131. UNWELCOME VISITORS - When Jordan Peterson Came to Michaela
I usually regret about 99% of the tweets I send. The reason is always the same: did I need to share that thought with the world? Especially when it’s a thought I haven’t really thought through. An initial knee-jerk reaction to something that I immediately got on my phone and sent off a random instinctive grunt about rather than a fully-formed idea. Philosophy is, famously, in the words of John Campbell, ‘thinking in slow motion’. Twitter, famously, is not. It is the exact opposite - speaking often so quickly you didn’t think at all. But even I took pause the other week when I saw my timeline filled with outrage that the controversial Michaela School in London, whose Head Teacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, is also chair of the government’s Social Mobility Commission, appeared to have invited infamous misogynist, culture warrior, and all round right-wing conspiracy theorist, Jordan Peterson, for a visit.
Like everyone else on my timeline, I felt disgusted at the thought of this legitimate child-safety concern being welcomed into a place of learning with vulnerable young children and being free to share his so-called ‘philosophy’. Certainly in schools where I have worked, students have expressed questionable ideas explicitly influenced by Peterson which can border towards potentially dangerous incel-like behaviours. The very same incel culture which schools have been specifically told to combat as part of their safeguarding work. Peterson is the public thinker most cited to me by my most troubling students defending some pretty vile ideas. That Peterson was welcomed to Michaela seemed a violation of some sort of trust. The very boogeyman from the terrible YouTube videos that are corrupting some of our students’ minds had jumped straight out of the screen and directly into their real-life corridors. I was outraged too. But…
…As my fingers hovered over my keyboard to join in the pile-on, I also remembered that I, myself, was due to speak at a school in Winchester in a few days time. Unlike Peterson, I am not a prophet of hate, spewing bitter bile and weaponising male alienation. But I am, as a philosopher speaking about anarchism, someone you could perhaps also call ‘extreme’. I was, after all, going to this school to explain to students why I believed we might be better off without a government. To advocate for - as the title of my talk billboarded it - ‘the possibilities of anarchism’. Now I know - and those who have actually read my work or heard me talk before know - that the sort of anarchism I advocate for is not the caricature of bomb-throwing terrorists calling for violent revolution. In fact, as I make disappointingly obvious every time I speak or write about anarchism - the prefigurative nature of anarchism means that if we want a world without violence, and believe governments cause violence, then one of the main things we wouldn’t want to do in bringing about a better world would be reproducing the very violence and coercion which we are supposed to be resisting. Revolution would have to be evolution. Slow, gradual, non-coercive, peaceful changes over a long period of time. Generations. I will never have a world without government in my lifetime (though I can work towards that ultimate goal and find temporary autonomous zones and pockets of anarchy within the authoritarian structures that exist). But you’d have to know me to know that. For many, they just hear the word ‘anarchy’ or ‘anarchism’ and imagine the molotov cocktails and riots. If you think someone is coming to your school to talk about that, to tell your children to break the law and smash the state, then you might be just as wary as someone like me coming to speak to your children as I - and my Twitter timeline - were about someone like Peterson.
From my own point of view, obviously, I do not in any way think a visit from myself or a visit from Peterson have equivalency. I think that Peterson has a demonstrable history of spreading specific ideas which have a proven potential to be dangerous, connecting him to a growing violent movement. His popularity, and adoption by certain people, means giving him further amplification serves as a possible endorsement of his message, and his very presence in a school setting sends a visual image to the world that normalises and makes acceptable his problematic brand anti-feminist thought. Meanwhile, I am just someone who is unpacking some fairly common ideas about democracy from the history of political thought and taking them to their logical conclusion in a way that develops students’ critical thinking skills. However - I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’m sure Peterson could say something similar in defence of his own controversial views and then throw back to me that letting any anarchist into a school could be a gateway to students exploring anarchist ideas in general and then getting sucked in to more violent and dangerous iterations of anarchism that certainly do exist.
This is the problem with controversial ideas of any stripe - critics will always perceive them as dangerous and problematic and those who hold them will have their reasons for doing so; reasons they believe are perfectly legitimate, maybe even good.
This is why we have academic freedom. While I completely disagree with Peterson’s ideas, and think he does not need more airtime with impressionable children than he is already getting online, I also believe that even the worst ideas have a right to be explored, and even advocated for. Mainly because I think it is only in an environment of such freedom that bad ideas like Peterson’s can be exposed and ultimately rejected. Academic freedom should mean that bad ideas are aired alongside good ones and the better ones survive the scrutiny and the bad ideas fall into obscurity. But it also, importantly, it means accepting that we cannot get to the ‘good’ ideas by predetermining the ‘bad’ ones and forbidding them or discouraging them from forming ahead of time. Once we set parameters on what is and isn’t worth thinking about - what is and isn’t acceptable - we never know what we might be missing out on. Moving away from the extremes of political discourse, we don’t just need academic freedom to explore controversial ideas, we need it also to explore seemingly pointless things. Things that no one can see the value of until suddenly the value becomes clear, maybe even necessary. The research that no one understand which then becomes a key ingredient to solving a future engineering problem, or the core component of an urgently required vaccine for a new pandemic. Which is not to say that every seemingly pointless piece of research will be one day vindicated. Some seeming wastes of time will just end up being a waste of time. But, crucially, it is only within that academically free environment of potential waste which allows those weird, outsider, and one day necessary ideas to bloom. For every twenty useless research projects, perhaps there is one which will one day have great social value. Even if it is one from every one hundred, the wastage is necessary to yield the crop of good ideas we ultimately need. And this includes theoretical wastage too. I don’t agree with Peterson and don’t think he’s a very smart thinker, but he is a necessary byproduct of the academic freedom which allows those thinkers I do think are smart to emerge and, ultimately, prove him wrong. Anarchism, too, might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but the study of the possibility of a world without the state emerges only from the academic freedom to ask questions about the state systems in which we live. Necessary questions and, yes, some not so necessary ones. And anarchist responses to those questions may ultimately prove useless or, they might one day, many years from now, be the things that save us, helping humanity find a path forward. The point is (and it is a very anarchist point to make) there can’t be any overarching arbiter of what is and isn’t worth researching who will not show bias and therefore potentially shut off fruitful avenues of research and discourse if given the right to determine what is and isn’t academically acceptable. Hence advocating for academic freedom removes the idea of authoritarian arbiters and leaves decisions about the fruitfulness of research and discourse to the discourse itself: ideas are formed, ideas are shared, and ideas sink or swim (or sometimes sink and find themselves later rescued, revivified and resuscitated with subsequent insights that transform our understanding) based on their ability to withstand criticism and respond successfully to objections.
I am currently writing a paper about how such ideas about academic freedom are fairly standard in higher education (although academic freedom remains always seemingly under threat there), yet without any similar ideas about academic freedom at the prior stages of secondary and maybe even primary schooling, how are we to ever expect society to protect academic freedom at the later stages of university education? Academic freedom is something only professional academics really talk about and understand, yet for it to exist academic freedom requires the funding and the sympathy of an entire population. That population, however, is not taught the value of academic freedom at school. In fact, quite the opposite, with the Peterson visit being an example. We are so limiting and protective of what ideas we expose children to at school that of course they grow up not being able to comprehend the concept that there will be people out there spreading terrible ideas they disagree with, but that it’s ok. That it is only by allowing the bile and the excrement that we can ultimately purge the bad and produce healthy thinking. That waste is a natural and necessary part of a healthy life. That the aim isn’t to sit passively and let people spew their ideas into young and impressionable minds, but to get those young and impressionable minds adept at questioning and critiquing what people attempt to tell them.
When I gave my talk on anarchism, it was not with the intention to convert a classroom of students into my way of thinking. It was to lay out my vulnerable position and take their questions. The Q&A was longer than the talk as the questions kept on coming long after the formal end of the session. And every question contained a skepticism to the ideas I had presented. Doubt. Rejection. Critique. And while I hope I answered them all satisfactorily, each question - importantly - made me think a lot too. I am not there to proselytise about anarchism, but to share an idea and see if I’m wrong about it. The discussion helps me gain greater clarity in my own thinking and - yes, it exposes students to some thoughts they may not have had before - but it also gets them thinking about why they might disagree with what I say as much as they might agree with it.
A healthy diet of all sorts of interesting and, yes, controversial ideas with an opportunity to scrutinise and critique those ideas can only be a good thing for young minds if we want them to grow up independently thinking and able to defend themselves against the rhetoric of demagogues. Let Jordan Peterson spew his nonsense in public, rather than from the cowardly comfort of a video online, and let the students poke holes in his arguments and find the problems in what he says. Let the anarchist come in and spout his nonsense about a world without government and show him why you think it wouldn’t work. Bring your best ideas, and your worst ones, and let them get an airing so long as they also get a chance for scrutiny; a chance to be rejected.
Because unless schools do this, it not only has a knock-on affect to important things like academic freedom at later stages of education, but the children we think we are protecting are left with the internet still exposing them to the same controversial ideas we think we are protecting them from, but without the resources to critique them. With videos they cannot ask questions to and algorithms showing them more and more of the same thing - a self-supporting echo-chamber free from the disruption of insightful questions and exposed contradictions. Just a one-sided barrage of indoctrination that paints the world in a single black and white narrative of right and wrong - us vs them.
The problem with Birbalsingh letting Peterson visit the Michaela School wasn’t that it was Jordan Peterson, but that the very ethos of the Michaela School is one of deference and not speaking back to authority. Peterson wasn’t there to get grilled and put his ideas up to scrutiny - he was there in ‘the strictest school in Britain’ for a photo-opportunity which both he and Birbalsingh knew would ‘trigger’ liberals opposed to both Peterson and the whole Michaela project and therefore ‘troll’ them with the apparent meeting of two much-disliked minds. He spoke only to pupils, in Birbalsingh’s own words, who were ‘clever, careful, polite’ students. Careful about what? Polite by not rocking the boat with any difficult questions? This was not about education or academic freedom, it was about intentional provocation. That said, even then, I would much rather students had Jordan Peterson in their classroom, where they could push back against what he is saying, ask him questions, and cite other thinkers who disagree with him, than having those same ideas as merely a hateful video on their private screens, whispering seductively and repeatedly into their ears without fear of interruption.
Preventing our students from developing passive acceptance of everything they are told is the only truly effective way of preventing ‘extremism’ and preventing young people getting into dangerous and potentially violent ideologies. We should have more unwelcome visitors to our schools, not fewer. More opportunities for students to ask questions and poke holes. More academic freedom to develop an enduring culture of critique and scrutiny so that ideas are never accepted without a fight. If we are worried about the young and impressionable minds of our students, it’s time that we stopped them being so impressionable. I worry about young and impressionable minds being exposed to Jordan Peterson, but young and critical minds will tear his bad ideas - and others’ - to pieces.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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