Leaving Psychiatry. J. R. Ó’Braonáin. M.D.
Jordan Peterson, who is also the hottest ticket on the speaking circuit, commanding upwards of fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars per appearance. Now part of the good professor’s shtick is the thesis that our current relativism with respect to truth, the attack on so called “Western” or “Judeo-Christian” values and even the tyranny of political correctness all flow from the postmodernist school, this being the scourge of the current age. And the postmodernist school in turn, whether we are talking Lyotard, Derrida or Foucault et al consisted of disillusioned Marxists who could no longer sustain their former allegiances in light of certain revelations as to the failure of the communist utopian project. The failures to which one might refer are the evidences in the 1950’s and 1960’s as to the brutality of the soviet regime and a material standard of living within the USSR that could not come within a country mile of rivalling that of an middle class white America surfing the wave of post war prosperity, something easily achieved for a nation whose mainland was not invaded to the tune of 20 million dead. Then there was Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations to the international communist world that all was not rosy under the regime. And there were the writings of Solzhenitsyn as another of just two examples.
And so, goes the conspiracy story, the maleficent forces infecting these brilliant young French minds against Western and Judeo-Christian values morphed Marxism into this thing called postmodernism, the latter being equally hostile to the west, yet simply using different dialectical weapons of “deconstruction”, identity politics (read class struggle) and the like. And then the infection spread to the Anglo western world as it had done already by the method of Gramsci, also in a disguised form. By extension what is implied is that certain political forces today to which Peterson is opposed are covert or at least rebranded Marxist Communist, a call to suspicion that in a sense is a recasting of the Mccarthyist upturning of the mattresses to find the reds under the bed. These are the views held by most of the so called “intellectual dark web”, self-styled classical liberals and many neoconservatives alike. And all without exception vie for preening themselves a product of the enlightenment.
Never mind that Marxism itself was a product of the west, a secular Jew situated in a German dialectic in a most enlightenment atheism. Never mind that the youth and academia of a post war France were struggling to find a grip on any moral and ideological firmament after a reign of terror, a mistake of Napoleonic proportions, the fin de siecle and two wars to end all wars, both of which were valiantly fought by the French with the latter war also contaminated by Vichy shame. And so why not at least try on for size the official ideology of those who won the Eastern front and the war in toto. Any port in a storm in a country where perhaps a quarter of all the post war populace had socialist leanings anyway, this proclivity evidenced from a time long before Marx was a glint in his father’s eye. Never mind that Peterson is a deconstructionist and reconstructionist himself in seeing Christ as a Jungian archetype of Christ, as opposed to Christ as the Christ, a definite article, one without a second. Never mind that to the nuanced eye there are considerable differences between those to whom might be given the descriptor postmodern. Never mind that that there many different formulations and expressions of Marxism to whom the postmodernists are supposedly too intimately connected, as “the new skin” of Marxism. And just as Marx was influenced by, and a response to, Hegel, there emerged and continue to emerge different Hegelians. Are leftist, right and contemporary branches of Hegelianism the same given the common root, and despite otherwise having considerable differences between them? And never mind that postmodernity could not have existed in thought much less in name were there not the modernity to which the current crop of “classical liberals” find themselves purporting to be a part of, an enlightenment project that also included the French revolution and the reign of terror. And was not modernity part of the slow creep away from Christian values towards the worship of the individual “me” and the coming to terms with being the happy orphans of a dead God, the victim of our own patricide. And never mind that “Western” in the “classical liberal” sense is not at all synonymous with “Judeo-Christian” either, and there is as great a degree of similarity between the “Judeo..” and the “Islamo..” as there is between the “Judeo…” and the “…Christian”. And one final never mind is the never mindedness to the fact that the so called Judeo-Christian values as having become part of the modern western politics has also been influenced by the Romans and Greeks, and further east besides. Are we to say Pagan Christian values? Or Socialist Christian values after the book of Acts? You see we can build the cladistics of our own ideology as being parented however we wish. All these words are just slogans towards a political end, an attempt to pick the best and prettiest of histories, draw a wiggly line between them and say this is me too.
Now this book is far from being either a defence or critique of Marx, Marxism or Marxoid thought here. Specifically, I cannot engage with the strength of any putative connection between what Marx thought and said, the horrors that might be said to have been committed in his name and the avant-garde continental philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. It is beyond the scope of this book, my experience and my learning, though my intuition suggests to me such an association is at least somewhat misplaced and frankly silly. But I will say I’m bemused at the ignorance of others to notice what I think is a far stronger and pernicious assault on the traditional Christian values and presents a stronger push to relativize truth. But this is not from continental philosophy. It goes instead by the name of pragmatism and its evils hide in plain sight, even hidden from those who think it to be benign and live out the philosophy daily. Peterson, incidentally, despite all his virtues which I duly acknowledge, is a pragmatist.
You see the story begins with Charles Sanders Peirce (from whom we get the term pragmatism, and later pragmaticism. When he thought the former term was being misused he invented yet another “ism”). Peirce, an American philosopher and chemist, once wrote in 1878 an article on epistemology titled “How to Make Ideas Clear”. Well I must confess his article was not always clear to me, and I dare guess many others who may read it. And I wish to make clear myself that Peirce held a belief in truth existing beyond the particular bearer of the truth. He held faith to a positivist eschatology that someday somehow science will irresistibly approach a point where belief (as a truth assertion) will be held without the possibility of an argument that would prevail against it.
That said, this eschatology was obviously an article of faith without empirical evidence. It also in no way could be interpreted as a correspondence theory of truth, where truth exists “out there” as something to be discovered and our beliefs must accord to it in order to be “true”. He saw belief (qua an assertion of truth) as having a psychological utility in discharging doubt, the resultant being a sense of peace for a time, a comfort with the thought held, this comfort being the affective side of belief. Doubtless this is all carrying a survival value and could be argued to be part of the Darwinian project, another pan explanatory “ism” extremely pervasive at the time and one that remains so to this day.
He (Peirce) also makes a number of other statements that point towards a concept of truth in the here and now that is our daily life, even the life of the scientist. And that is that belief or truth is a function of the utility of the belief. It is true if it works for the singular or collective “you”. The repeatability of science points towards a truth which is utilitarian, not a communing with an ontological truth “out there”. X is true because it works, not because it is true.
e.g. “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object”
In other words, if it is practical to believe in x and ascribe to X the word “true”, then believe in x.
Someone who was greatly influenced by Peirce and had both the intellect and the clarity as a wordsmith to take pragmatism to the masses was William James. James meta-philosophical project was to save those who carried what he called the “tender minded” philosophic temperament from the “tough minded” ones. That is to say he wished to save the humanities and spiritually minded philosopher from the corrosive effects of materialism, scientism and the excessive austerities of pure logic, much as Kant and Wittgenstein tried to do the same in their own and far better ways. Pragmatism was James answer as a happy mediation towards both the tender and the tough. James pragmatism can also be encapsulated beautifully