@EJennings
Tom Your view of history is, uh, quite glossy. The world was very definitely not getting more peaceful in the decades leading up to 1914. Let's see the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Sino-Russian War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War have I left any out? What was going on in India? I recall something about Lord Kitchener? Africa? We have the Maxim gun and they have none? And what was happening with the Ottomans? Don't forget the Boxer Rebellion. I haven't even considered Latin America here.
No. I said "In the decades leading up to 1914, the world was becoming richer and more peaceful, there was more international co-operation, civil rights were being advanced, and while life wasn't anywhere near as good as now, things were heading in the right direction relatively quickly."
I did not say there were no wars.
All of these were wars of empire -- 1914 was the worldwide explosion of tensions around the spoils of empire.
Which disproves nothing I have said.
As for FDR and the New Deal, he explicitly stated that he was trying every reform he could think of to stave off revolution. In the interwar years, the US was going through all kinds of civil strife, including bombings. Wilson passed the most illiberal laws, barring those around slavery, in US history, including restrictions on free speech, free press and free movement. He rounded women up into labour camps! People were jailed for speech and press violations. Women who married foreign nationals lost their citizenship.
The US did not come anywhere near revolution, which is the main point. Also, remember the context was the 1930s, when liberalism was in retreat everywhere. Despite this, whatever laws were made in the US would have borne no comparison at all to what was going on in the Soviet Union at the same time, in the name of class struggle.
The New Deal was implemented by a democratically elected government, and that is the point.
My British history is fuzzier but I think the interwar years in the UK were marked by similar strife, since the Bank of England had gone off the gold standard to pay for WWI and then returned to it after the war, whipsawing people between inflation (the borrower's friend) and deflation (the banker's friend.)
It's best that I return to the point I was originally making: that the liberal view that progress does not need explaining in Marxist terminology is defensible.
The UK experienced much hardship in the 1920s and 1930s (although other countries, including its colonies did worse) and I don't believe there was any progress of any sort. There was the emergence of some unpleasant groups like the BUF. Ultimately, however, whatever direction the UK was going in was overtaken by war in 1939.
It's just not possible to say that it was liberal democracy using reason and the ballot that brought about moves toward civil rights equality in the US without erasing this little thing Americans call the Civil War. Or the violence of the Civil Rights era and the very real fear many white Americans felt of a Malcolm-X style activist uprising .
Once again, my point is that human progress does not need to be explained by reference to Marxist ideology. Sometimes shit just happens, or for reasons that don't fit into a grand narrative like Marxism. I find it easier to explain the outbreak of the US Civil War by saying that the whites in the South rebelled against the North because they wanted to maintain their own way of live, including keeping slaves. The fact that a weaker group rebelled against a stronger group seems to run counter to Marxist theory.
I am not even defending the notion that all advances come about through reason and dialogue. In fact, they come about for all sorts of messy reasons, both bad and good. What I am defending is that reason and dialogue are capable of achieving this, and the notion that in fact all dialogue is guided by an invisible Marxist hand is not necessary to explain that progress. I would in fact go further and say it is highly suspect view as it's not falsifiable.
In fact, I would argue that the reason women's rights are constantly facing attack and erosion, in cycles through history, in a way that other liberation movements do not is precisely because women are NOT violent and don't inspire fear in governments the way that unhappy organised men do
The rights of all people advance and retreat over time for all manner of reasons.
It's funny to me that you speak of Marxism and Peterson somehow standing against it, when his entire chaos-order dichotomy comes straight out of the ground from which Marxism arose: German idealism. Chaos-order is as much a dialectic as anything Marx wrote, going back to the Greeks. As for materialism, that's simply the recognition that economic forces affect history -- Marx never believed they were the only driver, else there'd be no dialectic between economic conditions and what we call culture in his thought. Adam Smith, of Manchester liberalism fame, believed the same thing
What Peterson damns as Marxism is actually postmodernism, which arose in reaction (meaning against) Marxism.
Thanks - no really - those are interesting points and well made, and if I do sit down and read a book by Peterson I will certainly bear that point in mind. I completely agree that Marx's ideas rest in part on German idealism and I would be very curious if Peterson based his ideas on the same theories.
I think I would disagree about your view on Marx and economics. He always struck me as regarding it as the supreme influence.
Unfortunately his calls for "order" have led to very bad results, particularly when they're used to mobilise young men feeling defeated or disenfranchised by their nation, culture, or economy. That's especially true when he posits women as holding the opposite position of chaos, which of course must be restrained by order.
Yes, it sounds a little odd to me too.
Men do have reason to feel hard done by. They have been, in the US and UK, but not by women. By de-industrialisation. By a refusal of two governments both sovereign in their own currencies to use their economic power to create jobs to replace those destroyed and thereby expand their economies by increasing aggregate demand (not enough money in the wallet) and plugging demand leakage (trade deficit.) That's a political choice, not an economic one.
I think there are many men who have been advantaged by the changes over the last couple of generations. For example, I am currently on leave from work as my children are on school holiday (I'm in the Southern Hemisphere so it is summer). No one thinks this is at all strange. A lot of my preferences, which were considered unmasculine when I was growing up in the 1980s have become normal. This may not suit some men, but it has suited me.
I'm very concerned about a message that places women in the enemy position during times of economic dislocation. Let's see the 17th century European witch-burnings; Germany after WWI and the Freikorps anger that women spent the war in "comfort" and then, when the going got tough, demanded surrender that was a time when a new word, due spike in a specific kind of crime, entered the German lexicon: "sex-mord." Sex-murder. The aftermath of WWII that saw middle class US and UK women pushed back into the home and again into economic dependence. Iran after its revolution. Afghanistan in the wake of its civil war upon the Soviet withdrawal.
I would have thought it simpler to say that women (in Western societies at least) were pretty much all dependent at all times until the 1960s, unless they had a private income.
In March, 2009, Obama told a visiting group of Wall Street titans, "I am the only thing standing between you and pitchforks." At the same time, he told liberals and leftists in the US (paraprasing here),"You elected me to do things you want. Now make me do them." They didn't, and he didn't. No pitchforks yet, but Trump in 2016, and ordinary Americans, not the fringe whackos, are talking now about the possible future break-up of the States into civil war and/or about revolution in a way I've never heard before.
I find what is happening in the US and across the world alarming, but that's why I think it can be explained as a parallel to the fall of liberalism back in the early 20th century. It does not follow that Marx was right after all. Actually, what strikes me is how well American civil institutions are holding up.
In this mix, Peterson is very dangerous to women. Order is not liberal at all. I worry that in his message, and the way in which his followers are receiving it, he is fostering chaos.
Liberalism isn't anarchy. A liberal society is ordered, but in a way that is not oppressive. Whether Peterson stands for this, or whether he stands for odd diets, lobsters and some philosophical views on chaos versus order is something that I look forward to finding out. If he stands for the latter, he's no liberal.