Addendum to "Jordan Peterson sets himself on fire criticizing Sports Illustrated swimsuit model"
A little more thought = a little more clarity
I think I've pinned down exactly what Jordan Peterson meant when he said,
Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.
We know Jordan Peterson always chooses his words very carefully. We know he cares about millennials and young people in general. My previous analysis about just not looking at magazine covers was, I think, not deep enough: I do not think that was what he meant when he introduced the idea of “authoritarian tolerance”, and I think that term is the key to his argument. It sounds like a contradition in terms to say some tolerance is authoritarian, but he is exactly spot on. Post-modernists don't want you to think subjectively — how else could they pit groups against each other, after all?—but you know post-modernism is a despotic swamp of subjectivism. They triumph in defying definition. You are no doubt familiar with the nebulous, nice-sounding terms: “Lived experience”, “my truth”, “be tolerant”, “diversity is our strength”, etc.
Why is that level of subjective thought allowed (nay, enforced, as Jordan points out!), but the idea of subjectively determining for yourself whether someone is beautiful is not allowed? Peterson is raising a very serious concern, and exposing the hypocrisy of post-modernism in very few words. It’s actually impressive.
My only criticism is that by choosing just a few more well-crafted words, he could have been much more precise. People immediately assumed he was merely criticizing the model on the cover of the magazine; this is merely surface-level. Peterson doesn't work at surface-levrl, so his tweet deserves much more thought.
For all its flaws, Twitter is good at building “iron-man” arguments, because contrarians love to contradict in comment sections. But Twitter also encourages brevity, sometimes at the expense of clarity, and the moral here may be that, when given the choice between concise and precise, it’s always best to choose precise; ideas in every form are crucial to a dynamic society, but they must be carefully and completely targeted for maximum effect. 💐
I agree. I think he meant well. I argue another point: I for am just glad that we’re celebrating a woman, at the very least and not a trans woman. That’s only two positives I took out of this debacle. Is she celebrity beautiful, no. Is she unhealthy? Yes. But it took guts for her to go out and show herself. Is it the results she wanted no. But maybe we should be arguing for heath standards and beauty to be tied together to make a balanced argument. What do you think?
I dunno, I think that sloppiness has its place in all of this. If Peterson had chosen his words “more carefully,” there might not have been a firestorm to begin with.
In the Usenet days, flame wars began with such outlandish statements as Peterson’s and often led to a friendly agreement to disagree, but that was then and this is now.
What I find amazing is that the left is allowed to spew unfiltered bile about anything they want to while the right has to “more carefully” select their means of expressing themselves.
Rand once said something to the effect that choosing pure violence as a means of control is effective, combining violence with intelligence is utterly untouchable.
And, no, I’m condoning violence here, puh-leeze...
I’m just saying that using leftish methods while combining them with intellectual honesty can be infinitely more effective than raw emotion alone.
Just my $0.02 worth...