Rationalizing Ugliness

By Theodore Dalrymple
https://www.city-journal.org/rationalizing-ugliness
October 26, 2018


Boulevard Périphérique

Some things are too obvious for intellectuals to notice. It’s as if intellectuals were provided with a special kind of spectacles that automatically screens out what everyone else can plainly see. What, after all, is the point of being an intellectual if your perceptions are the same as everyone else’s?

I recently observed an example of this strange dichotomy between the perceptions of ordinary people and those of intellectuals. Someone who did not know Paris came to visit me there, arriving by train. Knowing that Paris is regarded (rightly) as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, he was astonished by the sheer eye-scoring ugliness of the approaches to the city center. He had not expected such a thing. He asked me whether there was something wrong with him.

I assured him that there was nothing wrong with either his eyesight or his aesthetic judgment; the approaches to Paris are indeed of a visual hideousness that one might expect of the capital of a Third World country that had undergone uncontrolled rapid growth.

On that very day, however, the New York Times published an article by David McAninch about his six-day walk around the Boulevard Périphérique, the 20-mile-long ring road or beltway that encircles Paris. Taking and documenting this journey was an excellent idea in principle, though of course one cannot actually walk along the boulevard; indeed, the very word “boulevard” for this concrete boa constrictor is an implicit lie, like calling O’Hare Airport a landing strip or Versailles a cottage.

What is startling about McAninch’s description of his tour is its non-mention of what was perfectly obvious to my visitor on first glance, and which never fails to appall me each time I take the B.P., as regrettably often as I do: namely, that practically everywhere the eye looks beyond the confines of central Paris, it is greeted by a modernist mess of gargantuan proportions, and that every occasional building that is not a total eyesore was built before 1945. In other words, there has been a total and utter collapse of aesthetic ability, judgement, and appreciation in France, a country with one of the world’s greatest architectural heritages, extending back many centuries.

McAninch acts as a kind of handmaiden or praise-singer to this collapse, perhaps from fear of making an unequivocal judgment that might cause him to be labelled conservative, backward-looking, or naive. His article commences with a picture of the new philharmonic hall, built at a pharaonic cost, which resembles nothing so much as a vulgar Brobdingnagian silver lamé dress crumpled on the floor after a night of debauchery, as clear an example of modern architectural psychopathy as I know.


Centre National de la Danse

The article is full of equivocations, such as “I gazed in awe at some of the most ugly-beautiful Brutalist buildings I’d ever seen” and “I stared open-mouthed for a long while at the modular-looking Neo-Brutalist structure housing the Centre National de la Danse. Designed as a municipal building in 1972 by Jacques Kalisz, the gray concrete behemoth somehow radiated childlike exuberance and dystopian menace at the same time.”

The brutalist buildings at which the author stared in awe (horror would have been a more appropriate reaction) are not ugly-beautiful; they are just ugly, without any possible aesthetic qualification, and grossly dysfunctional, to boot. And anyone who can see childlike exuberance in the building by Jacque Kalisz is capable of seeing the milk of human kindness in a Nuremberg Rally.

Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, including Out into the Beautiful World and the recently published Grief and Other Stories.

In Europe, Free Speech Bows to Sharia

By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/free-speech-sharia-european-court-of-human-rights-ruling/
October 27, 2018

When he was 50, the prophet of Islam took as his wife Aisha, who was then six or seven. The marriage was consummated when Aisha was nine.

This is not a smear. It is an accurate account of authoritative Islamic scripture. (See, e.g.,Sahih-Bukhari, Vol. 5, Book 58, Nos. 234–236.) Yet it can no longer safely be discussed in Europe, thanks to the extortionate threat of violence and intimidation — specifically, of jihadist terrorism and the Islamist grievance industry that slipstreams behind it. Under a ruling by the so-called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), free speech has been supplanted by sharia blasphemy standards.

The case involves an Austrian woman (identified as “Mrs. S.” in court filings and believed to be Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolff) who, in 2009, conducted two seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam.” She included the account of Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha. Though this account is scripturally accurate, Mrs. S. was prosecuted on the rationale that her statements implied pedophilic tendencies on the part of the prophet. A fine (about $547) was imposed for disparaging religion.

Mrs. S. appealed, relying on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That provision purports to safeguard “freedom of expression,” though it works about the same way the warranty on your used car does — it sounds like you’re covered, but the fine print eviscerates your protection.

Article 10 starts out benignly enough: Europeans are free “to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” But then comes the legalese: One’s exercise of the right to impart information, you see, “carries with it duties and responsibilities.” Consequently, what is called “freedom” is actually “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” that the authorities decide “are necessary in a democratic society,” including for “public safety” and for “the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others.”

Translation: Europeans are free to say only what they are permitted to say by the unelected judges of the European courts. Truth is irrelevant. As the jurists reasoned in the case of Mrs. S., a person’s freedom to assert facts must be assessed in “the wider context” that balances “free” expression against — I kid you not — “the right of others to have their religious feelings protected,” as well as “the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace.”

It is thus verboten to say things that might upset Muslims. Particularly offensive is mention of Islam’s many doctrinal tenets that make us cringe in the 21st century — approbation of child marriage, violent jihad, the treatment of women as chattel, the duty to kill apostates, and so on. That these tenets are accurately stated, supported by undeniable scriptural grounding, is beside the point. Or as the ECHR put it, reliance on scripture could be classified as “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam, which could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace.”

What the vestiges of Western civilization are coming to: I say something that is true; it hurts your feelings, so — of course — you blow up a building; and it’s my fault.

Nearly four years ago, when Europe bowed to the mob and curbed its tongue following the jihadist massacre at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I tried to explain the stakes in a pamphlet called “Islam and Free Speech.” If a society is to be a functioning, flourishing, free society, it must safeguard the robust exchange of knowledge and ideas. Absent that, the rule of reason dies, and with it freedom of conscience, equality before the law, due process, property rights, and equality of opportunity.

Islamists and their transnational-progressive allies seek to redefine democracy as a guarantee of domestic tranquility, on the road to global tranquility in a post-Westphalian order. It is a sweet-sounding roadmap to tyranny, in which “tranquility” is enforced Soviet-style, with an official version of history and truth that is not open to question or debate. Your “freedom” to speak is strictly limited to those confines.

There is no free speech in Islam. Sharia states do not merely forbid speech that insults or denigrates Islam; they regard as blasphemy — and punish with cruelty — any form of expression that casts Islam in an unfavorable light.

That, of course, is the problem with Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha: The description of it is deemed a pedophilic slander. That owes to one of the worst aspects of the solipsism that passes for modern culture: the severe judgment of past events, including ancient history, based on current sensibilities — which the “arc of history” crowd so confidently assures us are just the best sensibilities ever.

In Mohammed’s time — a time of rampant infant mortality and low life expectancy — notions of adulthood and marriageability were conflated with puberty. The coupling of men and girls was not uncommon or considered condemnable. Indeed, as observed by Myriam Francois-Cerrah, a progressive scholar of Islam, five centuries after Mohammed married Aisha, King John of England, at age 33, married 12-year-old Isabella of Angoulême.

The problem is not that, in the seventh century, Mohammed married a young girl. It is that, while the West evolves because it venerates reason, much of Islamic culture regards Mohammed as the perfect role model, and this conception of the good is immutable. To fundamentalists, enacting laws against child marriage would be tantamount to saying Mohammed was in the wrong — unacceptable.

As a result, child marriage, like the abuse of women and girls in many other contexts, remains a major problem in Islamic countries. In Saudi Arabia, for example, efforts to establish the marriage age at 15 (and, some hope, to raise it to 18) have been flattened by sharia authorities. The ulema point to the example of Aisha, as well as scripture that marks the onset of puberty as the point of marriageability, and decree that no minimum age is appropriate. Even when governments enact a marriage age, fundamentalist communities flout it.

Speaking of fundamentalist communities, one objective of sharia supremacists is to establish Muslim enclaves in the West and then pressure the host governments to concede their right to govern themselves under Islamic law. That is not seen as a permanent arrangement. It is a transition on the path to imposition of sharia standards on all of society.

You think it can never happen? Okay, but then ask yourself, after the ECHR ruling, what is the state of free speech in Europe compared to a sharia society? And if free speech dies, how does reason survive? How does Europe survive?

The Eternal Return of a Malevolent Charade

By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/26/the-eternal-return-of-a-malevolent-charade/
October 26, 2018

The eternal return—Friedrich Nietzsche thought the idea was horrifying. Life as an endless merry-go-round in which the same things keep recurring, forever. That prospect, Nietzsche thought, was the hardest, weightiest, most depressing idea mankind could ever confront. It was part of Nietzsche’s blustering nihilism that he should first conjure the most unpleasant idea he could think of and then announce that true heroism lay in embracing it.

The rest of us may be less enthusiastic about the prospect of ceaseless repetition. After all, we’ve all had a foretaste of what it entails in the remarkable career of socialism. Like the fabled hydra, socialism is an evil that suffers decapitation after decapitation only to spring back to life, its blood—or, rather, the blood of its victims—somehow sprouting ever new heads of credulousness.

The Soviet Union was “really existing communism,” under whose aegis millions were impoverished, tortured, and murdered (but, according to the New York Times, the sex was great). Western intellectuals, gullible creatures that they are, adulated that steaming tyranny. Eventually morons like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II brought to an end that horrible “experiment in living.”

Chairman Mao probably has the distinction of having murdered more people than any other single human being. His efforts to bring compulsory fraternity to China has yet to be definitively repealed; indeed, China seems to be slipping backwards towards a new embrace of centralized tyranny.

Where else have we seen socialism on the march? In Cuba, of course, an island paradise that the Castro brothers transformed into a murderous police state. Then there was Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Like the Earl of Strafford, Pol Pot’s motto was “Thorough.” Wearing eyeglasses was for him evidence of counter revolutionary sentiment since it signaled an interest in such despicable bourgeois pursuits as reading. The result were those mountains of skulls for which his reign was infamous. We all know about North Korea: possibly the worst place on earth under the Kims, though it must be said that Venezuela, once the richest country in South America, under Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro is well on its way to socialist apotheosis, i.e., total collapse.

Here We Go Again . . . 

Socialism really is like Nietzsche’s eternal return: a horrible idea that is never finally destroyed, that keeps coming back to haunt the dreams and blight the lives of freedom-loving men and women. Exactly why this happens is a deep question. It involves a demonic synergy between credulousness and apathy among the mass of mankind and a different sort of credulousness combined with infernal energy among the commissariat.

The latest example of this process at work is the Democrats’ bill to foist “Medicare for All” upon the unsuspecting populace of the United States. As President Trump noted in a blistering editorial for USA Today, the name is a mendacious misnomer. What the bill would enforce—socialism is always about forcing people to do things—is not “medicare for all” but “medicare for none.” In fact, it would destroy Medicare, a program people pay into during their working years and then benefit from in retirement. “The Democratic proposal,” President Trump observed, “would establish a government-run, single-payer health care system that eliminates all private and employer-based health care plans and would cost an astonishing $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years.”

Some Democrats disputed those numbers, but the Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous, a former Social Security and Medicare trustee, has confirmed their accuracy. “BernieCare,” as the wits at The Wall Street Journal have dubbed this monstrosity, is ObamaCare on steroids. And the irony, as well as the tragedy, is that we have all been here before.

Back in 1961, an actor and aspiring politician named Ronald Reagan delivered a classic talk on the dangers of socialized medicine. At issue was something much bigger than health care, big though that assuredly is. No, as Reagan saw, what was at stake was the fate of freedom and individual liberty. Medicine was merely the wedge through which the toxin of socialist control of society could enter and get a foothold.

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan noted, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.” He got it in one.

That was nearly 60 years ago. Since then we’ve seen the Left take step after step to relieve people of control over their lives and hand it over to—why, to themselves. You can’t have socialism without a nomenklatura. The people who came to take your freedom away are always the ones who deposit it into their own accounts.

The Real Object Is Control

President Trump is correct that, should this bill become law, it would “end choice for seniors” by eliminating Medicare Advantage plans for about 20 million. It would also “eliminate other private health plans that seniors currently use to supplement their Medicare coverage” and then “outlaw private health plans that offer the same benefits as the government plan.”

Horrible though that is, the Democrats’ bill is, just as Ronald Reagan saw, only incidentally about health care. Its real object is control: control over your lives, thoughtfully managed by the Bernie Sanderses, Kamala Harrises, and Cory Bookers of the world, supplemented, of course, by their squads of bureaucratic gauleiters.

“Pretty soon,” Reagan observed in 1961, “your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him.” It has happened everywhere that socialism has been instituted. The more thoroughly it has been instituted, the more complete the government control.

This truth is the deep insight contained in President Trump’s powerful op-ed. Like Reagan, he criticizes government run, single-payer health care schemes for the misery, inefficiency, and loss of freedom they entail. But he understands that the ultimate project is not just to control health care. It is to control all of us. “Every single citizen will be harmed by such a radical shift in American culture and life,” the President observes, noting that “Virtually everywhere it has been tried, socialism has brought suffering, misery and decay.” His only mistake is the word “virtually.”

As President Trump points out, the Democrats’ health care bill is but one piece of a larger project. Another big piece involves what he calls the Democrats commitment to “open borders socialism.” If the Democrats’ attack on border control is successful, that would encourage a Camp of the Saints-like tsunami of illegal immigration, Millions would flood our borders and consume our health care and welfare services. The result would be not just the end of American prosperity but also American exceptionalism and the freedom and limited government it presupposes.

This is what is at stake in the midterm elections. The choice is between mobs on the one hand and jobs on the other. Between the caravan of criminal would-be invaders wending its orchestrated way through Mexico towards our Southern border and the bustling economy that has seen historic growth, consumer confidence, and employment figures. Socialism or the free market. It’s the choice between Caracas and Odessa, Texas, between poverty and prosperity, between servitude and freedom. The Democrats offer the former but wrap it up in pleasant sounding humanitarian rhetoric. Let’s hope that the people voting in a couple of weeks see through this malevolent charade.

Dr. Zucker Defied Trans Orthodoxy. Now He’s Vindicated.

By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/transgender-orthodoxy-kenneth-zucker-vindicated/

October 25, 2018

Dr. Kenneth Zucker

The global debate on transgenderism has become toxic for all sides. In the U.S., the Trump administration sparked outrage after its apparent intention to restrict the legal definition of “gender” to one’s sex at birth was leaked to the New York Times. In the U.K., a government-led consultation on whether a person can change his or her legal gender by self-identification alone provoked feminist outcry, while a ComRess poll found that 63 percent of Conservative-party MPs are reluctant to express their views lest they be called “transphobic.” And in Canada, this month, a world-leading psychologist in the field of gender dysphoria has been exonerated at long last after being caught in the crossfire.

Following three years of legal fees and media silence at the request of his ex-boss and the advice of his lawyers, Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker has reached a public settlement with Toronto’s Centre of Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) for unfair dismissal and libel. The Centre’s $586,000 payout was accompanied by its public apology for, among other things, publishing the false allegation on their website that Dr. Zucker had called a transgender patient “a hairy little vermin.”

John Adair, Dr. Zucker’s lawyer, wrote by email:

The settlement includes a monetary payment that is very large by Canadian standards for a defamation case. We were proud to represent Dr. Zucker in achieving a resounding success that in our view affirms not only his treatment approach but his professional reputation as a world leader in his field.

Dr. Zucker, editor-in-chief of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, helped shape the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s current definition of “gender dysphoria.” Following complaints local activists made to CAMH in 2014, he was investigated by two independent assessors with little experience in childhood gender issues. After his removal in December 2015, though, more than 500 clinicians and researchers within the field signed an open letter to CAMH’s board of trustees, expressing “dismay” at Dr. Zucker’s dismissal and defending his integrity and his “outstanding” contribution to the field.

Though he will sometimes recommend social and medical transition for his patients, Dr. Zucker is guided by the general principle that congruence between a patient’s gender identity and birth sex is the ideal outcome. This approach is informed by decades of case-by-case clinical practice and a small but substantial body of research — in an uncertain and under-researched area — suggesting that over two-thirds of children with gender dysphoria will realign with their birth sex by the end of adolescence if they have not been exposed to transition-based treatments.

Prior to his ousting, however, political pressure was mounting. One petition to CAMH on Change.org, with 2,203 signers, sought to “eliminate Dr. Kenneth Zucker.” This complaint called his clinical practices “highly outdated and demoralizing” and further claimed, without any substantiation whatsoever, that he is an “alleged sex abuser.”

Broadly speaking, there are three main approaches for youth with gender dysphoria: 1) a range of treatments from psychotherapy to peer relations, which attempt to resolve root causes; 2) an intermediary therapeutic approach known as “watchful waiting”; and 3) gender affirmation (which involves social or medical transition). In recent years, however, activists have been increasing the pressure to make gender-affirming treatment the only treatment.

For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently released a policy statement whose lead author is Dr. Jason Rafferty, who, according to the PubMed database, has no published papers on gender issues other than policy statements. Yet the statement — backed by activists and approved by a committee of 24 pediatricians and a maximum of twelve AAP board members (according to an AAP insider), and intended for use by the 67,000 member pediatricians — recommended a strikingly simplistic, one-size-fits-all gender-affirming approach for “transgender” youth.

When Dr. James Cantor of Sexology Today! fact-checked the policy statement, however, he discovered that many of the sources it cited directly contradicted claims made in the document itself. Dr. Zucker, whose work is not cited once despite his authority, also said that the AAP statement was “shockingly bad scholarship” and that it makes bold assertions where the research literature is weak or nonexistent.

“Watchful waiting,” for instance, is dismissed as outdated, even though no randomized control trials have been done in this area. In addition, treatments are labelled as “conversion therapy” if they hesitate to adopt permanent medical and social conversion and instead seek to resolve root causes of gender dysphoria in children. The “conversion therapy” label is disingenuous and coercive, however, given that the real “conversion” would be to try to change a child’s sex through life-altering medical intervention.

Yet media critics often amplify this skewed picture, Dr. Zucker says. He gives the examples of a recent New York Times article by Dr. Perri Klass that endorsed the AAP policy statement and incorrectly asserted that gender dysphoric youth have “triple the rate of suicide.” The Times has now corrected this suicide statistic, admitting it had no basis. Dr. Klass also wrote that “mental health problems in these children arise from stigma and negative experiences.” (Note: not can arise.) Young people with gender dysphoria may indeed have a higher rate of mental-health problems than children without gender dysphoria, Dr. Zucker says, but he adds that it is deeply harmful to parents to assert that the sole cause is an unsupportive environment.

One pediatrician working at a large children’s hospital in the U.S., who prefers to remain anonymous, wrote by email,

If the AAP (and NYT) wishes to help me, a fellow of the AAP and a parent, they would ground their statements in evidence-based research (like vaccines or breast-feeding). They would welcome dissenting opinion when the research isn’t clear. And they would stand up to political pressures that would have them turn a blind eye.

Moreover, while historically gender dysphoria typically affected males, a surge in incidence in girls in a startlingly short period of time has turned this trend on its head. Lisa Littman, M.D., an assistant professor at Brown University, identified this trend in her study published in PLOS-One this year. A possible cause, she suggested in the paper, is “social contagion.” Dr. Littman has been vilified for her study, much as Dr. Zucker has been for his work. Bowing to political pressure, Brown University pulled the paper from its website.

Dr. Littman wrote by email:

Activists appear to follow a very conscious strategy of harassment and intimidation, which I’m sure they feel is justified. They go after the reputations of the people they wish to silence, and they also attack the organizations those people are affiliated with, offering to back off if only those organizations take swift and decisive disciplinary action.

The decision to make a medical transition is a difficult one and people need accurate information about risks, benefits and alternatives to assess whether, in their individual case, it will be beneficial—that is the essence of informed consent. When activists shut down gender dysphoria research about potential risks and contraindications of transition, they are depriving the transgender community of their right to receive accurate information.

Now that he has been vindicated, Dr. Zucker hopes that more clinicians and researchers such as Dr. Littman will be heartened and continue their important work on youth with gender dysphoria — putting evidence before increasingly toxic politics.

Jordan Peterson and His Enemies

By Gilbert T. Sewall

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/jordan-peterson-and-his-enemies/

October 24, 2018

Jordan B. Peterson has sold over half a million volumes of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos since January, a staggering number of books. His yearlong “Antidote to Chaos” speaking tour is even more remarkable. In December, he will speak to an already sold out 2,000-seat Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. His tickets are fetching up to $900 each, prices comparable to Bruce Springsteen and Hamilton. Before that, he’ll speak to audiences in Europe from Helsinki to Stockholm.

A while back, I asked a former college president what she thought of Peterson. To my surprise she drew a blank. He was saying sensible things about hierarchy, gender, and coping with life’s limits, I explained. He was dispensing good advice, some of it aimed directly at feckless young men.

I brought up the lobsters. Lobsters have been doing status and power contests for 350 million years and are a theme in 12 Rules for Life. Their neural systems are primitive analogues of our own. Just maybe, Peterson speculates, such status and power contests apply to more advanced animal behavior, to humans, to us. “They should rename my New York neighborhood Lobster Cove,” I laughed. She didn’t. For academics, social class, hierarchy, and status are touchy subjects, like sex and death in earlier times. Her ideological Geiger counter had started ticking. She looked uncomfortable, and we moved on.

Peterson’s freewheeling mindset, challenging academic follies, intrigued me from the start. His Jungian perspective is deeply persuasive, linking the present to history and age-old human dilemmas. Through archetypes, Peterson charts a life that is not miserable, supplicating, and unfulfilled, albeit one of tragic consciousness.

Practiced with wary, distrustful paranoiacs, the 56-year-old University of Toronto psychology professor stirs confidence even among skeptics and agnostics. He has an eye for the manipulative and false. Early in his book tour, Peterson stopped an obnoxious Channel 4 News television interviewer’s feminist harangue cold, crisply and rather graciously. The exchange went viral and helped make his book a runaway bestseller. He has since drawn respectful profiles in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire. His fans include two straight-talking social critics, Camille Paglia and Jonathan Haidt.

Caught in its own favored ideologies and idées fixes, the nation’s thought establishment was late to grasp Peterson’s phenomenal ascent. Using 21st-century media and the internet, he has built a worldwide platform that disputes progressive totems, ridiculing the invisible knapsack of white privilege, for example, and exposing postmodernism’s subtexts and tyrannies. Five years ago, Peterson started uploading old classroom lectures to YouTube. More than 300 have been posted to date and he has over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.

People like to listen to what Peterson has to say. Audiobooks are reportedly an unusually large share of his book sales. On YouTube videos and in stage appearances, he comes off by turns as breezy, blunt, witty, and profound. He wants to help, filling in listeners on how the cold, cruel world works and the malevolent possibilities contained in human shadows. Two admirers I know are older women, one a child psychiatrist who sees kids damaged by lax parenting and indiscipline, the other a Los Angeles therapist familiar with anguished young women choosing careers over motherhood.

I am a reader, not a watcher or listener, so all the YouTube lectures, podcasts, and $900 tickets in the world won’t help me. Until Google fired James Damore ignominiously in 2017 for his gender memo, I didn’t know that Peterson’s lectures had garnered a huge following. Damore chose Peterson to make his case to in a memorable online exchange. That should suggest the caliber of his adherents.

I read 12 Rules for Life in full only recently. It is more erudite and less cute than I’d anticipated, sometimes long-winded but deeply personal and even confessional, presented without guile or phony sunshine. As do Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier or Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son, it offers sharply drawn, aphoristic reflections on how the world works and how to play the life game well.

Peterson insists that limits, sacrifice, and suffering color all human experience. He gives advice on how to listen, see, think, pay attention, and be self-conscious. 12 Rules for Life explores the opposing forces of chaos and order—and the gray scale in between. Humans like chaos, Peterson points out, and the novelty and promise of change. But order, not freedom, brings redemption from misery, even if it demands self-recognition of limits. In an era when youth are urged to dream crazy, Peterson gives levelheaded advice on how not to dream crazy—or at least keep crazy contained. What he writes is thus closer to the ancient moral treatises than contemporary self-help, with traces of the Tao and Seneca.

Peterson asks his audience not to beat up on itself. Yet he demands it pull its oar with a minimum of self-pity. He restates perennial questions, what it means to be human and free. Roll with human experience, he advises, it’s a good bet. “It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to,” he writes. “It is reasonable for people to become educated and work and find love and have a family. That is how a culture maintains itself.” Such predispositions render Peterson a genuine conservative, concludes political philosopher Yoram Hazony in a Wall Street Journal appraisal.

Men do big things, Peterson suggests, building houses and writing books, because they crave female approval. Women inspire men. Collaterally, women seek capable, attentive, protective men. Men and women need each other. Men and women together love, build families and communities, and enforce rules and beliefs to secure order against chaos, and they fail when the rules and beliefs that undergird them collapse or prove unenforceable. Rules are not inhibiting, he reminds permissive parents terrified of being tyrants, and childhood creativity is “shockingly rare.”

Social symbols, heroes, languages, and shared folkways create coherent societies with agreed-upon mores. Contemporary cultures ignore behavior shaped by eons of biological adaptation at great peril. Peterson warns of the human proclivity towards payback and violence, often inflicted on the innocent and able. He challenges political power grabs disguised as moral imperatives.

The primordial emotions and relational skills that lead to order are rooted in prehistory and perhaps lobster-dom, certainly in centuries of experience. To preserve the culture that has afforded great numbers of people freedom and luxury—which much of the world envies and desires—we must forego fairyland hopes and dreams. “We are not equal in ability or outcomes and never will be,” Peterson declares. Gender is not a social construct. “This is not a debate,” he notes. “The data are in.”

Peterson’s enemies are eager to destroy his rising brand, tagging it as alt-right, deplorable, proto-fascistic—and dangerous. In their script, Peterson is an avatar of retrograde white male Christian supremacy. He’s a herald of the bad old days before intersectional power ruled the roost. “Is Jordan Peterson enabling Jew hatred?” The Forward asked in a particularly scurrilous article that labeled him a “public intellectual adored by white supremacists and conspiracy theorists.” The New York Review of Books exclaimed, “Islamophobes will take heart,” and concluded that Peterson’s popularity constituted “a crisis that is at least as deep as the one signified by Donald Trump’s unexpected leadership of the free world.”

To be sure, Peterson’s project provokes “a religious sense of devotion” among some white, straight, college-educated men who are, as Tanner Greer has observed, “heirs to a faith tradition they no longer believe in” yet exhorted all their lives to find “meaning.” They are also deprived of traditional social institutions and courtship rituals. Peterson’s biblical exegeses on YouTube are Christian-friendly. His devotees seek respect and solidity, not social supremacy. But they contest the diversity behemoth that continues to churn forward at their expense. They dispute campaigns to illegitimatize “white” social norms and to refigure status by race, gender, religion, disability, and other categorical claims. Their ideological defection poses a deep threat to postmodernism’s ascendant clerisy and power-hungry identity liberals.

Peterson is developing into one of the most elevating voices of his generation. It is an open question, however, whether he can yet resist the messianic impulses that come with the celebrity spotlight and ex cathedra Twitter commentary. In his celebrity, Peterson compares with Joseph Campbell, a different Jungian who advocated extreme self-expression in his celebrated 1988 PBS series on the power of myth. Like Campbell, Peterson is an academic entrepreneur and good at it. He might say, in contrast to Campbell, follow your bliss—but not into a trailer park or insane asylum.

As Peterson puts it, it is difficult to modify socially what is biologically determined. Nature wins in the end. We are lucky to live within social boundaries. In the future as in the past, humans will look for the best rock to live under where they can create communities and work and love and mate. As sentient animals, unlike lobsters, they can choose between the orderly and the chaotic. Take your pick, Peterson might say to his audience, lifting an eyebrow, pausing, and waiting for an answer.

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.

A Stark Raving Mad Conspiracy So Vast

By Michael Walsh
https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/24/a-stark-raving-mad-conspiracy-so-vast/
October 24, 2018


A member of the New York Police Department bomb squad is pictured outside the Time Warner Center in the Manhattan borough of New York City after a suspicious package was found inside the CNN Headquarters in New York, U.S., October 24, 2018. (REUTERS/Kevin Coombs)

It's bad enough that our politics have now become so polarized that there seems to be no way to escape either a split or an apocalypse. Left and Right no longer huddle near a squishy but relatively amicable middle, the nation’s rudder tilted slightly to the left and the ship of state steadily drifting to port. The postwar consensus, which by and large accepted the Roosevelt-Truman domestic agenda in the interest of winning the war, is now breaking up as a result of the conservative reaction (1980-present) against it. Even the brief interregnum of Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton/Barack Obama only served to heighten the distinctions between the two sides, while the Trump counterrevolution has effectively ended all thoughts of a reversion to the mean.

For his part, President Trump took the high road Wednesday. “Those engaged in the political arena must stop treating political opponents as being morally defective,” he said. “The language of moral condemnation . . . these are arguments and disagreements that have to stop. No one should carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains. It’s got to stop. We should not mob people in public spaces or destroy public property.”

“There is one way to settle our disagreements: It’s called peacefully, at the ballot box,” he said.

That’s quite right. Conflicts need be neither violent nor bloody. The Cold War was fought between the Soviets and the Americans without a clash of armies or an exchange of nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Cold Civil War (as I termed the current struggle back in 2010) has been largely nonviolent, however heated. But with the reports Wednesday of explosive devices and suspicious packages mailed to prominent figures on the Left—coming on top of some startling attacks against the Right (Steve Scalise and Rand Paul), we find ourselves moving into terra incognita, politically speaking.

It’s true that America has seen domestic violence before—the wave of anarchism and labor unrest around the turn of the century, the Mad Bomber in New York, the “Days of Rage” in the late 1960s—some of it politically motivated. But not since the Civil War—which was essentially a conflict between the Southern Democrats and the Northern Republicans (if you don’t believe me, read Grant’s Memoirs)—have the two main parties edged this close to direct action against each other.

That’s bad enough. Making it worse, however, is that they’re deliberately being egged on by the mainstream media, which in its eternal quest for a narrative has chosen to report the coming Second Civil War as the flip side of the first one: a contest of good (the “progressive” Democrats) versus evil (the “nationalist” Republicans). In the editorial offices of the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC and CNN, nearly every story must somehow be shoehorned into a political framework; every metaphor and simile must include a slighting reference to the president or “Trump’s America.” Thus, on the front page of the digital edition of theTimes as I write, the lead story about the bombs includes this teaser: “Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Soros, and CNN are all favorite targets of conservatives, with some of the attacks led by President Trump.” The coverage also includes an op-ed by Alexander Soros, son of George, who opines:

My family is no stranger to the hostilities of those who reject our philosophy, our politics and our very identity. My father grew up in the shadow of the Nazi regime in Hungary…. His biggest philanthropic endeavor, the Open Society Foundations, played a leading role in supporting the transition from Communism to more democratic societies in parts of the former Soviet Union and then expanded to protect democratic practices in existing democracies. My father acknowledges that his philanthropic work, while nonpartisan, is “political” in a broad sense: It seeks to support those who promote societies where everyone has a voice.

There is a long list of people who find that proposition unacceptable, and my father has faced plenty of attacks along the way, many dripping with the poison of anti-Semitism. But something changed in 2016. Before that, the vitriol he faced was largely confined to the extremist fringes, among white supremacists and nationalists who sought to undermine the very foundations of democracy.

But with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, things got worse. White supremacists and anti-Semites like David Duke endorsed his campaign. Mr. Trump’s final TV ad famously featured my father; Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs—all of them Jewish—amid dog-whistle language about “special interests” and “global special interests.” A genie was let out of the bottle, which may take generations to put back in, and it wasn’t confined to the United States.

We must find our way to a new political discourse that shuns the demonization of all political opponents. A first step would be to cast our ballots to reject those politicians cynically responsible for undermining the institutions of our democracy. And we must do it now, before it is too late.

Well, as the failing, soon-to-be-former mayor of Chicago once said, never let a crisis go to waste. Just the other day, Hillary Clinton declared that civility could not be restored to our public discourse until the Democrats retake the government. And now here is the heir apparent to George Soros, the man who tried to destroy the Bank of England and the Left’s biggest benefactor, basically saying the same thing by casting his family’s activities in the most heroic light possible.

But calls for civility are hypocritical, coming from whom they do. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a joint statement Wednesday that could be a case study in hypocrisy and sheer lack of self-awareness. “Time and time again, the President has condoned physical violence and divided Americans with his words and his actions: expressing support for the congressman who body-slammed a reporter, the neo-Nazis who killed a young woman in Charlottesville, his supporters at rallies who get violent with protesters, dictators around the world who murder their own citizens, and referring to the free press as the enemy of the people.”

Nothing about Antifa thugs. Nothing about “When they go low, we kick them.” Nothing about “no peace, no sleep.” Nothing about chants of “not my president.” Nothing about the New York Times publishing assassination fantasies the very day these supposed bombs appeared. It was not conservatives who rejected the results of the 2016 election, launched #TheResistance against the Trump Administration, and seem determined to carry on their war against the American electoral system, where their targets now include not only the Electoral College but also the makeup of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Sore losers don’t get much sorer than that. Pelosi and Schumer haven’t a word to say about that.

Left to their own devices, they’d be howling in the wilderness. But the media endorses and amplifies what otherwise would be their inchoate rage by constantly reinforcing, in ways both subtle and blatant, the narrative that the country has been illegitimately seized by reactionary forces who prevented Merrick Garland from cementing a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, then deprived the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua from her rightfully ordained rest in the Lincoln Bedroom, and now are rolling back social-justice gains that should have been legislated for all eternity. As I wrote in this space last week: they’re losing, and they know they’re losing.

Before jumping to conclusions, all journalists might want to read the Sherlock Holmes short story, “Silver Blaze,” or study the various theories of the Reichstag Fire. But no, like the Times, they would prefer the lazy out of smearing the president and conservatives even before the police and other authorities have investigated the matter thoroughly. The dog in the nighttime may not have barked, but that is just one more proof of a conspiracy so vast that the only recourse against Trump is to destroy our form of government in order to save it, and make sure it never happens again.