SJA #27 - 10 December 2018 - Who is Jordan Peterson? Part 1

Who is Jordan Peterson?
Part 1

One day you wake up. It’s an ordinary day. You have a family, you have a job, you have the things you’re supposed to have. But you’re not famous. You’re not a celebrated intellectual. You aren’t invited on television or radio. You’re not in charge of anything.

Confronted with a lifetime of evidence, you nevertheless insist that you aren’t mediocre. You’re not an average person, with average abilities, in an average life. You’re special. You’re great. But the world hasn’t recognized that.

There’s something wrong with the world.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Who is Jordan B. Peterson?

One of the leading lights of the new Intellectual Dark Web, Jeeperson exploded onto the world stage when he started lying about the Canadian government’s bill C-16, an act which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to provide protections for trans people (link in the thingy to an excellent podcast about C-16 and Jeep’s lies). He has now transitioned into a darling of the far right, traveling the world making largely inchoate pronouncements on difficult issues and earning tens of thousands of dollars a month on patreon from violent fanboys who needed to be told to clean their rooms.

But who was Jeepers before that?

He was a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who also operated a private clinical practice. Before becoming a full professor in Toronto, he was first an assistant professor and then an associate professor at Harvard (1993-1998). He got a BA in political science at the University of Alberta (1982), spent a year in Europe, then returned to Alberta for a BA in psychology (1984), then got his PhD in clinical psychology at McGill University (1991).

His research topics have covered a lot of ground. At Harvard he studied aggression arising from alcohol and drug abuse and, “supervised a number of unconventional research proposals”. That quote comes from a piece written in the Harvard Crimson (the school newspaper, link in the thingy) in 1995. That article is… illuminating. I’ll be referring to it from time to time, because it really says a lot about Peterson.

His wiki article (also linked) provides a long list of wiki-linked areas that Jeepers has researched.

• psychopharmacology
• abnormal psychology
• neuropsychology
• clinical psychology
• personality psychology
• social psychology
• industrial and organizational psychology
• religious psychology
• ideological psychology
• political psychology (okay, maybe they’re different, but why aren’t industrial, organizational, religious, ideological, and political psychology all just branches of social psychology? And how are religious, ideological, and political psychology not all the exact same thing? Anyway…)
• finally, creativity psychology

So what about his research? Personally, I’m not a clinical psychologist and don’t really want to read through a bunch of papers where I’d spend half the time looking up the vocab and the other half slogging through statistics. Fortunately, there are other things you can do, like compare him to his peers.

When you hop over to google scholar (linked), you can get a handy list of an author’s publications, as well as how many citations those papers have received. Like any other database, GS doesn’t include every publication (some databases are better for journals, others for conferences, others are only good for a particular field, etc.), and Google Scholar’s particular weakness is pre-1990 publications. However, Jeepers didn’t enter the field until the early 1990s, so this will provide an accurate reflection of his career. Also, since I’m comparing him to his colleagues in the field of psychology, any weaknesses in the database should apply similarly to all of them.

Jeepers isn’t the top of his field. Look into the GS list of people publishing in psychology and you get page after page of people ranked by how many citations they have. This doesn’t necessarily directly reflect how influential a person is in a field; authors tend to pile up citations over time. Various indexing methods that try to measure an academic’s impact and influence tend to suffer from a similar defect. On the other hand, you’re not going to be incredibly influential right out the gate; you have to establish your research, you have to establish that you know what you’re talking about, you have to have something to talk about.

Jeeperson is down on the fifth page. That’s not bad. He’s a solid, top tier researcher with 10,000+ citations under his belt. Given his recent notoriety, you might expect that to have changed, and there’s something to that. You tend to see a positive slope in an academic’s citation numbers; they keep writing newer papers, and those and their old papers keep getting citations, so the number of new citations they get keeps increasing. Jeeperson follows that trend up to 2016, a steady upward growth in citations.

Then he got a bump in 2017. This was the year immediately after he became famous, and it looks like some of his colleagues were curious, saw a little bit in his research, and cited him. But it wasn’t a big effect. His number of citations increased by 77 going from 2013 to 2014, by 71 ‘14 to ‘15, by 92 ‘15 to ‘16, by 217 from ‘16 to ‘17. His total number of citations in 2013 was 841 and it was 1289 in 2017. So it looks like popular celebrity landed him some extra academic attention in 2017, but it hasn’t moved him to the front of the pack.

On the other hand, 2018 doesn’t seem to be shaping up to be a very good year for the Jeep. He’s got 1010 citations as of writing (11/16), which means, depending on how/when the numbers are updated, he’s looking at roughly 1100 or 1200 citations. In other words, a decline. Part of the reason for that is that he’s spent so much time on the road being a famous fascist that he’s not been able to do much research. In fact, he shut down his clinical practice in 2017 and stopped teaching in 2018. You’re not going to get as many new citations if you’re not writing as many papers.

So Jeeperson’s research career looks to be successful, but not legendary. He’s on the fifth page in terms of citation numbers and the various indices meant to indicate a researcher’s impact are all on the same level as others on that page (some a little more influential, some a little less). The other psychologists on page five are also solid researchers, middle-aged men (and they’re all men) at good universities (and one clinic). You should expect people on higher pages to be a) older researchers with more publications, b) better researchers with more influential publications, or c) both.

And that’s what we see. Some of the front-page researchers (which list does include some women) are older, 70+ years of age. Others are a few years younger than Jeepers and clearly eminent in their fields, with very impressive awards and appointments. Not only do they have a large number of citations, but their citations are consistent and the various indices of influence are impressively high.

All of this is to say that, as a clinical psychologist, Jeepers doesn’t look like a crank. He’s not running a paper-mill, churning out worthless research like what happened at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab under Brian Wansink (link in the thingy). He’s not a top-flight researcher, the darling of the academic conferences, moving the field by leaps and bounds, but he’s also not a plodding dullard, publishing papers pro-forma and achieving nothing.

On the other hand, that list of research topics is troubling. Most researchers settle into a field early in their career. You take a look at their google scholar page and you’ll immediately see a theme to an academic’s publications. This one’s interested in depression and anxiety, this one focuses on recovering from trauma, this one is doing deep research into the formation of personality. Jeepers doesn’t really have that. Personality, social ability, creativity, drug abuse, anxiety… he’s kind of all over the place.

But what that means is that Jeepers might be a brilliant researcher. Ordinarily, you have to devote yourself to a field, learn all about it, and explore the whole structure to find the cracks that you can open up for new research, new insight. And those new insights and developments are what make other researchers want to cite your work, to build on what you’ve discovered. Or it challenges their work and they want to prove you wrong.

Which may be all that Jeeperson has actually done. Instead of a long career of powerful insights and great work, it could be that he’s something of a dilettante, moving into a field for a few years, achieving what he thinks of as an astonishing insight, then prancing along to a new project before anyone can tell him how deeply wrong he was.

So, which is it, is Jeeperson a masterful researcher in psychology, offering fresh perspective and insight into multiple fields thanks to his broad approach, or is he just an asshole who drops a nasty coffee fart in the elevator just before getting off at the second floor?

That’s hard for me to judge. I can’t dig through his citations to find out if they’re supporting or contradicting his work. Not only, again, am I not a psychologist with the training to read the papers, but the overwhelming majority of academic work is behind a paywall and thus inaccessible and I’m definitely not shelling out hundreds of dollars to find a snippet “DeYoung et al. say X, we disagree”.

From my perspective as an outsider, he’s a good researcher, who appears to be respected by his peers (or at least he was before he became the replacement daddy-figure for all the lost boys on the far right). He could be a crank who lacks focus and is unwilling to commit to a field because that would open him up to criticism and the possibility that he’s not the brilliant wunderkind he always thought he was, but I have no way of seeing that.

Where Jeepers definitely shines, no question, is in his ability to speak to an audience. His research work at Harvard got him hired at Toronto, but they might not have looked deeply into his teaching. They should have.

Remember that article I mentioned way back there? It was published in Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, in 1995, two years into Jeeperson’s time there, and it should raise red flags for anyone looking to hire a professor. Let’s go ahead and start with the opening paragraph:

“Harvard students may know Assistant Professor Jordan B. Peterson as the entertaining lecturer with the Canadian accent who taught Psychology 17, ‘Introduction to Personality’.”

That’s not terrible. Being an entertaining lecturer is good. Certainly better than being a boring drone, like Ben Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller. However, here are a few other snippets.

Quoting a senior: “Anyone who’s taking his class can immediately recognize that he’s teaching beyond the level of anyone else.”

A sophomore said the most notable thing about Peterson was “the way he synthesized information. He didn’t just talk about the theories, but he talked about some of his own ideas and different sources of information.”

Another sophomore said “Peterson’s wide breadth of knowledge allows him to create ‘beautiful’ theories linking together ideas from mythology, religion, philosophy, and psychology.”

Finally, quoting the Jeep himself, “The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.”

It might be one thing if you use literature and mythology to illustrate the enduring character of human psychology through the ages, how human beings have universal concerns and drives, and they build these into their beliefs, into the stories they tell and the dreams they have. But that’s not what Jeepers does. Because he’s a Jungian.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, died in 1961 and he looks like the movie villain who hypnotizes you, makes you into his accomplice in grotesque serial murders and rapes, then “cures” you himself through lobotomy before turning your wife and children into his sex slaves and getting away scot free and dying, happily, of old age thirty years later. Is that a movie? Feels like something like that is already a movie.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jung’s work is crap. He and Freud did a hell of a lot to move psychology away from “How are these people evil and how can we Jesus the crazy out of them?” and into a genuine science, but each of them was incredibly wrong about a lot of things. He believed in paranormal phenomena, for example. More importantly, he saw everything as manifestations of his weird spiritual interpretation of human development, what he called individuation, and also as manifestations of archetypes, a sort of platonic ideal of universal values buried deep in the human unconsciousness.

Any individual human being is a complex assemblage of parts and processes, but we all have core similarities, being variations on a powerfully unified central theme. We all have similar psychologies because we all evolved from the same small population of apes, and we all did so on our home planet with its environments, which only appear incredibly different if you don’t compare them to the things the universe as a whole has to offer.

What I’m trying to say here is that, when you study the psychology of human beings, you’re going to find common trends, tendencies, themes. You’re going to find that people as a whole tend to have the same sorts of reactions to the same sorts of situations. And you’re going to make those observations for the same reason you’ll observe that human beings have hair, mammary glands, external genitalia, a skull with a single, now closed fenestra… I’m saying we share an evolutionary heritage.

Jung and his followers do not have that basic understanding of biology. When Jungians talk about the “collective unconscious”, they’re not talking about the culture we live in, whose beliefs and attitudes we absorb without reflection. They’re talking about an actual collective entity that expresses itself through all of us. Jung studied the paranormal, alchemy, and the occult precisely because he thought those methods could provide insight into the collective unconscious.

And Jeeperson is a Jungian. He talks about archetypes and mythology and literature because he thinks they are a reflection not of a deeper biology, but of a deeper spiritual reality. That’s why he said studying myth and literature is more important than studying biology and the other sciences.

Some of the things Jeep has talked about in his many lectures and interviews include mythology and weird snippets of the natural world. He looks at an ancient Indian painting of a pair of snakes in a spiral and he doesn’t see artwork about snakes (there’s artwork about every damn thing in the natural world), he sees a deep archetypal insight into DNA (again, link in the thingy). Jungians think scientific discovery doesn’t happen because of research, but because it’s tapping into the collective unconscious, into this realm of real truths that can only be accessed through dreams.

Jeepers also got a bit of flack for talking about lobsters. Why lobsters? Because they have hierarchies and they use hormones that humans also use, and therefore humans should also live in the strict hierarchies Jeepers wants us to live in. That’s all garbage and any biologist could tear it apart, and many have (link!). But Jeepers isn’t interested in the actual biology; he’s talking about Jungian mysticism, where everything is a reflection of this deeper reality. He wants to talk about lobsters and hormones because he wants to say we’re all reflections of the collective unconscious, we all have to live that way because it’s the true way to live.

If you read his work, if you find out about his love of Jung, and you hear about how he’s tying mythology and literature into his lectures… that’s a matter of huge concern. The fact that he’s not just “teaching the theories”, but also “building his own beautiful theories”, that’s a matter of huge concern. Jeepers is a captivating lecturer because he’s passionate, because he’s not providing the facts, because he’s not teaching, he’s preaching.

If you watch his youtube videos, he bounces from topic to topic, rarely staying on psychology very long. He jumbles up psychology with mythology, literature, politics, pop culture, and science. If you know anything about any one of those, you can easily see how he’s incredibly, entirely, powerfully wrong. But few people know much about any of those, let alone all of them, and because Jeeperson loves to bounce from topic to topic, sometimes within a single sentence, and hates saying anything with clarity, it’s very difficult to construct a coherent response to anything he says. Hell, it’s difficult to construct a coherent understanding of anything he says.

I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not.

[FADE TO BLACK]

Jeep’s first book was Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief, published in 1999, a year after he moved from Harvard to Toronto. It took him thirteen years to write. He was 37. Which means he started it at the age of 24. In 1986, when he was just starting his PhD work at McGill. It purports to be a masterwork, explaining history. It is filled to the brim with Jungian nonsense.

AND DIAGRAMS. He has these… nonsense. They’re just wall to wall nonsense. A whole bunch of labels and arrows. It’s the worst collection of the most inconsequential venn diagrams ever. Let’s see if I can paint a word picture for you. Describe one of these things. Maybe get some coherent information out of it. Probably not.

So here we have a box labeled “YAHWEH: The Spirit of God” (note god’s name is in all caps), then that box is in an oval, because you have to have an oval. Then there’s another box, “THE VOID: Matter and the Deep”, and that box is also in an oval, because the boxes aren’t enough? The ovals make it official?

And there’s an arrow going from YAHWEH to THE VOID… well, from oval to oval, not from box to box. There’s probably something VERY meaningful there, something from the collective unconscious. … Ovals are probably eggs. Boxes are… penises? Maybe? Anyway, there’s another arrow from THE VOID to YAHWEH. Then there’s “Sexual” written above the arrow from YAHWEH to THE VOID… “sexual” is in quotes for some reason. Then between the two arrows there’s “(Creative)” … in parentheses… then below the arrow from THE VOID to YAHWEH there’s “Union”, with neither quotes nor parentheses.

So is “sexual” just for the arrow going from YAHWEH to THE VOID? Are all three words meant for both arrows? Why is “sexual” in quotes? Is it meant to say that YAHWEH’s interest in THE VOID isn’t actually sexual? That it just appears sexual? Is “(Creative)” for both? And how does THE VOID … have Union? Create Union? Do Union? For YAHWEH? To? At? With YAHWEH? And the oval around THE VOID is also an arrow. The oval’s line has a little arrowhead randomly placed on it. Pointing counterclockwise, though who the hell knows if that means anything for Jeepers. But we’ll see soon enough that the arrowhead isn’t an arrowhead. No no no, it’s just a head.

Now, THE VOID and YAHWEH are both inside another oval. With another box! This one labeled “The Precosmogonic “Egg””. “Egg” is in quotes for some reason. “Cosmogony” is the theory of the origin of the universe. So “precosomogonic” means “whatever came before the universe”. So “egg” is in quotes because it’s not a “real” egg, it’s a … metaphorical egg? It’s just a placeholder. Because he has a low opinion of his readers and didn’t want to seem too much like an egghead just saying “the precosmogony”? But YAHWEH and THE VOID are… totes sexual … well “sexual” for each other, even though they exist in the stuff before reality itself actually existed?

Now, there’s an arrow going from The Precosmogonic “Egg” to another oval. But this oval is outside the Precosmogonic “Egg”’s oval. It’s PARADISE: The Walled Garden. Now, this oval is a dashed line for some reason. Probably because it’s even more imaginary than the Precosmogonic “Egg”. The line going from the “Egg” to the Garden is labeled “Creation of Unconscious Paradisal World”.

But wait, there’s more! We also have… The Dragon of Chaos! You may have heard of the Dragon of Chaos. It’s kind of a theme for Jeeperson. Shows up in a lot of his diagrams. This one isn’t called the Dragon of Chaos. It’s just a picture of a dragon and it’s labeled CHAOS. In a box. And now we know why the oval for THE VOID has that arrowhead on it. Because it is also the Dragon of Chaos eating its own tail! And there’s an arrow going from the Garden to the CHAOS labeled Descent and Disintegration and another arrow from CHAOS to the Garden labeled Anomalous Information. And, next to the dragon, we have Eve, naked, holding a baby, and a fig leaf, both quite strategically placed. And Eve is in her own oval. No arrows for Eve, though. She’s just standing there. Naked. Next to the dragon of CHAOS.

Now, because symbolism is useless if it’s not hammered home with all the subtlety of a drag queen, we have MORE OVALS. These last two ovals are in dotted lines. One oval goes around THE VOID, Eve, and the dragon of CHAOS. The other is around YAHWEH and PARADISE. Both ovals are labeled, with boxes made of dotted lines, but outside the dotted line ovals and connected to them with more dotted lines. YAHWEH’s and PARADISE’s oval is “The “Patriarchal World” of Light”, with “Patriarchal World” in quotes. The dotted oval for THE VOID and Eve and CHAOS is “The “Matriarchal World” of Darkness”. Yup, “Matriarchal World” is in quotes.

And this whole diagram is Figure 56: Genesis and Descent.

So, this diagram is clear, right? YAHWEH is totally banging THE VOID, and imagining an Unconscious Paradisal World that is descending and disintegrating into the CHAOS that is feeding it Anomalous Information. Also, there’s some naked chick holding a baby.

No, the diagram doesn’t make any sense. Nor do any of the other diagrams. There are dozens of the damn things. All of them just collections of ovals and boxes and arrows and random clumps of vocab. The Jeep is absolutely garbage at creating clarity.

And you see the bit where it’s full of Jungian archetypal bullshit? He’s positing these as actual structures existing in places, full of serious meaning and value and … they create things and they’re why people do things.

And did you see the part where it is absolutely incredibly sexist? Did you notice the male world of light with the spirit of god and the garden paradise? The dragon of CHAOS, THE VOID, and the random, inexplicable, Eve? Did you notice that YAHWEH totally wants to metaphorically “sexual” the mystical vagina? THE VOID? The female chaotic darkness that destroys the male paradise of light....

And yet Jeeperson expresses confusion that people would think he’s a sexist piece of shit! His work is full of this shit. Male = Order = God = Civilization; Female = Chaos = Destruction = … somehow necessary but we won’t talk about this.

Maps of Meaning is intended to explain all of history, how and why people fall into ideological beliefs and go to war and commit genocide. He spent thirteen years putting this garbage together. It is loaded with pseudoscientific, mystical, debunked Jungian garbage, the sort of stuff that shows up in Hollywood movies because it’s a lot better for building a story than any actual science or medicine would be.

If Jeepers weren’t a faculty member at a real university, would any of this be taken seriously? His lectures combine a few snippets of things he actually knows something about (basic psychology) with mountains of falsehoods in fields where he’s utterly unqualified (politics, science, philosophy, literature, history). Without that PhD, what would he be?

I don’t doubt he’s an engaging teacher. He speaks with a great deal of confidence and assurance. Those who are wrong often do. He offers a universal and universalizing vision that seems to draw from every corner of human thought. The fact that he is as ignorant of all those things as the people listening to him is what makes him so compelling. Not being bound by mere truth is a great boon to passion and conviction.

It’s probably not an accident that he didn’t publish his garbage book until his move to Toronto. Tenure’s a hell of a drug.

So what about his teaching? What about his philosophy? What about his work? How did the hiring committee at U of T not see all this? Probably because Jeeperson was keeping it under wraps. Going back to the Crimson article, his teaching was engaging and full of his personal bullshit, and he let undergrads do all sorts of ridiculous projects (“Lopez notes that Peterson is willing to take on any research project, no matter how unconventional. His lab examines everything from sensitivity to loneliness to aggression among adolescents. “If you have a strange project, [the department] will immediately send you to [Peterson] because they know he’ll take them.”)

But Jeeperson’s own research? Orthodox, orthodox, orthodox. From his time as a grad student at McGill until he left Harvard, all of his publications are standard research into the psychology of alcoholism and aggression. Then he moves to U of T and both addiction and aggression almost completely disappear. The first thing he publishes after moving to Toronto is Maps of Meaning. Everything after that is talking about personality and the search for meaning, and politics. Toronto thought they were getting a good researcher and an engaging lecturer. Instead they got a passionate fruitcake.

It’s not impossible or even unusual for a researcher to be discouraged from following a controversial line of research. Grad students are frequently dissuaded from following lines of thought they find intriguing because it will make it difficult for them to get their doctorate, then to get a teaching position, then to get tenure. In a way, this is in keeping with what tenure is for. It’s there to protect faculty so they can do controversial research. However, it’s somewhat rare for their research to take quite such a dramatic turn.

What Jeepers did was dedicate himself to a single line of research, drug abuse and aggression, for more than a decade, only to abandon it on getting tenure. That’s not unprecedented, but it’s extreme. Academics who want to pursue their passion but are worried about not getting tenure normally pursue more orthodox lines of research related to their passion. For example, a sociologist who wants to study atheism in the United States will be discouraged from doing so because atheism is still largely taboo. So until they get tenure, they’ll study religion and religious beliefs.

What Jeepers did is more like when the occasional creationist stealths their way through a geology or biology doctorate. They spend years doing the work so they can get the degree, then go out and do whatever the hell they want with it. It’s kind of dishonest. Peterson wanted to be a sociologist and political scientist, a cultural anthropologist. Instead he became a psychologist.

To be continued...

Links

• Peterson’s wiki page
• Serious Inquiries Only #10: Peterson is Wrong or Lying or Both
• The Crimson article on Jeepers
• Petersons google scholar page
• Google scholar for all the clinical psych folk
• Vox article on Wansink
• The guy in Toronto who hired Jeep
• The wiki page on Jung’s collective bullshit
• Debunking Peterson’s snake thing
• PZ Myers debunking Peterson's lobster thing