Presses free utterance, disabled by failure to restrain – winnipeg free press

If Rotten Tomatoes had a page for Jordan Peterson’s new doorstops We who fight with Godwould the reviews look like the ones to The passion of Christ: Largely dismissed by professional critics, loved by readers.

The 500-page book-as Peterson is currently touring, with a stop in the Canada Life Center on Monday night-Nights at the moment a 4.6 out of 5-star classification on Amazon.com with more than 1,000 reviews.

It is probably the first self -help book written in the form of psychoanalytic interpretation of the Bible (came again?) And, unlikely, an international bestseller.

Monday night was almost two hours of lecture with us at the heart. Through a series of parables from the Old Testament, interpreted through a Jungian lens, Peterson packs some of the timeless lessons from Judeo-Christian morals.

The lesson, which is given the most attention in the lecture, is the responsibility of confronting and telling the truth, even in the danger of great personal danger. We know where Peterson is going with this, and he often returned to the point: There are dangerous forces that conspire to comply with freedom of speech today, and we must show great courage to turn them towards.

The audience who appeared to be about 5,000 people welcomed and cheered this call for heroic action.

Without talking to their theological profits, Peterson’s reading of the Bible can be alive and interesting.

There is some tension in his passionate religious defense of freedom of expression, given that the first amendment (America’s constitutional “freedom of expression” is the basis for the separation of church and state.

This excitement is not necessarily deadly to his approach, although it already suggests the problems of treating Peterson, as his defenders often do, as a straightforward “classic” liberal.

Then came the Q&A period, which allowed Peterson to throw out his biggest hits, sometimes with new variations: Transsexual identity is a worrying phenomenon that should not be encouraged; Canada goes to hell in a hand basket under Justin Trudeau and would do the same under Liberal Party Heir apparently Mark Carney; Climate change activism is alarmistic and prioritizes nature’s worship rather than human welfare; And US President Donald Trump’s administration’s top brass is “geniuses.” More audience is cheering.

He also referred to represent Canada (unofficially, apparently) at meetings in Washington, DC, but was guarding the details.

The Canadian psychologist who taught at Harvard and the University of Toronto is almost certainly the world’s most famous living conservative author and intellectuals, making it difficult to ignore when publishing a book or coming to town.

His massive following (including nearly nine million YouTube subscribers, a little more than New York Times And CBC News combined) obviously benefits from his eruditic aura. It gives a prestige to his forums for “Lowbrow” genres such as self -help, podcasting and punditry, which is too often seen by academics.

But it seems fair to say that Peterson’s fame is now resting more on his populist than scientific chops: his charisma and seizing the conservative zeitgeist. He is sometimes compared to a megachurch preacher. When you see him working at the Winnipeg Arena, in the middle of lighting and video signals, you can see why.

Yet there is a stubborn Canadianness and sincerity to Peterson – which is known to cry when he speaks – weakening this comparison.

The Alberta-born psychologist may remember stronger an all-but forgotten West Canadian figure: the social credit politician who grips rage against Laurentian eliter and praises individual rights.

This sensitivity repeated in his conversation a few months ago on YouTube with Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, as it does in the first things that made him famous: his scarce attack on Trudeau’s Bill C-16 (who changed the criminal code And the Canadian man’s rights law to include gender identity and gender expressions such as protected against discrimination and hate opinion) and the State of the Humanities at Canada’s universities.

Peterson claimed that Bill C-16 would “force speech” by forcing people to use the preferred gender prisoner, and that the humanities had succumbed to a dogmatic, forced ideology of “postmodern Marxism.” Both should represent a totalitarian threat to freedom of speech and free thought, which Peterson claimed to advocate as a classic liberal.

In other ways, Peterson in the last few years acts as a caricature of his former himself.

The guy got a little weird. He began to dress like Don Cherry and adopted a diet with all the meat. He struck an addiction to benzodiazepines, but appeared Pettier and more appalling than ever, prone to cringey tweet storms about “wokeness” in the entertainment industry.

“Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance will change it, ”reads a viral tweet about a plus-sized model on the front of Sports illustrated.

Not exactly Jonah risks his throat to bring a divine revelation to the hostile people in Nineve.

In short, the good doctor was in danger of becoming a meme.

The arrival of We who fight with God Seems to announce the return to a more high -minded and scientific Peterson.

Professional reviews that have been mixed to reject have taken minor problems with Peterson’s apparent religious beliefs than with the peculiar lens through which he interprets the script.

This answer feels in accordance with the reaction of progressive media, at least after his fame, to his previously more serious intellectual efforts: including Map of meaning (1999) and his popular academic lectures published online from his previous career at the University of Toronto.

Whether you don’t like or disagree with this output, it’s hard to deny its originality.

Peterson’s faith is not a coincidence, it is still more central to his interpretive sight. In an almost methodological secular field as psychology (which he no longer practices at a university), this is unusual.

As it is the heavy influence he has for a long time drawn from psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a setback to a much earlier moment in psychology.

While other social scientists strive to detach their subjectivity from objective study, Peterson draws on existentialism to claim that the very way that reality emerges to us is always already colored by people.

Being an outlier is no sign of intellectual credibility. But if Peterson was a progressive who made similar features of an English or philosophy department where psychoanalysis and existentialism still enjoy the currency, no one would have fought in mind. So it’s a bit ironic to see progressive critics give him a hard time for trends that are common among their own political tribe.

Still, it is worth reminding ourselves of exactly which existentialists Peterson most fancy: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, both violent critics of classical liberalism.

While Nietzsche’s ideas were undoubtedly abused by the fascists and the Nazis, the affinity is also not unintended: No other thinker has offered the radical right to such a prestigious rejection of democracy, women’s equality and human rights.

All this seems fudged in Peterson’s self-helping reading of Nietzsche as a prophet of individualism that can help modern readers (and YouTube subscribers) against the same self-realization.

This is especially rich when you consider that Peterson regularly has Twitter meltdowns about Karl Marx’s continued influence on the left.

Such double standards – as are suspected that the thousands of eager manitobans present at Monday’s event are stamped over the entire Peterson’s orientation against freedom of expression and the rule of law.

Consider the sad, repeated view of Peterson Hobnobbing with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, while journalists across Hungary are frightened and threatened by an “illiberal” government (Orban’s approval description) with weakening judicial independence.

Or consider Peterson’s continued support from Trump, a man who has spent four years spreading lies about a stolen choice of 2020 – is blown up by any judge who has reviewed the relevant litigation made by his crises.

All of this makes it harder to admit that Peterson often shows the raw things of a creative, original thinking, though he does.

This potential is less frustrated by his conservatism than by its temperamental opposite: his lack of restraint, his habit of giving venting to any curmudgeonly whim, whether he bothered to seriously examine the goals of his attack.

Our “very online” moment favors those who traffic in such an outrage. Nevertheless, Peterson’s popularity also speaks to a deep longing for intellectual self-improvement among ordinary people-nasty world of the world of ideas and perhaps tired of having police to police for their manners.

But as a declared ally to classical liberalism – one of the things that allegedly makes him reasonable and “not a radical” – Peterson’s status seems questionable.

This sense was difficult to shake in an arena event where Peterson’s tendency to diagnose those who disagree with him as mentally unwell and religiously suspect was further spoiled.

Is this the kind of person we should see as a reliable master of open debate?

[email protected]

Conrad Sweatman
Reporter

Conrad Sweatman is an art reporter and functional writer. Before you participate in Free press Full time in 2024 he worked in the UK and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for business, including WalrusAt Vice and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.

Our news room depends on a growing audience on readers to run our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, consider becoming a subscriber.

Our news room depends on its audience on readers to run our journalism. Thank you for your support.