XXIII (心: Part 2)

In the United States last Spring the public intellectual Jordan Peterson got a lot of press. And not just in the States, but in Canada and the U.K. as well. I can't speak for other places in the world but at least one of my Chinese students, a particularly media savvy one, had also heard of him. One can go to Youtube and find a thousand videos of his debates, lectures, and appearances on podcasts. Some of them have click bait titles like "Peterson Destroys SJW!" (repackaged from more official sites by god know who...Russian polorizers? Alt-right sympathizers? Fly-by-night internet parasites wanting to make a quick buck?) and some of them have descriptive headlines such as "Jordan Peterson Oxford Debate," posted by the BBC or Canadian public broadcasting (or its equivalent. Note: these are not real titles). The phenomenon of his popularity is one thing, and there are many different takes on his appeal. The dominant one, and one that he also acknowledges, is that people, mostly young men, are attracted to his bootstrapping message, where JBP provides folks with a way to be in the world, an "antidote to chaos" that pegs "neomarxist" identity politics and "post-modern" theory as major problems in the Western world. He is a clinical psychologist, professor, and academic who has published genuine academic research for the last twenty years. Controversy asides, it's amazing that a genuine researcher can become as well known as he's become.

Now, I don't want to talk about this person or the controversy around him. Instead, I want to illustrate how the political landscape in the States, and maybe even in the West at large, has become unrecognizable such that traditional left/right spectrums don't seem to apply. In painting this picture then, I need to acknowledge one of his arguments that I agree with, gulp, which is the idea that progressive identity politics sometimes goes too far. Meaning that just as extreme right wing identity politics (say, the kind that openly embraces racism and segregation) is gross and hateful, extreme left wing identity politics (say, the kind where people's careers and/or lives are destroyed by social media mobs because of a Tweet they made when they were a teenager) is also gross and hateful. A version of this then is Peterson's argument, that what he calls "political correctness" has gone too far such that in places such as academia free speech is being regulated to an alarming degree. His narrative suggests that one cannot say, "I don't believe in white privilege" without being accused of being a racist, for example. That's his argument, and generally I agree in that I feel that speech in the U.S. within particular spheres (academia, social media) has increasingly been watched and regulated in ways that, for better or for worse, remind me of ways that speech is regulated here in China. By this I don't mean in a "big brother" kind of way. I mean in the way that ideas are not harmless abstractions made of ethereal reasons, but that ideas are also moral. That there is such a thing as ideas that are good for us, and ideas that are not. The ideas that are not good for us then should be removed from the public sphere because they do real harm to people.

My point here is not about what constitutes a good idea or what right a person has to free speech. My point is that contemporary Western style debate, the kind built on science and facts, has been seriously challenged as of late. On the right you have Trump who continues to deride the media, claiming that all but Fox are liars not to be trusted. Fake news, alternative facts, and a polarized public has more or less "main streamed" what the post moderns pointed at a while ago, that is, that truth is a social construction. Cynics then (like Trump) have taken this idea to mean that if there is no ground for us to stand on, if the world is simply dog eat dog, then whatever it takes to maintain control is what's required. And as the world has seen, the guy seems to have very few principles outside of protecting his tribe of elites. At the same time, as Peterson's argument makes, there is also a contingent of this kind of thinking on the left, that facts are social constructions indicative of who has power. Because women, minorities, people of color were shut out, for the most part, of politics and power for much of the history of the West, the game has been rigged and therefore the rules need to change. I tend to agree with this view of history, yet, I also don't believe that everything is reducible to identity and power. My own conflicted views aside, the connection that I'm trying to make here is that both "sides" have seemingly adopted a similar relation to traditional conceptions of reality. There is not a right/left divide in this case, but a modern/post-modern divide. Peterson, his positivist psychology and Christian mythological framework, is very much a traditionalist striving to protect what has come under attack, which at its root are assumptions about a reality that separates the mind from the world. The challenge then is not choosing the correct side to take, but how to exist with others who see and act in the world in unfamiliar ways and more specifically, what rules, laws, and conventions we might abide by moving forward.