The devil is the spirit who underlies the development of totalitarianism; the spirit who is characterized by rigid ideological belief (by the “predominance of the rational mind”), by reliance on the lie as a model of adaptation (by refusal to admit to the existence of error, or to appreciate the necessity of deviance), and by the inevitable development of hatred for the self and world.
—JORDAN PETERSON, MAPS OF MEANING: THE ARCHITECTURE OF BELIEF
The year 1993 marked the culmination of Jordan’s postgraduate work at McGill University’s Douglas Hospital, his most prolific period of academic publication including 9 papers such as “Social Variability, Alcohol Consumption, and the Inherited Predisposition to Alcoholism” with his longtime mentor Dr. Robert Pihl and others, published that year. Eventually Jordan would contribute to over 140 papers in his career, many in the early years focusing on alcohol and drug use, then skewing toward his interests in Jungian archetypes and mythology in “Neuropsychology and Mythology of Motivation for Group Aggression” in 1999, his integration of psychology and Western religious traditions in “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2–6” in 2006, and on toward practical and political integration of his research in “Spiritual Liberals and Religious Conservatives” in 2013.
The language of science being necessarily precise, unemotional, and exhaustive had wreaked havoc on Jordan’s writing style as he attempted to make his insights more palatable to general readers in Gods of War. For instance, the typical abstract (edited for brevity) of “Social Variability, Alcohol Consumption, and the Inherited Predisposition to Alcoholism” reads,
This study examines psychological and demographic differences between (other) drug-using and non-drug-using alcoholic women and two contrast groups of controls in a population-based nonclinical sample of women.
The first chapter of Gods of War, a book that was in Jordan’s own words “quite dense,” begins with,
The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things. The former manner of interpretation—more primordial, and less clearly understood—finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature and mythology. The world as forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or, at a higher level of analysis simplification for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action.1
Not quite Shakespeare, but a useful starting place for his students of Introduction to Personality at Harvard University where he was recently accepted as an assistant professor. Gods of War was their textbook.
In July 1994, the Petersons moved from their cramped, ghetto-adjacent apartment in Montreal to a small row home on a leafy, quiet street in Amherst, Massachusetts. With two-year-old Mikhaila and infant Julian, Tammy found herself fully occupied with making adjustments to suburban American life in support of Jordan who had leaped several rungs up the academic ladder from McGill postgraduate fellow to assistant professor at prestigious Harvard. Tammy was further restricted to homebound concerns by the fact that she had not been given a work visa for the United States as Jordan had. For now, she was fully and happily engaged with the care of her family and would soon become a magnet for the care of other neighborhood children as well.
At Harvard, Jordan quickly developed a reputation as an engaging and enthusiastic teacher. His students found his style of wide-ranging, on-the-fly discussion more like improvisational performance than rote lecture and responded strongly to him. Student Hassan Lopez said in the journal of Harvard student life The Crimson, “Anyone who’s taking his class can immediately recognize that he’s teaching beyond the level of anyone else.”2 Jordan’s initial Introduction to Personality course was unique in a number of ways. First, he was teaching from his own unpublished book Gods of War rather than a standard introductory textbook on elemental psychology. Students were instantly freed from an uninspiring, expensive, and heavy standard textbook, and instead gifted with a personal work of art in progress. Jordan summarized his book at that time saying, “It describes what I think myth means and what I think about how our brains work.”3
His students were also among the first to enjoy the convenience of the digital age when Jordan transferred his fragile, spiral-bound manuscript to a digital version on Harvard’s new internet servers. He also was among the first to consistently record his classroom lectures on videotape for later access and review. These digital assets were the first green shoots of what would become distance learning and Jordan’s online presence.
Students immediately recognized they were co-voyagers on an authentic journey into psychology and flocked to his classes. Jordan’s innovative, free, and shareable online textbook also encouraged his students’ enthusiasm and set a trend that would expand years later for a Harvard psychology and computer science undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg who would launch www.thefacebook.com at Harvard to help students also share personal details like class years, mutual friends, and telephone numbers.
Second, students were getting firsthand, curated results of current psychological research on topics as wide-ranging as Jordan’s interests in psychology, literature, art, politics, and human potential along with the practical implications of each of these.
Student Alisa N. Kendrick said Jordan’s,
wide breadth of knowledge allows him to create beautiful theories linking together ideas from mythology, religion, philosophy and psychology. He just seems to be much more knowledgeable and on the cutting edge of where psychology is going.4
Student Naomi Reid said,
The way he synthesized information, he didn’t just talk about the theories but he talked about some of his own ideas and different sources of information.5
And third, the excitement of all this intellectual tumult triggered an explosion of the students’ own ideas for research that Jordan encouraged no matter how unconventional the topic, such as studies on body piercing and the suicidal pathology of singer Kurt Cobain of the rock band Nirvana. They included studies on pain sensitivity, loneliness, and aggression among adolescents.
Student Hassan Lopez commented on Jordan’s growing reputation as an eccentric saying, “If you have a strange project, [the psychology department] will immediately send you to [Peterson] because they know he’ll take them.” Lopez commented on Jordan’s reach outside of the psychology department, saying, “Philosophy students even go to him for advice on these.”6
Jordan’s approach garnered him attention from ardent students and pleased administrators, but his disdain for radical leftist politics turned heads among some administrators, alumni, and faculty. Harvard remained largely dormant after the volcanic explosion of the 1960s and resurgence of the 1980s. Professor Richard Lewontin, a prominent molecular biologist and self-proclaimed Marxist, said of the role of Harvard in the ongoing struggle for social justice,
What does Marxism have to offer the bourgeois university? Preferably nothing. That is, Marxism can do nothing for the university; the real question is what can Marxists do to and in the university?7
Reportedly at this time there were about a dozen neo-Marxists in Harvard Law School alone. Of the over two thousand professors then at the school, a conservative estimate of those who thought like Lewontin in the other departments might easily be in the hundreds. Among the relatively few who may have thought like Jordan was Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield. Mansfield had been a professor at Harvard for seven years when the communists of Students for a Democratic Society raided and took over Harvard’s main administrative offices in University Hall in April 1969. Two hundred and fifty students packed into the President’s and Fellows’ Rooms spouting revolutionary slogans and threatening violence. They threw “establishment lackeys out of the building, rifled through their files, and announced to humanity the dawning of a revolution.”8 Of course, the police were called and dragged the pampered revolutionaries out, effectively sunsetting the brave, new revolution after a few hours.
When Jordan began teaching at Harvard, Mansfield had been there for thirty years and would soon receive the National Humanities Award for his decades of work as a political philosopher. In that time, he apparently had developed a dim view of the ’60s radicals who had once taken over Harvard and had returned there and elsewhere in academia as professors. He said of their political philosophy and them, that they were “neither so outrageous nor so violent as at first. The poison has worked its way into our soul, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary.”9
Unfortunately for Jordan and his welcome to his new American home, these “poisonous” influences weren’t restricted to Harvard. At nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, also a recognized scholar in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, had said of America’s struggle with the postwar Soviet Union,
The United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off, and had engaged … a “secret army” under U.S.-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s.10
This might have been brushed off as an arcane conspiracy theory by an embittered ’60s radical, but Chomsky was a Harvard Fellow, a lifetime appointment that recognized extraordinary academic potential. Never rebuked or censured by his esteemed senior Harvard Fellows, Chomsky appeared to be speaking largely for the sentiments of the Harvard establishment even as his venom toward the United States became unusually poisonous. According to him, during the Cold War, the United States also wiped out communist uprisings in Latin America with “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads,” adding, “a close correlation [exists] worldwide between torture and U.S. aid.”
In regard to the Vietnam War, “the major policy goal of the U.S. has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing.”11
And so consequently, “legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.”12
And then there was the kindly, avuncular Howard Zinn self-described as, “something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist,” just over the Charles River at Boston University who would lecture students,
I think it’s very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was.… before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name … Socialism basically said, hey, let’s have a kinder, gentler society. Let’s share things. Let’s have an economic system that produces things not because they’re profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.13
In spite of these surrounding storms, Jordan set sail again in his pursuit of good and evil. But unnoticed in the dark hold of his ship was a nest of vipers.
As an introduction to his course Introduction to Personality, Jordan’s preface in Gods of War revealed his own torment and brush with madness as a young undergraduate. He described a time when he was approximately the same age as the students he now intended to teach, sitting in the same type of rows as his students were now sitting, and taking a similar introductory psychology course.
Some of the courses I was attending at this time were taught in large lecture theaters, where the students were seated in descending rows, row after row. In one of these courses—Introduction to Clinical Psychology, appropriately enough—I experienced a recurrent compulsion. I would take my seat behind some unwitting individual and listen to the professor speak. At some point during the lecture, I would unfailingly feel the urge to stab the point of my pen into the neck of the person in front of me. This impulse was not overwhelming—luckily—but it was powerful enough to disturb me.14
Although written matter-of-factly, such a personal confession was no doubt disturbing to several of his new students as well. And that was just the early part of his introduction. Along with his unsettling emotional honesty came his more brutal intellectual honesty about his politics, socialism in particular.
Orwell described the great flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least in Britain). Orwell said, essentially, that socialists “did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich.” His idea struck home instantly. Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure. Many of the party activists I had encountered were using the ideals of social justice to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge.15
And there it was—in black and white—a declaration of war against socialism and socialists in Jordan’s own words. The word went out among the Harvard neo-Marxists, including economics professor Stephen Marglin, law professor Duncan Kennedy, and critical race theorists like Noel Ignatiev, publisher of Race Traitor—Peterson was the enemy.
As the course progressed and he became more comfortable illustrating concepts in his book with his personal experiences, Jordan would motor along through the assigned reading from his book grabbing memories from his childhood, a quote from Jung, a fragment from Dostoevsky or Orwell, a study he’d come across on bio-mechanics; but sometimes he’d get stopped in midsentence. A long-ago personal moment or an account he had read of Solzhenitsyn’s gulags would slowly overwhelm him. There was no hurry or attempt to quash the rising emotions. His eyes filled with tears as they had all his life since early childhood, and as he was able to, he struggled on with a cracked, wavering voice to convey the depths of some human depravity he saw in his mind. The horror and pain of human existence was unavoidable for anyone taking Jordan’s class. It was an emotional tour de force. His popularity among students soared, even as the whisper campaign against him among Harvard’s radical faculty, students, and administrators grew.
At home, Tammy adjusted to the domestic life she had once scoffed at as a young girl. Unable to legally apply for work, she found that she was happy to care for the children of working mothers in the neighborhood. The Peterson house was soon full of preschool children for Mikhaila to play with and baby Julian to watch in wonder. Tammy apparently enjoyed the work, feeling a natural empathy for the challenges of children. Jordan was often home when the children were in the house and also enjoyed their antics as a break from the intense focus needed for his classes and research projects.
Tammy and Jordan had been able to see and feel the emotional landscape between and around themselves since childhood. It seemed certainly part of the dynamic that almost instantly bonded them together as children and likely prompted Tammy’s choices as an adult to become a healer, parent, day-care provider, and eventually a serial foster parent.
To the Petersons, a house full of children, their own and other people’s, was enjoyable. Jordan could easily spend hours drawing them pictures of monsters and letting them test their strength against him in roughhouse play. But keen empathy and several years of honing his sensitivity to human cruelty could also detect even slight evidence of problems in a child’s behavior.
Jordan came home one day to find a four-year-old boy standing alone on the Petersons’ enclosed porch, head down, not playing among the riot of other preschoolers surrounding Tammy in the living room. He didn’t recognize the boy, but said hello. The boy did not respond. He asked if the boy wanted to come in and play with the others, but again, no response. Recognizing something significant was up, Jordan squatted down to eye level and tried to break through the boy’s protective stance that seemed more typical of a one-year-old than a four-year-old. He smiled and gently invited the boy to come and play as he wriggled a finger into the boy’s armpit, tickling him. The boy wriggled away, tightening his protective stance. Jordan tried again and again. Nothing; a complete refusal to engage. He stopped and understood why Tammy had let the boy stay by himself on the porch.
Jordan went in and asked Tammy what the situation was. She said the boy’s mother, apparently a psychologist as well, had dropped the boy off in desperation because the boy’s regular nanny had been in some kind of accident and couldn’t care for him. The woman had said, “He probably won’t eat all day, but that’s okay.”
As Jordan would later retell the story in one of his classroom lectures, the mother’s statement was not okay. Jordan told this story as a long, personal digression, apparently one of several that preceded it, in his increasingly improvisational style. It was recorded in an undated video running nearly twenty minutes as he stands at an overhead projector attempting at several moments to return to the primary subject of the class. He is drawn away from his prepared lecture, back to the story again and again as he becomes more emotionally caught up in it. The video doesn’t extend beyond this digression. The original subject of the class is only indicated by his reference to an image on the projector of “this dragon,” the mythological representation of destruction and chaos.16
As Jordan told his class, the mother’s statement about her son not eating was not okay. First, because she so glibly admitted her inability to properly care for her son, and second, because the child would soon become distraught and disruptive if he didn’t eat, and third, and most concerning to Jordan, was because the boy had obviously learned to ignore adults. As he then emphasized to his class, ignoring adults was not a good psychological strategy.
You don’t want your four-year-old to have learned that it’s okay to ignore adults or that you should ignore adults or that you can ignore adults.… If they don’t respect adults then of course they don’t have any respect for what they’re going to be.… Why the hell grow up? You end up like Peter Pan because that’s what Peter Pan is about, right? Peter Pan wants to stay in Neverland with the Lost Boys where there’s no responsibility because, you know, he looks at the future and all he sees is Captain Hook, a tyrant who’s afraid of death.
That’s the crocodile, right, that’s chasing him with the clock in his stomach, that’s the same thing as this dragon.17
In the Petersons’ kitchen, the children were seated around the table for lunch. Tammy had gone to the porch and retrieved the boy who still refused to raise his head, look her in the eye, or respond to her invitations. She led him by the hand to the table and sat him next to her where she could focus all her attention on him. As the other children made their messy ways through the meal, Tammy used the tried-and-true method of a gentle, tickling poke in the ribs to get the boy’s attention.
In his classroom, Jordan digressed further from the main topic of the class, beyond the four-year-old boy’s story to what in scientific terms might be called a lower level of analysis. He analyzed the poking technique of child feeding that Tammy was using.
At about nine months old, his son Julian also would not eat and would only play with his food. A broad smile and a little laugh brightened Jordan’s face as he recalled his son’s tricks to avoid eating. These included smearing food in his mother’s hair.
But whenever a spoonful of food was presented, Julian shut his mouth and eyes tightly. Eventually, repeated gentle pokes in the ribs got Julian to open his mouth in annoyance, Aaa! With a quick swipe of the poised spoon, food went into Julian’s mouth and if necessary, his mouth was held closed until the food went down. This took many hours of trial and error to discover and exhaustive patience to execute.
At this lower level of analysis, the problem of the four-year-old boy who wouldn’t eat was revealed. The poke-feeding technique required more time and attention than the four-year-old boy’s mother was capable of, or willing to invest in her son. It also revealed that the boy had probably been like this since he was approximately nine months old. He’d been neglected for almost three years.
Returning to the first level of analysis, Jordan went on to explain that the poke-feeding technique worked exactly the same way on the four-year-old boy as it had on Julian, and added that every time the dreaded spoon went into the four-year-old’s mouth, Tammy rewarded the boy with a pat on the head and told him he was a good boy.
Jordan paused in his retelling of the story at the point where the boy had finished his entire meal with a big show of praise and caresses from Tammy. His voice cracked with emotion as he seemed to see the boy’s face in front of him.
And Jesus, you should have seen what happened to that kid. Man, it just about broke my heart.… his eyes got big and he smiled and he was just, like, he was super thrilled because he’d finally accomplished this absolute basic necessity that he hadn’t mastered in four years! He finally got it right!18
Then another pause as his emotions turned even more tender, his voice halting and straining as he fought to maintain composure,
You think of all the meals that he went through either being ignored or failing three times a day for, like, three years! Nothing but failure and bad responses. And you know he’d internalized all that, he thought he was a bad kid and then all of a sudden, poof, he figured this out!… He just lit up and that whole shell that he had on, that he was, like, using to protect himself when he was in the porch, that just melted away! It was horrifying and amazing at the same time.… And he followed my wife around after that in the house just like a puppy dog, like, he wouldn’t get more than one foot away from her. It was unbelievable!… And then we went downstairs to watch a movie with the kids and she sat on a rocking chair, he climbed right up on her lap and grabbed her just like that Harlow monkey grabbed the, you know, the little soft mother instead of the wiry mother. Boop! He was like this [clutching to his chest tightly] and he was like that for, like, two hours! He wouldn’t let her go!19
The mood turned gray, then black, as Jordan recounted the boy’s mother returning to pick up her son.
So then his mother came home and she came downstairs and she looked at what was going on, you know, and this kid was, like, glommed on to my wife and she looked at her and she said, “Oh, super mom.”
And, you know, took her kid and went home.… Jesus, if you don’t think there’s a dragon in that story, man, you’re not listening to it!… Because the dragon in that story was her. And it was something she did not want to admit. And she was willing, perfectly willing, to sacrifice her child to [her] failure to realize that she could be a dragon, so that meant that the child was the problem. And that’s a hell of a thing to do to a four-year-old.20
And then the final, angry turn of mind,
So it was not pleasant, it was really not pleasant. In fact, we probably did damage to the child by actually getting [him] to do something good because we opened him up to the possibility that he could behave properly and be rewarded for that and that gave him hope. And so you can bloody well be sure that that hope was dispensed with the next day.21
This was Jordan’s irrepressible illustration of the random malevolence of existence, the mindless evil inflicted even on innocent children by well-meaning parents. The only thing that made life bearable, in his view, was the reduction of human suffering, even if temporary. That was the meaning of Jordan’s life. It was the one message behind all his efforts.
Trouble was brewing in the administrative offices of Harvard. Faculty members were finally rebelling against a decades-long power grab by administrators who were overwhelming the faculty. Harvard professor of economics David S. Landes said,
There has been a major change in the governance of the University and the balance of resources. A silent shift has occurred in the past 25 years, resulting in the proliferation of University administration.… There are two parts of the central administration which I’m told would be most unhappy that we might want to know more about how things work.… The function [of legal counsel] has changed from advice to governance. The givers of counsel have turned into givers of law.22
The second part of the out-of-control administration was a bloated public relations department according to Landes. “In the past, Harvard officials spoke out as called for,” Landes said. “Now the masters of spin want to create work for themselves.”23
This was not a reassuring environment for untenured Professor Peterson. The split between Harvard’s aggressive administrative bureaucracy and its faculty reminded him of the power struggle that Solzhenitsyn had written about between the Soviet politburo and Russian intellectuals, particularly since Harvard’s new ruling politburo seemed to favor, or at least tacitly ignore, the disruptive and vocal socialists on their campus. For someone as sensitive as Jordan to neo-Marxist aggression and prone to anger when encountering it, this growing menace must have been more than just aggravating. He had lived in the midst of its resurgence since his days at McGill over ten years earlier. Now it literally surrounded him, invaded his classroom, threatened his career and the future stability of his family.
Professor Landes had been referring, in part, to Harvard’s energetic support of the new wave of “political correctness” that had been sweeping through college campuses since the late 1980s. It was reaching fever pitch during Jordan’s first years at Harvard after the publications of Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals in 1990 and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education in 1991. These books condemned the “liberal” promotion of self-victimization, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and postmodernist changes to university curricula.
Shocking new evidence of socialism’s encroachment at Harvard came in the public turn of mind of its “star” economist Stephen Marglin in Z Papers, an anti-capitalist publication. In his article “Why Is So Little Left of the Left?” he openly disparages capitalism and implies that urgent radical action was needed beyond just “liberating” oppressed workers to revitalize socialism.
The obstacles to liberating the workplace lie not only in the dominance of classes in whose interest it is to perpetuate the authoritarian workplace, but also in the dominance of the knowledge system that legitimizes the authority of the boss. In this perspective, to liberate the workplace it is hardly sufficient to overthrow capitalism.24
Harvard undergraduate G. Brent McGuire fired back, calling out the stealthy approach of activists like Marglin who were cloaking themselves with obscuring labels such as liberal and progressive instead of using the correct but alarming term of socialist. McGuire said,
Socialist ideas are very pervasive at Harvard, but they’re not called that by the socialist. It’s a play on words, but the ideas are as socialist as ever. [These ideas] are very dangerous because Harvard is so respected.25
Jordan was now center stage in a philosophical crossfire. Like the multi-headed Hydra that he used to illustrate the proliferation of psychological impulses when they are forcibly repressed, the proliferation of social identities took the place of the beheaded dragon of Marxism in Western society. Reformed Marxist David Horowitz explains these emerging social identities at Harvard and elsewhere,
As an expression of its nihilism, the contemporary left defines and organizes itself as a movement against rather than for. Its components may claim to be creating egalitarian futures in which racism, “sexism” and corporate dominance no longer exist and in which “social justice” prevails … and makes it possible for … anarchists, eco-radicals, radical feminists, “queer” revolutionaries, Maoists, Stalinists, and vaguely defined “progressives” to operate side by side.… The continuity between the generations of the Communist and neocommunist left is, in fact, seamless. It is the product of a leftist culture that openly embraces the intellectual forerunners, political traditions and anti-capitalist perspectives of the Communist past.26
By far the most bitterly divisive social identities emerging at this time were the particularly American ones of black and white. This racial wound was still fresh in the minds of most Americans, and so was easily exploitable by neo-Marxists desperate for a new class war. They attacked America’s historic and assumed systemic racism with revolutionary zeal and quickly overran Harvard. Jordan was forced to retreat from this particular attack. As a Canadian, he had no authority in America’s ongoing war with itself. But there were many other fronts opening in the left’s multipronged campaign. When “whiteness” itself was attacked, clearly a racist move, Jordan’s internal alarm must have sounded and may have even disturbed his sleep. This was a subject, identifying oppressor and oppressed classes, in which he had significant authority.
White Marxist Harvard graduate student Noel Ignatiev took direct aim at whiteness as the cofounder and coeditor of the magazine Race Traitor, published just prior to Jordan’s arrival at Harvard. He responded to a reader who objected to the magazine’s obvious racial animus:
We’ll keep bashing the dead White males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as the White race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed.27
Ignatiev’s use of “deconstructed” referred to the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, two of Jordan’s intellectual nemeses after Karl Marx, who were then riding the French New Wave of postmodern deconstructionism into the hearts and minds of Harvard students and faculty. Jordan reentered the fight, summarizing postmodernism this way,
You can think about it as an attitude of skepticism and irony towards and rejection of grand narratives, ideologies and universalism including the idea of the objective notions of reason, that’s a big one, human nature, that’s a big one. Social progress, absolute truth and objective reality, all those things being questioned.
The head Joker at the top of the postmodern hierarchy is Derrida. Foucault is often mentioned as are a number of other people. Here’s some other attributes of postmodern thinking; there’s a recognition of the existence of hierarchy, that’s for sure. And there’s an echo of that idea, the recognition of hierarchy, in the term patriarchy because of course patriarchy is a recognition of hierarchy. Now it’s a very particular kind of recognition because the postmodernists also tend to define hierarchy as a consequence of power differential. And so the world they envision, as far as I can tell, is something like a sociological Hobbesian nightmare … every individual in some sense at the throat of every other individual.28
It must have been maddening for Jordan to debate postmodern neo-Marxists.
Their reasoning was so convoluted by Derrida’s deconstructionism, their language so obscure as a result, their scholarship in departments such as Women’s Studies so atrocious as seen in Peggy McIntosh’s seminal paper in the discipline “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” that people like Jordan must have just thrown up their hands in frustration. But to his credit, he never quit. He constantly rearmed himself with fresh perspectives and new information from others inside and outside of academia.
Another witness to the quackery of Women’s Studies was professor Camille Paglia, a noted feminist writer at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Jordan interviewed her on this subject in October 2017.
These departmental models, okay, were to me totalitarian to begin with … separating the language into fiefdoms and to create the Women’s Studies department absolutely out of the air, just snap your fingers … The English department had taken a century to develop. And all of a sudden to create a department where they politicize agenda from the start and by people without any training whatever in that field?… The administrators wanted to solve a public relations problem. They had a situation with very few women faculty nationwide, at the time when the women’s movement had just started up. The spotlight of tension was on them. They needed women faculty fast. They needed the women’s subject on the agenda fast. So they just like, poof! “Let there be Women’s Studies.”29
Paglia elaborated on the other associated “frauds” of postmodernism,
This postmodernist thing, this thrashing of the text, this encouragement of a superior and destructive attitude toward the work of art we’re going through with red pen in hand finding all the evidence of sexism, check, racism, check, homophobia, check. I am sick and tired of these people … they’re frauds.30
Attesting to the fraudulent nature of postmodernism, its leading proponent intellectual Jacques Derrida was accorded the same degree of fame in France as a movie star would be in America. And accordingly, his fame rested on public performance such as his refusal to attempt explanations of a foundational theory of postmodernism, an “intellectual sleight of hand” according to Jordan, called deconstructionism. Instead of defending deconstructionism, Derrida offered only partial answers as to what deconstructionism wasn’t or largely indecipherable blather, “thrashing of the text,” as Paglia insisted, that maintained his aura of intellectual superiority.
An interviewer asked Derrida, “You’re very well known in the States for deconstruction. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of that idea?”
The philosopher responded,
Before responding to this question, I want to make a preliminary remark on the completely artificial nature of this situation.… I want to underline rather than efface our surrounding technical conditions, and not feign a “naturality” that doesn’t exist.
I’ve already, in a way, started to respond to your question about deconstruction because one of the gestures of deconstruction is to not naturalize what isn’t natural—to not assume that what has been conditioned by history, institutions or society is natural. The very condition of the deconstruction may be at work in the work within the system to be deconstructed. It may already be located there already at work, not at the center but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct.
One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion; deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards from the outside one fine day. It is always already at work in the work since the disruptive force of deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work. All what [one] would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this [is] always already, is to do memory work yet since I want neither to accept nor to reject a conclusion formulated in precisely these terms. Let us leave this question suspended for the moment.31
Obscurantist postmodern leaders aside, Jordan was particularly incensed by the lack of scholarship that accompanied the establishment of postmodern university programs such as Women’s Studies and derivatives such as Gender Studies, LGBTQ Studies and Critical Race Theory. They all seemed to spring from one essay written in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Harvard graduate and senior research associate at the Wellesley Centers for Women entitled “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.”32 A personal account? Not a peer-reviewed, deeply researched work of impeccable scholarship? No.
Jordan’s reaction to this founding document of the postmodern feminist movement reveals his frustration with the deconstructed intelligence of his new colleagues in academia.
The original paper on white privilege wouldn’t have received a passing grade for the hypothesis part of an undergraduate honors thesis. Not even close. There’s no methodology at all. It was called “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.”
Well, first of all, personal account is, like, sorry, no. She [the author] says these are personal examples of her unearned privilege or unearned privilege that she saw, as she experienced in the 1970s, 1980s. This idea is the opinion of one person who wrote one paper that has absolutely no empirical backing whatsoever, which is a set of hypotheses which has never been subject to any statistical analysis.33
Yet, onward the postmodernists and their politically correct multitudes marched until they were literally coming through Jordan’s classroom door. In one heated exchange witnessed by undergraduate Gregg Hurwitz, another student challenged the theories of mankind’s psychological development as posed in Erich Neumann’s book The Great Mother, a classic text in the canon of psychology that was being discussed in Jordan’s class. The challenge apparently followed a deconstructionist argument that the ideas of “mother” and the feminine goddesses of the past were simply social constructs of the male patriarchy. To which Jordan shot back something remembered as, “If you can posit a better alternative theoretical framework then please do. But tearing down scientific progress without offering a superior solution doesn’t get us anywhere.”34
It seems that Jordan may have been reacting to increasing political heat on Harvard’s campus. Harvard history professor Stephan Thernstrom had already been taken down for his similar politically incorrect view of American history.
I was subject to trial by a newspaper. The PC thought police [were the] editors at The Crimson. During McCarthyism, I didn’t see any case of a professor being called before a committee because of what he said in class. People got in trouble because of their political involvement in private life … It did not affect the daily life of the university.35
In reaction to the growing mob mentality, Thernstrom and a few other Harvard professors formed the National Association of Scholars in 1987 that was “devoted to preserving the traditional western curriculum.”
Within the association’s charter documents they commented on the postmodern programs being rapidly adopted in academia:
An examination of many women’s studies and minority studies courses and programs disclose little study of other cultures, but maintains that too often these fields are put into the curriculum for political, not academic reasons.36
The battle lines of the coming Culture War were drawn. But it was more like a culture riot since there was no clear strategy involved on the postmodern side, only an idea—the old Marxist chestnut of oppressors and the oppressed—dusted off for a new generation. But this time instead of abused workers, senior research associate Peggy McIntosh was as certain as a senior research associate could be that it was women, all women, who were and had always been oppressed.
Then in 1989, the year after McIntosh’s eureka moment, UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw discovered that not only women, but women and black people were, and had always been, oppressed. Crenshaw discovered intersectionality in her academic paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”37 that claimed black women, as part of two distinct oppressed groups—blacks and women—were doubly oppressed.
Unifying all the new radical theories facing Jordan and traditionalists like him, the following year University of California, Berkeley professor Judith Butler published her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. It became the founding document of the emerging area of scholarship called Queer Theory.
Butler’s thesis expanded on the unfounded assumptions of Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” Derrida’s nonsensical deconstructionism, and Crenshaw’s intersectionality to suggest, against the interests of traditional feminists, that the term woman was now simply a subcategory like class, ethnicity, and sexual proclivity. She wrote,
Further, it is no longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the questions of primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics. Instead, we ought to ask, what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity?38
So, the old-fashioned, single identity of “woman” was out, and multiple intersectional identities were in. Butler, a self-identified lesbian, went on to make sure that the connection between sex and gender was completely deconstructed, claiming it was a false distinction under the same theory of intersectionality.
If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive … because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities.… As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.39
While the motives behind this third-wave feminism were clearly political by the same “peevish and resentful” Marxist types Jordan had identified as a teenager in the NDP, the threat that this sweeping revival posed was as real and as clearly motivated by resentment as any totalitarian movement of the past. He stated his concern with academic dispassion in his nearly completed manuscript of Gods of War,
Degeneration into chaos—decadence—might be considered the constant threat of innovation undertaken in the absence of comprehension and respect for tradition. Such decadence is precisely as dangerous to the stability and adaptability of the community and the individual and as purely motivated by underground wishes and desires (resentment) as is totalitarianism or desire for absolute order.40
He would eventually come to refer to this junta of the oppressed in less scholarly terms as an “ill-informed, ignorant and ideologically-addled mob.”41
That kind of statement would come to be known as a microaggression in the thrashed new language of Jordan’s multiplying enemies. Among his first skirmishes was one fought in defense of student Gregg Hurwitz’s thesis “A Tempest, a Birth, and Death: Freud, Jung, and Shakespeare’s Pericles” before the assembled Harvard psychology department. The opening salvo was fired by a psychology professor, presumably probing for latent Nazism, who claimed, both off-topic and personally directed at Jordan, “I believe Jung chose the wrong side in World War II.” Jordan fired a personal shot right back, “That’s an incredibly ignorant statement.”
Hurwitz describes what happened next, “And we were off to the races. Then I had to defend my thesis to an angry room!”42
No doubt the angry exchange brought Assistant Professor Peterson to the attention of other, more senior antagonists in and around Harvard Yard. Along with his combative stance toward ignorant academics, Jordan was stained with the whiteness of an obvious oppressor, and so became a straight, white, male sitting duck. He arrived at the front lines with only his experience and years of study of Marxist thought that told him these new advocates for oppressed women, blacks, and gay people weren’t really interested in the liberation of any of these; they were really only interested in power. And, they didn’t really even like women, blacks, or gay people, they just resented straight, white men.
So Jordan, with few colleagues, manned the lonely ramparts of academia. His straight, white, male lectures and microaggressions would not escape collective vengeance for long. The postmodern neo-Marxists were inside the gates, and it was only a matter of time until they came for him.