Political Correctness Gone Mad?

Jordan B. Peterson, Stephen Fry, Michael Eric Dyson, Michelle Goldberg

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781786076052
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

‘Without free speech there is no true thought.’

–Jordan Peterson

‘If you’re white, this country is one giant safe space.’

–Michael Eric Dyson

The Munk debate on political correctness

Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, sparking needless conflict? Or is it a weapon in the fight for equality, restoring dignity to the downtrodden? How should we talk about the things that matter most in an era of rapid social change? Four thinkers take on one of the most heated debates in the culture wars of the twenty-first century.

JORDAN PETERSON IN CONVERSATION WITH RUDYARD GRIFFITHS

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Our guest now is Jordan Peterson. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube sensation, and the author of the internationally bestselling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tell us about the last little while for you. You’ve been on quite a ride.

JORDAN PETERSON: Yes. Since October 2016, I guess, it’s been nonstop scandal and entertainment, fundamentally, but for me also a tremendous amount of good. Most of this has been cast in the media, I would say, as a political issue, but it’s not a political issue for me. What I’ve been concentrating on mostly is psychological work at the level of the individual, which is the appropriate level for me, given that I’m a clinical psychologist.

And I’m out on this tour now. I think I’ve talked in twenty-six cities already and there are, I think, something like sixty more lined up. And it’s maybe one person in thirty who I talk to afterwards who has anything political to say; the rest of it is all focused on my lectures, essentially, and the book, and on people’s attempts to put their lives together, again at the individual level.

And so that’s a really good thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s a very rare day now if I go outside that I’ll not be approached by four or five people — it doesn’t matter where I go — and they all tell me the same thing. They’re all very polite and very welcoming. I haven’t had a negative interaction with anyone in public at all. Quite the contrary.

They tell me they’ve been watching my lectures and that they were unhappy in their relationships, or not doing particularly well at their careers, or in a dark place for one reason or another, and that watching and listening to what I’ve been saying has been very helpful to them. And so, that’s great.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: How would you say what you’ve been writing and thinking about, and people’s reaction to it, intersects with tonight’s debate? Because you’ve been quite vocal on the topic of political correctness.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I’m no fan of the radical Left, so people might say, “Well, does that mean you support the radical Right?” Just because you’re no fan of the radical Left doesn’t mean you support the radical Right. That’s absolutely a preposterous proposition. But the universities, especially the humanities and social sciences, are absolutely dominated by left-wing thinking. That’s well documented by people like Jonathan Haidt; it’s not my imagination.

And I find the doctrine that unites them to be unconscionably pernicious. It’s basically a collectivist doctrine. And here’s what disturbs me about it. There’s every reason to have a left wing; you need a left wing partly because being left-wing is in part temperamental; it’s not going away. And also because, when our society produces hierarchies, which it will inevitably do, people tend to stack up at the bottom. It’s in the nature of hierarchies to produce that as an outcome.

And what that means is that the people who are dispossessed in the hierarchical arrangements need a voice, and that’s the Left, obviously, and fair enough. But it’s also obvious that just as the Right can go too far, the Left can go too far as well. But when the Left goes too far, it’s something that’s very ill-defined, and to me that’s not acceptable. And I think they’ve certainly gone too far in the universities.

And the postmodern, neo-Marxist pastiche that makes up the radical Left philosophy that’s at the bottom of the social sciences and humanities now has nothing about it that’s useful, as far as I’m concerned. It has nothing to do with compassion; it has nothing to do with my lack of . . . what would you say?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Empathy?

JORDAN PETERSON: Precisely. They’re completely separate issues. And that’s another thing that really bothers me about political correctness. It’s like: “Well, we have hammerlock on empathy.” First of all, empathy is not enough. It’s not even close to enough, and an excess of empathy can do terrible things. And secondly, no you don’t have a hammerlock on empathy, and to ally that with a philosophy that essentially assigns people to their identity via their group membership, and then to read not only the current state of affairs but history itself as a battleground between competing groups is, I think, dangerous. I think it’s obvious that it’s dangerous if you know anything about history.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: One argument you’re sure to hear tonight is the idea that the privilege people like you and I have enjoyed historically in society by virtue of our race, our class, our gender — that it’s time for that privilege to be shared more equitably across groups who’ve been historically disadvantaged.

JORDAN PETERSON: That’s a good example of the conflation of empathy with ideology. First of all, the majority in any society has privilege. That’s the whole point of a society: to set up a system so that the bulk of the people in the system can do well, and then you build in protection for minorities. So, to conflate that with race is not acceptable. It’s a kind of toxic sleight of hand and it’s extraordinarily dangerous.

Apart from that, it’s an empty claim. Some people have advantages that other people don’t. Well, obviously. And if you take anyone apart into the multitude of categories that they can be taken apart into, what you will find is that on some of those dimensions they’re doing better than other people, sometimes for rather arbitrary reasons, and on other dimensions they’re doing worse.

The next part of that is: Well, historically speaking, over what span of time do you mean, precisely? Do you mean because my ancestors 150 years ago were privileged, comparatively speaking, that I should somehow pay for that now? And are you so sure my ancestors were privileged? As far as I can tell — take my grandparents on my father’s side — my father grew up in a log cabin until he was five; it had three rooms. My grandmother was a cleaning woman for farms in central Saskatchewan in the 1930s. She cooked for threshing crews. She chopped woodpiles that were as big as the damned cabin to get through the winter. So, where’s the privilege? I see it accrues to me as a consequence of my race. Oh, I see. So now we’re going to have a discussion about race, are we?

And that’s the thing about the toxic Left: everything is about group identity. And so, let’s take the argument even further and say, okay, well, because of my skin colour I’m differentially privileged, from a historical perspective. So what? You’re going to make everybody now pay for some historical inequity on the basis of their race?

And you’re going to view the history of the relationships between men and women as one fundamentally of oppression? That’s the way we’re going to play this, that it wasn’t that men and women cooperated throughout history to bring themselves out of the fundamental catastrophe that history has always been? That isn’t what it was, despite the fact that in 1895, the typical person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day by today’s standards, which is far below the UN’s current guidelines for abject poverty. We’re going to revisit that and we’re going to say, “No, really, the fundamental reality of the world was that men oppressed women”?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: So that brings me to a second argument you’re no doubt going to hear tonight, which is that men need to check their privilege; the idea that among women in particular—the #MeToo movement—there’s been an awareness, an awakening about the power of women in society, and that it’s time for that to be acknowledged. What will be your response?

JORDAN PETERSON: First of all, when the discussion is about power, it immediately sends a shudder up my spine, partly because part of the postmodern doctrine, especially in its alliance with neo-Marxism — which is the world’s strangest alliance, by my estimate — states that everything is about power. And I don’t believe that. I think hierarchies are only about power when they’ve already transformed themselves into tyrannies, and I don’t think the fundamental hierarchies that characterize the West are tyrannical, comparatively speaking.

Compared to the heavenly hierarchy in your utopian imagination, no doubt they’re exemplars of pure hell, but compared to everywhere else in the world right now and every other hierarchy throughout history, we’re doing pretty damned well.

And the fact is that once we had reliable birth control, which really only happened in the 1960s, women were welcomed most fundamentally — although also opposed, but most fundamentally welcomed — into every position of authority and competence that could possibly be laid open to them, to the point where now they make up something damned near three-quarters of humanities and social sciences students. They dominate the health care fields.

So how fast do you expect a transformation to take place? The argument is: well, it would never have happened without political pressure. No . . . sorry. What triggered it was reliable birth control. And that made it possible. It was reliable birth control, reliable menstrual sanitation, and all of those things that no one ever takes into account that made the playing field open. And it’s transformed utterly in, what, fifty years? How fast do you think these things can happen?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Good point.

JORDAN PETERSON: And I’m certainly not against equality of opportunity. What has to be wrong with you to be against equality of opportunity? Even if you’re selfish — if you’re not absolutely out for destruction and you’re only selfish, let’s say — anybody with any sense would go for equality of opportunity, at least because it gives you the possibility of exploiting the maximal number of qualified and talented people.

And equality of outcome, well . . .

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: We’ll save that for the debate tonight. Final question I’m asking all of you, pre-debate: Where do you think this debate is going to go from here? Do you think we’re in a kind of cultural spasm or do you think there’s something more fundamental happening, a new tribalism, a new set of antagonisms that are going to take much longer to work out? What are you seeing?

JORDAN PETERSON: I think it’ll depend on how well we each behave in the next ten years, because I think things could get way better everywhere, really fast. Or we could degenerate back into our idiot twentieth-century tribalisms.

I would say there’s plenty of pressure in both directions. You know, I’m heartened by the fact that so many people have been taking the psychological material that I’ve been providing online to heart, and doing what they can to put themselves together.

I’m disheartened by the fact that virtually everything now is transformed into a polarized political argument, and there seems to be no understanding of the fact that not everything is political. I actually don’t think the discussion about political correctness is political. I think it’s both theological and philosophical, but it’s always presented, or often presented, in politicized terms, not least because, if you’re influenced by the radical leftist collectivist ideology, that is the only playing field. It’s all hierarchies at each other’s throats playing power games.

The free speech thing is really interesting because on the radical Left, there is no debate about free speech. You can’t have a debate about free speech from that ideological position because there isn’t any such thing. All there is is those who are manoeuvring for power within their respective groups, making claims that benefit them. That’s the basic axiom of the interpretive system.

So, the reason free speech has become politicized is that if you adopt the collectivist viewpoint, it’s a shibboleth, it’s a fantasy. You might think you’re speaking freely but you’re not; you’re just expressing your privilege.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Speaking on behalf of my gender, my class, my race.

JORDAN PETERSON: Absolutely. And yeah, one of the things about the postmodern insistence on identity that I think is comical in a very, very dark way is the emergence of intersectionality, because the intersectional theorists actually identified the Achilles heel of the collectivist perspective. What they pointed out was: “Well, let’s say we cover the standard groups” — I don’t know why these are the standard groups, but let’s say sex, ethnicity, and race, for the sake of argument — well, what about how they interact? It’s like, yeah, what about that? And what about the fact that gender is infinitely differential, not least from the left-wing perspective. And what about the fact that there are endless numbers of ethnic variants. What’re you going to do? You’re going to control for the interaction between all of those? And the answer is, yes, that’s what we’ll try to do before we give up our ideology. But the fact of the matter is that the reason the West decided on a radical, individualist perspective to begin with is that we figured out 2,000 years ago, at least at the origins of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Pre-Debate Interviews with Moderator Rudyard Griffiths
• Political Correctness Gone Mad?
• Post-Debate Interviews with Moderator Rudyard Griffiths
• Acknowledgements
• About the Debaters
• About the Editor
• About the Munk Debates
• About the Interviews
• Copyright