Public Intellectuals

I can't remember when I first heard about Noam Chomsky. When I was a teenager, my brother took an interest in the book and subsequent documentary "Manufacturing Consent" and in the  years after I formed an impression of Chomsky as a lefty critic of capitalism and American imperialism, as well as being someone who had radically influenced the development of the field of linguistics. In 2011 or 2012 I borrowed "Year 501" from the library but, and this is painful for me to admit, was forced to return it before I finished it. In 2017 I came across Chomsky again when enrolled in a University course about Political Economy, watched "Manufacturing Consent" again, and read some supplementary literature about it. I have included the essay I wrote about his theory in this blog (it's the post called "Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent in 2018"). Since then I have become much more interested in Chomsky. There are numerous clips of him speaking at seminars, panel discussions, in interviews and debates available for everyone's delectation on Youtube. I can now say that I like Chomsky very much indeed. His greatest achievement, the theory of Universal Grammar, seems one of the most important contributions not only to linguistics but to science and philosophy of the twentieth century. He speaks knowledgeably and clearly not only about linguistics but about history, politics, philosophy, and science generally. His enormous erudition and surgical precision concerning important topics is always on display. Chomsky is a bona fide public intellectual.

What is a public intellectual? A public intellectual is a person who takes an interest in important but abstract ideas, and communicates his or her views about them to a lay audience. The public who consume these disquisitions tend to be people who have studied but have left academia, or people who have no tertiary education at all but have an appetite for ideas. Unlike those intellectuals happily ensconced in universities who spend all their time talking to other scholars via the books they write, public intellectuals seek to explain their ideas in ordinary language in order to be understood as widely as possible. Public intellectual speak down as well as across. France has a long tradition of public intellectuals but these savants are less common in the United States and completely absent from New Zealand – the closest we have are those newspaper and magazine columnists who write about the scholarly books they read and the latest scientific research. Deborah Hill Cone, the columnist who resigned a couple of months back, could be described as one of those mob, the closest New Zealand comes to having a scene for public intellectuals to act in.

However, times they have a way of changing. Over the last five years (I'd guess), the role of 'public intellectual' has boomed. The culprit? The internet of course, and particularly Youtube. Fifteen years ago, Youtube was where you went if you wanted to watch really short clips of cats doing silly dumb things but, today, anything and everything is on Youtube – old episodes of Monty Python, every song ever written (including classical and operatic pieces), snatches from CNN and Fox News, talks explaining quantum physics and Euler's Identity... just about everything. And unlike Google, Youtube, employing complicated statistical algorithms, works out the stuff its users are interested in, and steers them towards those videos it has been decided you and those most like you most like. It is in this environment that public intellectuals increasingly thrive. Youtube has dozens, perhaps hundreds, of TED talks (one I can recommend is "The Science Delusion" presented by Richard Sheldrake). Want to know the views of Sam Harris on free will? Just search "Sam Harris" and "free will" and an apposite video will pop up. Of course, Youtube is not the only platform through which public intellectuals can get their views across – Sam Harris has a podcast. And, in a feedback circle, public intellectuals can exploit their fame by giving stand-up orations to large paying audiences, which in turn amplifies their internet presence.

I said that Chomsky is a bona fide public intellectual. I now want to turn our attention onto someone who is taken to be one also but isn't – Jordan Peterson.

Oddly, I discovered Jordan Peterson through Stephen Fry. For many years I have been interested in Fry, not because I was familiar with his work with Hugh Laurie (I wasn't) but because he is an intelligent openly gay man. I like Stephen Fry because he is proof that at this particular stage of human social evolution, gay men come out and so, consequently, if a man says he is straight, he wouldn't lie about it and should be taken at his word. (I hope this odd rationale makes sense.) Last year, I discovered that numerous skits from A Bit of Fry and Laurie had been uploaded to Youtube and I voraciously consumed them. Perhaps halfway through last year, I became curious about Fry's attitude to political correctness and searched "Stephen Fry" and "political correctness". What popped up was a debate on the topic between Michelle Goldberg and Michael Eric Dyson, on one team, and Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson, on the other. The moot was "What you call political correctness, I call progress". Fry and Peterson were arguing against the resolution. The debate was stupid – it seemed that all four orators had different ideas about what political correctness is. Fry's idea seemed the closest to mine: I think political correctness is the idea that we can control behaviour and attitudes by making rules about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable speech. It was immediately evident that Fry and Peterson were strange bedfellows. Peterson is right-wing whereas Fry is a self-described "social justice warrior" who simply dislikes the idea that speech should be censored or that speakers should self-censor, and who is uncomfortable with modern PC terms like "cisgender" and "heteronormative". Peterson's argument didn't address my or Fry's understanding of political correctness at all. In fact, it was stupid to the point of incoherence. And yet, after watching this debate, Youtube's algorithms decided that I had an interest in Peterson; I didn't set out to find Peterson but, in a way, he found me. After watching the video of the debate, I was suddenly being pointed to lots of other online clips of Peterson fulminating against the Left and proffering muddled defences of religious sentiment, such as the video of Peterson debating Harris on religion. Obviously Peterson is the public intellectual du jour. 

I don't pretend to be an expert on Jordan Peterson but he seems to me to be a shallow thinker, a rhetorician who enjoys the sound of his own voice and his own fame, a man whose views are confusing because they are confused. I'll pick out two examples of Peterson simply talking bullshit. Peterson seems to imagine there is a kind of leftish conspiracy, that the Left can be characterised as "Postmodern neo-Marxists". The equation between Postmodernism and Marxism is just plain wrong. Postmodernism can usefully be defined as a skepticism towards meta-narratives, and Marxism is just another meta-narrative to be skeptical about. A prominent methodology within Postmodernism is deconstruction and many have pointed out that one can deconstruct the left as easily as one can deconstruct the right. A famous essay on Postmodernity, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", argues, as the title suggests, that postmodernism is the natural philosophical foundation for neo-liberal capitalism. But Peterson's devoted right-wing followers lap up this sort of overly simplistic bullshit, that postmodernists have a Marxist agenda, regarding Peterson as a kind of heroic crusader fighting against an evil Left who want to take away people's guns and emasculate men. Probably this is because the right want someone perceived as smart on their side. (Peterson also argues for enforced monogamy and is a hero of the In-Cel movement.)

The second example of Peterson's empty rhetoric I found in a clip in which he is talking about income inequality. Peterson argues that the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest 1% is inevitable because life is like a game of Monopoly. But why should we accept this simile? Perhaps life is like a game of chess. Perhaps we are seeking to outmanoeuvre an invisible opponent who will always inevitably win. Or perhaps life is like football, that we are part of a team battling against another team. Or perhaps life is not like a game at all. Perhaps it is is a collaborative exercise. Perhaps we are like a bunch of villagers in tenth century England working together to build a cathedral. Yet Peterson's arguments depend on his audience uncritically accepting the analogies he proposes without justification, a sure sign of empty rhetoric.

Interestingly, if you look up Chomsky and Peterson on Youtube, you'll find bits from talks by Peterson juxtaposed with bits by Chomsky, as though Chomsky is replying to Peterson. Chomsky always comes across as the deeper thinker with the greater erudition.

So if Peterson is a fraud, why is he famous? In 2016, Peterson, a professor at a Toronto university, was involved in a controversy because he refused to use the pronouns preferred by transgender people. He even appeared in front of a Canadian senate committee arguing against a bill that would have made it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of "gender expression". This controversy was the springboard that vaulted Peterson into the celebrity stratosphere. Peterson resembles another hero of the "intellectual dark web", Brett Weinstein, who also became famous as the result of a controversy – Weinstein had been the victim of student protests at Evergreen University in Washington State. Both Weinstein and Peterson are professors; both are vocal proponents of Darwinian explanations for human behaviour; both got in trouble with students and faculty because they objected to excessive political correctness. Peterson is a conservative and Weinstein is a progressive but both are alike in that they fell foul of what is perceived to be a far-Left culture on campus among both lecturers and students. This is what members of the "intellectual dark web" have in common – they are seen as renegades or apostates fighting against academia itself, which is construed as embracing a monolithic far-Left ideology, "postmodern neo-Marxist" to use Peterson's term. The public intellectuals who have become famous are always fighting against something. Harris is famous for fighting against religion, particularly Islam. Peterson is famous for fighting against "neo-Marxism". Chomsky, although he doesn't really belong in the "intellectual dark web", is famous for fighting against neo-liberalism and American imperialism. Youtube users like this belligerent attitude among their heroes – and once some professor or ostracised ex-professor becomes famous, he (it is almost always a 'him') immediately starts popping up among the recommendations that appear in Youtube's right-hand column, if the user has shown any interest in any other members of the "intellectual dark web".

It is possible, even probable, that the algorithms that send clips from Peterson my way direct other users to the "postmodern neo-Marxists" Peterson rails against. But I myself seldom get such recommendations.

The question then is: does being involved in a scandal qualify someone to be a bona fide public intellectual? Of course not. Chomsky has been involved in scandals but only after he had become famous. Chomsky has earned his status as the leading intellectual in the world through hard graft – he has written something like over a hundred books. Peterson and Weinstein are famous for being famous. In this they resemble Khloe Kardashian and Paris Hilton who became famous after sex tapes they were in were illicitly leaked onto the Internet. The result of the celebrity obsessed culture we live in is that we tend of confuse 'fame' (or 'notoriety') with genuine intellectual value. If I'm going to end this post anywhere, I might as well end it in the following way. Jordan Peterson is the Khloe Kardashian of the public intellectual scene. And, like Khloe, he is going to prove only a flash in the pan.