In 2018, University of Toronto emeritus professor of psychology Bernard Schiff published an article in The Star entitled, ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.’
It wasn’t a very good piece. Schiff’s take on his former colleague was overheated—and its effect was more to feed into than to undermine the way Peterson likes to portray himself. My friend Nathan Robinson put this point nicely in a critique in Current Affairs: ‘Why don’t I think Schiff’s article is a very powerful criticism of Peterson? Because, generally speaking, I don’t think calling someone a brilliant, dangerous, maverick who changes lives is a particularly good way of getting people to question them.’
Even so, Schiff’s piece did provide a few interesting tidbits, like this one: ‘Another thing to which I did not give sufficient concern was his teaching. As the undergraduate chair, I read all teaching reviews. His were, for the most part, excellent and included eyebrow-raising comments such as “This course has changed my life.” One student, however, hated the course because he did not like “delivered truths”.’
And this: ‘He was preoccupied with alternative health treatments including fighting off the signs of aging as they appear on the skin, and, one time, even shamanic healing practices, where, to my great surprise and distress, he chose to be the shaman himself.’
And, most especially, this:
Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church...I assumed that it was for a new home—there was a trend in Toronto of converting religious spaces, vacant because of their dwindling congregations, into stylish lofts—but he corrected me. He wanted to establish a church, he said, in which he would deliver sermons every Sunday.
If you’ve watched any significant portion of Peterson’s YouTube videos, you shouldn’t have any trouble imagining what he’d be like as either a New Age shaman or an evangelical protestant preacher. He’s an electrifying speaker even—maybe especially—when he’s saying absurd things. That’s why he can tell a classroom full of adults in one video that, ‘although it’s hard to explain’, he thinks that the twinned snake imagery in ancient artwork represents the DNA Double Helix discovered in the twentieth century. There’s no nervous laughter because everyone in the room is swept up in his lecture. Besides, he sounds so damn sure of himself. When he gets teary talking about (extremely poorly-defined) threats to ‘the individual’ in another, no one looks away in embarrassment. The reason is that, at least for people who start out with neutral or positive feelings about Peterson, the emotional intensity helps sell his message.
It’s a variation of what we can think of as the Christopher Hitchens Effect. Hitchens was a great writer and a great speaker and, in his best moments, he made thoughtful and interesting points about a variety of subjects. The last years of his life, starting with his post-9/11 turn towards a particularly crude form of cheerleading for America’s wars in the Middle East, were the ones in which he probably had the fewest of those ‘best moments’, but they were also the years in which he enjoyed the most mainstream popularity. (Conservatives liked his neocon foreign policy views. A certain kind liberal, feeling culturally besieged in George W. Bush’s America, overlooked those views and loved him for his militant atheism.) A few years after the creation of YouTube in 2005, the site was full of ‘Hitchslap’ videos, showing the master either wittily insulting interlocutors or simply stating his abhorrence of their views with great vehemence. Many of the people who put together such videos love to talk about ‘logic’ or the holy trinity of ‘logic, facts, and evidence’, but the ‘Hitchslap’ clips don’t really focus on Hitchens’ presentation of arguments. They showcase someone with an accent Americans are trained to associate with intelligence forcefully stating his conclusions.
The Hitchens Effect works so well that a barely literate grifter like Milo Yiannopoulos was able to use it to great effect. Yiannopoulos had the accent, and he was capable of working up some half-clever sarcastic barbs, but the content of what he said was rarely more complicated than ‘feminists are ugly bitches’ or ‘how can I be a racist when I love to suck black dick?’ Even so, legions of American conservatives were at least temporarily taken in. So was at least one contrarian liberal. When Milo appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher, the host—who, remember, had invited the real Hitchens onto the show on many occasions and considered him a friend—said that Yiannopoulos reminded him ‘of a young Christopher Hitchens’.
Peterson’s Alberta accent and folksy language—see for example his frequent use of the word ‘bucko’—are as different from the posh and boozy speech patterns of a Christopher Hitchens as a tent revival is from a debate at the Oxford Union, but he still trades on a recognizable variation of the Hitchens Effect. When someone presumed to be drawing on great reserves of knowledge speaks in a way that conveys great certainty, it’s easy to feel like they’re making a compelling case...even if they’re actually bringing you in at the conclusion. It helps if they speak in a distinctive way. (For a particularly lazy example of this last trick, think about the way various Star Wars screenwriters have rearranged the syntax of Yoda’s sentences at random to make his pronouncements sound more mystical and profound.) To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having an accent that confuses Americans—it’s not the fault of any of the people I’ve mentioned that we tend to be rubes about that kind of thing—and there’s certainly nothing wrong with packaging your arguments in the most rhetorically compelling possible way. But it’s important—if you don’t want to be taken in by every passing Milo—to learn how to see through the packaging and think hard about the underlying arguments.
In my Critical Thinking classes, I’ll often present my students with a video clip or a quoted paragraph in which someone makes an argument and ask them to reconstruct it in ‘standard form’, like this:
Premise One: ....
Premise Two: ....
Premise Three: ....
Conclusion: ....
Part of the point of the exercise is that when someone is saying things you like and saying them well, it’s easy to nod along without thinking too hard about how the pieces fit together. Conversely, when someone you dislike or disagree with is saying things you find annoying, it’s easy to dismiss what might turn out to be a strong underlying argument. Forcing students to restate the premises in their own words helps them separate the content from its presentation and turn their attention to the question of whether those premises add up to a good reason for them to believe the conclusion.
To see how this works, let’s take a representative Peterson video. It happens to be the first one I ever watched, and it addresses a subject close to my democratic socialist heart—whether the theoretical insights of Karl Marx can be separated from the horrors of twentieth-century Stalinist regimes. The video—dated 1 October 2017 and entitled ‘But That Wasn’t Real Communism, Socialism, or Marxism!’—starts with Peterson making his usual claim that post-modernism is just rebranded Marxism. (For an excellent discussion by Conrad Hamilton of how little substantive overlap Marx has with Derrida, see Chapter Eight. For some of the historical specifics Peterson has to mangle to try to make this conspiratorial view of the history of philosophy work, see the Peterson chapter of Michael Brooks’ book Against the Web.) Around the 2:25 mark he slides from denouncing post-modernism (or in Petersonian lingo, ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’) to mocking the idea of a form of Marxism that rejects the Soviet model: ‘They certainly don’t believe that they have any biological grounding, that there’s any such thing as a human being...it’s all socially constructed...which is really convenient if what you want to do is be the author of an entire socially constructed utopia that you can run...and then when the Marxists say that wasn’t real Marxism, what it really means and I’ve thought about this for a long time, it’s the most arrogant possible statement anyone could ever make, it means, “If I would have been in Stalin’s position, I would have ushered in the damn utopia instead of the genocidal massacres because I understand the doctrine of Marxism and everything about me is good.”’ At this point (the 3:05 mark) Peterson switches to a new level of intensity in a way that almost reminds me of the turn taken by a rock song when the melodic intro ends and the guitarist and bassist start thrashing, and he says, ‘Well, think again, sunshine, you don’t understand it, you don’t understand it and you’re not that good and if the power was in your hands, assuming you have the competence, which you don’t, you wouldn’t have done any better, and’—speeding up now—‘if you had, there would have been someone right behind you to shoot you the first time you even tried to do anything good’.
The crowd laughs and claps at all the right points, as responsive to Peterson’s rhetorical power chords as the congregation surely would have been if he’d gone ahead with his plan to buy that church in Toronto. And, as Peterson himself so often says, ‘fair enough’. But let’s try to reconstruct the argument. Here’s an initial attempt that confines itself to the premises that Peterson has explicitly given us:
Premise One: If contemporary anti-Stalinist Marxists had been leaders of a totalitarian one-party state, they would have either acted the way Stalin did or been replaced by those who would.
Premise Two: Either way, a Stalin-like outcome would have resulted.
Conclusion: ?
It seems like Peterson’s implied conclusion is something sweeping like ‘Marxism is inseparable from Stalinism’, but that pretty clearly doesn’t follow from Premises One and Two. Something that would actually follow from the premises would be:
Conclusion: If contemporary anti-Stalinist Marxists had been leaders of a totalitarian one-party state, a Stalin-like outcome would have resulted.
If this is his conclusion, then the argument thus reconstructed is valid—i.e. the conclusion follows logically from the premises. As the Scottish logician Alan Weir likes to emphasize, though, logical validity both ‘preserves truth upward’ and ‘preserves falsity downward’. In other words, if the premises of a valid argument are true, so is the conclusion (truth is preserved upward) but by the same token, if the conclusion is false, at least one of the premises must be false as well (falsity is preserved downward). An obvious objection to the conclusion (and hence the premises) is that many leaders of totalitarian one-party states haven’t done anything nearly as bad as what Stalin did. Take a moment to review the post-Stalin list of leaders of the Soviet Union. Not even the conservative Brezhnev, never mind liberalizers like Khrushchev or Gorbachev, committed any abuses even approaching the scale of Stalin’s crimes.
Granted, between the hysteria of the Great Purge and the deportation of entire nationalities, Stalin set the bar pretty high. And Khrushchev, for example, sent Soviet tanks into Hungary in 1956 to crush the Hungarians’ attempt to experiment with a more humane and democratic version of socialism. (Similarly, although he denies the charges, Gorbachev has been accused of complicity with an attempt at organizing an anti-democratic coup in Lithuania in 1990 to stop the Lithuanians from seceding from the USSR.) If ‘Stalin-like outcomes’ means any abuse of the same kind as what Stalin did, no matter how much milder the scale, perhaps these qualify.
If so, though, ‘Stalin-like’ deeds are more common for major world leaders than one might have thought. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s CIA overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government of Guatemala in 1954, an act that led to a far greater death toll than Khrushchev’s quashing of the Hungarian Revolution. The same is true of Ronald Reagan’s backing of the Contra death squads that fought to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government of Nicaragua in the 1980s. Were Eisenhower and Reagan ‘Stalin-like’ leaders? I’m not interested in promoting whataboutery—nothing about what happened in Guatemala excuses Hungary any more than Soviet crimes in Hungary excuse American imperialism—but in exploring what Peterson is trying to get at, since at the bare minimum he seems to be suggesting that communism is inherently more evil than America’s combination of corporate capitalism, reasonably democratic two-party elections and an imperial presidency. If this assumption about his views is correct, the bar for ‘Stalin-like outcomes’ should therefore be set higher than an Eisenhower—or Reagan—level of evil...which again, casts doubt on the conclusion that I suggested follows from his premises (and hence on the premises themselves).
A deeper problem, though, is that his broader implied conclusion about Marxism doesn’t follow from any of the premises we’ve extracted from his video. Perhaps we could charitably interpret what he’s saying as an enthymeme—an argument where some of the premises are not explicitly stated. But what’s missing? Assuming that the conclusion is, ‘Any attempt to implement a Marxist political programme would lead to a Stalin-like outcome,’ it seems to me that he needs this extra premise:
Premise Three: If a Stalin-like outcome would result from either of these two scenarios, then any attempt to implement a Marxist political programme would lead to a Stalin-like outcome.
Why on earth, though, should we believe that?
If Peterson isn’t relying on something like Premise Three, then I have no idea why he thinks a broad conclusion about Marxism leading to Stalin-like results follows from anything that he’s said. If he is, however, then the whole thing relies on at least two nested logical fallacies—a False Dilemma (‘attempts to implement a Marxist political programme would mean Stalin being in charge of a Stalinist one-party state or one of his retroactive critics having been in charge of one’) premised on what is, if you know anything at all about the history of socialist thought, a hilariously bizarre Strawman (‘anti-Stalinist Marxists advocate the creation of a totalitarian one-party state and believe that the problem was that the one that was created in the Soviet Union wasn’t led by individuals of sufficient moral integrity’). Marxists very emphatically reject the idea that historical outcomes are a matter of which individuals happen to be in charge of social structures rather than the nature of the structures themselves. When Marxists make a big point of calling themselves ‘historical materialists’, it’s precisely because we’re interested in distancing ourselves from that conception of history. There’s been a long (and in fact uninterrupted) tradition of Western (and some non-Western) Marxists criticizing the Soviet model, starting with Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet The Russian Revolution (which was published within months of the revolution, and showed a remarkable amount of foresight on Luxemburg’s part about the seeds of Stalinism that had already been planted) and going through people like Leon Trotsky, Max Shachtman, Tony Cliff, Ted Grant, Ernest Mandel, Hal Draper and Michael Harrington among many, many others. These figures criticized the Soviet Communists not for putting morally impure people in charge of their totalitarian one-party state but for setting up a totalitarian one-party state in the first place. Instead, their socialist vision was retaining a free press and multi-party elections while expanding democracy to the foundations of the economy through the collective democratic control of factories, farms and other workplaces.
Given that the ultimate target of Peterson’s critique is Marxism per se, not any particular interpretation of it, an obvious follow-up question is whether the Stalinists or their critics were closer to the views of Marx himself. On that question, for anyone who knows anything about Marx’s writings, there’s simply no room for serious disagreement. Marx was a critic of censorship and of the death penalty. In his Inaugural Address to the International Workingmen’s Association, he praised worker-run cooperatives as anticipatory models of a socialist economy—while he thought the whole economy could only be brought under workers’ control by ‘national means’ (i.e. using political action rather than hoping to outcompete the capitalists in the marketplace), he wrote that ‘these great social experiments’ proved in practice that ‘modern industrial production’ is possible without dividing society into ‘a class of masters’ and ‘a class of hands’. (Despite the fact that traditional capitalist businesses have obvious competitive advantages over coops in markets left to their own devices—it’s easier to keep wages down to free up funds with which to rapidly expand your business if the people being paid low wages don’t get a vote in the matter—a great deal more evidence along these lines has accumulated since Marx’s time. While Peterson may think that humans are as biologically predestined toward hierarchical economic arrangements as lobsters, in the real world, the Mondragon Corporation in Spain has grown over the several decades of its existence to 85,000 members and become one of the largest employers in the country.)
Not only did Marx not support any revolutionary dictators in his lifetime, the only head of state he ever thought highly enough of to write the man a friendly telegram on the occasion of his re-election was one Abraham Lincoln, who Marx supported for obvious anti-slavery reasons. He supported violent revolutions against monarchies (and against republics that didn’t give working-class people the right to vote) but as the franchise started to be extended to ordinary workers in countries like England, he started to hold out hope that workers in such countries could non-violently vote a socialist government into power. (He did worry that once this happened English factory-owners would respond the way American slave-owners had responded to the election of Lincoln.) While there were plenty of nineteenth century socialists who thought a transition to socialism could be achieved through a small elite conspiratorially taking power and acting on behalf of the working class, Marx himself and his close collaborator Engels were—as Hal Draper documents in his classic pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism—fierce critics of such schemes. They talked in a few places of a collective dictatorship of the entire working class (‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’) but the real-world model they pointed to in order to explain what they meant by this phrase was the ultra-democratic Paris Commune created by rebellious French workers and soldiers in 1871. The features of the Commune praised by Marx in his tract The Civil War in France included abandoned factories being turned over to ‘associations of workers’, the pay of elected officials being kept down to the average wages of skilled workers, and all elected officials being recallable by their constituents at any time and for any reason. That doesn’t sound to me like someone whose plan for delivering socialism was putting all power into the hands of a morally pure version of Joseph Stalin.
The problem, of course, is that Peterson doesn’t know any of this. He may collect Soviet art and maintain an interest in the psychology of totalitarianism, but his knowledge of Marx’s writings is non-existent. At the beginning of his debate with Slavoj Žižek, Peterson mentioned in passing that, before rereading The Communist Manifesto in preparation for his debate with one of the world’s most famous Marxist intellectuals, he hadn’t read it since he was 18 years old. For a middle-aged man who’s spent years ranting and raving about the evils of ‘Marxism’ at every opportunity, that’s an absolutely stunning admission. As my friend Michael Brooks dryly puts it in his book Against the Web, ‘If he hadn’t felt moved to pick up Marx’s shortest and most popular book at any point in the last few decades...it’s safe to say Peterson hasn’t been poring over the three volumes of Capital.’ Moreover—see Conrad Hamilton’s discussion of this point in Chapter Nine, or Benjamin Studebaker’s Current Affairs article ‘How Žižek Should Have Replied to Jordan Peterson’—it’s hard to believe that the good professor gave even the Manifesto more than a light skim.
This brings us to another problem with Peterson’s argumentative and rhetorical style. As pretty much everyone to have written about him has noted, Peterson likes to present himself as a sort of stern intellectual father figure—as the girls on the Red Scare podcast might put it, he’s ‘lobster daddy’. He’s most comfortable either explicating his findings to a rapt audience or dressing down his opponents for their moral fecklessness. Either way, the implied argument often seems to be:
Premise One: Jordan Peterson is a very smart guy who’s spent a lot of time looking into this stuff.
Premise Two: Jordan Peterson’s considered conclusion is X. Conclusion: X is probably true.
This sort of argument does have its place. Given that we can’t all be experts in every field, we do often need an epistemic division of labour whereby some become experts in one thing, others become experts in another, and we report our findings back to each other. The difference between the Appeal to Authority logical fallacy and a legitimate appeal to expert opinion is whether the figure being appealed to really does have expertise lacked by the rest of us.
Peterson is an expert in Jungian psychoanalysis. (Since my own academic background is in logic-chopping analytic philosophy, I’m strongly tempted to view Jungian psychoanalysis as bullshit, but I’ll assume for the sake of argument that this is unfair.) When it comes to the history of socialist thought, though, he acts like an expert—that is to say, he constantly makes assertions without bothering to cite texts or any other support beyond his own implied deep store of knowledge—but he’s a complete ignoramus. Similarly with the law. As Matt McManus points out in Chapter One, Peterson rose to prominence on the basis of extremely dubious claims about the implications of a civil rights law in which the word ‘pronoun’ does not appear. (Its primary purpose is to protect trans people against employment discrimination, housing discrimination and other matters weightier than having a psychology prof without the basic good manners to call you by your preferred pronouns.) In fact, the actual experts on that one—the Canadian Bar Association—put out a statement decisively rejecting the claim that C-16 would ‘force individuals to embrace concepts, or even use pronouns, which they find objectionable’. (Sadly, Professor Lobster Daddy has a far larger popular audience than the Canadian Bar Association, especially on the US side of the border.) Most bizarrely, in an August 2018 interview with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur, Peterson literally says the words, ‘I am an evolutionary biologist.’ For a psychologist with no special training of any kind in biology, claims to unearned authority don’t get much more brazen than that. But he seems authoritative, so his fans—and all too many fence-sitting casual observers—don’t register the oddness of these claims.
When someone projects the image of a stern patriarch, so morally upright that he’s often emotionally overcome by indignation at the wickedness of his enemies and so knowledgeable on so many subjects that he felt comfortable quoting Matthew 13:35 as the epigraph of Maps of Meaning (‘I will utter things that have been kept secret since the foundation of the world’), your instinct—to the extent that you take this image at face value—will be to mull over his odder pronouncements instead of coming right out and demanding to know what he means. This too is deeply dangerous.
Let’s consider, one last time, the ‘enforced monogamy’ brouhaha. Peterson was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the ‘cure’ for violence against women committed by self-described ‘incels’ was ‘enforced monogamy’. In various statements, including a written one on his website (‘On the New York Times and “Enforced Monogamy”’), he waxes indignant and aggrieved about how his ‘motivated critics’ have interpreted this as a sinister and misogynistic proposal. He angrily denies any suggestion that he supports ‘police-state assignation of women to men (or men to women)’ or dealing out ‘damsels to incels’ or anything else ‘scandalous’. Rather, he’s just supporting ‘socially enforced monogamous conventions’—i.e. society having a taboo against non-monogamous practices.
What could be ‘scandalous’ about that? After all, the society we live in pretty clearly does have a wide variety of social conventions rewarding monogamous pairing and discouraging deviations from it. (It would be a very unusual high school, for example, that would reward a boy who brought two girls to the prom by naming them Prom King and Co-Queens.) At this point, it’s an accepted article of faith in lobster world that anyone who brings up ‘enforced monogamy’ in the course of critiquing Peterson is being unfair if not outright libellous.
But wait. Thirty seconds of consideration should show that Peterson’s ‘explanation’ actually explains nothing. We already have various social conventions favouring monogamy. We also have incel killers. So if Peterson wants to argue that the solution to the latter is enforcement of monogamy, the only way this even adds up to a coherent thought is if he’s suggesting that we should be doing more than we already are to enforce monogamy. Well—what more, specifically? He doesn’t say—probably because just about any specific proposal for how society could do more to discourage promiscuity, infidelity, polyamory and other deviations from monogamous norms would almost certainly be controversial enough to strike some portion of the audience he was trying to reassure as...well...‘scandalous’.
Peterson’s move here is a version of the Fallacy of Equivocation (the way that an argument can go wrong when a key term is used to mean different things at different points in a reasoning process) called the ‘Motte and Bailey’ strategy. This is an analogy to medieval warfare used by British philosophy professor Nicholas Schackel in his paper ‘The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology’.
A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.
For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed.
You’ve almost certainly heard firebrand conservative politicians use this strategy. You know how it goes. First, a clearly inflammatory and racist claim about immigrants is thrown out as red meat for the politician’s base. Then, after the critics have savaged the politician for the original statement, he trots out a reinterpretation about crime and social services so carefully worded as to be hard to dispute. ‘All I was saying was...’
In Peterson’s case I frankly suspect that things might be even worse than that. My co-authors have laboured mightily to charitably interpret Peterson’s many odd pronouncements before critiquing him, and I thank them for their service, but I also worry that when it comes to figures like Peterson interpretive charity can all too easily be stretched beyond its useful limits. He may be a very smart man, genuinely knowledgeable and curious about at least some of the subjects on which he pronounces, but he’s also a man who’s spent his public life trading on the persuasive power of his electrifying preacher-like rhetoric. It might be all too easy for someone like that to throw out a vague statement—knowing that his loyal lobsters will like the sound of it, and that the feminists and leftists he so reviles will hate it—without meaning much of anything in particular. The Motte, in his case, may just be a vague conceptual smudge in the middle of the Bailey, the spot where a worked-out thought might go if he had one to offer.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Peterson himself makes a constant practice of attributing unsavoury motivations to his ideological enemies—socialists don’t really care about the poor, they really just resent their more dominant and successful fellow-lobsters—but perhaps I should be setting a higher standard here and refraining from speculating about what’s going on in the good professor’s head. Perhaps. One way or the other, though, if Peterson wants to complain about being misrepresented, he owes us clearer explanations of what he did mean to say. And if he wants to be taken seriously on subjects like socialism and feminism and monogamy and evolution and civil rights law by those not spellbound by his rhetoric, he should give us better arguments.