Jordan Peterson Is Fair Game for Criticism

“…where Peterson is fond of citing the brutal nature of chimpanzees as proof of nature’s pitiless character, we should recall that the Left can just as easily cite the relatively co-operative nature of bonobos.”

Where does one start with Kambiz Tavana’s recent piece in Merion West, “The Viciousness of Jordan Peterson’s Critics”? In it, Tavana reproaches Matt McManus and me for—over the course of our many articles for Merion West that address his work—having been “unfair” to him. As far as I can tell, Tavana marshals four arguments (I use this term loosely) in support of this point:

1. That we’re narrow-minded left-wing ideologues whose polemics against Peterson are—perhaps unbeknownst to us!—facilitating a totalitarian agenda
2. That it’s mean to criticize Peterson because he helps people
3. That it’s mean to criticize Peterson because he’s ill
4. That our blind advocacy of “equality of outcome”—something we supposedly share in common with Slavoj Žižek—may seem benign, but that this geniality is offset by the historical frequency with which “totalitarian-inclining governments […] arise in welfare states.”

One does not have to be a logic professor to see what these criticisms share in common: that they’re all, at bottom, diversionary fallacies. It’s perhaps for this reason that Tavana felt the need to intersperse his leaden diatribe with meandering summaries of existential literature, as if the mere mention of the name of Camus or Sartre were proof of one’s profundity. All the while, Tavana lacks the wherewithal to make a basic argument.

Given the bad faith with which Tavana has chosen to engage with us, it’s perhaps most important to respond directly to the claims that he makes in his article that are categorically false. Neither Matt nor I have ever advocated for “equality of outcome”—nor has Slavoj Žižek, who expressly disavowed that equality of outcome was something he sought to establish in his debate with Peterson. Of course, this allegation is partly easy to sidestep because it is—by its very nature—a poorly defined caricature of the Left. Who, after all, thinks that all discrepancies between peoples could be done away with? Not Marx, certainly, who confined himself to advocating for the abolition of social class—and who wrote in the Paris manuscripts that the problem with capitalist society is that inequality of wealth has a distorting effect on the endowment of other privileges (so that an ugly man can purchase a beautiful wife, and so on).