Jordan Peterson Is Confused

Reflections on Peterson's recent debacle

Liking Jordan Peterson is a bit like having a crush on seventh graders: I stopped doing it very shortly after I stopped being in seventh-grade, and if I hadn’t, that would have been a real problem.

Peterson’s been making the rounds recently after his appearance on the popular YouTube show Jubilee. Jubilee often brings in one public figure who adopts some position—atheism, Christianity, liberalism, conservatism—and then debates twenty less-well-known opponents of that position. It’s brought on Charlie Kirk to argue with a bunch of liberals, Alex O’Connor to argue with a bunch of Christians, and now Jordan Peterson to argue with a bunch of atheists.

Peterson did not do well.

The original title of the video was “Christian vs Twenty Atheists.” Strangely, however, Peterson was quite coy about whether he was a Christian, refusing to answer the question. When a fellow named Danny repeatedly asked if Peterson was a Christian, he got annoyed at Danny and proceeded to insult him as if he was asking stupid questions.

Now, call me crazy but I think if you’re the centerpiece in a video titled “Christian vs Twenty Atheists,” you should:

1. Be willing to clarify whether or not you’re a Christian.

2. Be a Christian!

It would be a bit like if a guy interviewed for a video titled “police officer reflects on twenty years in the force,” was unwilling to clarify whether he was really a police officer, and preferred to muse abstractly about what it is to be a force.

In the Jubilee debate, the main character—Peterson in this case—is supposed to select a list of claims to argue with people about. Peterson’s first claim was “atheists reject God but they don’t understand what they’re rejecting.” Now, this is already extremely dubious. Surely there are some people who are atheists and understand God but think there is no such person.

When pressed, however, Peterson vomited up a profound number of errors and deep confusions. He defined God as conscience. But this is obviously an absolutely terrible definition. Atheists who reject God don’t thereby reject that there are consciences. Rather, they reject the notion that there’s an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being.

You can define words however you want, but if you’re going to accuse others of ignorance about what words mean, you should not use bizarre and parochial definitions that go wildly contrary to common usage. The average atheist could define God much better than Peterson could. When people recite the Nicene creed they say:

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

They do not thereby think that conscience created heaven and earth. Rather, they think that an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being did it. When people say “God raised Jesus from the dead,” they don’t mean that conscience did that. Peterson’s definition goes flatly against how everyone actually uses the word God and is pulled directly out of his ass. Peterson is like the feminists who think that one can decisively dismiss every criticism of feminism by saying “feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” In fact, he’s precisely parallel—his view is basically “belief in God is the radical notion that conscience is a thing that exists.”

One person likens Peterson’s claim to a person rejecting the idea that a painting is moving on grounds that the painting isn’t physically moving—it’s stationary and nailed to the wall. While that might be right according to some definition of moving, it’s obviously not the one a person has in mind when they call a painting moving! Peterson replies by weirdly shifting the goalposts and declaring that there’s a unity to all things! How that’s supposed to be a cogent reply I will never know!

Peterson’s method of arguing involves almost exclusively engaging in bizarre contortions. He’ll rebut some straightforward claim by tendentiously interpreting a Biblical story, saying their claim is like some view of that Biblical story, and then equivocating on what that claim means. It’s a giant muddle of confusion. For example, he claims that atheists are really religious because they’re “concerned with deep matters.”

Peterson also is weirdly obfuscatory. When he’s asked if he believes in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God, he replies by asking what belief means. The person asks him if he thinks it’s true. He declares that definition circular—before going on to define belief as something you live for and you die for.

This is obviously a terrible definition. I believe that there are more than seven books in the library where I am currently typing out this sentence. However, I would not die for that belief—nor do I live for it in any real sense! Then when asked if he’d lie to the Nazi at the door, Peterson said he’d “do everything [he] bloody well could not to end up in that position,” and refused to answer the question on grounds that it’s “a hypothetical.” While this sounded dramatic, it was the kind of confused hypothetical dodging typical of non-philosophers.

Throughout the entire period, Peterson is weirdly angry and hostile. He’s like the stereotypical ranting old man—unable to clearly articulate what he’s talking about, always with his hackles raised, always going on about something. At every moment, it seems like he’s solely interested in a kind of movie monologue. His aim seems not to be making good points but instead merely having the kind of monologue that could go viral in a movie—like the famous “you can’t handle the truth,” speech.

But there was a nice upside to the Peterson appearance: he represents, in a deep sense, what confused philosophizing looks like.

I used to be very philosophically confused. When I think back to my previous philosophical beliefs, it’s hard to reconstruct them. I went through life in a confused haze, often unable to see the force of arguments both for and against my position. I remember, for instance, being very certain during early high school that the arguments for utilitarianism were decisive—even though when I think back it’s nearly impossible to reconstruct what the arguments were that I found so persuasive.

When you’re confused about philosophy, you generally don’t see it. It’s not internally obvious that you’re confused.

In fact, when one thinks back to periods of confusion, it’s generally hard to reconstruct one’s own frame of mind. Becoming less confused isn’t primarily a matter of learning new arguments for things. It’s a matter of coming to see that your previous thought-processes were built on sand. I’ve previously likened this to how one thinks when they’re dreaming. Your dream self isn’t ignorant because they’re unaware of certain powerful objections. They’re just…confused. They’re just, in some deep sense, unable to reason—and totally blind to this fact.

But Peterson is the perfect representative of this kind of confusion.

When one witnesses Peterson, it isn’t as if he’s ignorant of some specific objection. He’s well aware of what people would say in response. He could probably do a pretty good impression of a normal person objecting to his views. But he’s just lost. He doesn’t get what’s going on. He doesn’t get why hypotheticals matter, why being obfuscatory and objecting to people’s views by redefining their words isn’t persuasive. He ticks all the boxes of a person who is philosophically ignorant: rejecting hypotheticals, flitting from point to point without a clear sense of the flow of argument, misdefining words, getting hung up on irrelevant semantic quibbles, and going for weird deluded gotchas.

Now, it’s easy to beat up on Jordan Peterson. The criticisms basically write themselves. You don’t have to be a genius to see them. It’s easy to call other people pharisees. What’s more difficult is excising the pharisee from oneself. Similarly, what’s difficult is excising the Peterson from one’s self.

When you’re philosophically confused, you sound to people who are not confused like Jordan Peterson does to you. Most people are confused, in this way, about most issues.

There are no-doubt a lot of issues I’m this way about. Probably when I talk about many worlds, I sound like a total moron to those who know what they’re talking about. Probably the same thing is true when I talk about economics, history, or various other topics.

Generally the best way to dissolve this kind of deep confusion is to study philosophy. Even when wrong, philosophers tend to be less confused than others. Michael Huemer writes in his wonderful book Knowledge, Reality, and Value:

By the way, it is not just studying in general or being educated in general that is important. The point I’m making is specifically about philosophy, and about a particular style of philosophy at that (what we in the biz call “analytic philosophy”). When I talk to academics from other fields, I often find them confused. That is a very common experience among philosophers. To be clear, academics in other fields, obviously, know their subject much better than people outside their field know that subject. That is, they know the facts that have been discovered, and the methods used to discover them, which outsiders, including philosophers, do not. But they’re still confused when they think about big questions, including questions about the larger implications of the discoveries in their own fields. Whereas, when philosophers think about other fields, we tend to merely be ignorant, not confused.

Philosophy has been described as thinking in slow motion. When you do it a lot, the kind of general haze that most people go through the world in slowly dissolves. While you won’t always be right, you’ll at least stop being so hopelessly lost. You will, in other words, become less like Jordan Peterson.