By David Futrelle
Jordan Peterson is mightily miffed. In an angry statement first published on his blog yesterday (and then in Canada’s National Post), the Intellectual Dark Webster accused Cambridge University of “kowtowing to an ill-informed, ignorant and ideologically-addled mob” after Cambridge’s Divinity School rescinded its offer of a two-month fellowship.
According to Divinity school officials, the short-tempered Canadian Lobsterprof had “requested a visiting fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a further review.” A University spokesperson added that “we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our [inclusive] principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot.”
Peterson is so intolerant of so many groups it’s hard to know which particular brand of bigotry bothered the folks at Cambridge most. Was it his transphobic tantrum about using the proper pronouns for trans people? Was it his weird uneasiness about the very presence of women in the workplace, or his advocacy for some form of “enforced monogamy” to ensure that potentially murderous incels can get dates? (Why he’s convinced it would be a good thing for women to date men capable of going on shooting sprees I couldn’t tell you.)
Was it his tendency to threaten critics with lawsuits or literal slap-fights? Was it his contention that entire academic disciplines that he doesn’t like, including “women’s studies, and all the ethnic studies and racial studies … have to go and the faster they go the better.”
Or perhaps, in the wake of the New Zealand massacre, they were troubled by his many weird statements about Islam, including his repeated insistence that Islamophobia isn’t really a thing and is just a term made up by evil leftists and/or “fascists” trying to shut down “debate” on Islam?
Or perhaps they were concerned with Peterson’s marked lack of intolerance towards outright anti-Islam bigots, perhaps best symbolized by the picture (above) of him posing proudly with a fan in New Zealand whose t-shirt announces his hatred bluntly, accusing Muslims of an assortment of crimes including “Pedophilia, Rape, Wife-Beating” and “Praying for Violence.”
Would Peterson have happily stood next to someone wearing a shirt declaring “I’m a Proud Anti-Semite,” blaming Jews for alleged crimes like “hoarding money,” “killing Christ,” or “cucking white men with interracial porn?” Would he have posed with someone wearing a “Proud Racist” shirt attacking blacks for “being lazy” or “raping white women?” No, of course not. But he’s happy to put his arm around someone attacking Muslims in similarly bigoted ways.
I’m guessing the Cambridge Divinity School had issues with all of these things, as they well should have.
Many of Peterson’s fans, naturally, are crying “censorship,” as if Cambridge’s ultimate refusal to give a bigot a paid position were some kind of attack on free speech.
In case you’re worried, that last tweet is not from the official account of the band The Who, but from a fellow who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a
#MRA #mgtow #redpilled activist. rightwing. contrarian. not pc ideas. oppose SJWs. friendly. debater, im a believer in Jesus
Peterson, for his part, didn’t actually claim that he was being censored, which would have been a little weird, given that he devoted much of his angry rant on Cambridge’s disinvitation to bragging about how many books he had sold and how many hits his YouTube videos get.
According to Peterson, videos of some of his recent lectures on Genesis (the book in the Bible, not the prog-rock-turned-terrible-pop band)
have received about 10 million hits (as well as an equal or greater number of downloads). The first lecture alone — on the first sentence of Genesis — has garnered 3.7 million views just on YouTube …
It’s also the case that my books, 12 Rules for Life and Maps of Meaning both rely heavily on Judeo-Christian thinking … The former has now sold 3 million copies (one million in tongues other than English), and will be translated into 50 languages; the latter, a much older book, was recently a New York Times bestseller in audio format.
It’s also rather telling that this man whose speech has been so tyrannically silenced is saying all this in a newspaper with a daily circulation of roughly 140,000.
But if Peterson, unlike many of his fans, doesn’t think Cambridge’s disinvitation is censorship, exactly, he does seem to regard it as a symptom of “the collapse of rationality and reason,” to borrow a phrase from Ian Miles Cheong’s tweet above.
“I think that it is deeply unfortunate that the authorities at the Divinity school in Cambridge decided [to kowtow] to an ill-informed, ignorant and ideologically-addled mob,” Peterson declared.
Given the continued decline of church attendance, the rise in atheistic or agnostic sentiment, the increasing irrelevance of theological education and the collapse in interest in such matters among young people, wiser and more profound decisions might have been made.
Apparently his planned lectures on Exodus were the only thing that might have been able to hold off the atheist hordes that will destroy civilization any day now.
You see, it matters whether people around the world understand these ancient stories. It deeply matters. We are becoming unmoored, because we no longer share the structure these stories undergird. This is psychologically destabilizing. It’s producing a pathological and desperate nihilism that is increasingly common and, at the same time, a pronounced proclivity for the ideological certainty that mimics but cannot replace true religious belief.
No, he’s not talking about the “ideological certainty” of the Lobsterboys who think he’s pretty much the next best thing to Jesus; he’s talking about the people who aren’t part of his cult.
I believe that those at the Faculty of Divinity who rescinded their offer to me — and handled the rescindment in a manner that could hardly have been more narcissistic or self-congratulatory — don’t give a damn about the perilous decline of Christianity. I think that it is no bloody wonder that the faith is declining (and with it, the values of the West, as it fragments) with cowards and mountebanks of the sort who manifested themselves in this action.
Kind of a bold move to suggest that someone taking away a temporary academic gig you were kind of looking forward to is a sign of the impending collapse of Western Civilization, but hey. the dude does get a lot of hits on YouTube!
I wish them the continued decline in relevance over the next few decades that they deeply and profoundly and diligently work toward and deserve.
I believe this is just Petersonspeak for “fuck y’all motherfuckers.”
Alas, for poor Jordan Peterson — and possibly for Reason and Truth and Civilization itself — the good professor is also facing an attack from a New Zealand bookstore chain that has decided, in the wake of the Christchurch killings, to remove his books from their shelves.
As far as I know, Peterson hasn’t yet responded to this egregious assault on … the convenience of New Zealanders who will have to get the book from other bookstores or maybe online. But some of his fans are already crying foul for him.
Huh. Is that Lady Liberty wearing a ball gag, and pasties on her possibly augmented breasts? This Free Speech Fundamentalist dude doesn’t seem to be so much interested in free speech as he is in freejacking, at is were, and I don’t mean the 1992 sci-fi-racecar thriller starring Emilio Estevez and Mick Jagger.
And what flag is that on the pasties, anyway?
The culture war is weird.
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Oh Jesus Joseph and Mary not these jag offs again. Leave the Muslims alone they just want to live free of voilence and in peace.
David, gotta take exception with you here: Genesis is an AWESOME band. Period.
You’re just wrong. 😉
Whitcoulls (the chain of book stores) is going to get more of my custom after this.
I’m confused by Peterson, what has made him want to cosy up to the christians now? Just an excuse to share far right rhetoric with a captive audience? I thought he was an atheist anyway?
Kinda looks like the USAF roundel, except wrong. Like the rest of that picture.
“Our liberties are being destroyed! And to accentuate my statement: some softcore porn.”
Not exactly Churchill, are they?
He’s always been a ‘cultural Christian’ in his beliefs, and deplores Marxism as being an “atheist doctrine”.
Source: RationalWiki
Those pasties look too high up, or is it just me?
Also, semi on-topic, my usual RPG group includes an individual who’s about as right-wing as I’ve ever seen. Praises Shapiro, d’Souza, Peterson, actually sounds like Peterson a lot of the time. Anyways, we’re currently doing the Dead Suns adventure for Starfinder, and in book 2 the party has to deal with a university under fire for a literal floating brain professor saying genocidey stuff and not getting the backlash. Needless to say there was a digression from our player on how universities and free speech are being destroyed.
I wonder why I’m still in this group sometimes…
Just based on the strength of his academic work, I don’t think he deserved that fellowship in the first place. Serious scholars don’t hold up the viewcount on their YouTube videos as proof of their intellectual merit! If he’s really the best the right-wing intelligensia has to offer, well….
And that’s not even getting into the allegations of sexual misconduct.
E: Bakunin, it’s past time you left that group. No gaming is better than bad gaming!
Soooo, maybe they could take that fellowship and give it to, say, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, who has done waaaay more to promote Christianity than Peterson ever has?
Also, ironically enough, I think Peterson is right in that the decline in religion, without a replacement, can lead to negative effects…like people following Jordan Peterson.
@MrsObedMarsh
The bi irony is that before Peterson turned into a self-help guru, he had an excellent academic reputation in his domain. He was a good psychology professor and researcher. Now, though, his academic contribution is next to null and he basically fell into the ultracrepidarian hole where is ego got the best of him. He’s a bit like Ben Carson. He stepped out of his comfort zone to discuss politics and he can’t believe he can be wrong because he is very intelligent.
That’s… that’s definitely not where nipples are located.
Probably why David said they were “possibly augmented”.
That’s not how censorship works at all.
Why do these people continuously throw tantrums at third party vendors that have private policy and terms of service statements that show and explain what is allowed in their space? Do they not read them? Why do they continuously think that private enterprise is a public forum when it suits themselves?
there’s a type of “boob lift” surgery which simply consists of, er,
HORRIFYING DETAILS ALERT
… cutting the nipples off and sewing them back on several inches higher on the breasts. Sometimes people move then up a bit too much and they end up where the pasties are in that pic.
No idea why an artist would choose to duplicate what is clearly a bad result from plastic surgery.
Reactions to the book thing have been hilarious. One bookstore, or chain, decides not to re-stock 12 Rules (temporarily) and this is literally the end of all that is good and holy. Markus Meechan – oh, sorry, Count Dankula – claims that New Zealand has become North Korea, and one of the Weinstein brothers tweeted that “a civilisation cannot function like this” or words to that effect.
To be honest, I’m a bit ‘meh’ about the book store’s decision, but it’s a private business making its own decisions – something I thought these people were big fans of 🙂
That Liberty drawing is horrible. I quite like kink stuff with that kind of theme, but this one’s context makes it all kinds of wrong.
Lord help them if they ever had a real problem for five minutes. And they call us snow flakes. These are the most fragile people I’ve ever seen in my life. I work with 5 year old ballet dancers far tougher then these guys, and they all have perfectly pointed toes as well.
Christ, and here I thought it was just a misplaced implant.
My guess is dude did not care. Or drew it without a reference.
@MrsObedMarsh
Yeah, Sunk Cost Fallacy is a toughie tho
The irony being, of course, is that pasties are censorship.
Well, he’s a person thoroughly convinced of his own importance in the world, isn’t he? Christianity is going to expire unless he gives a few lectures to academics in Cambridge. Sure. Not exactly nailing a manifesto to a door, is it?
I wonder if replacing (in the text !) Islam by Peterson is not closer to the truth…
Because it would have been more fortunate if they have decided to kowtow to the well-informed, savant and ideologically-pristine base which support Peterson, of course.
Two caracteristics Peterson is totally free of. TOTALLY, as his totally scientific proof of having a big number of views on Youtube and big bookselling figures prove it. Science !
Out of topic : the horror when i see the number of time i have confused pasty for pastry (dig in shame).
To be fair, a (Cornish) pasty is a rather delicious pastry.
As Ariblester noted, Peterson is himself a Christian of at least the “cultural” persuasion (though I’ve a niggling doubt I read an interview with him once where he claimed to be a practicing Catholic). Which is amusing insofar as his staunchest fans tend to be atheists– or anti-theists– of the most obnoxious Dawk-bro type. If he wasn’t pandering to their prejudices, he’d be a prime target for their vitriol.
As for academic credit, just consider how much his YouTube videos have been cited in social media comments.