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One of the great moments at the Jordan B. Peterson lecture here in Portland, Oregon (June 25, 2018, Keller Auditorium) happened just before the program began. An announcer told the audience that had gathered that “a zero tolerance policy for heckling and disturbances will be strictly enforced.” The audience erupted with applause and cheers. I remember thinking in anticipation of the event that one unruly audience member could ruin this for everyone else. I wasn’t sure who the others were in the audience. Conservative? Liberal? Religious? Irreligious? We were all together on the desire to hear someone speak without worrying about them getting shouted down. We had paid money to hear Dr. Peterson, not protesters, and so it was a relief to know that should someone try to grab attention, it would be dealt with. Security was taken very seriously for this event. Each attendee was searched carefully upon entrance. There was a significant police presence both inside and outside the building.

The event was hosted by Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report. I had never heard of him previously, but I live in a basement, both literally and figuratively. I enjoyed him immensely in this context. His opened the evening and conducted the Q&A with Dr. Peterson at the end. Among whatever other skills he has is a particular genius for relating to crowds. (He is a stand-up comedian, which makes sense. Here is a short clip.) He didn’t appear to have a set speech and his role seemed to be to get the house ready for Dr. Peterson rather than appear for himself. Rubin noted that this was the first time in all his appearances with Dr. Peterson that the house announcer earned applause for the no heckling announcement. He assumed we were pretty tired of protesting. Yes!

I suppose the first take-away from the evening was the assumption that at least the nearly 3,000 Portlanders in attendance were fed up with protests. This is the age of shouting down those you disagree with or don’t think should be heard. It’s wearisome.  It’s not enough to ignore the people whose views you don’t like, you have to denounce and disrupt them. But in the same way that someone’s right to swing their arm ends at my nose, one person’s right to free speech can’t be at the expense of my right not to have to listen. Further, it is my right to choose to listen to someone speak, and someone who interferes with that is violating my rights.

In his opening remarks, Rubin mentioned the protest that was going on outside, across the street, in anticipation of this event. (I noticed it as we approached Keller Auditorium.) This was the first time I recall attending an event that was protested by others. Rubin told us that the protest was by Antifa against violent men. He wondered aloud (to applause and laughter) what that had to do with those of us who were inside Keller Auditorium. What there was to protest remains a mystery to me.

Rubin’s funniest line didn’t elicit the loudest response from the audience. It was subtle and may have caught his audience off guard. He mentioned how his appearance at a previous event led someone to accuse him of being “anti-gay”. He followed that with, “My husband was sure surprised to hear that.” Perhaps tolerance and respect doesn’t quite equate to acceptance and affirmation. Hard to know what happened there.

Rubin didn’t speak very long. I got the sense that his sense was we were ready to listen to the headliner. Rubin’s introduction of Dr. Peterson and his subsequent appearance on stage was greeted by a standing ovation and raucous cheering. The idea of college professor as rock star is really odd.

Here are some highlights from Dr. Peterson’s talk that night:

1. He is trying to understand why so many people are flocking to hear him speak at these public lectures and why the YouTube phenomenon of people like Joe Rogan is exploding. He contends there is a hunger for long-form, intellectual discussions. He believes we are in a Gutenberg-style revolution in communication. For the first time in history, the spoken word has the same reach as the printed word. He talked about television’s problem of “narrow bandwidth,” which he explained is the one- to six-minute opportunity you have to make a point before you have to go to a commercial. This is the sound-bite world where if you can’t make a point quickly, you fail. (A related point, which I’ve heard Dr. Peterson make elsewhere is that the narrow bandwidth requires a certain kind of charisma, which becomes more important than—and perhaps takes away from—what you’re actually saying.) He recounted recent events where he and Sam Harris had public debates that were on the intellectual level of a PhD defense, and where audiences seem quite engaged with it all.

He talked about the theory some have offered that television has made us stupid, but he thinks that is incorrect. To the contrary, television has brought a lot of people along who would have missed out on education. And he notes that HBO and Netflix are demonstrating that people are willing to binge-watch hours and hours of one television program and that those programs are nearing the quality of written literature in terms of the number of characters and the complexity of their stories, requiring a level of sophistication to engage with them. And so people are turning to YouTube to watch long intellectual discussions. His own experience with YouTube was having posted many of his lectures there and discovering one day that there were over one million views. “That’s a lot.” (I think he referred to a million books and then said, without a trace of irony, “That never happens.” As a warning to writers in the room he said, “It will never happen.”) By way of metaphor, he says he is riding a wave but is not the wave.

This technological revolution of long-form intellectual discussions means that where reading and videos both require single-minded attention, a podcast means you can recover time spent doing other things—driving, exercising, washing dishes, etc. The entrance barrier to embracing the technology is low and people can enrich their lives with perhaps as much as two hours of high-level intellectual engagement. For the first time in history, the spoken word has the reach of the written word.

Dr. Peterson referred to his fellow Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, who coined the expression, “the medium is the message.” What I understand of McLuhan’s arguments has come to me via Neil Postman. Something I’ve heard Postman say (or, rather, seen him write) is that new technologies mean there will be winners and losers. The Gutenberg revolution left you behind if you could not read. One of the things I’ve been trying to think through is what, if anything, is the downside to this new revolution. The closest I’ve come to is that you do need access to internet bandwidth, which has a cost. And the equipment you need to listen to anything on the internet also has a cost. So while the content is “free,” the way you listen to it certainly is not. Another possible downside is the fact that the internet is not edited like, say a book or a newspaper. On the up side, you have the free expression of ideas; on the downside is that you have an ocean of content to wade through, much of which is prurient or inane. Taking advantage of this new revolution requires a disciplined search for the ennobling, or else you drop hours watching cute cat videos and the like.

Further, that idea of “free,” while true, is misleading. True, you can upload and listen to a YouTube lecture for free (assuming you have internet access and a viewing platform), but it’s not like Google is not exacting a cost. In addition to fairly unobtrusive ads, the price we are paying is that we are giving over our data to internet companies. The YouTube lectures are not the product; we are the product. Perhaps the price is insignificant compared to the gain.

2. Dr. Peterson referred to the “intellectual dark web,” which was an unfamiliar term. Here is a website. The New York Times offered this report. Of all the people mentioned in these articles, I am most familiar with Dr. Peterson. It is odd for me to think of him as “dark” in any sort of way.

3. Dr. Peterson offered an interesting view of the political landscape. One of Dr. Peterson’s gifts is his ability to frame things well so that there is actually something to talk about and consider. He talked about politics this way: Most of us think that we are very enlightened when we vote. Whether we’re on the left or the right we think we have come to our opinions rationally. Really, though, we tend to select our sources for information, which have points of view we agree with. Dr. Peterson maintains that much of our approach to politics has to do with temperament. On the right you have people who appreciate structure. Republicans are organizers. They know how to build and manage things. They manage well. The problem is that those structures can get old and stale and you can spend resources maintaining structures that shouldn’t be maintained. On the left you have people who know how to create new structures. They have an idea for how things could be different and they create. The problem for these types is that they aren’t very organized and don’t know how to set up and maintain these structures. And, of course, the end of a structure is painful for those who benefit from that structure.The people on the right need to recognize that structures sometimes need to be ended so that new structures can emerge. Dr. Peterson’s point is that both sides need each other. The left has these ideas, but they need people on the right who can put the ideas together. There are visionaries and there are managers.  Dr. Peterson told a great story out of Egyptian history and mythology that stressed the importance of having both perspectives. I wish I had been taking notes. (I’m sure I will find the story in his book, Maps of Meaning, when I get into it.)

4. The political discussion led into a riff on the importance of dialogue. Since Left and Right need each other they need to talk continually with each other. The truth comes out in the talking. The goal is not to win. In fact, it’s bad if either the left or right wins. If the right wins, the inequalities that emerge from hierarchical structures will be ignored. If the left wins, we won’t have any structures and our culture falls. He placed the importance of dialogue in the context of marriage as well. There, again, the goal is not to win. The goal is to talk and discover the truth together. If you win an argument, that means your partner loses, and “who wants to be married to a loser?”

5. It was nearly a throw-away line, but one of his most affecting statements for me was about Donald Trump. He related an experience he had listening to a comedy icon talk about his work in movies and television. He was loving the conversation and then this person turned to talk of Donald Trump, which Peterson found dreadful. He commented that it doesn’t take much “perspicacity” (probably the first time I’ve ever heard this word used out loud) to find something negative to say about Donald Trump. I don’t have the exact words, but it was to the effect that it’s too easy to criticize; that, obviously, Mr. Trump is a deeply flawed person in a self-evident sort of way. It takes no special insight, really, to point this out and doesn’t really accomplish anything to do so. He imagines a number of American voters going into the voting booth in 2016 saying, “Ah, the hell with it” and “voting Trump.” His point is that there are more important and interesting things to talk about.

6. I liked Dr. Peterson’s rule of three when it comes to managing people. When someone does something you don’t like, you give it a pass the first time, you note it the second time, and then the third time you confront. If you confront after the first occurrence, the person can argue their way out of it, denying it happened or making it about you. But if, when you confront, you have three examples, it’s hard for the person to explain away all three.

*  *  *

Dr. Peterson doesn’t bring a product, he offers a discussion, which he says is possible even in the context of a lecture. He doesn’t show up with a prepared talk; he wants every lecture to be different. His goal, even as he does all the talking, is to engage the audience—and he is relentlessly focused on the people in the front few rows. (I’ve heard him say that the lights make it impossible to see any farther back.) He is to academia what jazz is to classical music. Because he can riff it’s a mistake to think he doesn’t know what he’s doing or talking about, in the same way that it’s a mistake to think a jazz musician hasn’t practiced long tones or scales. What appears improvisational, is only possible because of years of dedicated study. I’ve heard people get up in front of people and not say anything. What’s extraordinary is how Dr. Peterson can hold the attention of 3,000 for a couple of hours and, at the end of it, you can point to specific things he said and reflect on them.

A beautifully written account of the evening, including the protests, can be found here.

It was fascinating to spend time this past weekend at the quadrennial meeting of pastors and lay leaders of The Evangelical Church, a denomination known until recently as The Evangelical Church of North America. The national meetings occur every four years, at which point its supervising leader (the General Superintendent—a position more of influence than actual authority) is elected through an open ballot with the names of all eligible candidates. (In this case the national leader was re-elected to a third four-year term on the first ballot, with 65 out of 118 voting members selecting him.)  Regional meetings are held annually and regional leaders are selected by a similar election process within the context of those meetings.

The Evangelical Church is a small denomination within the larger world of evangelical churches and denominations. Each evangelical group, including, for example, The Evangelical Church, whose meetings I attended this weekend, and The Salvation Army, the church in which I grew up, have their own emphases, which is one of the reasons why there are so many denominations. My sense is that all the churches that make up the larger evangelical church movement have a relatively broad consensus on the following:

—The Bible is God’s revealed voice to people.
—God is both one and three—Father, Son (Jesus), and Holy Spirit.
—Human beings are sinners headed toward destruction.
—The death of Jesus on the cross provided the way for human beings to be saved.
—Salvation means life change, both within, through inner transformation, and without, through relationships with others.

All of these statements need to be defended, but are assumed here. And while I’m sure there are quibblers, I think these things are broadly accepted by evangelicals, even if they may be spoken of in different ways.

Within the evangelical group are a number of churches and denominations that are part of a holiness movement. (Yes, a movement within a movement.) The Evangelical Church, The Salvation Army, the Wesleyan Church, the Nazarene Church, and the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), for example, make (or at least at one time made) one of their emphases the imperative, “holiness unto the Lord.”

It’s important to note, these churches that identify (or identified) as holiness churches would not necessarily have an easy time merging, if that were something they even wanted to pursue. While they share evangelical underpinnings and may have similar beliefs about holiness, they have widely differing views about governance and the roles of women, to name just two.

One of the priorities of the current leader of The Evangelical Church is for its pastors and, by extension, their churches to embrace their heritage as part of the holiness movement. He was, of course, speaking directly to this denomination and not other holiness churches let alone the entire evangelical movement. But talk of “holiness unto the Lord” is familiar to me from my days in The Salvation Army.

As the leader spoke this weekend about the need for holiness I was reminded of some thoughts from childhood. There are two:

One, the need for holiness is beyond dispute. There are many, many verses that provide (and, in this case, were used to provide) ample proof-texting for the need of holiness in a person’s life. There’s no question that the Bible speaks about and emphasizes holiness (for starters, Ephesians 1:4 and 4:24, 1 Thessalonians 4:7, Leviticus 11:44, 1 Peter 1:15–16, and Hebrews 12:10 and 13:12 quoted in his talk.)

Two, what exactly holiness means and how it is achieved are problematic and, therefore, hard to talk about.

To frame the issue, I think of salvation as occurring over time. When we talk about salvation we are actually talking about three time frames. First, there is the moment we put our faith in Jesus and are saved. That is the day our salvation begins. Last, there is the day we die and our salvation is finalized for all eternity.

The second is the time between when we are saved and when we die.

To put it in chronological order: We were saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved.

What does it mean that “we are being saved”? (Noting that some might object to the present participle,  indicating that it is accomplished over time.)

Holiness churches sometimes stress the need for a “second work of grace,” which seemed to be the case this weekend. While this idea is derived from the Bible, it’s not a Biblical term. This seems to align the holiness churches with, say, the Pentecostal movement, which talks about the baptism of the Holy Spirit (a Biblical term), which may occur when you are saved, but often occurs later and is sometimes associated with water baptism. The reason they don’t align is that the holiness churches and the Pentecostal churches differ in what the second work of grace/baptism of the Holy Spirit means in terms of outcome. The Pentecostal churches would stress the gifts of the Spirit, beginning with speaking in tongues. The holiness churches would stress a holy life.

Here’s one quote that was used by the leader this weekend.

“Entire sanctification is a state of righteousness and true holiness, which every regenerate believer may attain. It consists in being cleansed from all sin, loving God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.” (The Discipline: The Evangelical United Brethren in Christ, 1947)

I have a problem with that first sentence. First, sanctification and holiness are synonyms. Second, holiness and sanctification are different from righteousness. Holiness (sanctification) has to do with being set apart; righteousness has to do with right actions. So this first sentence is a bit like saying, “A is B and A,” which is a contradiction and a tautology.

Still the larger truth is there. After you are initially saved, you’re not done. There’s more saving that God wants to do in and through you until the day you die. But now the complications begin:

1. Is a holy life accomplished over time or in one moment? Some will talk about sanctification/holiness as a process; others will insist it’s an event accomplished in a moment of surrender, often public at an altar.

2. What is this “state” of being? Is a holy life the end of sinning? If not, what has changed? Some will insist that a holy life means you no longer sin, or at least are no longer tempted to sin. Is this even possible? What is possible in terms of living a holy life? Or, what does a holy life look like?

3. What is the difference between sanctification and “entire” sanctification? My sense of the scriptures that talk about holiness is that they refer to it in a binary way. Something is or is not holy, meaning it’s unnecessary to call something (or someone) “totally” or “entirely” holy. If it is binary, then we don’t need to talk about “entire” sanctification, because sanctified is what it is. If it is not binary, how do we differentiate Biblical sanctification from so-called “entire sanctification”?

4. How do we talk about holiness without describing it as righteousness? Holiness is often presented as a list of things you do and don’t do, which is righteousness. It was interesting, as this particular leader spoke, he emphasized that holiness is not legalism. That was a relief, frankly. I grew up in a legalistic environment, which I now see as a kind of self-righteousness. But once you begin to talk about holiness not in behavioral terms, the meaning gets a little fuzzy.

5. Who is doing the work of holiness? When a person is saved, most evangelicals would be careful to stress it’s God’s work. We are saved by grace through faith and even that faith comes from God is how Paul formulates it in Ephesians 2:8–9. If God saved us and will save us, isn’t it possible that he will be instrumental in our present saving? As it was presented this past weekend, God saves us initially, but now we need to live a holy life, so get to work! Be holy. God saved you so you could save yourself.

6. How do we preach holiness in a way that communicates well. Is there a way to describe holiness that is both concise and invites consensus? In other words, can it be defined simply and will a large group, for example the pastors in a denomination, understand and agree with the definition. Further, is there a way to communicate “holiness unto the Lord” that may be understood and practiced pragmatically by lay people so that it may be communicated to and demonstrated to others? Finally, is it possible that “entire sanctification” has a whiff of jargon about it? It might make sense to some of us in our little group, but will not be understood by people in other, even Christian, groups. It seems to me that I should be able to explain what it means to follow Jesus so that people who don’t follow Jesus or follow him within another Christian tradition will understand what I am talking about.

None of this is meant to be critical of any particular individual or organization as much as to identify that my own thinking on the subject is rather muddy. This is most decidedly an area where I need to spend some time reading and thinking and writing. It may or may not be a confusing issue, but I don’t have to be confused about that.

Some working principles, initial hypotheses, and thoughts:

1. Differences need to make a difference. We shouldn’t play games with semantics to try and differentiate what is essentially the same thing as something else.

2. Distinctions should not be pursued in isolation. Nor should we be elitist about our faith. We should be convinced it’s true, but we need some intellectual humility to acknowledge that other people from other Christian traditions are thinking about what it means to follow Jesus and are convinced of truth as well.

3. The distinctions between Christians and non-Christians is paramount to distinctions between one group of Christians and another. Obviously, we need to talk about holiness, without which “no one will see the Lord,” (Hebrews 12:14) but a life of holiness may be anathema to someone who is hell-bound.

4. Avoid majoring on the minors. Given the choice of major doctrine or minor distinctions, we should focus on the former. One of the useful aspects of the many denominations is that their individual emphases may affirm our particular emphases or point us to something that we are neglecting.

5. We need to pay attention to the danger of pride.  If I call people to a certain experience with God, it can be a little condescending. The call to be holy shouldn’t be separated from the call to follow Jesus, so that what is called a holy life cannot be construed as “Look what I have achieved. I have become holy. You people better get your acts together and be holy like me.” We should not talk about holiness apart from God.

6. Perhaps holiness is talked about more than we think. Rather than look at verses that mention holiness in isolation and try to formulate an extra-Biblical idea of what they might mean, perhaps pursuing holiness without which no one will see the Lord is more widely discussed in the Bible than we think.

7. We are talking about both an experience and a theory. I see a couple of dangers. First, the person talking about holiness needs to be careful not to make their experience with Christ the measure of what it means to follow Christ. Second, this is something lived, not theorized about.

More to come.

I discussed a thread on a volleyball message board that turned into an unresolved argument about what is and is not racist language and what constitutes basic respect for others vs. what is political correctness.I think it all began with a simple question of whether or not the Japanese Women’s National Volleyball team is good, at least potentially. Eventually, the President’s name was mentioned and the argument became thoroughly politicized.

It wasn’t a sophisticated discussion and nothing much was resolved. But even in sophisticated discussions, things don’t always work out well.

Recently, I watched the Munk Debate on Political Correctness: “Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress …”

For the resolution were Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg. Against the resolution were Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson.

This was a sophisticated discussion, but it, too, had some heated and unpleasant moments.

The two-hour debate is well worth the time watching (through their website, linked above, or on YouTube, below) to, at the very least, understand where things go awry when talking about progress/political correctness.

I think I understand the opposition’s point of view. Stephen Fry, who for me was the highlight of the debate, is a self-proclaimed contrarian. In his pre-debate interview he said he stands against “sanctimony, piety, self-righteousness, resentment, anger, orthodoxy, accusation, denunciation, shaming.” A “soft lefty,” he stands against these things whether they come from the right or, as they do on this issue, from the left. He wants to “achieve the golden aim of making a more tolerant society,” but he doesn’t want it to happen by, for example, prescribing language or tearing down statues. His simple argument is that it doesn’t work and fuels the anger of the right. He wants to see a day when people relate to each other in respectful ways, but insists that “saying what is and is not correct to say … delays the day.”

This issue of speech is what I think brought Jordan Peterson onto a larger stage and, as a result, this stage. He is a psychotherapist and a college professor at the University of Toronto. But when Canada wanted to compel certain forms of speech for people who don’t identify as either male or female, he spoke up rather forcibly, decrying the agenda of “the radical left,” which he maintains has “dominated” the humanities and the social sciences in the universities. He does think you need a left. The left speaks for the people who aren’t making it in the culture. It’s a voice of empathy. But his grave concern is two-fold: that the left “can go too far,” and that their aims are “ill-defined.” He thinks “the conflation of empathy and ideology” is dangerous and doesn’t like how “everything transforms into a polarized political argument.”

It’s unfortunate that the weakest debater was for the motion. My current sympathies were with Dr. Peterson and Mr. Fry and I was interested in hearing the argument for the things that they are against. Unfortunately, Michelle Goldberg, a writer, including columnist at the New York Times, stood against the opposition, but not necessarily for the motion. She doesn’t like, in particular, some of the things that Jordan Peterson has said. But that’s not the same thing as advocating for progress. In the end, it seemed like she was against people who are against “political correctness,” where the word is used pejoratively.

The other problem with Ms. Goldberg was that she has too many tics in her speaking style. She has adopted the contemporary habit of often ending sentences with “Right?” Once in a while it’s appropriate to check in to see if you are connecting with your audience, but too often makes you sound needy. Add to that a generous supply of “um”, “you know?”, “kind of”, “sort of”, and it all becomes exhausting. (I note that the transcript of the debate removes all this chaff from her spoken language. She is much better on the printed page.) She also may be the most imprecise speaker, though I haven’t done any fact-checking. At several points in the debate she said she was quoting Dr. Peterson and he interjected, “That’s not what I said.” I’ve listened to a number of interviews with Dr. Peterson and I think he really tries to be precise in his speech because he worries about being misquoted. My initial reaction is to believe him.

Michael Eric Dyson, therefore, was the only person really advocating for the motion. In his pre-debate interview he said the idea of political correctness was created by the left as an ideal but was taken by the right to mean “everything I’m mad about that I can’t be bigoted about anymore.” His essential point is that there are people who have benefited from privilege. They tend to be white and male. It’s time for them to share. Dr. Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University. Interesting, in the debate he will say exactly the opposite of what Dr. Peterson did regarding the radical left in the universities:

“The radical left is a metaphor, a symbol, an articulation. They don’t exist, their numbers are too small. I’m on college campuses, I don’t see much of them coming.”

Dr. Dyson is also a minister and has an obvious gift for public speaking. There’s a line that he used in both the pre-debate interview and in the debate. He points out Thomas Jefferson’s essential inconsistency in that he advocated for human freedom and had slaves. And when it came to Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s “loins trumped his logic.” It’s a clever line that got an audience reaction, but what is he saying? Yes, Jefferson was not consistent, but it was his ideals not his failings that were appealed to by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement. You can complain about Jefferson, but didn’t Jefferson identify the very principle that ended slavery and introduced Civil Rights? My main complaint, then, about Dr. Dyson during the debate is that he sounds good, but what is he saying? This is a point that Mr. Fry would make in his closing statement, referring to a

“classic, if I can call it that, huckstering, snake-oil pulpit talk. It’s a mode of discourse, a rhetorical style that I find endlessly refreshing and vivifying, but I’m not sure that we actually focused on the point in question.”

Ms. Goldberg was the first speaker. It was just four paragraphs in that she suggested Dr. Peterson was insane and brought Donald Trump into the debate:

“In the New York Times today, Mr. Peterson says: ‘The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.’ That’s not particularly insane to me, because I’m an American and our President is Donald Trump, but it’s an assumption that I think underlies a worldview in which any challenges to the current hierarchy are written off as political correctness.”

This, though, is where the debate hinges. Those for progress or political correctness (not intended as a pejorative, here) maintain that there is a power structure, a pyramid or hierarchy, that leaves minorities at the bottom. They merely want the power and wealth to be shared.

The questions that the other side are wrestling with are:

1. How true is this? and

2. What do we do about it?

And the problems begin with asking that first question. On one side, people want to think about to what extent they have benefited from privilege. On the other side, people want to say that it’s axiomatic. If you’re even asking the question, you’re clueless. And we get stuck as we did in this debated. In one of the more heated moments of the debate, Dr. Peterson will engage with Dr. Dyson.

Dr. Peterson:

“Let’s assume for a moment that I’ve benefitted from my white privilege, okay? So let’s assume that.”

Dr. Dyson:

“That’s a good assumption; that’s a good assumption.”

Dr. Peterson:

“Yeah, well, that’s what you would say. So let’s get precise about this, okay?”

Dr. Dyson:

“Hmm, was that very individual of you?”

Dr. Peterson:

“Let’s get precise about this, okay?”

Dr. Dyson:

“Mm-hmm, let’s get precise.”

Dr. Peterson:

“To what degree is my present level of attainment or achievement a consequence of my white privilege? And I don’t mean ‘sort of.’ Do you mean 5 percent? Do you mean 15 percent? Do you mean 25 percent? Do you mean 75 percent? And what do you propose I do about it?

“How about a tax? How about a tax that’s specialized for me so that I can account for my damn privilege, so that I can stop hearing about it?”

The exchange continues and is worth watching because Dr. Peterson goes on to ask the question of when does the left go too far. At the same time, it feels to me as an observer that there is a bit of mocking in the way Dr. Dyson engages.

We never will get answers. This is where the conversation will break down. Dr. Dyson calls Dr. Peterson “a mean, mad, white man.” Dr. Peterson eventually responds,

“And with regard to my privilege or lack thereof, I’m not making the case that I haven’t had advantages in my life, and disadvantages in my life, like most people. You don’t know anything about my background or where I came from, but it doesn’t matter to you, because fundamentally I’m a ‘mean white man.’

“That’s a hell of a thing to say in a debate.”

Dr. Dyson contends,

“Let me just say that the “mean white man” comment was not predicated upon my historical excavation of your past; it’s based upon the evident vitriol with which you speak, and the denial of a sense of equanimity among combatants in an argument.”

I can say, having watched a fair amount of Dr. Peterson, is that he does communicate with a fair amount of intensity. And I do think it is just that—intensity, not anger—that you see when he communicates.

The point he wants to make is not that hierarchies don’t exist. There are people in power who have exercised power unjustly (Harvey Weinstein gets prominent mention in the debate). And there are people who are not participants in the hierarchy or speaking on behalf of those who are not or have been injured. The question remains, What do they want? And I do think it’s fair to ask How far is too far? Ms. Goldberg says violence and censorship are too far. But what about state-mandated speech? Dr. Peterson does recognize that inequalities are a problem. His argument is that correcting those inequalities can present a cure worse than the problem.

The finest moment of the night I thought belonged to Mr. Fry. In his closing statement he said this:

“It’s a strange paradox, that the liberals are illiberal in their demand for liberality. They are exclusive in their demand for inclusivity. They are homogenous in their demand for heterogeneity. They are somehow un-diverse in their call for diversity — you can be diverse, but not diverse in your opinions and in your language and in your behaviour. And that’s a terrible pity. So, I would say that I’m sorry that it got a bit heated in places, because I was hoping it wouldn’t. I was hoping it would be a shining example of how people of all different kinds of political outlooks can speak with humour and wit and a lightness of touch. As G. K. Chesterton said, ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.'”

After the debate, Dr. Peterson said this about Mr. Fry:

“[I]t was a pleasure sharing the stage with him. I’ve rarely heard anyone ever deliver their convictions with such a remarkable sense of passion and wit and forbearance and erudition — it was really something.”

The U.S. Women’s National Volleyball team is one of 16 teams who are playing in the inaugural  Volleyball Nations League over five weeks this summer. (Preliminary rounds are over. Six teams, including the USA remain and are headed to China for the finals.) Part of my following their play is that I pay attention to a volleyball message board called Volleytalk. Read the rest of this entry »

Since listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve, I’ve been turning to BBC Radio 4 from time to time, usually on weekends. The news that you hear isn’t any more hopeful than what you hear on NPR, but I find the remove from American politics and the dry humor refreshing. This past weekend one of the announcers introduced a program with words along the lines of, “As we get over our disappointment that the American president won’t be visiting us next month, we turn to …”

It’s other programs and voices that I find refreshing.

I’ve discovered that the BBC has its own news quiz, in a somewhat different format though along the lines of NPR’s “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me,” the one NPR show I listen to with any regularity. I’ve only heard two editions of this news quiz, but it’s interesting to hear the British talk about their single-payer health plan and to listen to them discuss so many different politicians. Here, we tend to focus almost exclusively on Mr. Trump (or whichever president is in power). I suspect that power in their government is more diffuse, therefore there are more players.

This weekend on BBC Radio 4, I heard a lovely program about Leonard Cohen’s song, “Hallelujah.” I don’t remember my first exposure to the song, but I remember a particularly heartbreaking moment on The West Wing (Season 3 Finale, “Posse Comitatus”) where the song was featured.

But the piece that I’ve been thinking about the most, though,  was a commentary by Howard Jacobson titled, “The Frozen Wastes of Emojiland.” This is a meditation by Jacobson on dramatic speech and social media.

Jacobson begins his commentary quoting one Julia Holmes who didn’t like what was written on the new £10 note. It was a quote “by” Jane Austen,

“I declare, after all, there is no enjoyment like reading.”

Ms. Holmes thought it “a strange choice.” The problem is that while Jane Austen wrote that, she didn’t really “say” it. The words belong to Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice, who is, according to Jacobson, “a woman of surpassing shallowness.” She is “saying only what she thinks Mr. Darcy would like to hear her say.”

And so Jacobson riffs on the nature of dramatic speech, the words of which “are as true or false as the person speaking them in the context of who they are spoken to and why.” Literature is different from a sermon or tract. Art is different from ideology.

Jane Austen didn’t say, “I declare, after all, there is no enjoyment like reading.” The same think happens with Shakespeare, Jacobson continues. He was “a dramatist not a philosopher.” The aphorisms that we quote actually belong to his characters. One of the most famous is:

“This above all: to thine own self be true
And it must follow, as the night the day
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Sounds like great advice. And it might be. Except that Jacobson points out, rightly, that “authenticity” is only a virtue “if the self in question is worth being true to.” In this case, Shakespeare’s Polonius, from Hamlet, is a gas bag. What does Gertrude in exasperation say to him at one point? “More matter, with less art.”

Jacobson makes two points. One is that we need to recognize dramatic speech.

In my car these days, I am listening to the collected speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” a speech from 18 September 1963, King concluded with,

“Shakespeare had Horatio to say some beautiful words as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet. And today, as I stand over the remains of these beautiful, darling girls, I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare:  Good night, sweet princesses. Good night … And may the flight of angels take thee to thy eternal rest.”

Probably among the least significant things to appreciate about Dr. King is the fact that he recognizes dramatic speech and uses it appropriately. But I do appreciate it.

Years ago I remember struggling with a book by a Christian author. It was one of those “You’ve got to read this” books that people tell you about. The book was saying we need to tell more stories and use less propositional truth. And for a conclusion they turned to the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which the author described as “the most beautiful explanation for the gospel of Jesus ever presented.” The author continues, “In this scene, Juliet may be considered the Bard’s Christ figure, and Romeo the embodiment of the church, thus presenting Shakespeare’s opinion of a Christian conversion experience.”

That, it seems to me, is not the way to recognize dramatic speech. I don’t have a problem with using the love of Romeo and Juliet as an analogy to describe the love between Jesus and the church, but it seems a stretch to say that this was “Shakespeare’s opinion of a Christian conversion experience.” I wish they had left Shakespeare out of it.

The second point Jacobson makes is critical of social media, which “has reduced all discourse to a shout.” He calls this a “thumb up or thumb down culture.” There are some great lines near the end of this commentary, which is worth listening to again (which I have done a couple of times, now):
“Before we attack,” make sure “it’s views that are being expressed.”
“Thought is not an act of war.”
“A joke is not a manifesto.”
“Insults are not conversation.”
“Differences in opinion come in shades.”

I am grateful for radio/listening that forces me to think.