- Wraith of J.O.I.
- Jan 25, 2012
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quote:In late September, Israeli fans of Jordan Peterson received a very pleasant surprise. The Canadian author, clinical psychologist, conservative media personality and hero to many a wayward young man in an uncertain age was to speak in Jerusalem. He would be joined by fellow right-wing talking head Ben Shapiro to discuss “the most important issues in the realms of culture, politics, and intellectual life,” the event’s website said.
The talk, held on Thursday at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center, was sponsored by the Tikvah Fund as well as Sella Meir and Shibolet, publishing houses that have translated into Hebrew the works of U.S. conservative and right-wing authors. The Tikvah Fund is a New York-based nonprofit that defines itself on its website as “politically Zionist, economically free-market oriented, culturally traditional, and theologically open-minded.” It's the organization behind Mosaic magazine and a host of other educational initiatives and journals.
In the two weeks between the event’s announcement and its staging, the 3,000-seat theater sold out. With tickets at 350 shekels ($99) a pop, this is no small feat.
This is the second Israeli speaking engagement for Shapiro, the Jewish American founder of the conservative website The Daily Wire. In July, he headlined an event hosted by the Tel Aviv International Salon, Sella Meir and Shibolet. Those who ordered their tickets through the salon weren't informed until the day of the event that it was taking place within the hard-right Conservative Political Action Conference in Tel Aviv, featuring panels such as “International Conservatism,” “Conservative Judicial Revolution” and “Peace Through Strength.”
Although the two events shared a target audience of mostly Anglo-Israeli right-wing adults, there was a difference in the crowds at the Shapiro and Peterson events. At Shapiro’s Tel Aviv talk, the general mood was smug. When people milled about alone, they walked with purpose.
Not so the crowd gathering outside the International Convention Center waiting for the doors to open for Peterson. There, individual men in their 20s and 30s wander around the courtyard and prop themselves against its railing, heads slouched (Jordan Peterson’s first rule for life: Stand up straight with your shoulders back).
I make eye contact with a few of them; most quickly avert my glance. There are a handful of women, dressed in long skirts and headscarves that are far less out of place in Jerusalem than they were at Shapiro’s engagement at the Tel Aviv Port. Here too though, almost every woman is accompanied by a man, usually one with an American accent.
Inside the convention hall are booths staffed by organizations largely supported by the event’s sponsors. They include Tzarich Iyun, a publication penned by ultra-Orthodox writers for ultra-Orthodox readers; the Israel Law and Liberty Forum, which pushes a conservative judicial line; and Epoch magazine, whose recent articles give space to climate denial and question what Google’s algorithm is hiding.
At the Shibolet stand, a precocious teenager peddling books greets me warmly – he recognizes me from the Shapiro event – and repeats to the crowd that Benjamin Netanyahu’s autobiography is for pre-order only. Another booth, the Israeli Immigration Policy Center, is brimming with reports. The first to catch my eye: “The inherent danger in Israel’s joining the Istanbul Convention” – the international convention to combat violence against women.
Connecting the dots
I admit that I came to Peterson’s event with reservations. Attending Shapiro’s talk and realizing that most of the audience was at least a bit on board with the January 6 Capitol insurrection was unsettling. His constant reiteration of what is called the right’s “One Joke” – that crude potshots at transgender identity are the height of comedy – disappointed me as both a person with trans loved ones and a person with a sense of humor.
But Peterson is a different breed. While Shapiro is a fast-talking provocateur, Peterson comes with his professorial background. He's an eloquent speaker who collects his thoughts before delivering a structured monologue that borrows from several disciplines – social sciences, biology, literary criticism, theology.
He was already professionally established when he rose to fame in the anti-political-correctness crowd. In 2016, the University of Toronto professor declared his opposition to Canada’s Bill C-16, which was intended to expand the country’s anti-discrimination laws to include “gender identity or expression.” His declamations made him a darling of the right, and his subsequent self-help books propelled him to legendary status among young men who felt lost in a world where masculinity is slowly losing its capital.
To make his arguments, Peterson seems to have a method of his own to both reach his target audience and shelter himself from criticism. Under this method, the speaker orbits close enough to saying something that intelligent readers would use to connect the context and the content, and thus infer intent.
But when confronted with the consequences of making a particular statement – for instance, the statement’s basis in prejudicial thinking or its ability to cause harm to a group of people that already experiences disproportionate violence – such speakers say they've been terribly misunderstood by an ill-disposed mob. They never said all of those things, why are you putting words in their mouth? It’s your fault for connecting those particular dots, even though those dots were numbered and, when linked together, form a very clear picture.
Peterson shows how this policy works in a piece appearing in Shapiro’s publication, The Daily Wire. In an article entitled “I’d rather die than delete a truthful tweet for cancel creeps,” he recounts that he tweeted after the transgender actor Elliot Page underwent top surgery: “Remember when Pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.” Twitter claimed that this violated the platform’s rules against hateful conduct, but Peterson disagreed.
He explained that Pride long being considered a sin is “merely a factual statement,” that he must call Elliot Page by the (female) name he was given at birth because it's “the name of a well-known actress” and it's how the figure is most prominently known. And he must use female pronouns to refer to him because “how could those I am writing to make sense of what I was saying if it was ‘his’ breasts that were removed?” (Never mind that masculinizing chest surgeries are also popular for men with gynecomastia).
He notes that he does have some regrets about the term “criminal physician” – “Were the operations undertaken by the fascist physicians who carried out the Nazi medical experiments legal? Yes, under the laws of the time. But were they criminal? I’ll leave that question up to you to answer.”
His conclusions, which he can state openly without fear of protest from The Daily Wire's readers, are that “Ellen/Elliot bears moral culpability” for enticing “many a poor, confused adolescent girl to blame her emergent pubescent self-consciousness, confusion, and discomfort on ‘being born in the wrong body’” and undergoing a gender transition. He ends with “up yours, woke moralists” and “I’m really starting to think you’re just not that bright.”
‘We love you, JP!’
Onstage, Amiad Cohen of the Tikvah Fund introduces the guests and hails them for their work against the “barbarians” trying to roll back reason and dignity and promote a worldview that abolishes national identity and dismantles the family. Both he and historian and Haaretz columnist Gadi Taub, who has joined him, enunciate the words “human rights” with such acid that it sounds like a new pandemic. After all, Taub says, “Any NGO that has ‘human rights’ in its name is in some way antisemitic.”
Shapiro, paying tribute to the Holy Land, focuses his mile-a-minute talk around the need to re-situate religion in rationality. The pantheon of paganism, he says, “promoted tolerance and diversity above truth.” But God is One, and “rationality without a higher purpose means nothing.” He delivers his speech while standing at the podium, and jokes that his newly grown beard means that he has finally hit puberty – this is his bar mitzvah.
Even without the quip, his talk conjures up the same atmosphere. The rushed delivery, the focus and exposition on the Torah, his place on the stage before thousands of kippa-clad heads suggest a coming-of-age ceremony, but with the added bonus of jokes about identifying as inanimate objects.
And then Peterson emerges – gaunt, sharply dressed and pacing across the edge of the stage. After the roaring applause dies down, a young man sitting behind me shouts, “We love you, JP!” Peterson responds, “It’s mutual.”
He speaks. Softly, clearly and familiarly, speeding up, slowing down and pausing to search for the perfect word. He speaks about the problems with perception, about how he'll give the postmodernists credit for understanding that science needs to be couched in a narrative, though Marxism – “a branch of the claim that the spirit of the world is one of power” – got it wrong. Domination and aggression don't lead to happy ends, neither for us nor for our cousins the chimpanzees. And “if you’re a man who acts like a tyrant, you’ll find that women aren’t that easy to oppress.”
He speaks about unity, about the anxiety caused by its absence, about the role of God in biblical stories in driving humanity in the right direction. And he speaks about responsibility, sacrificing short-term, hedonistic whims to see your goals achieved. His speech is a bit disjointed, and at times he seems to talk over the heads of the audience, who may not be native English speakers accustomed to so much academic language. But it's immediately clear that he has a particular talent for communication, for making sense of big ideas, for reaching people searching for a message.
“As Jews in Israel, are you telling the greatest story ever told? That’s up for you to decide,” he says. “You have a tremendous moral responsibility.” He adds: “I think it is true that the fate of the world depends on the people of Israel” – the crowd goes wild – “you attract people here because of what you’re capable of doing. You show us what a holy city looks like – because we need it.” A standing ovation.
And then David Friedman, who was Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel, takes the stage to moderate the question-and-answer segment. He lobs to Shapiro and Peterson questions about the future of the United States, liberty and nationalism, among other keywords. Shapiro treats each answer like a sprint, jamming them full of the discourse his audience wants to hear. He oscillates between condemning identity politics and starting sentences with “As a Jew …”
“I’m really optimistic about the future of the U.S.,” he says, because there is a backlash brewing against an ideology of “what is a man, what is a woman,” who can marry whom, “navel-gazing about our individual sexual identity.” It's both puzzling and fascinating to experience just how much the issue of queerness consumes this man.
Peterson, meanwhile, doesn't seem to be trying to meet a quota of buzzwords. His answers recall a gentle bootstrap ideology – invoking personal responsibility time and time again – but remain fairly politically neutral. When asked to give a final remark to the audience, he says, “My hope is that you make peace in your own houses.”
At this point, while the speakers take audience questions on Dostoyevsky and parenting young boys (here Shapiro manages to squeeze in yet another joke at the expense of the transgender community), I feel almost cheated. Peterson has said nothing incendiary – not even mildly spicy. He feels more like a pastor than an iconoclast, telling parents to praise their children for jobs well done and encouraging good communication with spouses.
I disagree with his oversimplification of power structures, but I feel like that could be smoothed out over some banter and a cup of tea. Where is the climate denialism, the suggestions (but not statements) about the inherent natures of men and women, the performative misgendering of celebrities?
Peterson unmasked
A woman makes her way to the microphone to ask the final audience question. She identifies herself as a fellow McGill University alumnus who began following Peterson when he started fighting against the anti-discrimination bill and cheered his support for the anti-vaccine trucker protest in Canada. Her question, as a proud unvaccinated person (the crowd erupts in cheers and I immediately feel a tickle in my throat) is about Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine policy.
Shapiro answers, calling the global COVID-19 response “a perversion of science” and noting that Israel’s pandemic policies kept him out of the country for two years. And with that, before Peterson can speak, the Tikvah Fund’s Cohen ends the session. The audience rebels – shouting, jeering, demanding to hear Peterson’s response. Acquiescing to the crowd, the moderators relent and the suave psychologist raises his microphone.
“Follow the science, said no scientist ever,” he says. From there, a series of claims burst forth: that politicians used opinion polls to enforce a false scientific consensus, that “there was no all-cause mortality data on the vaccines,” that lockdowns kill 100 people for every individual they save.
He starts to discuss a spike in mortality in Europe. “Is it that the vaccine is killing people?” he asks – again, suggesting but not stating. (The WHO-led Science Feedback initiative, it should be noted, labels this claim as unsupported.) “The fact that the left climbed into bed with the pharmaceutical companies” is unthinkable, he says. “Could it be because they offered the promise of centralized power and control?”
Until that question, I was wondering whether Peterson’s right-wing persona was a grift. There's little fame and fortune to be found in being a good professor and psychologist, and much to gain in the Trumpian age from sacrificing yourself on the altar of political incorrectness. And maybe it's an act. But his response was animated enough to suggest that he was finally removing his proverbial mask.
Peterson has constructed a meticulous image as the perfect therapist for the sort of young man who has committed to never going to a therapist. He has the academic knowledge and clinical experience to give sound, competent advice, and the gentle but authoritative voice and delivery to convince someone to actually follow through on that advice. And beneath the civil, well-dressed exterior is a man that these boys can relate to deeply. One who revels in being loathed by the left, who understands how to goad the “human rights activists” whom the event’s other speakers so detest, without explicitly expressing bigotry that may have consequences (beyond a possible Twitter ban).
While Shapiro preaches to nodding admirers that activists who push for civil rights are trying to force their sons into drag pageants, Peterson is more subtle. He's there to provide a self-improvement gospel to the vulnerable and questioning. Once the members of this audience reap some benefits from listening – better posture, peaceful relationships, a sense of responsibility – they're ripe for what they may not have been ready to hear when they started their journey: Maybe, just maybe, feminists are whiny man-haters and leftists push deadly vaccines in order to consolidate power. Maybe, just maybe, the problem was never with them at all.
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Oct 11, 2019 20:31
