Rehabilitating the ethical life as key to reinhabiting place
People with character set the standard for excellence. The fact is, moral character is the DNA of success and happiness.
'Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.' (Aristotle)
I’d never heard of Jordan Peterson until a week or so ago. Then I came to be involved in an incendiary ‘debate’ in which some very conflictual voices identifying themselves as left reacted very aggressively to suggestions from others that there are lessons for the left to learn from what Jordan Peterson has to say. (see previous blog, I could add much more to that, if I had time to waste).
I noted that Peterson conflates the left as cultural Marxists, postmodernists, social constructivists, identarians as some homogeneous group. The criticisms that Peterson makes of ‘cultural marxism’ do not apply to my reading of Marx at all. But putting that to one side, for now, reading further and deeper, I find myself in broad agreement with Peterson on key questions. And the ultimate irony is that Marx would be too. The issue of 'cultural marxism' is a red herring which skews the direction of Peterson's work.
An important point to establish from the first, then, is that what Peterson criticizes ‘cultural marxism’ is not the source of the modern world’s predicament but one of its expressions on the left in politics. It is the counterpart of the libertarianism and anarchism of the rich and powerful on the right in politics. At the source of this division is a liberal ontology based on self-possession and separation between individual and society, the split between fact and value, the inversion of means and ends, and the capitalist disembedding of exchange value from ethical, communal, social and ecological limits. Now that’s what my work examines at length. And perhaps there’s the point – the left needs to pull clear of the debacle of liberalism as it dissolves every common purpose and social tie and reconstitute itself around a true ethical ground. If not, it will be mistaken as the architect of modern ills, and not a symptom of them. People miseducated in modern obsessions would be surprised to discover how much Marx has in common with critics of cultural marxism. I'd go further, with respect to my attempt to recover the transcendent as the foundation of Marx's emancipatory claims, to say that Marx may well be surprised to. But that is to give expression to my own theme, values and interests which are independent of Marx's authority. Marx needs God and a true understanding of the religious ethic, otherwise his liberatory project very easily backfires to absorb us all in a universal self- and mutual hatred on earth. Such is the conclusion I drew in my recent Marx work.
This year, on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birthday, I issued a couple of works on Marx, one on his importance as a metabolic thinker, the other on his character as an essentialist. Marx believed that there were such things as human nature and nature, that these things were much more than social constructions. The point is important. I argue strongly that Marx could only criticise the capital system as a dehumanisation on account of holding to a conception of human nature. His rejection of dehumanisation comes with the corollary that Marx had some firm and clear idea of what a truly human society of truly human beings looks like. I argue at length that this is precisely Marx’s position. The great irony is that this places Marx with some very traditional and conservative, even theological voices, against the left and its dissolution in its turn to libertarian narcissism and identity.
I receive articles and notifications from right across the spectrum. I read without prejudice. And so today I received this article from The Claremont Institute: Recovering the American Idea.
The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon
Posted: August 1, 2018
This article appeared in: Volume XVIII, Number 3, Summer 2018
I read out of genuine intellectual curiosity to see who this man was whose ideas had caused such vituperation and conflict and downright nastiness on a forum of which I am a member.
Read the article yourself, without prejudice.
If he is conservative and right wing, rather than reject him, ask yourself why so many are finding him so plausible. I’d suggest that there is a long overdue reaction against the culturally and ethically libertarian and identarian politics of the liberal left, and that Peterson’s popularity is a warning to the left to get real again, come out of the fantasy world of deconstruction and social constructivism.
Because I have to say, there is plenty here not only with which I agree, but which I have already written myself, in relation to Marx.
‘To appreciate Peterson’s popularity fully, one must look at the massive social and political transformation underway as America’s 75-year-old Age of Television draws to a close. Its demise is closely related to the collapse of the liberal establishment’s “Blue Church”—a metaphor popularized by Jordan Greenhall’s essays on Medium.com. Greenhall, a tech entrepreneur with a law degree, explains the 2016 election as a “revolutionary war” that saw the end of television as a centralized, top-down method for reinforcing a dominant moral-political “narrative”—a set of authoritative customs that have defined American culture. Television powerfully reflected and enforced liberalism’s quasi-religious authority, respectability, and expertise—a process thoughtfully explicated by another Canadian, Marshall McLuhan.’
‘The crumbling of the liberal establishment’s moral orthodoxy is superintended by the nation’s first exuberantly anti-P.C. president.’
‘Jordan Peterson, however, is deeply worried. “There’s a reasonable possibility that things are going to go very wrong, very soon...for all of us,” he remarked in one video interview. “We’re playing with fire.” With the centrist accord on what constitutes respectable opinion falling apart—especially on the most sensitive issues of race and sex—political extremists at both poles are rushing to stake new claims. The “alt-right” sees itself as a new counterculture, gleefully embracing a shock-and-awe strategy to leverage digital vulgarity. Meanwhile, the zealous Left on and off campus has beaten the plowshares of postmodern views on identity and social construction into swords for tribal warfare.’
In numerous blogs on this site I have made these very points. I have argued the case at length in a number of dense academic texts, particularly picking up on themes developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. I direct people to those works. Here, I merely want it as a matter of record that the themes and issues that Jordan Peterson is raising are ones that have been central to my own work for decades – I have warned from within the left that they have ceased to be genuinely left, in terms of key themes of class, exploitation, morality, authority, human nature and nature, universal principles and values and have instead become liberal and libertarian, sophistic and empty. And I have warned that social constructivism is inherently totalitarian.
So put my with other left voices who have issued warnings, and are not preparing to take their leave of this corrupted, bastardised, culturalist distortion of Marx and Marxism.
‘For calling out the resultant anti-intellectualism, such eminent men of the Left as Noam Chomsky, Stanley Fish, and Steven Pinker find themselves attacked as enemies of the new progressivism. In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which has been sharing the bestseller list with 12 Rules, Pinker deplores the irrationalism of the regressive Left, and seems to accept or even welcome his prospective excommunication from the Blue Church.’
I’ve criticised Pinker myself, but on other grounds. I support him on science and reason, on his notions of nature and innatism, wholly consistent with my view of essentialism. And I wouldn’t wait for, or be worried about, excommunication – your only obligation is to truth, subscribing to both intellectual and moral virtue. In the second volume of my new Marx studies there is a long section on Chomsky’s innatist rationalism in relation to essentialism. Both Stephen and Susan Pinker have been criticised on these grounds (I love Susan Pinker’s book The Sexual Paradox). Such thinkers are vilified as apologists for patriarchy and other forms of oppression. Such criticisms are the plainest politics, and tommyrot, and we shouldn't be shy to say so – these critics are sophists, very organized, very vocal, bullying rather than arguing, and enforcing conformity by their aggressive, accusative tone. And I can’t be excommunicated from this ‘cultural Marxism,’ because I’ve never been a member. And neither has Marx for that matter.
‘Enlightenment Now defends the Age of Reason and its heroes: Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and the other scientific conquistadors who gave us the New World. If the political center cannot hold, then perhaps—as Pinker suggests—scientific progress can provide surer ground for our comfort and safety.’
Marx, certainly, defended the achievements of capitalist modernity – his socialism is premised on those very advances in the forces of production. Remove those achievements, and socialism has no grounding, is merely a good idea to be imposed on a recalcitrant reality and humanity. But Marx, I argue, is a critical post-Enlightenment figure, hence my criticism of Pinker here. Marx took the high road of modernity, but that road was not some uni-linear development following automatically from the expansion of scientific knowledge and technological capacity.
‘But there are deep questions about the underpinnings of modern science. The 20th century’s greatest statesman, Winston Churchill, and greatest philosophic thinker, Leo Strauss, both doubted the utopian presumption that science could liberate mankind from all restraint and hardship. Churchill warned against the possibility of a new Dark Age, “made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” Strauss observed that “while science has increased man’s power in ways that former men never dreamt of, it is absolutely incapable of telling men how to use that power.”’
The split between science and ethics, fact and value, has worked to block the realization of the emancipatory potentialities of modernity. So my reading is very much in line with the critical view of modern rationalisation taken by this article. I have sought to spell this point out in big capital letters – Nature offers us no firm foundations or grounding, no solution to the dilemmas and conflicts of politics, the relations between humanity-society-nature are much more intricate, complicated and nuanced. I have courted controversy with friends and colleagues in the environmental movement by arguing explicitly against naturalism, exposing its inadequacies. I stand by my argument in this respect.
And now I see Jordan Peterson arguing something similar.
‘Nature, with its quirks and quarks and charmed particles, appears far more mysterious and less manipulable than the Cartesian rationalists thought. Strange and indifferent, the universe would seem to offer no support to the ancient philosophers’ aspiration for a cosmological ground of virtue; but neither does it anymore underwrite the modern desire for a natural predictability and lawfulness that could be counted on to help liberate mankind from necessity. Those seeking refuge from the chaos of politics will find little comfort in quantum indeterminacy.’
This hits the nail smack on the head, and makes a point I have laboured in repetition over the years. I used to feel apologetic about the repetitive nature of my writings and its key themes, but I feel somewhat vindicated.
I cited Strauss’ argument for politics as the search for the good political regime in my thesis on Marx – I’ve been mixing sources all along. Jordan Peterson, like Leo Strauss before him sees the Enlightenment as a utopian project that is a dead end. One of my favourite philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre, shows why it is a moral dead end.
In his first book, Maps of Meaning (1999), Peterson writes:
‘Prior to the time of Descartes, Bacon and Newton man lived in an animated, spiritual world, saturated with meaning, imbued with moral purpose. The nature of this purpose was revealed in the stories people told each other—stories about the structure of the cosmos, and the place of man. But now we think empirically (at least we think we think empirically), and the spirits that once inhabited the universe have vanished.’
Peterson’s project is to rehabilitate the wisdom of this pre-scientific understanding by melding together three modern approaches to find a non-arbitrary ground of spiritual meaning amid the dislocations of modern life. The moral framework he constructs combines neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and Jungian analytical psychology.
That's not quite the way I frame the themes that Peterson addresses, although it is worth pointing out that Lewis Mumford - a thinker I rate very highly indeed - was attracted to Carl Gustav Jung, in whose ideas Mumford found corroboration for his own view on the eternal importance of ritual and tradition. Mumford read Jung's account of how he overcame his personal demons as a warning on the perils of fast-paced change and on the importance of the points of support and stability that had enabled Jung to keep his balance and sanity —clear, agreed-upon and shared values, recognizable faces and landmarks, social proximity, work, family and steady vocational duties — "Whatever be your lot, work is best for you," said Hesiod. Mumford and Jung (and Freud for that matter) saw all of this threatened in a growth-driven age that proceeds without reference to a scale of values.
Mumford put the key question: what is required, morally and institutionally, to enable us to keep hold of to these traditional values and supports? Jung saw the unconscious as not merely the "hiding place of the demons but the province of angels and ministers of grace." This is what Mumford responded to. These archetypes, as Mumford appreciated, were ideas and Social practices thousands of years in the making, forces that gave the ethical direction that brought unity and health. To ignore these values and experiences in an attempt to escape into a future, seduced by the false prospectus of progress, is to mistake forward movement for retreat and rout. "Our cult of progress," Jung wrote, "is in danger of imposing on us even more childish dreams of the future, the harder it presses us to escape from the past." Mumford agreed: To escape from the past into an unknown future in pursuit of "progress," Mumford warned, is "an excellent prescription for sending mankind to the looney bin." The task before us is to recover the autonomous functions, orderly processes and stabilizing associations that were being surrendered to the Megamachine and restore them to a society organised around the village virtues. (see Miller in Hughes and Hughes, Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual 1990).
I agree very much. And if certain sections of the liberal left find such investigations objectionable, whether in the books of Jordan Peterson or Mumford or whoever, then so much the worse for them; it speaks volumes about the dulling of their critical faculties and intellectual curiosity. And it promises a monstrous totalitarianism in practice. In Mumford's terms, these supposed radicals are not radicals at all, they continue the etherealization of mind which is an essential support of the Megamachine.
My project is rehabilitation of the ethical life related to a reinhabitation in terms of community and place. I draw on different sources and traditions to Peterson. But he is onto something, hence he has struck a powerful chord with so many.
Read the rest of the article. Karl Marx famously declared ‘I am not a Marxist.’ If Marx were around today, he would be positively opposing cultural Marxism. I certainly do – reality is much more than a socio-cultural construction. Hence the emphasis I place on Marx’s essentialist categories of form, necessity, lines of development etc.
Peterson has been criticised for his lack of academic rigor in conflating Marxists, postmodern deconstructionists, and feminists. I made that criticism myself, distinguishing my own writing on Marx from such figures, showing how Marx’s critical concerns are diametrically opposed to them. But that’s beside the issue with Peterson, his significance lies elsewhere.
‘His intent is to refute all “blank slate” doctrines that deny our biological hard-wiring and teach the same disastrous lesson: humans are merely social artifacts with no inherent or evolved nature. From there it is but a quick step to insisting that any differences in abilities or interests leading to disparate outcomes are arbitrary and unjust, and that men and women are essentially the same. This last emphatically erroneous point is of particular concern to Peterson, because it is at the root of so much of the unhappiness he sees in his clinical practice; not to mention that a society incapable of supporting stable families and raising healthy, well-adjusted children won’t long survive.’
I shall take the opportunity here to make the point that this has also been my intent over the years with respect to reinstating Marx’s essentialism. And I am glad now that I took time earlier in the year to write a second volume on Marx as an essentialist thinker against all notions of a ‘blank state’ constructivism.
I read further, and find more commonalities between Peterson and my own work.
‘Peterson sometimes argues against pursuing happiness, in the sense of pleasure or instant gratification. He makes clear elsewhere that he agrees with Aristotle that eudaimonia—the happiness of the well-lived life—is the true goal.’
Over and over again I have argued this as the basis of rational freedom in contradistinction to libertarian freedom.
‘In a perceptive Weekly Standard review of 12 Rules, Tanner Greer wrote that because Peterson is on a “quest to totalitarian-proof the Western world,” his target audience is civilization itself. Indeed, Peterson says he wants to immunize people against “ideological possession” by guiding readers away from extremism and toward a purposeful self-understanding that cultivates moderation, courage, and independent thinking. His enmity toward the alt-right has not gone unnoticed. Richard Spencer and his followers call him the “Cuck of Canuckistan,” even as leftists routinely assail him as a crypto-fascist.’
In the vituperative exchanges that followed a declaration of interest in Peterson, I avoided defence or criticism of the man. I’m reading. I don’t see an apologist of ‘white male privilege,’ I don’t see a right wing voice. I do see someone trying to steer a position, through Aristotelian moderation, between alt-right and alt-left, that is, ideologues of all types, putting their dogs into a pit to fight.
‘Generally, the most insightful reviews of Peterson’s work are by believing Christians, who seem to welcome anyone with a sympathetic appreciation for the Bible. These reviewers acknowledge Peterson as an insightful interpreter of Scripture.’
Praise be, there’s some sense out there after all.
‘Yet Peterson sidesteps the question of whether he is himself a believing Christian, and hints that he is agnostic. Some critics refuse to accept Peterson’s half-loaf of Scripture without God. They conclude, with Friedrich Nietzsche among others, that there is no Christian morality without Christ. But Peterson is actually correct, without ever quite saying how, in suggesting that God and His Word can be understood separately, that it’s possible to see the Old Testament as one among many ancient stories, and yet somehow radically different. He sees the centrality of the Bible for Western civilization, but misses something essential.’
My third volume of writings on Marx this year (references at the bottom) offers a critique of Marx which restores the truth of religious reality and experience. And here there is a long and involved chapter on Nietzsche and his criticism of those who rejected a belief in God and who yet retained a belief in moral terms whose content itself derived from the existence of God. I make the strong case for God and religion. So the above passage is very timely with respect to my own writing this year – it is directly pertinent to the themes I have been addressing.
The article goes on to discuss the radical unknowability of God. Please read, because this is key, as atheist scientists such as theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman are arguing for the need to live into the unknowable future with faith and courage, playing our part in the endlessly creative universe.
‘Thus in Peterson’s idiosyncratic—and likely problematic—melding of myth, existentialism, and neuroscience, the truth is mysterious but somehow real; it is both pre- and post-philosophic. From this murky well he nevertheless draws sensible advice and clear moral guidance.
Contrast his practical wisdom to the young and not-so-young technocrats who propose to create “Society 4.0” through computerized mechanisms and solutions, such as blockchain, crypto-currencies, digital crowdsourcing, and artificial intelligence. Some rather fanciful proposals for re-engineering society even draw explicitly on science fiction. More ominously, the enormous creativity and ingenuity in Silicon Valley have led some internet entrepreneurs to foresee the emergence of a superior “creator” class that will furnish the transfigurative ideas for society’s ultimate metamorphosis. Only a few, most notably Peter Thiel, seem to appreciate that while Asimov may fire our imaginations, it is still Aristotle who grounds us in reality.
The hubristic yet fanciful ideas of these keyboard legislators, seen alongside the Peterson phenomenon, should prompt political philosophers to consider what role, if any, they intend to play in our unfolding political drama, and to reflect on why no book by one of their own has engaged the popular imagination in this way since Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind 31 years ago.’
If I may, I’ve been something very similar to Peterson over the past two decades.
‘Almost alone among academic departments, biology—especially evolutionary biology—defends human naturalness and sociability, and thus opens a door to lead public opinion back to Aristotle’s acknowledgement of man as “the political animal.” With postmodernism now insisting not only on the social construction of gender, but even of biological sex—“Some men have a uterus,” a Planned Parenthood affiliate informed the world—evolutionary biologists deserve, and would profit from, modern Aristotelians’ insight and support.’
I’ve been doing my very best.
Spirited Engagement
Jordan Peterson concludes an article he wrote in an academic journal article with this non-academic call to spirited engagement:
Life is not the constant shrinking away from the terror of death…. It is that which keeps the spectre of mortality at bay, while we work diligently, creatively, at work whose meaning is so powerful and self-evident that the burden of existence seems well worth bearing. Terror management, be damned! The path of the eternal hero beckons, and it is a doomed and dangerous fool who turns his back on it.
I try to keep out of controversies on this on by simply stating the ethics, politics and metaphysics positively. I don’t need a thousandth of the flack that came down on the heads of those who, from the left, dared to suggest that the arguments of Jordan Peterson resonate with them. But I do need to stand up and defend my own work and its central themes, principles and values. And they are so very close to things that Jordan Peterson is doing that I can’t turn my back and pretend not to see the commonalities.
‘Political philosophers, for their part, need to admit that beyond their well-rehearsed arguments and well-thumbed books lie frontiers that demand exploration: the metaphysical challenges of modern physics, the new horizons of Aristotle’s empirical biology made richer with modern tools of discovery, and even the tumultuous potential of social media. In their ideal form, the lawmen of the Old West displayed a rough and ready sagacity that reflected Socratic wisdom, a harmonizing of courage and moderation. If there is a lesson for such thinkers to learn from Peterson it is the need to supplement their caution with appropriate boldness. With a civilization to be saved, we may all need to cowboy up.’
Well, my first referee, Liverpool historian Ron Noon, described me as an ‘intellectual range rider’ in 1992. I’ve been riding the range ever since, doctrinal specialism and purity be damned! I’ve gone where purpose, meaning and direction have taken me. And that, I will continue to do!
My recent works, which cover all these themes and more
A notion of ecological virtue, from a couple of years ago.