Top lobster
Julian Baggini has a droll review of a new book by Jordan Peterson on the 12 eternal truths or something.
It’s not difficult to see why Peterson’s rules sold in the online marketplace, where attention spans are short and repackaged clichés pass for original insights. In headline form, most of his rules are simply timeless good sense. “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”; “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” The problem is that when Peterson fleshes them out, they carry more flab than meat.
Actually I would say the problem comes before that, the problem is with his “rules” themselves. They’re too self-conscious, too composed, too pseudo-Chesterfieldish. Writing like that brings me out in a rash. He’s not some guy in the smoking room of a club in St James Square in 1875, he’s an internet-famous academic in 2018. He should relax and get over himself…or else go back to being a real academic who writes academic prose. Attempted aphoristic Wisdom is just embarrassing, though I have no doubt his fans will think it’s genius. They think Peter Boghossian is a genius after all.
Although he advocates a balance between the two, most of the time he argues that we need more order. In practice, this means a conservative return to tradition and what is “natural”. Dominance hierarchies, for example, are said to be “older than trees”, a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. But since when has “natural” meant “good”, or “is” meant “ought”? If we cannot move beyond dominance hierarchies, then his apparently empowering advice to stand tall has the chilling corollary that others will have to stoop.
…
Peterson, who has become one of the most prominent critics of anything that can be labelled as “political correctness”, is especially conservative on gender and family roles. “Female lobsters . . . identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him,” he writes. Generalising from the crustacean to the human he adds, “This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation.”
Ah so that’s why there are jokes about Peterson and lobsters. I’ve seen them around but not known why they were a thing. He fancies himself the top lobster.
Peterson has a knack for penning sentences that sound like deep wisdom at first glance but vanish into puffs of pseudo-profundity if you give them more than a second’s thought. Consider these: “Our eyes are always pointing at things we are interested in approaching, or investigating, or looking at, or having”; “In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.”
My point exactly, except for the part about sounding like deep wisdom at first glance; to me even at first glance they sound like someone trying to sound like deep wisdom.
Reminds me of a stunt Hitchens and New Statesman pulled one time – a contest to manufacture faux wisdom that sounded like that sort of thing. My favorites were “An owl in a bag troubles no man” and “He digs deepest that deepest digs”.
Peterson’s sort of “thinking” deserves all the mockery we can level at it. And I, for one, though female, have never once been attracted to a lobster for anything other than dinner.
This is putting my wife’s deeply felt, long lasting enthusiasm for marine invertebrates in a new, uncomfortable, light.
Somehow JBP makes both Christians and atheists of a certain stripe think that he is “one of theirs”. Last week I watched a debate about The Meaning of Life between (or I guess among since there were three of them): William Lane Craig, Jordan Peterson, and Rebecca Goldstein. WLC said that there was no meaning in life without immortal souls, and also Pascal’s wager. JP said that just because the music ends doesn’t make it meaningless, and spouted a bunch more poetic platitudes. Rebecca Goldstein was the adult in the room. Closing statement from JP: The bible is a manual for how to live. Closing statement from WLC: Quotemine Steven Pinker at Rebecca Goldstein. She appeared amused.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDDQOCXBrAw
Last I checked, lobsters were bottom feeders, eating dead things. And cannibals.
On the other hand, a Lobster Academy exists, so …
Yet another guy who thinks he’s very “Alpha” spouting off about how all the feeeemales should be irresistibly attracted to him (and conveniently picking a species where this is the case; admittedly lobsters are a novel choice, normally this sort goes for lions; funny how no one talks about hyenas, or elephants, or bonobos, etc, with a female topped hierarchy). But, even accepting his premise that all women should be irresistibly (and exclusively) attracted to Alphas, I don’t think he’d like that in practice.
For one, in the animal kingdom, high status males don’t just magically spring forth full-formed: they rise up through the ranks by competing with other males, often violently, sometimes with deadly consequences. Once they’ve achieved the “top lobster” status, they continue to have to defend it against challengers. Eventually (which, in practice, can mean “almost immediately”) they are deposed (often fatally) by the next in line. The reward for this high-stress existence is also fairly fleeting: the Alpha gets to mate with the most females while holding the title. These females then lose all interest in him, once they received what they wanted: sperm from an ostensibly fit donor, that makes it more likely their offspring will have a better shot at survival. The females don’t then stick around to make the Alpha sandwiches, and listen to him endlessly prattle on while pretending to be utterly fascinated, and nodding in the right places. In fact, just as soon as he gets his ass handed to him by the next guy, his popularity is history: it’s brilliant strategy after all, for the females to move on to the best and brightest, not stick around to soothe the loser’s bruised ego. There’s also no mention whatsoever of beauty contests among the lobster females to get a shot with the top guy, so presumably our Alpha is happy to fertilize grandma lobster and morbidly obese lobster, or whatever passes for unattractive in lobster terms. In other words, the brightest females in the animal kingdom (according to Peterson), behave precisely like human gold-diggers: they zero in on the male with the most to offer, take him for everything he’s worth (in exchange for a little nookie, sure), and as soon as they get what they want from him, they move on to the up-and-comer. Brilliant strategy indeed, but I’m gonna bet Peterson has something unflattering to say about it when properly applied by members of his own species.
Also, I’m kind of curious how he squares the “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today” rule (which ostensibly invites a person to forgo competition and focus on fostering one’s personal virtue as an end in itself) with his ideas on dominance hierarchies (and their corollaries re: sex and reproduction).
Anna Y, men like this love dominance hierarchies, because they are in a position of power over a number of young, nubile females. They have no idea how it works in real life, and also don’t realize that, in the macho worldview, academics are not going to be the alpha dogs, they’re going to be the 90-pound weaklings who get sand kicked in their faces by the Donald Trumps of the world who have little to no brain, very little sex appeal, and lots of money.
Academics are looked on with scorn by the vast majority of the “alpha male” crowd (many of whom appear to be youngsters sitting in their mother’s basement who can’t even achieve the scorned level of academic, because you have to do more than troll the internet to get there…it’s real work for most of us).
[…] a comment by Anna Y on Top […]