Peterson backlash illustrates power, bullying in social media age
There’s not much chance
I’ll be shelling out for Jordan Peterson’s latest book, 12 Rules for Life.
Instinctively, anyone telling me how to live my life — half a century ago my mother tried, but failed, and she had the inside track — gets a wide berth. He won’t care.
There are plenty of other people willing to buy his book, judging by the big turnout for his speech last Friday night at Arts Commons in downtown Calgary.
Something of a brouhaha erupted over the visit, which no doubt had the opposite effect for those silly souls who wanted the venue to ban the controversial professor.
They wanted this and all future talks banned, an apology from Arts Commons and better diversity training for its staff. What utter, self-righteous guff.
And, given that prices for tickets to the evening spiked in tandem with this “shut him down and shut him up” malarkey on the so-called aftermarket, the result should provide a sobering lesson for those who love to ban stuff they don’t agree with.
Sadly, that lesson likely will go unlearned.
Still, that his speech went ahead as planned is cause for giving thanks to those running Arts Commons (the fact that the place was at the time close to sold out probably aided in their decision).
Still, not to be churlish, these days any support for freedom of speech should be applauded — clap harder and cheer louder if it involves someone or something you don’t actually agree with.
In Peterson’s case, I’ve listened to his Youtube videos and found them interesting, thought-provoking, but a little dogmatic for my taste — people who take themselves too seriously are always a turnoff, no matter how much sense they might spout.
What got some people enraged at the psychologist and University of Toronto professor are his various public stands against stuff such as adding gender identity into the country’s Human Rights Act and the spread and subsequent consequences of the #Metoo movement.
He describes his opponents as post-modern, neo-marxists: Yep, you can tell the fellow has spent a lot of time in universities.
Come on, most of the people who are shouting the loudest and demanding verbal castration for Peterson wouldn’t recognize Karl Marx if they tripped over his grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery, and probably believe Neo was just a character in The Matrix.
No, this is simply about power and bullying, and it is getting worse.
The spread of social media has allowed people a public voice they previously lacked, and such newly found access to power goes straight to their heads.
There is a particular cruelty to it:
An often faceless, smallminded nastiness, which merrily globs onto an all-too-human transgression committed by some poor sap, and then, through online mob rule, magnifies it into a crime against nature itself, while demanding the swiftest and harshest punishment.
Once sentence — loss of job being the usual one — is carried out, the hunt resumes for fresh meat.
What is particularly dispiriting is that some of the worse proponents of this naming, shaming and online vigilantism are young people at universities across the land.
Once, such venues were the very crucible of debate, where views of all sides could be heard, dismissed, agreed with or eventually dumped into the trash.
There were occasions when students would be asked to debate from a viewpoint with which they personally didn’t agree: doing so being among the most challenging and remarkably enlightening mental exercises ever designed.
Sadly, such intellectual rigour is becoming a thing of the past.
Of course, not all free speech is acceptable.
There are laws of defamation for those falsely maligning an individual’s character and thereby causing financial, professional and societal damage.
Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University, two of its professors and a former gender and equity manager are discovering this: Peterson has launched a $1.5-million lawsuit against that lot for suggesting he is “analogous to Adolf Hitler.”
Ouch.