FREEDOM OF SPEECH: THE CURRENT IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE

Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, has become an international celebrity due to his online lectures on YouTube and his bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. In his biography Savage Messiah: How Dr. Jordan Peterson is Saving Western Civilization, Jim Proser describes the academic battles his subject experienced when he taught at Harvard and later in Canada. They illustrate the intellectual and emotional culture wars which permeate our politics and academia.

“Jordan was being surrounded by a hostile collection of neo-Marxists, each advancing a specific ideology with a specific line of attack. In a nod to his growing use of Christian ideas such as demonic possession to describe the world, he devised the catch-all term ideological possession to describe the mental state of his multiplying antagonists. He saw ideological possession in the fierce and often illogical arguments that had begun to be lobbed at him both inside and outside his classrooms. In the emotional pleadings for their rights to a sustainable environment, organic food, the rights of animals, or aggrieved people, these advocates for the oppressed seemed somewhat impervious to logic and resistant to reason. All that apparently mattered were their emotions often stoked by prevalent disinformation, paid instigators, or flash mobs, both online and offline. Some sacrificed their individual ability to think critically and instead embraced the historical, collective ideology of Marxism. They indicated this often consuming collective identity by adopting the title of social justice warrior, or SJW.” (p.137f.)

Although Peterson early in his life embraced a left-wing socialist point of view he came to a realization through George Orwell’s, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago, that socialism was deeply flawed.

“Orwell described the great flaw of socialism, and the reason for its frequent failure to attract and maintain democratic power (at least in Britain). Orwell, said, essentially, that socialists ‘did not really like the poor. They merely hated the rich.’ His idea struck home instantly. Socialist ideology served to mask resentment and hatred, bred by failure. Many of the party activists I encountered were using the ideals of social justice to rationalize their pursuit of personal revenge.” (p.102)

He was attacked as being an advocate for straight, white, male privilege. In response he argued that “these new advocates for oppressed women, blacks, and gay people weren’t really interested in the liberation of any of these; they were really only interested in power. And, they didn’t really even like women, blacks, or gay people, they just resented straight, white men.” (p.118) Resentment is the primary motivator of left-wing political ideology.

In contrast to the postmodern opinions that there is no objective truth, no right or wrong, but all truth is subjective, Peterson has argued for rational, scientific proof of traditional morality. In particular he championed freedom of speech in the university over against those who proposed that gender is socially constructed, not biologically determined. Male and female, as historically understood, have different strengths and perspectives. He opposed making identity pronouncements a form of hate speech subject to criminal prosecution. He infuriated progressive left-wing academics by challenging their presuppositions as baseless, factually unproved, and harmful to the understanding of what constitutes healthy personality.

“Gender identity and gender expression are not valid ideas, they’re not true, there’s no evidence for it. There’s an idea that there’s a gender spectrum but I don’t think that that’s a valid idea. I don’t think there’s any evidence for it.” (p.278) “And so the idea that identity is something that you define purely subjectively is an idea without status as far as I am concerned.” (p.295)

In response to the charge that he was offending transgender people he said that freedom of speech meant that people could offend him for his views and that he accepted that but he also had freedom to offend others. What is good for the goose is good for the gander! In the marketplace of ideas we are free to express our opinions. Universities that sought to limit free speech by disinviting speakers students or faculty disagreed with were imposing a totalitarian control of ideas. Students who sought safe spaces where they were not exposed to the debate of conflicting ideas would not do well when they graduated and had to face competition and conflict in the real world. Maturity demands the ability to handle differences and not to be protected from them.

I am impressed by Jordan Peterson’s story. He has studied authoritarian regimes and their underlying ideology and has much to contribute to our current debates about freedom and the right to one’s own convictions.