Introduction

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Kevin deLaplante.

Over the past few months, I’ve had a number of people ask me what I think about Jordan Peterson and the controversies and public reaction that surround him.

I know not everyone listening knows who Jordan Peterson is, but I thought this would be a good excuse to get into some political philosophical topics that I haven’t really talked about on the show, like Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, the state of free speech, and so on.

I get questions about all of these, so what I’d like to do on this episode is share a perspective on these topics, filtered through my personal experience as an academic philosopher who spent five years as an undergraduate student, seven years as a graduate student, and seventeen years as a working professor in the university system in Canada and the United States, and for a period of time as head of a Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies that had over thirty faculty.

In that time, I’ve encountered many different manifestations of these “isms”, in the students I’ve taken classes with, the teachers I’ve had, the colleagues I’ve worked with, the administrations I’ve worked within, in the courses I’ve taught, and in the intellectual traditions that I’ve been exposed to. And, in the world outside of academia, that I’ve been living in for the past three years as an independent educator.

So, what you’re going to get here is my perspective on these labels, what these terms mean to me, and how that may contrast with what these terms mean to people, like Jordan Peterson, and others — perhaps some of you listening — who see them as ideological players in a political arena in which one is forced to take sides.

I do have a goal for this episode, above and beyond just telling stories about my encounters with feminism, Marxism and postmodernism. I’d like to suggest an alternative way of thinking about how to think about these topics, one that doesn’t frame it as a decision about which ideological team you’re going to play for.

I believe there are costs to playing that game of ideological partisanship — costs to your intellectual freedom and your ability to learn and grow as an independent critical thinker.

I want to suggest that, maybe, the only winning move is not to play.

Who is Jordan Peterson?

I’m not going to say much about Jordan Peterson’s views on mythology and religion and psychology. That’s not really part of my agenda today. But let me start with few biographical details because as I said, I know there are a good number of listeners who aren’t familiar with this name.

Briefly: Jordan Peterson is a clinical and academic psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto. His research is mostly in areas of abnormal, social and personality psychology, and the psychology of religious belief.

In 2013 he began recording his classroom lectures and putting them on YouTube, but he didn’t become famous until 2016 when he posted several videos that criticized the Canadian government’s Bill C-16, which adds gender expression and identity as a protected ground to the Canadian Human Rights Act, and criticized political correctness and attacks on free speech that he associates with postmodernism, postmodern feminism, and so-called “cultural Marxism”, which he believes has infected the intellectual foundation of many academic disciplines in the arts and social sciences.

Peterson began pressing his case in public settings and on YouTube, and his popularity blew up, especially with audiences that lean conservative or libertarian, and among younger white males. He was concerned about getting into legal trouble and possibly losing his job at the university, so he opened an account on Patreon to receive monthly support donations from the public, and started appearing on popular independent media shows of folks like Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Sam Harris.

And soon he had thousands of Patreon supporters and was making $60,000 a month on pledges alone, on top of his $175,000 a year salary at the University of Toronto, so his message and personality have clearly struck a chord.

He’s said that he plans to use this money to develop an alternative post-secondary education system that isn’t corrupted by the postmodern, leftist ideological influences that he believes is pervasive in the current system.

Jordan Peterson’s critics on the left see him as anti-progressive, anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ equality, and ideologically aligned with right-leaning conservatives and authoritarians who see relationships of dominance and hierarchy, and certain traditional gender roles, as biologically and psychologically natural, not something you can expect to eliminate through social engineering.

This has lead to protests from progressive students and teachers when he’s invited to speak on campuses, and some of those protests have been very heated and disruptive, and videos from these events get recorded and shared on YouTube, which just seems to fuel the polarization, reinforcing his status as a hero among his fans, and as a villain among his opponents.

Who Do You Trust?

It’s in the context of all this that I get an email from a listener named Daniel that reads:

“Hi Kevin, I’m a big fan of your podcast. I’m very curious what you make of Jordan Peterson and his view that academia has been corrupted by cultural marxism. I used to be a big fan of his but now I feel like I’m hearing the same things over and over, and I’m not sure what voices to trust anymore.”

I can sympathize with this feeling of being unsure whose voices to trust. Because we can all remember times when we were gung-ho about something and a few months or years go by and your views change and you look back and wonder “how did I get stuck in that rabbit hole?”.

Who do you trust? What makes some voices seem trustworthy and authoritative to us and others not? That’s actually the topic that I’m covering in my next video in my tribalism series.

For purposes of this podcast, all I’m going to do is tell you how my story intersects with these issues, how they’ve been written into my narrative.

My Introduction to Feminism

Let’s talk about unpopular “isms”! And why not start with feminism.

What does this term, “feminism”, mean to me?

I read somewhere that 85% of Americans believe in women’s equality, but only 18% are willing to call themselves feminists.

Among a large segment of the population, the word conjures up an image of an angry, shrill protester holding a picket sign, who hates men, wants to overturn the patriarchy, doesn’t wear makeup, doesn’t shave, isn’t particularly attractive, and so on. Women themselves seem to think that if they’re attracted to traditional conceptions of femininity, or traditional gender roles, that’s somehow incompatible with feminism.

My marketing friends would say that feminism has a serious branding problem.

My first formal exposure to the term “feminism” in an educational context is fairly unusual. It was in middle school, but not at the Catholic middle school that I went to for 7^th and 8^th grade. It was in a philosophy mini-course that I was taking at a local university.

I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, which is the capital city of Canada. The city has two major universities, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. When I was 12 or 13 years old, the universities started offering week-long enrichment opportunities, they called “mini-courses”, to middle school and high school students.

A selection of students, ages 12 to 17, were allowed to pick from a list of mini-courses that would be taught by instructors from the university, and then you’d spend five full days on campus learning biology, astronomy, music, history, whatever.

I got my first opportunity to do one of these when I was in 8^th grade, and I picked a philosophy course, called “Contemporary Moral, Social and Religious Issues”.

Our class had about fifteen students, enough to fit around one of those rectangular conference tables. And that was my first formal introduction to philosophy, at the age of 14.

We covered a set of pretty standard topics, if you’ve ever taken an intro philosophy class. Some basic logic and argument analysis, some normative ethics, some meta-ethics — we did case studies on the ethics of abortion and capital punishment. Some epistemology, the problem of skepticism. Some philosophy of religion, Aquinas’s 5 proofs for the existence of God, the problem of evil, the free will debate.

And we did a unit on the philosophy of feminism, and some related topics, like censorship and pornography.

So my first exposure to feminism was in a philosophy class. That’s very unusual.

And like most intro philosophy that is taught in Anglo-American universities, the focus in this class was on presenting and evaluating arguments, and being clear about the meanings of the terms you’re using.

Not only was my first exposure to feminism in a philosophy class; it was in a philosophy class that was doing classic philosophical reasoning, presenting and evaluating arguments for and against positions that relate to feminist concerns.

No “postmodernism”, no “critical theory”. None of the theoretical buzzwords that are sometimes attached to modern feminism. Just straight, argument-focused philosophy.

Let me tell you how I was introduced to the term “feminism”, in this class.

Descriptive vs Normative Components

This introduction turns on an application of what’s known as the “fact”-“value” distinction, separating factual or descriptive claims, from evaluative or normative claims.

Feminism as a belief system has two distinct components. One is a descriptive component, a set of claims about empirical facts, about how things are, in reality.  The other is a normative component, a set of claim about values, about how things ought to be.

The main descriptive claim is this: Currently, and historically, women have been treated differently from men with respect to a range of important social categories, like legal status, economic status, political status, religious status, and so on.

The more common phrasing is to say that women have been discriminated against, under the law, in government and politics, within the economy, and so on. Women couldn’t vote, women couldn’t own or pass on property, women couldn’t be doctors or lawyers or judges or astronauts, couldn’t travel freely, etc.

Now, in cases where many of these formal barriers have been relaxed, as they are in many modern countries today, the descriptive component asserts that, in spite of these positive changes, there remain a variety of social forces that operate to make it so that the experiences and opportunities for men and women are still discriminatory.

Now, I know this is hard, but it’s really important at this stage not to read the term “discrimination” as implying a negative normative judgment. As a descriptive claim, to “discriminate” simply means to notice differences, and to act in ways that a responsive to those differences.

When I’m carving a turkey and I’m separating the white meat from the dark meat, that’s an act of discrimination. When I pick the larger chocolate bar over the smaller chocolate bar, that’s an act of discrimination. When I pick the tallest kid in class to be on my basketball team, that’s an act of discrimination. Police dogs can discriminate between different smells.

But I’m not doing anything morally wrong by separating white meat from dark meat, or picking the larger chocolate bar over the smaller chocolate bar, or picking the tallest kid to be on my team. The police dog isn’t doing anything wrong when it sniffs out drugs in a piece of luggage.

In the same way, giving some people but not others the right to vote, is an act of discrimination. You’re treating differently people differently. As a pure descriptive claim, that’s morally neutral. It’s a separate issue whether a particular act of discrimination is right or wrong, good or bad, justified or unjustified.

That’s why feminist claims have two components, a descriptive part and a normative part. The descriptive part is just as we said. It’s about noting the various ways that women have been treated differently, and are still treated differently, from men.

The normative part is the claim that these acts of discrimination, or some subset of them, are wrong, they’re not morally justified.

To give a somewhat more contemporary example, if the law makes it impossible for a husband to be convicted of rape against his wife, because it treats the husband as having sexual rights over his wife, one can describe this situation in a morally neutral way, in terms of the differences in the status of men and women under the law, as a descriptive claim.

It’s then a separate thing to say, and this is wrong. This practice is unjust. Women should not be discriminated against in this way. That’s the normative claim.

So, here’s one way of stating what it means to be a feminist, as a set of beliefs:

It’s to believe, (a) that women have, and continue to be be, subject to a wide range of discriminatory practices, and (b) that these discriminatory practices are wrong, they are not morally justified.

If you’re inclined to agree with both of these claims, then you’re philosophically sympathetic to feminism, in principle.

Comments on the Definition

Let me make a few comments about this definition.

First, when you present feminism in this way to people, a very large percentage will agree with both of these component claims. They may still have reservations about the label “feminism”, but it’s not hard to get people to agree to these two claims.

The people who are willing to explicitly challenge either of these two claims, who say “no”, women don’t face discrimination, or “no”, the discrimination that women face is in in fact morally justified — these people are a relatively small percentage of the population in modern, liberal democratic societies, and the percentage decreases significantly with higher levels of education.

This is way of identifying certain kinds of anti-feminist views. For example, a  certain kind of conservative religious view may grant that men and women have different roles to play, different functions, within the public sphere and the private sphere. But they may argue that these differences are morally justified. Men should be the leaders in government and business. Men should be leaders of households. Women should be the primary caregivers of young children. Why? Because those roles are ordained by God, they’re part of the natural order. That’s a certain kind of anti-feminist stance. Grant the descriptive claim, but deny the normative claim.

And you can imagine it going the other way. Grant the normative claim, but deny the descriptive claim. This is not uncommon to hear too, especially among conservatives. They’ll say that today, women have more equality and opportunity than they’ve ever had in human history. They’re not systematically discriminated against.  Whatever differences we see in the status of men and women are the result of the free choices mean and women have made. That’s another form of anti-feminism.

A second feature of this definition is that, by separating the descriptive component from the normative component, you’ve got some tools for analyzing arguments on specific issues.

For example, how do you justify an empirical claim about gender differences or differences in treatment? You use empirical methods, the same methods you use to evaluate claims of empirical fact. You use the methods of the natural and social sciences. And there is decades of data and research across the social sciences documenting the differential status and treatment of women under the law, in the workplace, in education, in the home, etc.

You wouldn’t use those methods to ground a normative judgment. For that you need a normative argument, an argument that appeals to values or moral principles. Like an appeal to happiness, appeal to rights, appeal to freedom and autonomy, appeal to the greater good of society, appeal to religious principles, etc.

These distinctions can be very helpful in thinking through the strengths and weaknesses of various positions, especially if you know what a good moral argument looks like, or a good scientific argument looks like.

A third point to make about this definition of feminism is that it doesn’t say anything about the causes of systematic discrimination. It’s one thing to document patterns of differential treatment of men and women. It’s another thing to try to explain these patterns.

This question opens up a whole other level of theorizing. A lot of feminist theory is actually about this level, different views about the root causes of the systematic patterns that we see in our behavior and our institutions.

This is where we see the distinction between liberal feminism and radical feminism, for example. In a feminist theory course you might study seven or eight distinct theoretical traditions, and you might organize these in chronological order, using the language of first wave, second wave, third wave and fourth wave feminism.

A lot of the criticism you hear directed at feminist theory, by people like Jordan Peterson, is directed at particular theoretical orientations within this larger group of theories, like postmodern feminism.

But it’s important to understand that the project of feminist philosophy is much broader than any of these particular orientations. It’s an umbrella term, like philosophy of religion, or philosophy of biology. It doesn’t pick out any specific theoretical orientation, beyond the two basic components of the feminist belief system that I’ve mentioned.

So, this was my introduction to feminism, at the age of 14. I wasn’t really aware of negative stereotypes about feminism at the time, and this all sounded like a perfectly reasonable way of thinking about it. By the criteria I’ve described here, I’m certainly sympathetic to feminism, and nothing I’ve learned over the past 35 years has changed that.

But it’s important to see that this way of thinking about feminism leaves lots of room for disagreement over specific issues, like how to understand the wage gap between men and women, or to what extent men also suffer from traditional gender norms, or whether there are systematic gender differences in psychological traits. I view these as largely questions for the social and natural sciences, and it shouldn’t be surprising to find disagreements here.

From a critical thinking standpoint, we should be able to evaluate these on an issue-by-issue basis. They shouldn’t become tribal loyalty tests, where if you question the conventional stance on an issue you’re branded a traitor to feminism. But our tribal nature does kick in here pretty hard, it’s very difficult to avoid this entirely.

On the deeper questions about the root causes of the patterns of gender discrimination that we see, I personally lean toward agnosticism. I think these are really hard questions to answer definitively — harder than, I daresay, many feminists appreciate. I think it’s important to say “I don’t know” when you really don’t know.

But I’m actually quite happy that there are many different kinds of feminists who are trying to tackle the problem from different points of view. They may disagree strongly with one another, but I’m inclined to believe that their collective efforts are helping to push the system in a positive direction, for men and women.

Activism and Social Change

Now, what this kind of analysis leaves out of the picture is the component of feminism that relates to activism, to feminism as a social and political movement. That’s by design, once again, in an effort to keep important issues from getting confused.

The question of how to go about changing a social system that one has determined needs to be changed, is its own question. A big part of feminist practice is occupied with this question. But it’s conceptually tied to the question about the root causes of gender discrimination, in the same way that a doctor’s prescription for treating an illness is tied to their diagnosis.

For me, this question is made even harder because it actually compounds two hard questions. The first hard question is, what’s the root cause of the social behaviors that we’re interested in? The second hard question is, how do we intervene in society in such a way that it changes from the state it’s currently in, which we’ve judged to be undesirable, to some new goal state, the state that we want it to be in, which is more desirable. How do we do that?

That’s the general problem of intentional social change. This is partly a social science/social engineering problem — knowing how to intervene to bring about the change you want — and partly an ethical and political problem — knowing how to define the goal state, the state that we think is ethically and politically better than the current state.

The social science and social engineering problem all on its own is extraordinarily difficult. The difficulty has nothing to do with feminism per se. It’s the same problem facing any social change movement. We’re just starting to understand the dynamics of human societies, which are genuinely complex systems. Our ability to predict how society will evolve in response to changes is very limited.

But, social and political realities, and human nature, will always drive us to intervene, drive us to try to steer society in one direction or another. That’s just a reality. So we don’t have much of a choice, these interventions are going to happen.

One of the complaints I have with social change movements in general — the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, political movements of all kinds — is that they’re way too confident that they’ve got the right diagnosis of the social problem they’re trying to solve, and they’re way too confident that the system will respond  in the way they want it to.

In this respect I find myself agreeing with a certain strand of conservatism that emphasizes how poor our predictive powers really are, and the risks we run in trying to make big changes to the social order in a short period of time. There’s no guarantee that we won’t end up in a worse place than where we started.

I don’t think that’s a reason not to pursue progressive social changes, but it is a reason to keep your eyes open, and in some cases to prefer gradual reforms over big, revolutionary changes.

This issue of understanding social change actually connects directly to the next topic that I want to talk about. So let’s move on.

My Introduction to Marxism

Here’s another unpopular “ism”, Marxism.

If you watch a lot of FOX news programming you’ll have heard the claim that the far left is under the influence of a political ideology called “cultural Marxism”, which is bent on undermining the foundations of Western society, and that this ideology has infiltrated its way into the academy over the past several decades. The totalitarian tendencies within cultural Marxism are ultimately the reason why universities have become so intolerant to free speech.You’ve heard that you should think very carefully before sending your child to university. If you do, keep them away from the humanities, because the infection is strongest there.

So, what do I think of these claims? Do they jibe with my experience?

Well, I’m going to start once again with my first exposure to Marxism as a belief system. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I was aware of the cold war with the Soviet Union. When I was in high school, Ronald Reagan was President and Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Soviet Union. I was an undergraduate student at university, studying physics and philosophy, during the last days of the Soviet empire.

A good chunk of the geopolitical history of the 20^th century is a history of conflict between the democratic countries of the West that had embraced some form of capitalism, and the countries in Eastern Europe, Asia and South and Central America that had experienced populist revolutions under the influence of Marx and Engel’s writings on capitalism and class conflict.

So I was a student studying philosophy during this historic moment, witnessing the dissolution of the Soviet Union, on television. And my teachers used this as an opportunity to teach us about the history of Marxism and its relationship to socialism and communism. So we could better understand the significance of what was going on. That’s what good teachers do.

And I in fact had one philosophy professor who was a card-carrying Marxist. And he was the one who was most emphatic in telling us students to pay attention to what was happening in the world right now, because we were witnessing a turning point in world history.

Now, one might expect that a card-carrying Marxist would be saddened by the end of the Soviet Union, but in fact he was very happy to see it fall. This Marxist philosophy professor was horrified by what had become of the communist revolutions of the 20^th century. He was firmly anti-authoritarian, and anti-totalitarian.

So, what does it mean to be a Marxist? what are the beliefs that distinguish Marxists from non-Marxists?

This is how I was introduced to it.

At one level, you can think of Marxism as a theory of history, of the factors that drive historical and social change, at the broadest level. At this level, Marxism is a theoretical orientation within the social sciences, that is associated with a certain way of explaining social change.

(See, I told you this would connect to the discussion we just had about the social change problem.)

At another level, you can think of Marxism as a theory of how economics relates to politics, and more specifically, as a critique of capitalist economics and its associated politics.

Marx’s analysis points to internal contradictions in capitalism that, he claims, will ultimately function to undermine its own goals, of distributing goods and services in a way that optimizes human welfare. Marx believed that capitalist economics naturally leads to conflict between the interests of business owners and the interests of workers who earn a salary from those business owners, and this conflict only grows over time. Capitalism, he argued, feeds on this conflict.

Now, one can study Marxist theories of historical change, and the Marxist critique of capitalism, and learn something valuable, without agreeing with Marx’s views on the ideal socialist state, or the inevitability of socialism, or the role of communism in ushering in socialism. I don’t know anyone who is sympathetic to all aspects of Marx’s views.

I mean, it’s not lost on modern day Marxists that Marx developed his theories in the 19^th century, at the tail end of the industrial revolution. He didn’t have the hindsight that we have, looking back over 100 years of experiments with Marxist-inspired movements and centralized economies. He didn’t see the colossal ethical and political failures that we’ve seen. He didn’t have a modern perspective on human behavior and human psychology. He didn’t see the ways that mixed economies have evolved to buffer class conflict. He didn’t see how technological innovation, driven by capitalist mechanisms, has raised the standard of living across the globe.

Modern day Marxists have all of this background at their disposal. So it should be rare to find today, in academia, a completely unreconstructed Marxist advocating for communist revolutions, centralized economies and the elimination of private property. In 25 years in academia I’ve never met one.

But I have met quite a few people, in the humanities and the sciences, colleagues and friends, who think that Marx’s critique of capitalism still has a lot of insight in it, that it offers a valuable perspective on the state of global capitalism and relationships between the rich and the poor, and that his materialist view of social change is important and insightful.

Because my training is in the philosophy of science, I’ve always been interested in what Marx-inspired approaches to social science look like, just for the sake of having that as a mental model in my head, that could compete with other models, when thinking about social issues.

A Marxist Explanation of Social Change: Case Study – Slavery

Let me give you an example of a Marxist perspective on social change, the very same example that I was given when I student. It’s a thought experiment.

Imagine gathering up a random assortment of a couple thousand people from our modern, technological society. People who believe in equality and human rights and democratic government.

You’re going to deposit this group of people on a big island. You’re going to leave them with all the same values they have now, but you’re going to take away their modern technology, and their knowledge of how modern technology works.

In fact, what you’re going to leave them with is the material and technological resources available to the ancient Egyptians, and the knowledge and ability to produce goods at the level of the ancient Egyptians. All their other modern sensibilities are left intact.

So, this is the setup to this thought experiment. The question we want to consider is this. If we go away, and leave this group of transplanted modern people to develop their own society, and give them several generations to do this, what sort of society do you think they’ll ultimately develop? How will they organize themselves to meet their basic needs?

Here’s the Marxist answer to this question, as I was told it. The Marxist prediction is that when you come back after several generations, what you’ll find is a slave culture. One segment of the population will have enslaved another segment, and slave labor will be central to the economy of this society.

What’s the logic? Ancient Egypt was a slave culture. What made it a slave culture? The Marxist view is that these kinds of social arrangements, which determine how goods and services are produced, are determined by the material culture of a given society.

Material vs Non-Material Culture

What do we mean by “material culture”? We mean the physical objects, resources and spaces that people use to reconstruct their culture, their mode of life, on an ongoing basis. What tools and techniques do you have to manipulate the physical world? How are homes built? How is food made? How are cities organized and managed? How are clothes made? How are material resources processed into useful goods? How are those goods distributed? Who controls the resources? The material culture is the tangible stuff out of which we carve our society and our way of life

The contrast with material culture is non-material culture. These are the intangible aspects of society, the conceptual aspects. Ideas, beliefs, values, ethical norms, worldviews, ideologies. It includes religious beliefs, scientific beliefs, beliefs about human nature, morality, and so on. Sometimes this is called “ideal culture”, in the sense that we’re talking about conceptual things, the world of ideas.

When you describe a society, you’ll describe both aspects, the world of material culture and the world of ideas. When societies change over time, they change in both domains. New technologies and new modes of material production emerge, and new ideas and belief systems also emerge.

But you can ask the question, what is it that determines how societies change over time? What is the engine that drives social change?

Social Idealism

On this question there is a long history of assuming that it is changes in the world of ideas that are the main drivers of social change.

In college, a lot of Western Civ and introductory history is taught this way, as the history of great ideas and how these ideas have shaped history. They even call them “Great Ideas” courses.

So when you study Ancient Greece you learn that the Greeks invented the idea of democracy, of democratic governance. The Romans made great advances in law and government; they invented the concept of “citizenship” as something that could be granted to foreigners.

New scientific and religious ideas push society to change in various ways. During the European Enlightenment we saw the emergence of the idea of the individual as the locus of moral and political reasoning, the individual as a bearer of rights, and society changed accordingly.

This view of social change, as driven by changes in the world of ideas, is known as “social idealism”. Accompanying changes in material culture are seen as caused by, or byproducts of, changes that originate at the level of beliefs and ideas. The world of ideas is the engine that pulls the other train cars along.

Marx was one of the first to articulate a theory of social change that flipped this script. He thought the direction of dependence went the other way; it’s actually changes in material culture that drive social change.

By a change in material culture we mean things like, a new technological innovation, or discovery of a new material resource, or a new way of manipulating the material world, or a new of organizing the production of material goods, or human labor. These changes are reflected in the economic organization of a culture.

Hunter-gatherer cultures, slave labor cultures, feudal cultures … these are all modes of economic organization that have a certain productive efficiency, relative to the background material culture. They arise naturally from within a given material culture.

Marx believed that many cultural values and norms, like beliefs about the morality or immorality of slavery, are reflections of the underlying material and economic order. Their basic function is to rationalize this economic order within the culture. They’re the narrative we tell ourselves to justify and reproduce this economic order.

So, when we ask a question like, why did slavery in America end, a social idealist might say that it ended because of the spread of moral and religious ideas and arguments about the inherent value of all human life, that persuaded people that slavery is morally wrong, and the success of this idea lead ultimately lead to the abandonment of slavery.

That’s an example of a “social idealist” approach to understanding social change.

Social Materialism

A contrasting approach is known as “social materialism”, and Marx is in many respects the founder of this approach, though there are many variants that fall under this label.

A social materialist approach to the slavery question might go like this. Slavery in American didn’t end because people became enlightened about the moral status of slaves. Slavery is a mode of economic production that reflects an underlying material culture. While that mode of production remains efficient and socially functional, people will develop ideas that will rationalize and justify this social order.

Slavery ended when the economics of slavery changed, when technological changes and other material changes made it less competitive, less efficient as a mode of production. These changes in the material culture then caused changes in the world of ideas. We saw the emergence of a new moral consciousness, a new set of beliefs about the moral status of slaves, that served to rationalize a new economic order that no longer relied on slave labor.

You see the difference? Changes in the material culture come first, driven by its own internal logic, and changes in the world of ideas follow as a consequence. As individuals we come to believe that it works the other way, that it was our new ideas that caused people to change their way of life. But on this view, that’s a kind of delusion, a false view of the actual causes of human behavior.

Just so you know, in Marxist terminology, what I’m calling material culture is sometimes called the “base”, or the “sub-structure”, and ideal culture, the world of ideas, is called the “superstructure”.

This completes my presentation of this thought experiment, that I was told many years ago, as an introduction to a Marxist-inspired model of social change, and of the relationship between economics and cultural values.

As a student, this example really did have an impact on me. It was the first time I had ever thought of an ideology as something that might serve an adaptive social function, and come into existence because of that function, quite independent of its actual truth or falsity. And that people living within that culture would come to believe the ideology, but they would not see it for what it is — they would be blind to its true nature.

This is a provocative idea. I’ve since come to learn that, in broad strokes, it’s a very common view in many branches of social science, it’s not necessarily tied to Marx at all. Many evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists hold views like this, for example.

Looking back on this particular example, I would say that it does what a lot of introductory teaching does. It presents a simplified model that tries to capture some important aspect of what in reality everyone recognizes is a more complex situation.

This dichotomy, for example, between social idealism and social materialism, is drawn so starkly that it’s almost a cartoon. Social reality is a complex network of relationships, and distinguishing the “material” from the “ideal” parts is always an exercise in abstraction.

It’s a useful cartoon, because it helps you understand a concept. But Marx was very clear that he thought the direction of causation was reciprocal and dynamic. He didn’t believe that the world of ideas was determined by the material base; but he did believe that the influence of the material base dominated the causal evolution of society over time.

I once did a lecture on Marxism and a student asked me if I was a Marxist, and I was a little taken aback. I said “no”. There are parts that I think are insightful, but don’t agree with enough of his framework to ever call myself a Marxist.

I feel exactly the same about Adam Smith. There are parts that are insightful. Doesn’t make me a free market capitalist. We get to think about these issues for ourselves.

This student was asking because in his whole life he had never heard anyone say anything about Marx that didn’t associate him with the enemies of America.

I told him, as I told all my classes, what I want from you is to learn how to think like Marx. Or Adam Smith. Or Thomas Hobbes. Or Ayn Rand. Or whoever we’re studying. Learn how to see the world through their eyes. Learn how to flip between them, like you’re doing improv and you have to switch between characters on cue. That skill set will pay off in a hundred different ways.

What is Postmodernism?

Now, we started this conversation about Marx with that FOX news worry about so-called “cultural Marxism” and its impact on academia.

I haven’t mentioned cultural Marxism yet, because I’m trying to stick to my own experience, and I confess that in all my years I had never heard that expression used up until a year ago.

However, among the actual Marxists I know, none of them use that term to refer to their own views, and I firmly believe that none of them would recognize themselves in the FOX news description of an intellectual movement that is trying to destroy the capitalist West from within, by indoctrinating students to hate Western values and freedoms.

So, from my end, there’s something fishy about all this, but I think the issue offers a “teachable moment” for us, as they say.

In this section of the show I’m going to try to unpack what’s actually being claimed here.

The claim that conservative critics like Jordan Peterson are making …  and by the way, his defense of this reading seems to be largely based on a book by Stephen Hicks, a libertarian “objectivist” philosopher, a follow of Ayn Rand, called Explaining Postmodernism, which was first published in 2010 … the claim is that Marxist ideas inspired a number of mid-century intellectual movements within so-called Continental philosophy, like French existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and these fed into a later 20^th century movement that came to be called “postmodernism”.

For Hicks and Peterson, postmodernism is associated with epistemological skepticism — the denial that we can actually know anything; moral and cultural relativism — the view that there are no transhistorical, transcultural standards by which we can judge the morality of actions; metaphysical anti-realism — the denial of an external, objectively existing reality beyond our conceptual constructions of such reality; and irrationalism, a belief that norms of good reasoning are not universal, they’re ultimately just a cultural construction, and people are fundamentally driven more by unconscious impulse and emotion than by deliberation and facts and logic.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is a correct reading of a postmodern philosophy. How exactly are these views supposed to connect to Marxism, or left-wing politics more broadly?

How Marxism is Supposed to Connect to Postmodernism and Contemporary Left-Wing Politics

The story is supposed to go something like this. Classical Marxist socialism predicted that anywhere capitalism was in place, there was a working class, a proletariat, that would ultimately revolt against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, and capitalism would collapse. And where such revolutions did take place, and socialism took over, people would be better off.

But that didn’t happen. Recessions and depressions aside, capitalist economies didn’t collapse. And where socialist revolutions did take hold, like in Russia, people weren’t better off. On the contrary, these states experienced corruption and humanitarian disasters.

So, European Marxist intellectuals in the 1930s and 40s watching all this realized that existing Marxist doctrine needed to be modified. In between the the world wars, a group gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, looking to develop a new approach to social theory that could guide progressive politics while avoiding the worst elements of capitalism, fascism and communism. This became what’s known as the Frankfurt School of critical social theory.

The term “critical theory” is used to signify the idea, inspired by a famous quote by Marx, that the goal of social theory isn’t simply to understand society, but to change it, to improve the condition of humanity.

The Frankfurt school held on to certain Marxist principles, but they also drew upon a variety of psychological and philosophical traditions, most notably Freud and Hegel. They wanted to understand, for example, how German socialism turned into Nazi fascism, and how Western culture under capitalism persisted, how Western culture seemed to make the masses willing accomplices in their own exploitation under capitalism.

Critical theory made its way to America after World War II, especially through the influence of Herbert Marcuse, who became a leading figure among the New Left, and the radical politics of the 60s, in America.

Stephen Hicks argues that Frankfurt-style Marxism in 60s and 70s changed its tactics, embracing a new ethic of equality, a new focus on liberation for minority and oppressed groups, and a critique of the culture of mass consumption under Western capitalism.

So instead of focusing on liberating the poor and the working class, their agenda widened to include the liberation of women and other socially marginalized groups. That lead to a new kind of identity politics, which we’re seeing the fruits of today.

Now, Frankfurt school theory continued to evolve in the 60s, 70s and 80s, alongside the views of a number of French intellectuals, like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard.

These are the figures that are most closely commonly associated with the term “postmodernism”. And they, along with a number of other figures, did have a big impact on social and literary theory in the last quarter of the 20^th century, which did find its way into academic departments in the humanities and social sciences.

This is the kind of theory that focuses on how literary meaning isn’t a stable thing, it shifts, and it says things like, what we call physical objects in the world are really nothing more than signs, that acquire their meaning through their relationship to other signs. On this view language doesn’t acquire its meaning by connecting to an objectively existing world outside of language — language connects to language. This is a kind of linguistic anti-realism; it’s language all the way down. There’s no way for thought and language to reach outside itself.

It’s worth noting that the dominant schools of Anglo-American philosophy were much less influenced by postmodern theory than other branches of the humanities. A lot of analytic philosophers, like many of my own professors, didn’t even recognize it as philosophy.

But, just to finish up this digression, what Stephen Hicks and Jordan Peterson are suggesting, when they use this term, “cultural Marxism”, is that this whole evolution of critical social theory and postmodernism was driven by a neo-Marxist ideology that has remained fundamentally hostile to capitalism, and Western society under the influence of capitalism.

What they regard as the relativism and subjectivism and nihilism of postmodern thought is actually, on their view, an ideology that evolved in order to undermine the foundations of western individualism and capitalism, and to enable the kind of identity politics and militant activism and curtailing of free speech that we’re seeing more and more of today.

That, in broad strokes, is their position as far as I understand it.

Elements of Conspiracy?

So, what do I think of all this?

Is there anything to this critique?

Actually, a certain amount of this does ring true. A lot of the history is informative. And there’s certainly a relationship between the culture of identity politics, the theory that’s taught in certain branches of the humanities and social sciences, and Marxism.

But there are also parts that have the air of conspiracy theory. This story requires us to believe that this diverse cast of left-wing intellectuals, from different disciplines and countries, across a span of decades, conspired to develop a postmodern ideology as a strategic tool for undermining Western capitalism and spreading socialism.

There’s nothing in my experience, or my reading of these figures, that would support this.

It’s also concerning that Stephen Hicks’ book, Explaining Postmodernism, which is viewed as the authoritative treatment of this issue among conservative and libertarians critics of the left, wasn’t published by a reputable academic press, and is now published by the author’s own vanity press. That means it doesn’t have to go through anything like the independent peer review process that a reputable academic publisher would require.

The fact is that, among philosophers who aren’t already libertarians or Randians, the book is generally dismissed as a piece of Ayn Rand apologetics that is competently written but distorts the history to fit a polemical agenda.

That doesn’t make it wrong, but vanity publishing is a signal that a scholar’s ideas wouldn’t pass critical peer review among recognized experts in their field, and that’s worth knowing.

Essence and Construction: A Clash of Intellectual Cultures

However, like I said, there is something here that rings true. Many philosophers who are critical of postmodern social theory see the whole project as at odds with the spirit of traditional philosophical inquiry.

It does seem like, in many cases, certain philosophical and scientific doctrines are rejected because of their political implications, because of a belief that, if one was to accept them, that would make it harder to promote an ethical or political goal.

Like, if you view women and men as suffering under a culture that prescribes certain gender roles, and you want to liberate people from these prescribed roles, one way you can do that is promote the idea that gender is a social construction, and gender identities are therefore not fixed, they’re malleable, changeable.

But then how do you respond to scientists studying the neurological or evolutionary basis of gender differences? Theories that may suggest that these differences are, to some extent, an essential feature of our biology?

The traditional philosophical attitude to this would be to hold the science to a high standard, be very careful not to draw conclusions that go beyond the data, but be open to the conclusion, and be willing to update our beliefs accordingly, as the research continues to evolve and mature.

It would not be to critically condemn the whole project as sexist or anti-feminist, or assume that the science must be biased and unreliable and object to giving it a hearing at all.

But that is an attitude that one sometime encounters among left-leaning critics.

And I know it’s a source of frustration for many philosophers who view themselves as progressive or left-leaning anyway, as allies, but who are repelled by this rhetorical strategy, this way of engaging with views that are perceived as threatening to a political agenda, even when it’s an agenda they may support.

This whole topic reminds me of a course that I took back in grad school, that was remarkable — in fact it became legendary, students in the department talked about it for years. This course was titled “Essence and Construction”, and it brought together six philosophy graduate students, and six students from the graduate program in Theory and Criticism, but it was taught by a philosopher.

Let me just set this up a bit.

The philosophy graduate program that I attended was at the University of Western Ontario, now called Western University, and that program was dominated by history and philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and the various core branches of philosophy — epistemology, metaphysics, value theory — in the analytic mode. The department as a whole, back then, was largely hostile to Continental philosophy and postmodernism. It certainly wasn’t the program you would you attend if you were really interested in studying these writers.

In 1990 the university set up an interdisciplinary graduate program called The Center for Theory and Criticism. Faculty who taught in this program had a home-base in some other department — English, Anthropology, Art History, Sociology, Media Studies, etc. If you were a student and wanted to do a Masters degree on, say, Foucault and the body, or Black cinema and post-colonial studies, that’s the program you would take.  This program still exists, by the way, I think it’s one of the oldest university programs of this kind in North America.

Now, at Western, the Philosophy Department and the Center for Theory and Criticism had virtually no interaction. We were in different buildings, their students didn’t take our courses, and some of our students sat in on theirs, but at the time, we didn’t offer anything they were interested in.

But one year, in 94 or 95, one of our philosophy faculty members, John Thorpe, decided to run a graduate seminar on the topic of essence and construction. Are categories like race, gender and sexual orientation essential features of human beings, or are they social constructions of some kind?

This was obviously a topic that would be of interest to students in Theory and Criticism, so it was advertised to those students as well, and in the end we had six students from Philosophy and six from Theory and Criticism, and I was one of the philosophy students.

John Thorpe was a middle-aged, bearded, straight white man — a very sweet, smart guy, whose academic speciality was Ancient philosophy, mostly Aristotle. He had a long-standing interest in these issues about the status of gender and race and sexual orientation, but they were sort of a hobby interest, they weren’t his main area of expertise.

John also viewed himself as a progressive ally of women’s rights, minority rights, LGBTQ rights. In his personal life he was actually a church-goer, I forget the denomination, but theologically he was very liberal, and he had a track record of giving presentations to church groups on the history of church attitudes toward homosexuality, and on textual readings of old and new testament scripture, like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, that actually supported a tolerant view of homosexuality. He wanted to promote acceptance of gays and lesbians within the church and reduce discrimination against them. So, like I said, he thought of himself as an ally.

For the curriculum that he had planned, he had a list of historical and contemporary readings from philosophy and science that were relevant to this debate over essentialism versus constructivism. What do we mean by essentialism and constructivism? Difference senses of both of these terms. Essentialism and gender in Ancient philosophy. Attitudes toward homosexuality in the early church. Sex, gender and race in medieval thought. The origins of the concept of the homosexual as a type of person, rather than as a behavior. Gender essentialism in Freud and psychoanalytic theory, and so on.

And he included some important figures who have argued for constructivism from a social theory perspective. I think he had Foucault in there, and a couple others. But he also included articles on the biology of sex and gender, Darwinian explanations for the evolution of homosexuality, and so on, to get that perspective, and some papers by analytic philosophers on the contemporary debate about essentialism and constructivism.

That was his plan. It was a great set of readings, I wish is still had it.

First day the philosophers walk into the seminar room, and take our seat around this rectangular conference table. We looked very unassuming, philosophy students don’t have a reputation for dressing flashy.

Then the six theory and criticism students come in, and you couldn’t not notice a difference.

One was a slim female student, buttoned up man’s shirt, almost completely bald, nose piercing.

Another was an older male student, looked to be a little over thirty. Leather vest, bare arms. Long hair. A lot of tattoos. A lot of piercings. And on his upper arms, and you could see on his chest, he had scars, in regular patterns, like they were branded. Like he had branded himself, or someone had done it to it.

And they all came in and sat down. Not all of them were visually so striking, but as we came to learn over time, three of the six identified as queer in some way, all were activists or identified with activism in some capacity, and our guy with the long hair was into S&M, and those were indeed self-inflicted scars.

And the first thing I thought, when we sat down and did our introductions and heard what everyone was working on in their studies, was … this topic, essence and construction, was not an academic issue for these students, in the sense of something that one can treat dispassionately, at a distance. This is their life. They’re literally wearing their commitments, and the meaning that they’re trying to make of their identities, on their bodies.

And I looked at our instructor — our straight, white, male instructor, who wanted to talk about sexuality, race and gender —  and I looked at the curriculum he had prepared, and thought, oh John, this isn’t going to go the way you planned.

In the first class John did an introductory lecture on essentialism in Greek philosophy, and did some conceptual analysis on the concept of essentialism, distinguishing different senses with which we can use that word.

All the philosophers are taking notes, asking questions, treating this like an ordinary seminar. The theory and criticism students were pretty quiet, like they were struggling to understand the point of this.

One of them starting talking about a more contemporary issue, that really didn’t have much to do with the lecture, and the rest of them got into it, and you could see John trying to steer things back to his lecture.

Next class, a couple of the theory and criticism students wanted to talk about the syllabus. Why are there so few women authors? Why are there no black women? They wanted to diversify the syllabus. And they insisted on it. Like, this is going to be an issue. We’re going to have renegotiate this curriculum.

None of us philosophy students could imagine doing this in a class, but these students were obviously comfortable doing this.

Well John was a little surprised but he was very willing to accommodate, so we ended up cutting some stuff out and adding readings from bell hooks and Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous and Frantz Fanon, very prominent figures in post-structuralist feminism and post-colonial theory.

But John had a line of thought that he wanted to cover too, so he plugged away, but it was very hard to keep the classes on track. The theory and criticism students were constantly questioning the point of what he was doing, and interrogating the way he was doing it. Like there was something suspicious about the methods of inquiry that he was using, which for us were standard methods of logical and conceptual and historical analysis. For them, he wasn’t sufficiently “problematizing this discourse” that he was engaging in, in the way that they thought was important.

A had a couple visits with John in his office early in the term. I remember him saying, “Kevin, I’ve never experienced anything like this.”

John eventually kind of gave up on his agenda, and he let the class evolve spontaneously.

And as we got to know each other better, we did have some really great, open conversations in this class.

But John never earned their trust as an authority in that class.

I remember having coffee with the bald female student one afternoon and she asked me, “So, Professor Thorpe . … what is his deal?” He seemed to her a like a caricature of a white, male egghead professor who didn’t have a clue about what was really at stake in these issues.  And she couldn’t figure out what he was trying to defend. Like, why are we reading articles on Darwin and the evolution of homosexuality? How is this helping us understand systematic oppression, or the specific experiences of gender and sexual identity of people like her?

And I have to say, I was quite sympathetic to where she was coming from. It was clear that we were experiencing a clash of intellectual cultures, that our respective groups had each been socialized into a certain way of thinking about how to think about philosophical or social or scientific issues.  And we were seeing the contours our socialization, the boundaries of our default modes of thinking, in our responses to one another, in the reactions of our respective groups.

Breaking Through

But I did learn something important from this experience. In spite of our differences, we were able to negotiate a space where we could communicate and share, and learn something from one another.

That came with time, and familiarity, and trust, like any relationship.

That student with the tattoos and scarring was an interesting character. He actually passed around fliers to an S&M club event that was going on the following week, sort of an open house for newbies.

My favorite conversation with him was at the graduate student pub on afternoon, late in the term. He talked about his tattoos and his scars, and his interest in S&M. He was actually doing his Masters on Foucault and the body, with an application to the kinds of practices that he was engaged in. And we talked about how different people react when change your body, and how self and autonomy are related to bodily identity, and how bodies are exposed to, and part of, the material culture of society, and about the cultural history of body marking and scarification, and about who has power over your body, and what sorts of practices reinforce or disrupt those power relations, and about pain, and the connection between pain and pleasure and bodily identity.

I talked about an experience I had of wiping out on my bike and tumbling down a ravine. I was skinned up and down my legs, but I told him, I remember picking up my twisted bike and carrying it back up to the road side, and my body was just humming, like it had electricity all through, the endorphins really kicking in, and I felt so alive and aware, because my body was so alive and aware, and he said yeah, that’s it. Pain can broaden your awareness. It reminds us of what we are, our material nature, and how vulnerable we are, but also what we’re capable of, that we easily lose touch with.

It was a fascinating conversation. Obviously very personal to him. And we even talked about whether this S&M thing he was into was actually good for him. He had just had a kid recently, still a toddler, but the prospect of his kid growing up and becoming aware of his proclivities and lifestyle choices, was upsetting to him. He didn’t want his kid to be exposed to all of that at an impressionable age. He was genuinely conflicted about what this meant to him.

And here’s the lesson. I learned more about Foucault and the body, and the kinds of concerns that motivate postmodern theory and criticism, in this conversation with an actual human being, than in any of the reading I had done up to that point.

Yes, we had some difficulties communicating. But our shared, lived experiences, our shared humanity, is a bridge that connects us. When differences in intellectual culture are a barrier to communication, and you’re struggling to understand how a person could think a certain way, the solution is to get closer, get more personal. Try to discover how that person experiences their world, in concrete terms. Look for correlates in your own experience. It’s in that place where you’re best able to see why the intellectual concepts they use are illuminating to them.

Curiosity and Empathy as Tools of Understanding

This lesson has stayed with me. It’s become part of my philosophy of  critical thinking. If you’ve been following me you know I place a lot of emphasis on empathy as a tool of understanding.

The best way to understand a position that is very different from the one you hold, is to get closer to the person who holds that view, to open yourself up to their perspective on the world; and from that perspective, to reconstruct the standpoint from which that position seems utterly natural and compelling.

If you can do this, then you’re in the best position to engage in a productive dialogue with this person, and you’re in the best position to persuade them, if that’s your goal.

But you’re also in the best position to actually learn something new, something valuable; to add to your storehouse of insight and understanding.

In my experience, even the most unpopular views can have nuggets of insight, if you’re willing to look for them. I don’t like missing out on the nuggets.

I also like people. Learning how a person sees the world is a great way to get to know them.

This lesson has always served me well personally … but not always professionally.

I was taught, as part of my socialization as a professional philosopher, working in the analytic tradition, that postmodernism was the enemy of clear thinking. It obscured more than it enlightened. As philosophy, once you cleared away the dense verbal underbrush, postmodern thought was either shallow, unoriginal, or false. I was told, by people I respected, that the figureheads of postmodernism are charlatans who managed to trick a generation of non-philosophers into thinking they’re profound.

I felt the tribal pull of this position, to so confidently carve the world into real scholars worth listening to, and everyone else.

Part of the process of professionalization, in any field, is learning how the sub-cultures of your profession draw these lines.

But in my case, curiosity usually got the better of me. I’d find myself reading people who I wouldn’t admit to reading in mixed company. And being very interested in people, like the students in this essence and construction class, who had a very different outlook on the world.

I think I’ve always been more interested in how people come to hold the views they do, why they find them so compelling, than in the truth or falsity of the views themselves.

That may sound odd for a philosopher to say, since we seem to be preoccupied with truth, but I include in this category of “how people come to hold the views they do”, the role that arguments play in convincing oneself of the views one holds.

When I learn about the arguments that you find convincing, or not convincing, I’m learning something about YOU. This I find endlessly fascinating.

These questions also make sense of my interest in the psychology of persuasion and influence, which is again, focused on the people who hold a given view, and how they come to hold, rather than the view itself.

It’s Easy When Everyone Else is a Charlatan …

But let’s bring this back around to where started.  My email friend asked me what I thought of Jordan Peterson. What does this all this talk about coming to understand someone have to do with Jordan Peterson, and the raving fans he’s attracted, and the condemnation he’s receiving from critics of all sorts?

Well, let me share a secret with you. Criticizing a popular intellectual figure or movement is easy. If they have an ambitious vision or a theoretical framework that attracts a lot of attention, it’s even easier.

It’s especially easy if you’ve identified your preferred intellectual style, your intellectual home base, as the only one that offers real insight, the only one that can get to the heart of what’s really important. From that position, everything else is either shallow, unoriginal, blinkered, or false. And it’s easy to demonstrate why this is so.

This is what Stephen Hicks did in his book-length critique of Marxism and postmodernism. A satisfying takedown.

This is what my analytic philosophy mentors did in their critique of postmodernism. Devastating.

This is what post-structuralist and postmodern critics of analytic philosophy have been doing for decades. A brilliant unmasking.

This what historians of philosophy and postmodernism did when they revealed Stephen Hicks’ critique of postmodernism as right-wing conspiracy and Ayn Rand propaganda. Brutal, embarrassing.

This is what conservative critics have been doing to feminist and progressive philosophies. Revealing them for the anti-social sickness that they are.

This is what feminist and progressive critics have been doing to conservative philosophies. Unpacking the racism, sexism and authoritarianism that animates this regressive ideology.

Every side has their champion, who crushes the opposition. Every. Side.

Jordan Peterson is a champion of conservative values who crushes leftist opposition wherever he goes.

And surrounding Jordan Peterson is an array of opposing champions, housed within their respective intellectual camps — leftists, feminists, philosophers and scientists of many stripes — who can easily show that Jordan Peterson is a charlatan, a purveyor of evolutionary pseudoscience, a Christian anti-intellectual moralist, a paranoid authoritarian, a master of unfalsifiable, unscientific Jungian bullshit.

Easily show. It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t ignorant or blinded by right wing ideology.

Or, so it seems from that side of the fence.

From the other side, the side of Jordan Peterson’s supporters, it’s not obvious at all. From their side, every attack misses the mark. Every critic misreads or willfully distorts what he says. Every critical essay is a one-sided “hit piece”. The growing number of critical voices isn’t a sign of weakness in his views; it’s a sign that the opposition fears him and wants to silence his message. If anything, it’s a measure of the strength of his prophetic vision that it has inspired such hostile, unhinged opposition.

Do you see the problem?

The Cost of Identifying With an Ideology

Once you start playing this game, of taking sides, fortifying positions, identifying with your team — there are attractions; you get to enjoy solidarity and community with like-minded people, a sense of shared mission and purpose — but you will be a creature of the game from that point forward.

There are places where your mind won’t be allowed to go. There are insights that you won’t be able to recognize. The rules of the game won’t allow it.

And there’s no winning this game. There will always be new teams to face off against. The struggle never ends.

A Way Forward

I want you to consider another option — the “War Games” option, if you’re old enough to the get the reference: sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.

That might sound like I’m asking you not to take sides. That’s not it.

What I’m asking you to do is resist the pull to take the sides of ideologies, to identify yourself with abstract belief systems.

I do want you to take sides. I want you to take the sides of people. Real people. People in all their lived, embodied, experienced complexity.

People are not ideologies. People are not belief systems.

People have fears and doubts and joys and values and aspirations. People have identities, and points of view. People have stories they tell to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

And when I say “take the sides of people”, I don’t mean agree with them. I what we’ve been talking about this whole episode. Try to adopt their point of view, try to see what the world looks like from their side. In that moment you have an opportunity to really learn something new.

When you adopt this stance, the interesting question isn’t whether Jordan Peterson’s views, or anyone else’s views, are vulnerable to criticism. Of course they are.

The interesting question is why people respond to him the way they do, on both sides of the fence, both supporters and opponents.

If you can understand that, then you’re in the best position see a path, a way forward, that others can’t see, and create a new conversation that changes the rules of the game.