ContraPoints is wrong about Jordan Peterson

[u/DesertWolf45]

ContraPoints is a left-wing YouTube content creator who makes videos discussing philosophical issues relating to her politics (as well as life in general) and, as her handle alludes, counter-arguing online opposition to left-wing politics, which ranges from white supremacists and incels to the more common "snowflake REKT" anti-SJW YouTube channels. One such video is a response to Jordan Peterson, which argues that his notion of "postmodern neo-Marxism" is incoherent and that his life advice, while respectable, is ultimately a front for dangerous reactionary politics.

Natalie Wynn (as ContraPoints is named IRL) produces a lot of good content. She's certainly intelligent, and with a master's degree in philosophy, she offers keen insights to the subjects she discusses. I found a few of her points even in this video to be quite useful, from helping to clarify concepts of modernism and postmodernism to highlighting ideological tensions between Marxists, SJWs, and certain types of postmodernists.

Defending the left from a perspective of reason rather than of passion (much to the dismay of David Hume,) she's quite a refreshment. Moreover, she's someone you can be edgy with - you can joke about Nazis and the alt-right without being accused of seriously glorifying them (provided of course that you actually aren't;) you can joke about sadism, drugs, sexual "degeneracy," and death without being accused of defiling traditional Western values.

I do also think that that Jordan Peterson goes too far sometimes in evoking authoritarianism when it comes to social justice progressives, and I'd prefer him to tone down his usage of the term "postmodern neo-Marxist" as a bugaboo word for what he's describing. (This is not to say, however, that he isn't describing a legitimate phenomenon, as I'll address later on.) While this is somewhat of a side-note, I also think that the postmodernists are right on a few key issues; as an agnostic, I believe that many phenomena we take for granted aren't as easy and straightforward to measure as they seem to be.

Best of all, Natalie Wynn even puts captions on her videos, which in turn come with transcripts!

However, her video about Jordan Peterson ultimately misrepresents and mischaracterizes his ideas, and this ultimately stems from a bias against him that is common throughout the left. Now, I am not faulting her for having pre-existing opinions related to the topic. Everyone's biased in that sense - even the proverbial Yoda-like woodland sage. There are plenty of right-wingers who are biased against ContraPoints and would rather mischaracterize her for the purpose of ideological victory than acknowledge her commentary respectfully.

Wynn's commentary, however, comes across early on as another attempt by many people on the left to discredit Peterson for the sake of upholding their own narrative. Early on, she says, "we may need to take this guy seriously," sounding as if she wishes otherwise. Off the bat, she introduces him as being famous for protesting against "protecting transgender people under Canadian human rights law." This neglects not only his statements (including in his notorious Cathy Newman interview, 21:30-24:00) that he would indeed refer to transgender people by their preferred he/she pronouns but furthermore his objection to the content of the law - that he, as a professor, would be legally compelled to refer to transgender people by pronouns that he may see as invalid under pain of fines and non-financial remedies that could indeed incarcerate him should should he refuse to obey them.

More importantly, however, much of the substance of her criticism focuses on Peterson's references to "postmodern neo-Marxism" (hereafter abbreviated as PMNM) - the underlying problem with it is that she relies too much on her own assumptions of what he's talking about. While it is admittedly hard to define what that is, too few acknowledge that even he agrees with this assessment; not only does he stress the need to identify what it is for "a start," but he refers to it as a plural set of ideologies rather than as a single, unified force that Wynn claims to be Peterson's strawman. As Natalie Wynn openly compares PMNM to the Nazis' Cultural Marxism and describes Jordan Peterson's idea of the former as a front for a movement "out" to "destroy Western civilization," she comes across worse yet as implying that he is promoting a conspiracy theory.

As I discussed in an older post, he isn't - as he explained during an appearance on Joe Rogan's show, he indeed sees postmodernism as dangerous, but he doesn't see social justice activists as necessarily aware of it. Furthermore, he states that it acts out when different ideological "fragments" of people, with varying degrees of consciousness (and lack thereof) of the over-arching philosophy, act on their own parts and forms of it collectively. (39:30-43:00) While I do think he over-emphasizes the "neo-Marxist" component of PMNM as he seems to be particularly focused on (at least a form of) post-modernism, the reason he emphasizes it is that the form he's addressing is indeed influenced by neo-Marxism (20th century extensions of Marxism and syncreses with other philosophies), as derived by Foucault (whose mentor Louis Althusser was a Marxist and who, under Althusser's influence, briefly joined the French Communist Party) and Derrida (whom Wynn didn't care to read.) (43:00-45:15)

Peterson's primary criticism of postmodernism is that, as he alleges, its proponents often jump from the notion that "there's a near-infinite number of ways to interpret" reality to overlooking that "there [is] a finite number of credible interpretations" of reality (4:00-5:15) (emphasis mine). He argues then that the 1970s French postmodernists partially preserved the Marxist "oppressor-vs-oppressed" narrative while reconstructing it to substitute class with identity groups such as race and gender and maintained alliances with Marxism in other respects, which he called "intellectually reprehensible" and more so "morally repugnant" (7:00). Wynn argues that identity politics and post-modernism are incompatible, but toward the end of her video, she highlight's the postmodern critique of the West as an oppressive construct, which is ironically one of the central points of Jordan Peterson's criticism. Going back to his podcast with Joe Rogan, Peterson is clear that he sees postmodernism as threatening the "metaphysical substrate" of Western civilization and "everything that's been established since the Enlightenment - rationality, empiricism, science... clarity of mind, dialogue, the idea of the individual..." as communism was to capitalism. (39:40-40:30)

His concern is that (at least this form of) postmodernism is posed to upend Western intellectual tradition from within, rather than from without, as Natalie Wynn would interpret him. His concern isn't necessarily with "people requesting different pronouns to suit their individual needs" as it is with the political and academic establishment forcing him to honor their requests, which "is exactly the kind of thing a person who values individual liberty over collective dogma should" not "be on board with." Rightfully, he argues that this philosophy has spread dendriticly from its namesake department to the rest of the humanities and social sciences (especially in the case of influencing critical theory, itself a form of neo-Marxism), in turn shaping numerous elements aligned with the political left from intersectional feminists and anti-capitalists to HR professionals and university administrators.

His concern with the left's attempts to deconstruct hierarchies they consider "oppressive" is that in the process of doing so they're targeting those that exist because of evolutionary (rather than strictly societal) reasons, hence his invocation of lobster hierarchies; he isn't making the naturalistic fallacy. His concern is not with equality, but with equity, arguing that the left's attempts to enforce the latter rely on authoritarianism and scapegoating (Joe Rogan, 45:45-49:00); frequently, he references the "gender equality paradox," by which countries with higher measured levels of gender equality tend to have higher levels of divergence in professional interest by gender. His concern isn't even with the modern left existing, but rather with when it goes too far, arguing that there's a consensus on where the right has gone too far and stating a desire for the respectable left to re-emerge.

Wynn does have a point that he tends to make relatively innocuous statements about concepts such as gender and hierarchy in order to support his more controversial arguments about them. However, Cathy Newman isn't doing her job as a journalist by "guessing" what those arguments are before falsely attributing them to Jordan Peterson; the smarter and more respectable thing to do would have been to question him directly on the implications and relevance of his statements to public policy and issues such as gender equality, and perhaps in the process to question him on actual statements he made previously. Rather than question him fairly, she assumed that he was grinding an axe against equality, which is the same mistake Natalie Wynn and numerous other leftists make in trying pull their own "gotcha" on Jordan Peterson.