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Peterson is a thoughtful Psychologist using a popular platform to make people think deeply and this is undoubtedly a good thing. He believes that the virtualisation of society occurring via social media is pathological, and there is much truth to this claim. He believes that tyranny is the major political problem of our times and like Socrates he is out everyday in the agora spreading his message to some effect. Meaning and Responsibility are the categories he uses to analyse complex social and political phenomena. He uses these categories broadly so that it includes references to Empirical research, Freud, Christianity, Sociology, Popular Psychology, and T S Eliot. Seemingly controversial issues such as, there are more important issues for humanity than climate change and the “close the society”-practice during the Covid pandemic, are discussed by contrasting these “visions” with pragmatic alternatives such as why not feed starving children instead and the “keep the society open” policy implemented by Sweden(lowest death rates in the EU).
He claims that we must go back to the origins of society to understand its structure and function, but his example is surprisingly, Jerusalem, which he claims is the model for our Western Societies. There is some truth to this claim but it is not the whole truth. JP holds up the crucifixion of Jesus as a key moment of our Western ethos and claims that it highlighted the issue of sacrificing oneself for an issue, for the truth. There is in fact another figure who did the same thing in order to mark the importance of justice, knowledge and Philosophy for humanity, namely Socrates, and Socrates was convicted of attempting to sell the false-god of Philosophy to a people who believed that a belief in the gods was important to keep the society together(religio). Jesus was a later figure who believed that a different religion to the prevailing religions was necessary to save a people still wondering in the wilderness trying to find a promised land. Even though we hear his disciples claiming that “the truth will set people free”, there is no attempt by Jesus to theorise about how to rule a society that was clearly in need of remedial measures insofar as both justice and freedom were concerned. There is no attempt to define the role of knowledge(epistemé) in the development of society and there is no acknowledgment of the extent to which the Greek “philosophical spirit” still to this day bears the burden of the most fundamental cultural achievements of the West. Instead of focussing religiously on one individuals selfless sacrifice, those scholars concerned with all the issues JP is concerned with, focus upon a philosophical method constructed by a large number of generations of Philosophers beginning with the triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, continuing with Kant and the Philosophy of the Later Wittgenstein and all the academic followers of these figures. This tradition preserves a role for Christianity as long as it is stripped of the dogma of the institutional church that has alienated so many people over such a long time. This tradition also places great emphasis upon the roles of principles and laws against an ethical background or “ethos”, as JP calls it, of areté(doing the right thing at the right time in the right way–virtue) and diké(justice) Emphasis is also placed, by the Greeks, upon the historical background of a rejection of tyranny, and the oscillation of civil war between the oligarchs and the democrats(who for Plato were the disgruntled sons of oligarchs). Plato, as we know, attempted to solve the problem of oligarchs and democrats abusing their power by suggesting a ruler class of Philosophers who were not allowed access to money nor allowed to have family. Such a class would rule in accordance with a philosophical knowledge of the principles of “The Good”. Aristotle rejected this idea of the rule of philosophers on the grounds of his principle of the golden mean, which would eventually ensure that an enlightened middle class would rule future societies(a logic which is playing itself out on the world stage, if one views this matter in the long term). References by JP, to Marx, totally ignore the possible Greek criticism of any simplistic criticism of the Marxist position. JP appears not to understand that the ethical principle–“to each according to their needs and from each according to their abilities” could also be a position attributable to the Socratic principle of specialisation needed to construct the “healthy city”. That we all now live in unhealthy fevered cities” would have come as no surprise to Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, and each would have given their differently nuanced explanations for the current condition of our civilisation. The appeal to “will to power” and Sociology that JP uses is from a philosophical point of view, simplistic. Of course the Nietzschean term “will to power” is psychologically appealing, but Freudian terminology and its complex appeal to the life and death instincts better explains the complexity of the human role in this debacle we call “civilisation”.
We are reminded of what was constantly on the minds of the Greeks, namely the oracular pronouncement that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. The Greek solution to this fundamental challenge from the oracles point of view could only come if we met the challenge thrown down like a gauntlet, from the Delphic oracle, to “Know thyself!” For Aristotle, we could only avoid the ruin and destruction of our cities by living a contemplative life that values knowledge, the good , the just, and Art. The theoretical account of knowledge passed down to us from Aristotle is much broader and deeper than the sources to which JP appeals to justify his more controversial and insightful positions.
JP polarises the philosophical debate by seeing his “middle position” between the radical leftists and the extreme right and this too is somewhat superficial since the middle ground between these extremes contains so many possibilities, all of which could be covered by the slogan “meaning and responsibility”. He ventures into the “middle ground” of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle when he talks about the real enemies of Islam being the atheists, and reductionist materialists, but he does not offer a coherent argument against such positions(of the kind we find in the works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein). At the end of the interview we are given an anecdotal reference to a world run by machines and AI which would be a worse form of tyranny than any bureaucratically run society. Anecdotes, however, are not arguments (which must embody both principles(arché) and epistemé(knowledge-claims)).
In many of his arguments JP is insightful and he uses the Socratic method of elenchus to illustrate the power of argument over opinion, but what he does not realise is that argumentation is a philosophical tool that is itself in need of justification byreference to principles (rather than psychological explanation–even if the latter may be one component of the justification). He does, however, argue effectively using the method of comparison for very insightful positions such as arguing against the current extreme focus on climate change which in itself is being run by opinion(insofar as the proposed solutions are concerned–there is no doubt that the science of the matter is accurate). This position is perhaps not taking into account the magnitude of other problems we have such as indoor pollution and child starvation.
His remarks on Elon Musk and Twitter, use the strategy of “well things could be much worse and at least my account has been restored”, are confusing. He presents a puzzling position. In such a context his silence on the matter of the restoration of the account of the second most dangerous tyrant on this planet(Trump) is also truly remarkable. Below is a response to a question on Trump in another interview which would have left all of the Philosophers mentioned above aghast:
Many psychiatrists(on the grounds of academic psychology) have diagnosed Trump as narcissistic and extremely manipulative, and as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. Some have gone further and classified his behaviour as Psychopathic. Such omissions and refusals on the part of JP to address what is so obvious to so many, speaks volumes and testifies to a blindness for tyranny which is alarming. This is an error of judgement which requires that we classify individual cases correctly insofar as classificatory categories are concerned.
Otherwise his position on feminism and the excesses of some of its more extreme forms would appear defendable, but perhaps not exactly on the grounds he would appeal to. His concern for the mental health of the young ought also to awaken us from our self satisfied acceptance of the status of chaos that currently characterises the condition of our civilisation. In this kind of concern JP resembles Diogenes more than Socrates. He is shining a lantern in our faces and asking if we are honest men and this is always controversial–and useful.