RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2018/03/10/psychology-progressive-hostility/

Recently, I arrived at a moment of introspection about a curious aspect of my own behavior. When I disagree with a conservative friend or colleague on some political issue, I have no fear of speaking my mind. I talk, they listen, they respond, I talk some more, and at the end of it we get along just as we always have. But I’ve discovered that when a progressive friend says something with which I disagree or that I know to be incorrect, I’m hesitant to point it out. This hesitancy is a consequence of the different treatment one tends to receive from those on the Right and Left when expressing a difference of opinion. I am not, as it turns out, the only one who has noticed this.

“That’s a stupid fucking question,” answered a Socialist Alliance activist when I asked sincerely where they were getting what sounded like inflated poverty statistics. “If you don’t believe in gay marriage or gun control, unfriend me,” demand multiple Facebook statuses from those I know. “That’s gross and racist!” spluttered a red-faced Ben Affleck when the atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris criticized Islamic doctrines on Bill Maher’s Real Time. Nobody blinks an eye when Harris criticizes Christianity, least of all Affleck, who starred in Kevin Smith’s irreverent religious satire Dogma. But Christians are not held to be a sacrosanct and protected minority on the political Left. As Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer tweeted recently:
Michael Shermer ✔ @michaelshermer

“When I debate Christians, Jews, Creationists, climate deniers etc. they are unfailingly polite, respectful, thoughtful, discerning, & listen to my arguments. Far Left SJWs do not. They simply look for fault & pounce. ”

Outbursts of emotional hostility from progressive activists – now described as Social Justice Warriors or SJWs – have come to be known as getting ‘triggered.’ This term originally applied to sufferers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but activists have adopted it to describe the anxiety and discomfort they experience when they are exposed to views with which they disagree. “Fuck free speech!” one group of social justice advocates recently told Vice Media, as if this justified the growing belief among university students that conservatives should be prevented from speaking on college campuses. It’s no secret that, with the rise of the triggered progressive, university professors are increasingly intimidated by their own students. An illustrative example of this alarming trend was provided by the hoards of screaming students who surrounded the distinguished Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis and demanded his head (which they duly received). Christakis had made the mistake of defending an email his wife had written gently criticizing Yale’s attempts to regulate students’ Halloween costumes. “Who the fuck hired you?!” screamed one irate student in response. “You should step down!”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/jordan-peterson-matters/

The Canadian professor’s entire moral enterprise arose from his horror at the ease with which murderous ideologies came to possess ordinary people. Most of us look only briefly at that matter and others, unsettling as they are, but Peterson explores the very bases of such thought and being.

The cultural world changed after the UK Channel 4 interview which took place on January 16 this year, in which Cathy Newman “interviewed” the Canadian psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

The interview, or rather attempted harangue by Newman, became an instant phenomenon, mainly because Peterson’s demeanour, intelligence and patience with Newman’s rudeness, and real or assumed stupidity, were so impressive. The interview, contrary no doubt to the plan of Newman and Channel 4, greatly raised Peterson’s already high public profile, ensured best-seller status for his second book (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos), and consigned Newman and Channel 4 to the ridicule of millions of viewers around the world. Whether either will recover is yet to be seen. (online editor: that video is embedded below)

While numerous profiles and interviews of Peterson have, over the last year, appeared in news and opinion outlets, most have been along the lines of: “Look at this wacky Canadian professor who seems to have millions of fans for some reason.” Few have attempted to come to grips with what are arguably his most important and original contributions to the ideas of the day. (A notable exception is the excellent hour-long interview by Dutch commentator Timon Dias, on the Geenstijl website and YouTube.) For me, writing as I have done for ten years about the importance of personal morality, in particular a return to a virtue framework, the most exciting thing about Peterson is that he is bringing talk about virtue and morality back to thousands of people in a West which has shunned and indeed ridiculed those ideas for fifty years.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/24/a-stark-raving

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.