Thanks, Joe Rogan!
Remember a month ago when the heterodox academia-adjacent were tweeting #ThanksJoeRogan in some goofball attempt to defend him from criticism? I know it was one thousand years ago but maybe you do. I jumped on the “Thanks Joe Rogan” train because I really do have something to thank him for:
Some of you asked me for the document I sent my dad that got him looking critically at Peterson. I don’t know why. I guess you, like me, love to suffer.
The Starting Point
My dad is very into philosophy, though his education and career were in engineering. He is a very smart, very thoughtful person. He was never a fan of Peterson, but he did tend to notice the banal, true-but-unoriginal statements Peterson would make (the “clean your room” stuff) and somehow hadn’t really seen the other stuff. Probably because the way he encountered Peterson was as a guest on TV interviews, where he was on best behavior.
This would happen a lot with figures like Peterson, Harris, Pinker, who have branded themselves as Rational Centrists and The Only Real Liberals, masters of enlightenment thinking and stalwart opponents of the illiberal woke mobs. Yes, they sound reasonable on the surface, but really slow down and listen to what they’re claiming. Check their sources. You will find problems.
One day, my dad sent me a clip from 2018 of Peterson and Rogan talking about gender and gendered pronouns. He wanted to know my thoughts as a linguist and social justice advocate. I was going to say I was too busy, but one day I had a few hours free and I really did want to nip this in the bud. I needed to follow my own advice: slow it down, look at the claims all laid out. And that’s why I decided to transcribe the actual conversation so I could respond in detail.
Full Disclosure
It wasn’t just my amazing email that changed his mind. My dad read through it, and around the same time he watched JBP get interviewed by a woman (he had only seen interviews with men up to then) and found him belligerent and sexist, and then he read the original bill C16 that Peterson made his name by opposing and watched Peterson’s testimony, realizing that he’d lied about what was in it. I had also recommended he watch Cass Eris’s analysis of the book 12 Rules for Life, which he did. These actions together led my dad to conclude that Peterson was not to be listened to. I am so proud.
The transcript:
In this section, the transcript of the conversation is in bold, and my response is in regular formatting. I was focused on getting across just how garbage Peterson is at reasoning, so the Rogan parts are mostly paraphrased. But I promise they’re faithful paraphrases. You can check for yourself if you want (if you dare).
Rogan: (paraphrased) would you have a problem with using a trans person’s preferred pronoun?
JBP: No, I don’t have any issue with that. What I have an issue with is I don’t like to see the postmodern neoMarxists use the transsexual issue as a lever for pushing forward their political nonsense, and I said that right from the beginning in the videos I made to begin with.
“postmodern neomarxists” is a made-up term to smear people who conservatives don’t like. It’s actually an oxymoron. Marxism is fundamentally modern, and postmodern philosophy is a rebuttal to Marxism. Here’s a critique of Peterson’s insistence on using that phrase despite its inherent meaninglessness. Here’s another. Nobody who knows anything about postmodernism or Marxism takes him seriously because of this.
The reason I won’t use ze and zir and all those other made up words, however many there are now, is that I’m not willing to cede the linguistic territory to postmodern radicals. I’m not doing that.
What he’s referring to are neopronouns, and people have been creating neopronouns since at least the 1300s. It’s not a new thing at all, it’s a natural linguistic process. Linguistic innovation is not a territory dispute, Jordan! Calm down! And it’s very silly to call something we’ve been doing since the middle ages “postmodern”.
And they say “well we’re doing it on behalf of the oppressed transsexual people” and I think “yeah, well that’s what you say, and there’s no reason I should believe that. I don’t believe anything you say.
Obviously this is silly, he’s just mind-reading and imagining some nefarious motivation behind people trying to live their lives.
I think you’re contemptible, cowardly, ideologically motivated cult-like corruptors of the youth. So why would I be using your language?”
More of the same — “cult-like corruptors of the youth” sounds like a criticism of Socrates, sounds like criticisms of gay people in the 80s and 90s, sounds like a lot of nonsense. Calling someone “ideologically motivated” is also very shallow and requires a lot of carefully presented evidence. Ideologies, extremely simply stated, are just “things people believe about how the world works” — the belief that the scientific method will yield objective truths about the world is an ideology. Gravity is an ideology. Some ideologies are true and some aren’t. So yeah, “people should get to define their own gender identity” is an ideology, but nothing about that means it’s bad. Jordan needs to sit down and think about what ideologies he has that are motivating his thoughts.
[Joe Rogan claims that nonbinary trans people don’t exist (that’s false), then walks back to “most” don’t do that]
Why is it important that there be a lot of nonbinary trans people, or nonbinary people in general? Shouldn’t we respect people regardless of their number? What if there were only 5,000 Black people in the whole US? Or just 40,000 women? Should we ignore their needs?
JBP: The other thing is those are also third-person pronouns. Like I’m not going to call you a third person pronoun while we’re sitting here, I never would. If I’m referring to you when I’m talking to someone else… I might use “he” then, but I don’t know- well, all of it is palpably absurd. It’s always hard to get the level of analysis for this sort of issue correct.
You should use someone’s correct third-person pronouns. Why is that absurd? Why does Peterson think it’s rare to need to use third-person pronouns? It’s extremely common. What about other gendered words? Like you shouldn’t call a nonbinary person “young lady” or “sir,” and that’s not third person.
Because the people who put it forward say “we’re against harassment and discrimination.” And they attribute all the moral virtue to themselves, but then what I see is that they’re utilizing a group, a very small minority group, who already have enough problems in my estimation, for nothing other than straightforward political purposes. I don’t buy the warmhearted all-inclusive love that the people who are pushing this sort of thing forward claim to display. I don’t see that at all, what I see mostly is resentment and the desire to undermine.
This is all coming from his imagination again. Why wouldn’t you believe someone who says they’re against harassment and discrimination? It’s the group themselves (trans and nonbinary people) asking Peterson to stop advocating against their interests.
Let’s get into “for nothing other than straightforward political purposes” — well, for one thing, we know that people are fighting not just for political outcomes, but for social acceptance as well. It is ridiculously hard to just live your life as a trans or nonbinary person. My friend gets misgendered and disrespected all the time in their job. My friend Claire has people stop talking to her when they discover she’s trans in her job as a philosophy instructor. She’s lost important networking opportunities because of a lack of acceptance. Just now google’s spellcheck tried to make me change my non-binary friend’s pronoun to “her” instead of “their.” It’s constant stuff like that on top of being afraid of actual violence. There are places they and their girlfriend won’t go because they know they’d be followed, harassed, attacked.
And so what if they’re looking for political outcomes as well? As feminists of the 70s said, “the personal is political.” Firstly, some kinds of people can’t avoid being seen as “political” when we live in a society where cisgender middle-class white men are considered neutral and everyone else is “political” — that’s why there’s a public outcry when a movie comes out that has anything approaching a representative cast (maybe a couple of non-white people, maybe one or two queer characters) as political correctness gone mad.
Secondly, there are real political goals that need to be met: the right not to be discriminated against, first and foremost. We shouldn’t demonize people for pursuing those needs.
And I’m quite familiar with the postmodern philosophy, not as familiar as I could be, and also reasonably familiar with its underlying Marxism. And there’s nothing touchy-feely, I can tell you. The best you can do with the post-modernist ideology is emerge nihilistic. That’s the best. The worst case is that you’re a kind of anarchical social revolutionary that’s directionless except that you want to tear things apart. Or that you end up depressed, which I see happening to students all the time because the post-modernists rip out the remaining structures of their ethical foundations.
Again, he does not understand postmodernism at all. I think you already know why postmodernism doesn’t result in nihilism or depression. The idea that reality is socially constructed (which is something that I believe) actually motivates me to challenge people to question the status quo, figure out whether the things we think are neutral facts about the universe are actually the result of tradition, what social realities we should change for the betterment of the people we share society with, etc.) A similar response to the idea that you become a “burn it down” destroyer and not a creator. Why would it entail that? Understanding that social realities are not universal or immutable is what inspires people to create positive change. Peterson is the one trying to destroy, by shutting down gender diversity and innovation. Maybe if his students are all becoming depressed it has something to do with him. If all you meet is assholes all day etc etc.
Rogan: (paraphrased): so you’re ok with pronouns that don’t fit sex assigned at birth?
JBP: As long as they’re not using that to promote a political agenda. But I don’t care about the gender thing, that’s- it’s a personal issue. I would also deal with it on an individual basis.
How is Peterson supposed to know that somebody is a real nonbinary/trans person and not just pushing a political agenda? Why is that his place to decide? Seems like a big logical loophole for him to use any time he doesn’t want to respect someone based on their gender.
Rogan: (paraphrased) there are lots of gender expressions out there and you should deal with it on person to person basis based on what they want
JBP: yes
(unless, as he stated before, he perceives somehow that this is a “political” trans/nb person and not a legitimate one, and certainly not if they use a neopronoun)
Rogan: (paraphrased) made-up words — trying to make them mainstream — what’s the motivation? is it necessary? what is a ze or zir? is it male or female or asexual? is it a nonconformist?
Rogan is showing how little he knows here — first of all, as we said, neopronouns have existed since the 1300s at least. Secondly, why is he framing this as some kind of motivated push? Thirdly, why does he think male/female (genders) and asexual (a sexuality) are the things you can be? Fourthly, a nonconformist? That’s literally the word he used. That’s not a gender or a sexuality.
JBP: Well, it’s supposed to be someone whose gender isn’t specified. Who is neither male nor female. Or they say technically in the policy guidelines, “anywhere or nowhere on the spectrum.” And that’s actually in the policy guidelines in Ontario. And the “nowhere”, these are policies within which the law is going to be interpreted. I don’t even know what “nowhere on the spectrum” means. I don’t know what it means!
Feigned confusion here. Saying you’re nowhere on the spectrum means you don’t believe everyone can be categorized as X% male and X% female. Man/Woman is a bimodal spectrum, so maybe that just doesn’t ring true to some people. It shouldn’t be this hard to imagine that.
Rogan: It doesn’t mean anything. It’s nonsense. So there’s someone who identifies with the opposite gender of their biological birth. So there’s a man who identifies as a woman, everyone’s cool with that, whatever your name is, whatever you’d like to be called, whether it’s Wendy or Mike, or whatever it is, that would be the noise that you want people to make with their mouth that means you. That’s it! Right, now whether you’re a he or a she outside of that, that’s where things get squirrely. So third person is the only issue… when it comes to zer and ze and the 78 other gender pronouns, it seems to a person outside of it, a person who’s “cisgendered” (mocking tone) it seems pretty preposterous. It seems pretty bizarre. And it seems pretty indulgent, and it seems like there’s something else going on.
Rogan is continuing the feigned confusion, and is hinting at a darker conspiratorial reason behind something that has been a part of human life since there were humans: some of us being a little different from the majority and wanting ways to talk about it.
Rogan is also pretending that a trans woman using her name and wanting to be referred to as she/her is always accepted. Talk to a trans person. They will set you straight.
How disrespectful can you get? Rogan is showing us he has no intention of thinking about or understanding trans and nonbinary people. “Doesn’t mean anything,” “nonsense,” “preposterous,” “bizarre,” “indulgent.” Gross, dude.
JBP: Well that’s the thing, the something else going on part is what concerns me. There is something else going on. If there wasn’t something else going on, a relatively obscure professor’s amateurish youtube videos on a relatively obscure piece of Canadian legislation wouldn’t have had any effect, right? It would have just disappeared. And that’s because there’s more going on, than the straightforward issue surrounding gender pronouns and everybody knows it. Or everybody feels it, at least.
Extreme conspiratorial thinking here. “something else going on” — he cannot imagine that trans/nb people have natural, valid concerns and are asking for recognition of those concerns. It must be something bigger.
And talking about his rise to fame here is ironic — why did he get so famous? A certain kind of person was attracted to his rhetoric, and those people are a great market to sell to. They become rabid. When Cathy Newman, a journalist for the UK’s Channel 4, challenged Peterson’s arguments in a televised interview, she received so many death threats that she had to get help from the police. In a previous conversation with Joe Rogan, he admitted how he’s gaming the system and getting people to pay attention to him. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to, because it’s just so goddamn funny I can’t help but say it: I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors: If they let me speak, then I get to speak, and then I make more money on Patreon … if they protest me, then that goes up on YouTube, and my Patreon account goes WAY up.”
Rogan: seems like you’re pushing back against something that they are trying really hard to establish, and it’s some kind of control. It’s some kind of control with how people behave and communicate. And it’s not like a societal thing, it’s a very small isolated group of people that seem to be trying to indoctrinate others into their ways. And they’re becoming very vocal and very angry, and verbally violent about your opposition to their controlling the way that other people communicate.
This is a common way to resist calls for social justice and equality — pretend they’re actually authoritarians trying to control us. Peterson says he studied the nazis for decades, but he isn’t catching that this is exactly what they did in order to gain populist support. Some small interest group is trying to control us.
JBP: Yeah well they don’t like me poking holes in their ideology.
Peterson has taken several things — trans/nonbinary identity, political movement for rights, the academic discipline of gender studies — and tried to condense them down to “ideology.” It’s overly simplistic and downright incorrect on a factual level. Again, Peterson doesn’t seem to understand what ideologies are or how they work.
MY CONCLUSION: it looks here like JBP is trying to handwave towards not being transphobic while repeatedly undermining his commitment to respect people’s right to be referred to according to their correct gender (I won’t do neopronouns, I won't gender you correctly if I think you’re being political about it). He’s also still pushing his totally made-up stuff about postmodern neomarxism, which is a huge disservice to the pursuit of knowledge. And both he and Rogan seem to be trying to suggest there’s some shadowy ulterior motive behind trans/nb people just trying to live their lives free of harassment and discrimination.
— end of email —
The Upshot
When he first heard this clip, my dad understood Peterson and Rogan both to be saying that people’s gender identities should be respected, that their preferred pronouns should be used, but that we shouldn’t let social justice warriors silence or censor dissenting opinions. That’s the message people get when they don’t slow down and really listen to what these guys are saying. Rogan wants you to think he’s a curious dude who provides space for smart people to share their wisdom. Peterson wants you to think he’s a rational and brilliant man who has lots of wisdom to share, if only the social justice warriors would stop trying to get him canceled. Neither is true, and it’s easy to tell as soon as you lay out their claims and examine them in the cold light of day. It’s not censorship to look at a person’s actions, evaluate them as meritless, and choose not to give that person any more support. That is being a discerning consumer.
