Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson

Myth and Mayhem gives a leftist critique of Jordan Peterson. In the book, Matthew McManus tries to give sense to Peterson's views, exploring his two books, articles, and background; Conrad Hamilton shows that Peterson's criticisms of "Postmodern Neo-Marxism" have no target (not Derrida, certainly); Marion Trejo takes up Peterson's criticisms of "radical feminists," showing, again, that Peterson has no target (MacKinnon differs from Nussbaum, for example); finally, Ben Burgis looks at Peterson's rhetoric, states the premises of one of his arguments, shows that those premises don't entail his conclusion, and observes that we may regiment any of Peterson's arguments, identifying their premises and conclusions, which will bring their strengths and weaknesses to light.Peterson grew up in Alberta Canada, studied and taught in Canada and the USA, and took a job as a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Recently Peterson got famous for criticizing a statute. He thought the statute criminalized calling transgender people by pronouns they do not want to be called by (as the book details, it conferred a range of civil rights on transgender people and did not impose criminal penalties for violating those rights). Peterson was outraged by the law, thinking that it limited who he could call "he" or "she."Peterson has long supported Carl Jung's exciting idea of a collective unconscious--the idea that the unconscious mind has cross-cultural, biologically fixed, forms or structures that repeatedly reveal themselves in myths, fairy tales, and legends from all over the world. These myths reveal, according to Peterson, a clash between manly order and womanly chaos. The hero's calling (in every biologically deep story that wells up from the collective unconscious) is to put these opposed forces into balance by becoming the person the hero was called to be. When order becomes too dominant, we get authoritarianism, neuroticism, and fascism. When chaos reigns, we get evil, collectivism, and the gulag. The gulag is run by Joe Stalin, the radical feminists, and Postmodern neo-Marxists.I have seen Peterson's videos and listened to his podcast, and find his videos interesting but also frustrating. Interesting: Jungian psychology is interesting to me, as are Peterson's takes on religious themes. Frustrating: despite his academic background, he is not curious about law, including civil rights law or criminal law. He is not seriously interested in philosophy or political thought, including Marxian philosophy, poststructuralism, phenomenology, the Frankfurt school, or philosophical explorations of the postmodern condition. Peterson is curious about human motives and behavior. People should be working towards becoming respectable citizens, not wasting their time on policing speech and advocating political correctness and identity politics. It is easy to see the attraction of this attitude, though I don't share the attitude.As all the authors observe, Peterson paints with a very broad brush. He speaks generally of "postmodern Neo-Marxists" and "radical feminists," as if these identified the view he attacks: that all hierarchy in society is due to the exercise of socially-constructed, arbitrary power, exercised by straight men over women, the laboring class, minorities, and the disadvantaged. As Peterson imagines it, this "Postmodern Neo-Marist" view involves claiming that all outcomes would be equal if power were justly distributed. Since nobody holds this view, Peterson falsely attributes it to Derrida and the postmodernists. Peterson, it must be said, is no more interested in Derrida, Marxism, and poststructuralism than he is in Quine and Rawls. His actual interests range over elementary statistics, popular biology, Carl Jung, the suffering of life, mythology, gulags, personality tests, gender pronouns, meat, lobsters, order and chaos in myth and in individual personalities, the fostering of personal responsibility in young men, and battling the precious prissiness we sometimes see on the left.Peterson seeks to promote the moral development of the individual person in light of the natural limitations on that development imposed by the world, including the constraints imposed by biology and psychology. For Peterson, these constraints doom us to suffering and limit our possibilities. As McManus and Hamilton acknowledge, Peterson is pessimistic. He does not see a wide field in which we may grow, in various directions, in our moral and spiritual development. The virtue of the liberal state is not that it allows different people to live together while pursuing alternative conceptions of the good life. It is that it allows responsible people to eat, enjoy mild pleasures, and suffer less than they would if they lived in the erstwhile Easterm Bloc. The best we can hope for is to find tolerable work, spend time with family, and affix ourselves to a deep-rooted tradition, and cling to it. Religion can anchor us, Peterson thinks, only because it comports with our biological and psychological natures. Hamilton rightly mentions that humans are more changeable and less constrained by nature than Peterson allows. In any case, Peterson cannot envision drastically improved social conditions because he thinks the political order is limited to the range of actual modes of political organization we have observed. Thus, if the authors of Myth and Mayhem are right, it is Peterson's picture of us--as determined by our individual, biologically evolved minds--that convinces him that we cannot improve on a liberal state, embedded within a free market economy. Accordingly, Marxism must collapse into Stalinism, since we are not much better than Stalin. The problem with this, of course, is that it drastically underestimates the influence of our social environments on us, and it fails to recognize that our social environments are always changing, and that we affect the direction and pace of that change.McManus, I think, compares Peterson to Schopenhauer. Both are angry pessimists. Schopenhauer, however, was much funnier than Peterson, and he was far more critical of tradition than Peterson. After reading Myth and Mayhem, I suspect that Peterson describes his views at a high level of generality to save them from rebuttal. Peterson may legitimately complain: "Unfair! That's not my view. My view is immune to that criticism," no matter what the substance of the criticism is. Temperamentally, Peterson is drawn to subjects in which exact thinking is not always possible, such as the depths of Being, suffering, and myth. He is vague and oracular, angry and sharp. These temperamental qualities, I think, are the source of his appeal. But they also make critique difficult. Myth and Mayhem makes a good attempt.

This book does a fairly good job of showing that Jordan Peterson is often talking way outside of his field of expertise and getting many things wrong in his commentaries on Marxism and post-modernism. It also does a good job in showing that his notions of "chaos" versus "order" are lacking in rigor and that he has not provided a convincing case, beyond intuition, when arguing that societies naturally tend toward patriarchy since women are naturally associated with chaos and men with order. The quality of the writing varies from author to author, but, in all cases, they throw in ample amounts of humor; something which is much more lacking in Peterson's work.The most effective critiques have to do with the lack of rigor in Peterson's main books. Yes, he does not attempt to define his key notions of "chaos" versus "order" beyond giving lengthy examples of both. True, there are no references to many key points that Peterson makes, for instance, regarding Derrida and Marxism. Yes, in general, it seems when Peterson tries to make points of what societies naturally tend toward he tends to provide only supporting and omit contrary evidence: e.g . women being associated with chaos. Possibly most stinging are the critiques of Peterson's "Law of the Jungle” (or lobsters, perhaps?) notion of Christianity backed by biblical quotes which are taken way out of context.Overall the portrait is of Jordan Peterson appealing mostly on the basis of the confidence he projects along with other qualities that make him a good speaker. Ultimately, the authors present Jordan Peterson as an over glorified, tough love, self-help guru, too often speaking on matters he knows little about, but, even in matter that he does, not presenting his case with requisite rigor.The book, though overall generally effective in making its case, does have many shortcomings:The main problem seems to be that it is not really clear who the target audience for the book is. Approximately half the time the discussions do provide enough detail, even of basics, and the writing is clear enough, that the critiques can be seen to be convincing even to readers who are not full time academics. In other cases, the writing is not at all clear. The place where this is the most egregious is when discussing what Derrida really meant. Here many undefined term are used. Even looking things up on Kindle just leads to "not found" entries for many of the terms used. Maybe full time academics can understand the discussion, but I doubt that even motivated folks who are not academics can. Or, perhaps, and this is my strong suspicion, many post-modernists deliberately write a bunch of gobbledygook which is comprehensible to no one but just part of a massive fraud. (Hence the success of the the Sokal and "Grievance Studies" affairs in demonstrating as much). Conrad Hamilton's "explanation" of Derrida will probably just reinforce many readers' notions that the field is filed with fraudulent windbags.Similarly, only partly effective was Hamilton's detailing what Peterson got wrong in his debate with Zizek on Marxism. Yes, Peterson makes enough admissions and other errors to show that he has done very little actual reading of Marx. Indeed, if he had read even Engels' "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" or, better yet, Sowell's "Marxism: Philosophy and Economics", which are very short summaries, he would not have made as many errors as he did. At the same time, Hamilton's discussion of all the things Peterson got wrong has its own problems. In some case it is being rather pedantic. Although Marx might not have claimed that nothing capitalists do constitutes valid labor, Marx and Engels do explicitly refer to them as being superfluous. The other problem with Hamilton's explanation of what Peterson got wrong is that it quickly breezes through Marxist counter points to Peterson's claim. There is not sufficient explanation or references for those not already familiar with current classical Marxist critiques of capitalism and, indeed, many of the claims made are dubious. For instance, it is merely stated, without evidence, that capitalism is responsible for rising inequality. A highly plausible alternative explanation is that it is actually central bank intervention doing various forms of money printing that is mostly responsible.In some cases the authors go a little too far in their speculations regarding Peterson possibly into the territories of projecting their own feelings or problems with the left onto Peterson and his philosophy. An example of this is the idea that Peterson must have left Harvard for the University of Toronto because he realized he could not hack it at Harvard. Is this just the author projecting his own feeling that he cannot see anyone rejecting Harvard (surely the highest credential in leftist circles) for another university for any reason beyond not being able to hack it there? Anyone who has gone to college can clearly see that some of the professors seem to be at the right level institution in terms of name recognition, but others seem like they could be at bigger name institution but, for whatever reason, choose somewhere else (prefer a different city? closer to family? Or *gasp* just do not like Harvard culture, as was the case with Justice Clarence Thomas) .As for projecting problems with the left onto Peterson, a good example is the claim that he mainly uses motte and bailey tactics. He has a very far right view of world but will retreat to saying he just claimed something uncontroversial when challenged. Anyone who is at all critical of the left surely is intimately familiar with their motte-and-bailey tactics. No they do not want to take your guns away they just want this next "common sense" measure and that will be it. Meanwhile, the ratchet tightens up as we see in Canada where now not even a domestic incident is needed to justify tightening guns laws: something that happened in the United States will do.The final thing to say about this book is that if its only goal was merely to discredit Peterson's guru status it makes a good case. (Of course, practically, it will not make a dent in his status at all since Peterson will likely sell at least hundreds of times as many copies of his books than this book will sell.) Also, in many ways, although the book does discredit the exact thing Peterson says it does not do much regarding the more general themes Peterson is appealing to. Is it strictly true that one cannot be a "post modern neo-Marxist" because of the contradictions between the theories? Yes, if you are talking post-modernism as it was in 1960's until its supposed death in the late 1980's. But how about the evolution of post-modernist ideas after that? Specifically into what James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose called "applied post-modernism" in which some truths can, perhaps, be known, namely the post modern truths regarding power, and then "reified post-modernism" in which they become beyond question, indeed to the point where anyone who does question them becomes cancellable. It would be a smaller market, but a book critiquing James Lindsay would be a good follow up to this one. By Lindsay and Pluckrose's account in "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody", combined with Lindsay's subsequent work, post-modernism and neo-Marxism evolved to meet each other like a hand in glove in woke'ism. Peterson’s response in the Zizek debate also hints at why they came to fit so well together.Along the same lines, throughout the book the notion of post modern neo-Marxists is met with scorn, partly because it is said to be mixing oil with water but also because, according to the authors, the theories are highly contested and indeed, non-dominate in academia. If this is indeed the case, one wonders why so many students, nearly all in my experience, come out of college completely "woke" to the extent that they do not even know what the criticisms of woke'ism are. Either the authors are not being honest, are not being adequately introspective regarding themselves and their profession, or they are doing a terrible job of opposing woke'ism which they say they disagree with (this book uses the 90's term "PC" instead of the currently used word "woke").

The first section, written by Matthew McManus PhD, a Professor at the University of Tec de Monterrey (political science & theory), is a well balanced dialectic (oppositional argument) that dissects the strength and weaknesses of Jordan Peterson’s “philosophy” and compares & contrasts with modern Liberal values. In fact he finds many parts of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic —as described in the book by Joseph Henrich) cultural philosophy that he himself would partly agree with. He attempts a partial synthesis that is seen in his other publications on post-modern conservatism.I was left with a balanced impression of the potential virtuous aspects of classical Marxism and modern Liberalism aligning with some of Peterson’s Western Renaissance and Enlightenment based “Rules of Life”.However, the opportunity was not taken to completely resolve the oppositional arguments into an ideology that took the best of both perspectives and resolved them (in true Hegelian Style) into new guidelines for society.Unfortunately, the book deteriorated into an ad hominem attack on Peterson and his associates, using invective, arrogant and sanctimonious speech, as written by Conrad Bongard Hamilton (PhD graduate student with Dr. Malabou at Paris 8 University). This is a pity, since he did write an interesting discussion on Jungian archetypes (although I was surprised he disparaged Peterson’s neurobiological basis in view of his PhD supervisor’s expertise on plasticity) and clarified some of these Jungian concepts, as well as the original Marxist dogma from Das Kapital (prior to its heterodox variations that Peterson eludes to).I suspect that Hamilton’s mocking style is very much a whistle blow to the seemingly authoritarian and totalitarian Liberals that espouse an “insider” academic ideology—that has evolved from the classical Marxists (and all their heterodox versions) using the tools of the Frankfurt School and Ecole Normale Supérieure. These academic insiders are the new Bohemians— globalized, preachy, seemingly arrogant and consiglieres to the totalitarian Liberal political elite (a post modern oxymoron). This is unfortunate since the confrontational approach maintains the continuous tension that prevents resolution of these ideals into a progressive but stable society that meets most people’s needs. On the other hand, a resolution would destroy many academic careers.As a doctoral student of Malabou and a scholar of the French Marxists from Rousseau and Sorel, to the post modern philosophers of Foucault & Derrida (who I agree are often misrepresented), Hamilton’s writing style is disappointing. His focus on the assumed banality of a Canadian newspaper insults all of its readers, and was an infantile attack on Peterson by association, especially when taken out of context and not compared with other media (including a very left wing Canadian newspaper that often publishes bias and vituperative drivel). The same is true for insulting all Canadians by his glib comment that Peterson’s academia in Canada was in a presumed Canadian culture of a conservative non-Marxist milieu (presumably to contrast with a left wing sanctimonious French academia). In fact, criticizing a debated opponent by association is a weak infantile tactic, since it just increases the divide without intellectual substance or resolution. It says more about the proponent.I gave the book a maximum 5 star because it actually helped to translate some of Peterson’s literature, gave an alternative perspective, and was engaging. It is not well referenced but has some endnotes. I hope that future discussions will inform us of a resolution of these Hegelian dialectics and not an angry continuation of Marxist dialectics based on a more socially constructed division (between the culturally oppressed and the designated WEIRD bourgeoisie) and mocking sanctimony from both sides of the ideological equation.The book is a propaedeutic for resolving the divide between the WEIRD and the current ultra-Liberal ideology (avoiding the Neo-Marxist or Cultural Marxist profanity). If this is a small step to avoiding an academic or political Totalitarianism, that can, ironically, develop from both the rhizomic sprouting, as well as the hierarchical evolution, of heterodox ideologies, this is a book worth reading and developing further.

A pitfall awaiting the conscientious teacher: spending more time grading a paper than the student has spent writing it. This thoughtful, well-researched and engaging book falls into just this trap. A self-promoting media personality does not need a coherent, refutable intellectual position; shrill Victorian catastrophizing has been sufficient fuel for this Chicken-Little-of-the soul's quest for book sales and Patreon donations. I applaud the authors for their reasoned analyses, but here they have mistaken cunning for intelligence and they respond to their subject's self-interest and grift with innocence. Nevertheless, if you are interested in what the thoughtful have to say about the unscrupulous, this is a book for you.

At last a rational critique of Jordan Peterson, and a good readable critique it is too. also very enjoyable, however it contains many references to social theory, Marxism and post modernism which may be beyond the casual reader and could benefit from having brief guides to these. It is perhaps worth saying that the writers show that Peterson does not know very much about these topics either, despite his railing against them.My biggest criticism is that when referring to the study that Peterson quotes that proports to demonstrate that women and men in gender egalitarian democracies are more likely to choose careers that are in accordance with traditional gender role, ie nursing for women, STEM for men. They accept the validity of the study at face value and challenge the explanations for these behaviours rather than the results, whereas I have seen a research paper that pointed out that the statistical methodologies used in the study were flawed and that this could account for the results, and that an attempt to replicate the studies finding in another study, failed.This failing on the part of the present authors may be due to the fact that they are not scientifically trained, indeed part of Petersons schtick is that he interweaves science (often inaccurately) with Christianity, Jung and the aforementioned critiques of feminism post modernism and SJW etc, and few critics can challenge him on both grounds, and those that can, have I suspect, regarded him as too lightweight, populist and downright wrong, to be worthy of being challenged, until recently.One good critic of Peterson is Cognitive psychologist PhD Cass Eris who is well worth checking out on Youtube, although given Peterson's mental and physical health issues, all critiques of him could be a bit redundant in that he may well be a spent force who, given the toll that his wife's publicly disclosed health issues have taken upon him, no doubt deserves our sympathy.