The Bluestocking, vol 328: Peterson/Musk, AI and slap fights
all the people engaged in this are going to die out
Happy Friday!
Because the most viral moment of my life (so far, and hopefully for ever) is my 2018 GQ interview with Jordan Peterson, I have found myself staying acquainted with what he’s up to, like a distant and slightly concerning uncle on Facebook.
This week, he conducted an interview with Elon Musk, which was notable both for Peterson’s reluctance to let Musk speak, and for the insight it gave into his fundamental worldview. Peterson’s vibe has changed since he first became famous, along with his hairline and dress sense, but his underlying obsessions have stayed the same.
Back in the 2010s, he was a Jungian therapist, interested in archetypes and myths—but his most famous pronouncement was a quasi-scientific one. He argued that evolutionary biology, in the form of mating lobsters, demonstrated that men formed dominance hierarchies, and life was hard for the defeated lobsters men at the bottom of the pile. (I could say “pecking order,” because chickens are held to have similar hierarchies.)
Transmit that to humans and you have a system where men compete with other men, based on their achievements in their careers and public life, and are matched with female mates on that basis. Female lobsters don’t compete against male ones, which . . . makes you think, huh. Without having to say it, Peterson was implying that women don’t belong in male-dominated career competitions.
At the time, the geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that reading from animal behaviour across to humans is an odd thing to do, since giraffes have a lot of gay sex and otters drown their girlfriends. In my interview with Peterson, I also questioned how much I could learn about contemporary gender relations from a creature that urinates out of its face.
That was Evo Psych Peterson, a figure who was once lauded as the world’s most interesting public intellectual by David Brooks of the New York Times. He is now in his Gnostic Era, and fishing in a rather different audience pool: his podcast contract is with the Daily Wire, where he recently interviewed far-right provocateur and mortgage non-payment enthusiast Tommy Robinson (his wife Tammy sat in as she was such a big fan).
Peterson is also now a Christian. Ish. (Please enjoy this clip of Richard Dawkins roasting Peterson’s inability to give a one-word answer to the question of whether he believes Jesus was born of a virgin.) For reasons best known to himself, during his interview with Musk, Peterson decided to give Mr Tesla a short lecture about images of masculinity and femininity in Christianity, saying that the “sacred image of masculinity in the West is the crucifixion,” whereas the feminine equivalent was the Virgin and child—a dyad, with a woman existing archetypically as a mother attached to a baby.
Musk looked absolutely baffled, as well he might. Presumably he wanted to talk about the CyberTruck and the “woke mind virus”, not listen to an overly enthusiastic preacher hector him about how the story of Job means he needs to accept Jesus into his heart. Some rightwing Christians were similarly baffled: the crucifixion has little to do with masculinity. If anything, traditional depictions of Jesus have always been quite feminine. He passively lets the Romans kill him. He accepts the suffering. In most of the religious paintings I grew up with, he had long hair and was, well, kind of weedy. (Michelangelo, who liked muscle boys, is one of the few proponents of jacked biblical figures.)
But you can see why Peterson wanted to talk about this iconography. The idea that men are individuals, with heroic quests to struggle and fulfil, whereas women are mothers, who are not individuals, but only half of a dyad—well, that fits neatly with his existing views about gender roles.
It’s his opinion and he’s entitled to it. What annoys me is that instead of making a case, and arguing on its merits, Peterson jumps instead to the idea that his perspective is natural, and therefore unquestionable. Where he once drafted in evolutionary psychology for this purpose, now he uses Christianity. A few years ago, the line was: I’m sorry, but the lobsters prove that men are like this, and women are like this. Now, the line is: I’m sorry, but the Virgin Mary proves that men are like this, and women are like this.
And just like last time, you can demolish Peterson with easy counter-arguments: the Christian view of God is the trinity—three people in one. So I am going to take that as a divine blessing for all those kids on TikTok with self-diagnosed multiple personality disorder? Samson lost his strength when he cut off his hair, so men should not have a grade 2? And so on.
You know how I always say that people don’t have ideologies, they have personalities? This is a version of that premise. Jordan Peterson likes the traditional view of gender roles, and he simply clothes that view in whatever set of garments he currently has to hand. Yesterday, lobsters. Today, the crucifixion.
Helen
Tony Blair Wants Us To Stop Worrying And Embrace AI (The Atlantic)
But Blair seems to have moved on to a more existential matter: trying to reassure people that AI will help more than it hurts. As he and I speak, investors are throwing money at buzzy companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, while everyone else is scrambling to catch up with them. Experts who believe that an artificial superintelligence is possible, or even imminent, argue about whether that superintelligence will wipe out humanity. AI is quickly insinuating itself into our lives. It has already changed my workday—I tell Blair that I will feed our interview into an AI transcription service, which saves me hours of work that were once a routine part of my job. Still, today’s generative AI has “hallucinations,” dreaming up fake quotes or citations. That’s what people fear: supposedly infallible cutting-edge computer systems going awry, and users’ complaints being dismissed.
Two years ago, Blair was sitting on a stage in the Bahamas with Bill Clinton and the crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. (Clinton and Blair were in suits; Bankman-Fried, inevitably, wore a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers.) SBF is now in jail for fraud, his billion-dollar company reduced to a smoking ruin. People were cynical about bitcoin, I told Blair. And they were right.
It’s funny: there are two big paradigm shifts happening right now, and I’m bullish on one (weight loss drugs) and bearish on the other (AI). So it was fun and challenging to talk to Tony Blair—who couldn’t love AI more if he tried—about the possibilities of the technology changing the way that states work. The full set of research papers are here, if you’re interested.
To repeat what I said on the Today podcast: I think sometimes when people talk about AI in government, what they are actually talking about is “well-functioning infrastructure”. I went to Finland a few years ago and their governmental digital services are way better than ours. Is that “AI” in the sense that Silicon Valley means it? Not really.
Power Slap Finds Fans Amid Controversy (New York Times)
Dayne Viernes, a slap fighter known professionally as Da Crazy Hawaiian, expressed initial reservations about the safety of the sport, in part because of warnings he had received. “There was a lot of people telling me about C.T.E. and brain damage and all this stuff,” he said. He has come to accept the risk, however. “Right now I’m listening to my body, and I hear it very well, and I don’t really believe that it will affect me the way some people think.”
Dr. O’Shanick said that because of the nature of these kinds of brain injuries, sufferers of C.T.E. do not always know they are affected. […] Dr. O’Shanick said that he worried about youngsters doing this, but as adults go, he seemed more flippant. “If you take a libertarian perspective, you don’t legislate it, you just let natural selection happen,” he said. “Eventually all the people engaged in this are going to die out, and you’re not going to have to worry about that population reproducing.”
The New York Times reports on the (TikTok fuelled) trend for slap fights, a “sport” that consists of people trying to give each traumatic brain injuries. America is already OK with this in football, so why not slapping too? There’s a very bleak moment in Amazon’s KELCE documentary where Jason Kelce says that he has to do as much as he can to provide for his family now, since—I’m lightly paraphrasing—so many former NFL players end up with mush for brains.
Anyway, this is why I’m not a full libertarian. Sometimes people make terrible choices for themselves and they ought to be stopped.
Quick Links
Before we had mass antibiotics, we had PHAGES. Thoroughly enjoyed this excerpt from Tom Ireland’s The Good Virus, about a Russian scientist who was desperate to avoid cholera sweeping through Stalingrad during the siege, but had no access to penicillin. So she turned to viruses instead (Substack).
“This is borne out in the slightly weird portfolio of campaigns, ranging from how political parties use personal data, to cleaning up the Manchester ship canal, to the provision of puberty blockers. It just doesn’t add up in quite the same way as the other groups’ causes do.” James O’Malley on why he’s not a fan of Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project (Substack, £).
“In our conversation at the residence, she touched briefly on how her ‘first woman’ status shapes even the most workaday elements of the job . . .Harris told me that she has to let the Secret Service know a day in advance if she is going to be wearing a dress instead of a pantsuit, because agents have to pick her up in a different kind of car.” This profile of Kamala Harris by my Atlantic colleague Elaina, published last autumn, is worth your time (Atlantic, gift link).
Matt Yglesias was not a Kamala fan(ala) in 2020, but he makes a good case for her on his Substack here, as does Josh Barro on his Substack here.
“I would like to know whether Harris’s unburdened faith means that as president, she would equip Ukraine with long-range strike capabilities against targets in Russia, and whether she plans to knock down tariffs or build them up.” On the other hand, my colleague Graeme Wood makes a good case that stitching up the nomination for Harris—rather than having a full primary—was a mistake (Atlantic, gift link).
“As recently as June 2023, a 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was declared dead after a suspected stroke. Five hours later, she was found alive after her coffin was opened to change her clothing.” AARRGH (Popular Mechanics)
See you next time! If you want to support my decadent, childless lifestyle with no investment in the future of humanity—thanks, JD Vance—consider subscribing to the Atlantic.
My latest articles there were about the sheer relief of Biden’s decision to drop out, meaning the Democratic party was no longer insulting American voters, and Vance’s unappealing demeanour: “Unfortunately, the kind of material that has X users such as MAGA Barbie, Catturd, and The Dank Knight hammering the “Like” button is not a winning message in the real world.”
I keep chickens, so I can attest to the pecking order very much being real. Like most chicken-keepers in this country (there are more than 5 million pet chickens in Britain), we only have hens, so we’re talking about hierarchy of females. It has less to do with size or strength and more to do with age: the hens we added later are lower down in pecking order than the ones from our original flock.
The feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether once argued that the crucifixion of Jesus was the 'kenosis' or emptying-out of patriarchy, Jesus renouncing masculine domination. Try that one on Peterson in the unlikely event he ever lets you interview him again 😊