Conservative men

My father is confrontational. He can’t help it. Sometimes, it’s fun. I don’t mind a debate, and we disagree about much, so topics abound. However, he started listening to conservative radio about fifteen years ago: the change to his personality in certain areas has been disheartening. So, there are now topics I would prefer we didn’t discuss.

He has a hard time with that line.

He’s become more willing to reject science since he started listening, choosing punditry and uneducated opinions instead. He hasn’t drifted so far to the right that he embraces the likes of Alex Jones, but when it comes to characters like Jordan Peterson, he seems to think they’ve got the right of it and rejects other opinions to the contrary.

Moreover, like many conservative men, he won’t agree to disagree. He won’t let me hold my opinions about contentious issues in peace. He won’t let it go. He brings these topics – misogyny, climate change, billionaires and greed, and religion – to the table time again and again to both my and my mother’s chagrin.  

He gets angry when I refuse to agree with what Mr. Peterson has to say on climate change, political correctness, social norms, gender, and sexuality, and opinions I offer to the contrary – my own and others – are met with the favourite conservative complaint wherein “they” are out to get “them.”

I appreciate my father’s dilemma – he doesn’t want climate change, racism, bigotry, and greed to be true. Pretending they’re not and that discussions about said change are conspiracies helps nothing.

Reality isn’t an opinion.

My father is further annoyed by the fact that not only do I reject Jordan’s ideas, but I’m no longer willing to discuss them, or him. He suggests that I’m being closed-minded and that I can’t have an informed opinion without continuing to listen to the things Jordan Peterson repeats.

Baked into that stance is the assumption that my opinion is uninformed. If I would just listen, I would see. I have done, however. I’ve read, listened, and watched. My rejection is informed and considered.

Setting aside the irony inherent in the accusation of closed ears, the “both sides have validity” argument is not always true. We’re not discussing whether or not we should have pineapple on pizza, and when it comes to discrimination and bigotry, not all opinions are equal.  

For me, with Jordan Peterson, everything is the fruit of a poisonous tree. And, to mix metaphors, I’m willing to toss the baby with the bathwater in these kinds of cases, accusations of judgmentalism or hardness notwithstanding.

I think sometimes we get a little fluid with the objective rightness of things.

Jordan Peterson: a man and a type

Jordan Peterson is a middle-aged, white Canadian male who self-identifies as an economic liberal and social conservative. He was trained as a clinical psychologist, and he’s worked in that capacity, and as a researcher and lecturer in that field for much of his life.

He’s a prolific publisher of papers, a good thing if you live in academia, even if you like to bite the hand that feeds you which has been Mr. Peterson’s position of late. ^[i]

Like many social conservatives, he’s testy these days. He feels like his way of life is under attack. Some people never understand that equality for others hurts them not at all.

He gives lots of talks, and he’s very convinced of the rightness of his positions, even when they’re based on bigotry. He likes to hide his isms under the rubric “freedom.” A lot of people try to excuse bad behaviour by labelling it as such.

His language and comportment eventually got him sanctioned by the governing body in his profession. Rules are for other people, apparently. Like many conservative public speakers, he especially chafes at ones related to good manners, kindness, tolerance, and inclusion.

There’s been a tendency of late to label things like good manners and tolerance as “political correctness” or “wokeness” in a pejorative way, as though prioritizing other people is a bad thing. It does have negative implications for the economics of libertarians.  

You can’t toss a stick at a conservative network without hitting a story bemoaning woke politics these days, but as best I can tell, the stories are mostly about people who’ve been asked to not be openly racist, bigoted, or discriminatory, and object to civilized limits on behaviour.

There are also plenty of stories about the contamination of education by “leftish propagandists,” though ones written by actual faculty and student body members seem thinner on the ground.

The push by conservative talking heads towards delegitimizing journalism, books, and educators should concern everyone.

The rejection of the conservative mindset at universities isn’t new, but this time, they’re taking it personally. Conservative thinkers have been booed and rejected in post-secondary halls for decades. Most of the time, youth skew left. Some of us even stay there. Excluding those in the commerce and business faculties of course.

Jordan Peterson complains about conservative oppression regularly. He shows up on social media ad nauseam complaining about being muzzled and cancelled, a victim of fascist oppression. He talks about it and writes about it all the time. I don’t think social conservatives understand what cancelled or muzzled means. They sure don’t understand fascism.

I wish they understood silence. Or even how to do a boycott: it’s getting embarrassing.

Oftentimes when people complain about being unfairly cancelled, what they’re really dealing with is natural consequences. Mr. Peterson says nasty things about many people. It’s only logical that the people he criticizes and demonizes would talk back. But rebuttal and rebuke appear to shock him.

His hostility towards women has made him very popular in certain spaces. He caters loudly to men who feel angry over the changes to the social contract. They’re not getting what they want, and as all toddlers know, not getting what you want is unfair. Men are entitled to certain things by virtue of their existence, or so writers like Mr. Peterson would have us believe.

One of the things these men want but aren’t getting is women. Equality is such a dirty deal. They feel entitled to a partner, though they’re not interested in an equal partnership. They often seem to have a nasty view of women and speak of them in derogatory and often violent terms.

Odd that they’re not more popular with those they wish to essentially enslave.

Jordan Peterson suggests that allowing women to choose their own lives is unfair and unworkable if it doesn’t include a provision for providing sex to men. He suggests that the traditional and “correctly patriarchal” social contract entitles people (men) to relationships, and therefore to sex, and therefore to women’s bodies.

He argues frequently that the masculine spirit is under assault in these modern times, a situation that could be corrected if we fulfilled his traditionalist desires and made heterosexual monogamy the required norm. He argues that patriarchy exists because of male competence and that it’s the proper system for societal and species advancement. I guess he’s unaware of the body count men-in-charge has left behind.

I guess he’s not too concerned about non-male spirits and what they might need.  

I find Jordan binary in his thinking, which perhaps explains his discomfort with gender fluidity. The simplistic duality of his thinking is seen in his characterization of men and women. It reminds me of the old Tarzan cartoons. He has a very stereotypical view of male and female roles, and he holds his stereotypes up as the ideal.

Peterson writes that order is masculine and that chaos is feminine, and these qualities are inherent to human existence. To Peterson, culture is “symbolically, archetypally, mythically male,” while “chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.”

And obviously, you don’t want chaos in charge. It’s not misogyny though. It’s just about “proper” roles.

The Opinions

As is often the case with people, especially academics who get fringe and vocal with it, Jordan Peterson began to run into issues with his employers. His refusal to adopt inclusive language is just one of the things that hampered his career. His public appearances certainly didn’t help, and his personal demons were problematic: he’s currently in recovery from a serious drug addiction he hid for years.

Benzodiazepines do some interesting things to the mind and body.

He explains his refusal to use inclusive language in a professional setting as standing his ground against forces that could see him imprisoned for incorrect pronoun usage. It’s a garbage claim, but the alt-right loves stories like that.

In 2021 he retired from his position at the University of Toronto to take up the position of chancellor at an uncredited institution in Georgia, USA. Not much is known about the school save for this tidbit:

“In 2023, Harvey Silverglate, co-founder of FIRE, a non-profit, civil liberties group founded with the stated mission of “protecting free speech” rights, resigned from Ralston’s Board of Visitors (the College’s advisory council), stating that Ralston has “all these administrators, very few teachers, and secrecy, which is antithetical to the whole concept of a liberal arts institution.”

He also blames his disaffection for inclusive language on his resistance to “cultural Marxism.” Marxism is a study of the nations’ class and economic structures, and the struggles between them: it’s cultural by definition, so Peterson’s soundbite means little. But it sounds good and people who make their living in the public eye very quickly become about the soundbite and catchphrase.

And “resistor of cultural Marxism” sounds better than “bigot.

12 Rules

Jordan Peterson is well-known for his book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.”

He labels the feminine “chaos.”

Tell me again about the lack of misogyny.

Fun fact about misogyny – you’re not precluded from demonstrating it because you’re married or have female children. That black friend doesn’t make you not a racist.

Initially set at forty-two rules, the book was honed down to the twelve that head the chapters. It’s not the easiest or best read, but you can find copies in the library if you’re interested. Some of the points he made were interesting and valid: would that I could endorse them, but alas, I don’t stump for people who want to curtail women’s freedoms in favour of straight men.

Taken together, the twelve chapters provide insight into his ideas about self-reliance, good behaviour, self-betterment, and individualism. It’s nothing new, but we’re always game for pop psychology content that gives up the secret to life.  Bookstores are lousy with them.

The chapters are as follows, with chapter six perhaps being my favourite. Jordan Peterson definitely doesn’t do irony.

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back;
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping;
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you;
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today;
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them;
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world;
7. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient;
8. Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie;
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
10. Be precise in your speech;
11. Do not bother children while they are skateboarding;
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.

The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

There’s a doctrine in jurisprudence called “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” and it describes evidence that is obtained illegally. The logic is that if the acquisition of the evidence is tainted, then that evidence and all information that flows from it is contaminated as well, and must not be used.

None of the evidence is any good because what it flows from is unacceptable.^[ii]

When it comes to evidence in the Canadian legal system, impartiality and fairness are necessary to sustain faith in the system. There must be trust in the process. Thus, if there’s contamination, then even if the tree yields interesting fruit, or has interesting branches, it all has to go. You can’t separate the wheat from the chaff.

This is true for me with people sometimes, and it’s this rejection of people over ethical issues that gets my father’s back up. I worry about it myself sometimes, to be honest. I worry that I’m edging towards hard, that I’m inflexible and rigid, and judgmental to a fault.

Because, of course, sometimes I am. All of us are some of the time. The trick is to keep our venal selves restrained. Live and let live, have grace, and be tolerant. These are things I believe in. Then where, my father would ask, is the difference when it comes to extending grace to men like Jordan Peterson or Glenn Beck?

The difference is the nature of the offence. Their sins are mortal.^[iii]

Jordan Peterson engages in behaviour that is greatly offensive to me. I object to his line of propaganda when it comes to women and vulnerable minorities. People with big platforms should be better.

People should be better.

My father – and I love my father – is a tall, straight, white, middle-class man. He’s never in his entire life known discrimination or challenge because of who he is. Women struggle in the face of that reality, and men like Jordan Peterson make things worse and more dangerous for us with their sophistry. But my father can’t understand that: he has no frame of reference, and he’s not particularly skilled at putting himself in other people’s shoes. He doesn’t understand the fear that accompanies membership in a vulnerable group.

Jordan Peterson is team patriarchy. He proselytizes about how patriarchy is the correct and inevitable system. All the good in the world flows from patriarchy, according to Jordan.

Jordan tells single men that it’s not fair that they don’t have a relationship. He tells them that coupled up is the natural and right order and that women should want the domestic sphere and the joy of doing all the emotional work. He floats trial balloons about various topics: about compulsive monogamy – for women; about reducing education in areas that are favoured by women; and about force.

An army of angry men who feel entitled to what they don’t have is a bad idea. Lecturers like Mr. Peterson light fuses and then deny responsibility for the explosions that ensue.

These misogynistic and bigoted ideas are easy for men like my father to write off. “Sure, he shouldn’t say those things, but he doesn’t mean it, he’s right about climate (no), he has good ideas about family, he’s right about education, people are too sensitive these days, on and on until we start getting quite short with each other, distressing my mother no end, trapped as she is between the rock and the hard place.

And didn’t Shakespeare say, “But me no buts”? The problem is men have no skin in the game when it comes to sexism and misogyny, and no idea what it’s like to live with it.

When it comes to who we have to give space to, we very much disagree. Interestingly, he’s fine with my drawing boundaries with friends and siblings. It’s only when I do it to conservative pundits that he takes offence.    We are not required to give space to those who wish us harm. It’s ridiculous

---

[i] I was told, or I read once upon a time, that people inevitably shift to a more conservative outlook as they age. We’re more willing to be egalitarian when we’re young and have little, or so the argument goes. This is possibly true, but as is the case with most things, shifting opinions also reflects a choice. Times change. The world changes. We can change with it, or get hidebound, wedded to the past we’re convinced is the only and best way, as of course countless old people have sworn down the ages. I was pretty determined not to shift. I think my affection for pop music and pop culture keeps me progressive. That and poverty.

[ii] The doctrine isn’t universal. Some jurisdictions accept evidence even if the methods of acquiring it are questionable. Both choices have pros and cons attached.

[iii] Consider that it’s often the people in the vulnerable position who are asked to be tolerant and have grace in the face of nastiness and abuse. Lately, I’ve decided to go in a different direction. Boy, does that result in a shocked look on the face.

---