Daily Wire cannot Give Jordan Peterson the Institutional Setting to Arrest his Current Dissolution
Twitter Unforced Errors Are Only a Symptom of His Larger Challenge
After yesterday's video Bethel McGrew noted the vocational change (from university professor/clinical psychologist to pundit) in Jordan Peterson as a significant factor in "The Message" videos. I thought it was a good point. Hence today's video.
Jordan Peterson exile from his two vocations as university professor and clinical psychologist is not a small part of the thrashing about we're seeing. His medical problems are also a major element. His unforced errors on Twitter were symptoms.
The video with trusted friends Jonathan Pageau and Gregg Hurwitz is to his credit as publicly opening up the conversation. Yet that video really didn't get into what I think is the key question for JBP right now which is clarifying his vocation.
While Jordan clearly is interested in a great many things his channel lacks focus and his persona lacks context. Compare his Lex Fridman interview with that of colleague and friend John Vervaeke.
John's interview was focused, concentrated on John's mission to address "the meaning crisis" and whatever you think of John's project his focus, mission and vocation were clear.
Jordan's interview with Lex wandered around exploring a variety of topics. I thought it was a good conversation, but it didn't have that mission and urgency that we saw from Jordan in wave 1 (Oct 2016 to June 2019).
I can understand Jordan's desire for additional platform security which he gets from Daily Wire, but it mis-locates him from his primarily therapeutic vocation to one of political punditry.
Vocational container, context, settings, institutions are vital both for continual ongoing personal formation and for ongoing impact in the broader world. As one commenter noted "you don't see @BishopBarron having these sorts of troubles..."
Jordan is one of other post-progressive exiles like Bret Weinstein and Peter Boghossian who are exiled from their vocations and are cast adrift from the institutions and communities that people need to flourish and progress.
Daily Wire Plus is not about to offer the proper context for the development of what I believe is the center of his vocation: help for the individual struggling with post-modern nihilism.
I also wonder whether Gregg Hurwitz also doesn't gravitationally pull him towards the political which again is not really the center of Jordan's vocation, at least as I've seen his impact.
If Jordan cannot find an institutional set and setting not only for his conversations but also his personal and vocational development I fear this lack of focus and dissolution will squander his important achievements seen before his illness.
I have been noticing like everyone else that JBP has been being political and ranting at times but I also remember Paul saying he may change Daily Wire from just a one sided conservative platform. I went to Columbia with a lot of guys like Ben Shapiro in 1960 - and came to respect and love them for their intellectual honesty and persistence. Most of them were on the left but, like Ben, they were the real deal. As he will tell you, he's got telos and knows it. Likewise I enjoy Klaven because I find him funny, but both are predictably ideological. I don't know how Peterson will end up at DW but he has already changed that ideological predictability with his Rep. Dan Crenshaw interview where both of them seriously took the right wing ideologues to task. Crenshaw even used the term 'right wing Woke' for those on the right who want to tear our institutions down as much as the Woke on the left do. That self critical move is what Jung called owning your own shadow. It involves the exceedingly unpleasant task of admitting one's own faults and seeking to correct them rather than constantly projecting one's own unadmitted darkness and, yes, evil outward on others. From Solzhenitsyn, Peterson knows that the line between good and evil runs down the center of each and every human heart. Mine. Yours. So too do Calvinists in their way, but Jung was the son of a Swiss Reformed pastor. I think that fact is a clue to the connection between the world before and after Nietzsche. So it is clear to me that Peterson is capable of real change and development because he understands the dynamic of shadow work. I agree he is in transition and bit all over the place, but like he said to Lex Fridman he is constantly aware of death as an absolute motivator. He also said he was ready to die last year, and, well, he almost did. I believe he is a lot like Jung who understood the implications of Nietzsche's death of God in his own times, and repeatedly asserted that where there is the will to power there can be no love, and where is love there can be no will to power. Jung, like and unlike Peterson, also gave those who had lost their connection to faith and the pre-modern world a way to experience the Sacred and God in modern terms without reducing that experience to intellectual ideas. Jung wrote "Esse in intellectu (being in the intellect) lacks tangible reality, esse in re (being in the thing) lacks mind........What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an esse in anima"?(being in the soul)" Peterson's work is not done and he must know it, and he is clearly not giving up, but like Jung he stands as a key contrarian figure of this time and I hope and believe there is more and better to come from him - should he live. On a lighter note I would point out that he has been hounded out of his job and his profession and had unscrupulous hit pieces from both Murdoch's Times and Sulzberger's NY Times and countless other bannings and outrageous treatment. I'd say the charming college professor we all liked so much is learning to be disagreeable in big 5 terms although he is not that way by nature. His son Julian is, so at least he has a role model. ;-)
I have not seen any of the Daily Wire with JBP, but I watched some of his talk with Jonathan and Greg. I would say that Greg seems to be trying to bring JBP back to the Democratic party fold for his own benefit, not Jordan's.
I agree that Jordan is best when he's analyzing the meaning crisis and how to help young people as individuals. Given that many young people have just struggled through two years of lockdowns with no access to school, sports, church, parties, and the real knowledge now that the government could do it again, I think that needs to be addressed because it's created even more of a crisis, not just of meaning, but of believing in a future for them at all.