I think my TV is broken

I've been talking with people recently about the increasing popularity of ‘long-form’ internet chat shows and wondering: 

a) why this is happening and 

b) why so much of the really interesting political and philosophical content is being produced in America. As far as I can tell, there are very few British equivalents (although I’d be delighted if someone pointed me towards something which would disprove that assertion).

I'm not sure why this seems to be the case, but there are, I think, a couple of ‘broad brushstroke’ observations that could be made. Perhaps because of the way the nation had to win its independence, the American psyche seems more readily tuned to notions of intellectual freedom, particularly to ideas that might, broadly speaking, be described as iconoclastic and /or libertarian (although I realise that these days that, in itself, might be seen by some as a pejorative term). Americans have a positive concept of citizenship which –generally speaking- makes them less inclined to trust centralised authority. 

By contrast, many British folk see themselves as subjects. Our psyche seems more readily tuned to deference and I think this applies as much to institutions and political parties as it does to class. Perhaps as a result of the conditions which prevailed during and after World War 2, our political discourse seems more likely to be framed within implicitly statist concepts and notions. Indeed, some of these have become such articles of faith that many folk appear to be unaware that there might be other ways of thinking about them. To take two obvious examples: Start a thread on any social network questioning the sheer wonderfulness of either the NHS and /or the BBC and you’ll soon encounter something very close to cult-like behaviour (by that, I mean an unwillingness to consider the possibility of any deviation from received views).

I only have an outsider’s superficial grasp of American mainstream media, so I won’t comment on the failings which are causing people on that side of the Atlantic to look elsewhere for nourishment. In the UK, the mainstream channels persist with the pretence of impartiality, a notion that permeates a lot of news content like a bad smell. Just occasionally, political debate ‘red in tooth and claw’ is allowed to break out, but generally speaking, the quality of discourse is dismally shallow.

It is inevitable, once consumers start noticing this, that some will decide to shop around. The popularity of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ has come about because people are rejecting the orthodoxies and pieties of the mainstream media, demanding instead content which treats them like adults and which recognises that every story contains degrees of nuance. They want discussion that isn’t stale and managed; they want debate which doesn’t banish some topics to the realm of the forbidden.

With the mainstream media unwilling or unable to provide such a service, some consumers will naturally flock to platforms which allow real conversations, unmediated by spin, to take place between real people. The popularity of these alternative outlets is evidence that there is, after all, an appetite for serious discussion about complicated ideas.

But don't expect mainstream journalists to do anything about it. They haven’t even noticed that the television might be broken.

Take the Red Pill

If there is anyone out there who still hasn’t watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with the Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson, I would strongly recommend that you check out what was a wonderfully illuminating piece of television. I found it riveting, but I’m not sure if that was in spite of -or because of- the interviewer’s insistence on trying to put words into her interviewee’s mouth at almost every turn. If you try counting the number of times she says “so what you’re saying is …” before inserting a ridiculously skewed interpretation of what he has actually said, you will need all of your fingers and some of your toes. It is evident that ‘listening’ and ‘responding to what the other person has actually said’ were not part of Ms Newman’s game plan.   

Some have argued that it was her job to challenge Peterson and not to just nod in agreement with whatever he was saying. This is a fair point and, if Channel 4 News applied that principle across the board, it would certainly present itself as a more balanced source of information. Peterson may not be right about everything, but even when he's wrong, he has reached his position because he has at least considered the available evidence. But, in an age in which feelings appear to trump reason, he is regularly libelled as a neo-Nazi, slave-trading, baby-eating agent of the patriarchy, or something.

Ms Newman’s lazy assumption was that her guest was an ‘alt-right' misogynist provocateur. Her researchers (I’m assuming she will have had some help) must be pretty dim if they thought that some back-of-a-fag-packet observations on this man’s significant academic oeuvre would cause him to recant his views. Mainstream news outlets regularly claim moral superiority over so-called 'fake news' sources, so examples of this kind of shoddy practice deserve to be highlighted and ridiculed.

There is a sense in which the exchange also illustrated what can happen to polite discourse once certain difficult topics are declared ‘off-limits’. Perfectly reasonable people who might, under normal circumstances, be prepared to discuss those difficult topics, start to retreat from debate. Once you’ve witnessed some poor sod raise his head above the parapet only to be monstered as a misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe (they’re all the same thing), it makes sense to keep your opinions to yourself. But people who shout those magic ‘shut-down’ words to dismiss their opponents eventually lose the ability to argue. And, when they come up against someone who won’t shut up and won’t back down, someone prepared to use logic and reason to make their points, the shouters have nowhere else to go. They don’t have the tools to argue because they’ve never had to do it; once their magic words lose potency, shouters are stuck in a very deep hole.   

I have been following Jordan Peterson’s work since his experiences at Toronto University dragged him into what -for shorthand purposes- I'll call the 'cultural debate'. During that time, he has conducted himself with dignity and intelligence. He has had exactly this kind of discussion many, many times and is way too smart to be intimidated by folk who, rather than listen, choose to project their own ‘evil Nazi’ fantasies onto him simply because he doesn’t share their worldview.
His critics, generally speaking, don't want (or are not equipped) to refute his arguments. Their standard approach is:

1) Try the magic words, like misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe.

When that doesn’t work,
2) Adopt the 'straw man' approach (like Cathy Newman) by deliberately misinterpreting his arguments ("so ... you're saying that all women are stupid?").

When these tactics fail (and they always do), resort to:
3) Playing the 'victim' card.

On youtube, the average Channel 4 News interview gets a few thousand hits. On big stories, the numbers might head somewhere north of 100,000. The Newman-Peterson interview, at the time of writing, has had more than six million views. Once it went viral, Channel 4 announced that it had consulted ‘security experts’ (but curiously, not the police) because of ‘vile misogynist abuse’ received by their presenter. With the help of their ideological allies in the press, they attempted to switch the narrative from ‘hectoring presenter embarrasses herself with civilised professor’ to ‘female presenter bullied and exposed to vile misogynist abuse’ from Peterson’s so-called ‘army of trolls’. Make of that what you will. As a fan of his work, I’d be more inclined to thank Ms Newman for handing him such an epic victory.

However one chooses to interpret the interview, it feels like something significant may be happening.
It’s not unusual for the younger generation to rebel against what is on offer from the world created by their parents and, when I listen to the kind of conversations that are going on, when I check out some of the podcasts, I get the sense that a cultural shift may be taking place. Jordan Peterson appears to have connected with a young audience in search of authentic meaning, an audience that suspects it could get a better deal than the one they’ve been told is the only one on the table. We assume that young people need their information delivered in bite-sized chunks, yet many of them clearly have the appetite to absorb long and deep discussions about complicated political and philosophical ideas.        
(To take one example, Joe Rogan’s podcast with Petersen and Professor Brett Weinstein lasts for 2 hours 45 minutes and has been watched by 3 million people).

Some young people seem to have worked out that television and newspapers aren’t going to help them. Why trust a tired medium in which demonstrably partial people have set themselves up as the entitled gatekeepers of information?
They seem to have worked out that, by and large, teachers and college professors aren’t going to help them. Why trust a profession in which the intellectual gene pool is so dismally shallow? Lots of young people understand that when someone is in favour of every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity, that person is more of an indoctrinator than an educator.   

When critics point out that Peterson’s message is not exactly 'new', they overlook an obvious point: To many young folk, what he’s saying seems new because, generally speaking, they will have been taught by people who adhere to the dead-end ideas of post-modern cultural relativism. And the people who taught those people will, generally speaking, have been taught by people who also adhered to those ideas. And the people who taught those people … you get my drift.

In the science fiction film ‘The Matrix’, the rebel leader Morpheus offers the main character Neo a choice between two pills: red or blue.

"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

The hero must choose between the convenient falsehoods maintained by the blue pill and the inconvenient truths revealed by the red.

Having been trained to react to cultural relativism’s trigger words, drilled to respond to the poisonous diktats of identity politics, young people are now being 'red-pilled' by Jordan Peterson. If we are to avoid hurtling towards a nightmare post-dialogue age wherein 'right' and 'left' are literally unable to communicate with each other, I can't think of a more important job or, indeed, a better man to do it.

If you haven't watched it, here's the interview.