Doctors, psychotherapists, liars and butchers

Thanks for that second video - it was really interesting and I've asked for the book at the library.

Like @FOJN it's the interview that has stayed with me since seeing it. The book is in my 'to be read' pile and I hope that we have an opportunity to discuss it on a thread at some point.

I'm still turning over a lot in my mind since that interview. And I've acquired more related material to read in this thread ( 😱).

Also Stephen Hicks, if he’s the person I’m thinking of, is notoriously reductive and inaccurate in terms of what he calls postmodernism - lumping in to his book all sorts of figures who weren’t postmodernists at all; and notoriously misreading a lot of the crucial texts. It’s polemic rather than actual intellectual history scholarship.

Well, Marxists certainly don’t believe that rhetoric is king - rather the complete reverse!

When you say “PoMo” what is it that you’re talking about? The trouble with these claims is that many theorists of the postmodern argue that postmodernism is not a position, but a state of late capitalism or a stage of history. They are largely critical of this - and precisely through a cultural-materialist or Marxist lens (eg coming out of Frankfurt School Marxism, which is highly critical of the nihilism inherent in society’s move towards postmodernism).

Marxists view postmodernism as a catastrophic stage of late capitalism, where we internalise the nihilism of capitalism to a degree that it is impossible properly to understand our own alienation.

The classic poststructuralist theorists of the postmodern were also deeply critical of it as a negative cultural force - they were diagnostic of it rather than approving of it (eg in Lyotard’s foundational The Postmodern Condition). They also saw postmodernism not as a belief you can adopt; but a malaise, a stage in cultural history with malign consequences.

So I’m interested in the reduction of these positions - often extremely nuanced and historical - to “PoMo” — because one of the other things about the postmodern is that it has a huge range of meanings (postmodernism in architecture means something completely different to in literature or in intellectual history, for example). It’s a term with a big range of histories and sometimes contradictory definitions, so it would be helpful to specify what it means in this context, because it’s widely thrown around without much clarification - often caricatured and lots of times inaccurately so.

The parts which combed through Biblical stories were rather openly anti-women, and a later chapter on sex differences in education. I can dig out my notes if you are interested in more detail.
Also, the interview he did on British television gave inaccurate data and theories about why so few women are in top decision-making roles in the UK.
My impression is that he's one of the gender critical people who is certainly not a feminist but rather a believer in traditionally ordered sex-based hierarchies.

Which parts did you think were sexist and patriarchal?

Stephen Hicks is a scholar of postmodernism and has done some long-form interviews and lectures that are available to watch free on YouTube.

His theory is more-or-less that PoMo and its close cousin IdPol are the left's reaction to the many repeated and seemingly unavoidable catastrophic and mass-murderous failures that arise from attempts at communism (including Marxism), socialism and anarchism.

It's a rhetorical strategy that attempts to reframe truth as a purely subjective concept, because those people (be it Marxists or IdPol acolytes) believe that rhetoric is king and that everything (literally everything) is socially constructed. They believe that when the current system collapses (whether they view it through an economic or social lens) a communistic, equitable utopia will spontaneously appear.

This is why they constantly try to tear everything down, why they are no good at building anything to go in its place, and why they are so impervious to strong evidence. It fills a religion-shaped hole, but I suspect it will be forced through a reformation soon enough.

His book (can't recall the name now) is rather deeply sexist and patriarchal. That's all I know about his work.

I saw something Peterson did recently actually where he was talking about the various roles postmodernism has played and how it plays into current discourse, and he certainly wan't entirely negative or reductive (given the context) - I'm not sure you're giving him enough credit on that front, nightwalkingmoon.

I think we can all agree that if major multinational corporations are pushing Gender Identity and waving the trans flag etc its really not about challenging the economic system in any meaningful way. So it may have originated in Marxism but now it has been highly monetized and made into a faux Civil rights issue to distract from massive economic inequality that had developed especially since the crash of 2008 in the West.

Its sinister how tech and pharmacy companies are very keen to wipe out biological definitions and biological relationships such as woman and mother. Its easy to see where that takes us.

@EmbarrassingHadrosaurus and @beastlyslumber Those spinning Marx as a virulent racist have an agenda and grossly take comments out of context or overstate them. For a rebuttal check out this article by Ben Burgis, a philosophy professor at Morehouse College, and the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters

No, Karl Marx Wasn’t a Hideous Racist by Ben Burgis

jacobin.com/2022/05/marx-race-antisemitism-history-andrew-sullivan-enlightenment

I read quite a reasonable article by him on this issue in the Telegraph the other day; but I don’t trust all of his opinions. I don’t think he’s at all right about Marxism (or most likely he simply doesn’t really understand Marxism): actual Marxist theory tends towards the complete opposite of contemporary identity politics, and critiques both that and postmodernism. (Both he and Pluckrose/Lindsay also don’t seem to understand the difference between postmodernism as a cultural form; and postmodernist theory, a large part of which is actually a critique of postmodernism/anti-postmodernism).

If anything, contemporary identity politics is most closely related to and comes directly out of a specific trend in US civil rights/gay rights discourse which was always really rather opposed to Marxism (Marxism in the US ran instead through lesbian and second wave feminism, which was the forerunner of radical feminism, but was pushed aside by the rise of identity politics).

Identity politics in its current Americanised form actually has a great deal in common with US right-wing individualism (and is thoroughly rooted in late capitalism); it’s a shame that Petersen can’t see that — it’s pretty lazy of him to resort to tired American tropes about the Marxist left. (The left in America hasn’t been anything remotely like a sniff of Marxist for at least half a century. It’s as thoroughly late-capitalist as he is himself.) And he also has some rather jumbled and quasi-nineteenth century ideas about myth and the psyche and so on: he might be spot on about aspects of gender ideology, but there’s a fair amount he doesn’t have a handle on or gets arse about face. But no matter - it should be fine to have opinions on things; I don’t go in for cancellation of any kind!

And it also seems to speak to some of the discussions that go around in circles where some people just can't understand why some others, even if they like some Labour policies, just don't feel comfortable with Labour over all. I think it's this tendency to adopt over-riding ideologies that many people distrust.

Thanks for that second video - it was really interesting and I've asked for the book at the library.

But what strikes me is how closely what he is describing morrors what has gone on with gender ideology. You have these people on the political left, who are wedded to an ideology and to a vision they have of the utopia that will come if only this ideology is instantiated. So they can justify all kinds of horrors. The element of deliberate denial of evidence when it doesn't fit the narrative, and the fear that it undermines the project, is really notable.

Continuing OT... That is my favourite Triggernometry interview ever, the book is well worth a read.

I recently met a mental health care worker who works with trans people (transsexuals by the old fashioned term, but needed here for clarity). He had stopped all work with under 18s because he was so disgusted by what he was seeing. And his approach with adults wanting surgery was that it's absolutely possible - and it was his job to support them through it - but he still advocated a slowly slowly approach, because the ramifications even for adults are immense.

Peterson has been under the most enormous attacks for what he says. I haven't followed enough of him to know what exactly makes him so mistrusted and his opinions so easily discarded. This piece, especially voiced by him, should be played on every undergrad psychology degree. Especially as some are quite happy to offer opinions in direct contradiction to this. Somehow I doubt any psychology student will come across this in any academic capacity.

I've heard Peterson say that himself about totalitarianism many times - I suspect he intends it here to be about something a bit different. He tends to see identity politics as being largely the invention of marxists who were disappointed with the political failure of class based marxism in the 20th century, who then adapted the structures to talk about identity charachteristics rather than class relations. So it may be that he sees gender ideology as a form of that.

Slightly OT but this interview with Giles Udy was interesting about the history of the overlap of Communism and Labour in the UK. (I'm overlooking the UK and North America difference of left and right politics.)

I'm no fan of JP but this is very good. Disappointed he likens trans indoctrination to Marxist indoctrination. It just clouds the issue. This is not about a Marxist mindset, its about a totalitarian mindset (yes there have been Marxist regimes with a totalitarian mindset but such a mindset is found all along the political spectrum)