I’ve been thinking a bit about the popular appeal of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, and how theories of ideology can explain and help us deal with the popular support the pop-psychologist and others like him seem to have. In a way, I do think the political left is to blame for his popularity. I will flesh that out by talking a little bit about ideology.
The way 'ideology' as a term is used is quite varied. Many use it pejoratively; i.e. 'you're being too ideological, be rational!' I personally do not think ideology should be used in a way that's only pejorative, however. Louis Althusser explained that ideology is an 'imagined condition' about our relationship to the world that is 'endowed' with a 'material existence' (see: 'On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.') In this sense, ideology helps us rationalize our relationship to the world and guides us in the claims we make about it.
Antonio Gramsci has this concept called 'hegemony', where he describes how there is an ideologically imposed 'consensus' on all members of society that is dictated by who is powerful enough to wield control of the media and educational systems. For Gramsci and other theorists of ideology that build on his work - such as George Rudé - the solution is then to develop a sort of counter-ideology or cultural techné that offers an alternative, less oppressive explanation of our relationship to the material world and how we ought to navigate ourselves within it.
In today's world, the hegemonic mode of social organization is neo-liberal. I'm going to operate on Asef Bayat's conception of neo-liberalism which is:
'a ‘hypercapitalist rationality’ whose ‘relentless ideology’ is ‘couched in “human dignity” and “individual freedom”’ and is manifest through deregulating the economy, free-trade, privatization, a reduction in welfare programs, and austerity.'
Life is expensive: the standards and costs of living have not kept up with wages. You are dependent on a small number of people who happen to own capital in order to survive (and you may feel like they don't care about you) your job just got taken away because capital owners can’t offer you a poverty wage and won’t offer you a living one, and to make matters worse, the people that are supposed to care about your well-being (i.e., people running for office) are using vague human rights language to talk about peoples' hardships that don't really apply to you.
Think of people like Hillary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau. They are incredibly wealthy individuals that market themselves as people that care about those who are disadvantaged. But to you, they just want more woke, empowered women to be one of the CEOs that cuts your hours or outsources your job, or spends all of your tax money on being the world's police officers in countries that don't concern you. They're still part of an elite class that has nothing in common with you or the plights you face, and are more concerned with the aesthetic of wokeness than alleviating the actual burdens of the oppressed.
Understandably, this might make a lot of people feel alienated.
Because of neo-liberalism dominating our current system, and because of the ways our current system has left people feeling alienated and neglected, both the left and the right are given the task of appealing to people that feel alienated by what some may view as a liberal elite. The elite ideology is built on the idea of being concerned for marginalized people, but the ways in which political figures act upon these concerns are frequently superficial. The right is not wrong to complain about the liberal elite necessarily, but their problem is that their critique is too idealist. They view liberal/left ideology as itself being the driving force of today’s systemic ills, rather than post-hoc rationalizations of changes driven by material forces.
The Intellectual Dark Web people like Peterson are offering a very simple and solid ideology to young and alienated men. And part of it is not entirely wrong. Peterson and co. are filling a hole that neo-liberalism has left wide open in these men's hearts. They come with guidance, they offer an entire worldview embedded in some comfy and familiar ideologies one may already possess.
Peterson and co. are grasping on to what Rudé calls 'inherent ideology.' Inherent ideology is internal to us and is based on both tradition and our experiences. Some of it has to do with our everyday practices and intuitions we take for granted. Gendered social roles might be an example - we grow up thinking that this is the right order of things and have a popular social consensus on what women do and on what men do. This is one of the things people like Peterson end up appealing to in his 'derived ideology.'
Derived ideology, Rudé explains, arises from deriving ideas from traditions that one might already know. It absorbs itself into a well-prepared ground. So, if there is a strong tradition and conception of something like gender essentialism, the ground is well prepared for a derived ideology that anchors additional worldviews on, e.g., women people like Peterson will promote.
Because today's cultural right is appealing to people that have been failed by neo-liberalism, I think a lot of the problems they are identifying have the right kind of indignation aimed at the wrong people. The debate about college campuses is a great example.
Peterson especially is invested in the case of Lindsay Shepherd, who was disciplined for showing a YouTube video of Peterson in her class. I think the discipline and censure was bad, personally, as someone that has been a TA. TAs don't have a lot of power, and those that have more power than us get away with a lot worse. But they are not disciplined precisely because they have power.
The problem is that the ideological nature of Peterson's outrage here is selective. He did not make a similar fuss over Masuma Khan's free speech as a TA - likely because she was not ideologically aligned with him. Nor did he draw attention to calls to fire Professor Marc Lamont Hill for a pro-Palestine UN speech.
And to be honest, this is a clever move on his part. He identifies what is a genuine problem (the muzzling of powerless people who don’t have the correct liberal sensibilities and politics of respectability), but the rationalizing ideology he offers to explain it (cultural Marxism, leftism, etc) does not adequately explain all abuses of power in the university or infringements on free speech. All it does is say: 'this is why my theory about leftism and silencing is the correct one' which is a shame, because it is an opportunity to call out a real problem that is about the power hierarchy in academia, and worker disposability under capitalism, and not about right wing vs. left wing culture wars.
The problem is that peoples' inherent ideologies are not primed for a critique of academic hierarchy - or the academy at all, really - as a whole. They are not primed for a critique of society on economic terms, or other forms of the status quo that keep re-materializing and re-branding. They are only primed for complaints about ideas that challenge the status quo, or ideas that are adopted by it. Sometimes this might edge close to a critique of elite liberal human rights discourse that is either empty or oppressive. For instance, there seems to be a consensus from both the left and the right that Justin Trudeau's performative wokeness is cringeworthy at the very least and damaging to a good deal of people - though not everyone is properly articulating how.
But instead of targeting elites properly, the right will often instead target the people liberal elites choose to tokenize. I'm willing to wager that, for instance, a lot of trans people do not find people like Trudeau or Clinton to be good avenues to their liberation. For instance, jurist Florence Ashley has recently outlined how the hate speech initiatives taken by liberals actually fail to properly elevate trans well-being. But the posturing by liberal elites about trans rights, when poorly received, are taken out on trans people instead of the people that are tokenizing them to gain more power.
Well, the task for those that are unhappy with the status quo, but also unhappy with the right's response, seems to be to cultivate a derived ideology that resonates with the public's inherent ideology. I don't mean that we should appeal to peoples' internalized racism or sexism per se, but I do think we need to appeal to the intuitive frustration that a lot of people have about the superficiality and negligence of those in positions of power. And by and large, the left fails to do that.
The left fails through confusing justified outrage with expedient political strategy. The right has traditionally been able to succeed at doing this because the derived ideology they offer aligns with the status quo and with tradition that is a source of comfort to more people than strange and unfamiliar radical ideas might be (though I think this is changing because the right is losing a lot of cultural power). The ground is (was?) well primed for the ways they want to frame their grievances because the way they direct their outrage reflects what the status quo has been.
Much outrage on the part of historically disenfranchised groups is certainly justified, and it can be tiring to explain something you find unjust over and over. 'It's not my job to educate you,' or 'shut up you're a x and you'll never understand' becomes a very tempting thing to say here and often is said. And I get it.
But the fact that some conduct might be understandable does not make it expedient.
The left could offer a good counter-hegemonic mode of organization to neoliberalism, but leftists fail against the right because they think that merely having the right belief system is enough. To take power, there is a need to develop a coherent and cohesive ideology that speaks to all classes of the population that are alienated by liberal elitism and that turns around and rationalizes peoples’ unfreedom to them. This rationalization needs to resonate harder than the alternatives.
Unfortunately, that is the reality of living under and fighting a system that is not equally free. If you think you have an alternative to offer, you have to be willing to buckle up for a long and grueling battle.
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