I've said elsewhere about Peterson that I quite enjoyed having my ideology interrogated. Also, as others have noted, he cannot be contended with reductionist, inflammatory dismissals. At the same time, I think there is a blindness and darkness to Peterson that will out itself more clearly eventually. Here is one of his tweets from January:
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/950398806054481921God. Could this be true? The repressed/recovered memory industry is an ethical morass....
8:08 AM - 8 Jan 2018
Here's a response I wrote to Peterson's claims about the sexes self sorting into careers in the Scandinavian countries, and about the existence of patriarchy in general:
Less than 40 years is far too early to discount the effects of social conditioning and to pivot to biologically based differences, but there is more than a bit of "having a hammer makes everything look like a nail" on both sides of the argument.
This circle that has come to prominence of late, Peterson et al shall we say, talk so much about a “male hierarchy”, but consideration of female strategies rarely appear beyond brief mention, do we have our own hierarchy, how do females relate to the male hierarchy? I have yet to see recognition of the fact that a significant portion of human behavior currently labeled “feminine” is essentially submissive posturing. Girls are trained in these appeasement behaviors to maintain their safety while negotiating life among larger and far more dangerous human males. This argues that male hierarchy is not separate but extends over and includes females. Yet higher rates of depression, and "Big Five" traits like neuroticism and agreeableness are attributed to the female reproductive role rather than negotiating life among larger and more dangerous males. Likewise, there is a lot of talk about female choice in the process of mate selection, but little recognition of how patriarchal cultural systems severely limit female choice. Rape, child sexual abuse, prostitution, FGM, arranged and child marriage, these are all evidence that there is a hierarchy between the sexes and males are dominant.
Here is a philosophical critique of
Maps of Meaning by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. It outlines Peterson's lack of consideration for females, something I noticed from the very beginning. How could any man who has a daughter advocate for a guiding mythology where she can see no major, positive reflection of herself? Would that not cause her psychological pain? It caused me pain when I was a youth. After reading Genesis, I threw the bible across the floor and never picked it up again. The war between the sexes is real.
http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?meaning-belief.214. Peterson's Maps of Meaning is on the one hand fascinating because of what it illuminates with respect to the patriarchal system it analyzes; it is on the other hand myopic because of what it fails to account for or even consider with respect to what is suppressed within the patriarchal system (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 1994b). In keeping with themes in mythology, religion, and Jungian psychiatry, the known and the unknown are personified by The Great Father and the Great and Terrible Mother, respectively, and the terrain between the two is mediated by the Hero. It is notable that in this historical/Jungian account, and equally, in Peterson's undistanced, uncritical rendition of it, daughters never enter the scene; there are only sons or the son. It is notable too that there are only heros. Heroines never enter the scene either--although a princess makes a brief appearance on p. 248 as she "waits for the kiss of the hero to wake." It is as if The Great and Terrible Mother never gives birth to females.
15. Females in fact rarely make an appearance within the analysis Peterson offers, or, if they do, it is with marginal attention, as when he writes that "rapid maturation and the naturally dramatic onset of menstruation" explain why "[initiatory] rituals tend to be more complex and far-reaching for males than for females" (p. 222); or when he writes that, following male initiatory rites, "The new environment is the society of men, where women are sexual partners and equals instead of sources of dependent comfort" (p. 224). How females come to be sexual partners in "the society of men" is not perplexing, but how they come to be "equal" in "the society of men" remains perplexing--and a challenge to this day. The question of an easy equality aside, how females make the transition from being "sexual partners and equals" to being "sources of dependent comfort" (i.e., mothers), or vice versa, or encompass the two modes--partner/equal and mother--not transitionally but simultaneously in "the society of men," is nowhere considered. Peterson's oversight is odd given the fact that having a child, for example--at the very least, a first child--is "unexplored territory," not only in the experiences of pregnancy and of giving birth, but in day to day discoveries of new meanings and potentially daily creative engagements with another being. Females are so shortly and breezily accounted for in Peterson's book that they appear to be no more than necessary but ready-made paste-ons in "the society of men"--which, perhaps, is what they are in such a society.
16. It is notable, furthermore, that while there is a Great and Terrible Mother, there is only a Great Father, even though this Great Father is tyrannical in the extreme as well as orderly, i.e., even though he, like Great Mother, has a powerful negative as well as powerful positive side. Why his negative side is not so designated in his label is peculiar--Terrible Father appears only once (p. 379). The lack of balance is particularly striking--and troubling--in light of the fact that men make war, men make concentration camps, men make prison camps, men dismember men, men rape women, and so on, and so on. Although Peterson chronicles the horrors of concentration and prison camps at length, recounting experiences described by Frankl at Auschwitz and by Solzhenitsyn at the Gulag Archipelago; although he specifically states that "Man can torture his brother and dance on his grave," that "Man exults in agony, delights in pain, worships destruction and pathology,... and constantly works to lay waste, to undermine, to destroy, to torment, to abuse and devour," that "Man chooses evil, for the sake of the evil," and that Man tortures and exults and chooses as he does out of "slavish adherence to the forces of socialization" (p. 347); although Peterson chronicles all these horrors and designates "Man" as their author, he does not seem to realize that it is specifically, universally, and virtually only males in "the society of men" who make war, who "torture," "massacre," butcher," "rape," "devour," and so on (p. 347). In short, that Peterson draws our attention to the horrors of "Man," all the while not questioning the patriarchal system itself in which Man's brutalities take place is an astonishing and puzzling omission, all the more so in light of his desire to discover the "human motivation for evil" (p. 460) and the way in which we humans might recognize "our infinite capacity for good" (p. 456); all the more so too in light of the absolute and central binary opposition he draws between male and female throughout.
17. One can legitimately wonder not only what kind of culture(s) would evolve--what kind of myths and religions would be spawned, what kind of stories would be told--but most significantly in terms of Peterson's central concern, to what degree evil would continue to "turn the world into hell" (p. 456), if females were the humans who spoke for society--for humanity--if they created myths of origin and structured cultures; or, if females and males in truth recognized each other as equals, treated each other as equals, and were thereby capable of creating culture together. In other words, if the "patriarchal kingdom of culture" were not patriarchal, and not a kingdom, and if connectedness rather than combative binary oppositions structured culture(s), then commonalities rather than differences might fundamentally motivate and define human action, and in ways that would move us in the direction Peterson tries to move us, i.e., toward "our infinite capacity for good." Taking just such a critical perspective on the "patriarchal system," Peterson might be willing to examine the structure of "the society of men" and determine how it eventuates in the morality it does. After all, if "morality, at its most fundamental level, is an emergent property of social interaction, embodied in individual behavior, implicit in the value attributed to objects and situations, grounded (unconsciously) in procedural knowledge" (p. 391-92), then whatever morality we have is a morality of the society in which we live, and an unfailingly scrupulous examination and critique of "the society of men" in which we live is mandatory. It may be that the kind of order a patriarchal system or patriarchal kingdom of culture produces is not the kind of order conducive to the morality Peterson envisions. The order the Great Father sets up, for example, is in opposition to Nature--in all Her forms, objective and well as culturally elaborated in myth, religion, and a host of other kinds of "narratives." It engenders a "dominant male" morality--and mentality--one which has evolutionary roots (Sheets-Johnstone 1994b), but one that is also unenlightened by insights into the positive moral capacities of humans that Peterson elucidates and personifies in the Hero. The question Peterson might ask himself is whether there is a connection between the opposition and the morality.
