[snip]
this obv wasn’t directed at me but if y’all don’t mind I’d like to try to give a thoughtful response because this is an honest post, and I feel like I could add something to the conversation.
conservatism is like a sociological immune system which would literally keep people safe from disease
And in the psychological lectures, you know, the idea that liberals and conservatives are just people of different biologically pre-determined psychological temperaments that serve important sociological purpose blows my mind too. It's one thing to respect other (common) political views because you're "nice" and "empathetic", which is arbitrary and takes some training, it's another thing entirely when the entire success of your society has been predicated on the interdependence of the full diversity of the personality spectrum and everyone needs everyone else or else society falls apart and dies.
This is functionalism, specifically the kind that treats in organic metaphors. It has all the attendant pitfalls of functionalism, viz. struggles to explain change; deliberate between external and internal causation; and, since society is essentially just the name we give the large aggregation of means-end relationships, where culture (among other things) is the means, we’ve assumed the ends as given (which i assume for Peterson is going to be simple perpetuation of the ‘organism’). I don’t mean to give an overwhelmingly negative picture of this as a schema, functionalism has its proponents in the social sciences (although its organic variety is definitely passé), but it is one among several lenses to view ‘the social’.
And he'll do this while also integrating moral philosophy (as it arises from basic psychological study)
could you elaborate on this? Point out where he talks about this?
So in this way he really is the stupid man's smart man
i agree, in both a) the non-pejorative sense that it’s important to have gateways, so to speak, into academic discussions, especially ones which impinge on deeply felt needs in everyday, lived experience (more on that below) and b) the pejorative sense that we should be demanding a better gateway.
he's exposed me to stuff I never would have discovered otherwise.
this is great! It’s exactly what you want out of a gateway,
provided you keep reading. Just with respect to philosophy, if you took Peterson at his word, you’d come away with a gross misunderstanding or eclipsed view of: Newton, Nietzsche, the American Pragmatists, Heidegger, and French poststructuralism. Ditto any contemporary work done in phil of sci, phil of the social sciences or history of phil because he largely doesn’t engage with any of it. Again, this isn’t absolutely damning. Selective readings, or even outright misreadings, can still be philosophically productive (and happen fairly frequently)*, but, at least in my estimation, they shouldn’t determine our stances towards the sources in question.
What was it in this for me that blew my mind?...I'm a materialist, atheist, hedonist, moral relativist. I don't care about religion. Knowledge for me is hard empirical science. I'd never considered before that mythology or literature of all things could be a source of knowledge, or that truth could be encoded in every single one of us literally in our DNA or reflected through society, which is some crazy Spinoza-level monism. Just saying something like "artists are mystics" is straight up new age nonsense I would have never said before but here I am saying it. And never had I considered there to be a universal human morality because, you know, that's not self evident at all, especially when you don't believe in God, it's everything goes, man, but here I am now believing in a universal morality determined and discovered by evolution itself and baked right into our social structures and laws. And I never considered that ideologies of all kinds, like political ones especially but even stuff as simple as environmentalism and veganism, were primitive unsophisticated religions and rituals that replaced Christianity as a sophisticated value system, because we are hardwired to codify and act out and ahdere to value systems by virtue of being social creatures. Here I am saying I'm not religious and yet I'm revering Mother Earth just like a Wiccan would.
theres a lot here, but where I’d like to start is the descriptors you outline initially. What follows is supposed to be ideal typical, I’m not saying this is what you experienced exactly. We start with a worldview that takes a (at the risk of sounding blunt) bastardized view of Newtonian mechanics as an exhaustive ontological description of the world. The world is at bottom a physical process of things bouncing off each other in predictable patterns; if we knew the sum total of things and their causes at any initial point of origin, we’d successfully be able to predict every resulting thing and cause from that point, including human activity. What’s more, there is no transcendent end or good towards which we should be orienting ourselves. Life doesn’t have any objective meaning beyond which we give it; and we experience this process of meaning-defining as rational deliberation but as we already know, this is just another thing that can be reduced to collisions between physical objects happening at some microscopic level (which level? tbd; it’s pretty much causal factors all the way down). So what we’re left with is self-interested eudaemonic accumulation until we die and return to nothing.
It’s not hard to see how someone can feel caged in by this worldview, and I think that goes to explain in large measure how liberated someone can feel when they shake it, or something like it, off -as you mentioned how hungrynoob, and possibly you yourself, felt. Suddenly, the world has meaning again, it’s re-enchanted vis-à-vis myth being made non-trivial, there are real values to strive/fight for and all of this is an intrinsic part of being human so there’s no need to experience a kind of schizophrenia when intentions clash with worldview. But I want to point out how this liberation was purchased. Myth was rescued, but only at the expense of completely naturalizing it. Everything gets shoved into a Darwinian framework even though it’s not clear why we should take ‘natural selection in a zero sum competitive environment’ as our guiding metanarrative. The good/end ascribed to what it is to be human is self-perpetuation, so not only have we not gotten rid of the anxiety-causing specter of the will to power, but now we have to contend with it in the cultural sphere, too. So it seems if the goal was to eliminate “the malaise of modernity” we haven’t gotten any closer to solving that problem.
Which would be a bummer if we didn’t recognize that the either/or we’ve outlined above isn’t actually the Sophie’s choice we made it out to be. It isn’t at all settled that the world is atomically physical in the way a certain understanding of Newtonian mechanics describes or that any endeavor outside the domain of empirical science wasn’t worthwhile (neither newton, nor the most logical of the postivists thought this). It isn’t settled that myth needs to be interpreted genetically in order to do the most justice to it (although I can think of two off the top of my head, cassirer and blumenberg, that do exactly this, just better than Peterson). And it isn’t settled that there is no ethical yardstick by which man is obligated to measure himself -the majoritarian stance in meta ethics is moral realism and the anti-realist position doesn’t necessarily imply relativism. That all of this is contained in scholarship with such a huge barrier to entry -in terms financial, time-wise, effort-inducing, etc.- constitutes a legitimate tragicomedy. And...
People are so hungry for this stuff, in our cold, dead, rational world. And they want answers for who they are and what they should do, because nobody's telling them, and there's so much power in a positive and human centric philosophy that doesn't require a tyrant living in the sky. And I can honestly say I felt the exact same thing.
i think the fact that the person who has been one of the most successful at speaking to and capitalizing on this very real felt need did so publicly, freely, and accessibly speaks volumes.
*although I do think that in Peterson’s case since his narrative history of phil is tied so closely to his political project, the latter is undermined if we recognize the former for what it is, highly tendentious at best.
