Jordan Peterson gets burned hard

Whoa, you have to read this op-ed from a retired member of Jordan Peterson’s department at the University of Toronto — and not just a member, but his primary supporter in getting him hired and tenured, and who was good friends with him. Now it’s all regrets.

I thought long and hard before writing about Jordan, and I do not do this lightly. He has one of the most agile and creative minds I’ve ever known. He is a powerful orator. He is smart, passionate, engaging and compelling and can be thoughtful and kind.

I was once his strongest supporter.

That all changed with his rise to celebrity. I am alarmed by his now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency, which I had not seen before. His output is voluminous and filled with oversimplifications which obscure or misrepresent complex matters in the service of a message which is difficult to pin down. He can be very persuasive, and toys with facts and with people’s emotions. I believe he is a man with a mission. It is less clear what that mission is.

I am baffled by all the people who say things like that “He is a powerful orator”. I just don’t hear it — I find him meandering and pointless and weirdly distractable, but OK, I’m just going to have to recognize that some people are sympatico with his lecture style. Every teacher knows that there’s no such thing as a universal communication strategy.

But he really was a strong supporter, initially.

We did not share research interests but it was clear that his work was solid. My colleagues on the search committee were skeptical — they felt he was too eccentric — but somehow I prevailed. (Several committee members now remind me that they agreed to hire him because they were “tired of hearing me shout over them.”) I pushed for him because he was a divergent thinker, self-educated in the humanities, intellectually flamboyant, bold, energetic and confident, bordering on arrogant. I thought he would bring a new excitement, along with new ideas, to our department.

Been there, seen that. Contrary to the right-wing stereotypes of academia, we actually do look for different voices — someone with good credentials who is also enthusiastically radical will get some attention. We won’t necessarily hire them, unless there’s a strong advocate on the search committee, but yeah, that rings true. It’s also sometimes a colossal mistake.

He sat in on some of Peterson’s lectures. This also rings true.

He was a preacher more than a teacher.

We walk a tightrope in the classroom. I think it’s a good thing to be transparent about my biases, but I have to be careful to avoid strong rebukes of students’ ideas — my job is to give them the basics, get them thinking, and draw out their ideas in discussion. I am not the repository of all knowledge, I’m the guy who has read a lot and can steer the class in productive engagement with the material, I hope. That’s not Peterson’s style.

And then it gets weird.

Jordan exhibits a great range of emotional states, from anger and abusive speech to evangelical fierceness, ministerial solemnity and avuncular charm. It is misleading to come to quick conclusions about who he is, and potentially dangerous if you have seen only the good and thoughtful Jordan, and not seen the bad.

Shortly after Jordan’s rise to notoriety back in 2016, I emailed him to express my upset with his dishonesty and lack of intellectual and social integrity. He called in a conciliatory voice the next morning. I was reiterating my disappointment and upset when he interrupted me, saying more or less the following:

“You don’t understand. I am willing to lose everything, my home, my job etc., because I believe in this.” And then he said, with the intensity he is now famous for, “Bernie. Tammy had a dream, and sometimes her dreams are prophetic. She dreamed that it was five minutes to midnight.”

That was our last conversation. He was playing out the ideas that appeared in his first book. The social order is coming apart. We are on the edge of chaos. He is the prophet, and he would be the martyr. Jordan would be our saviour. I think he believes that.

He used to support him, but now he’s seeing serious problems with the man — problems that are probably key to his popularity, but also tell us what we ought to fear in this guy who is basically a religious fanatic on a mission from God.

What I am seeing now is a darker, angrier Jordan than the man I knew. In Karen Heller’s recent profile in the Washington Post he is candid about his long history of depression. Depression is an awful illness. It is a cognitive disorder that casts a dark shadow over everything. His view of life, as nasty and brutish, may very well not be an idea, but a description of his experience, which became for him the truth. But this next statement, from Heller’s article, is heartbreaking: “You have an evil heart — like the person next to you,” she quotes him as telling a sold-out crowd. “Kids are not innately good — and neither are you.” This from the loving and attentive father I knew? That makes no sense at all.

It could be his dark view of life, wherever it comes from, that the aggressive group of young men among his followers identify with. They may feel recognized, affirmed, justified and enabled. By validating them he does indeed save them, and little wonder they then fall into line enthusiastically, marching lockstep behind him. That is unnerving. The misogynistic attacks on the British broadcaster Cathy Newman, after she was humiliated and left speechless by Jordan in the infamous “gotcha moment” of their TV interview, were so numerous and vicious that Jordan asked his followers to back off. These devoted followers are notorious for attacking Jordan’s critics, but this was different. It was more persistent and more intense. That was not outrage in defence of their leader who needed none; she was the fallen victim and it was as if they had come in for the final kill. Jordan’s inflammatory understanding of male violence for which “the cure … is enforced monogamy” as reported by Nellie Bowles in the New York Times is shocking. This is upsetting and sad if you are, or were, Jordan’s friend. But it is also frightening.

Peterson is also getting scathing reviews of his skills as a therapist. Again, he’s not there to help people learn and become better — his goal is to bully people into accepting his dogma, or to pander to their beliefs if they’re already aligned.

Ugh. Just ugh. I can’t believe this fellow has such a zealous following, but then I’ve never understood how people can fall for Deepak Chopra, or Joel Osteen, or Donald Trump, either…but they do.

A martyr for Shermer

There was a small contretemps at Santa Barbara Community College a while ago. Michael Shermer was invited to speak, and a few people objected publicly. They pointed out his unsavory history! They dared to use their free speech to express a strong dislike for Michael Shermer! As an ardent advocate of liberty and freedom, Shermer could do but one thing: he blustered and threatened to sue the campus newspaper and various individuals unless they shut up. Fortunately, he chickened out when his lawyer informed him how much it was going to cost — or perhaps when it sunk in how much dirty laundry a lawsuit was going to uncover.

Now for the twist. Shermer’s most vociferous defender on campus was a philosophy instructor named Mark McIntire.

McIntire’s contract was not renewed this year — he’s out of a job.

So he’s set up a GoFundMe site to “defray his legal expenses incurred defending Dr. Michael Shermer”, which is a rather curious statement. What legal expenses? He doesn’t say. He was a guy firing off angry letters to the editor of the campus newspaper. I don’t think that costs money. Also, I think Shermer is well-off enough that he doesn’t need randos incurring undefined legal expenses defending him so they can ask for donations. I suspect this is dishonest: he also recently announced that he’s signed up with FIRE’s litigation project. He’s not raising money to defend himself, but rather, to go on the offensive and sue SBCC.

Also curious is that he lists a bunch of reasons why he was fired: he was accused of using “politically charged” topics in his classes, the chairman doesn’t like his facebook postings, and that he was accused of not understanding basic philosophical concepts. What he does not do is include the contents of his actual termination letter, which I can guarantee you doesn’t say any of those things. College administrators usually know how to cover their asses better than that. He goes further and claims that:

I will argue, in any future venue, that my removal is because I publicly oppose the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ who have seized control of Santa Barbara City College of late.

The real reason I will never be rehired is that I was the sole faculty voice expressing the cause of marginalized religious, conservatives, libertarians, homeschoolers, and/or Trump voters on staff, faculty, and student population. That is unacceptable on the SBCC campus today. Therefore, these are violations of my First and Fourteenth Amendments protections, attempting to silence and remove me from the SBCC campus forever.

You know, I really don’t believe that there is one word in the official correspondence from campus administrators that said any of that, which means his hypothetical lawsuit is going to have a tough time making a case. Also, I’m sorry to say, he was temporary, adjunct faculty, and those positions have limited support and are prone to termination on a whim. Without supporting McIntire personally — I think he’s a bit of a jerk — I do think the adjunctification of academia is disastrous, inhumane, and a disgrace to the system, and that every worker deserves better protections against frivolous dismissal.

I am also amused, though, that the body of Shermer defenders aligns so well with Trump supporters. If he was the “sole faculty voice” supporting assholes like himself (which I don’t believe for a minute — there are multiple regressive voices everywhere), then SBCC has just become a much more pleasant, rational, and collegial place.

If you want further entertainment, read the update, a letter of support from Michael Shermer. Once again, his defense against accusations is that he was never investigated by the police — exactly. He was never questioned by the police because conference organizers closed ranks and never forwarded any complaints to legal authorities. He was astoundingly privileged and sheltered when preying on women, and now he thinks that means he never did anything wrong.

Get out of my head, Eiynah!

Over at Nice Mangos, she posts about her perspective on movement atheism.

It’s quite depressing that movement Atheism has turned into such a joke. I valued it so much once.

This unraveling of the movement and it’s leaders has been tough to come to terms with. Especially for those of us who have already done this bit before…wrestled our beliefs, questioned respected leaders, lost community for it, and so on.

I had noticed a troubling turn 2-3 years ago. The questions in my mind became harder and harder to ignore when Rubin arrived on scene. He really brought the hypocrisies to the surface.

My personal, recent last straw was the treatment of the Krauss thing generally among movement leaders….and the Ezra Klein/Harris convo, the utterly obvious flaws in thinking. That was really it for me. No looking back and hoping former heroes come to their senses.

OK, that’s eerie — it’s the same scene, only about 5 years later, with different players. I noticed the “troubling turn” about 8 years ago, as more and more atheists began to rally around two themes: the Glorious Leaders who were fonts of inarguable Reason & Logic, and a definition of atheism that exempted them from all social responsibility or ethical obligation. The other big difference was that unlike Eiynah, I resisted criticizing with the excuses of #NotAllAtheists and they’ll outgrow the regressive social tendencies if we just keep trying. I was wrong. And it is quite depressing.

At least I can really love this portrayal of the shambles movement atheism is in right now.

Where’s all the energy of atheism going? Right into the pockets of those jokers, many of whom are openly anti-atheist.

Milo’s fate

It’s so sad and pathetic, and exactly what he deserves. Alex Jones “stormed” a Google Fiber office to see the “big AI supermachine” while raving and wandering around and confusing everyone, and he brought along a friend who tittered and joined in all the feeble fun — Milo Yiannopoulos. The clerk they talked to didn’t recognize him, and just seemed baffled by it all. Then they get kicked out and go to a bar and start babbling about evil technology.

They recorded the whole thing. It’s 40 minutes long, but it gets boring fast. Watch it yourself. You won’t be impressed.

How to Logic

I am amused. This preacher gives everyone a lesson in Logic.

It’s amazing. I don’t like to get on the subject of evolution with atheists because they just freak out. They’re like, “Oh my! I can’t believe you don’t believe in evolution!” Why would I? It’s stupid. You have to actually defy science. “Oh, it’s scientific.” Well what about this? “I never thought of that. It’d really never even crossed my mind.”

Except he never tells us what the this is. Then he tells us that evolutionists are not taught to logic, not taught to reason. Then he thanks God he was in a home where [he] at least got taught to Logic.

Which immediately leads to a demonstration of Christian logic. Watch the whole thing. It’s hilarious.

You know what all these atheists have in common? Go on. You know what it is.

VIDEO GAMES!, he yells.

And HARRY POTTER!

They drink COKE ALL DAY!

And that’s why evolution is false. LOGIC!

Freethought!

Jeet Heer wrote a nice article on Kanye West and freethought, and I just felt like sitting down and saying a few things about freethinking and freethought in general. So many people fail to understand the words!

Oh, look. A wild transcript appears!

I want to take a moment to share something that made me happy, an article in the New Republic. I’m one of the people behind a writing collective called freethoughtblogs — Ed Brayton and I put this blog network together back in 2011, and we started it with a specific mission: to create a site for progressive writers, and specifically, to make it a comfortable place for all the godless people who weren’t white heterosexual men, to leverage our traffic to call attention to the diverse ideas that are out there in the blogosphere.

Of course, we were a couple of white heterosexual men, but we never thought of this as a zero-sum game — it was going to be a win-win situation for all of us, because we like new ideas, and thought atheism and secularism were great unifying principles, that without religious dogma barking at our heels, we’d all naturally gravitate towards ideals of fairness and equality and social justice.

You can stop laughing now. This was about the time we were discovering just how thick the racist/misogynist dogma coating the the atheist community was. We were naive and innocent and optimistic.

Anyway, we were chatting back and forth, trying to figure out what we’d call this thing, among many other details, and all credit to Ed, he came up with the basic idea of linking our site to the tradition of freethought, rather than just atheism, and so we christened it freethoughtblogs. We were both conscious of the history of that term, we knew exactly what it implied, and we realized that it was exactly representative of the set of ideas we wanted to advance. And we made it so.

We built it, we recruited smart progressive people, we explicitly set it up as a pro-feminist, pro-liberal values site. We were then surprised, because we were naive and innocent, when harassment campaigns followed, and when ignorant people started complaining that we weren’t allowing anti-feminist or racist or wildly conservative voices on board.

“You’re not really about thinking freely if you don’t let Thunderf00t rant about how feminism is a cancer”, they said. “You can’t moderate comments because that violates free speech”, they declared, confusing free speech with freethought, and not comprehending either.

Some people get it, though. That’s not what freethought is about. I can’t recommend an article by Jeet Heer in the New Republic highly enough, because he really gets it. He is criticizing Kanye West who has come out as a conservative jerk, and then labels himself a freethinker…so Heer writes,

Many people who claim to be “free thinkers” today are, in other words, just ignorant right-wing trolls. That’s a shame, because the term “free thinker” has a long history, dating back centuries, and refers to a noble tradition that’s worth recovering.

Exactly. Freethought is not an empty word that implies an absence of values. The best summary of the term comes from Susan Jacoby’s wonderful book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It’s a book that came out shortly after Harris’s End of Faith, but before Dawkins’ The God Delusion. The End of Faith did not impress me; the major philosophical and historical work that shaped my attitudes towards atheism was Jacoby’s. I think the American atheist movement would be far better off if it had been inspired by Jacoby’s tolerant and historically aware ideas than the simple-minded “There is no god” and “I really hate Islam” approach of far too many atheists.

Jeet Heer quotes Jacoby to summarize the deeper meaning of freethought.

The term “freethought,” according to Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, “first appeared in the late 1600s and flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement during the next two centuries.” Freethinkers played an especially important role during the American Revolution and the early days of the republic, when they were key in securing the idea of a separation of church and state.

As Jacoby notes, freethinkers ranged from deists to outright atheists, but what they shared, “regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earth existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world. It was this conviction, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, that carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to write the Constitution.”

Get it? It’s a positive set of values. It’s more than just rationalism and naturalism, though, but also includes a social and political agenda. Jacoby explains:

For if freethinkers did not have a political platform, they nevertheless agreed on a wide range of social, cultural, and artistic concerns, which generated such fierce debate in the decades after the Civil War that they would form a template for the nation’s ‘culture wars’ a century later. These included free political speech; freedom of artistic expression; expanded legal and economic rights for women that went well beyond the narrow political goal of suffrage; the necessity of ending domestic violence against women and children; dissemination of birth control information…; opposition to capital punishment and to inhumane conditions in prisons and insane asylums; and, above all, the expansion of public education.

That’s a movement I can get behind. There is meaning there. It’s not the vapid emptiness that too many people want to assign to atheism.

I’ll include a link to Jeet Heer’s article below, and I recommend it highly — it’s short, it’ll be a quick read. I’ll also include a link to the book Freethinkers on Amazon, which is even better if more than a bit longer. And of course I recommend that you read the fine assortment of freethinkers at freethoughtblogs.com!

I get email

Ahh, evangelical Christians…so persistent, so illogical, so arrogant. There’s a guy who has been pestering me for years, and he wrote again today. I’ll include most of it here, because one notable thing about him against the background of the usual mob of people who write is that he actually has decent command of spelling and grammar. He couldn’t argue his way out of a wet paper bag, though.

Isn’t that nice? He’s read some books about science. It’s an open question whether he understands them, though, since he never talks about the contents, nor will he in this letter. It’s a kind of meaningless nod, to say he has some books on his shelf I might have read, too, but nah, he’s going to talk about a sermon he heard, instead.

Also, it’s very nice to hear that Harry Kroto had recommended me to the evangelicals that pestered me. Harry and I had quite a few conversations before his death — he was deeply passionate about science education, and used his Nobel as a tool to fund all kinds of outreach programs. He was a genuinely good guy, and ferociously godless as well.

See what I mean? All he writes about is the stupid goddamn sermon he heard recently, and he seems to think that sprinkling Bible verses everywhere will be persuasive. I believe there was a Paul who lived in the first century AD. I believe that he traveled about, preaching. I can believe he visited Athens, and that philosophers were curious about him (I don’t believe that all Athenians did nothing but listen and think about the latest ideas, though). Nothing in this account contradicts a reasonable understanding of people and the natural world. So, so what?

Of course many people are searching. I’m searching. That doesn’t mean I’m searching for a god — I’m searching for a better understanding of reality. I even accept that last line, People will NEVER find soul satisfaction in false gods. True. That’s why I reject Jesus and Jehovah and all that nonsense, along with other false gods. Is my correspondent actually so incapable of understanding that other people won’t necessarily find his assertions about god at all true?

He just resorts to puking up more Bible quotes.

Some guy insisted, 2000 years ago, that his god was real and true, and some people believed him, and others disbelieved him. There are prophets everywhere who have been saying similar things — Mohammed, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard. Why should I believe? Because you thump your holy book harder?

Here are his conclusions.

No evidence given. We’re just supposed to accept this because it’s in the Bible. You know, this is not an approach that’s ever going to work with people who deny the authority of scripture.

But wait! He has a little evidence to throw at us at the end!

So they found that the Bible names 53 people who have been confirmed to have really existed.

I can do that, too. Here’s a story.

Robert Downey Jr and I used to get together to drink beer and build robots in Wakanda several years ago — Harry Kroto was there, too, as well as Harry Potter, and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms. Downey later used the skills I taught him to build an armored suit and become famous as Iron Man. Unfortunately, we had a falling out because his girlfriend, Pepper Potts AKA Gwyneth Paltrow, found me irresistible and kept throwing herself at me, and Iron Man refused to believe me when I said I found her ditziness unattractive. So I moved to Iceland and married a far more attractive woman named Mary and we went on to found the city of Little Rock, Arkansas. You’ve probably heard of it.

There are 6 names in there, maybe more if you aren’t particularly rigorous in your fact-checking, that you can easily confirm belong to people or places that verifiably exist.

Therefore, the whole story is true.

Well, what if we put a golden calf on a white horse?

Charles Pierce comments on the recent abrupt resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a liberal Democratic politician — one of our guys! — whose career “went into the acid bath because, at one level or another, they failed to see women as actual human beings”. The article resonates with me because this is a universal problem everywhere, not just in politics. I run into it in science, in atheism, everywhere. It’s a problem with the human condition.

The search for the person on a white horse is an open invitation to counterfeit engagement and artificial activism. The impact of celebrity on our politics has been devastating enough; see the current tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for details.

See also the list of Intellectual Dark Web phonies. Every time an organization looks for the guy on the white horse to lead them, they are going to experience a colossal pratfall because there is no end of grifters with a bucket of whitewash and a broke-down mule ready to announce their candidacy.

Schneiderman is one of those terrible people with a history of assaulting women, and it’s good that he’s out (for now; expect a comeback attempt soon. The standard waiting time seems to be a few months.) But the rot goes deeper. Who are all these people who knew, but did nothing?

His swift resignation was more than justified and his disappearance from the ongoing drama of this presidency, while unfortunate, is wholly appropriate. He should’ve been in jail years ago.

Instead, for the purposes of this story, we should focus on one small slice of the account.

After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose. She described this response as heartbreaking. And when Schneiderman heard that she had turned against him, she said, he warned her that politics was a tough and personal business, and that she’d better be careful. She told Selvaratnam that she had taken this as a threat.

Who in the hell counsels a friend to hush up a violent assault on these grounds? My politics are as important to me as anyone’s are but if, say, Sherrod Brown came and burglarized your house, I wouldn’t tell you to let him keep your jewelry because we need him to save Social Security. (Note to Senator Brown: I do not believe you are a cat burglar.) This is turning your politics into a graven image, a golden calf of the soul. Believe it or not, there are some things that politics ought not to touch. Physical abuse of any kind is high on that list.

The metaphor may be apt, but it’s also kind of incongruous that so many atheists are hauling around golden calves of the soul. The argument that “So-and-so is an asshole, but he’s our asshole, and his book/podcast/videos are soooo good” is tiresome. They aren’t worth it.