The news cycle moves at an incomprehensible speed these days, so perhaps you might have missed when noted Canadian psychologist and cultural pontificator Jordan Peterson shared his opinion on the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover.
Peterson promptly announced his intention to leave Twitter forever following the backlash from this tweet. He hasn’t left Twitter as of this writing and we shall see if follows through. If you aren’t familiar with his work, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is notable for being arguably the second most influential member of the intellectual dark web, following professional “dude who is just asking questions'' - Joe Rogan. Peterson started out as a charismatic professor of psychology at Harvard and later the University of Toronto. He entered the public stage when he decided to mischaracterize and rail against a Canadian anti-discrimination bill that was being updated to protect trans people.
He went on to write a very successful book “12 Rules for Life”, which largely avoided explicit political opinion and was mostly a self-help book for those (mainly young men) feeling overwhelmed by a chaotic world. He became a fixture on the center-right IDW media circuit and a four-star general in the war against wokeness. He’s also endured some personal hardships with health and family, which for our purposes warrants little discussion other than some empathy.
Peterson’s backstory is briefly presented here for context but is less important than the space he occupies in modern conservative politics. Perhaps more than anyone, Peterson represents the platonic ideal of contemporary conservatism. He believes in rigid natural hierarchies, especially when it comes to gender and sexuality. He believes in an objective meritocracy, that if unimpeded would allow the most deserving to occupy the highest tiers of society. He believes in individual responsibility and a free market that provides freedom and opportunity to those who work hard. He believes that western European enlightenment thinking and values are the basis for all free and prosperous societies heretofore since. But most importantly, and the reason why Peterson enjoys the amount of influence and infamy that he does, he believes that these values are under attack from a devious cabal of cultural neo-Marxists who deny the reality of human nature and seek authoritarian control.
He also walks right up to the line of race science and occasionally peeks over the edge.
Peterson engages in what essayist Pankaj Mishra termed Fascist Mysticism. It’s something that we briefly touched on in our last conversation about the Buffalo terror attack. He basically launders the precepts of fascist ideology (hierarchy, traditional manhood under attack, the invading other, and a healthy dose of misogyny) through a façade of serious philosophical and scientific inquiry. Peterson advocates for individual freedom and responsibility so long as it fits within a strictly defined cultural framework. Anything else is chaos.
And he kind of gives up the plot in his latest controversial tweet. Leaving aside questions of female objectification and the performative wokeness of a commercial enterprise continuing to mine profit from the male gaze (Be the change you want to see!). Peterson’s response is pretty interesting. When he says:
“Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”
He is essentially appealing to the existence of an objective beauty standard. Some universally recognized ideal form that transcends a subjective postmodern idea of desirable female physiology. This is an insane premise. If for no other reason than the incontrovertible fact that beauty standards change over time. They are not the product of fixed human nature, but rather the social and material conditions within a particular social structure. In fact, the enlightenment thinkers that Peterson holds up as the basis for rational and moral cultural thought would have found Yumi Nu to be an absolute snack. That is when they weren’t trying to figure out her skull shape and what space she should occupy in their racial taxonomies.
However, I find Peterson’s ideas on what kind of women are or aren’t beautiful much less interesting than the phrase “authoritarian tolerance”. What the fuck does that even mean? Did the Homeland Department’s office of State Cultural Affairs demand that Sports Illustrated put a full-figured woman on the cover of their swimsuit edition? Did Biden’s White House put out a statement demanding that skinny models are banned from the public square and that America is only allowed to fetishize plus-sized women?
Authoritarian tolerance is an oxymoron and an incredibly stupid one at that. But it doesn’t need to make sense or be intellectually sound because it’s meant to be a political signifier to Peterson’s audience. He is saying that the magazine featuring bikini-clad models that his followers would want to buy (for the articles of course) is no longer catering to their aesthetic tastes. What was once an objective truth, that skinny women are more visually pleasing than fat women, is being perverted by a nefariously postmodern culture attempting to enforce the destabilizing and evil idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Conservative politics is currently obsessed with what it sees as cultural progressivism run amok. Liberals are using pop culture and education to impose certain cultural values on the country against the will of those who don’t share them. They vociferously decry the loss of freedom of thought and speech. And they have dedicated their political project to the fight against “wokeness”, a term they have repurposed to mean anything that conservatives are instructed to dislike.
This is pure projection. Conservatives aren’t mad that a certain cultural moral framework is being promoted through art and culture. They are mad that their particular cultural moral framework isn’t being promoted through art and culture exclusively. You may see this as hypocritical, and it is, but hypocrisy isn’t really a useful counter-argument. Instead, the analysis of hypocritical tendencies within political projects is only useful for understanding what those projects are truly trying to accomplish. I’m currently writing this article on a computer that was most likely made with exploited labor and resources. I will go on to upload it through a private internet service provider that enjoys a functional monopoly in my area and host it on a platform that makes money off of the intellectual product of Bari Weiss. It would be a fair analysis of my politics to say that despite my constant criticism of the institutions that allow me to produce context for an audience, I would still like to maintain the ability to shitpost in the glorious automated space communist society I want to see.
Reactionaries like Peterson lament about cancel culture from the comfort of media platforms with huge audiences. They seek to fight against big government getting in between parents and children by restricting the kinds of care parents can seek for their kids who happen to be trans. They oppose censorship by fighting to ban books they don’t like. Bodily autonomy is sacrosanct when it comes to mask and vaccine mandates but less so when it comes to a woman's right to choose.
These hypocrisies aren’t flaws or contradictions in conservative politics, they are chapters in a book building to a larger narrative. Conservatives don’t want equal participation in the public square, they want to dominate it. It's not the authoritarianism that Peterson has a problem with, it’s the tolerance. A pluralistic society that can celebrate all body types is a society that cannot be dominated by one specific cultural framework. This is important for conservatives because they need to find other explanations for the increasing unrest and decreasing standards of living for average working people other than the atomizing and exploitative nature of late-stage capitalism. So it all falls on culture.
The animating idea is that the failures of capitalism to provide economic stability and opportunity equally are due in part to the prominence of deficient cultural values. The state's role isn’t that of ensuring a just baseline of material security for its citizens but rather enforcing a cultural and moral framework to better prepare people to succeed in the market. The irony of all this is that it is precisely market forces that are compelling companies like Sports Illustrated and Disney to embrace a more aesthetically woke product. But that doesn’t matter because, in the end, conservative cultural homogeneity isn’t about any objective public good. It’s about who gets to have power, and how power is served.
Peterson believes in natural hierarchies, and naturally, he believes that his place in the natural hierarchy is at the top. Any cultural product that doesn’t codify his ideas about beauty is by definition unnatural and damaging to a cohesive social structure. It’s a self-serving notion to be sure, but reactionary politics always are. It’s the very thing that conservatives want to conserve, social structures where their claim to power and resources are affirmed by the cultural product.
The culture war that Jordan Peterson wants to fight isn’t about Sports Illustrated covers or CRT. It’s not about wokeness or trans people in bathrooms. It's about whether culture is produced democratically and pluralistically or from within a strict hierarchy where the self-imagined heirs and stewards of western civilization and values dictate what is acceptable in the public square. And honestly, it’s way too early to predict who wins that fight, but for now, we can take some small solace in the counter-salvo launched by Yumi Nu herself:
Solidarity forever.
Fear is the worst emotion when speaking of race, beauty and the right of all people to live in harmony with one another... Most racist look for ways to divide and conquer because they fear being outnumbered and will do to them what the unfortunate and minorities have had to endure... True beauty comes from the inside and what may be beautiful to some may not be beautiful to others... Usually full figured women are ignored and put down, minorities are considered less than human and are not entitled to what others have ... Fear comes into play when racist think others are going to surpass them in some way and they will be left behind or exterminated... Karma scares most of them, because what goes around will come back to bite you in the ass... We are one!! Solidarity Forever!! "Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. WE ALL BREATHE THE SAME AIR... We all cherish our children's future and we are all mortal." - John F. Kennedy
as usual, your clarity helps me with mine. it's helpful to keep clear on this idea. the right IS against choice, over birth, appearance, opportunity, pathways to success and safety, they are against equal opportunity for women and people of color, against protecting the planet, on and on. they really don't want trans people to feel ok. but overarching the particular choices they're against is the idea of choice itself, as long as they are not in charge of the options for choosing. choice itself implies an element of freedom they prefer to keep out of the hands of people who want things different from what they want. they want the power to create the cultural space they feel liberals have hogged for decades (without mentioning that cultural space isn't the same thing as food on the table and protection from police.)