Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Social Justice War against Jordan Peterson

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March 21, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

20:43

The Social Justice War against Jordan Peterson

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	The clip you just saw was yet another professor attempting to give a talk on a university campus, in this case McMasters University in Canada, and being shouted down by social justice activists.
	The professor in question was one Dr. Jordan Peterson, who has found himself at odds with these activists, because he refuses to cow himself to their thuggish bullying tactics.
	Shortly after the event, a statement was issued by I can only assume to be the organisers of this demonstration, and I think it's really worth going through so you can understand their mindset.
	The statement was issued by the President's Advisory Committee on Building an Inclusive Community's Priorities and Planning Committee and LGBTQ plus working group, the McMaster Student Union Diversity Services Director, the McMaster Student Union Queer Students Community Center Coordinator, the McMaster Student Union Women and Gender Equity Network Coordinator.
	Notice how no names are given, and if you go to the McMaster Student Union Diversity Services page and say, oh, I don't know, try to meet the team, you're presented with a 404.
	Well, I guess I'll never know who these people are then.
	But that's okay, they only have a gang of students by which they used to censor professors.
	They only have this kind of power on their university campuses.
	It's okay, these people don't need to be held to account at all, do they?
	Oh well, let's just get straight to the statement then.
	We are deeply troubled that Dr. Jordan Peterson has been invited to speak at McMaster at an upcoming event about freedom of speech and political correctness.
	For some reason, both of these are inverted commas.
	Most recently, Dr. Petherson has gained notoriety for his refusal to use the preferred pronouns of trans and gender non-conforming colleagues and students at the University of Toronto.
	Right, we'll stop there.
	Yes, it's one thing preventing someone from saying something, but it's entirely another thing to force someone to say something.
	What could be termed the technical language of social justice is entirely contrived and did not arise naturally from common English usage.
	It has come from an ideological drive in order to change the culture around it.
	And the very fact that we have to discuss why Dr. Peterson was censored by these people demonstrates precisely the kind of ideology it is.
	The only concern that social justice has for Dr. Peterson's liberty is in how to suppress it.
	It is no wonder that he and other professors like him are doing what they can to resist it.
	Dr. Petherson would be lucky to simply be persona non-grata to these people, but no, they cannot simply allow the man to speak his mind and then speak theirs in return.
	They have to issue a fatwa against him and declare that any speeches he makes must be interrupted because he is of course an enemy of social justice.
	And they see opposition to this as defending his callous regard for their personhood for a misguided deference to his freedom of speech and his distaste for political correctness.
	It's this kind of extreme rhetoric that is deliberately designed to polarise the discussion because nobody is questioning the personhood of these people.
	This is simply not the focus of the debate.
	But if we do not paint Dr. Peterson as some kind of victimizer, then we cannot paint ourselves as victims.
	They go on to say that freedom of speech doesn't now and hasn't ever meant we can or should be able to say whatever we like in public spaces regardless of the impact of our speech on others.
	Of course, they can't give reference to a time when Dr. Peterson has argued that it does, because he never has, to my knowledge.
	The issue is not whether people should be allowed to say exactly as they want when they want, but whether they are allowed to express a political opinion or not.
	That is the core concept of free speech.
	And unfortunately for the gender activists who are so concerned about this, they have to understand that they are the ones who politicized gender pronouns.
	And so if Dr. Peterson does wish to exercise his freedom of speech, then he does need to be able to say what he likes in this realm.
	You politicized it, not him.
	They go on to say that instead, the concept of freedom of speech has most often been mobilized to protect, specifically, counter-hegemonic ideas.
	Ideas that actually challenge rather than reiterate the status quo.
	Well, that's breathtakingly ironic given that on these university campuses, you are the hegemonic status quo.
	You are the ones with the diversity institutions studded across your campuses all across the Western world.
	Jordan Peterson is the dissident.
	He is the rebel.
	He is the one who is going against your hegemony, and you are exercising your power against him anytime you can and to the fullest extent of your abilities.
	It is a breathtaking irony by which you attempt to paint yourselves as the marginalized and oppressed victims of systemic injustice while controlling the systems.
	Unbelievable as it is to me, it gets worse.
	Dr. Peterson is actually in danger of being prosecuted in a Canadian human rights court for failing to use the approved language and then may actually be fined.
	And if he doesn't pay the fine, he may actually go to jail and you think he represents the status quo.
	But what annoys me most about this argumentum ad populum is the fact that they think that just because it has been most often mobilized to protect a specific kind of idea, that it should not be mobilized to protect another specific kind of idea.
	And perhaps they would appreciate it if I quoted Noam Chomsky: if we do not believe in freedom of speech for our enemies, we do not believe in it at all.
	Given that the people who issued this statement do not believe in freedom of speech for their enemies, and are quite happy to infringe that right when it suits them, I don't think I'll be taking any lectures from you on what you think the good or bad of freedom of speech is.
	Next, they say, freedom of speech was not conceived as a means to protect normative ideas from contestation by marginalized communities, but to protect those whose speech might actually contest normative or nationalist ideals from censure punishment or retaliation by state forces.
	Ironically, this is actually a correct statement, but not for the reasons they think.
	Freedom of speech was not conceived as a means to protect ideas at all.
	It was conceived as a means to protect individuals, because individuals have rights, ideas do not.
	Nothing about your ideas is sacred.
	Nothing about your ideas is protected from interrogation, but everything about Dr. Peterson's right to speak politically is.
	You are in the wrong and he is in the right.
	If your ideas cannot bear scrutiny, perhaps you should question the reason you even hold them.
	And this is where we arrive at the science denialism portion of what may as well be a statement from the Flat Earth Society.
	There is nothing rebellious or revolutionary about insisting on the naturalness of the long-debunked gender binary or of what Dr. Peterson describes as the biological fact of sexual differences neatly categorizable as male and female.
	A fact subjected to intense critique and questioning and reconsideration by numerous scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and even the biological sciences for several decades now, which demonstrates the limited extent of Dr. Peterson's knowledge on this subject.
	I don't want to point out that this statement contains logical fallacy after logical fallacy, but it simply does.
	This is an argument from authority, and you do not even cite any sources, because I think that if you did, because if we were to interrogate the careers of these professors, I am sure that we would find things like feminist glaciation, queering agriculture,
	all this kind of nonsense, which I'm going to give a quick shout-out to a Twitter account called Real Peer Review, which I'll leave a link in the description, which you should check out if you want to see the very worst of who they consider to be scholars in these fields.
	But of course, I am not surprised that you named no names, because you say this demonstrates the limited extent of Dr. Peterson's knowledge on the subject, since he seems either entirely unaware of this body of literature, or else unwilling to engage with the challenge it poses for his own arguments.
	Very interesting you would say that, given how you refuse to engage with his arguments at all, and you instead resort to shouting him down as an organized mob.
	The breathtaking hypocrisy that you would ask him to engage with your arguments, but you refuse to engage with his is ridiculous.
	I suggest that the gender activists who wrote this statement name the professors and scholars they are talking about.
	Show us the citations of the studies and literature they want us to reference, because I think it's been left deliberately obscured.
	They then say that there is nothing subversive or radical about suggesting that one ought to be entitled to read the complexities of gendered identification on the basis of a quick and unwarranted scrutiny of others' bodies and appearance.
	And this is where they reveal the insubstantial depth of their own knowledge on the concept of identity.
	Dr. Peterson is a professor of psychology with a clinical practice in which he treats people with identity disorders, because identity is a large part of human psychology.
	So unsurprisingly, he is an expert in this field.
	It also comes as no surprise that you have a distinct fear of letting him speak.
	You know that you cannot allow his ideas to be spread because they will directly counteract your own.
	And we know that you know this.
	The sophistry continues with, this is not a freedom that needs to be defended, but rather the simplistic reassertion of the status quo, of ideas about gender and sexual difference that have become and stubbornly remain very widespread and commonsensical, even in the face of mountains of academic evidence to the contrary, and legislative changes made to protect the human rights of trans and gender non-conforming persons.
	I can't say that I'm surprised that you think that freedoms do not need to be defended, but unfortunately, they do, because people like you will infringe on them whenever they can.
	Nobody is fooled by your attempt at claiming to be the protectors of the human rights of trans and gender non-conforming people when you are busy infringing the human rights of others.
	I would ask the people who wrote this sentence to even ask themselves, do they even understand why they framed it through the lens of power politics?
	Because if your ideas were correct, and it was in fact a massive and historical misconception that in fact human beings were designed by nature to be male and female and people who fall out of this gender binary are in fact, and I use this word without trying to be offensive, aberrations.
	Any ideas to the contrary would not be stubborn to debunk.
	They would not be difficult to explain to a lay person.
	But the reason that you have to make multiple references to the reassertion of the status quo is because you are framing this as if there is an opposite group to yourselves.
	If you can characterize the status quo as another team, then it validates your actions as a team as well.
	Dr. Peterson is no longer simply an individual professor speaking out against the infringement of his own rights.
	He becomes the agent of another faction, what you are terming as the status quo, and you are acting as agents of your own faction.
	And so this legitimizes your action against him.
	The reality, of course, is that the status quo as you conceive it is not a unified faction.
	It is not operating with a coordinated strategic plan against you.
	And so you using a coordinated strategic plan against individuals that you view as being agents of the status quo is entirely inappropriate.
	And as soon as these scales fall from your eyes, you will realize that you are in the wrong.
	You are the people who are infringing rights, not protecting them.
	They then say, so let us not pretend that Dr. Peterson is a staunch defender of any sort of freedom.
	What he is defending instead appears to be a misguided presumption that his right to uphold the status quo trumps the right of others to exist in public spaces and be treated with respect and dignity free from hatred and discrimination.
	I have just refuted your assertion that he is a defender of the status quo.
	He is a defender of his own ideas and of course his right to express them.
	The right of others to exist in public spaces is not under threat.
	Nobody is suggesting that anyone should not be treated with respect and dignity and free from hatred and discrimination which, again, I must ironically refer you to your own protests against Dr. Peterson, in which you do not treat him with respect and dignity, and he is not free from hatred or discrimination.
	You do precisely what you accuse others of doing.
	And then say, and in a world where hate and discrimination continue to flourish and appear to be on the rise, his way of expressing his right amounts to a presumptive sense of entitlement to deny others their status as fully and complexly human.
	This is nothing but a rhetorical flourish.
	Real life is not a Hollywood movie.
	There is no presumptive sense of entitlement to deny others their status as fully and complexly human.
	This is a particularly underhanded way of attempting to frame yourselves as the victims of Dr. Peterson.
	He is not denying the status as fully and complexly human of anyone.
	In fact, you are denying his by denying his right.
	These are the kind of vipers that we have to deal with.
	The kind that will cry out in pain when they strike you.
	These people are not the victims of Dr. Peterson.
	He is the victim of them.
	They then say, there is nothing new about Dr. Peterson's position then.
	It is a position taken by multitudes of others before him.
	And this is a very convenient method of dismissing him.
	If there is nothing new from Dr. Peterson, then why should they debate him at all?
	Which is what they say now.
	There is also little to be gained by debating Dr. Peterson, because he presents no argument founded on evidence that would actually be worthy of debate.
	To invalidate his entire career as a psychologist in one line.
	How convenient.
	But once again they're right.
	And again, I don't even know if they know that they are framing this through the lens of power politics.
	Because they are right.
	There is nothing for them to gain by debating Dr. Peterson, which is why they don't do it.
	Every debate is a battle of ideas, and as Erwin Rommel said, you don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.
	If they debate Jordan Peterson and win, they retain their hegemony over the politics of gender identity.
	But if they lose, who knows what follows?
	That's why, instead of engaging him in a debate, they send their rainbow-haired goon squads to shout him down.
	They have the power to do it, and they don't even need to fight the battle to win.
	They finish with, We stand in solidarity with trans and gender non-conforming members of our communities who have been called upon repeatedly in the last several months to publicly respond and to challenge Dr. Peterson's views and to articulate again and again why they should be able to participate fully and meaningfully in public institutions in ways that reflect their humanity.
	This is, like every attempt they make at characterizing Dr. Peterson's views, a straw man.
	He is in no way attempting to exclude them from participating in public institutions and nor is he trying to dehumanize them.
	He is resisting a gang of ideologues who have attacked people along the lines of gender politics because gender politics is not normally a subject with which people are well versed.
	This is an easy path to power for these people and they've taken it.
	And as soon as someone stands up, they must insinuate, if not outright state, that he is trying to dehumanize people and exclude them from the public dialogue.
	This is a weapon being used against your own best intentions.
	And with this weapon, they are trying to maintain their hegemony at the expense of Dr. Peterson's rights.
	This is dangerous.
	This has to be identified.
	You have to be able to see these people for what they are.
	They say, we anticipate that Dr. Peterson's talk will and should result in public critical opposition to his ideas, including public opposition to how he has treated trans and gender non-conforming people.
	Well, I don't believe that he has treated them in any particularly negative way, and I find it highly ironic that they suggest that his talk will create critical opposition when it seems to have done the exact opposite.
	It appears to have created a battalion of mindless drones, who, cult-like, will interrupt every single sentence with their endless chants and air horns to prevent the professor from even expressing himself.
	They say, in the present climate, proponents of free speech may try to paint such opposition as just another indicator that Dr. Peterson's freedom of speech is in fact under threat.
	Obviously, it is under threat.
	You have infringed it already and you are continuing to try and deny it.
	Instead, we suggest that wherever free speech is valued, protest too must be valued as a legitimate exercise of that freedom.
	Protest is legitimate.
	The heckler's veto is not.
	But protest does more than this.
	It also aims to articulate and demand the kind of university and the kind of society that many of us are fighting for.
	Again, they phrase it in terms of a battle or a war.
	They can't stop themselves from doing it, and I don't even think they know that they're doing this.
	One in which we recognize that speech or action that reduces the humanity of any group of people is not an exercise of freedom, but instead poses a threat to us all.

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