The worst imaginable perversion
Jordan Peterson is notoriously a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.
Example:
Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.
Tip Jar
Jordan Peterson is notoriously a stupid person’s idea of a smart person.
Example:
Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.
Peterson has a lot of dumb ideas, and a few smart ones. I also know he’s helped a lot of young men grow up (and make their beds), and someone had to. I also appreciate that he was one of the first prominent people who publicly said “no” to the gender mafia. So he’s not my favorite guy, and I like to make fun of him (lobsters!!) but I do think he’s helping in some ways.
Today I am happy that because of his grumpy tweeting (and Ophelia’s distaste for him) that I’ve now heard of the concept of the “15-minute city.”
https://www.planetizen.com/definition/15-minute-city
I love it. I have decided where to live because of factors that work into that idea, and I support more people being able to do so as well. I like the idea of cities being planned this way. Most people who live in cities should not have to drive cars to get to the supermarket, for example. Our best solution is not making streets faster, but making bike rides shorter.
One of the fundamental divisions between the left and the right in contemporary politics has to do with the idea of public planning. The left likes the idea, and the right hates the idea. This could be public planning about any number of things – public health, transportation, education – the righties want to reduce every single thing to nothing but a personal choice, and abolish any public agency or program that looks at questions of a collective good. Lefties like policy more. Sometimes it’s good policy, and has clearly good results, and sometimes it’s bad policy, and the negative consequences outweigh the positive ones. I’d like to see some good policy come out of the idea of the 15-minute city.
Papito: It’s another of those issues where our political parties don’t align with traditional definitions of Leftism and Rightism. Fascist dictatorships absolutely love public planning. What we tend to call the Right is actually more like bastardized Libertarianism viewed through a reactivation, conservative lens. Our Left, on the other hand, is … Well, it’s kind of just anything that isn’t that.
Peterson retweets Keiller, who is unhappy about land use and traffic planning in the U.K.
The U.S. grew up with the automobile, and we built our cities and suburbs around it.
England existed for centuries before the automobile. I’ve been to England–both walking and driving–and it is very clear that the British have made a policy decision to not surrender the country to the roads and the automobiles. I’m sure this causes friction: they face the same pressure for roads and sprawl that the U.S. does. But it’s their county, and they are entitled to make decisions like this.
Keiller talks like this is some kind of future dystopia, but the future is now: the British have already built their roads to disfavor automobiles. See, e.g, https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+traffic+calming+measures&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjp_pesqKn8AhXSMlkFHTViCbIQ_AUoAnoECAIQBA&biw=1600&bih=1019&dpr=1. FWIW, one reason that we keep going back to England (on vacation) is that we like walking in the cities there.
Whenever I see Peterson talk on a video, I feel a certain distaste in my mouth. And he’s said some pretty dumb things. But some people whom I respect have respect for him, so I try to keep an open mind that maybe he’s not so bad as all that. The problem is that in order to make up my mind about that, I would need to watch more of him, and I find that too unpleasant and distasteful, so I dont.
I think if he had actually been clearer about what he was talking about it would have helped everyone.So for example in Bethnal Green where I live there are many smaller roads which have been made functionally unusable for motorists to use them to get from one place to another, and can only be used by people who actually live on those roads. They block off the ends so cars can only come and go from one entrance, in practice.
Now this is a perfectly laudable aim, and I understand why they have done it. For people who live on those roads it is obviously better. for people who need to use the main roads in the borough the situation is worse. Congestion, public transport, pollution and emergency service access have all been affected.
This is a legitimate public debate, and the new mayor of the borough has advocated one position, whereas others take a different view. We are still trying to work it out. My personal view is that this scheme has created more problems than it has solved, but I can see why you would come to a different opinion, and that’s fine.
Is this an example of the kind of thing Peterson means? Who knows? He hasn’t been specific enough for anyone to work it out. If he had said ‘taking perfectly functional roads and making them inaccessible for motorists to actually use is wrong, in my opinion’ and then expanded on that, I could see where he was coming from. That’s a discussion we could have, because it is actually happening. But this vague nonsense just polarises the debate without informing anyone at all.
And that is pretty typical of Peterson. It’s possible he is saying something that at least makes sense, but it is practically impossible to tell, because he cannot formulate his thoughts in way that they can be clearly understood.
‘Ah yes, we live in that utopia where nobody decides were anybody can drive, so there are no freeways or highways or roads.’
I used to spend a lot of time in planning meetings, as a local government representative; as a non-driver, I always support policies and projects that benefit people who choose to, or are forced to, travel in ways that don’t require a private car. A lot of people screamed ‘social engineering!’ at me–and I had to explain to them that the status quo situation they were protecting was THE RESULT OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING. I even had to write a journal article explaining this.
I’ll share one story from this period of my life–a guy corralling me after a meeting to earnestly explain how important it was to get buses off the roads. ‘You don’t realise,’ he pointed out to me, ‘that every bus on the road takes up enough space for THREE CARS.’
GW: Here’s an example of Peterson saying something reasonable and useful. Zebra stripes explain a lot. It doesn’t take much to see how the principle applies to ideological conformity, say, with respect to Democrats and Genderism.
@guest the problem is that where I live these policies have *not* discouraged motorists, and *have* made public transport more difficult to use, which surely is not the outcome they were going for.
I understand what they were trying to do, I just don’t agree that they actually achieved them. In fact I think they made the situation worse, not better.
@7: Thanks. His voice is so annoying, in how he talks down to us, but I watched the first three minutes. It’s an interesting idea in terms of analyzing the whole “Queer” phenomenon: People think that by being “Queer” and doing “Queer” (e.g., painting hair blue or insisting that people call them by “zey/zir” pronouns), they are being like the zebra with the red dot, standing out — but actually, they’re being just like all the other hundreds of thousands of boring people painting their hair blue and insisting on zey/zir pronouns.
Peterson may be right sometimes, but so are stopped clocks. His useful things, directed at men and boys, are all very well and good on the surface, but there are numerous things he has said that demonstrate that his attitude toward women and girls is somewhere between disrespect and disregard. Among other things, JBP has said that men and women are not able to engage in proper intellectual discourse, because man-vs-man arguments always have the potential to end in fisticuffs, which is not the case for man-vs-woman. This is apparently one of the many reasons that he thinks women are ill-suited to become political or business leaders.
And for those of us who can’t ride bicycles? Because our shoulders don’t work right? I live in walking distance of a grocery store, so it isn’t a problem for me, though.
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Actually, we built our cities and suburbs around the train and trolley; we had a world class mass transit system. The US didn’t grow up with the automobile until the mid-twentieth century. It’s just that nearly everyone still living remembers nothing but the automobile, so people assume it has always been that way. The automobile was force fed to a population that didn’t want it, and now we believe we can’t live without it.
My father is still able to remember before car culture. And he was born in the 1930s.
No one solution is best for absolutely everyone, because that’s not possible. Making bike rides shorter is one solution, not THE solution for everyone including people who can’t ride bicycles.
Some of the things Peterson is criticizing in that tweet *do* seem a bit dystopic… cities marking off zones and putting in checkpoints where people are fined for traveling between them without a good reason sounds like something you’d see in a bad ’70s sci-fi dystopia movie. “Citizen, what is your purpose for leaving Zone 3?”
@10: Yeah.
@11: Where in the US did your dad grow up?
I think what Steven meant by “The U.S. grew up with the automobile” is that the US developed and embraced the car when it was still very young, while the UK has a long history pre-car. You know, the US as brash callow youth compared to the older nations across the pond. I think there’s a lot of truth in that, plus there’s the vast size of the continent and the emptiness of much of it.
My eyesight is particularly bad today. I swear I read the top line of the tweet as “Sir Jordan of Peterson.” I heard the Monty Python theme of “brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Jordan” in my head as an accompaniment.
GW, my dad grew up in Oklahoma. On a farm…a dairy farm.
But car culture was a deliberately instilled idea by the car manufacturers. Yes, we grew up with cars, but they were sort of forced on us initially. I wish more people realized that. The US system breeds such nonsense.
To see Peterson at his best, check out his interviews with Helen Joyce and Abigail Shrier.
I started out despising Peterson, but I’ve changed my mind, mostly because he’s been sticking up for women against genderism.
Of course I often disagree with him, and his Jungian woo really makes me grind my teeth. But he’s far from the fascist-adjacent misogynist I once imagined him to be.
If bike rides are made shorter, then walks are made shorter as well. For that matter, trips by wheelchair are made shorter as well.
This is one of those generalization errors the TRAs are so prone to. The fact that some people have only one leg doesn’t make the human being not bipedal. The fact that some people have disorders of sexual development doesn’t mean there aren’t two sexes. And the fact that some people can’t ride bicycles doesn’t mean that making cities compact enough that most people will use bicycles for their daily errands is a bad idea.
As regards the installation of car culture in the United States, it’s worth considering its connection to the invention of air conditioning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/the-all-conquering-air-conditioner.html
An American city developed before WWII was probably laid out around mass transit; one developed after WWII was probably laid out around cars and highways.
Papito, that’s an interesting observation, one I note to my students regularly. They think America has had cars as the main transportation since it’s beginning (huh? WTF?) and that liberals are trying to force mass transit on us because…I guess because liberals hate America.
It’s interesting to read the books on Nebraska cities and their history; almost every city in Nebraska (possibly every city) was built around the railroad routes. When the railroads gave way to highways, very few of the cities in this area were on the highway, and most of them turned into near ghost towns, or disappeared altogether. It was the railroad that built this country; the car is a late usurper.
I agree that walk routes are shorter if bike routes are; I’m glad we chose the house we did because we can walk so many places (not today; we’re iced in). But people around here don’t walk or bike; they will get in their car to go three blocks. So it takes more than making routes shorter. There is a huge need for changing the zeitgeist around transportation.
iknklast, your neighbors would have hated 1886. Those fancy elitists were forcing public transit on us back then.
https://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org/history/presComm/beaconSt.asp
Mustn’t forget the bicycles.
These days people park where the bridle paths used to be.
I have a theory that what these people are really afraid of is not “tyranny” or even traffic regulation (What? I’m required to drive on roads?) What these people are really afraid of is community.
Look at Keiller’s tweet. The first–first!–panel isn’t about traffic or tyranny. It is a picture of a community. A place where people can get the things they need from others who live in the same place.
Living in community is scary. As a threshold matter, you have to behave yourself. People put up with Peterson’s histrionics on YouTube and Twitter, but that kind of behavior won’t fly with real-world neighbors. What’s more, you have to trust others to be there for you when you need them. And the whole thing is ultimately grounded in people caring for each other.
People like Peterson and Keiller want to be able to buy their way out of community. They want to have enough money to buy whatever they need at arms-length, and to not have to depend on anyone else or care about anyone else. It’s understandable. When I was first living on my own in my 20s, I felt like I had to be totally self-sufficient: that I had to be able to carry everything I needed in my own two hands. It’s an illusion, of course. None of us are self-sufficient in that way. Eventually I outgrew it.
People like Peterson and Keiller seem to still be living in that illusion. For them, community is deeply threatening, both because it might impinge their unfettered ability to buy and do whatever they want, and because the existence of community exposes the hollowness of their own strategy. No matter how much money you have, we are all ultimately dependent on each other.
I’ve seen this reaction before. Back…uhhh…before the pandemic, some bike-share companies started positioning bicycles around New York City. The elites went nuts.
Their putative complaint was the bicycle racks taking up space on the sidewalks (how dare they!), but it’s hard to credit that. These aren’t people who use the sidewalks to begin with: they spend their lives being chauffeured around in stretch-limos.
I think what the elites were really upset about was what those bicycles said about community. That in a city of ten million people there could be this floating supply of bicycles for people to take and use when then need them and leave for others when they don’t. Yes, yes, owned by a private, for-profit company; locked in racks; released by credit card and charged by the minute; doubtless subject to high rates of loss and damage. But still, the fact that you could do this at all says something about the viability of that community. And it just terrified the elites.
Going back further, we have the absurd and grotesque words of Margaret Thatcher
This from the head of state of one of the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful societies on the planet. It seems the higher up you go, the stronger this fantasy of the self-sufficient individual becomes.
@Lady Mondegreen
I wouldn’t call JBP “fascist-adjacent”, but I do think it would be fair to call him “MRA-adjacent”. I don’t think he particularly cares for the plight of women, except insofar as it affects men. I also think that his Jungian approach tends to support the idea of traditional gender roles, reifying gender in a way that’s not very different from genderists. (The main difference is that he would insist that gender is immutably tied to physical characteristics.)
I don’t begrudge him his concern for troubled young men, but I used to wish he’d show more concern and understanding for women. But I THINK he may be learning more about what the sisters of his young men are dealing with.
Really, check out his interviews with gender critical women.
Oh gawd yes.
Jungians do reify gender, there’s an Archetypal Masculine and an Archetypal Feminine, but everyone has a mix of masculine and feminine traits, so gender non-conformity is okay at least.
Jungians reify everything, really. Archetypes are like Platonic ideals; they exist inside our heads within a Collective Unconscious we all share.
Meh. My experience of Peterson is summed up by a comment made about another talking head: When he speaks, that which is novel is untrue, and that which is true is banal.
In other words, even when he’s ‘right’, he’s generally not adding anything to the conversation that others who are more insightful and more intellectually rigorous haven’t already said. And when you mix that with his absurdities–not just the Jungianism, but his pushing of an all-meat diet, FREX–he just becomes an information hazard, cited as an authority because someone can point to him saying something that was obviously correct that one time.