He’s a hurricane of fresh air, this university professor who baldly says that one of the many reasons he won’t adopt the faddish new non-binary gender pronouns is that “the people who made those words are possessed by ideology and not to be trusted anyway.”
In fact, Dr. Jordan Peterson, the man at the centre of a freedom-of-speech battle at the University of Toronto, isn’t even certain that the whole gender-identity/gender-expression issue isn’t really at heart a question of fashion.
“Because the logic underlying the arguments is that … biological sex, gender identity and gender expression vary independently,” he says — noting quickly that that is “absolutely contradicted by the data,” which shows 98% of people have the same gender identity as their biological sex — “it has become unmoored from the underlying reality” and is “all interpretation.”
“Well, if it’s all interpretation it’s not distinguishable from fashion,” he says.
Peterson isn’t being mischievous or just idly stirring the pot.
Nor was he doing that when he posted three new videos to his YouTube channel late last month, thinking through on his feet, as he has done for years, the dangers of the looming federal Bill C-16 and how it will beautifully and terrifyingly meld with the policies already enshrined in the Ontario Human Rights Code.
It was during one of these videos that Peterson criticized the use of gender-neutral pronouns and drew the ire of self-appointed “social justice warriors” both at the school and outside it.
That led, in swift succession, to two warning letters from the university — one dated Oct. 18 from the dean of the faculty of arts and science, Peterson correctly calls “an exemplar of Orwellian doublespeak” — a free-speech rally and counter-protests and complaints against him.
He’s a psychologist, author and intellectual heavyweight whose life’s work has been the study of authoritarianism.
He was influenced by the likes of Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and “more peripherally by people like (the former Czech Republic president) Vaclav Havel, who noted very carefully the tight causal relationship between the pathologizing of everyday language and the degeneration of societies into authoritarian states.”
And oh yes, the other great intellectual influence of his life was Sandy Notley, the late mother of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.
He and the premier, a few years apart in age, were raised in the same small northern Alberta town, Fairview, and even double-dated occasionally.
For four years, in fact, Peterson worked as a volunteer for Notley’s father, Grant, the Alberta New Democratic Party leader.
“I ran for the NDP vice-president in Alberta when I was 14,” Peterson says. “I almost won too. I lost by about 12 votes out of about 700…. So I was very serious about pursuing a political career but then I realized, I started to understand, the role that ideology played in these underlying horrors of the 20th century and that put me deep into the study of the psychology of religion and that’s really what happened.”
Through Grant Notley, Peterson had “high-level access” to other politicians and labour leaders, and remembers kindly big names singing “the Internationale (the socialist anthem) late at night after they’d been drinking and I saw that they were working hard for working-class people” in that “sensible Saskatchewan socialist way.”
Less benignly, he remembers “the low-level party functionaries” as “the sorts of people that (George) Orwell had criticized, the ones that didn’t like the poor.”
The experience left him leery of partisan politics and ideologues.
To borrow a modern term, the trigger for his concern about gender neutrality sprang from his clinical practice.
“I’ve had a number of clients who have been bullied into states of mental uncertainty by their politically correct peers,” he says.
Independently, one raised the issue of Bill C-16 (designed to enshrine the rights of transgender people by adding gender identity and expression, the bill is now heading to the justice committee), the other the decision of the university’s human resources department to make anti-racism and anti-bias training mandatory.
So Peterson did what he does, researched the hell out of the matter and decided he needed to raise it.
He’s amused that by its warning letters to him, the university has proved he was right when he said on the videos that even raising the issue of gender neutrality is probably illegal, since gender identity and expression both are protected classes in the human rights code.
That letter from the arts dean, by the way, begins as Peterson says “with a ringing defence of the university’s stance on free speech, only in the next page to impose a limitation on that speech for me.”
Language hugely matters to him.
“One of the things I’ve come to understand is that the central functional axiom of Western civilization is that language … is the process that keeps chaos and order in balance … and that when (language is) corrupted, we careen into chaos or pathological order.”
Having, as New York City has now recognized, 31 gender identities and expressions — from “bi-gendered to “agender” to “gender-gifted” and “gender-bender” and “gender-fluid,” all protected from discrimination — is “just not tenable.”
“We’re going to have 31 different classes of pronouns? No, we’re not. It’s just not possible. People can’t do that. Our language doesn’t allow for that; we can’t remember that; what if we make a mistake?”
I’ve had a number of clients who have been bullied into states of mental uncertainty by their politically correct peers
He’s thought about why we use standard pronouns.
“Part of it, apart from the un-tenability, is that … you actually don’t have the right to demand that of someone.
“You know that every individual is surrounded by the mass of humanity. And the mass of humanity is to be categorized in the fastest and simplest manner possible because you can’t do it any other way.
“We use ‘he’ and ‘she,’ and we use ‘they’ when there’s more than one person, and we do that for purposes of simplicity of interaction.
“And for you to come to say, ‘You have to mark me out as singularly special in the manner that I require and you have to remember it,’ no, it’s like, no, you can’t ask that of me, because you’re actually not singularly special.”
He’s braced for the next shoe to drop: A student who asks him to use a preferred pronoun, or a complaint at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. “Perhaps that won’t happen and let’s hope it doesn’t,” says the warrior for common sense and plain speech, “but there is an element of logical necessity to it.”
• Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki
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