I love how some of you folks are trying to interpret my maundering from just before bed.
So, confession time, I don't know a great deal about Jordan B. Peterson, but I have read some of his written material, including abstracts from his books as well as what I believe are even-handed reviews of his positions. I tried to listen to one of his youtube videos once, but he was off on a Gish Gallop so quickly that I gave up after the third time I yelled at the screen, "You need to unpack that!"
For background on me, my training on Modernity, Postmodern thought, and Radical Orthodoxy is from the point of view of Theology, which will make pure philosophers cringe, but whatever. So here goes:
Peterson has made comments like "I am a classic British Liberal" and "I admire Kant's approach to ethics", which seem innocuous enough, bit of name dropping, but whatever. Until you realize that Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason includes an argument that is structured as follows:
"If a man comes to you and hides in your house from his mortal enemy, and his mortal enemy comes to you and asks where the man is so that he can kill him, what should you do? The answer is to give the first man to the second man. After all, you cannot be sure that the second man will kill the first, but you *can* be sure that you will be falling into error by lying."
The simple argument (elementary, trivial, and obvious) extending "a man" to "a Jew" and "his mortal enemy" to "the Nazis" gives you my statement. (8th of his 12 rules)
So, then what about Peterson and dragon slaying?
The key is not the pizza and diet coke. The key is that you are gathering with friends. "You must slay
your own dragons", right? All of Peterson's work is concentrated on the individual, and to be blunt, himself and his own place in the world. Friends are defined by their utility to the person, not for their own selves. If someone else is getting more out of an experience than you are, you need adjust things either up or down so you are either equal or ahead. I freely admit that I may be extending Peterson's argument beyond his actual intent based on arguments that his fanboys have made, but that is the gist of what I get from him.
Which brings me around to Postmodernism and what I mean by it.
The Modern project is based around an examination of the relationship between the Self and the Universal. The Enlightenment kicked off modern thought by trying to reject claims to particularity and set up a Universal Truth, whether empirical (based on observation) or rational (based on internal thoughts). But as time wore on, it became evident that Truth -- with a capital T -- was harder to pin down than that. Kant tried, the Existentialists tried, modern theologians tried (much as I love Karl Barth, it's clear that he's preaching to the choir), but it became clearer and clearer that rather than Truth, what the Modern project was uncovering was Utility. There are folks who have embraced that, and late-stage Modernity still rolls on around us, seeking out what will give us the most useful stuff, or the theories that will prove the most useful in predicting phenomena.
Postmodernism discovered that Modernity had turned to utility and rejected that. The postmodern effort has been described as "a radical turn to the Subject" where all that is important is the self -- "If it feels good, do it!" is a postmodern slogan. The key to understanding postmodern stuff is to understand that in the postmodern view there is no objective or universal truth, there is only lived experience.
One of the tools of the postmodern effort, in fact it's primary tool in postmodern Theology, is the small group. People gather together, hopefully with a variety of backgrounds but a common theme, and discuss their personal experiences and explore both their own and each other's interior life around that theme. The lived and shared experience is the point of the exercise, but those experiences then can be shared with others to form a cascade of understanding other people's experiences and perhaps seeing things outside yourself and your experiences and incorporating them into your own world.
Small groups/breakout groups in meetings are a postmodern thing. AA (and it's relatives) uses postmodern methods. And RPGs are the first form of entertainment where you explore the shared experiences of beings that not only don't exist, but that you crated within the small group of (hopefully!) friends so that you can entertain yourselves and tell stories about your experiences later -- I call that a truly postmodern endeavor and hobby.
Of course, that also means that catpissman telling you about his character in the local gaming store is expressing a high form of self-actualization. (
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