to you, with plenty of extra links and such in regards to our first dispute. I hope that you respond, though I know that I wrote a lot. Please don’t feel as though you need to respond immediately. I’m sure that we are both busy in life (I myself have a two-week old baby to care for).
Allow me to respond to some of what you said:
“Please pay attention to what I said. This is still disrespecting her. That you have a reason to do so does not change that fact. Any more than justifiably killing someone does not change the fact that you did indeed kill someone. “Disrespect in this case is okay” does not make it not disrespect. ”
I will do my best to pay attention to what you say. If you think that I have failed to understand you, please understand I do not do that intentionally or carelessly.
Given what you say here, it seems as though we have an implicit disagreement (though now explicit) about what disrespect involves. As far as I see it, disrespect is something bad, something we are obliged not to do. For that reason, I’d say that there is no disrespectful but morally justifiable action, especially if we are talking about what philosophers call respect for persons. For that reason, I’d say that if it is permissible, then it is not disrespectful; and so, if it is disrespectful not to refer to her birth mother as Mom, then it is not permissible; but, as I explained earlier, it is permissible; and thus, it is not disrespectful.
You then say:
“You do the same with every other example: you merely present excuses for disrespecting people; that does not change the fact that it is disrespect. And there is no comparably valid reason to disrespect trans people. You do this again with homosexuality. “But my ideology compels me to disrespect homosexuals” simply rationalizes your homophobia. It does not take it away. “But I have a bigoted ideology” does not excuse you from the valid charge of being a bigot.”
Given what I just said, I deny that I do that with every example. In fact, I deny that I did it with any example.
Secondly, I don’t know who you are quoting or paraphrasing, but it isn’t from any writing that I recognize. I do not say and I explicitly deny that there is disrespect on my part, and I also deny that there is any bigotry (Bigotry is about tolerance. What, exactly, am I not tolerating?).
“The rest shows me you have lied to me. You claimed to have read a lot of literature on trans issues. But now you reveal you don’t even know the difference between gender and sex, or how even trans-sexuality differs from cis-sexuality. Transsexuality and transgenderism, and cissexuality and cisgenderism, are specifically not identical—that’s why they have different names! You don’t even know that Jenner is a trans-woman, not a cis-woman or that these are different sub-categories of the generalization “woman”. Which means you lack even rudimentary knowledge of this issue.”
I’m puzzled by this response. Part of the debate between trans-advocates and gender critical feminists as well as social conservatives pertains to the question of whether trans-women are women. Trans-advocates typically claim that Jenner is a woman, full stop. And any other trans-woman (hence, the slogan “trans-women are women”) . You can further distinguish the types of women (cis and trans), but nevertheless, it is alleged that trans-women are women. Others disagree (hence, the debate, Dr. Carrier).
I didn’t suggest that Jenner is a cis-woman. Im well aware of the distinction between trans-women and cis-women. I haven’t got a clue where you’re getting this charge from. Despite your allegation that I am lying (Seriously? Do you think that’s charitable?), I have read lots of literature on it, though mostly isolated to philosophy. I am conversant in the philosophical debate (largely because I followed Bettcher’s advice that I quoted earlier – and so should you).
Be honest: Were you aware of the different projects and disputes that one can take about the definition of woman, those perspectives and papers offered by Bettcher?
“You have two choices here: admit you don’t know what you are talking about and make an effort to get up to speed on what you clearly don’t know before commenting further; or admit you don’t care to because you are too bigoted to care to be informed about the principles of other people’s dignity or the actual factual reality that underlies it.”
Dr. Carrier, please stop talking like this.
Semantics can’t escape reality. You can try to redefine disrespect. The behavior still exists no matter what you call it. So renaming things doesn’t help you. All that matters is whether your behavior is due them or not, whether you are therefore demeaning someone who does not deserve it. And none of your examples track the case of what to call trans people. They do not deserve to be demeaned in this way. And your claiming their demands are contrary to reality tells me you don’t understand what their demands are or what a trans person even is. Read my article on transgenderism. That’s the third time now I’ve told you to do that. Please do it.
When trans advocates say Jenner is a woman, they mean a trans-woman. They do not mean a cis-woman. They are telling you that there are two kinds of women. Therefore the word “woman” does not specify which kind someone is. Therefore for you to insist that it does specify only cis-women is false and bigoted. It is not linguistically correct. It is not factually correct. And if you refuse to learn and understand this, you are a bigot. Otherwise, you can learn, understand what people are actually saying, tender respect to those who deserve it, and thus stop being a bigot. Your call.
“Semantics can’t escape reality. You can try to redefine disrespect. The behavior still exists no matter what you call it. ”
I don’t know if I tried to “redefine” anything, but in any case, if you grant that it is permissible for that adult child to refuse to call his birth mother Mom, then, what is the moral problem with the refusal to use this name? There is none. So what’s my point? Well, take a look at the reasons behind what makes it justifiable: The adult child does not want to use language that suggests and recognizes ideas that he sincerely believes are false. Yet, if that is what makes his refusal justifiable (even though you might see it as disrespectful), then a similar argument can be made for JP. It will be argued that, just like the adult child, JP does not want to suggest ideas that he believes are false. You might want to insist that this is still disrespectful, but whether it’s a moral problem remains an open question.
“And your claiming their demands are contrary to reality tells me you don’t understand what their demands are or what a trans person even is. Read my article on transgenderism. That’s the third time now I’ve told you to do that. Please do it.”
I’m unsure if I’ve ever read or heard about any authoritative document about trans-people’s demands, so I suspect you’re right about that. But that’s only because it doesn’t exist. The trans-community has a lot of different opinions and ideas about what they expect (some trans-people are frank in their admission that they’re not women, for example). I’m sure you’re aware of that, so I don’t know why you’d speak so confidently about their demands. Regarding your latter claim, if trans-identity is grounded in gender identity, then you’d be right to think that I don’t know what trans-people are, simply because I find the idea of gender identity to be far too vague and illy define. I also find that that the popular accounts of what makes trans-women women seem circular or just false (see the article and video I cited earlier). You might claim that this is ignorance – but it’s not. It’s precisely because I am familiar with the criticism of gender identity (that is, the philosophical criticism) that I confess befuddlement about trans-identity. In contrast, I suspect that your cocksure confidence is grounded precisely in your ignorance about the depths of these philosophical disputes (your article doesn’t focus on these issues and the criticisms offered by real philosophers, btw).
Holy balls. Seriously?
If is permissible to not call your actual mother your mother because of her misbehavior that warrants disrespecting her, it is not permissible to call a transwoman a man, because no misbehavior has occurred to justify that disrespect.
Otherwise they are factually a particular kind of woman, just as your mother would factually be your mother. Your own analogy thus proves my point: you are equating transwomen with transgressors who deserve to be disrespected because of their misbehavior. That’s your analogy. So either your analogy is a false analogy, or you are advocating bigotry: mistreating the innocent, because it is okay to mistreat the guilty.
Read my article on what transwomen are actually saying and what they are actually asking of you. Learn. Get out of this bigoted mindset. And stop using excuses to not learn and thus not escape it. Read. Learn. Understand. No more excuses.
You write in reply to my post about compelled speech:
“If Peterson doesn’t know that gender is an expressed preference (and is not the same thing as sex), he is incompetent and should be fired. If he refuses to allow students and coworkers the freedom to express themselves as they wish and as his employer allows, he is a bigot and should be fired. If he refuses to call them by the names they ask him to, he is disrespecting them and should be fired.
There is no way out of this conundrum. He either treats people with the respect they are due, or gets to be fired. He either treats people with the respect they are due, or we get to call him a transphobic douchebag. His choice. Anything else is just complaining about the consequences of fairness to one’s bigotries. “But it’s unfair everyone is treating me like a bigot” does not take away the fact that you are a bigot. If you don’t like being called a bigot, stop being one. Peterson hasn’t learned that lesson. And that alone, IMO, is reason enough to fire him.”
I don’t know what to say other than that this doesn’t address what I said. We can drop this as an impasse, if you like.
Will you publish and respond to my longer rejoinder, the one I first offered, with Bettcher and a multitude of other links? I hope so. That is where the meat of our disagreement is.
No. Your verbose response was irrelevant to what I’m saying. So there is nothing in that to respond to. (It did get published; your links threw it into spam, so I had to recover it.)
Transwomen and ciswomen are both women the same way tigers and tabbies are both cats, cops and firefighters are both public servants, sergeants and privates are both soldiers, and so on. So none of your claims that this isn’t true are correct. “Woman” simply does not mean ciswoman. Only ciswoman means ciswoman. Learn how language works. Please.
And once you get to that point of understanding your continued mistake here, nothing you are saying about rationalizing the demeaning of transwomen does anything but establish your rationalization for demeaning people who don’t deserve it. That makes you a bigot and an asshole. If you don’t want to be a bigot and an asshole, if you don’t want to demean innocent people, then you will call them by their actual names. You will treat them with the respect they deserve. Not make up bogus excuses to disrespect them.
Regarding this,
“When trans advocates say Jenner is a woman, they mean a trans-woman. They do not mean a cis-woman. They are telling you that there are two kinds of women. Therefore the word “woman” does not specify which kind someone is. Therefore for you to insist that it does specify only cis-women is false and bigoted. It is not linguistically correct. It is not factually correct. And if you refuse to learn and understand this, you are a bigot. Otherwise, you can learn, understand what people are actually saying, tender respect to those who deserve it, and thus stop being a bigot. Your call.”
No, that’s often wrong. They will grant that Jenner is a trans-woman, but they insist that trans-women are women. Hence, the slogan “trans-women are women”. You can google it, Dr. Carrier. If by “woman” they only meant trans-women, then you’d have a tautology (trans-women are trans-women), which is dumb. Heck, the main debate between trans-advocates and gender critical feminists/social conservatives is with whether trans-women are women (read the links, man).
I readily grant the trans-advocates will say that there are two kinds of women – that’s not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether they are right with respect to their classification (whether trans-women are, in fact, women).
I won’t respond to the rest. You are being rude and you’re out of line. Please stop.
Please read the article I keep telling you to read. You don’t know what your are talking about. And seem stalwartly disinterested in learning.
Transwomen and ciswomen are both women the same way tigers and tabbies are both cats. You are like someone who wants to insist tabbies can’t be cats, because only tigers are cats. Factually and linguistically false. When will you realize this?
Whether transwomen are women depends on the definition of womanhood being used. If defined biologically (in terms of the female reproductive system) or genetically (XX chromosomes), transwomen are definitely not women. So no, transwomen and ciswomen are not biologically or genetically women the same way tigers and tabbies are biologically and genetically cats. But if womanhood is defined socially, as being able to mimic stereotypical female behaviors, they are women. In this case, transwomen and ciswomen are socially female in the same way tigers and tabbies are, in terms of social behavior, cats.
What do you think of TERFs? Would you consider them feminists?
Do you think transwomen should be allowed to use the womens’ washroom or attend women only gyms?
Mario, I expect this was just poor wording, but you said, “But if womanhood is defined socially, as being able to mimic stereotypical female behaviors, they are women.”
There is an implication there that trans-women are “mimicking” stereotypical female behaviors, rather than acting in their own character. Also, it’s clearly not the “ability” of someone to act like the opposite gender that makes them trans either.
I don’t get the impression those are really your positions, so wanted to point it out.
Mario, you seem confused here.
Biology is sex, not gender. Transwomen is a gender category, not a biological one. And indeed, its very meaning is “not a woman with respect to gametes.” That’s what the “trans-” is doing in front of “-woman” in that word.
So you have confused different things. When I say “women” is a non-specific category that includes trans- and cis- women the way “cats” is a non-specific category that includes tigers and tabbies I am not saying “biologically.” If I were, I’d have to say “transwomen” are biologically women, but that’s the exact opposite of what I am saying and what everyone is saying. By definition a transwoman is usually not a biological woman. That’s what “trans-” means! If we thought otherwise we wouldn’t need the “trans-” prefix. Nor would we use the “cis-” prefix to designate what are usually biologically women.
(Not always, I should remind you: “cis-” refers to gender assigned at birth, and biologically intersex people often get designated a gender at birth contrary to or in disregard of their actual chromosomal or genital or gamete status; so it is possible for someone to be a “ciswoman” who does not biologically track any exact definition of woman in respect to sex. For instance, there are XY women, due to Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome; there are women with both XX and XY chromosome pairs; there are hermaphrodites with both sets of genitals and even both sets of gametes and reproductive organs; and so on.)
The tabby and cat analogy is solely linguistic, not biological. It is not a reference to how cats behave socially. It is simply that the word “cat” includes different kinds of cat. Just as the word “woman” includes different kinds of women. Wholly regardless of anything whatever to do with biology. Even with respect to social behavior, that is mostly a gender phenomenon that is culturally constructed, not a biological phenomenon decided before birth (biological variances in behavioral characteristics and personality between men and women almost never exceed ten percentiles, which entails tremendous overlap, leaving few significant differences at that level of analysis—indeed, behaviorally, women differ from other women more than women differ from men; and men differ from other men more than men differ from women).
TERFs (Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists) are penis-fearing bigots. They are feminists as much as Hitler was a socialist. Which is to say, barely, and pretty much in name only.
As for socialization, yes. Transwomen should be allowed to use the facilities of their preferred gender. Just as no one cares when transmen do so, no one should care when transwomen do so. Fearing the company of transwomen is transphobia by definition.
If “gender” identity is largely socially constructed, how do you explain the David Reimer case and the failure of sex reassignment surgery in general? Theoretically, you should be able to take any young boy, socialize him into being a female, give him phalloplasty and female hormones, and end up with a transwoman. But in the real world, this doesn’t seem to work.
Mario, in addition to Ash’s point, you are again confusing sex with gender. Gender isn’t about genitals. It’s about, for example, body language, aesthetics, clothing and cosmetic preferences. You almost never know what genitals anyone you meet has. So you aren’t gendering them by their genitals. Or their hormones. Or their chromosomes. And thus neither is society. Until you understand that, you won’t understand what we are talking about.
But if you want to talk about the other category, not transgender persons but in narrow formal terms “transsexuals,” your claim that it “fails” is not credible. The statistical data show it works to everyone’s satisfaction except transphobes (study study study). Which is why you are starting to look like one here.
Reimer was forced into a gender without his consent; he did not choose the gender he was comfortable with. That’s why it didn’t work for him. He wasn’t psychologically transgender.
“Theoretically, you should be able to take any young boy, socialize him into being a female, give him phalloplasty and female hormones, and end up with a transwoman. But in the real world, this doesn’t seem to work.”
No one is claiming it should. Explaining that gender is socially constructed is to say that what it means to be “male” or “female” is determined by society (and not biology). In other words, what it means to be a given gender—i.e. its behavioral expectations, social roles, attitudes, privileges, clothes, typical jobs, etc—is largely constructed by culture and is independent of physiology. Hence, different societies and even the same society over different periods of time will have different conceptions of “male” and “female” (and, in some cases, other genders). This is a simple and easily observed fact.
Now then, saying that gender is socially constructed does not mean that parents can “program” a child into comfortably identifying as any given gender, regardless of their genetic dispositions. Your scenario implies that the social construction of gender therefore makes it arbitrary. This is nonsense. In fact, a central point of trans-rights is explaining that people can choose the gender expression that feels right for them, regardless of how they were raised. In other words, virtually all trans folks were raised to be a gender other than the one they eventually chose for themselves. As such, that your scenario does not match reality is an argument in favor of transsexualism.
The entire point of all this is to explain that gender identity is a reflection of one’s internal psychological state in reference to how the individual expresses themselves in terms of gender. For most people, this psychological state comfortably aligns with the biological sex that society defines as “male” or “female”. But for some people, it does not align. The gender expectations assigned to their biological sex feel wrong.
Hope this clears up some of your confusion.
I second everything Ash just said. They just did a better job than I at explaining this point.
Do you have better quality studies on success of sex reassignment surgery? For example, in the first study you linked, it says: “These findings must be interpreted with caution, however, because fewer than half of the questionnaires were returned.” In the second study, only 37% of post-op trans responded to the questionnaire, so it has the same problems as the first. The third study’s findings are based on a very small sample size, so it’s basically unreliable.
If transexualism works, why do post-op trans have “substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalisations” than the general population?
I believe this study is more accurate since its longitudinal and has a larger sample size. See here:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885#s4
What do you think of trans kids? When should they get sex reassignment surgery? Before 12? 16? 18? When?
That’s why I cited three studies. That’s multiple corroboration with multiple replicated results.
Meanwhile, the longitudinal did not compare pre- with post-op trans people. It compared trans people with cis people (“compared to the general population”). By contrast it finds the same results as those other three studies I cited, and numerous others also cited in that one (hence even the longitudinal study concluded “sex reassignment of transsexual persons improves quality of life and gender dysphoria”).
The reason trans people differ on measures like suicide with the general population is that trans people are subject to abuse and discrimination and bigotry, not because of any transition surgery or HRT. That’s why suicide and health problems persist in the trans community altogether, non- and pre- ad post-op. Though again note that that same study shows even this is improving as transphobia decreases (e.g. “the overall mortality rate was only significantly increased for the group operated before 1989”).
This is why you need to actually read all these studies, rather than make false assumptions about what they report.
I’ll also remind you again: transsexuals are a minority in the transgender community. You really need to stop confusing sex with gender, and transsexual with transgender. Please learn the difference. This whole digression on post-op trans persons is completely irrelevant to the actual issue we’ve been discussing. And it looks like you are trying to use this irrelevant side issue to evade accepting facts regarding the existence and nature of the trans-gender community.
Meanwhile, as for children, we should not dictate to them what gender they express. We should allow them to express themselves any way they want, including non-binary expressions.
The matter of surgical or chemical intervention (which is, again, a completely different thing) need not be decided before pre-puberty, and at that point it should be a pre-teen’s choice whether to go on puberty blockers (which postpone physical puberty) until they are a certified adult and can choose which HRT profile to pursue thereafter (likewise any surgical interventions they might then want). Read this article on the reality of all this.
One piece of evidence that you are acting like a bigot, is that you aren’t actually checking these things yourself, even though it’s extremely easy to. Why did you not even read the longitudinal study you yourself cited and thus instead got completely wrong what it said? Why did you not just Google trans kids and see what trans advocates and medical professionals are already saying about this? Why did I have to do these things for you? Why do you keep refusing to inform yourself, and instead keep pushing a willfully uninformed transphobic narrative? You have some self-reflecting to do here. There is something wrong with how you are handling this. And you need to fix that to be a good citizen and neighbor to your fellow human beings.
Multiple corroboration doesn’t matter if all of your studies are of low quality, with small sample sizes. No firm conclusions can be drawn either way.
I’m not sure what pre-operative data would prove in this case, given that mortality due to suicide and other factors increased significantly among post-op trans relative to the general population 10, 20 and 30 years after sex reassignment surgery (just look at the Kaplan-Meier curve in Figure 1). This clearly indicates worsening outcomes, not better.
Obviously sex reassignment is not a panacea. Even the study authors admit “sex reassignment … may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.” Maybe these people have underlying issues that need to be treated first before undergoing sex reassignment surgery?
Please note that only increased cardiovascular deaths among post-op trans is attributed to discrimination, not suicide. In fact the study says “transsexualism is a strong risk factor for suicide,” not discrimination, which could very well indicate the condition itself – or the numerous psychiatric illnesses that often accompany it – place the individual at greater risk.
Also, how does wanting to learn more about trans make one transphobic? I’m not anti-trans, I just want to learn more about them. And you happen to be the resident expert on trans.
Dude. Multiple studies, even the longitudinal study you cited, all show the same conclusion. NO study shows any other conclusion. I even quoted that longitudinal study saying so, repeatedly, and you now say the opposite. So you aren’t reading even that study, nor listening to me. Why?
Acknowledge this. Stop pretending there is any science showing any other result.
Then explain why you tried to claim there is any science showing any other result.
Meanwhile, you were not called transphobic because you “want to learn more.” You are being called transphobic for repeatedly refusing to learn more. You don’t check facts yourself, even though it’s easy to. You didn’t even read the study you yourself cited. And still haven’t and still won’t acknowledge what it actually said. You don’t read trans literature. You don’t listen to what it says. You sometimes even say it says the opposite of what it says instead, demonstrating you are only pretending to read it. This is all evidence of transphobia.
Attend to yourself. Fix your bias. And start listening and learning. Rather than refusing to do either and just spewing ignorant transphobic talking points instead.
Be a better person.
Please.
So preteens should be allowed to use puberty blockers? Do you really think preteens have the cognitive capacity to choose that kind of life-altering path? Your wording suggests that although sex reassignment “need not” occur before puberty, it may occur if the child decides to become a post-op trans. So you’re for full-blown gender reassignment surgery for kids?
If preteens want to drive vehicles or choose to have sex with adults, is that OK too? If they can use puberty blockers and request gender reassignment surgery, they might as well.
Also, keep in mind, I’m not anti-trans. I have not once judged trans on this blog, nor have I ever passed judgment on them anywhere else, so it’s totally unfair of you to insinuate that.
Puberty blockers are not life altering. And teens wouldn’t make the decision alone, any more than they decide on any other psychiatric meds alone. Read the article.
The trans community actually is advocating for the opposite of pre-adult surgery; because that is more typically being used against them, not for them (e.g. someone else is deciding how to reassign them, often against their will and their preference). Hence the article says surgical options must only begin for those 18 and above. That you said the opposite shows you did not read the article. Read the article.
Then explain to me why you didn’t read the article. Why did you do that? Why won’t you become informed? Why do you not listen? What’s wrong with you?
Puberty blockers are life altering:
“A protocol of impersonation and pubertal suppression that sets into motion a single inevitable outcome (transgender identification) that requires lifelong use of toxic synthetic hormones, resulting in infertility, is neither fully reversible nor harmless.”
https://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-dysphoria-in-children
Ok, I just looked at your article, but you weren’t being entirely honest. “Bottom” surgery isn’t allowed, but “top” surgery is:
Clinics simply don’t offer “bottom” surgery of any kind — meaning surgery to change a person’s genitals — to children under the age of 18. And while the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines do allow “top” surgery — surgery to remove breasts and reconstruct the chest — for certain adolescent boys “after ample time of living in the desired gender role and after one year of testosterone treatment,” that course of treatment isn’t common.
So you agree that trans kids should be allowed to get boob jobs under certain circumstances?
On puberty blocking: No one but adults are taking synthetic hormones. And puberty blockers once stopped do not require one to take hormones afterward—puberty simply starts later and your body generates its own hormones like usual. You seem not to understand the science here.
On boob jobs: Teens have as much right to it with parental support as tattoos, piercings, prosthetics, plastic surgery, dental work (including extractions and prosthetics and orthodontics), and many other cosmetic interventions routinely performed on teens every year. Maybe you are unaware of how much surgery teens already regularly seek and consent to and are allowed to have.
I’m not denying the three studies you presented show some improvements in trans quality of life, however these were poor quality studies, with no value from an evidential perspective. The longitudinal study I presented admitted sex reassignment helps alleviate feelings of gender dysphoria, but also said sex reassignment “may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism,” given that trans worsened after surgery. It acknowledged trans as a risk factor for suicide.
Why are you denying that this is what the study said? How can you want to help trans if you’re not willing to look at all the evidence?
“NO study shows any other conclusion.”
You know that isn’t true:
“RESULT(S):
Fifty-five transsexuals participated in this study. Fifty-two were male-to-female and 3 female-to-male. Quality of life as determined by the King’s Health Questionnaire was significantly lower in general health, personal, physical and role limitations. Patients’ satisfaction was significantly lower compared with controls. Emotions, sleep, and incontinence impact as well as symptom severity is similar to controls. Overall satisfaction was statistically significant lower in TS compared with controls.
CONCLUSION(S):
Fifteen years after sex reassignment operation quality of life is lower in the domains general health, role limitation, physical limitation, and personal limitation.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18990387
But unlike you, I admit that most of the data on trans is of poor quality and that more research is needed before drawing any definite conclusions.
Also transphobia is defined as an irrational fear or aversion to trans people, but I neither fear them nor hate them, nor do I have any desire to discriminate against them. Trying to understand where trans are coming from is not transphobia. Stop accusing me of something I’m not.
I just quoted to you your own study saying they did not worsen after surgery. They actually are better off. Particularly in cases after 1989.
You clearly are disinterested in the actual facts and are starting now to just say anything you want even when it’s contradicted by your own source.
I am seeing a dedicated transphobe here.
I see no point in continuing this conversation.
Dr. Carrier,
I don’t think you responded duly to my longer post.
My guess is that you were unaware of just how complicated and hotly disputed the woman question is. I have a hunch that you were surprised to hear from Bettcher (a trans-woman, philosopher and specialist in this area – unlike you) that the woman question is far more complicated than it might seem to trans-advocates and their critics who aren’t immersed in the philosophical scholarship (and let’s face it, that includes you). I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. Truth be told: I don’t think you are prepared to debate the philosophical issues on this matter for at lest two reasons:(1) you don’t seem aware of the philosophical scholarship and (2) you emote and scream bigot rather than thinking seriously about this issue and without begging questions. In this way, and on this issue, you’re more of an activist than a philosopher. I think that readers will see this, too.
You write:
“Transwomen and ciswomen are both women the same way tigers and tabbies are both cats. You are like someone who wants to insist tabbies can’t be cats, because only tigers are cats. Factually and linguistically false. When will you realize this?”
For Pete’s sake, Dr. Carrier. I understand that you see it this way, but many people do not. Much the scholarship on this issue disputes whether trans-women are, in fact, women. Said differently, your statement here affirms the trans-inclusive understanding of the concept woman, something that is in dispute. If you don’t believe me, read the articles, man. Read Bettcher. Read Stock. Hell, read anything I linked.
You also write:
“And “woman” refers in most common use to gender not sex (because you almost never observe someone’s sex when you gender them—you have and deserve no access to their DNA or genitals and rarely use either to gender someone). Every trans advocate writing on this says this. So you have no excuse to not know this by now”
This is wrong. The pronouns he and she are assigned based upon the sex of the referent (typically). We can see in English grammar books dated from 1857 until the modern time. You’ll see that on page 17 of this book (1); page 113 of this book (2). With respect to the word woman,
(1) https://books.google.ca/books?id=h28CAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17&dq=English+grammar++pronoun+sex&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj80eTpy53mAhWHVN8KHdW1AooQ6AEIQDAD#v=onepage&q&f=false page
(2) https://books.google.ca/books?id=HKISAAAAIAAJ&dq=English+grammar++pronoun+sex&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=+sex
The word “woman” typically refers to a human, adult female, where “female” is cashed out in terms of sex. You can check old and modern dictionaries to confirm that. This is a meaning that Bettcher recognized as the standard within the public, which is why it’s the primary meaning cited in English dictionaries ( see Bettcher’s “Trans Women and the Meaning of “Woman”- an article that I’m sure you’ve read eye roll)
Lastly, regarding what else you said, you commit two errors. First, while you’re right that we don’t have direct access to DNA and genitals, human beings are sexually dimorphic species – we have reliable secondary sexual characteristics to induce a person’s sex, and hence determine whether we shall refer to that person as a man, or woman. We are also helped with what you call gender expression, but nevertheless secondary sexual characteristics are visible and something we have direct access to. I already said that to you in earlier posts, but you ignored it. Second, even if it were true that we rely on gender to refer to people as men or women, that does not imply that the words men and women mean some concept of womanhood apart from sex. You’re confusing two issues: Which data we use to attribute a word and what the word actually means in English.
If you want to know what the word means in English, check out a dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/woman
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/female
No, I’m not surprised by any of that.
You are simply continually ignoring what I said. For example, far from my not knowing “the woman question is complicated,” I actually directed you to my own article about this which extensively explains that it is complicated. You clearly are not reading what I told you to read.
“It’s complicated” is precisely why you are wrong. Gender differs from sex. You keep ignoring this. And in actual regular practice (not always, but most of the time) “woman” is used to refer to gender, not sex. You keep ignoring this. And in the context of gender it is always the superset of the two subsets. Woman is a generic word inclusive of both. Ciswoman is the specific word that specifies at-birth assignment of gender and sex; transwoman is the specific word that distinguishes all other women from those. You keep ignoring this. And even with respect to sex there is variability (including both chemical and surgical intervention; and various kinds of naturally occurring intersex biology). You keep ignoring this.
Since you keep ignoring everything I say, why are we even bothering to have a conversation? You refuse to listen. You refuse to learn. That’s on you.
Meanwhile, since you seem to believe in listening to dictionaries, maybe you will listen to Merriam-Webster. Read this entire section on gender.
@EM_CATHOLIC, quick questions:
Do you agree Gender and Sex are separate concepts that do not intrinsically rely upon the other?
Do you believe the term “woman” refers specifically to Sex rather than Gender?
Do you believe that presenting/believing oneself as the opposite gender (please note the term gender here, as it will relate to the first question) is an immoral act/belief?
I disapprove of your manner of presentation. I prefer just facts and analysis. Your interspersed vitriol is very off-putting and would be for any Peterson intrigue who you could potentially enlighten. No one wants to feel like they’re being made to eat shit which is what you’re sure to imbue in anyone who may have felt helped by Peterson and thereby held a favorable opinion of him. It’s sickening to know how quickly you’ll weaponize terms like ‘delusional’ and ‘irrational’ should a person react even partly on that basis. As long as you discount psychology by withdrawing all sympathy for its role in how all of us operate you do yourself and the world a huge disservice. To be succinct: you’re an asshole. And I’ll preempt any weaselly attempt on your part to make me out as ‘FAILING to address’ any of your ‘fact-based’ points by saying: I already agree with a lot of what you have to say but this reply isn’t about that.
Nice example of an irrational, emotional, pointless, ad hominem outburst. Well done. A true Peterson follower.
Give me an example of any factual inaccuracy in my article, with cited or linked evidence showing it is inaccurate. If you can’t, I have no interest in anything you have to say about it. Nor will any other reasonable person.
Objecting to factually accurate presentations is not commendable. I only care about facts, and only derive conclusions therefrom. If you don’t, that discredits your opinion as useless.
Hi Richard,
I want to clarify the issues stated in the article because I’ve seen inconsistencies based on what Jordan Peterson as said (as someone who has seen his videos and read his book).
It’s not a case that the rhetoric is homophobic, that’s never been stated. This is evident in his lectures, he states masculine and feminine roles get played regardless of the sex who is raising the children, whether they be same sex or non-same sex couples. One parent will take more of a masculine role, which makes sense because it’s intricately linked to how the species biologically survive. The majority of child-raising has always been a male and female partner (statistically speaking). That is not to suggest that homosexual couples can raise children or that males and females assume an absolute gender role; women, for example, tend to become more masculine in temperament as they get older and males, as the testosterone lowers around the late 20’s mark, tend to adopt more feminine traits.
Jordan hasn’t mocked people, or when he does at least it’s for good reason (mocking is a sign of being below contempt and therefore the content is not meant to be taken seriously. The issue is when it’s used maliciously or for the purpose of malevolence (something Jordan continuously states in his work). There hasn’t been any evidence (as far I have seen) of what he’s said advocating the harming of people or hate speech. You cannot choose who reads your book and who resonates with it, just as the Nazis perverted Nietzsche’s work.
The case for C-16 concerning transgender people is also misunderstood and coming from a perspective of English common law. Essentially the argument is that C-16 doesn’t bring human rights to trans people (as that is already affirmed in human rights law in the first place by representation of the individual regardless of ethnic background, sex etc), but instead is codifying the expression of such as mandatory. For example, the mandatory referring of people by pronouns by law (which is an important distinction) in society on the basis that:
“gender identity or expression” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the list of characteristics of identifiable groups protected from hate propaganda in the Criminal Code. It also adds that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on a person’s gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance for a court to consider when imposing a criminal sentence. (https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/421C16E)
The law also adds “gender identity or expression” to section 718.2 of the Criminal Code. This section is part of the sentencing provisions and makes gender identity and gender expression an aggravating factor in sentencing, leading to increased sentences for individuals who commit crimes motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression.
It’s a systematic imposition of language by law and is therefore tyrannical in nature. You cannot force someone to say something they don’t want to say and the issue is how this codified law (contradiction English Common Law) transforms compelled speech to an act of accusing people of prejudice, or hate speech because they did not use the right pronoun. This was blindly evident in the Lindsay Shepard case when she was reprimanded by faculty for showing Peterson’s critique of Bill C-16 in her class, which was concluded out to be bogus anyway. This coinciding with the domination of Marxism within humanity studies in some universities (something I experienced when I did my Bachelors and Masters in History, though I do not do ideologies), shows the abuse that this type of legislation has granted on an ideological level, e.g. stopping people from using contextual cases as an example to prove a point (disassociating the context/content itself and using it to show a case). The point is that the legal precedent set up can lead to non-legal action being totalitarian in nature e.g. you shut down a lecture because it has the inkling of being “bigoted” with no evidence to support that claim (as evident in the Lindsay Shepard case). This can lead to behaviour beyond the confines of the law; it was wilfully apparent in the USSR.
Often issues like these work outside the confines of the law, whether compelled speech or abusive institutions.
My opinion (with little evidence): This is not to say that Peterson’s content isn’t aimed at men; firstly, that’s the main commonality (since the majority of people anywhere in the world are heterosexual), it’s not only a logistical but also statistical point as well (since it incorporates the majority of cases within the human species) but secondly, the statistical element that accrues to the “downtrodden young man” is something wholly valid because most heterosexual men strive for that in their lives; even for homosexuals, the aim is somewhat similar as the idea of homosexual marriage wouldn’t be an issue in the first place had this not been apparent (even though there’s a strong case for how traditional marriage institutions e.g. the church have treated homosexuals, otherwise homosexuals with traditional religious views wouldn’t be advocating for gay marriage); there are only so many outliers to conclude human beings are different before you conclude they’re similar: that’s why the constructionist vs universalist argument is not a valid dichotomy anymore, neuroscience has shown this isn’t the case (you bring it up yourself with neuroplacidity, (Jan Plamper’s “History of Emotions” is a good work showing how the dichotomy is no longer relevant).
Back to me being disassociated: Even in this case, he doesn’t explicitly imply it’s an aim, more of a indicative by-product to having a successful life (from the perspective of the individual striving for that successful life) because that’s what women go for; men who are conscientious, hard working, attractive and successful and mirror the similar level to their intelligence and success (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1984.54.1.47). You don’t need a psychological textbook to show you that, it’s about choosing the optimum chance of success in life. You don’t want to be with someone who’s going to be a net-loss to you in life, you want them to benefit your life in some way (unless your open to opportunistic, depressing and abusive partners). The argument isn’t against sexual liberation or female dominance, to suggest that is to misconstrue what’s been said because Jordan’s point is men and women are different and abide by different criteria when it comes to dominance, because they’re biologically different; the cognitive aspect is more or less the same but women rate higher in agreeableness and neuroticism, those are biological aspects the individual cannot control.
My opinion: What’s being said is that with sexual liberation (since the 1960’s) and female dominance (in modern society anyway, historical cases have shown female dominance in multiple sectors, just not political; though that would imply political power equals de-facto power), has created multiple issues such as the balance between work and a social life, or priorities like having a family and having children (something which comes very apparent as you get older). These aren’t subjects to take lightly because the way they’re navigated is valid. It’s a valid discourse to have and has an effect in society.
Back to me being disassociated: There is a stride to commit to a traditionally structures family (two parents and kids with an extended family) as the optimum way, but that doesn’t imply traditional gender roles; he pretty much states there’s always going to be outliers, some women are going to be more masculine and some men are going to be more feminine: for example, the rate of agreeableness in women, according to Jordan, is something like 60% which leaves almost half as less-agreeable. That doesn’t take away from the 60% because it’s above half but it’s an important outlier to show (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/). But having the traditional structure is optimum for raising psychologically sound, healthy, children who can grow and be successful in the world, that is to say contributing members of society to are liked by their peers, who equally want them to succeed as well. This is a large misunderstanding and is illustrated, in the article, by “forced monogamy”, something which has been mis-implied. The point of it is to show that society encourages you, through social values, to be monogamous and marry one person and that links to the point of marriage (contrary to partnerships) being an act of faith, because you stick with the person regardless of the adversity you face through your life. This also coincides with the fact polygamous marriages tend to be higher in violence and monogomous marriages tend to promote better equality and an overall positive outcome (https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-link-between-polygamy-and-war). If the relationship turns out to be abusive, the above mentioned isn’t an excuse to stick to that marriage (and arguably it wasn’t really a marriage in the first place) which is why it’s advocated to be truthful about yourself and play a straight game (that is to say, be as honest as you possibly can be). It’s not a case of “Jesus, get a hobby already” (and that is quoted out of context in this article, it’s picking out a quote for your own self-benefit to slander) because the implication is that marriage is an oppressive institution when it’s not, if you don’t want to be a housewife, you don’t have to be: that’s the benefit of free choice, pick something to do and be good at it (whether it’s a profession or areas of expertise, which can be seen as a hobby, at least at first); just make sure, when you dedicate yourself to parenting, you do a good job and actually raise your kid with good ethics and a value structure but it proves to not only be a net positive to society but also means they’re raised mentally and physically healthy.
There’s nothing wrong with dressing the part, in a suit (something that’s been apparent since the advocation of the suit began well before the 1950’s). Neither is what being said rhetoric, all you need do is watch his lectures, he even has a list of books he quotes which you can read. This isn’t unfounded material. Coinciding with the critique that he thinks classical liberalism is a safe passage to economic freedom, something that’s partly agreed, though it is not an assumption that capitalism is inherently evil as it simply has a system that has private ownership and profit (and there are many substructures of capitalism, including ones like in the Scandinavian countries which are very left-wing and regulated).
Concerning the point about being bad at science, again the point is misconstrued, and he quotes neuroplacidity in his lectures because he shows that (using Piaget’s constructivism) that there are a-priori instincts within human beings but a lot of that is channelled, and influenced, through social standards and structures and as that changes, so does the development of the brain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ4VSRg4e8w). The point about lobsters is that, like humans, there is a dominance hierarchy which humans also have. The similarity is beyond a superficial observation, it’s part of a biological process that stands millions of years and pre-dates human beings (whatever form) themselves. Even, as “an actual scientist who studies lobsters says” social hierarchies isn’t apparent in acoel, it’s still apparent in our biological ancestors (when we evolved to primates) and also in most social creatures who have to abide by a hierachy. The reason is because there is a consensus to mitigate the use of violence (which is incredibly apparent in our animal cousins and our ancestors) and therefore develop consensus. This is stated in Thomas Hobbs and Roseau for the human aspect in that a social contract is formed, and that’s in a situation where things are relatively stable because, like the lobster case, aggressive displays arise from access to resources: something that is inherently evident when people are at the bottom of the social spectrum e.g. gang violence. Humans work together in situations where there’s a net benefit and because otherwise firstly, conflict provides an opportunity for others to succeed in place of the social conflict (this is also linked in game theory) and secondly, as you said by your own words, “Humans as a species are dependent on social cooperation; they do very poorly as loners, and individual self-sufficiency is exhausting to impossible.” Jordan says this almost in parallel, people who move up the dominance hierarchy or are considered valuable are reciprocal and value is based off of an exchange of favours. It’s a social contract that’s based partly on cohersion (since society is to an extent forceful to socialise you into proper behaviour based on the values society has promoted, and that enables you to cooperate properly) but that also enables cooperation in the first place. It’s complex and it’s evident, even in something as complex as modern society otherwise it wouldn’t have been theorised in the first place. That’s something apparent in most social creatures or pack animals. Even from your article from Psychology today, it states this. This isn’t a matter of who has the most resources (as stated in the article or probably stated by Irwin Bernstein), so this wouldn’t be the flawed (as you say) Marxist theory of social dominance. It doesn’t have to common when it comes to dominance, it just has to be evident; dominance doesn’t also need to contribute to the stability of group-based hierarchies because that implies some level of forcefulness in conformity to the group (whereas society is broadly forceful in socialising so you’re a reasonable member of society, that’s why you, for example, learn to concentrate and sit down in school). This is a debate about the substance of the structures but the structures themselves, Jordan is conducting a meta-analysis (which is why he does an analysis of archetypes within different narratives).
One issue I do also point in relation to this is social animals can be co-operative and conflict takes place within the framework of that, because humans (like most social/pack animals) are dependent on that. The conflict inflicted is within the group and can be for status, resources etc and factors like that are socially dependant. I mean, all you need do is look at conflicts historically, for example in Early Modern Europe, to see how violence was mitigated as part of what’s called the “status economy” (see Hilay Zmora, “The Feud in Early Modern Germany”). Co-operation does not exclude conflict or competition. In fact, those aspects are contingent on each other which, from my perspective, is biological. That is why though history (whether it is the Roman-Sassanid Wars, which had agreed trading routes for merchants that did not get harassed, or Early Modern Germany, where thrusting was not permitted in sword fighting against fellow Christians), there has always been some kind of social agreement to treat others in times of conflict and the taboo that comes with when that is broken. When it is, usually the individual is shunned; good examples can be seen, for example, with the treatment of executioners in the Medieval period (who often earned good money but were social outcasts).
The point about Jung is invalid in the article by Phil Christman because the point central point about men being protectors of women is not valid. According to Jordan, men are more aggressive because they are higher in testosterone, which mellows out in the upper 20’s (https://www.medicinenet.com/high_and_low_testosterone_levels_in_men/views.htm). This means less risk-taking and less readiness to pick a fight with other males, because that’s how male competition takes form. To relate this to Jung, it’s imparted with Jung’s concept of the shadow (which is something the persona, the outward appearance of the person, rejects because they’re issues which are considered too taboo). it’s not an issue of “who is manly” but as Jordan says, realising you are capable of untold destruction, and good morals is a case of making the conscious decision to not do it (by choice, which means standing up to adversity and not being ignorant as ignorance is not an equivalent to being morally good; this was pointed out by Nietzsche whereby he states people disguise their cowardice as morality). In short, humans are capable of horrible things (usually men when it comes to subjects like war, instigating, physical violence etc. I mean all your need to do is look at, with accounts of soldiers in war, in what drove those people to choose to commit horrendous acts).
The point about men and women containing essential and separate ad immutable personality characteristics, is not one based on personality, cognitive ability or leadership, but temperament. Women are higher in agreeableness and neuroticism, which Jordan should know as he’s a clinical and behavioural psychologist and invests highly in the big 5 personality (see previous article linked).
The fact based critique about gender pronouns is valid, especially in opening up to a dialogue, but that doesn’t take away from Jordan’s arguments about free speech. Especially when gender, as stated in the article, is a construction and is relative to the historical period. However, one if dependant on the other. For example, in the Roman Empire (Anthony Kaldellis podcast talking to Stephen Morris who produced ” “When Brothers Dwell in Unity”: Byzantine Christianity and Homosexuality (McFarland & Company 2016) (and in the case of the Mamluk Sultanate, from Thomas Bauer, “Mamluk Literature: Misunderstandings and New Apporaches,” in Mamluk Studies Review IX ) sexuality was divisioned between those who were “bearded” and non “bearded” (which included young men, eunuchs, women etc), but the theme is more or less the same because it relates to common features (softer features) that are more apparent in women than men, as that is the commonality, biologically, with women.
Jordan’s point about “ancient aliens” is something that has been apparent for existentialists for years (not literally ancient aliens). He admits it’s a mystery and there is a level where, existentially, things can no longer be quantified within human understanding; that’s the basis of metaphysics. The example of the snake cannot be compared to pseudo-science because firstly, it’s not a scientific statement to make (he says this in a discussion and says he’s reaching the borders of what he knows; he doesn’t need to backtrack on the point and is as precise as possible in his point. Also coinciding with the fact the theme of the lecture may have taken on a number of themes, namely Jung) and secondly, Jordan actually clarifies why it’s the case: snakes were constantly a threat to our ancestors and, arguably, one of the factors which resulted in heightened awareness and self-consciousness, but was also so evident as to be carried within human narratives and myths across societies well after snakes stopped posing a threat (snake detection theory: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20445911.2011.629603) His relation to the snake with chaos and order is Judeo-Christian, going back to Zoroastrianism (and the theme of the snake as a representative of chaos, like water, is evident cross culturally). It’s a meta-narrative (so Jordan can hardly be seen as a post-modernist as he outlines this in his lectures and associates with it as a key teaching).
Concerning George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, the point shown by Jordan is that Orwell observed that the typical middle-class socialist was not for helping the poor but being resentful of the rich. Magery Sabin shows that “Orwell does not wish merely to enumerate evils and injustices, but to break through what he regards as middle-class oblivion” (Margery Sabin, “The truths of experience: Orwell’s nonfiction of the 1930s”, in John Rodden (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell, 2007, p. 45.) That isn’t an implication to say Socialists are bad, in fact Jordan himself states that he was part of a Socialist organisation when he was younger, where individuals focused on helping the poor (compared to now where he claims that’s no longer the case and I agree with him, especially in partisan or radical groups that strive to say capitalism is bad but do not want to help those who need help).
History-wise, I have an masters in History and I keep up-to-date with the literature concerning my areas of expertise. Peterson is anachronistic in his historical interpretations, though, biblically, I would differentiate the new testament with the teachings to Christ to after his death/ascension to heaven, according to the gospels (unless there needs to be a debate about what constitutes Christ’s teachings when it’s not Christ teaching himself since Christ gave no dogmatic teaching in his ethics, so he cannot come across as misogynistic since he never advocated that or totalitarian) since there’s large historical precedence, and religious precedence, to why certain gospels were accepted, and others excluded (under Constantine and the council of Nicaea).
Finally, I do not think Jordan’s philosophy is to resonate in justifying the resentment of men. It’s there to come to terms with it and deal with it, not to act out on it. He uses moral narratives to justify that point. That’s why he talks about “radical honesty” as a means of addressing it using Jungian Psychology in conjunction with integrating the shadow.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBet_lgh4wc)
This is not to say there are not some things I’m in agreement with. I do agree with the point about the lobster and how it has been mis-used in terms of reference and the false claim about being part Native Canadian (though as said in the article, he is part of the same box, which would be the equivalent to and it is evident that the bond with Charles Joseph’s family is honest). The stuff about neuroscience and evolutionary biology is also questionable, though his points about Piaget, coinciding with research he’s said he’s done points more or less to neuroscience and neuroplacidity.
Other than this, I do not have any other issues with the article.
Every single thing you just said is either irrelevant (it addresses nothing I wrote whatsoever) or already refuted by the evidence I cite and thus effects no defense.
That you don’t notice either is disturbing.
I know that I’m late to the party here, but I just wanted to thank you for writing this excellent piece. I’ve been much concerned about the possible proliferation of Peterson’s type of bullshit in the zeitgeist and the danger that it might pose to the freedom and happiness of minorities. It was nice to see a systematic takedown like this.
I find it really interesting that Carrier, in this article, while criticizing and lambasting Jordan Peterson for his statements and publicly held positions on issues like feminism, transexuals and religion, he completely avoids and makes no mention whatsoever about Peterson’s most glaringly egregious behavior when it comes to racism and his lies about ‘white privilege’ not existing and his endorsement of racist IQ propaganda. This is a glaring and instructive omission on Carrier’s part. And it is a reflection of the pervasive social reality of America that while every sentiment from anti-Christianity to pro-feminism to pro-LGBT and so on is highly popular and encouraged by the elites in America, the one thing that is widely socially forbidden is any talk that threatens the system of anti-black racism and ‘white’ privilege. This is a rule that virtually every other intellectual and social commentator in America can be observed abiding by.
You must have missed the point of my article. This is not a catalog of Peterson’s political positions. It is a catalog of his crankery and incompetence.
And I did cover his racism in respect to that…
See my entire bit about his “shaking sticks” argument; and the whole section about Nazism; and my digs at his race-position with his dream for a “white man’s paradise,” and “identity” politics that are “exclusively white male or pro-white-male.”
However, if you know of any good debunking videos that specifically address his race baiting and race politics, share them here and if they are indeed good, I’ll paste them in.
Otherwise, if you are looking for articles about racism and white privilege, see my “racism” category (dropdown menu, top right).