Prophets; Greatness; Universities
10/29/2021
Prophets
I dismissed Jordan Peterson when he was big a few years ago, but reading Scott Alexander’s review of “12 Rules for Life” changed my perspective on the guy. Obviously he’s not the same person today that he was then, and to be honest, I still haven’t really dived into his lectures or anything, but Alexander’s “prophet” angle makes sense to me. I was trying to evaluate Peterson as a philosopher (and rating him a failure) when he was playing an entirely different game! “Make your bed” is a boring platitude, and yet, my bed is often not made! To philosophically dismiss a prophet’s call to action as platitudinous is to miss the point. The prophet isn’t trying to convince you of the truth of the proposition; they are trying to get you to act on the things you supposedly acknowledge as true. They are fighting akrasia, not ignorance.
Anyway – I wanted to give a small defense of Peterson against an objection from Alexander. Alexander argues:
I think he’s saying – suffering is bad. This is so obvious as to require no justification. If you want to be the sort of person who doesn’t cause suffering, you need to be strong. If you want to be the sort of person who can fight back against it, you need to be even stronger. To strengthen yourself, you’ll need to deploy useful concepts like “God”, “faith”, and “Heaven”. Then you can dive into the whole Western tradition of self-cultivation which will help you take it from there. This is a better philosophical system-grounding than I expect from a random psychology-professor-turned-prophet.
But on another level, something about it seems a bit off. Taken literally, wouldn’t this turn you into a negative utilitarian? (I’m not fixated on the “negative” part, maybe Peterson would admit positive utility into his calculus). One person donating a few hundred bucks to the Against Malaria Foundation will prevent suffering more effectively than a hundred people cleaning their rooms and becoming slightly psychologically stronger. I think Peterson is very against utilitarianism, but I’m not really sure why.
I think the Petersonian response would be something like: the kind of person lacking self-confidence/self-esteem simply won’t donate to AMF, but Alexander is even a little too hasty to see Peterson lament suffering and then jump to calling him a negative utilitarian. I think the best way to read Peterson is as being somewhat agnostic about what ends to bring about and more interested in the ways in which personal weakness/suffering/incompetence make achieving any kind of moral end impossible. Peterson wants to say: you must overcome your own suffering before being a useful person in the world, AND HERE’S THE WAY TO DO IT. If no one had any self-confidence, no one would be distributing malaria nets. Human goodness is downstream of human competence. That’s actually not that philosophically controversial. What’s hard is actually making people competent. I’m not sure how effective Peterson is, but to the extent that he is, that’s a meaningful contribution, and this kind of thing is an important problem to work on.
Alexander finishes his argument by noting “I think Peterson is very against utilitarianism, but I’m not really sure why”. I think the best explanation for why Peterson would oppose utilitarianism is something like: utilitarianism is a kind of totalitarianism that seeks to, in a top-down way, totally expunge suffering. But it’s hubris to think you can do that. All you can control is yourself, and therefore all you can hope to do is make yourself as good as possible. You can’t worry about the suffering a galaxy away, clean your room first, make yourself as strong (physically and morally) as possible, and then worry about tackling suffering where and as you can.
But, again, aren’t we back in the world of philosophy? As Alexander aptly realized, Peterson is not playing the philosopher’s game. How much easier is it to ask the person telling you to make your bed whether their time would be better spent donating to AMF than, well, listening and making your bed?
Greatness
Point:
Counterpoint:
What’s the Purpose of the University?
Rohit Krishnan has a blog post about “unbundling universities”, in which he proposes the below possible purposes of the university:
They provide a place to meet likeminded others, and socialising
They provide a space for learning
They provide the ability to get jobs
They provide space for faculty to do research
I think it’s a good list, but I would add some stuff like:
They help 17 year old children mature into 22 year old adults
They help students find work that they are good at and find stimulating
They inculcate values in young people who will become future leaders and trend setters
I think there’s an interesting tension between the job prep stuff and the faculty research stuff. Universities have narrow research interests (ie they research disciplines in the liberal arts: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and mathematics) – should they be trying to create leaders outside of those interests (ie should they be explicitly preparing people for jobs outside of the liberal arts)? In the status quo, it’s a bit weird that the investment bankers spend four years studying political science or whatever. Should we unbundle higher ed so the technologists do a Thiel Fellowship, the financiers an excel bootcamp, and so on? What do future professionals (as opposed to academics) get out of a non-pre-professional education? They can always read Shakespeare on their own, and they could make friends and build a network at work or through their pre-professional organizations. Should future bankers and future biotech CEOs and future sociology professors really all spend four years studying together?
One solution here is to prioritize the personal growth/leadership training stuff. Maybe it doesn’t really matter what specifically students are studying so long as they are learning things like personal responsibility, critical thinking, how to find what interests them, etc. Then the question is whether a single institution can provide enough value to future leaders in all of those different fields (business, science, politics, etc) along the axes of maturation/networking/cultural coordination/self-discovery such that they outweigh the losses they incur in job-specific learning. I don’t think that is actually an unreasonable proposition. It’s kind of absurd to think that you do one four-year stint to prepare for your career and then it’s just smooth sailing from then on out. Over the course of one’s career, their function and field may change many times, and yet we do not expect people to go back to college to get re-skilled for every transition: people somehow seem to make it work. A suspicion would be that those people who are the most agentive, the most curious, the best networked, etc are able to do that best, so maybe that’s what colleges should focus on: how to create leaders above all else.
So we can justify having students who will end up pursuing a variety of different paths in one place on the pretense of trying to make them better people. How does that mesh with the university’s function as a research institution for faculty? I’m not sure. I think one path forward would be to have a more capacious understanding of the kind’s of research that a university ought to sponsor. Keep the academics working on questions in the liberal arts, but also bring in leaders from other fields. Something like the Institute of Politics at Harvard where experienced leaders in government come through to the university may be an interesting model to expand on. Give mid-career leaders the space to take a step back and perhaps focus on bigger questions in their fields than their active lifestyles allowed while also having them mentor students. Of course, this learning would not be limited to the specific knowledge the leaders have acquired but also the character and virtues they have developed. The assumption this university makes is that a student who is interested in how to be a leader tout court can learn as much from the scholar as the general as the CEO as the activist. I don’t think that’s a bad assumption to make.
If you have thoughts on any of the above, I’d love to discuss. Just reply to the newsletter email!