Jordan Peterson: Slayer of woke dragons
where are the quality critics of the left?
Cross polarization is a very boring phenomenon, not least because it produces some very tediously one-sided commentary. Much has been written about how authors on the left have refused to debate or contend with the ideas of their counterparts; often leaning in on cancelling, shaming, or simply ignoring. The result, according to critics of the left, has been the adoption of a closed worldview that refuses to understand-let alone empathize-with the other side. Whatever the merits of this position (I think it once had punch, but there are a lot of good left critiques of the right now available across media) too little attention has been paid to negligent standards on the other side. Put simply, the right doesn’t have a lot of quality critics of the left.
There are of course some. Patrick Deneen’s Democratic Faith and Why Liberalism Failed are deep and learned critiques of egalitarian perfectionism and the excesses of (neo)liberalism. The late Roger Scruton wrote a punchy, popular book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands that has its problems, but is characteristically knowledgeable and sharp. The heterodox libertarian Jason Brennan has developed probing critiques of Marxists like G.A Cohen.
But by and large one surveys what’s on offer with the grim sense that it mostly exists to affirm its audiences resentments without offering serious rebuttal. Sometimes the lack of seriousness becomes blatantly funny. Mark Levin, author of American Marxism, inveighing against the “Franklin School” of critical theory. Charlie Kirk insisting that Marx was the literal “President” of the Young Hegelians in The College Scam. James Lindsay being at a lost for words when confronted with someone who actually knew the deep ins and outs of critical theory and trying to insist that centrist banalities are a kind of Satanic-Marxist code.
Unfortunately even the more scholarly of the right’s intellectuals often can’t seem to bring themselves to do much better. Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind presents itself as a cure to contagious ideas, but in 200+ pages seems more interested in relitigating his Twitter feuds and plagiarizing decades old South Park jokes. Contending with Foucault, Derrida occupies less space than a discussion of Gad trolling Charlize Theron. And of course there is Jordan Peterson, infamous slayer of woke dragons who, when pressed to name the alleged “post-modern neo-Marxists” who are destroying the west couldn’t name one. Things don’t appear to have gotten much better in the intervening years. In We Who Wrestle With God, Peterson gish gallops past a huge range of progressive authors and movements, discussing none in depth, making basic errors about Marx’s appreciation for the bourgeoisie’s historical role, and shrilly lumping very different leftists together as “spiritual descendants of Cain.”1
Why Won’t the Right Debate the Left?
There are a few surface explanations for the indifference right wing intellectuals show towards rebutting their counterparts in depth. Part of it is simple laziness. Harsh as that sounds, it’s the immediate sense you get when being victimized by books like American Marxism or The Parasitic Mind. Carefully reading and critiquing the strongest alternative viewpoints is time consuming and difficult. If you think you can get away with avoiding it, plenty of commentators would understand that as a small mercy. Another surface explanation is no doubt market factors. Whether because conservative audiences are uninterested in takes on the left that go beyond Elon Musk tweeting “Concerning” above a liberal commentary, or whether that’s because this is the standard they’ve been primed to expect, isn’t something I’ll address here. Whatever happens to be the case, the conservative ecosystem has generated expectations that low standards of intellectual engagement with the left are the norm, and right wing intellectuals and commentators have followed suit.
But I think there are deeper explanations for this lack of Socratic discourse which can tell us some important things about the nature of the right.
Firstly, there is an inherent danger entailed by taking left wing arguments seriously. In doing so one might inadvertently suggest that they in fact have some merit. Oftentimes this is what more serious intellectuals are forced to do when engaging with their opponents. In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Roger Scruton can without a doubt be tart when dealing with those he considers fools and frauds, like the French philosophers Alain Badiou or Jacques Lacan—sometimes to a degree that undermines the cogency of Scruton’s analysis. But when engaging the work of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, Scruton complimented his “breadth of knowledge” and elegant prose before calling his four volume history of the modern world a “remarkable work of synthesis, seriously misleading only in the fourth volume, where the attempt to whitewash the communist experiment and to lay the blame for all ills at the door of ‘capitalism’ has an aspect that is partly sinister, partly quaint.” He also highlighted Hobsbawm’s important contributions to understanding the Industrial Revolution, which the Marxist historian painted in largely dim rather than hagiographic terms. In How to Be a Conservative Scruton also acknowledged the “truth of socialism”—namely its claim that we are defined by “mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them.”
Of course one can contend with whether the substance of Scruton’s critiques of left intellectuals or traditions like socialism have merits or whether they largely fall flat. I think some do happen to have merits, although his overall outlook has problems. But from the standpoint of an agonistic, partisan politics what might appear dangerous about Scruton’s attitude is that he takes left intellectuals and traditions seriously. He recognizes that leftists raise arguments often grounded in moral principles sufficiently cogent that their real appeal to intelligent and sometimes good willed—if from Scruton’s standpoint, very misguided—people is understandable. It is impossible to do this without granting one’s opponents a degree of dignity that many on the right reject since their outlook is to simply to dismiss, lampoon and “destroy” the opposition at every level.
Certainty Versus Truth
This brings me to the second and deeper reason why many on the right wont sincerely debate the left. In a post-modern epoch like our own, many of Nietzsche’s transcendent “idols” have been overthrown with the result being the spread of widespread skepticism and nihilism. This is a well established point. Less noted is the dialectical fact that in response to the anxieties induced by such cultural skepticism and nihilism, many have raced towards doctrines which promise a sense of certainty. A solid keel in a stormy postmodern sea as it were.
In my book The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism, I observed that since the advent of modernity’s overthrow of antiquarian modes of thinking, it has largely been the right which has been especially attracted to this yearning for certainty. Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France castigated the philosophes for tearing down “all the pleasing illusions” which held society’s orderly hierarchies together. Joseph de Maistre called Enlightenment philosophy a fundamentally “destructive” force and even “Satanic,” insisting that it was human nature and a deep social need to treat the principles and institutions one was born into as “dogmas.” In The Meaning of Conservatism, Roger Scruton offered paeans to “unthinking people” who accept life and their station as they find it, and don’t seek to politicize their lot excessively. He even described conservatives as not having reasons for their views, which are largely a matter of feeling, and portrayed conservative intellectuals as paradoxically offering “reasons for not having reasons.” Though for a pure expression of a distinctly post-modern conservative’s need for certainty, none can beat Charlie Kirk in Right Wing Revolution. Describing politics as mainly being about “advertising” and “framing,” which may even entail a little “friendly deception,” Kirk insists those on the right must “police” its own thinking to banish any doubts that their worldview is correct.2
This yearning for certainty, to not have to give reasons or justify one’s beliefs before a tribunal of endlessly critical downer leftists, is understandable. It has often been developed by the more reflective conservative intellectuals into an explicit principle. Few have done better than Yoram Hazony in Conservatism a Rediscovery, where he attacks the “rationalism” of left intellectuals for undermining certainty and consensus through encouraging an endless questioning.”3
The problem for the conservative is that certainty is not the same thing as truth—indeed in some circumstances a need for certainty can become antagonistic to the attitude required to pursue truth. A person who is attached to traditional modes of thought, who is certain they must be correct is not—as some conservatives like to present themselves, a “free thinker”—but a dogmatist. Someone who is unable to bear the Socratic burden of not only confronting new intellectual currents and ideas that have to be explored, and which intellectual honesty might compel us to accept to the detriment of our old convictions if those happen to be wrong. Not coincidentally, the conservative intellectual Wilmoore Kendall even mused that the Athenian elites might have been right to execute Socrates for corrupting the youth and undermining faith in the city’s Gods. At some point, at least the public display of endless rationalistic criticism of a “second best” regime has to be silence because the unending quest for truth becomes inherently distintegrationist and critical—and consequently threatening to both one’s sense of metaphysical stability and the actually existing social hierarchies needed to maintain order.
Post-modern conservatives have flourished in part because they have strategically operationalized the skepticism of the epoch as a basis for affirming their certainty. This might appear paradoxical, but the coupling of skepticism towards rationalistic universalism with an endorsement of dogmatism is a longstanding trope of the right going back at least to Burke. In a postmodern environment, where the grand narratives of Enlightenment themselves come under question, it is so easy to say everything is simply a matter of opinion or qua Adrian Vermeule groundless “theological” choice. If one chooses to be a Catholic or a liberal or socialist, that’s up to them. There is no need to subject one’s views on, say, the environment to the tribunal of environmental scientists any more because, as Jordan Peterson once opined, can they even say what the environment is? My resentment towards pretentious liberal intellectuals who want to scold me for believing Trumpian untruth can now be grounded by dismissing them as “fake news” or defenders of the “mainstream media.” Its all just your opinion, man.
Conclusion
This approach to politics is a big part of why so many contemporary right-wing intellectuals don’t feel compelled to deal with their left-wing counterparts. Central to their worldview is the idea that it is certainty that matters at all cost. On this basis, politics is an agonistic contest where one reads conservative intellectuals not to be challenged or provoked to a higher or more truthful view that might entail revising priors. Far too often one reads conservative intellectuals to be affirmed and conciliated in one's resentments; dare one say coddled by being told that one is indeed the Luke Skywalker of the political world challenging and endless series of Darth Vaders (at least circa A New Hope). “Truth” and “logic” no longer refer to truth and logic as analytical standards. They are rhetorical tropes to compliment one’s viewpoint and redouble conviction.
By contrast, engaging with the left and rebutting their views would inherently mean conceding that conservative positions are open to contestation and require defense. Most conservative intellectuals treat this as intolerable. As Nathan Robinson and myself noted, even comparatively erudite tomes like Chris Rufo’s American Cultural Revolution don’t even bother offering arguments against the left-authors described in the book. The implicit understanding is that anyone reading Rufo’s book already knows in their gut that these views are simply wrong, theirs are right, and the only reason to bother looking at the opposition is to better understand how to annihilate them. The ideal American mind is one firmly closed to all but the siren’s song of the Daily Wire.
“The resentful, then murderous, then genocidal Jacobins who first planned the French Revolution and then took it over completely were the spiritual descendants of Cain. Karl Marx is Cain to the core, construing society as nothing but a battleground of power…He failed completely (and purposefully) to separate wheat from chaff in the totalizing condemnation of the ‘bourgeoisie,’ regarding them in consequence of their success as only parasites, predators and thieves, and gave no credit whatsoever for the wealth and stable societal structure they produced as a result of their conscientiousness, diligent, honest, and productive labor. The modern meta-Marxists, the postmodern power players, have, as it were, metastasized Marx-but, more deeply, the spirit of Cain...”
“So how do we turn back wokeness? It starts by refusing to give a single inch on framing. This has to happen on two levels. First, don’t let the woke set the frame tactically by deciding what words are used. But second, and even more importantly, police your own thinking to make sure you aren’t letting them set the moral framework of debate. We should be confident that our worldview is correct. Even if we aren’t fully certain what is right in a given context, we can definitely be certain that the left is wrong. So quite simply, stop giving them a pass. Chase a clear-cut, black-and white, Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader attitude toward every issue possible.”
“Enlightenment rationalism supposes that individuals, if they reason freely about political and moral subjects without reference to tradition, will quickly discover the truth concerning these matters and move toward a consensus. But experience suggests just the opposite: When people reason freely about political and moral questions, they produce a profusion of varying and contradictory opinions, reaching no consensus at all. Indeed, the only thing that reasoning without reference to some traditional framework can do with great competence is identify an unlimited number of flaws and failings, both imagined and real, in whatever institutions and norms have been inherited from the past. Where individuals are encouraged to engage in this activity, the process of finding flaws in inherited institutions proceeds with ever greater speed and enthusiasm, until in the end whatever has been inherited becomes a thing of lightness and folly in their eyes. In this way, they come to reject all the old ideas and behaviors, uprooting and discarding everything that was once a matter of consensus. This means that Enlightenment rationalism, to the extent that its program is taken seriously, is an engine of perpetual revolution, which brings about the progressive destruction of every inherited institution, yet without ever being able to consolidate a stable consensus around any new ones.”
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