An exchange, maybe only at its beginning, on the interesting podcast hosted by Sam Harris and guested by Jordan Peterson, which may be more than anything a discussion of the whys and wherefores of Peterson. The podcast is linked to below.
Me:
...There’s an interesting podcast here if anyone has the patience for some, any, of it between Peterson and Harris, round two.
Two more different verbal and polemical styles you couldn’t imagine.
And how Peterson talks here, such a bilgey motormouth, it brings again to my mind that critique by Nathan Robinson....
L:
....First, Peterson does have a verbal style that is quite different from the usual ironic norm among academics, and which Harris typifies -- what little I've seen/heard of it I find engaging and interesting rather than bilgey, but maybe I haven't listened to enough. Second, I favor a pragmatic notion of truth, as I think P does but not H. And third, I think myth is or can be significant, in the way literature or art or religion is significant, and I'm pretty clearly against what I consider a pseudo-"common sense" rejection of such symbolic cultural forms, which again H, as one of the erstwhile "new atheists", may typify. But at least he's relatively fair, in contrast to Robinson whose critique of P I thought was a piece of crap.....
Me:
....It’s not so much a matter of watching YouTube. It’s that it’s the site/platform for the broadcast of some of these exchanges. Me, I gambol over the cats.
I don’t see Harris as being ironic save maybe for the odd sardonic comment. More, he strikes me as pretty straight forward wanting to engage civilly, talk really, not debate, with his guests. I’ve only watched him a few times and didn’t see the notorious first round between him and Peterson.
I’ve had different responses to Peterson at different times. On this one as I said he struck me as a bilgey motor mouth whose ultimate position I find elusive. It so happened that just before I started to watch Harris/Peterson 2—I watched it over a few viewings—I saw a few minutes of him maybe lecturing to a class. His point was that, and he talked for a while about Crime and Punishment, ...If God does not exist, everything is permitted...And I thought to myself, “Well, I understand that. And I diametrically disagree with it.”
And it came to be that that was *one* of his themes in talking with Harris, that but for God, we’re in a state of nature, unconstrained in seeking to get what we want, a view I reject.
I’m not sure what a pragmatic notion of truth is even as I have a lay understanding of pragmatism, as judging theories and actions by their consequences and adjusting as we go as consequences lead us to. But my understanding is so anodyne that I can’t imagine that either Harris or Peterson would disagree it. Pragmatism came up in the conversation but I could make no sense of what Peterson means by it.
What do you understand Peterson’s conception of pragmatic truth is? Apparently what truth itself is was the stumbling block in the first debate; apparently, they couldn’t converge on what it means and apparently, at least according to Harris, truth, or what is true, is only that which helps us survive, a view I can’t get my mind around and doesn’t accord with my understanding of what’s true.
As for myth, I sensed in what Peterson said either confusion or that he’s wrong, as I understand him. Maybe I don’t. He assimilates literature to myth and myth to literature—I see them as categorically different, one an art as such, the other not—in offering us fundamental touchstones and patterns in how we ought live and what life is basically is, contingent, malevolent and tragic. In them both as a species of each other is truth or truths.
I think that betrays a fundamental misconception of what literature is, has and does. If literature reflects and illumines life or reality, it does so in ways that allow us to enter imaginatively into characters’ lives and situations, understand discrete emotions and states of being, be carried along with into life’s dilemmas, conflicts and abysses, some small and some overwhelmingly large, and perhaps broaden and enrich our own sense of reality and life. The truth of literature is the authenticity of its creation, what a character does or thinks rings true, how people speak with and treat each other seems true, created worlds seem true, paradoxical insights and tensions seem right. We are able to enter literary worlds as if they were true.
So what literature decidedly does not do is offer us truthful ways of living, truths by which to live or by how to live. We come away with better senses of how things are, what they are like and what maybe possible. That’s different from what I understand Peterson to be saying about the mining of myths for models and touchstones that are in some sense prescriptive.
Harris of course agrees that literature offers us truths but I think of the kind I described. And where for sure they differ is that Harris insists that we needn’t leave this world to engage these truths. Peterson seems to see that differently but I’m not sure what he’s saying about what we’re to do with the myths or the truths literature or Christianity has for us. For me, as for literature, there is nothing we are to do with it save to enrich our sense of the world, enjoy the beauty of the art. Certainly by it we are not in the main going to change the way we live.
Somehow for Peterson we have to get inside the myths, the archetypes, or some such or I don’t know what.
Penultimately, I never heard Harris or Dawkins or Hitchens or Dennet reject “symbolic cultural norms,” perhaps save for those of religion itself, and if I understand what they are, say binding civic rituals or national rituals, maybe something like the practices of Reform Judaism. In fact I heard Dawkins specifically subscribe to those kinds of secular reenactments of religious rituals, though stripped of religious belief, as socially gluing. But maybe as with pragmatic truth you could clarify what you mean by symbolic cultural norms.
I myself have no problem with the new atheists, no longer so new, proselytizing against religion and for atheism or agnosticism. It seems to me an altogether worthwhile project and a good counterweight to all the religious hocus pocus, creationism, intelligent design, continuously blasted at us....
L:
....Harris' tone is cool and distanced, in a way academics commonly learn since grad school as a generically defensive manner, and that's what I mean by irony, not a specific ploy. Peterson's on the other hand, is both warmer and more hesitant, often groping for the right words, using hand gestures, etc. -- the sort of thing that's easily mocked but, for those resisting that temptation, also more engaging, or so I find it.
I don't know what P's conception of pragmatic truth is, only that, as you say, it was apparently an issue in their earlier discussion, and my understanding is that H disagreed with P over it. If your conception of Harris' notion of truth is correct, on the other hand, I don't know what they were arguing about, since it certainly seems pragmatic.
I'd like to know what P actually said in that lecture you saw where you say he made the old claim re: God and moral permission. If he did say or imply that I'd agree with you that it's wrong, but I'm dubious about that claim or interpretation since it seems to me at odds with the much more complex set of themes that he deals with. I'd be grateful if you could point me to a more precise location for this than an hour long podcast. The one thing I would say in general is that the origins and maintenance of morality is a cultural construct involving meaning and narrative that is much more complicated than an individual just following their instincts or "thinking it out".
And that brings me to myth and literature. I don't agree with your disjunction between the two, and I'd say that literature, which you approve of, itself relies heavily on mining the myths of culture(s), which form a great repository of narrative and meaning for all of art. In your telling it seems as though you regard literature as mere escapism, delivering us to other worlds and taking us away from our lives in the real world, while myths are reduced to mere falsehoods, and both views seem to me mistaken.
You're probably right that the new atheists so-called don't explicitly reject "symbolic cultural forms" (or "norms" if you prefer), since that would leave them a little too naked. But your short summary of them glosses too quickly over the role, and the source or well-spring, of these "socially gluing" forms. The latter term underlines their importance, but doesn't help with the question of how exactly do we sustain them -- or at least sustain meaning, purpose, and value that have been given body, over many generations, by such forms, but that the modern world has undermined. In comparison with that question, simple atheism, whether new or old, strikes me as, well, trite. I'm not getting the blasting by the sort of religious hocus-pocus, creationism, etc. you are, and I find the existence of such inadequate reactions to be only a sad testament to a spreading cultural desperation. Anyway, that's the sort of question I see P grappling with, and it's the main reason for my interest in him, not the pronouns....
Me:
....Lotta words coming your way:
I’ve not read all your back and forth with Roger. So if my response is impoverished or repetitive or negligent or ow sinful by reason of that, I’m sorry. I’m responding to your longer response to my last email to you.
I’m going paragraph by paragraph.
I of course agree with the contrast in styles as between Harris and Peterson. I myself don’t mock Peterson for the way he presents himself in public. I’m interested in the tones, body language, human drama, rhetorical style and tics and so on of these people, or anyone really, when they speak, but I try not to let it distract me from trying to grapple with the substance of what they say.
My sense of Harris is that by nature he’s a fairly dry and restrained speaker almost to the point of boredom and being phlegmatic. I don’t see irony, even as you define it, in that nor anything peculiarly academic save if academic means being intellectually straight forward, trying to understand the argument, raising questions, making counter arguments and presenting his case.
Except that the human drama of Peterson’s way of speaking draws one, me, in, as it’s involving to see him struggle to formulate his thoughts as he goes, his manner in this is for me disjunctive from what he says.
Here, when I speak of him as a bilge-filled motor mouth, I find him to be speaking, maybe for me for the first time so much so that it became remarkable, in an almost obsessive way, dunning Harris and viewer with foray ridden and obscure references, not offering substantive product for all the rhetorical work, and with a certain, I perceived, desperation, as though his floods of words and references and going on and on and on would somehow swamp Harris, who doesn’t typically talk a great deal.
There was a pointed, maybe ironic, inversion by the end of conversation. Peterson was visibly tiring, slowing down, being almost conversationally perfunctory, till he admitted he was done while Harris was just getting going, much more energized at the end than at the beginning, expanding enthusiastically on his arguments, talking longer and with some references too to underscore his points.
To clarify, with pragmatic truth, I was more interested in what you meant by it. I did take your mention of it as you meaning it was a reason why you liked Peterson or liked him over Harris as a thinker. I thought if you could clarify what it means to you, I would’ve tried to link it back to conversation.
I’ll try to dig out the discrete 10’ or on YouTube where Peterson talks about the point of “No God, no moral restraint.” I can’t go back to the conversation, which is about 140’ or so: that’s a bridge too far. But I will say that that notion seems to me to be one of his foundational ideas, that secularlity itself cannot ground or lead to moral absolutes such that the inherent immorality of Raskolnikov killing the old pawnbroker withers away.
I’ve noted before my agreeing with quite a few things Peterson says along the way to his “more complex themes”—as I noted in my rethink of Robinson on Peterson—I can’t get hold of his deepest complexities. I find them either inapplicable to what I understand about living a righteous life in the world or basically incomprehensible, which raises the Costanza question: is it me or him. My working presumption in these matters is “it’s me.” But with Peterson, I’m feeling some rebuttal. So I don’t know. I’d said that in Scott Alexander in calling Peterson a prophet, he noted that that was in big part comprised by the force, and maybe even depth, strange to say, with which Peterson conveys the wisdom of certain cliches. Maybe something will become clearer in your paragraphs on literature any myth and the new atheists.
I’m not seeing how you get from my view of what the truths are in literature to me seeing it as “mere escapism.” I’d thought I’d said, tried to say, just as we “suspend disbelief”—in quotation marks because that phrase doesn’t really capture the dialectic in reading involving the ongoing dynamic interplay of, so to say, one leg of our mind firmly planted in as if and the other in the world we know—so we come back to our world engaged, affected, informed and perhaps for some even revisioning it from what we have read.
My point about what Peterson gets wrong, as I see it, is that when he assimilates myth and literature to each other as providing the indispensable well springs of “truth” as to how we ought live, he gets literature and hence, on his reckoning, myth wrong. Literature does no such thing, I don’t think. Art is the reflection and illumination of our experience. It indispensable in the sense that it is inconceivable that we can live without it. Peterson maybe makes a category mistake here. It’s his posit, I think, that the logic of secularism leads to a world without the truth of literature insofar as secularism denies the literal truth of God, and that we must therefore turn away from secularism and embrace the truths of myth and literature to ground and be led to righteousness. And if he’s not saying that, then I don’t know what he’s saying.
I think this is a false dichotomy and that this is where Harris was going when he got on a roll at the end of the conversation. We secularists need not leave this world for righteousness; we can absorb the good ethical teachings of (say) Christianity (or other religions) and such truths as literature and myth have for us without losing our atheism or agnosticism. Again, it’s Peterson’s position, as I have it, that we cannot. Where I stop short with him is this: I don’t understand why the hell not: and I’m not sure he does either. For why in this conversation so many words, words, words, words, that leave me and many others, of reasonable intelligence, not understanding him on this.
I guess finally I’m not seeing the cultural desperation you speak of—and I hear from Steven Pinker that empirically, i.e. studies show that—it’s not the case, that on the whole and generally we in the developed world aren’t a particularly unhappy lot, or why, if we’re non believers, if we’ve arrived by thought and experience at a total rejection of any belief in the supernatural, we shouldn’t be assertive about it at the proper time and place, which is a matter of good manners, and why we need to look to what we wholly reject at its core to sustain both righteousness and spirituality. I think that’s where Harris ends up when he speaks, for one example personal to him, of his Bhuddist practices, mindful meditation and that sort of thing, without forsaking his devout atheism....
P.S.
P.S. this isn’t the 10’ one I saw. It seems buried in the bowels of YouTube but maybe this one will do. I haven’t watched it through but I did the first few minutes of it. I’m hopeful he makes the same point.
It’s about 11’. (Linked to below)
Maybe in any event this video, which I’ll watch through, could be a manageable case in point for talking about Peterson....
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zWfrhT8G5DI
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dlj2fuJsGLI
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