STILL all the knee-jerk responses about how he is a grifter or pointing out his cringe moments on twitter. Is that all the left can come up with? We have been waiting for years for some real critique now.
This just isn't remotely true, you clearly aren't familiar with his body of work, which is much more significant and larger than Dunham's (altho of course he has had many more decades to produce it). The meme JBP of the 2010s/20s is not the same JBP as the 80s/90s/00s theorist and lecturer, who wrote a lot and made non-trivial contributions to intellectual history
As a friend says, "The best argument for JBP's ideas are his Harvard lectures. The best argument against his ideas are his personal/family life."
On the one hand, I mean, the guy really is embarrassing himself, and he should've drifted off post-benzo incident. The apple cider stuff, the Lion diet, some of his motte-and-baileys re: transness/pronouns, it's all really embarrassing and discrediting and I sorta can't blame the left because it's such an easy target
On the other hand, none of that really matters, does it? The ideas are what count. Of course, this is how intellectual discussion always goes—each side picks the easiest targets, and ignores the hardest battles. It would be great if there was a discussion of substance about the relative merits of traditionalism & self-discipline vs progressivism and liberty, about when and to what extent these approaches are better or worse. (I can believe that the family structure dissolving might be a disaster, and also that I support legal marijuana & gay marriage.) The balance between order and disorder, structure and subversion, tradition and innovation—that's a tough dialectic, but maybe we can come up with good rules or heuristics for navigating when to favor one approach vs another.
And look, JBP's ideas—he's done a very good job (or did, back in 90s/00s) of synthesizing and interpreting a bunch of Biblical and art historical and literary ideas about tradition, duty, discipline, meaning, myth. His ideas aren't especially innovative, but (at peak form) he represents one of the best distillations and presentations of a set of lowercase-c conservative stances, and why they ought to be taken seriously.
Liberalism's never adequately dealt with these issues.
People forget—it is uncontroversial, i.e it has been widely testified to by tenured UToronto psychology professors—that Peterson was the most beloved professor they'd ever seen. That huge swathes of his classes—which were evenly split between men and women, lecturing on topics that had nothing to do with the current "address to men" incel shtick he's on—would break out in tears during his lectures, and write that JBP had changed the entire direction of their lives. I've heard interviews with members of that department who said it was "common knowledge" that Peterson was operating on a "different level" as an instructor—that his end-of-term evaluations were so consistently, overwhelmingly, unanimously glowing that it became a regular topic of gossip and fascination among other departmental instructors.
So, whatever embarrassments he's committed and been a part of in his 70s—and come on now, basically everyone is geriatric and confused by that age—he's an incredibly formidable thinker who cannot be easily dismissed.
I've personally invested, and am still investing, a lot of time into watching his taped lectures from these periods, and they are absolutely top-tier. There's a tremendous amount to be learned, not just from the content/ideas he's pushing, but about how he presents them, how he leads an audience through a story, how he speaks and pauses and emphasizes for effect.
"So-called" academic - it's almost as if the gestures libs make to shore up the symbolic order are at bottom solely expedientHe has a peculiar vocabulary even for a so-called academic
Only heard him and David Lynch say ‘golly’ as North Americans in the public domain but JP has a tendency to call kids ‘little monsters‘ a bit too often (I mean hate kids if you want but....), uses slightly incongruous but symbolically emotive terms eg ‘bloody’, he’d be a good word map candidate
he’s a bellend
fuckin waistcoat and pocket watch,
I've heard rumors for multiple semi-reputable sources that he believes God has chosen him as a prophet. How metaphorical this is, unclear.I've only seen his first Harvard lecture (the one you linked). His UoTs lectures before he got infamous are excellent as well. I mean even if you disagree about everything he is saying at least you can acknowledge his talent as a teacher.
He is a complicated fellow that's for sure. In one of the docs he tells how as a teen he envisioned his statesman-like funeral (he mentioned Robert Kennedy). So I am pretty sure a great deal of his warnings of totalitarianism, narcissism even schizophrenia are directed at himself. As any proper psychologist of course should do.
Training machines are brutal things, powered by ego appeals and shame. "The algorithm picked him up and spat him out."I think at least part of the problem is that however good he was back in the day that isn't what's getting him attention today. What's getting him attention today is controversy and a sizable group of people feeling he's an opponent of the things which irritate them.
You can pull up his old lectures but how many are sitting through hours of that stuff and how many are just enjoying his tweets and clips pretending not to understand pronouns? That's where he is today and that's where the bulk of his audience is today. You can't ignore that in favour of pretending he never left the 90s. It'd be like pretending Nick Land died in 2003 because you like Fanged Noumena.
Training machines are brutal things, powered by ego appeals and shame. "The algorithm picked him up and spat him out."
wouldn't surprise meI've heard rumors for multiple semi-reputable sources that he believes God has chosen him as a prophet. How metaphorical this is, unclear.