Undeniably, Ireland has produced some of the finest creative writers in the history of the English language. From the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) through to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who ultimately abandoned English in favour of French, a body of work has expressed a contradictory national character.
A recurring theme in Irish writing has been what a therapist would refer to as abreaction – the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion. Thus, the drama of colonisation and sectarian division enthralled a global audience, at a remove from what is often the painful direct experience of a dysfunctional state and troubled society.
On the other hand, we have seen little in the way of philosophical wisdom in Irish letters, apart from George Berkeley (1685-1753), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797) at a stretch. So Ireland must make do with imaginative writers as intellectuals: our novelists of departure, and poets of abstraction.
I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.
Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.
That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’saward-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.
The Last Modernist
Beckett was the last of the great Modernists. His crucible and training ground was the Paris of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, as well as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great pity that Beckett never had the chance to meet the author of The Great Gatsby – that great work exploring the vacuity of capitalist aspirations. Fitzgerald matched him for pithiness, although he lacked the same profundity.
Those were heady days on the Seine, albeit Beckett was late to the party. He acted as a sort of amanuensis to Joyce, assisting him, in a way that is still unclear, in the completion of Finnegans Wake (1939). At one level he seems to have operated like a staff nurse, or what today we call a carer, leading Joyce – who was almost blind by that stage – to his final statement of total incomprehensibility, or brilliance, depending on your viewpoint.
Photographic portrait of Samuel Beckett as a young man.
Yet Joyce’s torrent of words – full of richness and fecundity – the psychobabble of tongues and the fiddling with language, had a depressing effect on Beckett aesthetically. It is widely agreed that the latter’s early works, such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and Murphy (1938), did not scale the heights of his post-World War II masterpieces.
Similarly, I would argue the polyglot innovation found in Joyce’s final work is a form of literary escapism of limited relevance in this dark age of casino capitalism. Linguistic accuracy in marshaling facts is what I prize most highly, and Beckett delivered powerfully in this regard.
Beckett laconically described the relationship between the two literary titans in the following terms: ‘James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can.’[i]
Irish Bluffers
In my experience the Irish often display a tendency towards loquacity and linguistic chicanery. Unfortunately this provides scope for bluffers and often brings a resistance to facing up to the truth. Too often we take refuge in the deliberate self-deceptions of lyricism, or display a love of rhetoric and bombast that permits falsities.
As Seamus Heaney puts it in the poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ (1975):
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Having said that Joyce in his early work, particularly Dubliners, captures some of the spoofing that is still a feature of life in the city, particularly evident politics, where the theatrical pseudo-debaters of hucksterdom are out in force.
Perhaps if we Irish were better listeners, and concentrated on using language with greater precision, we would not have dug ourselves, collectively and individually, into the awful hole we found ourselves in when the Banks crashed in 2007.
Uncharacteristically as an Irishman, Beckett is famous for the compression of language, which may explain his departure into French. Not a word is wasted in his writing; but like Joyce, words are sometimes re-invented or used in novel ways. Thus Beckett mangles and distorts language, stripping it to the bone to devastating effect, yet generally enhancing our understanding of it.
I cannot say I have enjoyed reading all of his oeuvre. The later works, particularly the plays, are heading towards the extinction of language itself, and offer an unsparingly bleak take on both art and human communication. I should add that all of this was in marked a contrast to the chatty and open person I encountered in Montparnasse.
However, the quartet of plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape and Happy Days bear the unmistakable hallmark of genius, a commendation that should also apply to All That Fall, a play for radio memorably dramatized by Michael Gambon in 2013.
In my view the only playwrights his equal over the course of the twentieth century have been Eugene O’Neill for his A Long Day’s Journey into Night (which is also an exercise in Irish psychosis); Arthur Miller with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible; and perhaps David Mamet for Glengarry Glenn Ross; as well as the best of Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, Brecht was the only twentieth century dramatist of comparable stature, and even then he falls short in my view.
I would argue the only real modern rival – and that excludes the Bard of Avon – to Beckett’s Godot or Endgame is his near Irish contemporary Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Surviving an Irish upbringing is never easy. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wilde died a broken man in Paris having endured imprisonment in Reading Gaol – immortalized in verse – his downfall coinciding with the Importance of Being Earnest becoming the toast of London.
Beckett preserved his genius to the end through an intelligent exile, the default option for Irish creatives and intellectuals. Yeats died in France. Beckett and Wilde in Paris. Joyce in Zurich. Most Irish writers get out Hibernia – ‘the land of winter’ which the Romans chose to steer clear of – if they can.
In my experience the Irish can be a deeply malicious lot. Anything goes and always has. Our downfall, collectively as a nation, lies in the art of cutting tall poppies down to size, and destroying national heroes. Thus the great nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was driven to an early grave for an affair out of wedlock with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea.
Charles Stewart Parnell, driven to an early grave.
Not all artists, it should be emphasised, lack wisdom and judgment. Beckett aged gracefully and is now buried in modest Parisian grave, where he is treated as a French writer and a hero of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, where he demonstrated true courage.
The Novels
Moving on to the novels of Beckett, including the famous, or infamous, post-War trilogy of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), Malone Dies (1958); L’innommable (1953), The Unnamable (1960). It is here we see a gradual dismantling and delimiting of language. In my view by the time of The Unnameable the artifice has gone too far and the conceit frankly tiresome.
My favourite novel, suffused with humanity, is Company (1980), which was part of an Indian summer of later works. Company, and indeed Worst Ward How (1983), also demonstrate the compression of language of the greater plays, as well as a playful sense of humour, something he is often unfairly accused of lacking.
Company is a lyrical and profound statement of his childhood in Leopardstown. Coincidentally, I was born just up the road from Beckett’s childhood home – not two hundred yards away – although not to the same conditions of privilege.
The compression of language at times in the novels is aphoristic and the statements on the human condition act like gelignite in their exactitude: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,’ from The Unnameable, and in the and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
There is an effortless font of ridicule in this. Woody Allen would have a field day, as he did in his essay on Irish writers.
In Our Times
I am not a literary critic and do not pretend to be one, so I am appropriating Beckett’s legacy for my own purposes.
It is clear to me that in our post-truth universe we require searing honesty rather than linguistic chicanery of a sort that provides us with ‘known unknowns,’ associated with the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We need to concentrate on that which matters, which is the truth, forensically researched and conveyed with precise language – and barbed if necessary – thereby providing an accurate portrayal of the human condition and the challenges we confront.
The extent to which Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, the great Marxists or post-Marxists of our age, quote Beckett is revealing, although less surprising in the case of the latter given he is French. They quote Beckett to couple both absurdity and engagement, and to demonstrate the effective use of language.
Thus every lawyer committed to the truth, particularly a criminal defence lawyer, would do well to read and absorb Beckett in order to focus precisely on what is chosen to be said and, equally importantly, left unsaid. Beckett also helps us to recognise the nuances and tropes of language.
Moreover, a close reading of Beckett embeds a faculty for detecting bullshit: contained in his works you will find an unstinting focus on the essentials to human life.
What do you mean when you say this? What do you mean by what you say you mean? What do you mean by what you say or said or said then? Why did you do what you did? Who are you, and what do you say you have done?
Cross examination techniques are of course a poor excuse for a Beckettian aphorisms, but the importance of a literary appreciation in a lawyer should not be underestimated.
Samuel Beckett in 1977.
Swift Return
Other great Irish writers besides the Modernists are also relevant to our present dark age, Jonathan Swift above all else. The Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral received a disappointing sinecure after a controversial career as a journalist in London, where in carrying out his duties he alienated a large amount of influential people. The culmination of his rage arrives at the end of his life in the totemic work: ‘A Modest Proposal’.
The conceit of that piece, based on acute recognition of the Malthusian capitalism operating at the time, and contempt for absentee landlords, is that rather than letting the poor die in increments it would make ‘economic sense’ to eat their babies whole. This was the ultimate cost benefit analysis approach to law and economics, still evident in our dangerously commoditized world.
Finally, another Irish Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats is also relevant in this regard, not for the Romantic murmuring of Innisfree, nor the more insightful political poems surveying the grubby inception of the state – ‘And add the halfpence to the pence. / And prayer to shivering prayer’ – but for the mystical poems from 1919 onwards, with their anticipation and exploration of the totalitarianism on the horizon.
Thus in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) Yeats anticipates a world of immoderate extremism that has returned to haunts us.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
he falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
So notwithstanding a tendency towards bluffing and linguistic chicanery, Irish writers have much to offer. Above all Beckett. He reminds us to be precise and exact with our words, while anticipating the age of extremes we have entered – a dark age of neo-liberal meltdown and capitalist excess, with fascism rearing its ugly head again.
[i] Mel Gussow, ‘BECKETT AT 75- AN APPRAISAL’, New York Times, April 19th, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/19/theater/beckett-at-75-an-appraisal.html
‘The interesting thing is that they’re protesting against themselves. There’s no enemy out there. They know they are the enemy.’ J.G Ballard, Millenium[i]
The 2019 Reuters Institute Digital News Report points to increasing de-politicisation across the Western world. This accompanies a seemingly inexorable rising tide of ‘identitarian’ Populism, globally led by Steve Bannon. The movement channels latent anger into cynicism towards central governments and supra-national institutions such as the E.U.; just when we require solidarity to address climate chaos.
Symptomatic were Conservative Party tactics during U.K Election 2019 – under the influence of Bannon – promising nothing beyond ‘getting Brexit done’; in other words a negation of the country’s institutional ties with other states – rather than a vision for improvement. This recalls Donald Trump’s ongoing pledge to ‘DRAIN THE SWAMP’ of Washington politics.
In a climate of suspicion, roguish buffoons like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have lied and cheated their way to high office. The moral landscape has altered to a point where the truth doesn’t seem to count for much anymore; in contrast to a cosy relationship with Big Data, and plenty of campaign dosh, which is more vital than ever.
Delving deeper, these political trends are tremors from a seismic Internet Revolution radically re-shaping our societies and very brains. This new medium has proved a fruitful ground for the advancement, and enrichment, of varied corporate entities and human beings. Those benefitting include Canadian psychology Professor Jordan Peterson, arguably the first public intellectual of the Digital Age – with many of his lengthy YouTube lectures hitting numbers associated with music videos.
It is instructive that Steve Bannon targeted Peterson’s online devotees before the last Presidential election. Peterson came to prominence especially through the so-called culture wars, contributing to a ‘woke’ caricature, which really should be attributed to the liberal centre, given the emphasis leading lights such as Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton placed on political correctness and multiculturalism.
Peterson’s cult status brings adulation of a type associated with Pop stars, drawing huge audiences to venues across the English-speaking world. A predominantly male audience has been impressed by a refusal to pay the usual fealties to political correctness, and offered the kind of sound, fatherly advice that many seem to lack, but Peterson abuses his power by peddling climate change denial, while demeaning collective institutions, and governments.
Politicide
In 2003 Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling published a book called Politicide, which charted the destruction of the Palestinian nation as a political entity. He claimed the state of Israel was transforming Palestinians into a leaderless community struggling for an identity – as had previously been the case.[ii] Thus in 1969, then Prime Minister Golda Meir questioned the existence of a distinctive Palestinian people, an inquiry that might soon be aired again.
Israel’s erosion of Palestinian identity has been achieved through collective impoverishment, targeted assassination of key leaders and the age-old technique of divide and conquer. Now the Palestinian voice on the international stage has been reduced to a barely audible whimper.
A similar, though less overtly violent, campaign of Politicide is being waged by Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings and other unelected political advisors across the Western world. Democracy is being corroded by sophisticated technology, including from the notorious Cambridge Analytica, mining data from social media and other online interactions to develop advertising specific to targeted groups in key marginals.
The old left that forged bonds both within countries and internationally, especially through working class solidarity is the immediate target of attack ads that are having an effect. In this respect, Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 comment ‘And you know, there is no society’ recalls Golda Meir’s aspersion of Palestinian identity. Lacking sufficient resources for social media campaigns, and pilloried by journalists increasingly beholden to conservative billionaires such as the Koch brothers, socialism is on the decline across Europe and beyond.
Drawing support away from the old left, so-called Populists – who really have little in common with the agrarian-radical originals of the late nineteenth century led by William Jennings Bryan – are incubating acceptance of a global corporate order, directing oppositional energies against what they characterise as a corrupt state – which of course is being hollowed out by those same corporations, through lobbying and regulatory capture.
An important component of Politicide is for growing numbers to be turned off news content altogether. Thus the Reuters Digital News Report for 2019 found an average of 32% across a large number of countries actively avoid it, up from 29% the previous year. In the U.K. that figure reached 35% in the election years of 2019, a striking 11% increase on the previous poll. Such shifts do not occur by accident. Turning people off trusted news sources increases susceptibility to fake news arriving via political ads.
The success of the Bannon formula is not measured purely in terms of increasing vote share, but also in opponents losing support through apathy and despair. The most important social media platform remains Facebook, still the dominant player by quite a margin, especially for older people. There we find the kind of attack ads long a feature of U.S. political culture targeted precisely at voters in marginal or swing constituencies or states.
Both Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings are clever political operators, they are not, however, geniuses. But the project of politicide, working distinctly to the advantage of large corporations, is the product of broader cultural currents. The first wave of the Internet Revolution is fraying old systems of thought, and recasting political discourse. The Jordan Peterson phenomenon is instructive.
The rise of the ‘Petersonites’
Notably, Steve Bannon mined the data of the followers of Jordan Peterson before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as ‘they were looking for a father figure to tell them what to do,’ according to a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower.[iv] Apparently they possessed ‘the big five traits’ of easily manipulatable men: frustrated economic opportunities; an estranged father; enjoyment of word salad; not showering on a regular basis; and ranking in the top quartile for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Jordan Peterson is not, however, a political extremist – by North American standards at least. Nonetheless, his generally compelling talks – with ideas distilled in particular from the archetypes of C.S. Jung and Aristotle’s virtues – have been adopted, and glossed, by a legion of far-right digital warriors. He also represents a successful formula for the entrepreneurial pursuit of an online personality in this neo-liberal zeitgeist that has been copied more broadly.
Peterson’s fame, or notoriety, derives mainly from impressive public speaking performances and televised debates rather than through books. Indeed, his literary output is a relatively modest two publications[v] – the most recent a self-help bestseller.
Like Donald Trump, Peterson is a master of the new digital medium. While the U.S. President specialises in cutting brevity – ‘show me someone who has no ego and he is a loser’[vi] – Jordan Peterson represents the opposite pole, opting for grandiloquent expression; dazzling audiences with a flurry of references; fluently recalled using streams of synonyms ‘maxing out’ any SAT Writing and Language test. He reaches a crescendo of self-righteousness when laying waste to scruffy woke opponents.
The Digital Age
We are in the early stages of a communications revolution reconfiguring human societies, and perhaps rewiring our brains.[vii] This Digital Age is characterised by a ‘secondary orality’ conveyed through video, podcast and memes that still depends on an inheritance of books.[viii] As the pace of change accelerated with the arrival of affordable smartphones from 2010, the quality of political journalism declined in tandem.
The great U.S. reporter Seymour Hersh recently offered a withering assessment of contemporary media to the effect that ‘We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.’[ix]
It is perhaps unsurprising that abandonment of books in favour of digital ephemera should herald a cultural decline. On social media the image is king, and language, as Richard Seymour argues in the Twittering Machine, is increasingly reduced to its effects, like all manipulative communication, from marketing to military propaganda.[xi]
These developments are unravelling a profound cultural inheritance. Walter Ong contends that ‘More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.’[xii] ‘By separating the knower from the known’, he says, ‘writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the objective world quite distinct form itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.’[xiii]
It is through textual records, passed down and renewed by each generation of scholars, that the wide-ranging dialectics required for scientific research and philosophical enquiry occur. The development of writing allowed us to determine and convey facts.
The increasing dominance of a ‘secondary orality’ of video and podcast is shifting political debate away from philosophic “articulate intropsectivity”, and also bringing celebrity veneration, as “the knower” (or quickfire know-all such as Jordan Peterson) merges with what is “known.”
Moreover, unlike public intellectuals of the recent past, who conveyed facts and ideas in books, the output of a digital-era leading light arrives in a stream of video, more challenging to parse, or counter, than the venerable medium in print form. Thus, previously agreed upon facts are more easily dismissed as we enter an era of post-truth.
‘An explosion in identity talk’
Alongside devotion to vacuous celebrity, Richard Seymour observes that over the course of the last decade, as the numbers regularly accessing Twitter and Facebook grew into billions, there has been ‘an explosion in identity talk.’[xiv]
Jordan Peterson is perhaps the intellectual apotheosis of this trend. Thus, in 2016 after igniting controversy for refusing to adopt gender-neutral pronouns, he released a series of videos justifying his positions.[xv] Soon he had emerged as a global conservative champion in the culture war, ‘destroying’ interlocutors with well-rehearsed, and often, it must be said, reasonable arguments.
Peterson railed against a woke-ish political correctness that many on the left already acknowledged had lurched into absurdity, to the exclusion of more pressing discussions of climate change, ecological collapse, spiralling inequality and unaccountable digital platforms.
Amy Chua identifies acute problems with identity politics ‘on both sides of the political spectrum,’ which she says, ‘leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: almost no one is standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites all the country’s many subgroups.’[xvi]
Peterson has amassed a reasonable fortune in the process of emerging as both hero and villain in the febrile culture war. Knowingly or otherwise, he has served the interests of Bannon and his ilk.
Narrowing Debate
Jordan Peterson is broadly correct that the parameters of debate in Anglophone so-called liberal – or ‘woke-ish’ to use the term de jour – media such as The Guardian and TheNew York Times have narrowed. The phenomenon of no-platforming outspoken thinkers such as Germain Greer for questioning whether a transgender individual should be considered a woman is disturbing. The media’s obsession with celebrity sex scandals often amounts to little more than clickbait.
Harvey Weinstein believes he can rebuild career if cleared of charges https://t.co/CJbsye1pIR
Moreover in America, and elsewhere, a range of media from Fox News to Breitbart have picked up the slack, accommodating so-called conservative, increasingly far-right, standpoints.
Similarly, right-wing views are well represented in U.K. media by established players such as The Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express as well as newcomers like Spiked, whose founders’ journey from Marxism to the alt-right is symptomatic. The traditional viewpoint that Peterson purports to represent is far from being marginal across the Anglophone world.
A shift towards identity politics can be traced to the fissuring of the political order at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream centre-left parties in the U.S. and U.K. pivoted to the centre-right.
Thus in the U.S., Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama essentially ignored spiralling inequalities attending the rise of the digital behemoths, assuaging discontents by endeavouring to roll out state-funded medical care that has done little to break the dominance of Big Pharma and an epidemic of legal drug addiction. With identity politics centre-stage, Obama’s victory – that ‘Audacity of Hope’ – was mistakenly viewed as the harbinger of a tolerant and inclusive society.
Then stories such as the ‘birther’ controversy– an unfounded rumour that Obama had not been born in the United States which, if true, would have debarred him from the presidency – generated endless columns in the liberal media,[xvii] to the exclusion of reporting on social and environmental issues highlighting the despoliation of the Earth by large corporations.
Focus on identity politics, from race to feminism and same-sex marriage, not to mention abortion, diverted attention from the long-standing exclusion of the poor of all ‘races’, with real wages stagnating for decades,[xviii] while extraordinary wealth and privilege has been concentrated in increasingly few hands.
Donald Trump tapped into economic insecurities – offering up poor Latino immigrants as a scapegoat to blue collar workers – to win the Presidency of 2016. Hilary Clinton and her handlers persevered with identity politics, emphasising the importance of a female candidacy, and focusing on her opponent’s philandering, rather than addressing entrenched poverty and social exclusion, let alone the excesses of the military industrial complex, and lost.
In the U.K., the Labour Party also settled in the centre, or even centre-right, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010). New Labour essentially accepted Margaret Thatcher’s (1979-90) market deregulations and privatisations to the satisfaction of the newspaper barons that tend to decide elections. ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ read Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after John Major’s come-from-behind victory in 1992 – a cheeky headline masking a sinister political reality.
The Sun newspaper, April 11th, 1992.
As Mark Fisher memorably put it: ‘Blairism has consolidated and outstripped the ideological gains of Thatcherism by ensuring the apparently total victory of PR over punk, of politeness over antagonism, of middle class utility over proletarian art.’[xix]
Later David Cameron and his fellow ‘modernisers’, or ‘One Nation’ Tories, rebranded the Conservative Party in the dress code of New Labour, embracing non-economic issues such as marriage equality and increasing the visibility of female and ethnic minority representatives, while pursuing Thatcherite, austerity policies in the background.
This approach yielded electoral success in 2010 and 2015, before Brexit derailed the formula. Similar to Trump’s victory over Hilary, Brexit bubbled up, dialectically, inside the cauldron of identity politics first stirred by the centre-right.
It is disingenuous therefore for Jordan Peterson to bemoan the excesses of identity politics given it was the centre-right he claims to support that has promoted ‘woke-ish’ causes. Grandstanding on controversies over transgender identity simply gives oxygen to debates that are of little consequence, at least by comparison with fundamental issues of human welfare and climate chaos.
Logos
As a psychologist with extensive clinical experience Jordan Peterson is acutely attuned to what makes a primarily male target audience tick. Skillful rhetoric taps into the concerns of essentially Anglophone or Nordic males, perturbed by suggestions they should be ashamed of privileged upbringings, another unhelpful idea that entered debates around identity politics.
Importantly, Peterson also gave intellectual credibility to belief in God after decades of sustained attacks from evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, and, following Jung, identifies the role of spirituality in recovery from mental illness. His appeal to mythology also presented novel insights to an audience jaded by a dominant discourse of scientific materialism.
More problematically, however, Peterson also styles himself a philosopher and scientist. But as James Hamblin pointed out in The Atlantic what Peterson is really selling is a sense of order and control. Thus, while science is about settling questions and determining facts, self-help is concerned with supplying immediate answers to the question of how to live in the world. Hence, a recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules as ‘an antidote to chaos.’[xx]
A crucial concept that Peterson has pronounced on is ‘logos’, which the Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice Which Rationality describes as follows:
To engage in intellectual enquiry is then not simply to advance theses and to give one’s rational allegiance to those theses which so far withstand rational refutation; it is to understand the movement form thesis to thesis as a movement towards a kind of logos which will disclose how things are, not relative to some point of view, but as such.
Essentially, logos, in contrast to moral relativism, permits us to pronounce on moral ‘truths.’ In the wrong hands, however, it leads to moral absolutism, and is a sinister recipe for totalitarianism of a sort the Catholic Church institutionalised through the idea of a Pope speaking ex cathedra.
In our time, where celebrity veneration increasingly equates the knower with the known, real danger lurks in vesting any individual with a singular authority. We should instead assess the merit of their ideas on a case-by-case basis.
Jordan Peterson makes compelling arguments regarding the excesses of political correctness, and even in assessing virtues necessary for a good life, but he should certainly not be considered omniscient, or even competent, in fields beyond his ken.
The ‘Lion Diet’
Notably, Peterson has revealed himself as a climate change denier having argued before the Cambridge Union that views on climate change are inseparable from political orientations,[xxi] an assumption no doubt resting easily with a conservative fanbase, or market. It would certainly have pleased Steve Bannon.
Here we can see the contradiction that lies at the heart of Peterson between the scientist and the charmer, with the latter winning out. One may speculate as to why he holds these views that are at variance with scientific orthodoxy. Perhaps adherence to a ‘carnivore diet’ led to the distortion and departure from science, and logos.[xxii]
The edifice of Peterson’s ideas starts to crumble when we examine the ‘Lion Diet’ he has adopted on the advice of his daughter Michaela. James Hamblin recalls how:
On the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.
Bannon
Trump’s victory and the Brexit Referendum are products of a profound, and arguably justifiable, disillusionment with the political status quo. Washington and Brussels are both seen as corrupt centres of power. Many of the arguments against these institutions are valid, but ignore the essential functions federal and supranational institutions still perform, with the baby being thrown out with the bathwater in the case of Brexit.
Of more importance to Populist success, however, has been the growing sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, derived from identity politics. Mistakenly characterised as ethnic pride, it diminishes solidarity between human beings. Thus we enter the third decade of the millennium increasingly lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive and dependent, to quote Erich Fromm.
The Internet Revolution has brought opportunities for a few, particularly the first corporations to optimise social media, and aggressively pursue audience share through acquisition of kindred platforms in Facebook’s case. It has also allowed human beings of varied intelligences to thrive, from Donald Trump to Jordan Peterson, and more encouragingly, Greta Thunberg.
Peterson is the reigning conservative intellectual champion, who has used an undeniable talent to deflect attention from the real challenges confronted by humanity. His strawman of the left is really a creation of the liberal centre. Peterson may prove to be a dangerous guru whose eccentric tastes have brought climate denial.
The intellectual decay associated with Peterson provides the soil wherein Bannon’s seedlings germinate. Peterson informs his legions of fans to stand up straight and ‘own’ their prejudices (whether against transgender individuals or supranational institutions), while Bannon’s software prowls online preferences for signs of alienation.
We are only slowly coming to terms with a Digital Age reshaping our reality. The rise of a “secondary orality” is fraying our allegiance to the older print medium of books that acted as a conduit for facts. Video and podcast are easily accessed but content is not easily parsed. Moreover, as we retreat into a solitary cyberspace the view of the world is often jaundiced, and Bannon wins.
Feature Image by Gage Skidmore/wikicommons: Jordan Peterson speaking with attendees at the 2018 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Hyatt Regency DFW Hotel in Dallas, Texas.
[i] J. G. Ballard, Millennium People, Fourth Estate, London, 2003, p.109.
[ii] Deaglán de Bréadún, ‘Contemplating Politicide’, Irish Times, August 9th, 2003, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/contemplating-politicide-1.369096
[iii] Dominic Cummings, ‘‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…’ Blog Post, January 2nd, 2020, https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
[iv] Andrew Hall, ‘Steve Bannon Targeted Jordan Peterson’s Followers Because They Were ‘Easy To Manipulate’’, Laughing in Disbelief, November 4th, 2019, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/laughingindisbelief/2019/11/steve-bannon-targeted-jordan-petersons-followers-because-they-were-easy-to-manipulate/
[v]Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, Abingdon, 1999 and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Penguin Random House, New York, 2018. Peterson has also authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers.
[vii] Hilary Bruek, ‘This is what your smartphone is doing to your brain — and it isn’t good’, March 1st, 2019, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-smartphone-is-doing-to-your-brain-and-it-isnt-good-2018-3?r=US&IR=T
[viii] Walter Ong, ‘Orality and Literacy – The Technologisation of the Word METHVE and co. London, 10982 p.2
[ix] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York, Random House, 2018, p.3.
[x] Untitled, ‘Leisure Reading in the U.S. is at an all time low’, Washington Post, June 29th, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/29/leisure-reading-in-the-u-s-is-at-an-all-time-low/
[xi] Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine, Indigo, London, 2019, p.118
[xv] Jessica Murphy, ‘Toronto professor Jordan Peterson takes on gender-neutral pronouns’, BBC News, November 4th, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37875695
[xvi] Amy Chua, ‘How America’s identity politics went from inclusion to division’, The Guardian, March 1st, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/01/how-americas-identity-politics-went-from-inclusion-to-division
[xvii] Michael Calderone, ‘Fox News Gives Donald Trump A Pass On Birther Crusade It Helped Fuel’, Huffington Post, August 23rd, 2016. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-donald-trump-birtherism_n_57e54a06e4b08d73b830d54e
[xviii] Drew Desilver, ‘For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades’, Pew Research Centre, August 7th, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
[xix] Mark Fisher, K-Punk – The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 -2016), Shepperton, London, 2018, p.61
[xx] James Hamblin, ‘The Jordan Peterson All-Meat Diet, The Atlantic, August 28th, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/the-peterson-family-meat-cleanse/567613/
[xxi] Jordan Peterson at the Cambridge Union: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY
[xxii] Adam Gabbatt, ‘My carnivore diet: what I learned from eating only beef, salt and water’, The Guardian, September 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/10/my-carnivore-diet-jordan-peterson-beef
