Ms McCartney
You are fundamentally wrong.
When you talk about oppressed woman in abusive marriages having no escape, and have sly digs at men with daddy issues, you reveal both your smug sanctimony and your lack of understanding. Traditional societies were not defined by male dominance but by traditional roles. Just as a woman could not escape a bad marriage, neither could a man. Social roles were proscribed along social values. What power did poor men have but to die in wars or live miserable existence in hard pitiless labour? You may argue against social roles, but it was not roles and rules for women and complete freedom for men.
And the purpose of social roles was to impose order on primitive libidinal chaos (the id, if you like that jargon). Rules will always constrain, just as complete freedom will always be nihilistic.
Once you are wise enough to stop seeing everything as a gender war, you will realise that JP’s rules apply to all humans. Woman need to take responsibility too. Suffering is universal. The need for order and the equally strong need for breaking rules occur in all human beings. We all crave safety and security; we all must pay a little price in individual freedoms for that security. Or we are all equally free as moral agents to break social roles and accept the consequences.
But first you must rise above your narrow understanding of the world.
Well said.
Peterson outlines incredibly well how brutal life has been for *all* people in previous generations and still is for most now. The liberal over-educated parts of the West have decided that it’s about identitarianism now and cannot see beyond it, manufacturing outrage to order to quell boredom and lack of life purpose.
Peterson calls it out and many of us see it for what it is: subversive amd dangerous.
Feminists get things done for which women!?, They never asked my consent or my view – the majority of women don’t like new age feminism! I believe in my right to self determination over ID politics and group identity! I speak for myself and won’t allow another group to force me into id politics or make rules on “my behalf”! I won’t have some radicals assume my voice for me!, or have special laws and money diverted to them either!! Feminists in my book are not wanted, and I want nothing to do with them!
Back in the 60s and 70s I used to really enjoy reading the Feminist books which were very hot at the time, and were very much about Middle Class. The position basically was that Men and women went to university for two very different reasons, with striking differences.
Men went to University get professions to be successful. Women went to be worthy of becoming their wives. (which is the reason for humanities degrees, to make attractive spouses who could have high conversation and be cultured at dinner parties, basically be trophy spouses, but not very employable.)
So these educated women went from highly stimulating University to cleaning a big house and tending infants wile the man did stimulating work, coming home tired, fulfilled, with the wife was desperate for some intellectual exchange. This led to their going crazyish, and Valium and so on.
That was Feminism as it began. This is not the case now, and Feminism has moved on, in many ways an answer looking for a problem.
Education is not just about becoming employable (or a worthy wife, for that matter). And feminism didn’t suddenly spring into existence in 1960; the Suffragists who campaigned for votes for women were undoubtedly feminist in their way – and they were not the first.
Not that all battles fought by today’s feminists are necessarily wise, or even well fought.
Ah, so because one male’s grasp of the history is a bit awry then it’s the case with all of them. And anyways that doesn’t negate their right to an opinion or engage in debate.
You’ve been brainwashed by feminist propaganda, “the vote” had less to do with feminism than you think. Women’s suffrage gradually spread across the world from the end of the 19th century onwards without feminist’s help, largely due to industrialisation and wealth. Only in the US and Britain were some women vociferous in their demands and interestingly enough they were given the vote by their countries later than others.
See my comment further down.
The Suffraget s were sexists who fought only for votes for women, ignoring the 40% of men who also didn’t have the vote.
In fact, women only got the vote when working class men returned from the trenches and demanded the franchise. The decision was made to extent voting rights for all citizens at that point.
The Suffragettes didn’t win the vote for women. It was won by the blood of men.
well that wins the utterly full of b.s. award. Where in the deep dark crevices of the gluteous maximus do you males pull these fantasies out of…Emily Davidson was forced fed 49 times in seven imprisonments before she martyred herself for the vote via racehorse.
yes, handmaidens are always willing to let other women do all the work and then knife them in the back to curry favor with the males who will always despise them no matter what.
Which women? I’m a woman and nothing feminism ever did was for me. More like against me. And you’ll find i represent the views of the majority of women on that.
what we have achieved is being taken apart by transvestite uber-white-privileged males
And that’s why i’m a bit torn on the trans issue. On one hand, it’s so grotesquely, ridiculously absurd that i cannot comment on it with a straight face. On the other hand though, they are pissing off all the feminists, and i like that. Also they are blokes (however much they insist they aren’t), and as a heterosexual woman i like blokes. So, in a binary choice between feminists and trannies, the tranny blokes get my vote any day.
Perhaps the reason why men’s rights groups haven’t made much progress is the active opposition by feminists to men’s groups who try to achieve equality.
Consider the feminist opposition to the movie The Red Pill, a film made by a former feminist investigating men’s issues. Feminists in Australia and Canada managed to ban the film, effectively de-platforming the attempt to investgate mens issues,
The category error you make here is to see Peterson as a champion of male rights per se, a sort of male version of you. Then of course he has “done nothing” in terms of who you perceive him to be. What he has done is to call into question the idea of a male patriarchy as the way feminists see it, and has the temerity to question your world-view, so you descend into ad hominem attacks. Anyone can attach power-laden words like “whining” to someone’s discourse, but this isn’t intelligent debate.
“I don’t even think men know HOW to fight for the rights of lower status males.” — Nothing inhibits lower status males more than general feminist indignation towards them. Their status and living experiences are just getting more dismal with #MeToo and total gender equality in education and management jobs. Among men there was at least some code of cultivated conduct.
@Micah – but Feminism had the big advantage that men tend naturally to feel protective and helpful towards women. While neither men nor women naturally feel sympathetic to ‘loser’ men.
I think that where there have been advances in men’s rights, such as equal child custody presumptions here in the UK, they have often been more a side effect of Feminism*, of equal-handed application of Liberal Equality principles, or just from a recognition that fair treatment for men gives the best outcome for other more sympathised-with groups, such as the children of divorced parents.
*My impression is British Feminism doesn’t seem nearly as hostile to men as much of US Feminism.
There is an interesting hypothesis called Gamma Bias. The bias is a cognitive distortion of which one of your instances could be applied to the distortion as a confirmatory example. I am still waiting to see when this hypothesis undergoes empirical testing and replication.
The lack of action in the so-called MRA movement might be explained also by this supposed background context, if it turns out to be confirmed via multiple studies. Putting it down to a univariate causation of lack of grass roots action fails to explain why this is so.
Where did the MRA movement come into this? Peterson does not whine or support those that do, he advocates the complete opposite- taking responsibility and standing up for yourself, absolutely not self pity. Peterson is not an activist nor claims to be. He is exceptionally good at analysing describing and critiquing social structures and strategies and that is what people enjoy. On the subject of standing up for rights of the lower status what do you think the trade union movement was all about then, nearly all male until recent times. Women would never have got the vote and had the rights they enjoy today without the support of men within the trade union movement.
I think you may not understand men. Do you have brothers? Did your father love you? Did you know or have any Uncles (actually, often more important than fathers)? You want men to fight for the rights of “lower status men”? Do you fight for the rights of lower status women who don’t agree with you? Please.
I agree Vikram.
Feminist indoctrination runs deep; both the belief that they, feminists, have forced social change already, and that they can put an end to particular types of violence, tribal customs and behaviour by pathologizing men. The greater freedom of women throughout the 20th century in the West has been largely driven by the requirements of the market and the liberal humanism that has developed alongside that, neither are necessarily ‘good’ or better than what existed before.
Peterson’s most simple advice to put your own house in order first before trying to change the world is one of the best. But egos, ideologies and money tempt people away from that good advice all the time.
Oh what it is to be human.
There’s been a lot of nonsense said above and below. Not just by you. But on this… I must say… that feels like an unfair attack on the man not the ball. Your argument seems to be that Peterson is a fraud and a charlatan for writing observational books intended as advice.. while suffering in his own life and with his own life choices. Why? Wasn’t Hemingway a drunk? Wasn’t MLk a womaniser? I’m sure all of the marvellous and celebrated feminists of our times have had some deep character flaws.. their personal battles don’t necessarily make their arguments invalid. Just because my girl friend squawks doesn’t mean I shouldn’t listen to and honour her.
Peterson’s fundamental message in both books (although like the author of this article I haven’t yet reached the midpoint of the sequel) seems to be … things are hard and often deeply flawed.. so strive to make them better without fixating on perfection… that seems like a pretty harmless message to me. And possibly one a lot of people will benefit from contemplating
Women in Japan got the vote because MacArthur forced the Japanese to accept it in the constitution he forced on them – he gave the women the vote because it would stop the culture of Militarism, which it did. Their constitution has the record of being the longest in effect without any changes at all.
If you mean Emily Davison, noted arsonist, who attacked people with a bullwhip, what specifically were her accomplishments? When she died women still didn’t have the vote and it was not until Davison was long gone and thousands of women had been recruited for war work that Parliament granted some women the vote if they were over a certain age and owned property. Davison herself accomplish nothing.
Indeed, and it is highly likely that the terrorist activity of the suffragettes, including bombing, arson, acid attacks through letter boxes and criminal damage, actually delayed women getting the vote. No sensible government would give way to violence like that.
Women’s suffrage was already gradually spreading worldwide before WWI, in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway and partially in Sweden women had suffrage, without the need for terrorism of any kind.
It is quite reasonable to suppose that if the suffragettes had not caused so much trouble, all women in Britain would have got the vote in 1919 (as they did in Germany) instead of having to wait another decade.
I agree. Women’s participation in war efforts, so necessary and so praised, changed the course of history in so many ways, not the least of which were employment and suffrage. It wasn’t someone burning things down that led to anything good for women.
Wyoming was the first State in USA to give women the vote, 1921 I think. This was because (I believe) because women had to run the Ranch and farm business wile the men worked on them, they were economically equal of necessity, not because they they protested. It was a different economy than any other.
Britain entered the industrial Revolution in the 1780s and by 1900 there were plenty of upper middle class women whom had income from investments, family trusts, owned pubs, market stalls. The Married Wmens property Act of 1860 meant they kept their assets after marriage. Obtaining the vote was an extension of economic independence and so gained the greatest support from upper middle class women. Women living in slums who had witness several of her children die of poverty was less concerned with the vote. .
The suffragettes were certainly a mixed bag, and had lots of crazies in their ranks. The organisation was also something of a personal fiefdom of Emmeline Pankhurst, and was very much a middle and upper class class affair.
One of the events that galvanised lots of women into the Sufferage movement was the spreading of the franchise to a range of men that permitted some domestic servants to exercise the vote. The very notion that a creature as worthless as a servant might have some status that didn’t properly reflect their complete inferiority to their mistress in every respect drove a lot of upper class women into a near apoplectic state. The idea, for example, that a fully grown male gardener might silently put up with being addressed like a child, or being bullied, but harbour secret thoughts along the lines of, “Well, I might have to tolerate your shit, but I’ve still got the vote and you haven’t,” drove some women into wild indignation.
It’s also worth remembering that the main pastime of the Suffragettes during WW1 was handing out white feathers to men who were invalided out of the army, or who they suspected were not manly enough to throw themselves in front of German machine gun or cannon fire with enthusiasm.
It is also the case that the widening of sufferage was merely a continuation of Enlightenment thinking: a social, political, intellectual and cultural movement that men came up with very happily on their own. Indeed, the first pamphleteer for votes for women was a man. Furthermore, as you say, the Pankhursts probably slowed things down because pro-women’s vote male parliamentarians had to contend with the argument that the antics of the Sufferagettes proved that women were too irrational and emotionally unstable to be entrusted with a vote. To many, the Suffragettes mostly served as the perfect illustration of why women were unfitted for a wider political role in society.
The notion that women ‘won’ the vote by fighting for it is absurd. Most of the people who did the real fighting were men – especially people like John Stewart Mill, who was a million times more important than Emmeline Pankhurst – mostly because he wasn’t mad. Certainly, all of the intellectual work was done by men except for a very tiny number of women who were educated in Enlightenment thinking by men. Like many things, women were given the vote as a free gift from men.
As you say, the participation of women in the war effort pretty-much closed the case because the logic of extending the franchise to a wider range of men was partly grounded in the same line of reasoning – if a man can be called upon to serve his country then he’s earned the right to have a say in how it’s run. The difference is that ‘service’ for women didn’t mean the battlefield. And so men were told, “You’re getting a say in your country because your country may demand that you fight and die for it,” whereas women were told, “You’re getting the vote because your country may ask you to stand in for your brothers, fathers, uncles, sons, etc., while they’re away fighting and dying.”
Micah, I don’t know if you’ll pick this up but I needed a few days to think before responding, or whether to respond at all.
I wonder what has caused you to be such an angry person. I don’t think anyone from a loving home could be as angry, unless they had an illness and you seem too rational for that.
This is just a comments page where disparate people comment on articles and put forward their ideas, you fight back with such verbal aggression as if your life depended on it. Why?
Don’t go through life full of anger and hate, try and be objective, talk to someone you can trust who will help you sort things out.
Different ideas about politics are really not as important as your happiness and well-being.
49 forcefeedings in seven imprisonments, suicide by racehorse. Keep re-writing history, if you must, I love to hear supposed “non-feminists” expressing opinions they think women shouldn’t be allowed to have and showing the results of the hard work of people whom they claim did nothing. Your screaming hypocrisy and ironic presence on this thread is proof of the work of women whose morality you will never approach.
And she follows up the marriage part by using the 1960s as an example. Of what exactly? A woman today is not under those restrictions. Neither is a man. In the US, half the marriages end in court and that is among those who bother with it in the first place.
I think this is an overly harsh critique. The point she makes has always struck me as the most important question to ask Jordan Peterson, which hatchet interviewers such as Cathy Newman always fail to ask: to what extent is his account of hierarchy in our societies merely descriptive and therefore changeable, and to what extent is it normative or, at least, inevitable?
Jordan P is simply dismantling by rational arguments the PC scoring mechanism that more or less works like this.
White -1 Black +1 Male -3 female +3 hetero -4 Gay +5 Muslim +4 Conservative -2 liberal 0 Marxist +3, family ( traditional ) one income -6.
Jordan makes the point that the traditional system of values is far from perfect, but replacing it with a different system as BLM etc and most of the media advocate, simply creates a different process of discrimination with a different set of winners and losers. Thomas Sowell, many feminists and others have come to realise, that these woke solutions far from helping often make things much worse by virtue of unintended consequences.
Yeah, me too. I wonder when I’ll get a call from the mysterious ‘Patriarchy’ to come and become a member. It sure sounds good, having all that power and status.
Hierarchy is descriptive and normative. The word describes what we observe in a multitude of social settings currently in place, but other hierarchies could and would exist. That is, I would argue that hierarchies are inevitable in human social systems but that the details are only weakly influenced by biological imperatives*.
*My opinion is undoubtedly based on the prevailing attitudes when I learned evolutionary biology (c 1990), but I studied social dominance in depth. I have not read Peterson because, from what I have read in reviews of his work, he get’s the biology wrong (he is naive in relating the simple to the complex).
Yes – Agreed. This confirms my impression of JP that he’s a brilliant and charismatic speaker, a successful writer of self help books but flawed as an academic. His arguments generally fall down when fellow academics in his field look at them.
No but I’m not at all surprised to find out that he’s a junkie. That’s a good thing by the way. It means the flat effect I always picked up on was just from drugs and not true psychopathy. When he gets sober after a few years of really learning to process emotions his work might be worth reading. It’s scandalous he was advising other people on how to live. In my view he owes all of you a deeply felt apology for advising you on how to do something that he himself was not even capable of. If he stays clean and appropriately apologizes for suckering so many hateful and desperate people into being even more hateful and desperate than they already were, I might read his work some day, when he’s clear headed and has actually experienced the “life” that’ he’s telling everyone else how to navigate.
I would advise you to try Hemingway and stick to straight fiction if you want to read drunk or drug-addled minds. Reading someone like Dr. Robert Hare might help you with discernment, too.
Mr Nash
I missed your comment.You ask a very important question, and I wish Ms McCartney had asked it with equal elegance without resorting to gender war cliches.
As to your question, Rousseau (I think) said: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains” (by man I am sure he meant human beings, lest someone accuses him of misogyny). Hierarchies are normative; what changes is the rigidity of boundaries.
In “Straw Dogs”, John Gray cites Joseph de Maistre on the Rousseau dictum: to think that, because a few people sometimes seek freedom, all human beings want it is like thinking that, because there are flying fish, it is in the nature of fish to fly. So far hierarchies are normative in meeting some basic needs for nearly all.
But then what society could you ever form that didn’t have a hierarchy? Every iteration has one needed to enforce laws, fairness. Anarchist societies don’t work,communism andcollectivism, are an affront to personal dignity and freedom.
We are a social creature – hierarchy is in our dna.
Have I struck a nerve with you? See, two can play this game.
I did not accuse her of being a woman, just reducing complex social questions to one about gender. Next you will accuse me of mansplaining.
Every ‘social question’ (the word ‘social’ has no meaning in itself) resolves into the questions ‘Who tells whom to do what and what authority have they to do so?’
On the left this question is assumed to have been answered, definitively, and thus it is never asked.
Just as a woman could not escape a bad marriage, neither could a man.
The situation today has improved for women, but not for men. Women can end a marriage for good, but a man is never really married nor is he ever really divorced. He can be married on false pretences, and pursued for more money decades after a divorce.
literally is not a violin small enough. We are talking, or Peterson was, about getting the hell beat out of you, about marital rape, about little children being clobbered. Not about spousal support.
“…pursued for more money decades after a divorce” is hardly true in the U. S. nowadays. If he is extremely rich and can support a penurious woman, there will be judges who figure he should do it instead of the taxpayers. But it doesn’t happen in the ordinary peoples’ cases.
No, for herself. If you Google ‘”Dale Vince” “Kathleen Wyatt” divorce’ you will find the case of a woman who sought more money from someone she had divorced 20 years earlier. He became wealthy later, so she came after his money – with whose creation she had had literally nothing to do – and she actually won. He was not divorced at all, in effect.
Gosh, you sound very bitter and not at all wise. On the contrary . . . As a woman I would like to point out that women ‘like you’ do not speak for me in any way. And it seems you enjoy not only hassling people – men AND women – online but probably do so in real life on a daily, minute by minute basis. Which probably makes you very disliked by all and so greatly influences your warped world view.
I don’t normally resort to personal comments, but the remark “because of a chromosome” borders on moronic stupidity. The difference between you and an ape or a lower life form is just chromosomes.
Please don’t let your anger make you become silly.
Keep ya hair on! You’ve completely missed the point of the article. The marriage bit was just an example and she’s not saying it couldn’t apply to men.
Women cared about other women’s lives and have changed the world because of it. Imagine what men could do for men if they could transcend their selfishness and self-pity.
That’s one of the most entertaining generalisations I’ve read in a long time.
Men also cared about women’s lives and vice versa. My mother and father loved and respected each other and it was a joy to behold. It sounds like you hate all men and something has caused this.
I’m a woman and if i had a penny for each time i was accused of “mansplaining” online, i’d be rich.
Not quite sure if you’re aware that the vast majority of us sane women abhors your toxic feminist bullcrap with a fiery passion.
Reading these posts of yours I was about to write something along the lines of “back away, no sudden movements” etc. But I stopped when it struck me that you really are in a great deal of pain, as evidenced mostly by this furious projection at Peterson and anyone who takes you on. He’s “cold”, he’s “dark”, he’s “soulless”. Those who don’t agree with your worldview are “spineless” and “deluded”. And on and on. I honestly think you need to get off the internet and get some help.
You’ve missed the point of the article. The bit about marriages was just to illustrate a point and she hasn’t said it couldn’t apply the other way round.
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
12 Rules for Life is not a book for males or one that appeals mostly to men, the author is way off track there. It has universal common sense ideas and principles. Men don’t need to be told not to lie simply because they are men. Everyone needs to hear that.
I’ve never found Peterson to be “testy” in interviews but I have enjoyed some of them as many interviewers try so hard to misstate his positions and ideas. It’s quite comical sometimes and yet he never gets snotty with any of them, just patiently tells them that they are not talking about any of his actual ideas.
What I find truly interesting and admirable about Peterson in addition to the plain old common sense he espouses, is that he appears to be uncancellable. No matter how hard the lefties try, they can’t seem to stop him from spreading his ideas. Must be so infuriating.
I’ve never found Peterson to be “testy” in interviews but I have enjoyed some of them as many interviewers try so hard to misstate his positions and ideas.
I’ve seen Peterson in a state I would call testy, but it’s not surprising, given how often and how grossly his opinions are misrepresented by seemingly intelligent people.
I can’t think of anyone in the English-speaking world who is more misrepresented and unfairly traduced than Peterson.
Craig Bishop
3 years ago
I find it interesting, if not downright malevolent, that The Guardian keeps the article titled, “How dangerous is Jordan Peterson, the rightwing professor who ‘hit a hornets’ nest'”: as No.10 most accessed story on its Science page, despite it being written in Feb 2018. Usually, The Guardian puts a yellow banner over old stories, stating this article is 6 months or 4 years or however old. However, No. 4 on this Top 10 listing, about Australia’s marsupials, does indeed have a caveat that the article is two months old. The Jordan Peterson article is so badly written, and so biased, it’s quite surreal. In a nutshell, they call him a drug-addled, loony alt-right, conspiracy theorist, a cultist, ad nauseam. It is so odd, and obviously a deliberate editorial smear campaign kept on the Top 10 stories listings, I suspect in retaliation for his utter, utter evisceration of Cathy Newman. And, of course, there is absolutely no attempt to answer their original question, on how dangerous he allegedly is. It is such an awkwardly gauche piece of editorial tomfoolery that it makes you question the entire newsroom process. Who is that upset or threatened by the man that they need to keep reminding their readers that there is this dangerous terrorist, in effect, walking around selling books and corrupting young males?
I think you misunderstand the utility of The Guardian, it’s there for a sanity check on yourself. If you ever read The Grievance and find yourself agreeing with it you know its time to get yourself sectioned, possibly lobotomized for your own safety. I’m only half joking. If you read The Guardian especially the headlines as they are the most obvious editorial points, but understand the opposite of what they write you will be better informed. so in your example can be better understood as – Jordan Peterson is safe he’s not rightwing and he’s never hit a hornets nest.
The Guardian , not even once.
And, of course, there is absolutely no attempt to answer their original question, on how dangerous he allegedly is. that’s a feature of the modern-day, slash and burn left. The accusation is accepted as an article of faith. To even question its validity suggests something wrong with you.
Just read the Guardian piece. It doesn’t mention drugs. It doesn’t call him a loony or alt-right. It explicitly states that he isn’t a white nationalist. It does say he supports conspiracy theories about post modernist cultural marxism taking over academia and that he’s popular with a wide spread of people who include . Good point about the banner on the age of the article and odd that the piece is still in the top ten. Maybe it’s got back in the charts because of the new book?
It does address the how dangerous he is question in the section where it quotes an assessment of his main threat being how his beliefs ‘detract from more critical, informed and, frankly, interesting conversations’.
In summary, your summary of The Guardian piece is as biased as you claim the piece is about Peterson. But I’ve learned more about his views so thanks for pointing me in its direction.
To be honest, Joe. Depends on how you approach things. I read The Guardian, Telegraph, UnHerd, Jewish Chronicle and bits and pieces from other publications like The Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesmen – not because I’m looking for things I agree with but so I can come across different views and opinions and hopefully get a better understanding of why people have different opinions and how that might even influence my own. To that purpose I try not to disregard something just because its in a publication whose content I largely disagree with.
Nah, the Guardian has become horrific, along with the US legacy newspapers, the NYTimes and Washington Post. The Independent jumped ship to workness ages ago, but once upon a time, in the late 1990s, it was the greatest newspaper i have come across
The issue with many modern publications is that they could actually be written by algorithm. Almost all Peterson coverage, anything “woke” it is not like finding an original argument you disagree with it is an argument that has been made and refuted years ago. It is very hard to find new takes on issues.
I have the same approach – truly. I read widely, and deliberately. I go as far out (occasionally, not that often) as the Grauniad on one edge and Breitbart at the other. I prefer calmer, saner publications such as the Times, Telegraph, Economist, Prospect, and even (with care) the BBC website.
The NYT is engaged in self-destruction as it transforms from a news site to an outrage site (like the Graun did a few years ago).
I like this site, mostly, but watch with interest how its comment censorship policy develops.
One of my concerns about the state of our current “intellectual climate” is how moribund it has become – diversity is just about look, not thought.
Hi Mark, I see that the article has today vanished from the Top 10 on the Guardian’s Science page. Yay! I call that a victory.
And, to be fair, when you say about someone, “No, he is definitely not a white nationalist, but….” the audience can’t help but think, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That is exactly in the same category as a person who says, “I do like black people, but…” Or, “There’s nothing wrong with trans-women, but…”
So, you are being a tad disingenuous there, Mark. Moreover, as soon as you put the words “alt-right” in the same sentence as an allegation, the link has been concretised in the reader’s mind. Take this example, from that article:
“Peterson is not just another troll, narcissist or blowhard whose arguments are fatally compromised by bad faith, petulance, intellectual laziness and blatant bigotry. It is harder to argue with someone who believes what he says and knows what he is talking about – or at least conveys that impression.” And tell me you don’t walk away from that paragraph thinking, ‘right, the damn bigot, he obvs is another troll, narcissist, blowhard, blatant bigot.” It’s classic guilt by association. Gaslighting, perhaps. So, no, I don’t think my comment was as biased as The Guardian’s piece. But I do welcome your comment which forced me to check my own internal processes. That’s surely doesn’t happen enough to any of us.
Peterson is not just another troll, narcissist or blowhard whose arguments are fatally compromised by bad faith, petulance, intellectual laziness and blatant bigotry.
What’s particularly ironic is most critics of Peterson could in all honestly add a new clause to that sentence, reading “… whereas my arguments are.”
now let’s not get to testy about the dear Guardian. i heard about Peterson through their coverage. I came for the outcry and stayed for the content. I’m still there. His thinking is at another level.
Well it’s certainly at ‘another level’ to the Guardian, which I gave up on some time ago. But there is rarely anything particularly profound in what Peterson says. It’s mostly just basic stuff about self reliance.
I disagree. The ‘self-reliance’ part, as valuable as it is, especially for troubled young people – is just the surface. Those who invest the considerable time and effort required to read his first book Maps of Meaning will be rewarded with deep insights into the structure of the human experience. Similarly, his analysis of the Book of Genesis in a series of talks, which can be found on his YouTube page, is a tour de force.
The Guardian has the most cancle policy of anywhere, try posting there, you get one ideological strike and you are gone. And an ideological strike is merely not agreeing.
I’ve disagreed with the “party line” in the Grauniad comments, and not been cancred. And there are lots of right-wing commenters over there (other than yourself), who don’t seem to have been cancelled either.
I got put on “probation” at the Guardian at the end of last year. The article I took issue with had as its starting premise the claim that “anti-black racism has been at the heart of many of this year’s biggest crises”. That is simply false, either on a global scale, or with reference to the US or with reference to the UK, where the author was from. So I listed all the biggest crises of the year (Covid, Yemen, treatment of the Uighurs, Hong Kong, and numerous others). My attitude was evidently insufficiently unsympathetic, so I was punished.
But now the Guardian never really allows comments on anything but Labour Party policy, Brexit, football and pop culture. It simply won’t allow dissent on social justice issues.
Likely you have no idea about the number of comments which don’t even make it to appear in the first place, as opposed to being deleted by mod.
Being one of those “right wing” regular commenters there (on my 4th account – the rest are all permabanned), it’s probably ⅓ of submitted comments what gets & remains visible. And i’m not exactly a bumbling idiot who keeps breaching the so called “terms & conditions” of the site.
Jonathan Ellman
3 years ago
For me, it’s more than Peterson stood up to woke persecution than his intellectual work with what seems like immense courage and integrity. His academic work seems interesting but then so does the work of thousands of academics. Unfortunately thousands of academics have not shown the same courage in the face of the anti-intellectual spite meted out to Peterson, let alone supported him as they should have. It’s a rare case of admiring an intellectual for what he does rather than what he says.
I agree. I have often said that there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly original in what Peterson says or writes, but he is notable for his bravery (and uniqueness among academics) in speaking some kind of truth.
I am an academic, and the pusillanimity of academics, or worse, complicity has been deeply disheartening.
Nixon said that academic battles were so vicious because the stakes were so low. But in JPs case, it not merely an academic argument. There is a fundamental rot at the heart Anglospehere academia, which is both a cause and consequence of deeper social malaise.
FRANKFURT SCHOOL, the intellectual, soft Marxist, school of thought from 1930’s Germany which set out to wreck the Traditional West by gnawing at its vitals from within. Later 1950s, moving to Columbia University, NY, it infested the USA academia, and via them, the school teachers. Try looking it up, and its 11 points for a dramatic view of its hopes.
…Vikram, Peter Turchin’s work, and his book “Ages of Discord” provide a mathematical modelling perspective on the “rot” which you describe. It could be that we are at he point in the cycle of structural demographic change, where population growth and good times have created a cohort of aspirants for elite positions which is larger than the volume of actual (valuable/productive) positions. To cope, artificial elite positions full of bitter people aware of their irrelevance, have metastasized across academia and elsewhere.
As far as I recall, the only issue he’s ever taken with feminism is with the extreme end that tells women that they are always oppressed and that all men are evil because they are men. I don’t believe I’ve ever read or heard him take issue with its successes at levelling the playing field. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Can I just add how refreshing it is to read a reasonable and civilised critique of Jordan Peterson.
Peterson does not laud feminism(as an ideology). He does not describe himself as a ‘feminist’ precisely because, in his view, ideologies are extremely narrow or monist ways at looking at the world. Their lens is univariate – predicated on one totalising variable to the exclusion of all others; cf the C4 interview.
Personally, I’d rather watch feminists rip each other’s throats out over which of them qualifies, rather than enter the fray. As soon as you scratch the surface, most feminists can’t really say what a feminist is, or can only settle on a common-denominator definition that amounts to no more than a bunch of broad platitudes that everyone broadly agrees with anyway. There is therefore no logic to being a ‘feminist’ anyway because nobody opposes what they want. This means if you are determined to become a ‘feminist’ you are compelled to invent stuff in order to fight it, which is a humiliating state of affairs and mostly make you look idiotic.
David George
3 years ago
Thanks Jenny. The book is due out today and I’m looking forward to receiving my copy. I found the first Twelve Rules needs to be read slowly, thoughtfully and thoroughly; it’s richness is not always immediately apparent.
“how might disparate individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change?” Perhaps the prior book’s chapters contain the clues:
“Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”
“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”
“Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie”
“Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”
“Unfortunately, his new book forgets the status quo simply doesn’t work for everyone”
And it never will, the all too common reaction that my failures are the fault of someone else, society, “them” carries with it a lot of danger and little chance of success.
“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for life.
I can fix myself till Doomsday, but it won’t mean a better tax system, or that expert tax avoiders pay their fair share, or that hungry people are less exploited, or that rogue psychologists are reined in (a project in which I am involved, but which does not refer to JP), or that white supremacists are discouraged from Holocaust denial, or that extreme leftists are discouraged from gulag denial, or that financial criminals are stopped from causing crashes, or that… the list is endless.
There are reasonable causes in this world which are well worth supporting, but which won’t be addressed by perfecting myself.
I think the point Peterson is making Robert is that you will be in a much stronger position to influence the things you highlight if you have ‘fixed yourself’, and those around you first. He is also at pains to highlight a very similar list of things to fix as you.
How perfectly do you have to “fix” yourself (never mind those around you) before you can work on anything else that needs fixing? Isn’t there a risk in requiring some sort of utopian self before addressing the non-utopian outside world?
Sure, dealing with major issues you have in yourself will help a whole swathe of issues with how you relate to the world. It may even help with your attempts to change the world. But it won’t in itself make objective injustices go away – which I think was Robert’s point.
There’s a million things wrong with the world Robert; malevolent people and systems that are unjust and so on. The idea that imperfect people can create a perfect system is the great conceit that JP is concerned with. People fall for the lie and things fall apart as exemplified by the unmitigated disasters that unfolded in the wake of the Utopian fantasies of the 20th century.
“To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner rather than an enemy. Truth makes the past truly past, and makes the best use of the future’s possibilities. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.”
See the truth. Tell the truth.”
― Jordan B. Peterson,
Is it mere coincidence that the people clamouring for justice are so often filled with envy, resentment and hate, a will to power. What are the chances that the world that results from those impulses will be paradise.
“What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge“—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not“—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue”.
Is it mere coincidence that the people clamouring for justice are so often filled with envy, resentment and hate, a will to power.
No coincidence at all. Many of these people – I have come to believe – simply have to see the world as full of horrible people in order a) to make themselves feel better about themselves and b) to give their lives meaning.
Their entire self-worth is completely invested in and dependent on the idea that they’re surrounded by wicked people.
Too true, Robert. But fixing yourself won’t hurt anything, either. And who knows when lightning may strike, and you find yourself prepared and ready to do something that needed doing?
When it comes down to it, if you improve yourself you are more able to improve your society.
Hopefully others will also improve themselves.
Stewart Ware
3 years ago
If there is anyone out there who is unacquainted with Jordan Peterson, and there surely can’t be many, the first stop must be the infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman: https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54.
The constant attempts by Newman to misrepresent him and to put words into his mouth didn’t faze him and he was constantly polite and respectful. He even felt the need to help her out at the point when her misapprehensions about his ideas let her down and left her stumped for an answer.
I think the recording his daughter made of the Decca Aitkenhead interview for The Sunday Times and releasing it after the article came out, was a master stroke. For the comparison between the two yields the most unambiguous illustration of malevolent reporting by the MSM.
99% of my friends and acquaintances have never heard of him. He’s a pretty fringe character outside of these pages and YouTube algorithms. Sort of less well known Yuval Noah Harari level and about as interesting (not very) in my view.
Alison Houston
3 years ago
“It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.”
Before the National Health Service came into existence everybody just died of their wounds and diseases, untreated, while yearning for some foreigner to come along and conquer Britain.
The whole of this UK Scamdemic is predicated on saving the NHS, the last surviving relic of that Attlee inspired utopian socialist nightmare we all had to live through as our reward for triumphing over Adolph.
Lady T managed to slay many a socialist monster, the miners, a plethora of nationalised industries, and off course she chastised much of the Trades Union movement.
Sadly her ‘reign ended prematurely thus both the NHS and Education avoided the scythe they so justly deserved.
So that’s why similar lockdown measures have been brought in right across the world, including places which don’t have an equivalent of the NHS? It shouldn’t need saying at this point, but the point of lockdown measures was to save lives and prevent all health systems from being overwhelmed, to the point where hospitals were full, ambulances double-parked, and emergency calls were going unanswered in thousands because there was no more capacity.
The idea that privatising the NHS and adopting a more US-style system is risible. Not only is their life expectancy lower than ours, and their infant mortality rate at third world levels, but millions of people have no adequate cover, and can’t afford it. A third of US bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and even well off people can find that chronic illness loses them their cover.
And all of this while spending 16-18% of GDP on health, against our 9.9%.
The US “system” is not the only alternative, in fact arguably it is the worst. I live in France, which for all its deficiencies, does have a truly excellent health care system – we have made such a shibboleth of the NHS now, it is almost impossible to reform it. It’s just become a ghastly money pit.
Why do defenders of our new religion assume its validity rets on a comparison with a USA based insurance system.There are any number of studies that conclude that the NHS has numerous failings and could benefit from reform.The Israeli health system is an interesting comparison with 4 separate but competing health providers funded by a mandatory contribution-I’m not saying it should be adopted but for heavens sake lets open our eyes.
To assert that worldwide lockdown is in someway a justification for our health system is a rather bizarre argument.And as for hospitals being full etc I suggest you look at previous UK winters when various respiratory diseases have caused chaos-I recall refrigerated lorries being commandeered by the Govt to store bodies some years ago-the NHS has run on a very low bed buffer for decades-despite te record amounts of money thrown at it by the (yes) Tories.
And the point of lockdown measures was to save lives rather skimps over the collateral damage caused by lockdown which I would argue when measured over the ensuing decade will demonstrate that it has caused more deaths when measured by pure numerical deaths and the QALY lost will be off the scale due to the demographic apartheid of this particular virus.
“despite the record amounts of money thrown at it by the (yes) Tories.”
Britain spends 2% less of its GDP on health than other Western European countries.
Under Labour, NHS targets ranging from waiting times in Accident and Emergency, to waiting times to start cancer treatment, were being met. They continued to be met for some years under the Conservatives, as the afterglow of Labour’s increase in NHS spending. In 2019 (ie before Covid arrived), as 9 years of Tory spending restrictions sapped the NHS, the targets were being missed for the first time, and missed across the board.
Did Labour ever pay for that spending or did they leave the country basically bust and the Tories to find the money?
I can have a Ferrari outside my house in a heartbeat. The tricky bit is paying for it.
“Did Labour ever pay for that spending or did they leave the country basically bust”
National Debt when Labour left office in 2010 – very roughly £1 trillion (half of it inherited in 1997 from the previous 200 years of borrowing)
National Debt after 9.5 years of Conservative Government, in December 2019, before Covid came along: around £2 trillion. Twice as much was borrowed by the Tories in 9.5 years as by Labour in 13 years.
Sloganising about “Labour left the country bust” is mindless regurgitation of Daily Express headlines.
But if you feel you can justify your statement given the above facts, please feel free to do so. I shall enjoy watching you.
What was the PSBR
1/ when Labour entered office in 1997
2/ When Labour left office in 2010?
For bonus points, is it your contention that the Tories should have cut harder, to run a smaller deficit?
The epic dishonesty of Labour supporters is matched only by their grotesque irresponsibility.
The major problem with Labour funding of new NHS projects such as new builds was the accelerated and irresponsible use of John Major’s PFI wheeze to pass the costs to later taxpayers (and the profits to private enterprise). Funding of ongoing expenses like adequate staffing was much more likely to be covered by straightforward taxation – or sometimes “stealth taxes”.
The great recession and the related bailouts had more to do with the deficit than responsible spending on health did.
Britain does devote less of our GDP to health than most comparable countries. That’s because those countries have a sizeable contribution from private healthcare whereas here, as your comment exemplifies, individuals’ contributions to their own healthcare are actively discouraged.
The healthcare spending comparison includes money raised through general taxation, and money raised through private insurance premiums, or even billed directly to patients.
Taking all that into account, the UK spends less as a proportion of GDP. Hence the lower levels of service.
In the UK, individual contributions to their own healthcare are encouraged – in two important ways. Firstly by cost-based rationing of NHS resources (which drives those who can afford it towards private care). And secondly by an effective subsidy to the private sector whereby the NHS bears the burden of emergency / intensive care when something goes wrong in the privately run operation mills.
Most countries have much more robust public/private systems, unlike the UK. But don’t pretend that people in the UK with money as well as those who work in the UK and have private insurance as a workplace benefit are not already paying their way out of NHS level care. Life expectancy is not solely determined by healthcare of course. But if you want to look at how healthcare does matter in life expectancy, check out cancer survival stats, the US vs UK.
Low spending on healthcare is a point of pride for some. Personally I am fine with every penny being spared on your care. But not mine.
Yes, I stumbled over that line too. Does it prove anything at all, given that Germany’s welfare state and statutory health insurance system were introduced in 1883 by the staunchly right-wing Otto von Bismarck?
I’m not sure that the right or left nature of the government in question was the point, so much as the fact that there was social change involved. The author’s whole point in that section seems to be about how Peterson’s views explain or deal with positive social change over time, either in the past or future.
In fact what what we had before the war was very arguably a better, more cost effective and more accountable system. Th NHS largely exists for the benefit of its employees. I should know I have worked in it.
Although health systems now vs. the 30s are very different things given the enormous differences in technology and scientific understanding.
Personally I’ve always thought the German/Singaporean model of public health insurance with private providers has the optimal balance between the externality gouging excesses of the US insurer led system and the sclerotic inefficiency of the British model.
I have experience of the German system, though not the Singaporean. High tech, but staff attitudes were appalling and patient care very poor. Interestingly, a friend (British nurse) employed there thought the same, from experience in a different way and in different hospitals.
And the Germans spend a higher percentage of a higher-per-capita GDP on healthcare. Multiply those together and they have a lot more money to play with – yet as you point out, no magic solution.
Healthcare bureaucracy in Germany approaches NHS levels. I have experience with family in Germany as well. One sister in law waited years for a simple fibroid operation that impacted her fertility. My mother in law was sent home with a giant magnifying glass at 80 rather than the eye surgery she needed. Germany has a startlingly low number of specialist hospitals.
You can opt out of the public system in Germany if you make above a certain income which isn’t very high, are self-employed, work part-time, or are an artist.
As to money, let’s not forget that Germany skips defense spending so it should have a lot more to spend on healthcare. Can’t do much about the bureaucracy though. When you can’t be fired no matter what you do, you’re all set up for poor service.
You clearly know all about it, then. Frontline demands, financial systems, logistics, training, technology, etc, etc.
What we had before the war employed my grandfather comfortably enough, but the life expectancy of most people doesn’t suggest it benefited them much.
The four commonest pills prescribed by modern doctors are antibiotics, antidepressants, contraceptives, and painkillers. Three out of four of those didn’t exist before WW2 and the painkillers they had weren’t as good or were bloody dangerous (eg morphine). The world economy was $4 trillion in 1939 versus $133 trillion now. It’s probably safe to assume, given these facts, that we’d have seen an improvement in life expectancy even without the sainted NHS, not least because countries without it or anything similar have done so.
The four commonest pills prescribed by modern doctors are antibiotics, antidepressants, contraceptives, and painkillers. Three out of four of those didn’t exist before WW2 and the painkillers they had weren’t as good or were downright dangerous (eg morphine). The world economy was $4 trillion in 1939 versus $133 trillion now. It’s safe to assume given these facts that we’d have seen an improvement in life expectancy even without the sainted NHS, not least because countries without it or anything similar have done so.
“what we had before the war was very arguably a better, more cost effective and more accountable system.” No. Because of the poor access to healthcare of those without much money. Though that doesn’t bother some on the right, particularly in the US still. And those who had lived with Britain’s prewar health system voted overwhelmingly in 1945 to replace it with Labour’s NHS.
The NHS now has a quarter of the hospital beds that it started with. If nobody could afford healthcare back then, who, exactly, was occupying all the beds that the NHS has got rid of?
Medicine across the world tries to use drugs etc to minimise hospital bed use. People do not spend two weeks in hospital after giving birth, for example.
Nit-picking doesn’t alter the fact that between the wars the upper middle class had the best treatment available, the middling middle class had reasonable treatment which they caned themselves to pay for, and the working class had limited treatment. That’s one of the reasons why Labour swept to power in 1945.
Healthcare was much different before the war. It was much less involved, people just lived with conditions that are routinely treated today. This is one reason the NHS doesn’t keep up. It was designed to manage a much lower level of care than is available today. If you have a broken leg, it’s fine. If what you have is expensive to treat or you don’t fit into defined parameters for certain tests, you may be out of luck.
Attlee and Bevan fondly imagined that demand on the NHS would decline after a few years, as the nation would be healthier. In fact, the opposite happened. The longer you keep people alive, the more healthcare they need.
Demand is essentially unlimited, which is what happens when stuff is free.
Yes absolutely. We see this with Medicare in the US. One of the things that the US has to better control is healthcare for the very elderly. Today you can get anything, no matter how old you are. Former Senator Bob Dole at age 97 with stage 4 lung cancer, undergoing treatment. Is this reasonable? Much of the expense of US healthcare is spent on the very elderly.
And as someone with two parents still alive in their 90s, I pay their bills and see what goes through Medicare for them. There is nothing off limits, at one point last year, my dad’s doctor was considering a heart operation on a 93 year old. My mother, with dementia, was offered testing and surgery if necessary for a hoarse rasp in her voice that had been there for years. She is now getting speech therapy. At 92 with dementia. Where does this stop? I mean, I love my folks but is this reasonable? And of course it’s all “free” unless you count what their grandkids are chipping in for it.
Yes, we see this with Medicare in the US. Senator Bob Dole at 97 with stage 4 lung cancer undergoing treatment. To what purpose?
The vast majority of spending in US healthcare is through Medicare and it’s within the last few years of life.
The vast majority of healthcare spending in any healthcare system at all is in the last years of a patient’s life.
Modern healthcare (however funded) costs more and covers more ailments now than it did in the middle of the last century.
Neither of these truths is limited to systems funded by public taxes – or by private insurance – or by just billing patients directly.
A hospital occupancy rate of 100% is not healthy – spare capacity is needed for several reasons: to reduce infections, to manage regular seasonal fluctuations in demand, to cope with pandemics.
Arguably capacity has been cut more than was wise in the past decade or so, and more than was justified by increased “efficiency” in recovery or from less invasive surgery.
Actually, many of them did. They used to think twice and three times before calling a doctor. That is probably one reason (among others) why our lifespan has increased so much (and now exceeds that of the US, where a private system holds sway).
Lifespan has increased throughout the west, not just in the UK. And not everywhere in the UK has lifespan had much increase. Glasgow for example. The US is a public/private system.
It wasn’t the patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee that gave Britain its National Health Service – it was America’s willingness to bankroll the British social state as part of post-W2 European stabilisation. US foreign policy gave Britain its National Health Service, not Attlee – he couldn’t afford it.
The author has wisely avoided the shallow superficialities and misguided stupidities of journalists like Cathy Newman and Decca Aitkenhead: unlike those two (and so many others), she has actually read what Peterson has said. Nevertheless, I still detect in this article an acknowledgement of the talents of Peterson that is still somewhat grudging. This takes the form of molehill versus mountain arguments – with subtle suggestions that, after all, Peterson is overstating his case when he points to the excesses of the Woke. For example, she grossly understates the problem in the current hysteria (and frequently extremely violent and damaging actions) by intersectional feminists. What she describes simplistically as “relatively trivial shaming campaigns” (REALLY?) by these radical activists is in fact often directed at venomously destroying the careers and livelihoods of people who don’t espouse the party line. Witness young women activists during BLM protests screaming through megaphone into the ears of elderly couples trying to have a quiet dinner in a restaurant, or “cancelling” women who don’t share the simplistic party line, or hounding people out of university jobs and off Hollywood screens… The number of examples is too distressing to render as “relatively trivial”. When you argue that Peterson is making a molehill out of a mountain that is simply because when you stand too far from a mountain it looks like a molehill. Take a closer look at the Stalinist motives behind such “trivial” campaigns. Peterson is constantly warning us all not to be so glib. As a consequence, commentators on his work should also avoid being glib.
Jim le Messurier
3 years ago
‘Unfortunately, his new book forgets the status quo simply doesn’t work for everyone.’
Unfortunately, no status quo on the planet has ever, or will ever, work for everyone. A status quo that ‘works for everyone’ is an impossibility. Unless you believe in Utopia.
Mike Boosh
3 years ago
How rare to read a balanced review of Peterson from somebody who’s actually read his work. Nicely done.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it.
Is it difficult? Really? When the man is painted as something other than he is, and those employees are too lazy or too stupid to some independent research, it is very predictable that pearls would be clutched. When you are on the side of silencing someone, you are wrong. That is as close to an absolute as there is.
“When you are on the side of silencing someone, you are wrong. That is as close to an absolute as there is.” I guess that must also apply to Daniel Finkelstein’s column in the London Times last week, calling for the University of Bristol to sack a lecturer for criticising the State of Israel.
So simple and yet so difficult for so many. Whether you agree with someone or not has no bearing on their right to speak freely.
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
“the US, it remains the only OECD country without a national statutory paid maternity leave.”
The US is a federal republic. Maternity leave is a state government issue and some states do mandate paid maternity leave. But let’s review what being a federal republic means. In order for the federal government to pass a new law that restricts individual (including private business) rights, it generally needs to be shown that doing so fulfills a role of the federal government and that it does so using the least restrictive means. So what federal government role would maternity leave fall under and how would mandating leave for every business in the country be considered the least restrictive means?
Then there’s the tenth amendment which says that any power not specifically delegated to the federal government by the constitution is reserved for the people (which means the states). Nowhere does the constitution list maternity leave as a federal government responsibility. I mean no disrespect to the author but these are bedrock principles of US government and should be familiar to any author writing on the subject.
The Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, which is a federal law upheld under the interstate commerce clause guarantees some but not all employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for maternity as well as several other situations.
Sometime in the future the courts might decide differently – constitutions are human instruments, subject to change. Maternity leave might not be mentioned, but equal rights for women might one day be so. Then maternity leave might be mandated.
What rights do women NOT have, other than the right to not register for selective service in the US? Otherwise, the goals of the original feminists have been reached, to the point where their successors are now turning on themselves by reducing womanhood to a matter of identity. But that aside, the question stands – if, as you say, equal rights “might one day be,” what rights are currently lacking?
Good point, perhaps selective service registration would become a requirement for women. Would love to see the look on progressive females faces should that occur. Anyone for AOC in combat fatigues?
I guess there’s always the possibility of a constitutional amendment to make maternity leave a responsibility of the federal government, but that seems unlikely.
“The US is a federal republic. Maternity leave is a state government issue and some states do mandate paid maternity leave.” “The Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, which is a federal law upheld under the interstate commerce clause guarantees some but not all employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for maternity “ These seem contradictory. After all, imposing a requirement for the employer to pay the employee, and imposing a requirement on the employer to allow the employee unpaid leave, are both impositions on the employer for the benefit of the employee, so why are they treated differently? Just asking.
On the broader point, making this a states rights issue leads to a race to the bottom, with employers moving to lower-regulation states.
Why would competition lead to a race to the bottom? If a state could improve retention and workforce participation by extending maternity leave they would gain a competitive advantage. Or are you saying that the policy is sh$t economics, and is really just tax on businesses that employ women – i.e. entirely a cost with no benefit, and so must be compelled by law?
Isn’t the whole premise of having a Republic that states must be free to compete, which means having the freedom and independence to develop models that work for them, and to place decision-making closest to where its impact is felt?
The principle, therefore, must be: If it doesn’t concern a matter that appertains specifically and necessarily to the nation (e.g. national defence), then it’s in the remit of the state.
Although the federal legislature gets around this often by putting limits on funding for states if they don’t enforce certain laws. A state wants to have a drinking age below 21? Great a state has a right to set that under the costitution.. But get a 10% cut on funding for your roads.
Last edited 3 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
michael stanwick
3 years ago
Good grief!!! Get it right!!
He DID NOT have an addiction.
He had a Prescribed Physical Dependence.
The two phenomena are not the same.
Repeating the addiction canard provides ammo for the lazy thinker to use ad hominem as if it were a valid argument.
The Helen Lewis “debate” was replete with insults posed as interrogative questioning. Lewis, according to Peterson, had voiced her opposition to his views even before the “debate” began.
Bringing arguments from the past to question Peterson’s injunctions I would say is a tad irrelevant. Peterson is speaking to the contemporary situation.
It should be pointed out that the ‘predominantly’ male audience is a canard oft repeated for Peterson has mentioned it breaks down to roughly 60:40. It depends to which environment the observation applies.
“It should be pointed out that the ‘predominantly’ male audience is a canard oft repeated for Peterson has mentioned it breaks down to roughly 60:40.”
Apart from which, what on Earth is wrong with that ratio? Let us say, for argument sake, that Peterson’s message particularly resonates with men. Why is that concerning? Feminists often complain that men don’t take enough responsibility for their own personal emotional and psychological welfare, and leave it up to the women in their lives to do this ‘work’ for them? So, Peterson has managed to engage men in precisely such an activity, and feminists are mad as hell about it.
Why? – Because there is anxiety that it isn’t happening under female supervision, of course. What the hell are those men getting up to that doesn’t require the tender ministrations of nanny? Probably no good! Indeed, the feminist story about wishing men to follow the lead of women and become more self-reliant is total BS. Sure, they want men to be self-reliant in organisations like the Good Men Project where they come to understand their proper role is being “allies” in furthering the comfort, welfare and interests of women, lol. After all, what other obligation could men have except acknowledging they “have it all” already, and finding ways to make redress for this vile injustice?
Furthermore, of course, there are lots of women who speak almost exclusively about women, and if they mention men at all, it is only in relation to women. Such figures, unsurprisingly, have predominantly female audiences. They are celebrated for being ‘relevant’ and men generally don’t consider them to be sinister, suspicious, threatening, corrupting, etc. Why is that? It’s not because women tend to be control freaks, whereas men are considerably less so, is it?
G Harris
3 years ago
Not knowing much about JP other than watching the odd YouTube video here and there, but this struck me as a really thoughtful, considered, balanced, extremely well-written and, an increasingly rare commodity nowadays, easy to read piece whether you agree with every sentence written or not.
Last edited 3 years ago by G Harris
Paul Marks
3 years ago
In his youth Jordan Peterson was a socialist – an active member of the Canadian NDP, and it was then that he first encountered Frankfurt School Marxism and rejected it as destructive.
Jenny McCartney’s article is really about Frankfurt School Marxism – but the term is not mentioned in the article. That is the sort of behaviour that Jordan Peterson rejects – and he is correct to reject it. To talk about the doctrines of Frankfurt School Marxism without even saying that they are the doctrines of Frankfurt School Marxism (I wonder if this is what Jenny McCartney means by “alt right conspiracy theories” – as if the education system, and much else, was not dominated by the ideas of Frankfurt School Marxist thinkers) is dishonest – and one can not even start a productive conversation without a foundation in honesty. Frankfurt School Marxism was not designed to improve Western Civilisation (“capitalism”) it was designed to destroy it – so it is not something a supporter of Western culture (society) can “work with”.
As for the “status que” and the “institutions” – well, in 2021, that is by and large Frankfurt School Marxism under such names as “Critical Theory” and “Diversity and Inclusion” (which excludes anyone who dissents – any defender of Western Civilisation) – certainly Jordan Peterson has not had an easy time with such institutions as universities or the media, and one would not expect him to as these institutions are now dominated by ideas that are deeply hostile to the West, indeed designed to destroy the West.
It has been a gradual process – so gradual that the “long march through the institutions” and the new “intellectual hegemony” of Frankfurt School ideas has almost occurred unnoticed – but Western society is dying, and it is not dying a natural death. The West is being murdered.
Frankfurt School doctrines now dominate the institutions – even that senile puppet Joseph Biden repeats them, although he does not understand what he is told to say. And these doctrines are designed to destroy society – the idea being that from the death of the West a new wonderful (Marxist) society would appear. But after the destruction of the West there will be no wonderful new society – just ashes and dried blood.
leosavantt
3 years ago
“It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.” It really wasn’t. In 1943 Winston Churchill instructed his Conservative Minister of Health to draw up plans for a National Health Service, Labour adopted in modified form those plans in 1948. He was also responsible for introducing national insurance, pensions and unemployment benefit prior to WWII. And therein lies the political part of the problem, which is increasingly impacting on the social, the left has and is rewriting reality to the extent that it ceases to be real.
The Conservatives voted against the Bill (not the Act) introducing the NHS because they had serious concerns, which history has vindicated, in respect of the state taking over the running of charitable hospitals. In 1943, on March 21st he broadcast his “Plan for Post-war Britain”, which included “to establish a National Health Service”. He instructed his Conservative Minister of Health to immediately begin drawing up plans, which was done.
The Conservatives voted against the Bill (not the Act) introducing the NHS because they had serious concerns, which history has vindicated, in respect of the state taking over the running of charitable hospitals and other worries about not the concept but the implementation. In 1943, on March 21st he broadcast his “Plan for Post-war Britain”, which included “to establish a National Health Service”. He instructed his Conservative Minister of Health to immediately begin drawing up plans, which was done.
Churchill naturally called it “a national health service”, but it was in no sense the NHS which Labour created. It was just a pale upgrade of the failing inter-war system and was designed to continue the privileged access of the middle class to healthcare, relative to the working class. That’s why the British people weren’t having any of it, as they showed at the ballot box, and the Tories abandoned it a couple of years later.
However, it’s also the also the case that Britain didn’t have the funds to pay for the NHS after the war and could only embark on the legislation after the Americans agreed to pay for it. The Yanks were assured it was necessary for the stability of post-war Britain, and they should regard it as an essential element in the social and political reconstruction of a key war-devastated European ally.
So strictly-speaking, the NHS had nothing to do with Atlee or the British government. It was a US foreign policy measure.
(1) The Conservative plan for post-war healthcare was a pale upgrade of the unsatisfactory pre-war system. Labour’s NHS was massively different, and that’s one of the reasons for the Labour election landslide of 1945. The Tories abandoned their own plans and signed up to Labour’s NHS concept in the late 1940s in order to get elected since the NHS was so popular, as it has remained ever since.
(2) Churchill introduced pensions (and I suspect the other two things you mention) as a LIBERAL. Asked why he had crossed the floor from the Conservatives, he replied that as a Conservative he had been forced to say stupid things, and he had left them because he had become tired of saying stupid things.
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago
socialism, feminism and environmentalism — began as a way of addressing genuine wrongs in the existing society.
I agree.
Socialism began in response to the genuine wrong that Educated Youth — e.g., the son of wealthy lawyer in Trier, and the son of a prosperous textile magnate — were not given no respect. The horror!
Feminism began because of the genuine wrong that well-born women were not able to differentiate themselves sufficiently from the rising plebs. The horror!
Environmentalism arises from the genuine wrong that when society reaches a certain level of prosperity (The Economist pegged it twenty years ago at a per-capita GDP of $10,000) prosperous people decide to clean up the place. The horror!
Joe Blow
3 years ago
“But then it is also hard to tell which version of Jordan Peterson…they were primarily reacting to…” They were reacting to a non-existent version; one cooked up from fantasies of clowns like Cathy Newman, or the myriad hacks who cannot be bothered to actually find out what Peterson (who might challenge their prejudices, or refute their arguments) actually believes.
I suspect Peterson provokes such visceral hostility among ‘progressives’ because his measured, logical and rational approach to issues, which prioritises evidence over feelings, is such powerful kryptonite to their campaigns. For me, I think nothing has generated more revulsion than the way a succession of progressives has attempted to destroy his credibility. But the man keeps going. Bravo!
His apparent ability to stay cool and deal with even the most idiotic interviewer is remarkable.
Jon Redman
3 years ago
in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.
Leaving aside the small points that FGM is done to women almost entirely by other women, and that domestic abuse is two-way, of course there is. The trouble is, the feminist movement of today is largely an entitlement crusade focused on making things even better for a minority of rich and privileged women. It’s not so interested in poor women, such as their cleaners. As Michael Crichton said of environmentalists, we need a feminist movement; just not the one we’ve got.
that FGM is done to women almost entirely by other women
I used to say this too, and then I realised that the reason it is done is that men won’t accept unmutilated women. Men, in those cultures that practise it, could stop FGM in a single day.
Thomas Laird
3 years ago
“ a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, “
You really are having sex with the wrong people Jenny.
Last edited 3 years ago by Thomas Laird
simon taylor
3 years ago
Thats not a post, its an ignorant rant.
Judy Simpson
3 years ago
A long, wordy article that says very little, and nothing about Jordan Peterson that hasn’t been said countless times before. Only this time, it’s couched in, yes, I can see his appeal, but …
I haven’t read Peterson’s first book but have heard him interviewed countless times and occasionally watch one of his YouTube videos. I can never understand the vitriol he generates as he always seems a thoughtful, considered man. In a world where we are increasingly force fed absurdities such as a man can be a woman and vice versa, middle class women from high income countries are oppressed, and if you have white skin, you are inherently racist, why wouldn’t people be attracted to someone who pushes back against this type of rhetoric? He may not be married to the author’s brand of feminism, but so what. There are plenty of people who are. Listen to them and leave those of us who enjoy his common sense approach to life him in peace.
You are perhaps right that all these things have been said before about Peterson, but Ms McCartney does that rare thing in the current climate of synthesising these conflicting views into a coherent picture, calmly, intelligently and humanely.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
‘But for those who may be freshly entering the world of work after an extended period in school and college, where the focus is placed more narrowly on intellectual achievements,’
I am not aware of any schools or colleges that are currently nurturing any ‘intellectual achievements’ outside of STEM, not these days. ‘Many institutions contain much that is of value…’ I can no longer think of any institutions that contain or deliver any value whatsoever.
I can no longer think of any institutions that contain or deliver any value whatsoever.
Think harder – you may be overstating your case a bit.
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
It is hard to imagine the disparate groups co-operating because many believe that their opinions are facts.
Someone said to me this week that we tend to judge others for their actions but ourselves for our intentions.
I think it goes further than that. These groups believe that their opinions are The Truth and therefore to follow them becomes ‘The Right Thing To Do’, an awful phrase which instantly portrays anyone who opposes The Truth as not only wrong in their mind but also morally wrong.
Spot on, Daniel. With more discussion about the underlying moral principles that people believe are behind their own opinions disparate groups might find there is maybe more, or maybe less, common ground than they initially thought.
It could also enable discussion about how to achieve outcomes that match those common moral principles rather than discussion about the immorality of them. At the worst it would clarify whether disagreement is about morals or policy.
Mark Bridgeford: I would love to agree with you, but the whole problem is that there aren’t necessarily shared moral principles. Interestingly, another article on this edition of Unherd, Mary Harrington’s piece on Clubhouse, demonstrates this. She writes:
“The section [of the audio recording] that follows is an object lesson in the naïveté of that strand of optimistic rationalism that continues to imagine that all we need do in order to foster social harmony is just talk to one another. Weinstein and his interrogators agree on next to no fundamental premises, and those questioning him are hostile to his viewpoint. There is no ‘constructive dialogue’ under those conditions, and the outcome is as brutal and futile as you’d expect: a kind of toxic anti-conversation.”
Although, as someone else has pointed out, the real answer is just to listen to one another (or read each other’s books)
Clive Mitchell
3 years ago
Well this is an odd discussion. A generally sympathetic and balanced article, but not hagiographic. Most of her points seem reasonable and if I disagree with some of them, so what?
You’d think upon reading the comments that this had been a man hating hatchet job. Personally I find it far from that. Yes it asks some questions, but what is the problem with that?
I also think that trying to equate the male experience with the woman’s as if somehow they are equally bad is nonsense. Most murders are done by men. Most rape and sexual assault is done by men. The factories where male employees were overworked and underpaid were owned by men. The fighting of wars happened because of malign over ambition of male leaders. Most violence between the sexes is done by men. The list goes on. Their is no comparability of experience. Being a woman for most of human experience, in most of the places in the world, was for most of them, to pick the short straw of life.
Anyway I enjoyed the article, it at least was balanced.
You may be right, but I not infrequently find that it is the other way round.
Christopher Chantrill
3 years ago
Jenny McCartney seems to have the conventional opinions that you need to succeed as a published writer in the woke era. Good for her.
But Peterson comes from a world that believes the progressive arc has been a dreadful mistake. His world view is Nietzsche and Jung. And in that world the question “how might disparate individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change?” completely misses the point.
See, the Jung acolytes like Joseph Campbell and Peterson believe that you do not save the world with valuable political change, but by dying on the border of Order and Chaos — after you have completed the Hero’s Journey into the depths of the underworld of your unconscious.
Do you notice that Peterson has already practically died twice, the first time at the Canadian C-16 hearings and the second time in his drug withdrawal.
As Breitbart said: politics is downstream of culture.
As I say, politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
Get it, Jenny?
“Jenny McCartney seems to have the conventional opinions that you need to succeed as a published writer in the woke era”
I’m not sure if “it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it” would qualify, really.
ANNE Quinlan
3 years ago
Misdirected rage does little but feed voracious algorithms – good jobs, affordable homes, equal opportunities, and a social safety net, is that too big of an ask of a modern wealthy democracy?
I am 62, my father was an electrical foreman in Dublin, he and my Mother had nine children, but were still able to buy a nice four bedroom house on one wage, and that was when PAYE tax was very high and interest rates were in double figures – how did we get to a place where the teacher/Garda/civil servant combo can’t afford to live in our Capital city?
The special conditions faced by Western countries in the immediate post-war period evaporated. The situation where 1/3 of the world is in a state of post-colonial dependence, 1/3 is trapped behind the iron curtain and the other 1/3 had all the industrial and technological cards is gone. This was obvious even in the 70s, which is what pushed many of these countries towards greater economic liberalisation to keep up with the newly emerging industrial competitors, but which had the side-effect of destroying much of the industry as they became specialised in services.
and, we simply have a smaller piece of the global cake than we once did (a good thing) but it’s now less fairly divided amongst ourselves ( a bad one but not because of any moral consideration, but because it leaves too many of us angry, frustrated and despairing)
Among other things, I believe the definition of a nice house has probably changed, for example, how many bathrooms did your house in Dublin have? Likely one, maybe two. That would be considered insufficient today. As would having nine children in 3 bedrooms.
I know my own daughters all in their late 20s and early 30s would consider a four bedroom house too small even with just one child. Because, of course you have to have a guest room and then a room for an office (maybe two), which your Dublin house also didn’t likely have. And then they want a large yard and a three car garage. And you’ll need a bonus or Rec room because you can’t live in the living room of course. One of my daughters is moving because they are having a second child. Their current house has three floors, three bedrooms, 2 full baths and two half baths, a two car garage and a large yard. One entire floor is a giant game room with a wall size screen for one of their three television set ups. They now want four bedrooms plus two dedicated offices since they both work from home.
I grew up in a one bedroom apartment in NYC, on one income, with two siblings, we slept in what was actually the dining room and the little one didn’t even have a bed. She made do with a cot. We had one television. We had two cars but they were kept blocks away in a garage and rarely moved out of it. This would be considered abusive today.
Lastly, your parents likely didn’t spend money on multiple cars and expensive toys like golf carts and ATVs and home theatre systems that are required these days. One of my son in laws has a Jeep used just for fishing trips. Your parents didn’t have to buy computers. Today, people might have a smart phone, a tablet and a laptop. Plus your Kindle of course. And then several annual vacations are the norm today, not a once in a lifetime trip to DisneyWorld or equivalent. The house was the big purchase but that was it.
The definition of a nice house may have changed for some – but the problem is not that people can’t afford some inflated version of nice housing any more. It’s that almost anyhousing is much less affordable now, whether rented or bought on a mortgage.
You speak of
a one bedroom apartment in NYC, on one income, with two siblings, we slept in what was actually the dining room and the little one didn’t even have a bed. She made do with a cot. We had one television. We had two cars but they were kept blocks away in a garage and rarely moved out of it. This would be considered abusive today.
It’s actually more common than you seem to think, in your clearly “comfortable” circumstances. Much of the discretionary spending you mention is unavailable to people in poorly paid jobs, in areas where housing is expensive, and where the in-work benefit system does not cover the difference.
Daisy D
3 years ago
Ms. McCartney writes: ” …for example, that while so much feminist academic discourse is generated in the US, it remains the only OECD country without a national statutory paid maternity leave. But in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.”
Problem is, feminists actually only care about non-issues like paid maternity leave (a non issue, since most companies offer paid maternity leave) – and don’t give a damn about issues like FGM and forced marriage (aka, child marriage) effectively ignoring these barbarisms under the illiberal code of cultural moral relativity.
As for sexual violence, as feminists have effectively destroyed the protective roles of males towards women and children (and really, female protective roles too: see the severe downgrading of wife and mother as a vocation) isn’t it reasonable to expect that w/the degradation of sexual mores that naturally accompanies the dedicated feministic eradication of decent male roles, that revenge porn, and indeed porn sex would replace wholesome sexual intimacy?
No. What I’ve said is that Feminism has eroded protective values in both men and women. Consequently, the sexual mores of both men and women have been degraded to the point of normalization of porn sex and vengeance.
John Riordan
3 years ago
“It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.” No actually, it was what nationalised a pre-existing system of near-universal healthcare paid for by a combination of friendly societies, unions and charities. It is not at all obvious that the NHS we have now is better than what would have evolved in its absence. Before anyone mentions the USA and its even more degraded system through the abuse of the same producer interest that has wrecked the UK’s healthcare systems, look instead to the various examples in place in Europe, which have proper social insurance systems underpinning efficient healthcare sectors, with a proper balance of market forces and state involvement. In other words, insofar as socialism was involved in the UK’s development of universal healthcare, it did what socialism always does: imposed a top-down system having no ability to adapt to changing demand and almost instantly harnessed to a political agenda which comes before the interests of the consumers it is there to serve.
“in the UK’s development of universal healthcare… socialism… imposed a top-down system having no ability to adapt to changing demand “
The NHS, whatever its faults, has constantly adapted to changing demand, and to new methods of treatment.
But you have a point about politics getting in the way of the interests of the patient (or consumer, if you prefer). Though that manifestly happens in the US system too, so it’s clearly not fundamental to socialism or public funding.
mike otter
3 years ago
Good to hear Peterson’s new book being puffed – as comments below suggest he’s got broad universal appeal across different cultures, educational and economic strata. The bit about the waiter is very telling. In parts of the world where work is scarce and wage equality better than UK/US etc waiting is artisanal occupation. It remains so in parts of Spain, Italy and France. I certainly enjoyed it as fill in job when i was younger but few of today’s youth have the interpersonal skills to do it. Add to this the leftist – woke claim that all paid work is a “McJob” and it shows how much Peterson’s work could add to our current state “education” system.
I am not sure what you are talking about. In the UK waiting, at least at any semi-decent restaurant – is far more respected than here in Spain. In Spain it is work given to semi-casual labour and immigrants.
Meghan Kathleen Jamieson
3 years ago
Rather nice to see an article that takes Peterson’s ideas seriously enough to ask significant questions about his views, rather than the reflexive negation or support that tends to be the norm. Though rather disappointing that so many in the comments interpret that as being inherently critical.
I agree and it’s a shame. There seems to be a bit of mirroring going on here. At one extreme, people seem to believe that everything JP says is wicked; at the other, any critical discussion of his views is seen as wrong.
Dr Stephen Nightingale
3 years ago
Love the rejoinder to “the stupid man’s smart person”. Puts me in mind of Groucho Marx’s remark that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member.
It also begs the question; Would the person who described him as “the stupid man’s smart person” actually be capable of distinguishing a smart person from a stupid one because, if not, her assessment is worth precisely nothing. From her writing, I’d say she’s as thick as a brick: a complete nonentity. Of course, the writer of this piece doesn’t even consider the possibility that her fellow journalist may not have a clue who is smart and who is stupid – she only wonders how Peterson manages to reach these stupid men, when ‘real’ intellectuals fail to do so.
She also doesn’t consider the possibility that maybe her fellow journalist doesn’t care whether Peterson and/or his followers are smart or not – she just going to write any poisonous sh$t about him that she can dream up because that’s the modus operandi of ideologically-committed journalists. This suggests that the writer of this piece doesn’t even have insight into her own profession, and yet she poses as someone capable of having insights into Peterson.
In fact, there is a good chance that most of the people who take the trouble to listen to Peterson are likely smarter than the writer of this piece – and are certainly more imaginative and capable of thinking critically. And they certainly smarter than the dumb journalist who disparaged them because they correctly identify Peterson as more interesting than her.
Russ Littler
3 years ago
When socialism and liberalism can tell little boys that they are actually little girls but just don’t know it yet, and that the system can help them transform, then bring me a cup of Peterson orthodoxy any day of the week.
Socialism doesn’t actually have anything to do with telling “little boys that they are actually little girls but just don’t know it yet” – even relatively extreme trans activists don’t go quite that far.
Maybe you should remember this morsel from the cup of Peterson’s orthodoxy: “tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.”
They tell little boys they can be little girls and vice-versa and for impressionable children that is often enough. One of the great lies of the modern age is that people can change their sex. They cannot. No amount of chemical or surgical deformity will ever turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man because gender is in our DNA forever.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that “little boys… can be little girls and vice-versa“.
But, once again, Socialism doesn’t actually have anything to do with telling “little boys that they are actually little girls but just don’t know it yet.” Can we keep the discussion of socialism (as well as the discussion of gender) grounded in reality?
These are all policies advocated by socialist organisations such as the labour party, the democrat party, Trudeah’s Liberal party, etc, so when I said “socialist, I meant socialist. You won’t see conservative parties pushing this nonsense. You should take a leaf out of your own book Paul. Stop lying.
I think you’re confusing “socially liberal” (or even seriously weird) with actual socialism.
P Joe
3 years ago
“Unfortunately… the status quo simply does not work for everyone”. If the standard is that it “must work for everyone”, we can stop trying to make any progress. Absurd. Do you think this is something he “forgot”? How would you think this was his, or any realistic individual’s goal?
Walter Lantz
3 years ago
Ever since I first heard and read Peterson’s opinions and theories I was conflicted.
IMO, once you stripped away the academic jargon it was plain that he was simply relating common sense ideas that a lot of us were raised on. So why the hero worship? why all of the fuss? and then you realize it’s because basic common sense regarding human success and failure has been missing for so long very few know what it is.
If you’ve bought into Equality of Outcome theory and use it to explain away the cold reality that sometimes life sucks but the upside is you can warm your ego with the glowing embers of victimhood then Jordan Peterson is in fact – the Devil.
The criticism of Peterson’s academic offerings because he apparently has misquoted or misread some dusty theories by one or more of history’s deep-thinking spoon-benders just makes my eyes glaze over but his ideas that humans and E of O are pretty much mutually exclusive events seems fairly clear to me as in “Duh, everyone knows that”
Well said. He makes sense and so much spoken in this world today makes no sense. Particularly in the age of Covid, when not just common sense but reason seems to have gone out of the window.
Plain old-fashioned common sense got our ancestors through the worst of times. We need it back.
Bits Nibbles
3 years ago
No offense intended Micah, but maybe you’ve gone through withdrawal too quickly for your own good? Just based on your comments throughout the thread here, perhaps its time to bring a little pot back into your life?
Chris Jayne
3 years ago
Thanks for the review Jenny! Interesting stuff.
In my (uninformed) opinion, JBP’s rise to fame demonstrates the largest failing of modern conservatism. Since Thatcher it has been almost entirely reactionary and has failed to articulate it’s own coherent and positive vision.
As you rightly point out, much of this appears as “common sense” to older readers who grew up in a time when there was a dominant “common”. For those of us who grew up in different eras this has not been the case, but the dispositional appetite was still there.
I agree but, as someone once said-The problem with common sense is that it is not very common.
Natalija Svobodné
3 years ago
Hierarchy of competence is the measure by which we gain assurance the right people are in the right job for the right reason! And the baseline for any good democracy. Identity politics is undemocratic and anti human rights by its very precept.
“Governments are repeatedly lobbied by forces that do not always have the best interests of ordinary people at heart… ” Perhaps what you mean here is that the democratic process is being circumvented…) I’d agree lobbiest should be removed – One vote per person, no industry, special interest groups! Democracy was not made for that addition.
” a better, more harmonious society” The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Harmony comes at having a cohesive society that works together. – from what I see of ID politics – that will become increasingly unlikely.
As far as equality of opportunity… while you have an economic system that considers (world banks view) “inequality is beneficial for economic growth at an early stage of development, since a moneyed capitalist class can undertake more investment, but is harmful at a later stage. Others have pointed to inequality as a necessary, even desirable outcome of rewards to innovation and risk-taking” You might look in the direction of the economy and its actions on society instead of asking ever more from the average working classes.
https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-opportunity-income-inequality-and-economic-growth
Hierarchy of competence is basically meritocracy by another name though. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but certain authors here such as “Tory socialist” Giles Fraser certainly do see it as such.
The powers to influence and make collective decisions are distributed equally in a democracy – In a meritocracy its vested in those on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class – I doubt that the wealthy would be willing to forgo their seat at the table. But yes a meritocracy with good checks and balances has advantages and disadvantages…
In a dystopian meritocracy intelligence and merit would become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited , that is Aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of talent.
Then too you come to the resources problem – in a society increasingly fighting over the scraps of infrastructure that is ever increasingly run down. Exceptional talent requires exceptional schooling! Not everyone goes to an amazing school even if they had the ability to become more.
The strength of democracy is that ALL people deserve the right to influence collective decisions. To have their say and hold their leaders accountable. and vote them in and out on the basis of performance.
In the end we are caught between the talented and not so talented – Lucky and unlucky, What is clear is there is and never can or should be equality of outcome.
People are not born that way, I feel however democracies /democratic capitalism’s problem is in the allocation of infrastructure! and the structure of economic thinking (Herman Daly ecological economics + social costs) – The talented don’t always get their chance. (unlucky? or could a better economic system done more?)
We are equal under our rights but not equal in talent or luck, This is something a meritocracy may not guard as well as a democracy. Opportunity based purely on immutable characteristics would also be another kind of Aristocracy – neither to do with talent or ability, but blocking those that could do better, and being treated differently because of peripheral characteristics other than an equal humanity.)
For all its flaws I still put my money on people power and Democracy that each person has the right to choose, for each person to have and equal voice and worth – this idea aligns with my concept of human rights. Equality based on a person’s humanity (not sex, race, religion)
As long as citizens take their responsibility seriously to ensure their leaders are kept to task and that they watch the laws being made with care. Will be as long as we have a democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
Last edited 3 years ago by Natalija Svobodné
Arnold Grutt
3 years ago
I do not agree with, or even recognise, the distinction drawn between Conservative (‘order’) and Liberal (‘chaos’). In my view it’s exactly the other way round. This is why ‘liberals’ are perpetually active in wanting more control, more order, more regulation.
They want life, and especially ‘political’ life to be ‘predictable’. Conservatism is really the absence of a positive programme of this sort, since no human is privy to all the required information that could allow these sorts of final decisions and plans to be made, nor could universal approval of any such scheme be guaranteed, since the question ‘Why this plan rather than that?’ has first to be answered.
Hence there is not a conservative (‘far-right’ in the stupid phrase) ‘movement’ as such. It would have no actual content. What Conservatives try to do is work out what constitutes legitimate authority in the Government of the State. This, it has turned out, is a far more complicated question than merely giving some activist group or other ‘power’.
It’s more to do with having space to create order for one’s self than have it imposed upon one by others.
Colin Haller
3 years ago
Sounds like the newest book is more directly related to his first, “Maps of Meaning.”
Having known of Peterson and his work for many years, I am primarily concerned for his health and well-being, both of which have been a struggle for him of late.
Robert Camplin
3 years ago
No-one ever gets it all right but Peterson is certainly thought-provoking and eminently readable. There is no reason why we have to take on board all that he or anyone else ever says.
Take what is of value to you and leave the rest.
Robert Camplin
3 years ago
I suggest you read the book. Whatever trip he might have been on, he wrote words of value. Indeed in the laudanum laced age of centuries past we saw some of our greatest literature and poetry written.
J Bryant
3 years ago
A very interesting and informative review.
I agree that a major challenge of our age lies in the question, “how might disparate individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change?”
I’m beginning to suspect that, for the time being, “disparate individuals” might not be able to co-operate to effect real change that is acceptable to society in general. The battle lines are currently too fixed and drawn too far apart. People have plugged their ears to what the other side says. Anyone who tries to occupy a conciliatory middle ground is attacked by both sides or ignored. Perhaps our immediate future lies only in futile conflict. At some point our society will become so broken that real change becomes possible if only because the combatants are exhausted. I hope that time is soon.
People often attach moral considerations to their opiniions and mistake their opinions for statements of fact.
LCarey Rowland
3 years ago
Jenny, this is a timely portrait of an unusually gifted teacher. Being both sensitive and sensible, your analysis of Dr. Peterson’s work contributes well to our widespread assessment of his admirable scholarship.
Keep up the good work.
Yeah. it has weaknesses discussed in the comments above, but under the rubric of “female journalist reviews JBP”, it is one of the very best ones.
There’s a horrid little piece published earlier in unheard, entitled ‘women already have their jordan peterson’
Last edited 3 years ago by renatojohnsson
Campbell P
3 years ago
Very interesting article. Thank you. Just two comments. First, I have been astonished by the number of mothers who have given his first book to both their sons and daughters. Are modern so- called ‘liberals’ and libertarians missing something here? Is the divide between the self-styled intellectual elite and the rest of the country even wider than most think it is? And, secondly, as for the debate with Helen Lewis, she could hardly contain her bile. She knew that she was being beaten by a greater intellect and one sustained by empirical evidence rather than frustration and fancy. Just read her subsequent reports and tweets on it and Peterson. ‘Hell hath no fury like a liberal feminist faced with the truth’. I know that’s a misquote from the Bard but it is sooooooooo apposite.
Dan Poynton
3 years ago
Ah finally, that rare gem: a balanced and intelligent article on Jordan Peterson.
Very glad to see you are still ‘on board’ Dan, even with this new terrible system.
I haven’t had the temerity to use the word ‘bovine’ since you so correctly castigated me a few months ago!
Daniel Björkman
3 years ago
A very thoughtful critique. I agree, JP is good at offering an antidote to liberal madness, but what he offers in its place is conservative sanity. That’s fair enough, though one might wish that he’d also acknowledge how much conservative madness is going on, including among his most devoted fans. But fine, he’s gotta do him.
Those of us who’d like for society to change, but change in an orderly and sustainable way, aren’t going to find it satisfying, though. What we need is more institution-loving Aaron Sorkin-style liberals, people who see movements as a necessary part of the public debate rather than as either perfect heroes or a sinful scourge. We have a sad lack of liberals like that, and the ones that do exist are getting pretty old, too.
I agree that the madness of Peterson’s fans, whether conservative or not, is very concerning. Could you explain it a bit so I can be forewarned and keep an eye out for it? Also, if it’s not too painful a memory, how did you cope dealing with the trauma? Did they hurt you very badly? Do you feel you will ever recover?
I have to say it also worries me very greatly this “conservative madness going on.” What if it spreads to more people? Consider what you have suffered by being exposed to it, and multiply this by even a small amount. It hardly bears thinking about! Indeed, I am trembling just trying to imagine it! For you it must be terrifying!
Obviously, having not had your lived experience of the conservative madness of Peterson fans, I can’t claim to fully empathise. But I’d like to, so give me all the sordid details. I strongly encourage you to consider setting up a support group. The import thing is to stay strong, and to believe you will get over what they did to you some day.
Certainly, I know they ruin careers, destroy innocent lives, break up homes and families, get involved in kidnapping, people smuggling, and engage in extensive criminal activities to fund their network. And then there’s the P–U–T—I—N connection. Which part of their operation did you fall victim to?
Ars Hendrik
3 years ago
No, Mr Peterson can’t bring order, though he looked a likely candidate a couple of years ago.
He is, I think, too fragile to survive another bout of virtual hatred – the last one practically killed him. Yes, his wife’s illness precipitated his drug dependency, but the relentless hounding clearly unhinged him as well.
Now, he is following an extreme Blake Donaldson diet and, if a recent interview is to be believed, has taken to a punishing regime of self care to cope.
I susect he needs to stay out of the limelight until he is properly strong again. If he jumps too soon then only his health will suffer.
Colin Haller
3 years ago
I would also observe of Peterson that these lyrics from Sloan’s “Coax Me” apply:
“It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans”
Diotima Socrates
3 years ago
The comment about Tabatha Southey and her description of Peterson as “the stupid man’s smart person” is telling. The writer points out that this remark “reeked of intellectual entitlement” and then asks, “But who exactly are these “stupid men” to whom she referred?”
A far more relevent question is: Who the hell is Tabatha Southey?
The answer is that she’s a mediocrity who has almost certainly never had an interesting or original thought in her head even once in her life, and wouldn’t have a clue how to determine if someone is an intellectual or not other than by divining the group-think of the collective of people just as stupid as herself to which she belongs. Would she have the capacity to think independently and consider Peterson’s ideas in their own terms? Of course not! She’s a scribbler of the received opinions of the class that Nassim Taleb perfectly described in his essay “The Intellectual Yet Idiot” who are intellectuals in every sense except in every sense that matters. And where does Southey fit in this ignoble class of idiots? Probably in the third rank!
The writer of this piece also finds “it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it.”
Apart from inserting “reportedly’ in her description (despite the fact of the protests not being in dispute), and describing the employees as “junior’ (which given that most of the objectors preferred anonymity, it is impossible to determine their seniority), how can she find their actions “difficult to comprehend” when even a fool would understand them perfectly? How totally out of touch do you need to be not to know that the employees were manifesting a mundane contemporary group neurosis? Indeed, their reaction was conventional and entirely normal in terms of the collective and individual consciousnesses of a certain class of people in the present era. Insane? Yes! Stupid? Yes! Pathetic? Yes! Completely absurd, facile, childish and laughable if it wasn’t taken so seriously? Yes!
Does the writer feign incomprehension because she dare not say what it is, or is she so bound up in the absurd, childish and facile herself that she cannot step outside of this state in order to clearly identify it?
In either case, she is unqualified to talk seriously about Peterson, and probably most other things as well.
So what do we have? – Just another opinion piece about Jordan Peterson from someone whose opinions are worthless. My advice is to go to the primary source and forget about reading mediated accounts of him. They invariably tell you far more about the writer than they do about Peterson – all of it deeply uninteresting.
Last edited 3 years ago by Diotima Socrates
Matt Sylvestre
3 years ago
What a tremendously thoughtful and thought-provoking article… I do not necessarily agree with every single word but greatly appreciate the measure and nuance… Work toward equality of opportunity, together… Exactly!
More from this author please,
Derek Boyes
3 years ago
From the sheer number of inflammatory comments on this article, it seems pretty clear that Micah Starshine is a social media hate baiter that could benefit from psychotherapy.
Well written piece – a rarity when the subject is JP.
I think there is definitely common ground to be found in reducing the existing disparities in equality of opportunity, but JP seems best when he’s dealing with individuals, rather than society as a whole. To expect him to provide solutions to wider societal issues may be a little too much to ask of him.
Perhaps instead, we can use his teachings to learn how to set aside our differences, to reconnect and reunite with each other in order to abate misguided ideology from the extremes and finally tackle some of these outstanding inequalities ourselves.
Last edited 3 years ago by Derek Boyes
Jason Lockwood
3 years ago
Oh boy, these comments do devolve into bickering quite fast. I disagree with a fair amount of what the author claims about Peterson, but I’ll only focus on one thing: the claim that he is didactic. Didacticism is not the same as educating.
I don’t agree with everything Peterson says, but I do think his general approach is sound, and it’s not preachy. Didacticism is about being preachy.
Peter KE
3 years ago
The woke, the ism’s and gender studies are all a waste of public resources and an attack on democracy and most of society. We need to start a process to defund any institution or business that wishes to allow or support such groups and individuals.
Mark Preston
3 years ago
“But in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.” Men are on the receiving end of domestic violence about 40%of the time. Men are very often genitally mutilated (circumcision). As for violence against women during sex – nice assertion. How about some supporting evidence?
You come across as just another feminist for whom evidence is unnecessary when you’re in thrall to a cult.
Simon Newman
3 years ago
The article, while I disagree with some of it, is much better than its sub-heading!
I suspect that Peterson, as a Classical Liberal sort (of what was until recently the soft-centre-left) would disagree with the social policies of the mid 20th century Republic of Ireland. Any sensible person has a preferred balance point between liberal and conservative norms. The big problem is purity-spirallers who can never say “This is about right – better not go any further”.
Stephen Makk
3 years ago
The title doesn’t seem to fit the body of the article, but perhaps it is a clever trick to get people to read it who might otherwise avoid it. I saw this as a generally positive review of Peterson. I am a bit surprised by some of the negative reactions.
S A
3 years ago
Unfortunate piece. It appears to come at Peterson with an open mind (who can tell these days) but has so many questionable assumptions. I’m still waiting for someone to engage Peterson about some of the areas of his positions that seem weaker (he seems to dislike social constructionism but credits it with a lot of power in certain respects which may not be as str0ong as he thinks), but I guess the wait continues.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
For anyone who’s interested, the Rubin Report has a new, two-hour long interview with JP.
Thankyou for this very helpful review.
I’m wondering l if there are any biblical allusions in the book because his lectures in this area have been very popular.However there has been some criticism of JP’s handling of the biblical narratives. There is always a danger of reading into the texts what you want them to say making them work for your personal agenda. This is called eisegesis. But preachers and teachers of the Bible are trained in exegesis which is letting the Bible speak for itself. It’s about discovering what the Bible is actually saying to us as opposed to making it conform to what we want it to say so that it confirms our own views and prejudices.
Part of that training is locating a narrative in its historical and cultural context and interpreting it in relation to the Bible as a whole. JP does not do this which is very understandable because he is not trained in exegesis nor does he claim to be a Christian, despite being deeply imbued with and deeply respectful of Christianity.
If he were he would realise that the Bible is more than a self-help handbook and a rich seam of illustrations for living well. The Bible is not just about the horizontal- our relationship with ourselves and others. It’s also about the vertical – our relationship with God and the transforming power of that relationship and it’s eternal consequences.
David Hartlin
3 years ago
Haw haw !
Michael Hobson
3 years ago
This is one of the fairest and most considered pieces I have read on Peterson by a British journalist – particularly a female one, and which stands in contrast to Unherd’s lightweight hit piece a couple of months ago by Sarah Ditum. However you seem to feel the need to defend another lazy and biased piece by Helen Lewis in her YouTube interview with Peterson. He is on record in either a Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin interview saying how rude, unpleasant and hostile she was to him before that interview. Apprised of that information I suspect her interview with him will seem a lot less ‘courteous’.
anxious coupe
3 years ago
Peterson makes some valid points , however his obsession with the left brings him down to the alt right nonsense
Pete Kreff
3 years ago
it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it
It’s only difficult to comprehend if you’re looking for the reason for it in the wrong place, i.e. in the book’s content rather on its cover.
John Jones
3 years ago
This new format for posting comments just doesnt work. When I try to reply, my comment ends up running into the post comment button. Comments downpage end up being strung out in long single word strands.
Unherd: either fix this posting program, or return to the old one.
Allan Dawson
3 years ago
I’ve got to be honest…when ever I’ve read Peterson, I just can’t help but feel his spiel – though well crafted – is essence a warmed over version of the sort of s78te self-books that have been around for decades….
Lesley McLure
3 years ago
Good read. Shame about the unedifying swill that follows.
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
Jenny’s not Canadian, so I doubt that she is familiar with Tabatha Southey’s oeuvre. Unfortunately, I have wasted more time reading her than I ever should have. She has written for the National Post and the Globe and Mail, as well as Maclean’s, where her “Is Jordan Peterson the Stupid Person’s Smart Person Was Published”. “Is Tabatha Southey the Terrible Person’s Virtuous Person?” is the reply (not from Peterson) to La Southey’s broadside, which tells you what a horrible woman she is, trying to take her hugely talented comedian husband Dave Foley, the father of her two children, for every loonie he had. The author of “Is Tabatha Southey” notes that Tabatha doesn’t hate Peterson so much as envy him. The material greed that led her to live high off of her husband’s income and divorce him when she had cleaned him out makes her resent a man who Peterson for making “$50,000 a month in voluntary donations on Patreon from all the people who value the great work he’s doing.”
Jenny says “It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.” I am sure Jordan is aware of that too; the Canadian medicare system was modelled closely on the UK NHS. When Peterson first gained acclaim for attacking state overreach, it wasn’t’ for our state-run health care, which he seems to have no problem with, but for the Trudeau Liberal government’s authoritarian effort to compel people’s speech. He said that he has 42 rules for life, so I suspect he has another book or a book and a half on those to right before he even thinks about writing a book on “reducing the existing disparities in equality of opportunity”. And why should he write such a book? He is a psychologist, not an economist. Would anyone want to read Jordan Peterson on the Job Guarantee, worthy initiative though that may be? I don’t agree with you on this one, Jenny; Jordan should keep to his last. He’s the Canadian Sakharov.
Chris Milburn
3 years ago
Oh. My. God.
You are a writer given a platform on (in my opinion) one of the best platforms on the internet. I’m just a random dude sitting in my living room with a cat. And I know way more than you. I figured you would have done your research.
Your 2nd last paragraph suggests that Peterson has never addressed the issue of how power/competence hierarchies become corrupt. He has addressed this issue over and over and over and over again. He makes it very clear that we need the left, and the right, to maintain balance, exactly for that reason. The right, if left to it’s own devices, will tend to corrupt their hierarchies and become dysfunctional.
Disappointed with that glaring bit of idiocy, as otherwise many of the points made in the article were decent, and some were even thought-provoking.
Virginia Durksen
3 years ago
The UnHerd editors did a great disservice to readers and the author of this piece, by setting it up with the misleading sub-head.
I suppose it worked, if your goal was to generate a certain volume of overreaction. Your usual editorial stance is to assume readers are capable of discussing a topic without being whipped into a frenzy. I hope Jenny McCartney pushes back on this treatment of what is otherwise fair comment on JBP’s new book.
I would love to see her interview JBP and discuss his views further.
J J
3 years ago
I think Peterson’s key message is:
‘Don’t perceive yourself as a victim of society, perceive yourself as having agency. Then act accordingly.’
It’s a simple and unoriginal idea. The reason it’s so popular is because an entire generation has been conditioned to believe they are at the mercy of external social structures. To suggest you can actually control your life is revolutionary to these people. Young men in particular lap this message up like water being offered to a man dying of thirst.
Peterson’s simple message completely undermines most forms of left wing political theory. It’s why the Left simply cannot accept Peterson. Indeed, their survival depends on ensuring Peterson is discredited and ideally removed from the discourse altogether. We can’t have people going around believing they are responsible for their own circumstances. It’s truly outrageous.
When humans believe they control events, they realise they are accountable for events. And good things start to happen. When they believe other people are responsible for events and they are mere victims, bad things start to happen. History is clear on this.
Last edited 3 years ago by J J
Alka Hughes-Hallett
3 years ago
I did not find JP’s 12 rules particularly remarkable nor enlightening. There is nothing new or particularly groundbreaking there.
I found him talking to his readers and listeners as if he were giving a lecture & since I listened to his audiobook, it came across as supercilious & haughty & better than thou.
There are so many intricate circumstances that lead to complex characters in humans & to me his understanding of how a subtle human nature develops is overly simplistic.
Of course it works so well for so many young men and even a large proportion of western population. However, perhaps your teachers, your parents etc are quite likely saying the same things. Perhaps, when you are receptive to learning, a book & author can make that difference that no one in your life previously could. I can understand that sometimes the answers are not that clear ,the epiphany cannot happen & perhaps JP’s books have given that clarity to a lot of people but the solution is not ingenious or wonderful.
Left leaning ideas do not resonate with me at all & much of what JP says, is my philosophy too.
I CAN however understand the desperation & vulnerability of any minority group either of women, LGBT , BAME etc who are still on fragile ground wrt to their freedoms and rights. I think JP could do a bit more understanding and a bit less preaching as there is much more complexity of character out there than meets the eye.
‘…the desperation & vulnerability of any minority group either of women, LGBT , BAME etc who are still on fragile ground wrt to their freedoms and rights.’
Please explain which freedoms and which rights are being denied to these groups. Please be specific.
I guess not long ago LGBT, BAME etc was not a group that would want to draw attention to itself and to be and live as they like without persecution or negative attention . Today it’s a different experience for them but that doesn’t mean several millennium of persecution can be fully negated in a few years . I CAN understand that when someone is scared they can lash out. When JP says “ put your house in order” I agree with him but I also understand if someone cannot just act on those words and MAY need more help than just words.
I thank you for your reply, but I have to say that it does not seem to answer my question about which specific freedoms and rights are being denied to the groups that you referred to.
The specific freedom to be who they want to be and the right to live the way they want to live. I was referring to ‘recently’ won freedoms & rights to be who they want to be without persecution. It’s still a fragile subject for them. I can understand their fragility and sometimes irrational behaviour despite being given those freedoms.
“Women” a minority group? … women are the majority of the population. Your “etc” presumably includes a minority group on fragile ground – working class white men.
Totally . Everyone in any fragile situation whatever their background ethnicity or denomination . And my inclusion of women in minority was not accurate, I was thinking of those (anyone) who has relatively recently reached any equality status with men in general , esp men in power.
‘I was thinking of those (anyone) who has relatively recently reached any equality status with men in general , esp men in power.’
This seems a bit muddled to me. If those people have in fact achieved equality status, in what sense do they need special consideration? They’re equal now, aren’t they?
‘…esp men in power’ – the vast majority of men in the world are not in any kind of power; so aren’t men who are not in power as ‘desperate and vulnerable’ as all the other groups, minorities, and women?
If some men are in power, the men not in power aren’t equal with them either.
And what about women in power? Are they oppressing the men not in power? So is the sex of people in power relevant, or the fact that they are in power?
And does being in power mean that you are oppressing everyone else? If so, everyone not in power (what, 99% of the world’s population?) presumably falls into some sort of victim category.
Sure, it’s all about the past. Indeed, were I to beat you around the head there would be no point in stopping because it would bring you no relief. Certainly, by stopping beating you round the head it would no longer be in the present, but it would still in the past, which is as little different from the present as makes no difference. Indeed, as a sage once remarked “the past features in the present’s development” and you don’t get much more profound than that.
I would vey much like to try this experiment on you and explain when you begged me to stop that it would be pointless because “the past features in the present’s development” which is as good as the past being present in every sense that matters, and so stopping or continuing the beating amounts to the same thing. You would immediately see the great wisdom of this insight and would cease your complaining having understood it was mere confusion, while I, of course, would carry on thrashing you enjoying every second of it.
Ok , point taken . Not a minority. Just the oppressed half .
elidwek0
3 years ago
The NHS led to the bankruptcy of the UK and destroyed its industry by Hoovering up the nation’s resources. Germany, Switzerland and other countries with successful medical systems understood that a balance between private and public was Sustainable.
Votes for women created a support base for socialist parties because women are more likely to vote socialist. The expansion of the voter base created a society where nothing can be achieved except through years of argument (e.g. the Heathrow runway). If you give women the vote then you have to remove it from men. By allowing all of society to vote you cause society to disintegrate.
It would be much better to allow only people between 35-45 to vote thereby creating a Government that would be decisive and clearly reflect one point of view.
Ms McCartney
You are fundamentally wrong.
When you talk about oppressed woman in abusive marriages having no escape, and have sly digs at men with daddy issues, you reveal both your smug sanctimony and your lack of understanding. Traditional societies were not defined by male dominance but by traditional roles. Just as a woman could not escape a bad marriage, neither could a man. Social roles were proscribed along social values. What power did poor men have but to die in wars or live miserable existence in hard pitiless labour? You may argue against social roles, but it was not roles and rules for women and complete freedom for men.
And the purpose of social roles was to impose order on primitive libidinal chaos (the id, if you like that jargon). Rules will always constrain, just as complete freedom will always be nihilistic.
Once you are wise enough to stop seeing everything as a gender war, you will realise that JP’s rules apply to all humans. Woman need to take responsibility too. Suffering is universal. The need for order and the equally strong need for breaking rules occur in all human beings. We all crave safety and security; we all must pay a little price in individual freedoms for that security. Or we are all equally free as moral agents to break social roles and accept the consequences.
But first you must rise above your narrow understanding of the world.
Well said.
Peterson outlines incredibly well how brutal life has been for *all* people in previous generations and still is for most now. The liberal over-educated parts of the West have decided that it’s about identitarianism now and cannot see beyond it, manufacturing outrage to order to quell boredom and lack of life purpose.
Peterson calls it out and many of us see it for what it is: subversive amd dangerous.
Your life must suck.
Imagine someone asking the same question about feminist groups?
Your sexism is appealing.
Appalling.
Feminists get things done for which women!?, They never asked my consent or my view – the majority of women don’t like new age feminism! I believe in my right to self determination over ID politics and group identity! I speak for myself and won’t allow another group to force me into id politics or make rules on “my behalf”! I won’t have some radicals assume my voice for me!, or have special laws and money diverted to them either!! Feminists in my book are not wanted, and I want nothing to do with them!
Back in the 60s and 70s I used to really enjoy reading the Feminist books which were very hot at the time, and were very much about Middle Class. The position basically was that Men and women went to university for two very different reasons, with striking differences.
Men went to University get professions to be successful. Women went to be worthy of becoming their wives. (which is the reason for humanities degrees, to make attractive spouses who could have high conversation and be cultured at dinner parties, basically be trophy spouses, but not very employable.)
So these educated women went from highly stimulating University to cleaning a big house and tending infants wile the man did stimulating work, coming home tired, fulfilled, with the wife was desperate for some intellectual exchange. This led to their going crazyish, and Valium and so on.
That was Feminism as it began. This is not the case now, and Feminism has moved on, in many ways an answer looking for a problem.
Education is not just about becoming employable (or a worthy wife, for that matter). And feminism didn’t suddenly spring into existence in 1960; the Suffragists who campaigned for votes for women were undoubtedly feminist in their way – and they were not the first.
Not that all battles fought by today’s feminists are necessarily wise, or even well fought.
Feminism was merely an interesting idea until the pill freed women from pregnancy. Feminists blame an abstraction, t
Ah, so because one male’s grasp of the history is a bit awry then it’s the case with all of them. And anyways that doesn’t negate their right to an opinion or engage in debate.
Could that injunction be labelled at females? Femsplaining MR activism to men? Femsplaining why MRAism has an asserted outcome?
Neither did that.
I don’t know if you vote at all, but wasn’t giving women the vote a significant victory for feminism?
You’ve been brainwashed by feminist propaganda, “the vote” had less to do with feminism than you think. Women’s suffrage gradually spread across the world from the end of the 19th century onwards without feminist’s help, largely due to industrialisation and wealth. Only in the US and Britain were some women vociferous in their demands and interestingly enough they were given the vote by their countries later than others.
See my comment further down.
oh you poor thing. Reading the MRA revisionist propaganda lowers your IQ dramatically.
And you accuse your opponents of “always being with the hostility”. Cast out the beam in your own eye etc.
…or that.
The Suffraget s were sexists who fought only for votes for women, ignoring the 40% of men who also didn’t have the vote.
In fact, women only got the vote when working class men returned from the trenches and demanded the franchise. The decision was made to extent voting rights for all citizens at that point.
The Suffragettes didn’t win the vote for women. It was won by the blood of men.
well that wins the utterly full of b.s. award. Where in the deep dark crevices of the gluteous maximus do you males pull these fantasies out of…Emily Davidson was forced fed 49 times in seven imprisonments before she martyred herself for the vote via racehorse.
Or you could just do some reading..
Lot of insults there and no evidence refuting the claims of John Jones. Have you always been so unable to debate like a grown up?
Absolutely, sister.
yes, handmaidens are always willing to let other women do all the work and then knife them in the back to curry favor with the males who will always despise them no matter what.
Do you have any male friends Micah ?
I never said a word about “new age feminism”. You can relax and stop using the exclamation points btw, it’s exhausting to read.
Quite. We don’t want any posts that are exhausting to read now do we?
It was blue pilled men who put in place systems and lawas which the feminists wanted
I think you’ll find Father’s for Justice effected change.
Which women? I’m a woman and nothing feminism ever did was for me. More like against me. And you’ll find i represent the views of the majority of women on that.
And that’s why i’m a bit torn on the trans issue. On one hand, it’s so grotesquely, ridiculously absurd that i cannot comment on it with a straight face. On the other hand though, they are pissing off all the feminists, and i like that. Also they are blokes (however much they insist they aren’t), and as a heterosexual woman i like blokes.
So, in a binary choice between feminists and trannies, the tranny blokes get my vote any day.
twit
Fascinating read, Micah. Truly, writing is a window into one’s soul. Your soul seems to cry in a longing for…something.
Anyhoo, back to the topic: You seem to want to control the definition of feminism.
Fortunately for all of us, you don’t.
Perhaps the reason why men’s rights groups haven’t made much progress is the active opposition by feminists to men’s groups who try to achieve equality.
Consider the feminist opposition to the movie The Red Pill, a film made by a former feminist investigating men’s issues. Feminists in Australia and Canada managed to ban the film, effectively de-platforming the attempt to investgate mens issues,
The category error you make here is to see Peterson as a champion of male rights per se, a sort of male version of you. Then of course he has “done nothing” in terms of who you perceive him to be. What he has done is to call into question the idea of a male patriarchy as the way feminists see it, and has the temerity to question your world-view, so you descend into ad hominem attacks. Anyone can attach power-laden words like “whining” to someone’s discourse, but this isn’t intelligent debate.
“I don’t even think men know HOW to fight for the rights of lower status males.” — Nothing inhibits lower status males more than general feminist indignation towards them. Their status and living experiences are just getting more dismal with #MeToo and total gender equality in education and management jobs. Among men there was at least some code of cultivated conduct.
@Micah – but Feminism had the big advantage that men tend naturally to feel protective and helpful towards women. While neither men nor women naturally feel sympathetic to ‘loser’ men.
I think that where there have been advances in men’s rights, such as equal child custody presumptions here in the UK, they have often been more a side effect of Feminism*, of equal-handed application of Liberal Equality principles, or just from a recognition that fair treatment for men gives the best outcome for other more sympathised-with groups, such as the children of divorced parents.
*My impression is British Feminism doesn’t seem nearly as hostile to men as much of US Feminism.
There is an interesting hypothesis called Gamma Bias. The bias is a cognitive distortion of which one of your instances could be applied to the distortion as a confirmatory example. I am still waiting to see when this hypothesis undergoes empirical testing and replication.
The lack of action in the so-called MRA movement might be explained also by this supposed background context, if it turns out to be confirmed via multiple studies. Putting it down to a univariate causation of lack of grass roots action fails to explain why this is so.
You have fallen into the trap once again of seeing everything through female v male. Surely it is all of us who need a better way to live?
Where did the MRA movement come into this? Peterson does not whine or support those that do, he advocates the complete opposite- taking responsibility and standing up for yourself, absolutely not self pity. Peterson is not an activist nor claims to be. He is exceptionally good at analysing describing and critiquing social structures and strategies and that is what people enjoy. On the subject of standing up for rights of the lower status what do you think the trade union movement was all about then, nearly all male until recent times. Women would never have got the vote and had the rights they enjoy today without the support of men within the trade union movement.
I think you may not understand men. Do you have brothers? Did your father love you? Did you know or have any Uncles (actually, often more important than fathers)? You want men to fight for the rights of “lower status men”? Do you fight for the rights of lower status women who don’t agree with you? Please.
When you get over 40 downvotes (at last count) you should probably have the sense to look at yourself in the mirror carefully…
Thumbs up.
That didn’t go down very well did it Micah ?
I agree Vikram.
Feminist indoctrination runs deep; both the belief that they, feminists, have forced social change already, and that they can put an end to particular types of violence, tribal customs and behaviour by pathologizing men. The greater freedom of women throughout the 20th century in the West has been largely driven by the requirements of the market and the liberal humanism that has developed alongside that, neither are necessarily ‘good’ or better than what existed before.
Peterson’s most simple advice to put your own house in order first before trying to change the world is one of the best. But egos, ideologies and money tempt people away from that good advice all the time.
Oh what it is to be human.
Oh my! You should be concerned by the depth of your delusion.
Not with hostility then, Micah?
There’s been a lot of nonsense said above and below. Not just by you. But on this… I must say… that feels like an unfair attack on the man not the ball. Your argument seems to be that Peterson is a fraud and a charlatan for writing observational books intended as advice.. while suffering in his own life and with his own life choices. Why? Wasn’t Hemingway a drunk? Wasn’t MLk a womaniser? I’m sure all of the marvellous and celebrated feminists of our times have had some deep character flaws.. their personal battles don’t necessarily make their arguments invalid. Just because my girl friend squawks doesn’t mean I shouldn’t listen to and honour her.
Peterson’s fundamental message in both books (although like the author of this article I haven’t yet reached the midpoint of the sequel) seems to be … things are hard and often deeply flawed.. so strive to make them better without fixating on perfection… that seems like a pretty harmless message to me. And possibly one a lot of people will benefit from contemplating
Yes and the Berlin Wall fell because Gorby decided to be a good guy.
Women in Japan got the vote because MacArthur forced the Japanese to accept it in the constitution he forced on them – he gave the women the vote because it would stop the culture of Militarism, which it did. Their constitution has the record of being the longest in effect without any changes at all.
If you mean Emily Davison, noted arsonist, who attacked people with a bullwhip, what specifically were her accomplishments? When she died women still didn’t have the vote and it was not until Davison was long gone and thousands of women had been recruited for war work that Parliament granted some women the vote if they were over a certain age and owned property. Davison herself accomplish nothing.
Indeed, and it is highly likely that the terrorist activity of the suffragettes, including bombing, arson, acid attacks through letter boxes and criminal damage, actually delayed women getting the vote. No sensible government would give way to violence like that.
Women’s suffrage was already gradually spreading worldwide before WWI, in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway and partially in Sweden women had suffrage, without the need for terrorism of any kind.
It is quite reasonable to suppose that if the suffragettes had not caused so much trouble, all women in Britain would have got the vote in 1919 (as they did in Germany) instead of having to wait another decade.
I agree. Women’s participation in war efforts, so necessary and so praised, changed the course of history in so many ways, not the least of which were employment and suffrage. It wasn’t someone burning things down that led to anything good for women.
Wyoming was the first State in USA to give women the vote, 1921 I think. This was because (I believe) because women had to run the Ranch and farm business wile the men worked on them, they were economically equal of necessity, not because they they protested. It was a different economy than any other.
The 19th amendment to the constitution passed in August 1920, it gave women the right to vote nationally in the US.
When I read loony guff like this I long for the return of the ‘block’ functionality.
Ah those brave women. They made all those boys who died on the Somme look like pussies.
No, they were given it by sympathetic male legislators. They had no power to take it for themselves.
Britain entered the industrial Revolution in the 1780s and by 1900 there were plenty of upper middle class women whom had income from investments, family trusts, owned pubs, market stalls. The Married Wmens property Act of 1860 meant they kept their assets after marriage. Obtaining the vote was an extension of economic independence and so gained the greatest support from upper middle class women. Women living in slums who had witness several of her children die of poverty was less concerned with the vote. .
That really is going too far. How dare you be so insulting?
The suffragettes were certainly a mixed bag, and had lots of crazies in their ranks. The organisation was also something of a personal fiefdom of Emmeline Pankhurst, and was very much a middle and upper class class affair.
One of the events that galvanised lots of women into the Sufferage movement was the spreading of the franchise to a range of men that permitted some domestic servants to exercise the vote. The very notion that a creature as worthless as a servant might have some status that didn’t properly reflect their complete inferiority to their mistress in every respect drove a lot of upper class women into a near apoplectic state. The idea, for example, that a fully grown male gardener might silently put up with being addressed like a child, or being bullied, but harbour secret thoughts along the lines of, “Well, I might have to tolerate your shit, but I’ve still got the vote and you haven’t,” drove some women into wild indignation.
It’s also worth remembering that the main pastime of the Suffragettes during WW1 was handing out white feathers to men who were invalided out of the army, or who they suspected were not manly enough to throw themselves in front of German machine gun or cannon fire with enthusiasm.
It is also the case that the widening of sufferage was merely a continuation of Enlightenment thinking: a social, political, intellectual and cultural movement that men came up with very happily on their own. Indeed, the first pamphleteer for votes for women was a man. Furthermore, as you say, the Pankhursts probably slowed things down because pro-women’s vote male parliamentarians had to contend with the argument that the antics of the Sufferagettes proved that women were too irrational and emotionally unstable to be entrusted with a vote. To many, the Suffragettes mostly served as the perfect illustration of why women were unfitted for a wider political role in society.
The notion that women ‘won’ the vote by fighting for it is absurd. Most of the people who did the real fighting were men – especially people like John Stewart Mill, who was a million times more important than Emmeline Pankhurst – mostly because he wasn’t mad. Certainly, all of the intellectual work was done by men except for a very tiny number of women who were educated in Enlightenment thinking by men. Like many things, women were given the vote as a free gift from men.
As you say, the participation of women in the war effort pretty-much closed the case because the logic of extending the franchise to a wider range of men was partly grounded in the same line of reasoning – if a man can be called upon to serve his country then he’s earned the right to have a say in how it’s run. The difference is that ‘service’ for women didn’t mean the battlefield. And so men were told, “You’re getting a say in your country because your country may demand that you fight and die for it,” whereas women were told, “You’re getting the vote because your country may ask you to stand in for your brothers, fathers, uncles, sons, etc., while they’re away fighting and dying.”
Interesting post, thank you.
Micah, I don’t know if you’ll pick this up but I needed a few days to think before responding, or whether to respond at all.
I wonder what has caused you to be such an angry person. I don’t think anyone from a loving home could be as angry, unless they had an illness and you seem too rational for that.
This is just a comments page where disparate people comment on articles and put forward their ideas, you fight back with such verbal aggression as if your life depended on it. Why?
Don’t go through life full of anger and hate, try and be objective, talk to someone you can trust who will help you sort things out.
Different ideas about politics are really not as important as your happiness and well-being.
49 forcefeedings in seven imprisonments, suicide by racehorse. Keep re-writing history, if you must, I love to hear supposed “non-feminists” expressing opinions they think women shouldn’t be allowed to have and showing the results of the hard work of people whom they claim did nothing. Your screaming hypocrisy and ironic presence on this thread is proof of the work of women whose morality you will never approach.
LOL
tl;dr
See my post above.
And she follows up the marriage part by using the 1960s as an example. Of what exactly? A woman today is not under those restrictions. Neither is a man. In the US, half the marriages end in court and that is among those who bother with it in the first place.
Also Ireland! the fact it was 60 years ago is obviously weird but to pick Ireland as your model is very odd.
I think this is an overly harsh critique. The point she makes has always struck me as the most important question to ask Jordan Peterson, which hatchet interviewers such as Cathy Newman always fail to ask: to what extent is his account of hierarchy in our societies merely descriptive and therefore changeable, and to what extent is it normative or, at least, inevitable?
Jordan P is simply dismantling by rational arguments the PC scoring mechanism that more or less works like this.
White -1 Black +1 Male -3 female +3 hetero -4 Gay +5 Muslim +4 Conservative -2 liberal 0 Marxist +3, family ( traditional ) one income -6.
Jordan makes the point that the traditional system of values is far from perfect, but replacing it with a different system as BLM etc and most of the media advocate, simply creates a different process of discrimination with a different set of winners and losers. Thomas Sowell, many feminists and others have come to realise, that these woke solutions far from helping often make things much worse by virtue of unintended consequences.
I am minus 16! No wonder I feel so out of step with the world.
Yeah, me too. I wonder when I’ll get a call from the mysterious ‘Patriarchy’ to come and become a member. It sure sounds good, having all that power and status.
We must be brothers, I’m – 16 also!
Agreed – and from what I can gather, he seems to be suggesting that it is normative.
Hierarchy is descriptive and normative. The word describes what we observe in a multitude of social settings currently in place, but other hierarchies could and would exist. That is, I would argue that hierarchies are inevitable in human social systems but that the details are only weakly influenced by biological imperatives*.
*My opinion is undoubtedly based on the prevailing attitudes when I learned evolutionary biology (c 1990), but I studied social dominance in depth. I have not read Peterson because, from what I have read in reviews of his work, he get’s the biology wrong (he is naive in relating the simple to the complex).
Yes – Agreed. This confirms my impression of JP that he’s a brilliant and charismatic speaker, a successful writer of self help books but flawed as an academic. His arguments generally fall down when fellow academics in his field look at them.
Get a grip,you are just bitter and nasty.
What happened to the mute button?
No but I’m not at all surprised to find out that he’s a junkie. That’s a good thing by the way. It means the flat effect I always picked up on was just from drugs and not true psychopathy. When he gets sober after a few years of really learning to process emotions his work might be worth reading. It’s scandalous he was advising other people on how to live. In my view he owes all of you a deeply felt apology for advising you on how to do something that he himself was not even capable of. If he stays clean and appropriately apologizes for suckering so many hateful and desperate people into being even more hateful and desperate than they already were, I might read his work some day, when he’s clear headed and has actually experienced the “life” that’ he’s telling everyone else how to navigate.
Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. You would probably find Diane Abbott ‘charismatic’ or ‘intelligent’.
I would advise you to try Hemingway and stick to straight fiction if you want to read drunk or drug-addled minds. Reading someone like Dr. Robert Hare might help you with discernment, too.
That’s because you’re crazy.
Mr Nash
I missed your comment.You ask a very important question, and I wish Ms McCartney had asked it with equal elegance without resorting to gender war cliches.
As to your question, Rousseau (I think) said: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains” (by man I am sure he meant human beings, lest someone accuses him of misogyny). Hierarchies are normative; what changes is the rigidity of boundaries.
In “Straw Dogs”, John Gray cites Joseph de Maistre on the Rousseau dictum: to think that, because a few people sometimes seek freedom, all human beings want it is like thinking that, because there are flying fish, it is in the nature of fish to fly. So far hierarchies are normative in meeting some basic needs for nearly all.
But then what society could you ever form that didn’t have a hierarchy? Every iteration has one needed to enforce laws, fairness. Anarchist societies don’t work,communism and collectivism, are an affront to personal dignity and freedom.
We are a social creature – hierarchy is in our dna.
Peterson responds that he was high the entire time and he can’t believe you suckers took it all seriously.
Have I struck a nerve with you? See, two can play this game.
I did not accuse her of being a woman, just reducing complex social questions to one about gender. Next you will accuse me of mansplaining.
Every ‘social question’ (the word ‘social’ has no meaning in itself) resolves into the questions ‘Who tells whom to do what and what authority have they to do so?’
On the left this question is assumed to have been answered, definitively, and thus it is never asked.
If by being a man and speaking you mean he was mansplaining, yes.
Just call Vikram a misogynist and make your identitarian accusation plain.
LOL
The situation today has improved for women, but not for men. Women can end a marriage for good, but a man is never really married nor is he ever really divorced. He can be married on false pretences, and pursued for more money decades after a divorce.
literally is not a violin small enough. We are talking, or Peterson was, about getting the hell beat out of you, about marital rape, about little children being clobbered. Not about spousal support.
“…pursued for more money decades after a divorce” is hardly true in the U. S. nowadays. If he is extremely rich and can support a penurious woman, there will be judges who figure he should do it instead of the taxpayers. But it doesn’t happen in the ordinary peoples’ cases.
Do you mean for child support?
No, for herself. If you Google ‘”Dale Vince” “Kathleen Wyatt” divorce’ you will find the case of a woman who sought more money from someone she had divorced 20 years earlier. He became wealthy later, so she came after his money – with whose creation she had had literally nothing to do – and she actually won. He was not divorced at all, in effect.
Nicely said.
Taking your personal demons out for a walk today?
You don’t usually see this type of crank here. Which makes it such a great place to talk with people who don’t agree with you as well as those who do.
Gosh, you sound very bitter and not at all wise. On the contrary . . . As a woman I would like to point out that women ‘like you’ do not speak for me in any way. And it seems you enjoy not only hassling people – men AND women – online but probably do so in real life on a daily, minute by minute basis. Which probably makes you very disliked by all and so greatly influences your warped world view.
I don’t normally resort to personal comments, but the remark “because of a chromosome” borders on moronic stupidity. The difference between you and an ape or a lower life form is just chromosomes.
Please don’t let your anger make you become silly.
Keep ya hair on! You’ve completely missed the point of the article. The marriage bit was just an example and she’s not saying it couldn’t apply to men.
That’s one of the most entertaining generalisations I’ve read in a long time.
Men also cared about women’s lives and vice versa. My mother and father loved and respected each other and it was a joy to behold. It sounds like you hate all men and something has caused this.
I’m a woman and if i had a penny for each time i was accused of “mansplaining” online, i’d be rich.
Not quite sure if you’re aware that the vast majority of us sane women abhors your toxic feminist bullcrap with a fiery passion.
Reading these posts of yours I was about to write something along the lines of “back away, no sudden movements” etc. But I stopped when it struck me that you really are in a great deal of pain, as evidenced mostly by this furious projection at Peterson and anyone who takes you on. He’s “cold”, he’s “dark”, he’s “soulless”. Those who don’t agree with your worldview are “spineless” and “deluded”. And on and on. I honestly think you need to get off the internet and get some help.
You’ve missed the point of the article. The bit about marriages was just to illustrate a point and she hasn’t said it couldn’t apply the other way round.
12 Rules for Life is not a book for males or one that appeals mostly to men, the author is way off track there. It has universal common sense ideas and principles. Men don’t need to be told not to lie simply because they are men. Everyone needs to hear that.
I’ve never found Peterson to be “testy” in interviews but I have enjoyed some of them as many interviewers try so hard to misstate his positions and ideas. It’s quite comical sometimes and yet he never gets snotty with any of them, just patiently tells them that they are not talking about any of his actual ideas.
What I find truly interesting and admirable about Peterson in addition to the plain old common sense he espouses, is that he appears to be uncancellable. No matter how hard the lefties try, they can’t seem to stop him from spreading his ideas. Must be so infuriating.
Not really got any skin in this particular game, but I think you might have picked the wrong person to reply to like that there.
speaking of arrogant, myopic and misogynist….
You keep harping on “pill popper”? Is this the best insult you can come up with?
I have always found him to be humble. Opinion is subjective.
I’ve seen Peterson in a state I would call testy, but it’s not surprising, given how often and how grossly his opinions are misrepresented by seemingly intelligent people.
I can’t think of anyone in the English-speaking world who is more misrepresented and unfairly traduced than Peterson.
I find it interesting, if not downright malevolent, that The Guardian keeps the article titled, “How dangerous is Jordan Peterson, the rightwing professor who ‘hit a hornets’ nest'”: as No.10 most accessed story on its Science page, despite it being written in Feb 2018. Usually, The Guardian puts a yellow banner over old stories, stating this article is 6 months or 4 years or however old. However, No. 4 on this Top 10 listing, about Australia’s marsupials, does indeed have a caveat that the article is two months old. The Jordan Peterson article is so badly written, and so biased, it’s quite surreal. In a nutshell, they call him a drug-addled, loony alt-right, conspiracy theorist, a cultist, ad nauseam. It is so odd, and obviously a deliberate editorial smear campaign kept on the Top 10 stories listings, I suspect in retaliation for his utter, utter evisceration of Cathy Newman. And, of course, there is absolutely no attempt to answer their original question, on how dangerous he allegedly is. It is such an awkwardly gauche piece of editorial tomfoolery that it makes you question the entire newsroom process. Who is that upset or threatened by the man that they need to keep reminding their readers that there is this dangerous terrorist, in effect, walking around selling books and corrupting young males?
I think you misunderstand the utility of The Guardian, it’s there for a sanity check on yourself. If you ever read The Grievance and find yourself agreeing with it you know its time to get yourself sectioned, possibly lobotomized for your own safety. I’m only half joking. If you read The Guardian especially the headlines as they are the most obvious editorial points, but understand the opposite of what they write you will be better informed. so in your example can be better understood as – Jordan Peterson is safe he’s not rightwing and he’s never hit a hornets nest.
The Guardian , not even once.
Jordan Peterson: “I hit a hornets’ nest at the most propitious time.”
Enjoying the Guardian’s new name!
And, of course, there is absolutely no attempt to answer their original question, on how dangerous he allegedly is.
that’s a feature of the modern-day, slash and burn left. The accusation is accepted as an article of faith. To even question its validity suggests something wrong with you.
Just read the Guardian piece. It doesn’t mention drugs. It doesn’t call him a loony or alt-right. It explicitly states that he isn’t a white nationalist. It does say he supports conspiracy theories about post modernist cultural marxism taking over academia and that he’s popular with a wide spread of people who include . Good point about the banner on the age of the article and odd that the piece is still in the top ten. Maybe it’s got back in the charts because of the new book?
It does address the how dangerous he is question in the section where it quotes an assessment of his main threat being how his beliefs ‘detract from more critical, informed and, frankly, interesting conversations’.
In summary, your summary of The Guardian piece is as biased as you claim the piece is about Peterson. But I’ve learned more about his views so thanks for pointing me in its direction.
If you seriously think that The Grievance is interested in “critical, informed and, frankly, interesting conversations” I have a bridge to sell you.
To be honest, Joe. Depends on how you approach things. I read The Guardian, Telegraph, UnHerd, Jewish Chronicle and bits and pieces from other publications like The Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesmen – not because I’m looking for things I agree with but so I can come across different views and opinions and hopefully get a better understanding of why people have different opinions and how that might even influence my own. To that purpose I try not to disregard something just because its in a publication whose content I largely disagree with.
Nah, the Guardian has become horrific, along with the US legacy newspapers, the NYTimes and Washington Post. The Independent jumped ship to workness ages ago, but once upon a time, in the late 1990s, it was the greatest newspaper i have come across
The issue with many modern publications is that they could actually be written by algorithm. Almost all Peterson coverage, anything “woke” it is not like finding an original argument you disagree with it is an argument that has been made and refuted years ago. It is very hard to find new takes on issues.
I have the same approach – truly. I read widely, and deliberately. I go as far out (occasionally, not that often) as the Grauniad on one edge and Breitbart at the other. I prefer calmer, saner publications such as the Times, Telegraph, Economist, Prospect, and even (with care) the BBC website.
The NYT is engaged in self-destruction as it transforms from a news site to an outrage site (like the Graun did a few years ago).
I like this site, mostly, but watch with interest how its comment censorship policy develops.
One of my concerns about the state of our current “intellectual climate” is how moribund it has become – diversity is just about look, not thought.
LOL
Hi Mark, I see that the article has today vanished from the Top 10 on the Guardian’s Science page. Yay! I call that a victory.
And, to be fair, when you say about someone, “No, he is definitely not a white nationalist, but….” the audience can’t help but think, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That is exactly in the same category as a person who says, “I do like black people, but…” Or, “There’s nothing wrong with trans-women, but…”
So, you are being a tad disingenuous there, Mark. Moreover, as soon as you put the words “alt-right” in the same sentence as an allegation, the link has been concretised in the reader’s mind. Take this example, from that article:
“Peterson is not just another troll, narcissist or blowhard whose arguments are fatally compromised by bad faith, petulance, intellectual laziness and blatant bigotry. It is harder to argue with someone who believes what he says and knows what he is talking about – or at least conveys that impression.”
And tell me you don’t walk away from that paragraph thinking, ‘right, the damn bigot, he obvs is another troll, narcissist, blowhard, blatant bigot.” It’s classic guilt by association. Gaslighting, perhaps.
So, no, I don’t think my comment was as biased as The Guardian’s piece. But I do welcome your comment which forced me to check my own internal processes. That’s surely doesn’t happen enough to any of us.
What’s particularly ironic is most critics of Peterson could in all honestly add a new clause to that sentence, reading “… whereas my arguments are.”
now let’s not get to testy about the dear Guardian. i heard about Peterson through their coverage. I came for the outcry and stayed for the content. I’m still there. His thinking is at another level.
Well it’s certainly at ‘another level’ to the Guardian, which I gave up on some time ago. But there is rarely anything particularly profound in what Peterson says. It’s mostly just basic stuff about self reliance.
I disagree. The ‘self-reliance’ part, as valuable as it is, especially for troubled young people – is just the surface. Those who invest the considerable time and effort required to read his first book Maps of Meaning will be rewarded with deep insights into the structure of the human experience. Similarly, his analysis of the Book of Genesis in a series of talks, which can be found on his YouTube page, is a tour de force.
I have been in hysterics reading the comments under Toynbee’s latest rant. These people are literally psychotic.
Apples and trees.
The Guardian has the most cancle policy of anywhere, try posting there, you get one ideological strike and you are gone. And an ideological strike is merely not agreeing.
I’ve disagreed with the “party line” in the Grauniad comments, and not been cancred. And there are lots of right-wing commenters over there (other than yourself), who don’t seem to have been cancelled either.
I got put on “probation” at the Guardian at the end of last year. The article I took issue with had as its starting premise the claim that “anti-black racism has been at the heart of many of this year’s biggest crises”. That is simply false, either on a global scale, or with reference to the US or with reference to the UK, where the author was from. So I listed all the biggest crises of the year (Covid, Yemen, treatment of the Uighurs, Hong Kong, and numerous others). My attitude was evidently insufficiently unsympathetic, so I was punished.
But now the Guardian never really allows comments on anything but Labour Party policy, Brexit, football and pop culture. It simply won’t allow dissent on social justice issues.
Likely you have no idea about the number of comments which don’t even make it to appear in the first place, as opposed to being deleted by mod.
Being one of those “right wing” regular commenters there (on my 4th account – the rest are all permabanned), it’s probably ⅓ of submitted comments what gets & remains visible. And i’m not exactly a bumbling idiot who keeps breaching the so called “terms & conditions” of the site.
For me, it’s more than Peterson stood up to woke persecution than his intellectual work with what seems like immense courage and integrity. His academic work seems interesting but then so does the work of thousands of academics. Unfortunately thousands of academics have not shown the same courage in the face of the anti-intellectual spite meted out to Peterson, let alone supported him as they should have. It’s a rare case of admiring an intellectual for what he does rather than what he says.
I agree. I have often said that there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly original in what Peterson says or writes, but he is notable for his bravery (and uniqueness among academics) in speaking some kind of truth.
I am an academic, and the pusillanimity of academics, or worse, complicity has been deeply disheartening.
Nixon said that academic battles were so vicious because the stakes were so low. But in JPs case, it not merely an academic argument. There is a fundamental rot at the heart Anglospehere academia, which is both a cause and consequence of deeper social malaise.
I agree. Do you have a name for that rot?
Identity politics, perhaps, or wokeism.
May I suggest “complacency of comfort”?
FRANKFURT SCHOOL, the intellectual, soft Marxist, school of thought from 1930’s Germany which set out to wreck the Traditional West by gnawing at its vitals from within. Later 1950s, moving to Columbia University, NY, it infested the USA academia, and via them, the school teachers. Try looking it up, and its 11 points for a dramatic view of its hopes.
Autophagia (tried unsuccessfully to trace the originator of this insight).
…Vikram, Peter Turchin’s work, and his book “Ages of Discord” provide a mathematical modelling perspective on the “rot” which you describe. It could be that we are at he point in the cycle of structural demographic change, where population growth and good times have created a cohort of aspirants for elite positions which is larger than the volume of actual (valuable/productive) positions. To cope, artificial elite positions full of bitter people aware of their irrelevance, have metastasized across academia and elsewhere.
Thank you. Will read
As far as I recall, the only issue he’s ever taken with feminism is with the extreme end that tells women that they are always oppressed and that all men are evil because they are men. I don’t believe I’ve ever read or heard him take issue with its successes at levelling the playing field. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Can I just add how refreshing it is to read a reasonable and civilised critique of Jordan Peterson.
Peterson does not laud feminism(as an ideology). He does not describe himself as a ‘feminist’ precisely because, in his view, ideologies are extremely narrow or monist ways at looking at the world. Their lens is univariate – predicated on one totalising variable to the exclusion of all others; cf the C4 interview.
Personally, I’d rather watch feminists rip each other’s throats out over which of them qualifies, rather than enter the fray. As soon as you scratch the surface, most feminists can’t really say what a feminist is, or can only settle on a common-denominator definition that amounts to no more than a bunch of broad platitudes that everyone broadly agrees with anyway. There is therefore no logic to being a ‘feminist’ anyway because nobody opposes what they want. This means if you are determined to become a ‘feminist’ you are compelled to invent stuff in order to fight it, which is a humiliating state of affairs and mostly make you look idiotic.
Thanks Jenny. The book is due out today and I’m looking forward to receiving my copy. I found the first Twelve Rules needs to be read slowly, thoughtfully and thoroughly; it’s richness is not always immediately apparent.
“how might disparate individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change?”
Perhaps the prior book’s chapters contain the clues:
“Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”
“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”
“Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie”
“Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”
“Unfortunately, his new book forgets the status quo simply doesn’t work for everyone”
And it never will, the all too common reaction that my failures are the fault of someone else, society, “them” carries with it a lot of danger and little chance of success.
“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for life.
I can fix myself till Doomsday, but it won’t mean a better tax system, or that expert tax avoiders pay their fair share, or that hungry people are less exploited, or that rogue psychologists are reined in (a project in which I am involved, but which does not refer to JP), or that white supremacists are discouraged from Holocaust denial, or that extreme leftists are discouraged from gulag denial, or that financial criminals are stopped from causing crashes, or that… the list is endless.
There are reasonable causes in this world which are well worth supporting, but which won’t be addressed by perfecting myself.
I think the point Peterson is making Robert is that you will be in a much stronger position to influence the things you highlight if you have ‘fixed yourself’, and those around you first. He is also at pains to highlight a very similar list of things to fix as you.
How perfectly do you have to “fix” yourself (never mind those around you) before you can work on anything else that needs fixing? Isn’t there a risk in requiring some sort of utopian self before addressing the non-utopian outside world?
Sure, dealing with major issues you have in yourself will help a whole swathe of issues with how you relate to the world. It may even help with your attempts to change the world. But it won’t in itself make objective injustices go away – which I think was Robert’s point.
There’s a million things wrong with the world Robert; malevolent people and systems that are unjust and so on. The idea that imperfect people can create a perfect system is the great conceit that JP is concerned with. People fall for the lie and things fall apart as exemplified by the unmitigated disasters that unfolded in the wake of the Utopian fantasies of the 20th century.
“To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner rather than an enemy. Truth makes the past truly past, and makes the best use of the future’s possibilities. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.”
See the truth. Tell the truth.”
― Jordan B. Peterson,
Is it mere coincidence that the people clamouring for justice are so often filled with envy, resentment and hate, a will to power. What are the chances that the world that results from those impulses will be paradise.
“What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge“—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not“—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue”.
Fredrich Nietzsche’s Thus spake Zarathustra:.
No coincidence at all. Many of these people – I have come to believe – simply have to see the world as full of horrible people in order a) to make themselves feel better about themselves and b) to give their lives meaning.
Their entire self-worth is completely invested in and dependent on the idea that they’re surrounded by wicked people.
Too true, Robert. But fixing yourself won’t hurt anything, either. And who knows when lightning may strike, and you find yourself prepared and ready to do something that needed doing?
When it comes down to it, if you improve yourself you are more able to improve your society.
Hopefully others will also improve themselves.
If there is anyone out there who is unacquainted with Jordan Peterson, and there surely can’t be many, the first stop must be the infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman: https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54.
The constant attempts by Newman to misrepresent him and to put words into his mouth didn’t faze him and he was constantly polite and respectful. He even felt the need to help her out at the point when her misapprehensions about his ideas let her down and left her stumped for an answer.
Yes, that was and remains a moment of pure nectar.
I think the recording his daughter made of the Decca Aitkenhead interview for The Sunday Times and releasing it after the article came out, was a master stroke. For the comparison between the two yields the most unambiguous illustration of malevolent reporting by the MSM.
99% of my friends and acquaintances have never heard of him. He’s a pretty fringe character outside of these pages and YouTube algorithms. Sort of less well known Yuval Noah Harari level and about as interesting (not very) in my view.
“It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.”
Before the National Health Service came into existence everybody just died of their wounds and diseases, untreated, while yearning for some foreigner to come along and conquer Britain.
Alison, I suspect your irony/sarcasm might go over the heads of some people in this instance.
The whole of this UK Scamdemic is predicated on saving the NHS, the last surviving relic of that Attlee inspired utopian socialist nightmare we all had to live through as our reward for triumphing over Adolph.
Lady T managed to slay many a socialist monster, the miners, a plethora of nationalised industries, and off course she chastised much of the Trades Union movement.
Sadly her ‘reign ended prematurely thus both the NHS and Education avoided the scythe they so justly deserved.
Well said. I fear I scanned the rest of the review with reluctance and distaste after that muted paean of praise to the repulsive and murderous “NHS”.
“repulsive and murderous “NHS”.”
Do please explain.
So that’s why similar lockdown measures have been brought in right across the world, including places which don’t have an equivalent of the NHS? It shouldn’t need saying at this point, but the point of lockdown measures was to save lives and prevent all health systems from being overwhelmed, to the point where hospitals were full, ambulances double-parked, and emergency calls were going unanswered in thousands because there was no more capacity.
The idea that privatising the NHS and adopting a more US-style system is risible. Not only is their life expectancy lower than ours, and their infant mortality rate at third world levels, but millions of people have no adequate cover, and can’t afford it. A third of US bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and even well off people can find that chronic illness loses them their cover.
And all of this while spending 16-18% of GDP on health, against our 9.9%.
The US “system” is not the only alternative, in fact arguably it is the worst. I live in France, which for all its deficiencies, does have a truly excellent health care system – we have made such a shibboleth of the NHS now, it is almost impossible to reform it. It’s just become a ghastly money pit.
Why do defenders of our new religion assume its validity rets on a comparison with a USA based insurance system.There are any number of studies that conclude that the NHS has numerous failings and could benefit from reform.The Israeli health system is an interesting comparison with 4 separate but competing health providers funded by a mandatory contribution-I’m not saying it should be adopted but for heavens sake lets open our eyes.
To assert that worldwide lockdown is in someway a justification for our health system is a rather bizarre argument.And as for hospitals being full etc I suggest you look at previous UK winters when various respiratory diseases have caused chaos-I recall refrigerated lorries being commandeered by the Govt to store bodies some years ago-the NHS has run on a very low bed buffer for decades-despite te record amounts of money thrown at it by the (yes) Tories.
And the point of lockdown measures was to save lives rather skimps over the collateral damage caused by lockdown which I would argue when measured over the ensuing decade will demonstrate that it has caused more deaths when measured by pure numerical deaths and the QALY lost will be off the scale due to the demographic apartheid of this particular virus.
“despite the record amounts of money thrown at it by the (yes) Tories.”
Britain spends 2% less of its GDP on health than other Western European countries.
Under Labour, NHS targets ranging from waiting times in Accident and Emergency, to waiting times to start cancer treatment, were being met. They continued to be met for some years under the Conservatives, as the afterglow of Labour’s increase in NHS spending. In 2019 (ie before Covid arrived), as 9 years of Tory spending restrictions sapped the NHS, the targets were being missed for the first time, and missed across the board.
Did Labour ever pay for that spending or did they leave the country basically bust and the Tories to find the money?
I can have a Ferrari outside my house in a heartbeat. The tricky bit is paying for it.
“Did Labour ever pay for that spending or did they leave the country basically bust”
National Debt when Labour left office in 2010 – very roughly £1 trillion (half of it inherited in 1997 from the previous 200 years of borrowing)
National Debt after 9.5 years of Conservative Government, in December 2019, before Covid came along: around £2 trillion. Twice as much was borrowed by the Tories in 9.5 years as by Labour in 13 years.
Sloganising about “Labour left the country bust” is mindless regurgitation of Daily Express headlines.
But if you feel you can justify your statement given the above facts, please feel free to do so. I shall enjoy watching you.
What was the PSBR
1/ when Labour entered office in 1997
2/ When Labour left office in 2010?
For bonus points, is it your contention that the Tories should have cut harder, to run a smaller deficit?
The epic dishonesty of Labour supporters is matched only by their grotesque irresponsibility.
The major problem with Labour funding of new NHS projects such as new builds was the accelerated and irresponsible use of John Major’s PFI wheeze to pass the costs to later taxpayers (and the profits to private enterprise). Funding of ongoing expenses like adequate staffing was much more likely to be covered by straightforward taxation – or sometimes “stealth taxes”.
The great recession and the related bailouts had more to do with the deficit than responsible spending on health did.
Britain does devote less of our GDP to health than most comparable countries. That’s because those countries have a sizeable contribution from private healthcare whereas here, as your comment exemplifies, individuals’ contributions to their own healthcare are actively discouraged.
The healthcare spending comparison includes money raised through general taxation, and money raised through private insurance premiums, or even billed directly to patients.
Taking all that into account, the UK spends less as a proportion of GDP. Hence the lower levels of service.
In the UK, individual contributions to their own healthcare are encouraged – in two important ways. Firstly by cost-based rationing of NHS resources (which drives those who can afford it towards private care). And secondly by an effective subsidy to the private sector whereby the NHS bears the burden of emergency / intensive care when something goes wrong in the privately run operation mills.
Most countries have much more robust public/private systems, unlike the UK. But don’t pretend that people in the UK with money as well as those who work in the UK and have private insurance as a workplace benefit are not already paying their way out of NHS level care. Life expectancy is not solely determined by healthcare of course. But if you want to look at how healthcare does matter in life expectancy, check out cancer survival stats, the US vs UK.
Low spending on healthcare is a point of pride for some. Personally I am fine with every penny being spared on your care. But not mine.
Rather like 1914 it will be judged by History as one of the most catastrophic decisions of all time.
She deindustrialised Britain and handed the keys to the unproductive but wealthy financial manipulators in the City of London.
Labour reduced manufacturing by more.
I guess you missed the memo — the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the healthcare system.
Yes, I stumbled over that line too. Does it prove anything at all, given that Germany’s welfare state and statutory health insurance system were introduced in 1883 by the staunchly right-wing Otto von Bismarck?
I’m not sure that the right or left nature of the government in question was the point, so much as the fact that there was social change involved. The author’s whole point in that section seems to be about how Peterson’s views explain or deal with positive social change over time, either in the past or future.
In fact what what we had before the war was very arguably a better, more cost effective and more accountable system. Th NHS largely exists for the benefit of its employees. I should know I have worked in it.
Although health systems now vs. the 30s are very different things given the enormous differences in technology and scientific understanding.
Personally I’ve always thought the German/Singaporean model of public health insurance with private providers has the optimal balance between the externality gouging excesses of the US insurer led system and the sclerotic inefficiency of the British model.
I have experience of the German system, though not the Singaporean. High tech, but staff attitudes were appalling and patient care very poor. Interestingly, a friend (British nurse) employed there thought the same, from experience in a different way and in different hospitals.
And the Germans spend a higher percentage of a higher-per-capita GDP on healthcare. Multiply those together and they have a lot more money to play with – yet as you point out, no magic solution.
Healthcare bureaucracy in Germany approaches NHS levels. I have experience with family in Germany as well. One sister in law waited years for a simple fibroid operation that impacted her fertility. My mother in law was sent home with a giant magnifying glass at 80 rather than the eye surgery she needed. Germany has a startlingly low number of specialist hospitals.
You can opt out of the public system in Germany if you make above a certain income which isn’t very high, are self-employed, work part-time, or are an artist.
As to money, let’s not forget that Germany skips defense spending so it should have a lot more to spend on healthcare. Can’t do much about the bureaucracy though. When you can’t be fired no matter what you do, you’re all set up for poor service.
You clearly know all about it, then. Frontline demands, financial systems, logistics, training, technology, etc, etc.
What we had before the war employed my grandfather comfortably enough, but the life expectancy of most people doesn’t suggest it benefited them much.
The four commonest pills prescribed by modern doctors are antibiotics, antidepressants, contraceptives, and painkillers. Three out of four of those didn’t exist before WW2 and the painkillers they had weren’t as good or were bloody dangerous (eg morphine).
The world economy was $4 trillion in 1939 versus $133 trillion now.
It’s probably safe to assume, given these facts, that we’d have seen an improvement in life expectancy even without the sainted NHS, not least because countries without it or anything similar have done so.
Mostly for the reasons given by Jon Redman
The four commonest pills prescribed by modern doctors are antibiotics, antidepressants, contraceptives, and painkillers. Three out of four of those didn’t exist before WW2 and the painkillers they had weren’t as good or were downright dangerous (eg morphine). The world economy was $4 trillion in 1939 versus $133 trillion now. It’s safe to assume given these facts that we’d have seen an improvement in life expectancy even without the sainted NHS, not least because countries without it or anything similar have done so.
“what we had before the war was very arguably a better, more cost effective and more accountable system.”
No. Because of the poor access to healthcare of those without much money. Though that doesn’t bother some on the right, particularly in the US still. And those who had lived with Britain’s prewar health system voted overwhelmingly in 1945 to replace it with Labour’s NHS.
The NHS now has a quarter of the hospital beds that it started with. If nobody could afford healthcare back then, who, exactly, was occupying all the beds that the NHS has got rid of?
Medicine across the world tries to use drugs etc to minimise hospital bed use. People do not spend two weeks in hospital after giving birth, for example.
Nit-picking doesn’t alter the fact that between the wars the upper middle class had the best treatment available, the middling middle class had reasonable treatment which they caned themselves to pay for, and the working class had limited treatment. That’s one of the reasons why Labour swept to power in 1945.
The Marxist lies weren’t a factor then.
Are you seriously claiming that Labour swept to power after the war on a tide of Marxist lies?
Yes. Labour has only ever taken power based on lies, spite, envy and hatred.
Healthcare was much different before the war. It was much less involved, people just lived with conditions that are routinely treated today. This is one reason the NHS doesn’t keep up. It was designed to manage a much lower level of care than is available today. If you have a broken leg, it’s fine. If what you have is expensive to treat or you don’t fit into defined parameters for certain tests, you may be out of luck.
Attlee and Bevan fondly imagined that demand on the NHS would decline after a few years, as the nation would be healthier. In fact, the opposite happened. The longer you keep people alive, the more healthcare they need.
Demand is essentially unlimited, which is what happens when stuff is free.
Yes absolutely. We see this with Medicare in the US. One of the things that the US has to better control is healthcare for the very elderly. Today you can get anything, no matter how old you are. Former Senator Bob Dole at age 97 with stage 4 lung cancer, undergoing treatment. Is this reasonable? Much of the expense of US healthcare is spent on the very elderly.
And as someone with two parents still alive in their 90s, I pay their bills and see what goes through Medicare for them. There is nothing off limits, at one point last year, my dad’s doctor was considering a heart operation on a 93 year old. My mother, with dementia, was offered testing and surgery if necessary for a hoarse rasp in her voice that had been there for years. She is now getting speech therapy. At 92 with dementia. Where does this stop? I mean, I love my folks but is this reasonable? And of course it’s all “free” unless you count what their grandkids are chipping in for it.
Yes, we see this with Medicare in the US. Senator Bob Dole at 97 with stage 4 lung cancer undergoing treatment. To what purpose?
The vast majority of spending in US healthcare is through Medicare and it’s within the last few years of life.
The vast majority of healthcare spending in any healthcare system at all is in the last years of a patient’s life.
Modern healthcare (however funded) costs more and covers more ailments now than it did in the middle of the last century.
Neither of these truths is limited to systems funded by public taxes – or by private insurance – or by just billing patients directly.
A hospital occupancy rate of 100% is not healthy – spare capacity is needed for several reasons: to reduce infections, to manage regular seasonal fluctuations in demand, to cope with pandemics.
Arguably capacity has been cut more than was wise in the past decade or so, and more than was justified by increased “efficiency” in recovery or from less invasive surgery.
Actually, many of them did. They used to think twice and three times before calling a doctor. That is probably one reason (among others) why our lifespan has increased so much (and now exceeds that of the US, where a private system holds sway).
Lifespan has increased throughout the west, not just in the UK. And not everywhere in the UK has lifespan had much increase. Glasgow for example. The US is a public/private system.
It wasn’t the patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee that gave Britain its National Health Service – it was America’s willingness to bankroll the British social state as part of post-W2 European stabilisation. US foreign policy gave Britain its National Health Service, not Attlee – he couldn’t afford it.
That is not something I have considered before.
The author has wisely avoided the shallow superficialities and misguided stupidities of journalists like Cathy Newman and Decca Aitkenhead: unlike those two (and so many others), she has actually read what Peterson has said. Nevertheless, I still detect in this article an acknowledgement of the talents of Peterson that is still somewhat grudging. This takes the form of molehill versus mountain arguments – with subtle suggestions that, after all, Peterson is overstating his case when he points to the excesses of the Woke. For example, she grossly understates the problem in the current hysteria (and frequently extremely violent and damaging actions) by intersectional feminists. What she describes simplistically as “relatively trivial shaming campaigns” (REALLY?) by these radical activists is in fact often directed at venomously destroying the careers and livelihoods of people who don’t espouse the party line. Witness young women activists during BLM protests screaming through megaphone into the ears of elderly couples trying to have a quiet dinner in a restaurant, or “cancelling” women who don’t share the simplistic party line, or hounding people out of university jobs and off Hollywood screens… The number of examples is too distressing to render as “relatively trivial”. When you argue that Peterson is making a molehill out of a mountain that is simply because when you stand too far from a mountain it looks like a molehill. Take a closer look at the Stalinist motives behind such “trivial” campaigns. Peterson is constantly warning us all not to be so glib. As a consequence, commentators on his work should also avoid being glib.
‘Unfortunately, his new book forgets the status quo simply doesn’t work for everyone.’
Unfortunately, no status quo on the planet has ever, or will ever, work for everyone. A status quo that ‘works for everyone’ is an impossibility. Unless you believe in Utopia.
How rare to read a balanced review of Peterson from somebody who’s actually read his work. Nicely done.
it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it.
Is it difficult? Really? When the man is painted as something other than he is, and those employees are too lazy or too stupid to some independent research, it is very predictable that pearls would be clutched. When you are on the side of silencing someone, you are wrong. That is as close to an absolute as there is.
“When you are on the side of silencing someone, you are wrong. That is as close to an absolute as there is.”
I guess that must also apply to Daniel Finkelstein’s column in the London Times last week, calling for the University of Bristol to sack a lecturer for criticising the State of Israel.
You guess right. Well done.
So simple and yet so difficult for so many. Whether you agree with someone or not has no bearing on their right to speak freely.
“the US, it remains the only OECD country without a national statutory paid maternity leave.”
The US is a federal republic. Maternity leave is a state government issue and some states do mandate paid maternity leave. But let’s review what being a federal republic means. In order for the federal government to pass a new law that restricts individual (including private business) rights, it generally needs to be shown that doing so fulfills a role of the federal government and that it does so using the least restrictive means. So what federal government role would maternity leave fall under and how would mandating leave for every business in the country be considered the least restrictive means?
Then there’s the tenth amendment which says that any power not specifically delegated to the federal government by the constitution is reserved for the people (which means the states). Nowhere does the constitution list maternity leave as a federal government responsibility. I mean no disrespect to the author but these are bedrock principles of US government and should be familiar to any author writing on the subject.
The Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, which is a federal law upheld under the interstate commerce clause guarantees some but not all employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for maternity as well as several other situations.
Sometime in the future the courts might decide differently – constitutions are human instruments, subject to change. Maternity leave might not be mentioned, but equal rights for women might one day be so. Then maternity leave might be mandated.
What rights do women NOT have, other than the right to not register for selective service in the US? Otherwise, the goals of the original feminists have been reached, to the point where their successors are now turning on themselves by reducing womanhood to a matter of identity. But that aside, the question stands – if, as you say, equal rights “might one day be,” what rights are currently lacking?
Good point, perhaps selective service registration would become a requirement for women. Would love to see the look on progressive females faces should that occur. Anyone for AOC in combat fatigues?
I guess there’s always the possibility of a constitutional amendment to make maternity leave a responsibility of the federal government, but that seems unlikely.
“The US is a federal republic. Maternity leave is a state government issue and some states do mandate paid maternity leave.”
“The Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, which is a federal law upheld under the interstate commerce clause guarantees some but not all employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for maternity “
These seem contradictory. After all, imposing a requirement for the employer to pay the employee, and imposing a requirement on the employer to allow the employee unpaid leave, are both impositions on the employer for the benefit of the employee, so why are they treated differently? Just asking.
On the broader point, making this a states rights issue leads to a race to the bottom, with employers moving to lower-regulation states.
Why would competition lead to a race to the bottom? If a state could improve retention and workforce participation by extending maternity leave they would gain a competitive advantage. Or are you saying that the policy is sh$t economics, and is really just tax on businesses that employ women – i.e. entirely a cost with no benefit, and so must be compelled by law?
Isn’t the whole premise of having a Republic that states must be free to compete, which means having the freedom and independence to develop models that work for them, and to place decision-making closest to where its impact is felt?
The principle, therefore, must be: If it doesn’t concern a matter that appertains specifically and necessarily to the nation (e.g. national defence), then it’s in the remit of the state.
Your last paragraph is a perfect one sentence summation of federalism as illustrated by the US constitution.
Although the federal legislature gets around this often by putting limits on funding for states if they don’t enforce certain laws. A state wants to have a drinking age below 21? Great a state has a right to set that under the costitution.. But get a 10% cut on funding for your roads.
Good grief!!! Get it right!!
He DID NOT have an addiction.
He had a Prescribed Physical Dependence.
The two phenomena are not the same.
Repeating the addiction canard provides ammo for the lazy thinker to use ad hominem as if it were a valid argument.
The Helen Lewis “debate” was replete with insults posed as interrogative questioning. Lewis, according to Peterson, had voiced her opposition to his views even before the “debate” began.
Bringing arguments from the past to question Peterson’s injunctions I would say is a tad irrelevant. Peterson is speaking to the contemporary situation.
It should be pointed out that the ‘predominantly’ male audience is a canard oft repeated for Peterson has mentioned it breaks down to roughly 60:40. It depends to which environment the observation applies.
“It should be pointed out that the ‘predominantly’ male audience is a canard oft repeated for Peterson has mentioned it breaks down to roughly 60:40.”
Apart from which, what on Earth is wrong with that ratio? Let us say, for argument sake, that Peterson’s message particularly resonates with men. Why is that concerning? Feminists often complain that men don’t take enough responsibility for their own personal emotional and psychological welfare, and leave it up to the women in their lives to do this ‘work’ for them? So, Peterson has managed to engage men in precisely such an activity, and feminists are mad as hell about it.
Why? – Because there is anxiety that it isn’t happening under female supervision, of course. What the hell are those men getting up to that doesn’t require the tender ministrations of nanny? Probably no good! Indeed, the feminist story about wishing men to follow the lead of women and become more self-reliant is total BS. Sure, they want men to be self-reliant in organisations like the Good Men Project where they come to understand their proper role is being “allies” in furthering the comfort, welfare and interests of women, lol. After all, what other obligation could men have except acknowledging they “have it all” already, and finding ways to make redress for this vile injustice?
Furthermore, of course, there are lots of women who speak almost exclusively about women, and if they mention men at all, it is only in relation to women. Such figures, unsurprisingly, have predominantly female audiences. They are celebrated for being ‘relevant’ and men generally don’t consider them to be sinister, suspicious, threatening, corrupting, etc. Why is that? It’s not because women tend to be control freaks, whereas men are considerably less so, is it?
Not knowing much about JP other than watching the odd YouTube video here and there, but this struck me as a really thoughtful, considered, balanced, extremely well-written and, an increasingly rare commodity nowadays, easy to read piece whether you agree with every sentence written or not.
In his youth Jordan Peterson was a socialist – an active member of the Canadian NDP, and it was then that he first encountered Frankfurt School Marxism and rejected it as destructive.
Jenny McCartney’s article is really about Frankfurt School Marxism – but the term is not mentioned in the article. That is the sort of behaviour that Jordan Peterson rejects – and he is correct to reject it. To talk about the doctrines of Frankfurt School Marxism without even saying that they are the doctrines of Frankfurt School Marxism (I wonder if this is what Jenny McCartney means by “alt right conspiracy theories” – as if the education system, and much else, was not dominated by the ideas of Frankfurt School Marxist thinkers) is dishonest – and one can not even start a productive conversation without a foundation in honesty. Frankfurt School Marxism was not designed to improve Western Civilisation (“capitalism”) it was designed to destroy it – so it is not something a supporter of Western culture (society) can “work with”.
As for the “status que” and the “institutions” – well, in 2021, that is by and large Frankfurt School Marxism under such names as “Critical Theory” and “Diversity and Inclusion” (which excludes anyone who dissents – any defender of Western Civilisation) – certainly Jordan Peterson has not had an easy time with such institutions as universities or the media, and one would not expect him to as these institutions are now dominated by ideas that are deeply hostile to the West, indeed designed to destroy the West.
It has been a gradual process – so gradual that the “long march through the institutions” and the new “intellectual hegemony” of Frankfurt School ideas has almost occurred unnoticed – but Western society is dying, and it is not dying a natural death. The West is being murdered.
Frankfurt School doctrines now dominate the institutions – even that senile puppet Joseph Biden repeats them, although he does not understand what he is told to say. And these doctrines are designed to destroy society – the idea being that from the death of the West a new wonderful (Marxist) society would appear. But after the destruction of the West there will be no wonderful new society – just ashes and dried blood.
“It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.”
It really wasn’t. In 1943 Winston Churchill instructed his Conservative Minister of Health to draw up plans for a National Health Service, Labour adopted in modified form those plans in 1948. He was also responsible for introducing national insurance, pensions and unemployment benefit prior to WWII. And therein lies the political part of the problem, which is increasingly impacting on the social, the left has and is rewriting reality to the extent that it ceases to be real.
The Conservatives voted against the Act bringing the NHS into existence. Who is re-writing history?
They were in opposition
And?
The Conservatives voted against the Bill (not the Act) introducing the NHS because they had serious concerns, which history has vindicated, in respect of the state taking over the running of charitable hospitals. In 1943, on March 21st he broadcast his “Plan for Post-war Britain”, which included “to establish a National Health Service”. He instructed his Conservative Minister of Health to immediately begin drawing up plans, which was done.
The Conservatives voted against the Bill (not the Act) introducing the NHS because they had serious concerns, which history has vindicated, in respect of the state taking over the running of charitable hospitals and other worries about not the concept but the implementation. In 1943, on March 21st he broadcast his “Plan for Post-war Britain”, which included “to establish a National Health Service”. He instructed his Conservative Minister of Health to immediately begin drawing up plans, which was done.
Churchill naturally called it “a national health service”, but it was in no sense the NHS which Labour created. It was just a pale upgrade of the failing inter-war system and was designed to continue the privileged access of the middle class to healthcare, relative to the working class. That’s why the British people weren’t having any of it, as they showed at the ballot box, and the Tories abandoned it a couple of years later.
However, it’s also the also the case that Britain didn’t have the funds to pay for the NHS after the war and could only embark on the legislation after the Americans agreed to pay for it. The Yanks were assured it was necessary for the stability of post-war Britain, and they should regard it as an essential element in the social and political reconstruction of a key war-devastated European ally.
So strictly-speaking, the NHS had nothing to do with Atlee or the British government. It was a US foreign policy measure.
It had been planned by WSC &Co back in 1944. Otherwise you are correct the USA paid for nearly everything, something we conveniently forget.
33 times.
Actually before WW One, not Two
(1) The Conservative plan for post-war healthcare was a pale upgrade of the unsatisfactory pre-war system. Labour’s NHS was massively different, and that’s one of the reasons for the Labour election landslide of 1945. The Tories abandoned their own plans and signed up to Labour’s NHS concept in the late 1940s in order to get elected since the NHS was so popular, as it has remained ever since.
(2) Churchill introduced pensions (and I suspect the other two things you mention) as a LIBERAL. Asked why he had crossed the floor from the Conservatives, he replied that as a Conservative he had been forced to say stupid things, and he had left them because he had become tired of saying stupid things.
I agree.
Socialism began in response to the genuine wrong that Educated Youth — e.g., the son of wealthy lawyer in Trier, and the son of a prosperous textile magnate — were not given no respect. The horror!
Feminism began because of the genuine wrong that well-born women were not able to differentiate themselves sufficiently from the rising plebs. The horror!
Environmentalism arises from the genuine wrong that when society reaches a certain level of prosperity (The Economist pegged it twenty years ago at a per-capita GDP of $10,000) prosperous people decide to clean up the place. The horror!
“But then it is also hard to tell which version of Jordan Peterson…they were primarily reacting to…”
They were reacting to a non-existent version; one cooked up from fantasies of clowns like Cathy Newman, or the myriad hacks who cannot be bothered to actually find out what Peterson (who might challenge their prejudices, or refute their arguments) actually believes.
I suspect Peterson provokes such visceral hostility among ‘progressives’ because his measured, logical and rational approach to issues, which prioritises evidence over feelings, is such powerful kryptonite to their campaigns. For me, I think nothing has generated more revulsion than the way a succession of progressives has attempted to destroy his credibility. But the man keeps going. Bravo!
His apparent ability to stay cool and deal with even the most idiotic interviewer is remarkable.
Leaving aside the small points that FGM is done to women almost entirely by other women, and that domestic abuse is two-way, of course there is. The trouble is, the feminist movement of today is largely an entitlement crusade focused on making things even better for a minority of rich and privileged women. It’s not so interested in poor women, such as their cleaners.
As Michael Crichton said of environmentalists, we need a feminist movement; just not the one we’ve got.
I used to say this too, and then I realised that the reason it is done is that men won’t accept unmutilated women. Men, in those cultures that practise it, could stop FGM in a single day.
“ a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, “
You really are having sex with the wrong people Jenny.
That
s not a post, its an ignorant rant.A long, wordy article that says very little, and nothing about Jordan Peterson that hasn’t been said countless times before. Only this time, it’s couched in, yes, I can see his appeal, but …
I haven’t read Peterson’s first book but have heard him interviewed countless times and occasionally watch one of his YouTube videos. I can never understand the vitriol he generates as he always seems a thoughtful, considered man. In a world where we are increasingly force fed absurdities such as a man can be a woman and vice versa, middle class women from high income countries are oppressed, and if you have white skin, you are inherently racist, why wouldn’t people be attracted to someone who pushes back against this type of rhetoric? He may not be married to the author’s brand of feminism, but so what. There are plenty of people who are. Listen to them and leave those of us who enjoy his common sense approach to life him in peace.
You are perhaps right that all these things have been said before about Peterson, but Ms McCartney does that rare thing in the current climate of synthesising these conflicting views into a coherent picture, calmly, intelligently and humanely.
‘But for those who may be freshly entering the world of work after an extended period in school and college, where the focus is placed more narrowly on intellectual achievements,’
I am not aware of any schools or colleges that are currently nurturing any ‘intellectual achievements’ outside of STEM, not these days.
‘Many institutions contain much that is of value…’
I can no longer think of any institutions that contain or deliver any value whatsoever.
Think harder – you may be overstating your case a bit.
It is hard to imagine the disparate groups co-operating because many believe that their opinions are facts.
Someone said to me this week that we tend to judge others for their actions but ourselves for our intentions.
I think it goes further than that. These groups believe that their opinions are The Truth and therefore to follow them becomes ‘The Right Thing To Do’, an awful phrase which instantly portrays anyone who opposes The Truth as not only wrong in their mind but also morally wrong.
Spot on, Daniel. With more discussion about the underlying moral principles that people believe are behind their own opinions disparate groups might find there is maybe more, or maybe less, common ground than they initially thought.
It could also enable discussion about how to achieve outcomes that match those common moral principles rather than discussion about the immorality of them. At the worst it would clarify whether disagreement is about morals or policy.
Mark Bridgeford: I would love to agree with you, but the whole problem is that there aren’t necessarily shared moral principles. Interestingly, another article on this edition of Unherd, Mary Harrington’s piece on Clubhouse, demonstrates this. She writes:
“The section [of the audio recording] that follows is an object lesson in the naïveté of that strand of optimistic rationalism that continues to imagine that all we need do in order to foster social harmony is just talk to one another. Weinstein and his interrogators agree on next to no fundamental premises, and those questioning him are hostile to his viewpoint. There is no ‘constructive dialogue’ under those conditions, and the outcome is as brutal and futile as you’d expect: a kind of toxic anti-conversation.”
Although, as someone else has pointed out, the real answer is just to listen to one another (or read each other’s books)
Well this is an odd discussion. A generally sympathetic and balanced article, but not hagiographic. Most of her points seem reasonable and if I disagree with some of them, so what?
You’d think upon reading the comments that this had been a man hating hatchet job. Personally I find it far from that. Yes it asks some questions, but what is the problem with that?
I also think that trying to equate the male experience with the woman’s as if somehow they are equally bad is nonsense. Most murders are done by men. Most rape and sexual assault is done by men. The factories where male employees were overworked and underpaid were owned by men. The fighting of wars happened because of malign over ambition of male leaders. Most violence between the sexes is done by men. The list goes on. Their is no comparability of experience. Being a woman for most of human experience, in most of the places in the world, was for most of them, to pick the short straw of life.
Anyway I enjoyed the article, it at least was balanced.
Yeah, welcome to Unherd. Great articles, awful comment section.
You may be right, but I not infrequently find that it is the other way round.
Jenny McCartney seems to have the conventional opinions that you need to succeed as a published writer in the woke era. Good for her.
But Peterson comes from a world that believes the progressive arc has been a dreadful mistake. His world view is Nietzsche and Jung. And in that world the question “how might disparate individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change?” completely misses the point.
See, the Jung acolytes like Joseph Campbell and Peterson believe that you do not save the world with valuable political change, but by dying on the border of Order and Chaos — after you have completed the Hero’s Journey into the depths of the underworld of your unconscious.
Do you notice that Peterson has already practically died twice, the first time at the Canadian C-16 hearings and the second time in his drug withdrawal.
As Breitbart said: politics is downstream of culture.
As I say, politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
Get it, Jenny?
“Jenny McCartney seems to have the conventional opinions that you need to succeed as a published writer in the woke era”
I’m not sure if “it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it” would qualify, really.
Misdirected rage does little but feed voracious algorithms – good jobs, affordable homes, equal opportunities, and a social safety net, is that too big of an ask of a modern wealthy democracy?
I am 62, my father was an electrical foreman in Dublin, he and my Mother had nine children, but were still able to buy a nice four bedroom house on one wage, and that was when PAYE tax was very high and interest rates were in double figures – how did we get to a place where the teacher/Garda/civil servant combo can’t afford to live in our Capital city?
The special conditions faced by Western countries in the immediate post-war period evaporated. The situation where 1/3 of the world is in a state of post-colonial dependence, 1/3 is trapped behind the iron curtain and the other 1/3 had all the industrial and technological cards is gone. This was obvious even in the 70s, which is what pushed many of these countries towards greater economic liberalisation to keep up with the newly emerging industrial competitors, but which had the side-effect of destroying much of the industry as they became specialised in services.
and, we simply have a smaller piece of the global cake than we once did (a good thing) but it’s now less fairly divided amongst ourselves ( a bad one but not because of any moral consideration, but because it leaves too many of us angry, frustrated and despairing)
Money printing and zero interest rates, among other factors.
Among other things, I believe the definition of a nice house has probably changed, for example, how many bathrooms did your house in Dublin have? Likely one, maybe two. That would be considered insufficient today. As would having nine children in 3 bedrooms.
I know my own daughters all in their late 20s and early 30s would consider a four bedroom house too small even with just one child. Because, of course you have to have a guest room and then a room for an office (maybe two), which your Dublin house also didn’t likely have. And then they want a large yard and a three car garage. And you’ll need a bonus or Rec room because you can’t live in the living room of course. One of my daughters is moving because they are having a second child. Their current house has three floors, three bedrooms, 2 full baths and two half baths, a two car garage and a large yard. One entire floor is a giant game room with a wall size screen for one of their three television set ups. They now want four bedrooms plus two dedicated offices since they both work from home.
I grew up in a one bedroom apartment in NYC, on one income, with two siblings, we slept in what was actually the dining room and the little one didn’t even have a bed. She made do with a cot. We had one television. We had two cars but they were kept blocks away in a garage and rarely moved out of it. This would be considered abusive today.
Lastly, your parents likely didn’t spend money on multiple cars and expensive toys like golf carts and ATVs and home theatre systems that are required these days. One of my son in laws has a Jeep used just for fishing trips. Your parents didn’t have to buy computers. Today, people might have a smart phone, a tablet and a laptop. Plus your Kindle of course. And then several annual vacations are the norm today, not a once in a lifetime trip to DisneyWorld or equivalent. The house was the big purchase but that was it.
The definition of a nice house may have changed for some – but the problem is not that people can’t afford some inflated version of nice housing any more. It’s that almost any housing is much less affordable now, whether rented or bought on a mortgage.
You speak of
It’s actually more common than you seem to think, in your clearly “comfortable” circumstances. Much of the discretionary spending you mention is unavailable to people in poorly paid jobs, in areas where housing is expensive, and where the in-work benefit system does not cover the difference.
Ms. McCartney writes: ” …for example, that while so much feminist academic discourse is generated in the US, it remains the only OECD country without a national statutory paid maternity leave. But in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.”
Problem is, feminists actually only care about non-issues like paid maternity leave (a non issue, since most companies offer paid maternity leave) – and don’t give a damn about issues like FGM and forced marriage (aka, child marriage) effectively ignoring these barbarisms under the illiberal code of cultural moral relativity.
As for sexual violence, as feminists have effectively destroyed the protective roles of males towards women and children (and really, female protective roles too: see the severe downgrading of wife and mother as a vocation) isn’t it reasonable to expect that w/the degradation of sexual mores that naturally accompanies the dedicated feministic eradication of decent male roles, that revenge porn, and indeed porn sex would replace wholesome sexual intimacy?
Are you seriously suggesting that sexual violence against women is a recent phenomenon?
No. What I’ve said is that Feminism has eroded protective values in both men and women. Consequently, the sexual mores of both men and women have been degraded to the point of normalization of porn sex and vengeance.
“It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.”
No actually, it was what nationalised a pre-existing system of near-universal healthcare paid for by a combination of friendly societies, unions and charities. It is not at all obvious that the NHS we have now is better than what would have evolved in its absence. Before anyone mentions the USA and its even more degraded system through the abuse of the same producer interest that has wrecked the UK’s healthcare systems, look instead to the various examples in place in Europe, which have proper social insurance systems underpinning efficient healthcare sectors, with a proper balance of market forces and state involvement.
In other words, insofar as socialism was involved in the UK’s development of universal healthcare, it did what socialism always does: imposed a top-down system having no ability to adapt to changing demand and almost instantly harnessed to a political agenda which comes before the interests of the consumers it is there to serve.
The NHS, whatever its faults, has constantly adapted to changing demand, and to new methods of treatment.
But you have a point about politics getting in the way of the interests of the patient (or consumer, if you prefer). Though that manifestly happens in the US system too, so it’s clearly not fundamental to socialism or public funding.
Good to hear Peterson’s new book being puffed – as comments below suggest he’s got broad universal appeal across different cultures, educational and economic strata. The bit about the waiter is very telling. In parts of the world where work is scarce and wage equality better than UK/US etc waiting is artisanal occupation. It remains so in parts of Spain, Italy and France. I certainly enjoyed it as fill in job when i was younger but few of today’s youth have the interpersonal skills to do it. Add to this the leftist – woke claim that all paid work is a “McJob” and it shows how much Peterson’s work could add to our current state “education” system.
I am not sure what you are talking about. In the UK waiting, at least at any semi-decent restaurant – is far more respected than here in Spain. In Spain it is work given to semi-casual labour and immigrants.
Rather nice to see an article that takes Peterson’s ideas seriously enough to ask significant questions about his views, rather than the reflexive negation or support that tends to be the norm. Though rather disappointing that so many in the comments interpret that as being inherently critical.
I agree and it’s a shame. There seems to be a bit of mirroring going on here. At one extreme, people seem to believe that everything JP says is wicked; at the other, any critical discussion of his views is seen as wrong.
Love the rejoinder to “the stupid man’s smart person”. Puts me in mind of Groucho Marx’s remark that he wouldn’t join any club that would have him as a member.
It also begs the question; Would the person who described him as “the stupid man’s smart person” actually be capable of distinguishing a smart person from a stupid one because, if not, her assessment is worth precisely nothing. From her writing, I’d say she’s as thick as a brick: a complete nonentity. Of course, the writer of this piece doesn’t even consider the possibility that her fellow journalist may not have a clue who is smart and who is stupid – she only wonders how Peterson manages to reach these stupid men, when ‘real’ intellectuals fail to do so.
She also doesn’t consider the possibility that maybe her fellow journalist doesn’t care whether Peterson and/or his followers are smart or not – she just going to write any poisonous sh$t about him that she can dream up because that’s the modus operandi of ideologically-committed journalists. This suggests that the writer of this piece doesn’t even have insight into her own profession, and yet she poses as someone capable of having insights into Peterson.
In fact, there is a good chance that most of the people who take the trouble to listen to Peterson are likely smarter than the writer of this piece – and are certainly more imaginative and capable of thinking critically. And they certainly smarter than the dumb journalist who disparaged them because they correctly identify Peterson as more interesting than her.
When socialism and liberalism can tell little boys that they are actually little girls but just don’t know it yet, and that the system can help them transform, then bring me a cup of Peterson orthodoxy any day of the week.
Socialism doesn’t actually have anything to do with telling “little boys that they are actually little girls but just don’t know it yet” – even relatively extreme trans activists don’t go quite that far.
Maybe you should remember this morsel from the cup of Peterson’s orthodoxy: “tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.”
They tell little boys they can be little girls and vice-versa and for impressionable children that is often enough. One of the great lies of the modern age is that people can change their sex. They cannot. No amount of chemical or surgical deformity will ever turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man because gender is in our DNA forever.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that “little boys… can be little girls and vice-versa“.
But, once again, Socialism doesn’t actually have anything to do with telling “little boys that they are actually little girls but just don’t know it yet.”
Can we keep the discussion of socialism (as well as the discussion of gender) grounded in reality?
These are all policies advocated by socialist organisations such as the labour party, the democrat party, Trudeah’s Liberal party, etc, so when I said “socialist, I meant socialist. You won’t see conservative parties pushing this nonsense. You should take a leaf out of your own book Paul. Stop lying.
I think you’re confusing “socially liberal” (or even seriously weird) with actual socialism.
“Unfortunately… the status quo simply does not work for everyone”. If the standard is that it “must work for everyone”, we can stop trying to make any progress. Absurd. Do you think this is something he “forgot”? How would you think this was his, or any realistic individual’s goal?
Ever since I first heard and read Peterson’s opinions and theories I was conflicted.
IMO, once you stripped away the academic jargon it was plain that he was simply relating common sense ideas that a lot of us were raised on. So why the hero worship? why all of the fuss? and then you realize it’s because basic common sense regarding human success and failure has been missing for so long very few know what it is.
If you’ve bought into Equality of Outcome theory and use it to explain away the cold reality that sometimes life sucks but the upside is you can warm your ego with the glowing embers of victimhood then Jordan Peterson is in fact – the Devil.
The criticism of Peterson’s academic offerings because he apparently has misquoted or misread some dusty theories by one or more of history’s deep-thinking spoon-benders just makes my eyes glaze over but his ideas that humans and E of O are pretty much mutually exclusive events seems fairly clear to me as in “Duh, everyone knows that”
Well said. He makes sense and so much spoken in this world today makes no sense. Particularly in the age of Covid, when not just common sense but reason seems to have gone out of the window.
Plain old-fashioned common sense got our ancestors through the worst of times. We need it back.
No offense intended Micah, but maybe you’ve gone through withdrawal too quickly for your own good? Just based on your comments throughout the thread here, perhaps its time to bring a little pot back into your life?
Thanks for the review Jenny! Interesting stuff.
In my (uninformed) opinion, JBP’s rise to fame demonstrates the largest failing of modern conservatism. Since Thatcher it has been almost entirely reactionary and has failed to articulate it’s own coherent and positive vision.
As you rightly point out, much of this appears as “common sense” to older readers who grew up in a time when there was a dominant “common”. For those of us who grew up in different eras this has not been the case, but the dispositional appetite was still there.
I agree but, as someone once said-The problem with common sense is that it is not very common.
Hierarchy of competence is the measure by which we gain assurance the right people are in the right job for the right reason! And the baseline for any good democracy. Identity politics is undemocratic and anti human rights by its very precept.
“Governments are repeatedly lobbied by forces that do not always have the best interests of ordinary people at heart… ” Perhaps what you mean here is that the democratic process is being circumvented…) I’d agree lobbiest should be removed – One vote per person, no industry, special interest groups! Democracy was not made for that addition.
” a better, more harmonious society” The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Harmony comes at having a cohesive society that works together. – from what I see of ID politics – that will become increasingly unlikely.
As far as equality of opportunity… while you have an economic system that considers (world banks view) “inequality is beneficial for economic growth at an early stage of development, since a moneyed capitalist class can undertake more investment, but is harmful at a later stage. Others have pointed to inequality as a necessary, even desirable outcome of rewards to innovation and risk-taking” You might look in the direction of the economy and its actions on society instead of asking ever more from the average working classes.
https://voxeu.org/article/inequality-opportunity-income-inequality-and-economic-growth
Hierarchy of competence is basically meritocracy by another name though. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but certain authors here such as “Tory socialist” Giles Fraser certainly do see it as such.
The powers to influence and make collective decisions are distributed equally in a democracy – In a meritocracy its vested in those on the basis of talent, effort, and achievement, rather than wealth or social class – I doubt that the wealthy would be willing to forgo their seat at the table. But yes a meritocracy with good checks and balances has advantages and disadvantages…
In a dystopian meritocracy intelligence and merit would become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited , that is Aristocracy of birth has turned into an aristocracy of talent.
Then too you come to the resources problem – in a society increasingly fighting over the scraps of infrastructure that is ever increasingly run down. Exceptional talent requires exceptional schooling! Not everyone goes to an amazing school even if they had the ability to become more.
The strength of democracy is that ALL people deserve the right to influence collective decisions. To have their say and hold their leaders accountable. and vote them in and out on the basis of performance.
In the end we are caught between the talented and not so talented – Lucky and unlucky, What is clear is there is and never can or should be equality of outcome.
People are not born that way, I feel however democracies /democratic capitalism’s problem is in the allocation of infrastructure! and the structure of economic thinking (Herman Daly ecological economics + social costs) – The talented don’t always get their chance. (unlucky? or could a better economic system done more?)
We are equal under our rights but not equal in talent or luck, This is something a meritocracy may not guard as well as a democracy. Opportunity based purely on immutable characteristics would also be another kind of Aristocracy – neither to do with talent or ability, but blocking those that could do better, and being treated differently because of peripheral characteristics other than an equal humanity.)
For all its flaws I still put my money on people power and Democracy that each person has the right to choose, for each person to have and equal voice and worth – this idea aligns with my concept of human rights. Equality based on a person’s humanity (not sex, race, religion)
As long as citizens take their responsibility seriously to ensure their leaders are kept to task and that they watch the laws being made with care. Will be as long as we have a democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
I do not agree with, or even recognise, the distinction drawn between Conservative (‘order’) and Liberal (‘chaos’). In my view it’s exactly the other way round. This is why ‘liberals’ are perpetually active in wanting more control, more order, more regulation.
They want life, and especially ‘political’ life to be ‘predictable’. Conservatism is really the absence of a positive programme of this sort, since no human is privy to all the required information that could allow these sorts of final decisions and plans to be made, nor could universal approval of any such scheme be guaranteed, since the question ‘Why this plan rather than that?’ has first to be answered.
Hence there is not a conservative (‘far-right’ in the stupid phrase) ‘movement’ as such. It would have no actual content. What Conservatives try to do is work out what constitutes legitimate authority in the Government of the State. This, it has turned out, is a far more complicated question than merely giving some activist group or other ‘power’.
Interesting twist, but I’m not sure many conservatives are all that keen on chaos, creative or otherwise
It’s more to do with having space to create order for one’s self than have it imposed upon one by others.
Sounds like the newest book is more directly related to his first, “Maps of Meaning.”
Having known of Peterson and his work for many years, I am primarily concerned for his health and well-being, both of which have been a struggle for him of late.
No-one ever gets it all right but Peterson is certainly thought-provoking and eminently readable. There is no reason why we have to take on board all that he or anyone else ever says.
Take what is of value to you and leave the rest.
I suggest you read the book. Whatever trip he might have been on, he wrote words of value. Indeed in the laudanum laced age of centuries past we saw some of our greatest literature and poetry written.
A very interesting and informative review.
I agree that a major challenge of our age lies in the question, “how might disparate individuals best co-operate to effect valuable political change?”
I’m beginning to suspect that, for the time being, “disparate individuals” might not be able to co-operate to effect real change that is acceptable to society in general. The battle lines are currently too fixed and drawn too far apart. People have plugged their ears to what the other side says. Anyone who tries to occupy a conciliatory middle ground is attacked by both sides or ignored. Perhaps our immediate future lies only in futile conflict. At some point our society will become so broken that real change becomes possible if only because the combatants are exhausted. I hope that time is soon.
People often attach moral considerations to their opiniions and mistake their opinions for statements of fact.
Jenny, this is a timely portrait of an unusually gifted teacher. Being both sensitive and sensible, your analysis of Dr. Peterson’s work contributes well to our widespread assessment of his admirable scholarship.
Keep up the good work.
Yeah. it has weaknesses discussed in the comments above, but under the rubric of “female journalist reviews JBP”, it is one of the very best ones.
There’s a horrid little piece published earlier in unheard, entitled ‘women already have their jordan peterson’
Very interesting article. Thank you. Just two comments. First, I have been astonished by the number of mothers who have given his first book to both their sons and daughters. Are modern so- called ‘liberals’ and libertarians missing something here? Is the divide between the self-styled intellectual elite and the rest of the country even wider than most think it is? And, secondly, as for the debate with Helen Lewis, she could hardly contain her bile. She knew that she was being beaten by a greater intellect and one sustained by empirical evidence rather than frustration and fancy. Just read her subsequent reports and tweets on it and Peterson. ‘Hell hath no fury like a liberal feminist faced with the truth’. I know that’s a misquote from the Bard but it is sooooooooo apposite.
Ah finally, that rare gem: a balanced and intelligent article on Jordan Peterson.
Very glad to see you are still ‘on board’ Dan, even with this new terrible system.
I haven’t had the temerity to use the word ‘bovine’ since you so correctly castigated me a few months ago!
A very thoughtful critique. I agree, JP is good at offering an antidote to liberal madness, but what he offers in its place is conservative sanity. That’s fair enough, though one might wish that he’d also acknowledge how much conservative madness is going on, including among his most devoted fans. But fine, he’s gotta do him.
Those of us who’d like for society to change, but change in an orderly and sustainable way, aren’t going to find it satisfying, though. What we need is more institution-loving Aaron Sorkin-style liberals, people who see movements as a necessary part of the public debate rather than as either perfect heroes or a sinful scourge. We have a sad lack of liberals like that, and the ones that do exist are getting pretty old, too.
Agreed — we need more of the old, Fabian sensibility.
I agree that the madness of Peterson’s fans, whether conservative or not, is very concerning. Could you explain it a bit so I can be forewarned and keep an eye out for it? Also, if it’s not too painful a memory, how did you cope dealing with the trauma? Did they hurt you very badly? Do you feel you will ever recover?
I have to say it also worries me very greatly this “conservative madness going on.” What if it spreads to more people? Consider what you have suffered by being exposed to it, and multiply this by even a small amount. It hardly bears thinking about! Indeed, I am trembling just trying to imagine it! For you it must be terrifying!
Obviously, having not had your lived experience of the conservative madness of Peterson fans, I can’t claim to fully empathise. But I’d like to, so give me all the sordid details. I strongly encourage you to consider setting up a support group. The import thing is to stay strong, and to believe you will get over what they did to you some day.
Certainly, I know they ruin careers, destroy innocent lives, break up homes and families, get involved in kidnapping, people smuggling, and engage in extensive criminal activities to fund their network. And then there’s the P–U–T—I—N connection. Which part of their operation did you fall victim to?
No, Mr Peterson can’t bring order, though he looked a likely candidate a couple of years ago.
He is, I think, too fragile to survive another bout of virtual hatred – the last one practically killed him. Yes, his wife’s illness precipitated his drug dependency, but the relentless hounding clearly unhinged him as well.
Now, he is following an extreme Blake Donaldson diet and, if a recent interview is to be believed, has taken to a punishing regime of self care to cope.
I susect he needs to stay out of the limelight until he is properly strong again. If he jumps too soon then only his health will suffer.
I would also observe of Peterson that these lyrics from Sloan’s “Coax Me” apply:
“It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans”
The comment about Tabatha Southey and her description of Peterson as “the stupid man’s smart person” is telling. The writer points out that this remark “reeked of intellectual entitlement” and then asks, “But who exactly are these “stupid men” to whom she referred?”
A far more relevent question is: Who the hell is Tabatha Southey?
The answer is that she’s a mediocrity who has almost certainly never had an interesting or original thought in her head even once in her life, and wouldn’t have a clue how to determine if someone is an intellectual or not other than by divining the group-think of the collective of people just as stupid as herself to which she belongs. Would she have the capacity to think independently and consider Peterson’s ideas in their own terms? Of course not! She’s a scribbler of the received opinions of the class that Nassim Taleb perfectly described in his essay “The Intellectual Yet Idiot” who are intellectuals in every sense except in every sense that matters. And where does Southey fit in this ignoble class of idiots? Probably in the third rank!
The writer of this piece also finds “it is difficult to comprehend how his latest book reportedly had a number of junior employees at Penguin Random House Canada protesting, and even becoming tearful, at the decision to publish it.”
Apart from inserting “reportedly’ in her description (despite the fact of the protests not being in dispute), and describing the employees as “junior’ (which given that most of the objectors preferred anonymity, it is impossible to determine their seniority), how can she find their actions “difficult to comprehend” when even a fool would understand them perfectly? How totally out of touch do you need to be not to know that the employees were manifesting a mundane contemporary group neurosis? Indeed, their reaction was conventional and entirely normal in terms of the collective and individual consciousnesses of a certain class of people in the present era. Insane? Yes! Stupid? Yes! Pathetic? Yes! Completely absurd, facile, childish and laughable if it wasn’t taken so seriously? Yes!
Does the writer feign incomprehension because she dare not say what it is, or is she so bound up in the absurd, childish and facile herself that she cannot step outside of this state in order to clearly identify it?
In either case, she is unqualified to talk seriously about Peterson, and probably most other things as well.
So what do we have? – Just another opinion piece about Jordan Peterson from someone whose opinions are worthless. My advice is to go to the primary source and forget about reading mediated accounts of him. They invariably tell you far more about the writer than they do about Peterson – all of it deeply uninteresting.
What a tremendously thoughtful and thought-provoking article… I do not necessarily agree with every single word but greatly appreciate the measure and nuance… Work toward equality of opportunity, together… Exactly!
More from this author please,
From the sheer number of inflammatory comments on this article, it seems pretty clear that Micah Starshine is a social media hate baiter that could benefit from psychotherapy.
Maybe everybody could Derek: including you.
Well written piece – a rarity when the subject is JP.
I think there is definitely common ground to be found in reducing the existing disparities in equality of opportunity, but JP seems best when he’s dealing with individuals, rather than society as a whole. To expect him to provide solutions to wider societal issues may be a little too much to ask of him.
Perhaps instead, we can use his teachings to learn how to set aside our differences, to reconnect and reunite with each other in order to abate misguided ideology from the extremes and finally tackle some of these outstanding inequalities ourselves.
Oh boy, these comments do devolve into bickering quite fast. I disagree with a fair amount of what the author claims about Peterson, but I’ll only focus on one thing: the claim that he is didactic. Didacticism is not the same as educating.
I don’t agree with everything Peterson says, but I do think his general approach is sound, and it’s not preachy. Didacticism is about being preachy.
The woke, the ism’s and gender studies are all a waste of public resources and an attack on democracy and most of society. We need to start a process to defund any institution or business that wishes to allow or support such groups and individuals.
“But in a world that still includes FGM, forced marriage, domestic violence, “revenge porn” and a growing normalisation in the West of violence against women during sex, there is surely still a place for a vigorous international movement which explicitly centres the concerns of women and girls.” Men are on the receiving end of domestic violence about 40%of the time. Men are very often genitally mutilated (circumcision). As for violence against women during sex – nice assertion. How about some supporting evidence?
You come across as just another feminist for whom evidence is unnecessary when you’re in thrall to a cult.
The article, while I disagree with some of it, is much better than its sub-heading!
I suspect that Peterson, as a Classical Liberal sort (of what was until recently the soft-centre-left) would disagree with the social policies of the mid 20th century Republic of Ireland. Any sensible person has a preferred balance point between liberal and conservative norms. The big problem is purity-spirallers who can never say “This is about right – better not go any further”.
The title doesn’t seem to fit the body of the article, but perhaps it is a clever trick to get people to read it who might otherwise avoid it. I saw this as a generally positive review of Peterson. I am a bit surprised by some of the negative reactions.
Unfortunate piece. It appears to come at Peterson with an open mind (who can tell these days) but has so many questionable assumptions. I’m still waiting for someone to engage Peterson about some of the areas of his positions that seem weaker (he seems to dislike social constructionism but credits it with a lot of power in certain respects which may not be as str0ong as he thinks), but I guess the wait continues.
For anyone who’s interested, the Rubin Report has a new, two-hour long interview with JP.
Thanks. Rubin Reports are often absorbing
Thankyou for this very helpful review.
I’m wondering l if there are any biblical allusions in the book because his lectures in this area have been very popular.However there has been some criticism of JP’s handling of the biblical narratives. There is always a danger of reading into the texts what you want them to say making them work for your personal agenda. This is called eisegesis. But preachers and teachers of the Bible are trained in exegesis which is letting the Bible speak for itself. It’s about discovering what the Bible is actually saying to us as opposed to making it conform to what we want it to say so that it confirms our own views and prejudices.
Part of that training is locating a narrative in its historical and cultural context and interpreting it in relation to the Bible as a whole. JP does not do this which is very understandable because he is not trained in exegesis nor does he claim to be a Christian, despite being deeply imbued with and deeply respectful of Christianity.
If he were he would realise that the Bible is more than a self-help handbook and a rich seam of illustrations for living well. The Bible is not just about the horizontal- our relationship with ourselves and others. It’s also about the vertical – our relationship with God and the transforming power of that relationship and it’s eternal consequences.
Haw haw !
This is one of the fairest and most considered pieces I have read on Peterson by a British journalist – particularly a female one, and which stands in contrast to Unherd’s lightweight hit piece a couple of months ago by Sarah Ditum. However you seem to feel the need to defend another lazy and biased piece by Helen Lewis in her YouTube interview with Peterson. He is on record in either a Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin interview saying how rude, unpleasant and hostile she was to him before that interview. Apprised of that information I suspect her interview with him will seem a lot less ‘courteous’.
Peterson makes some valid points , however his obsession with the left brings him down to the alt right nonsense
It’s only difficult to comprehend if you’re looking for the reason for it in the wrong place, i.e. in the book’s content rather on its cover.
This new format for posting comments just doesnt work. When I try to reply, my comment ends up running into the post comment button. Comments downpage end up being strung out in long single word strands.
Unherd: either fix this posting program, or return to the old one.
I’ve got to be honest…when ever I’ve read Peterson, I just can’t help but feel his spiel – though well crafted – is essence a warmed over version of the sort of s78te self-books that have been around for decades….
Good read. Shame about the unedifying swill that follows.
Jenny’s not Canadian, so I doubt that she is familiar with Tabatha Southey’s oeuvre. Unfortunately, I have wasted more time reading her than I ever should have. She has written for the National Post and the Globe and Mail, as well as Maclean’s, where her “Is Jordan Peterson the Stupid Person’s Smart Person Was Published”. “Is Tabatha Southey the Terrible Person’s Virtuous Person?” is the reply (not from Peterson) to La Southey’s broadside, which tells you what a horrible woman she is, trying to take her hugely talented comedian husband Dave Foley, the father of her two children, for every loonie he had. The author of “Is Tabatha Southey” notes that Tabatha doesn’t hate Peterson so much as envy him. The material greed that led her to live high off of her husband’s income and divorce him when she had cleaned him out makes her resent a man who Peterson for making “$50,000 a month in voluntary donations on Patreon from all the people who value the great work he’s doing.”
Jenny says “It was the practical, patriotic socialism of Clement Attlee, for example, which gave Britain its National Health Service.” I am sure Jordan is aware of that too; the Canadian medicare system was modelled closely on the UK NHS. When Peterson first gained acclaim for attacking state overreach, it wasn’t’ for our state-run health care, which he seems to have no problem with, but for the Trudeau Liberal government’s authoritarian effort to compel people’s speech. He said that he has 42 rules for life, so I suspect he has another book or a book and a half on those to right before he even thinks about writing a book on “reducing the existing disparities in equality of opportunity”. And why should he write such a book? He is a psychologist, not an economist. Would anyone want to read Jordan Peterson on the Job Guarantee, worthy initiative though that may be? I don’t agree with you on this one, Jenny; Jordan should keep to his last. He’s the Canadian Sakharov.
Oh. My. God.
You are a writer given a platform on (in my opinion) one of the best platforms on the internet. I’m just a random dude sitting in my living room with a cat. And I know way more than you. I figured you would have done your research.
Your 2nd last paragraph suggests that Peterson has never addressed the issue of how power/competence hierarchies become corrupt. He has addressed this issue over and over and over and over again. He makes it very clear that we need the left, and the right, to maintain balance, exactly for that reason. The right, if left to it’s own devices, will tend to corrupt their hierarchies and become dysfunctional.
Disappointed with that glaring bit of idiocy, as otherwise many of the points made in the article were decent, and some were even thought-provoking.
The UnHerd editors did a great disservice to readers and the author of this piece, by setting it up with the misleading sub-head.
I suppose it worked, if your goal was to generate a certain volume of overreaction. Your usual editorial stance is to assume readers are capable of discussing a topic without being whipped into a frenzy. I hope Jenny McCartney pushes back on this treatment of what is otherwise fair comment on JBP’s new book.
I would love to see her interview JBP and discuss his views further.
I think Peterson’s key message is:
‘Don’t perceive yourself as a victim of society, perceive yourself as having agency. Then act accordingly.’
It’s a simple and unoriginal idea. The reason it’s so popular is because an entire generation has been conditioned to believe they are at the mercy of external social structures. To suggest you can actually control your life is revolutionary to these people. Young men in particular lap this message up like water being offered to a man dying of thirst.
Peterson’s simple message completely undermines most forms of left wing political theory. It’s why the Left simply cannot accept Peterson. Indeed, their survival depends on ensuring Peterson is discredited and ideally removed from the discourse altogether. We can’t have people going around believing they are responsible for their own circumstances. It’s truly outrageous.
When humans believe they control events, they realise they are accountable for events. And good things start to happen. When they believe other people are responsible for events and they are mere victims, bad things start to happen. History is clear on this.
I did not find JP’s 12 rules particularly remarkable nor enlightening. There is nothing new or particularly groundbreaking there.
I found him talking to his readers and listeners as if he were giving a lecture & since I listened to his audiobook, it came across as supercilious & haughty & better than thou.
There are so many intricate circumstances that lead to complex characters in humans & to me his understanding of how a subtle human nature develops is overly simplistic.
Of course it works so well for so many young men and even a large proportion of western population. However, perhaps your teachers, your parents etc are quite likely saying the same things. Perhaps, when you are receptive to learning, a book & author can make that difference that no one in your life previously could. I can understand that sometimes the answers are not that clear ,the epiphany cannot happen & perhaps JP’s books have given that clarity to a lot of people but the solution is not ingenious or wonderful.
Left leaning ideas do not resonate with me at all & much of what JP says, is my philosophy too.
I CAN however understand the desperation & vulnerability of any minority group either of women, LGBT , BAME etc who are still on fragile ground wrt to their freedoms and rights. I think JP could do a bit more understanding and a bit less preaching as there is much more complexity of character out there than meets the eye.
‘…the desperation & vulnerability of any minority group either of women, LGBT , BAME etc who are still on fragile ground wrt to their freedoms and rights.’
Please explain which freedoms and which rights are being denied to these groups. Please be specific.
I guess not long ago LGBT, BAME etc was not a group that would want to draw attention to itself and to be and live as they like without persecution or negative attention . Today it’s a different experience for them but that doesn’t mean several millennium of persecution can be fully negated in a few years . I CAN understand that when someone is scared they can lash out. When JP says “ put your house in order” I agree with him but I also understand if someone cannot just act on those words and MAY need more help than just words.
I thank you for your reply, but I have to say that it does not seem to answer my question about which specific freedoms and rights are being denied to the groups that you referred to.
The specific freedom to be who they want to be and the right to live the way they want to live. I was referring to ‘recently’ won freedoms & rights to be who they want to be without persecution. It’s still a fragile subject for them. I can understand their fragility and sometimes irrational behaviour despite being given those freedoms.
You don’t half talk sh$t.
“Women” a minority group? … women are the majority of the population. Your “etc” presumably includes a minority group on fragile ground – working class white men.
Totally . Everyone in any fragile situation whatever their background ethnicity or denomination . And my inclusion of women in minority was not accurate, I was thinking of those (anyone) who has relatively recently reached any equality status with men in general , esp men in power.
‘I was thinking of those (anyone) who has relatively recently reached any equality status with men in general , esp men in power.’
This seems a bit muddled to me. If those people have in fact achieved equality status, in what sense do they need special consideration? They’re equal now, aren’t they?
‘…esp men in power’ – the vast majority of men in the world are not in any kind of power; so aren’t men who are not in power as ‘desperate and vulnerable’ as all the other groups, minorities, and women?
If some men are in power, the men not in power aren’t equal with them either.
And what about women in power? Are they oppressing the men not in power? So is the sex of people in power relevant, or the fact that they are in power?
And does being in power mean that you are oppressing everyone else? If so, everyone not in power (what, 99% of the world’s population?) presumably falls into some sort of victim category.
Of course, I may be missing something.
It’s about the past too. You perhaps might agree that the past features in the present’s development.
Sure, it’s all about the past. Indeed, were I to beat you around the head there would be no point in stopping because it would bring you no relief. Certainly, by stopping beating you round the head it would no longer be in the present, but it would still in the past, which is as little different from the present as makes no difference. Indeed, as a sage once remarked “the past features in the present’s development” and you don’t get much more profound than that.
I would vey much like to try this experiment on you and explain when you begged me to stop that it would be pointless because “the past features in the present’s development” which is as good as the past being present in every sense that matters, and so stopping or continuing the beating amounts to the same thing. You would immediately see the great wisdom of this insight and would cease your complaining having understood it was mere confusion, while I, of course, would carry on thrashing you enjoying every second of it.
Given the higher mortality rates of male babies and men’s shorter average life-span, please explain how women can be classed as a minority.
Ok , point taken . Not a minority. Just the oppressed half .
The NHS led to the bankruptcy of the UK and destroyed its industry by Hoovering up the nation’s resources. Germany, Switzerland and other countries with successful medical systems understood that a balance between private and public was Sustainable.
Votes for women created a support base for socialist parties because women are more likely to vote socialist. The expansion of the voter base created a society where nothing can be achieved except through years of argument (e.g. the Heathrow runway). If you give women the vote then you have to remove it from men. By allowing all of society to vote you cause society to disintegrate.
It would be much better to allow only people between 35-45 to vote thereby creating a Government that would be decisive and clearly reflect one point of view.