The Postmodern Diaries #1:

Introduction:

What exactly is a ‘Postmodern Neo-Marxist’? If you are like me, Western, interested in intellectual public discourse and sympathetic towards the political right, then you have probably heard of this buzz-term before. If you are a fan of public intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson, then you probably view Postmodern Neo Marxism as the ideological underpinning of the ‘Woke’ movement you can’t stand. You may not understand the breadth of Marxism nor Postmodernism, but you are confident that they represent at least two ideological beliefs that are untenable with your worldview. These beliefs are: 1) all social phenomena can be reduced to oppressor/oppressed dynamics and 2) there is no objective truth, only power. Surely ideas that combine the oppressor/oppressed narrative with the notion that there is no objective truth send chills down your spine. And why wouldn’t they? It seems quite obvious that this radical way of viewing the world is a recipe for disaster and a surefire way to plummet ourselves into societal collapse. This is precisely what Peterson and others are trying to warn us about and they are not wrong. While many intellectuals address a valid concern, there may be aspects of it that they get wrong which are worth exploring, especially if this societal collapse is something that you care about. I am here to present you with a case study of a couple of these intellectuals that are worried about the current state and the future of Western culture. To do this, I will use my personal experiences reading their work and listening to them speak. I plan to uncover the misconceptions in their thinking and attempt to steelman postmodernism. My goal is not merely to defend postmodernism, but to address and solve the polarization problem within the academic sphere that I strongly believe postmodernism is at the heart of. I hope that I am able to convey that our culture will always struggle with the notion of truth as long as our best and brightest minds do not come together and take up a more unified position when it comes to postmodernism.

Essay 1:

My Relationship with JBP:

I still am to this day a fan of Jordan Peterson. My father bought me a year subscription to his online academy and it is by far the best gift that anyone has ever gotten me. Peterson Academy is an innovative new branch of higher education that offers university level courses by real professors for a fraction of the price. It also serves to take a stand against what Peterson and many others believe to be a dying and ideologically corrupted institution of academia. Regardless of the academy’s normative ends, it is a spectacular educational hub. I find it surreal to have such easy access to many amazing lecture series taught by some of my favourite academic minds such as John Vervaeke and Peterson himself. The academy also comes with quizzes, exams and has a built in social media aspect that has allowed me to connect with other intellectually curious individuals with a vast array of viewpoints. What Peterson has managed to do with respect to higher education is quite remarkable. Whether you agree with his hard stance against traditional academia or not, if you log on to Peterson Academy, you will be impressed. I credit Peterson as the public intellectual that sparked my own intellectual and philosophical journey. These days, I find myself disagreeing with him more and more, but I will always have a great deal of respect for him. He is well intentioned, cares very deeply for others, is an extremely hard worker and must be commended for triumphing over the myriad of health issues that both himself and his family have faced for many years. It also is not an easy feat to be a controversial figure that has the level of compassion that he possesses.

After getting acquainted with Peterson and his ideas around 2016 when the whole Bill C-16 fiasco started, which I have no intention of getting into here, I turned away from his political endeavours and decided it would be more prudent to understand his work in the realm of psychology. After reading a few of his publications (out of his impressive 143) I saw that he had done a lot of work into understanding personality. Finding his publications dense and time consuming, albeit interesting, I opted to watch some of his personality lectures on Youtube. The way Peterson broke down personality using the Big 5 Personality model was fascinating to me. Peterson and his colleagues took the model that became widespread in the realm of psychology due to the work of Costa and McCrae in the 1980’s and broke it down even further. They took  the Big 5 traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) and reduced each of them into two aspects. For example, the trait of agreeableness was broken down into compassion and politeness. Not long after watching those videos, I took his personality test online. After reading my results and thinking about them I felt as if a whole new world had opened up to me. Not only did I understand myself much better, but I began to apply his model to both other individuals in my life and my community. I was already highly interested in psychology and sociology, and Peterson’s model provided me with a new framework for understanding people, particularly how to appeal to the different kinds of people that the model discriminates between. As a self-proclaimed student of our societal polarization issues, the model also provides a lot of insight, but that too is a conversation for another time.

While Peterson helped to provide me with a tool for understanding others, he also did the unthinkable and got me to sit down and read a damn book. Presently, I am always reading roughly three or four works of non-fiction at a time, but 12 Rules for Life reignited my love for reading that became disillusioned throughout my secondary and post secondary education and I am eternally grateful for that. While Peterson’s prose is sophisticated and sometimes takes me a few reads to properly understand, he is far from the maker of ‘word salad’ that many of his critics suggest he is. 12 Rules for Life taught me that a purposeful life requires one to carefully balance order and chaos. As Peterson eloquently puts it, “You need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood, and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.” Peterson’s book also reminded me to never forget what my aim was. I found this useful in my pursuits for understanding polarization and the art of dialogue. Often when getting into disagreements with others, I felt as if I started to get too self conscious as my ideas were challenged. ‘Know your aim' became the mantra I needed to orient myself properly and ensure that I never let my ego get in the way of my goal, which was to understand people and the nature of disagreements. It was this practice that allowed me to reach the point where I felt at peace with being wrong in public, something very few people can attest to. Honesty was also a major theme in the book. After reading the chapter on honesty, I became very self-critical. Peterson explained to me that telling the truth when it may be easier to tell a lie is akin to a call to adventure. When we lie, we are controlling for the consequences of our actions because we are scared of the unknown world that awaits us if we tell the truth. This realization made me feel like a coward, and I’m glad that it did because soon after that I began telling the truth in uncomfortable positions much more, courageously taking the plunge. The outcomes that followed from telling the truth were not always pleasant, but I felt as if I was living much more freely and authentically which further helped me stick to my aim.

In the 6th chapter of his book, Peterson tells the reader to get themselves in order before they try to order the world. The popular ‘clean your room’ meme associated with Peterson is a decontextualized manifestation of this chapter. One of Peterson’s main positive messages is his emphasis on the importance of personal responsibility. Chapter six expands on his beliefs regarding personal responsibility and criticizes the resentful individuals that blame society for their problems. I did not realize it at the time, but when Peterson made statements such as, “It is far more likely that a given individual is simply unwilling or unable to take on the arduous responsibility of confronting malevolence and suffering and dealing with it properly. It is much less demanding to slander the great, and to persecute the exceptional.”, he was implicitly referring to the ‘Postmodern Neo Marxists’. Nevertheless, I completely agreed with this message. As someone who went through cognitive behavioural therapy, I had already gone through the transformation from someone who blames society for his problems to someone who takes responsibility for them and I too was put off by those who did not want to take that responsibility. He mentioned Marxists revolutionaries once in that chapter, but I did not think much of it. Then came Chapter 11: Do Not Bother Children When They are Skateboarding.

Up to this point in the book, Peterson had done a great job explaining to me the dangers of resentment and he even helped me come to the profound conclusion that resentment should never be justified by vengeance, even towards those that have intentionally harmed you. He also made it clear that his prescriptions, such as taking personal responsibility, knowing your aim and orienting yourself with what you believe to be good, true and beautiful were the antidotes to resentment. However, as I read through chapter 11, I found that Peterson was beginning to contradict himself. I could understand that he was trying to caution the reader against Marxism and Postmodernism, which I still knew very little about at the time,  but I found it as if he was doing so with an unnecessary degree of vitriol. He was making very direct claims that lacked any supporting information to back it up such as, “Postmodernists don’t believe in individuals. They believe that individuals are a collective of groups defined by their status as oppressor or oppressed. They reject the dignity and responsibility of the individual, and they are ungrateful for what they have been given by history.”. Another excerpt that floored me was, “And that was not the last of Marxism’s attraction for intellectuals.”. At first I thought Peterson wrote the sentence incorrectly as it would make more sense to say the other way around,  ‘…intellectuals' attraction for Marxism.’ After all, intellectuals are people capable of being attracted to something while Marxism is an idea. Ideas are not often personified in this way. However, after thinking about it some more, I began to believe that Peterson deliberately wrote the sentence this way. The implication of this is that Peterson believes that Marxism has an agentic quality to it, a spirit of its own. As a metaphysical nut, I share the same sentiment as it pertains to the nature of ideas, but Peterson viewed Marxism’s agency as something fundamentally malevolent. The way he had been vilifying it throughout the chapter implied that he believed Marxism to be an evil spirit that preys itself upon intellectuals and uses them to to concretize its goals within the social milieu. I found this to be a bit much. For someone who was prescribing a resentment free life, Peterson’s attitude towards Marxist and Postmodern thought was most certainly resentful. 

I then thought about people in my life who I felt resentment for. They were people who wronged me, made me feel small, treated me unfairly etc. I knew that some of those people did not do so intentionally, but thinking of them still filled me with the evil spirit of resentment that Peterson had warned me about. CBT provided the mindset I needed to understand why I felt resentment towards these people. By resenting someone, your mind stores unfavourable images of them that correspond to negative emotional states that we find physically uncomfortable. This signals to us that the person responsible for the aforementioned neurological cascade is somebody we need to be cautious around or avoid completely. If we boil it down, resentment is simply one of many survival mechanisms our complex minds are equipped with. If we were living in the wild west, feelings of resentment are probably a good thing to have as they caution you to stay away from those who may cause you some serious bodily harm. However, if the resentment you feel towards someone is due to harm to your self-esteem or your sense of belonging, then it becomes less of a necessity and more of a maladaptive ego-driven response. Eventually, you begin to forgo the necessary introspection needed to put things into perspective and take personal responsibility. Perhaps Peterson’s feelings of resentment towards Marxists and Postmodernists were simply due to the times where he was wronged by those who espoused those ideas. Since his Bill C-16 critique, Peterson has been constantly lambasted by those in academia. He has been slandered, deplatformed and chased out of the academic sphere, most likely by those who hold Marxist and Postmodern views or at least cite their rhetoric. Presently, his credentials as a clinician are at risk as a result of him maintaining his political positions. It wasn’t a stretch for me to believe that resentment was a major driver of his pursuits, perhaps just as much as his integrity was. I felt sorry for him, but his disdain for these left wing ideas left me very curious. It was hard for me to believe that the people in academia who mistreated him were completely a product of Marxist and Postmodern thought. My intuition signaled to me that there was more about these ideas than Peterson was prescribing, so I went on an intellectual mission to understand them, always staying true to my aim to approach ideas with a high degree of epistemic humility, just like Peterson taught me.