The Best Example of Civil Discourse You Will Ever See
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| Jordan Peterson (left) and Sam Harris (right) with Douglas Murray as the moderator at the O2 arena in London in 2018. |
A couple of weeks ago, I canceled my Hulu subscription. When the site asked me why as clicked through the process I checked the “not enough content” box, which is a general statement but the truth nevertheless. Of course there is a ton of content on Hulu and I have watched countless hours of programming on that platform over the past few years. But, in today’s pandemic crisis, I find it more difficult than ever to connect with any traditional TV programming.
We have a family account on Netflix but I don’t watch that any more either. I have tried repeatedly to get into something. Typical futuristic shows like Dark and Altered Carbon that I have read so many good reviews of do not speak to me. I just don’t care about any entertaining puzzle they strive to create. I am living in a reality that is far more interesting than any fiction TV can come up with.
For most of the past few decades TV has been a bunch of crap. Hell, it might have always been crap from the beginning but the more channels it has the worse it gets. I watched a few “hit” shows in years past like 24 and Modern Family (I watched all of Game of Thrones too). By and large, however, except for the occasional good documentary on HBO or PBS it is all garbage for the mind. Garbage in, garbage out. I have reached the conclusion that TV is one of things most wrong about American society because, for the most part, it teaches people not to think.
Lately at night I surf YouTube, as I have for years, only now it is my primary source of “TV entertainment.” I especially enjoy watching clips from the old The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson or The Carol Burnett Show. I have also found a great deal of interesting philosophical lectures on the platform. I watched a whole series on Nietzsche, lectures on Saint Augustine, lectures on Martin Heidegger, among many others.
It was by randomly following YouTube’s suggestions based upon my viewing history that I came across this guy who read a paragraph in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and proceeded to dissect it in a remarkable 45-minute talk on just that one paragraph. I was blown away. That is how I discovered a Canadian clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson.
After watching a couple of hours of his lectures and interviews I concluded that Peterson was some sort of agnostic Christian or at least a psychologist who respects the quasi-spiritual perspective of Carl Jung. He conducted a series of lectures on Christianity that I have yet to watch. But, he most definitely must be an “academic” Christian at best, he's no "bible thumper."
There is a lot of information about and by Peterson on YouTube. Dozens of videos. I discovered that he has become quite a celebrity in the last four years. I learned that he became virally famous when his lectures and his presence before a Canadian government committee spoke against government mandated speech with regard to the use of pronouns for transgender persons. This is a topic I have been hot under the collar about of a couple of years myself, so I connected.
As far as I’m concerned, transgender people are free to do whatever they want to do with their bodies. But I completely agree with Peterson, who articulates the point better than I can, that it is absurd to change the rules of grammar because sex change operations are possible. In fact, my opinion is it is the height of arrogance, Donald Trump level arrogance ironically, for any person to claim that the rules of grammar for a given language should change because of their private choice to change their gender. Society should not give a shit if you change your gender but it also should not give a shit that you feel it is necessary to affect language because of your choice. You’re not that important.
Well, that’s more my take than Peterson's actually. What Peterson states is more fundamental and political. Government should not dictate speech. Period. Further, the entire “collectivist” mentality by the Left that speech should somehow be controlled or modulated because of transgender people or for any other reason is flawed and, in his view, abhorrent. You can watch his full statement here. In 2017 it rocketed him to a level of fame of which I was not previously aware.
Naturally, a lot of people accused him of being Far Right. I think probably his initial fame may have even come from the Right. He also gave interviews where he questioned feminism, “equality of outcome,” among a few other hot topics for the Right.
But Peterson is not Right Wing at all. He definitely despises the Far Left, particularly in academia, he detests postmodernism, but he is actually more of a centrist than anything. His problem with feminism, equal outcome, or any other collectivist approach to society is that, as a practicing psychologist, he is far more interested in individual freedom and expression than he is in any form of “group think.” So, Peterson is a fascinating person with ideas that make him almost impossible to plot on the traditional political axis.
Then one night YouTube recommended a video of a discussion between Peterson and neuroscientist Sam Harris. I have followed and respected Harris for years. I reviewed the last book I read by him here. His pragmatic, atheistic lifeworld is founded upon the secular application of Buddhist meditation and open awareness. His arguments about religion doing more harm than good in the 21st century are spot-on as far as I am concerned. I think he is sometimes too idealistic but mostly I agree with him.
The prospect of watching someone I respected in an extended discussion on relevant topics of fundamental importance fascinated me more than anything Hulu and Netflix was offering. But I was also a bit skeptical. The discussion with Harris turned out to be four appearances, two in Vancouver, one in Dublin, Ireland and one in London in 2018 before large audiences. Each discussion was about 2 hours in length. I just did not know whether it would hold my attention or not.
The four-episode, 8-hour debate/discussion between Harris and Peterson exceeded my expectations. I have now watched parts of it more than once. Quite simply, this is the best example of civil discourse between two parties with specific points of disagreement that I have ever had the privilege to enjoy.
In the first video they walk out on stage to this audience of 3,000 people in Vancouver. The crowd roared like it was a boxing match, which is exactly the way it was promoted on YouTube. They sit in large, comfortable leather chairs on a stage that is otherwise dark and unadorned. It is sort of a minimalist approach, probably out of desire to keep the focus on the ideas presented. Nevertheless, the more stylish chairs in Dublin and London received a lot of comments on YouTube.
Jordan Peterson is lanky and highly animated. He is constantly waving his hands and fingers about and shifting around in his chair. Sam Harris is shorter and more muscular. He hardly moves at all and spends pretty much all of each video sitting still in his chair while he talks and listens.
Peterson’s profound arguments require the cross fertilization of different human disciplines. Harris’s thoughts are no less profound but his position is such that he has fewer points to make. William of Ockham would be proud. So, in the later debates, Harris repeats himself a bit. Peterson rarely repeats anything. Instead, he is constantly introducing new ideas into the discussion. Harris remains firm and solid, although at the very end he points out the entire dialog could have taken another perspective altogether. Instead of talking about religion they could have discussed the value of human consciousness itself.
The reason Harris has fewer points to make is that he is not centrally interested in multiple human disciplines being of importance where human values and truth are concerned. There is no benefit in any religion that wouldn’t be better realized by secular reason. Secular reason tops everything. He believes a human morality can emerge from our collective direct, open rationality to every situation no matter what you come up with.
Peterson comes up with a lot of stuff striving to understand and undermine Harris, particularly on the subject of religion. Harris remains unambiguously rational with respect that the world would be a better place without religious dogmas, where everyone possesses a certain “openness” to the secular possibilities of our humanity. That is too vague for Peterson. Hence the eight hours of debate/discussion.
There is a moderator for each debate. But, like everything else in these extraordinary discussions, it is not a traditional moderator. This is an active moderator. Bret Weinstein has the honor in the first two events to, while remaining mostly in the background, interrupt the flow of things to ask questions, to make contentions about particular problems he sees or to pint out lack of clarity in the articulation of both Peterson and Harris. Weinstein also interjects his own insightful interpretations from time to time to facilitate the discussion, making sure to point out areas of agreement as the two debaters battle out differences.
Almost incredibly, about 10,000 people show up in Dublin and again at the London event held in the famous O2 arena. These are also very enthusiastic crowds – so remarkable to see such high-level, civil discourse on philosophical topics before thousands of energized people. In that respect, this is the most hopeful programming I have seen in years.
Douglas Murray is the moderator for the Dublin/London dialogs. Even more so than Weinstein, Murray often finds himself in the three-way discussion with Harris and Peterson. I’ve never seen such expert, proactive moderation before and it fits perfectly with the spirit of the event, the excellent articulation of Harris and Peterson and the applauding engagement of the large audience. This is, once again, a splendid example of what intelligent, open, honest discourse should be. It is a refreshing change from the bipolar partisanship of the American political stage, for example. These people are civilized. American politics is just dysfunctional by comparison.
A couple of the discussions begin not with Harris and Peterson making claims and summarizing their positions. Rather, in the spirit of fairness, openness, and genuine understanding, each person must state, to the best of his ability, the positions of the other person whether or not they agree.
This actually works pretty well as a starting point. It forces Peterson and Harris to put their opponent’s ideas into words, to reason them out loud. They begin with the other person’s point of view and then the exchange evolves from there. Of course, each person very quickly goes back to their honest perspective and the disagreements re-emerge but, interestingly, there is also genuine movement of one person toward the other as they find that certain aspects of points of contention actually have grounds for more agreement than either originally would have admitted.
This is progress. Harris and Peterson will never completely agree with one another. They are both passionate about their perspectives. Harris is more subdued but his intelligence is just as intense. More importantly, they do their perspectives justice without disrespecting the other person. They are both convinced they are right. They also, quite obviously, have a lot of respect for one another. In the mind of the first moderator, Weinstein, it is "historic" progress.
Sad, but true with the way everything is going in the world these days. Intellectual civility in disagreement is historic. This four-part extended conversation is remarkable and shows the rest of us the proper way to proceed.
As originally designed, these discussions were to stop after an hour and 15 minutes to take questions from the audience. But in each case, when that point came, the audience was polled through applause as to whether it wanted the debate to continue as is or to stop for Q&A. In all four cases the audience thunderously wanted the discussion to continue, to do away with the Q&A part. That speaks volumes as to how fascinating and satisfying the Harris-Peterson exchange is to watch.
Naturally, the world being what is it - falling apart, not everyone agreed that this was an extraordinary thing in the summer of 2018. Canada's National Observer, for example, thought most of it was "waste of time." And on some level the whole thing is kind of pretentious.
But, to a large degree, others chose to participate in the post-discussion. Both debaters were accused of "metaphorical blindness" by Medium.com. That site also "decoded" the dialogs for everybody. Bloggers spotted ways they could understand one another better. Here is a clever parable written about the event. Harris-Peterson definitely generated a lot of buzz on the internet and the time. They still generate a lot of buzz today, separately of course.
To give you some idea of the substance of this discussion, here is are some very brief snippets from the first hour of the London debate…
Harris: “The world we are living in now is one in which we have whole societies are shuttered over this notion that some books weren’t written by human beings. They’re a different class of book. There’s a shelf in the library where the products of almost certainly merely human brains are venerated for all time and considered uneditable and unignorable by the majority of human beings.”
Peterson: “But there’s another problem, I think, and this is obviously a contentious one. I don’t go to church but there is one thing I admire about the church and that is that it has managed to serve as a repository for these fundamental underlying fictions for millennia. And that’s really something bloody unbelievable…There is something to be said that you have an obligation to a transcendent ethic…What has happened in part as our great narratives have emerged across time…is that we have winnowed out those narratives that encapsulate the ethic that reflects that wisdom.”
Harris: “Stoicism could be the quote religion or the guiding philosophy of the West. It would be a much better one than Judaism or Christianity and have virtually none of the downside. And so that’s my point. We’re in this perverse circumstance of being held hostage by certain products of literature and we need to break the spell.”
Peterson: “Those are perfectly creditable arguments but the weakness in the argument is that…atheism is a doctrine of negation…there isn’t a positive ethos in atheism. All it says is that there is nothing personified transcendent…The problem is when your doctrine demolishes the literary or fictional substructure and leaves nothing behind and ethos needs to be provided because something will rush in to fill the void. And this is what Nietzsche warned about even though he was a strident anti-Christian, Nietzsche believed that it was Christianity’s emphasis on truth that destroyed Christianity, which was an extremely interesting criticism…Nietzsche’s prognostication was that if we allowed God to die, and perhaps there are reasons for that, that the consequence of that was that we would be awash in both nihilism and totalitarian bloodshed. That is what happened in the 20th century…I think the fact that the rationalist ethos doesn’t have the motivational push is actually a fatal flaw.”
Harris: “There are religions that have made that transition to an increasing attenuated commitment to the truth of the doctrine and there are religions who haven’t moved an inch. But I think we have to acknowledge that this movement in this direction is progress because what it actually is at bottom is increasing sensitivity to the difference to having good reasons and bad reasons for what you believe…If we are going to list the sacred artifacts that keep our society worth living in, I think the list will be very long before we get to the objects of any one faith. It will be things like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and the free exchange of ideas across boundaries. The fact that we are no longer religiously or linguistically or geographically partitioned in the ideas we can entertain.”
You get the idea, so to speak. It’s just a wonderful, admittedly long experience. Or if you treat it like a mini-series then it isn’t long enough. Which is even more wonderful. I am so impressed with both these guys. The moderators, too, managed to contribute significantly. Murray ended the final debate with this statement:
“Conversations like this, civil discussions on the most important matters between people who have enormous amounts in common and have important disagreements, which engage with the past and which are going to be facilitated for a long time by the knowledge of the extraordinary progress we’re about to hit can take place in an arena like this with an audience like you…I think it’s, at any rate from my point of view, one of the most positive things in the world I can imagine at the moment.”
Amen to that. Even more true in 2020 than it was in 2018. Check it out.
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