I cannot recall my humanities classes besides philosophy classes doing much wrt helping understand ambiguity or complexity of every day life, and few people are taking many philosophy classes unless you want to count the neo-nunnery of Female Gender Studies departments. Peterson doesn't rip all humanist academics. Just the ones who probably like Foucault. Which just so happens to be a substantial portion. This portion can't continuously deride a portion of the population as inherently immoral and then wonder why there's a backlash, especially when one can't even "repent" for the sin of a straight white male.
Where the hell do humanist academics "deride a portion of the population as inherently immoral"? What does it mean that this portion is deemed "inherently" immoral? How is immorality inherent? This isn't something we can discuss if I can't even understand or relate to your premises, especially when journals like Critical Inquiry and New Literary History publish articles that say things like this:
The understanding of both agency and ethics in the identity-based approaches, by contrast, is relatively impoverished. Such approaches typically envision enactment or practice as a simple choice between (or, at best, taut combination of) espousal and subversion of various ascriptive and power-laden identities (gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality); such enactments are imagined, moreover, as directly and predominantly political in meaning and consequence. Reflexivity is limited to one’s relation to generalized social and cultural categories, whether that relation expresses itself as affirmation, affiliation, subversion, or disidentification; and what Nancy Fraser calls “recognition politics” dominate the landscape of political practice and debate. Ultimately, a whole range of possible dimensions of individuality and
personality, temperament and character, is bracketed, as is the capacity to discuss what might count as intellectual or political virtue, or, just as importantly, to ever distinguish between the two.
(from Amanda Anderson's "Pragmatism and Character," published in
Critical Inquiry)
Major figures in the humanities exhibit similar suspicions of critical theory as vanguard politics, including Toril Moi and Rita Felski (both heavy-hitters in the contemporary literary studies landscape; Felski edits
New Literary History). I also think it's worth noting that all of them are women...
So again, I simply cannot take Peterson seriously when his knowledge of "postmodernism" is at best a naive conservatism reacting to selectively identified comments from such "latent communists" (or whatever Peterson would call them) as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, blah blah blah. I'm sorry, the whole thing is so alien to any accurate perception of what the humanist academic landscape actually looks like from inside. So as far as I'm concerned, Peterson's arming the "damned" (as you call them) by painting a false image of the "saved"; and then, consequently, it becomes this very lack of understanding that perpetuates the rhetorical divide between the damned and the saved. The whole thing is obscene.
I'm not trying to let the 1970s and '80s critical theorists off the hook. As far as I'm concerned, they did very little to correct misconceptions of their work (and in certain cases, some conceptions may have been warranted). But Peterson is lodging an assault on an intellectual ecology that he clearly knows next to nothing about.
Incidentally, Peterson seems to be publishing actual peer reviewed work at a far higher rate than any of his more notable academic detractors. I can't even find any publications by Nathan Robinson (of course he's still a graduate student - but still, not even one?) or others like Ira Wells, so it wouldn't even be fair to compare citation numbers when the competition is at a potentially collective zero. If he keeps publishing and teaching, it's pretty hard to claim his videos or the self-help book are reaching for popularity when failing otherwise. Pinker doesn't appear to have contributed original research in a peer reviewed journal in some time - is he then only interested in the popularity of being a public intellectual? I don't think so. Of course, Robin Hanson might disagree (can't wait to read his new book)!
Several associates of Peterson have acknowledged the quality of his peer-reviewed work, which makes his online rants all that much stranger. Honestly, it appears that his goal is to translate his academic work into palatable and digestible content for his fans; and he does so by demonizing others.
Robinson seems to be cultivating a public persona. There's nothing wrong with that. He's also published two books, only one of which looks to be academic.
Since 2010 or so, most of Pinker's research has been funneled into his book projects, which are both academic and aimed at a wider audience. Again, there's nothing wrong with this. It's possible to be a public intellectual without being fanatical (it's just easier to do through books than through interviews and videos).
The problem for people in need of therapy is not that they can't do some complicated thing, it's that they need help functioning in routine tasks and situations. No surprise that a lot of therapy can have a "no duh" sound to those not in need of it.
So why does the therapeutic methodology need to involve the demonization of the complicated thing? It's a flaw in perception that academics are somehow targeting non-academics (specifically, non-educated non-academics); but Peterson's brand of therapy chooses to exacerbate this flaw instead of correct it.
