Jordan Peterson: Gender Pronouns and Free Speech War
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Thanks for posting the interview above Pashalis- it was nice to see an MSM interview of JBP minus a hidden agenda to deliberately misconstrue him. The interviewer seemed genuinely interested in hearing what Peterson had to say. And I was so happy to hear that he’s coming back to Australia next year!
Thanks, that was a very interesting discussion. I haven’t really followed Sam Harris (aka Ben Stiller
) and only knew that he was really anti-religion and an atheist. The article posted by Hi_Henry was interesting but I haven’t read enough about Sam Harris to substantiate some of the claims. However, after watching the discussion I think there might be some truth to it. I also took a look at a few other videos and they didn’t offer much more insight into his "atheology" for lack of a better term. Strangely even his fan “top 10” moments didn’t provide anything particularly meaningful except for superficial statements on why religions (and in particular Islam) were bad.As for the discussion, JP opened up by putting forth Sam’s claim as he understood it to be, which was that Sam wanted to ground a structure of ethics into something solid, based only on fact and to stay away from dogmatism or moral relativism and compares it to his order vs chaos. He goes on to say there is undue suffering in the world, it would be better to have less suffering and this morality is grounded on the premise that if it does this it’s good.
Sam interjects that it will also be grounded on well-being , the positive side of things. To which Peterson explains that he only focuses on suffering (or “what we don’t want”) because it’s something that can be much more easily defined vs what we want. While Peterson doesn’t devalue his claim and says it’s “not unimportant” he goes back to stating that we can get a better grip on where "not to go".
Here’s where I think Sam is showing some of his naiveté or at least it seems he hasn’t really thought too deeply about it. He places the same value on ‘well-being’ as that of suffering, but how can one arrive at a valuation if we don’t have a clear way of measuring it in order to compare it? What would be a sufficient measure of well-being? Is it just having enough food/clothing/shelter for every single person in the population? Or do we need more? I think until something like that can be clearly defined, I don’t know if using that aspect as a grounding is really going to work. People vary greatly when it comes to ‘good’ things compared to ‘bad’ things that lead to suffering. So in this instance I think Peterson is right to say that we can much more easily see where we don’t want to go than where we do.
The overarching theme running throughout mostly revolved around what Peterson outlined: trying to lay down a foundation for a system of ethics/morality that can guide humanity towards progress. Peterson’s argument is that stories (in particular the ones in the bible) provide a context for connecting our long standing structures with our experience of reality which can overtime extract basic truths about the correct mode for living.
Harris says we don’t need religion for that and stories can be used as an aide but they can’t contain any absolute truths since what we get is filtered through our own biases and interpretations of it. (To which Peterson contends the same could be said about ‘facts’). He keeps coming back to his examples of fundamentalism and dogmatism to support his claim (however those traits are not a failing of religion only and are present in the sciences and medicine as well). I actually find it kind of funny because his assertion itself has undertones of fundamentalism/dogmatism.
One question that Peterson kept asking him throughout the talk was (paraphrasing) “how do you extract value from facts without an a priori structure; what is this structure that transcends that?”
However he seems to avoid the question or rather, doesn’t offer any real explanation on that. His answers to me seemed vague and underdeveloped and he meandered around it without ever really answering (or if he did, it was rather ambiguous) before moving on to another talking point. And anytime he did start to get anywhere he’d be taking elements from religion to try and describe it.
This question is to me a crucial point – his answering it in a more detailed manner would have given a whole lot more weight to his rationalistic (or rather materialistic) view and I was a little disappointed that he couldn’t describe that in more detail or without resorting to some parallel with religion.
There’s no doubt that Harris is a very smart guy – but something about his proposal and his mental ability reminds me of Ouspensky in a sense. He can’t or won’t accept that in order to make progress, he has to let go of his ‘identification’, though in Harris’s case, I would say it's with the rational materialistic viewpoint.
Anyway, that was my overall impression of the talk. There’s a lot more that can be said about that (and the talk) but I think I'll leave here for now.
Note: The videos have been uploaded by Peterson on his channel, with improved audio.
Part 1
Part 2
He also put in the description a couple of links to his blog regarding the talk, which outline in much better detail what I was describing above.
Facts and Values/Science and Religion: Notes on the Sam Harris Discussions (Part I) | Jordan Peterson
Facts from Values? Not without an intermediary: Notes on the Sam Harris Discussions (Part II) | Jordan Peterson
Yeah, that's my issue with Harris: He may be smart, but he can't see his own "religion", which is effectively materialism.
He doesn't seem capable of taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture in a way that he can also see himself from a wider view - which would then allow him to see how he thinks.
I'm not sure if this is an effect of the "yay science and hard facts" crowd (as in: it's just "religious belief" to them like religion is to other people), or if there's something else there.
It's almost like ardent belief in "just the facts, ma'am" is in some ways worse than religious belief in terms of hampering the ability to think deeply and broadly... maybe because it's a powerful focus on material reality instead of more abstract concepts like God or heaven or whatever.
So my theory is that hardcore materialistic views are more harmful in the long run than hardcore religious belief because with the materialist thing, you may literally be shutting out so much of reality that it turns your brain to mush faster.
If you have religious beliefs that are screwed up, that's not quite as "bad" because at least you realize there's something beyond nuts and bolts 3D. So everyone focuses on religious fanaticism that creates chaos, but nobody ever thinks to look at how materialism creates chaos because those people are viewed as "smart".
There's a huge difference between appearing or sounding smart, and actually being smart. I think Peterson is the real deal, while Harris is merely the appearance of it.
Yes. What I found interesting about the conversations is that Sam and Jordan at times talked about totally different things: Sam was talking about organized religion from a materialist, "modern" (and frankly often very uninformed) position, which allowed him to score some points on the bible bashing and Islam bashing front. And fair enough. But Jordan was talking about religiosity, about religion as such. And Sam simply has no point of reference for any of this, he can't grasp it. And I think you are right Scottie, it's as if he (and the enlightenment crowd) completely ignores his own "transcendent motivational substrate" if you will, pretending that it doesn't exist. And since Jordan's whole project is getting a handle on this "transcendent motivational substrate" or "deep structure of Being", he can't grasp his points and just runs in circles. His whole position seems pretty contradictory.
Still, I think Sam is smart enough to make for an interesting conversation, especially when pressed and challenged by Jordan and Bret. As for the article Hi_Henry posted above, at first glance (haven't looked deeper into it) this seems largely like character assassination. Okay, Sam founded a successful business, as a famous speaker and author hired some assistants to help him with his research etc. - sounds like a smart, successful guy. Nothing wrong with that.
Jordan talked a bit about his series with Sam in his September patreon Q&A. It's taken so long to get it up, because they weren't sure it would even fly as an event, let alone a series worthy of being uploaded. He was surprised at how well it was received by the audiences.
JP said he enjoyed the talks very much, crediting Harris with sharpening his thinking on certain points which he talks about. Shows how knowledge can be extracted from just about any situation. That section starts at 1:01:00.
He also mentions his future book, and the next couple of lecture series he preparing, the way government agencies interfere with proper research and discusses a poem written by Marx(!) The whole thing is worth listening to, even though there are some technical glitches from a software update that causes the stream to freeze. Just wait it out.
JP said he enjoyed the talks very much, crediting Harris with sharpening his thinking on certain points which he talks about. Shows how knowledge can be extracted from just about any situation. That section starts at 1:01:00.
He also mentions his future book, and the next couple of lecture series he preparing, the way government agencies interfere with proper research and discusses a poem written by Marx(!) The whole thing is worth listening to, even though there are some technical glitches from a software update that causes the stream to freeze. Just wait it out.
Harris gave a slightly clearer defense of the bolded point in the second debate. He argued that taking a moral or 'better/worse' perspective is just an inevitable presupposition of experience, therefore we should accept it as a brute fact and proceed from there. He's right - technically - but just leaving the answer in that form is pretty hollow. Tom Nagel made the same point in Mind and Cosmos: human experience is impossible without the ideas of better and worse - a fundamentally moral outlook. Nagel takes it to its logical implication, while Harris doesn't. Nagel basically asks, "OK, so what does this imply about the nature of the universe?" Nagel's atheistic teleology is itself unsatisfying, though, IMO.
Whitehead was clearer on this, conceptually (even if his own writing is pretty opaque). He argued that philosophy should provide a worldview that accounts for all of our inevitable presuppositions (e.g., truth, causation, consciousness, the external world, etc.) in a coherent manner. Not to do so leads to performative contradiction (e.g., "There is no such thing as true" presumes that such a statement is true). Doing so will suggest a speculative metaphysic. For Whitehead this means a cosmic mind. Harris doesn't go there, but bringing in metaphysics would actually bring him closer to Peterson's position: values must be rooted in some universal 'something' over and above (or beneath) the material world of facts. Peterson doesn't really go there, either, but most of what he says implies such a metaphysic, even if he doesn't state it explicitly. He gets close though, as when he speculates as to the nature of God, or when he says information may be the actual substrate of reality (see his latest Q&A which herondancer linked to).
BTW, we talked about the first 2 debates on this episode of the Truth Perspective: The Truth Perspective: The Great Debate: Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson's Epic 4-Night Battle of Ideas -- Sott.net
Those were my thoughts too, well-being is very hard to define even if we just circumscribe the definition within the western culture. And what about the systems that provoke a natural hierarchy between nations? Is this the same as saying that he is in favor of equality of outcomes?
There are some parallels between those two, both seem to have clear what the reasons are for the sorry state we are in. For Harris is this irrational belief in religion and its accompanying dogmatism, for instance. But by shying away from a real answer to the above question, he just revealed his materialism and its limiting scope, and he seems content with it. He just can't make the "jump" into considering a possible divine substrate innate to our human condition, which IMO is what Peterson is trying to propose with his theses.
Yes, Sam's definition of well-being is kind of a sleight of hand IMO. Defining this term - and realizing that it can't be defined without recourse to the spiritual realm! - is absolutely crucial.
I always think about Huxley's Brave New World here: everyone's well, happy, satisfied, has all the food/sex/entertainment one could ever want etc, yet we are all instinctively disgusted by such a totalitarian nightmare. Or take the other end of the spectrum - Solzhenitsyn who lived through the opposite of "well-being", the Gulag, and still managed to find meaning and purpose.
And Sam even realizes this at some point in the debate when he brings up the fact that people can grow from periods of suffering, though again, he just weaves it off as some inconsequential detail when in fact this is crucial! In fact, post-traumatic growth is a well-studied phenomenon. Does that mean we should inflict trauma on purpose? Of course not! Which goes to show that the universe is so much bigger and more complex than we can grasp with simple "rational" moral rules.
I really enjoyed Peter Kreeft's discussion of the question of suffering, which shows how nuanced all of this really is:
I’ve been reading some essays on Marx, and by most accounts he seems like a deeply disturbed man, with Mephistophelean hate for Being itself (from Faust “Everything is existence is worth being destroyed”). Gives you some insight into the roots of the Communist movement and Marxist philosophy for sure. Here is the poem that Jordan Peterson reads out:
I think I know why. I had a conversation with my roommate not long ago who is a declared atheist. I proposed that life is ultimately about lessons and learning. I was a little dismayed when he got a little condescending and implied that that was believing in a form of fantasy. There is no underlying purpose for the atheist. So of course well being has as much value as suffering if not more.
But as the C's have told us, we've chosen what they call the short wave cycle. (i.e. learning the hard way) Suffering is a far greater motivator for change and for learning.
It's interesting that atheist have a desire to be 'moral.' They want to take the moral high ground to validate their position. The rational goes something like this; We've got our feet on the ground. We're not delusional or hypocritical like those religious people.
My roommate feels it's important to be moral and just, specifically to represent being an atheist in a positive light.