My Take On Jordan Peterson’s 12 Principles of Conservatism

A while ago I made a crack about one of Jordan Peterson’s principles for conservatism on Minds for sounding quite a bit like what socialists might advocate for despite constantly shilling against those who might actually want it. But after some thought, I decided that these precepts are worthy of a broader critique in that they resemble a legitimate premise for a conservative ideology as presented by Jordan Peterson, a man who I’m told likes to shy away from labels.

On that point, I also think it will be a good opportunity to delusion that Peterson is somehow not a right-winger. Now, I’m not one of those people on the leftoid circles who view him as far-right or crypto-fascist, because those labels are simply inappropriate. I simply view him as a conservative or a reactionary (at least a mild reactionary anyway, as opposed to people like Mencius Moldbug). Peterson himself calls himself a “terrified traditionalist”, which to me suggests that he is a social conservative who is fearful of the social changes happening around him. By his own admission, he can’t be anything but right-wing no matter how much he likes to deny it.

Anyway, we will go through the precepts point by point in the order presented via a tweet he put out in which he summarized them for our convenience.

The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid

This on its own is simply not good enough. It’s not simply a matter of the wording (as in, why “valid” as opposed to “necessary”), though without a doubt it does tell me that we have to coddle our cultural assumptions quite a bit if we go down this line, but I think it’s not enough to simply say “they are valid”. Every set of ideas has to be defended on its merits, we have to prove that these ideas have value rather than simply assert them on their own. The advocates of classical liberalism and Jordan Peterson’s conservatism would expect the same of all of their critics, so it is not unreasonable to expect the same of the vision of Western civilization they hold sacrosanct.

More to the point however, what are the fundamental assumptions? And at which point in time. It might surprise Mr. Peterson to learn that the assumptions of what is called Western civilization have never remained the same. For instance, one of the assumptions of contemporary Western society is the intrinsic equality of all human beings (you know, “that all men are created equal” as the American Declaration of Independence says), from which some extrapolate a kind of taxonomic equality (meaning people are all basically equal in terms of constitution and capacity). Did we ever make this collective assumption this before the Enlightenment? Well, that’s not fair really; The Bible did, and it is supposed to be the backbone of Western civilization according to Peterson. For instance, the Bible says in Romans 10:12 that there is no distinction in God’s eyes between the Jew and the Greek, in James 2:9 there is an explicit condemnation of favoritism and in Acts 17:26 God is said to have made all nations from one man, yet the attitudes of society towards social equality of the races have not been historically consistent, especially in America where there is sadly a rather storied history concerning the treatment of the African races, perhaps indicating that we have contradicted the Bible in our assumptions about race in the past, despite the Bible and its teachings being the apparent building blocks of Western civilization. Jesus was even quite socialist in his views considering that in Acts 2:44-45 he describes the fellowship of the believers as holding all things in common domain and distributing resources based on need. Yet, despite this, if you talk to the people who boast of the assumptions of Western civilization, they will likely tell you that socialism is at odds with everything about their conception of Western civilization. Indeed, the West was hardly socialist for much of its history, despite it supposedly being founded on Christianity or the teachings of the Bible. I wonder why that is. I truly find it odd how Christianity came to be associated with right-wing capitalist politics historically.

So, returning to the basic question, what are the assumptions here? Is it the modern assumptions we have? I would think he considers much of our modern agreed upon assumptions to be a little too liberal. Is it the Enlightnment era assumptions, which are really a mix of different philosophical traditions? Is it the assumptions made in the Bible, some of which contradict a lot of conservative ideology? Or is it a very contemporary idealization of Western values that he generated himself? That’s one thing I complain about with Peterson a lot: when you drill into his philosophy you will find he is actually quite vague and wishy-washy about himself. Hell, even in interviews you can see him to be rather vague except on certain issues. As you’ll soon see, this is also a recurring theme throughout his conception of conservatism.

Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy.

There are many ideologies and philosophies that stress peaceful social being as preferable to isolation and war, so this ideology is really not that special in this regard. And again, on what basis is peaceful social being determined? Because this is something that many people are going to disagree on. For instance, some people may view peaceful social being as possible only through relative isolation, as with the Amish communities who largely cut themselves off from modern society. Others view peaceful social being as defined by rigid deference to authority and servility to all people at all times even on a bad day, as is basically Japanese social norms in a nutshell. Some view peaceable social being as defined by primarily tolerance and openness towards outsiders, which is something Peterson himself would associate with the typical liberal mindset. So it is important to define what constitutes the conservative idea of peaceful social being. You can’t just hide that behind sensible-sounding but ultimately vague wording.

The same holds for the second part of this sentence. Which individual impulse and idiosyncrasy is problematic? Hell, defining that probably requires you to define peaceful social being as well. Beyond that though, it is a decent signpost for what conservatism is about: a social order for which you must sacrifice some of your individual being and impulse in order to co-exist with your peers and either ascend or make peace with the dominance hierarchy. Liberals, libertarians and I suppose progressives to some extent, at the very least, wish to minimize this as much as possible, while conservatives try to avoid shedding many historical norms whenever possible. The problem with this is that one of the ways in which progress is measured sometimes consists of what we have gotten past as norms. Slavery as we all know was once considered quite normal, indeed it was once considered part of the fabric of human life, the natural order of things. But we have moved past this, and not entirely for moral reasons either. The basis of the prevalence of slavery was largely economic in nature, as the global slave trade remained a benefactor to regional economies within pre-abolition societies per the conditions they found themselves in. In some parts of the world, women and children sacrifice much of their innocence in accordance with social norms which insist that they ultimately assume a wifely role as soon as possible. We chide their societies for this, of course. Because we have moved past those ideas, and they have not.

Hierarchies of competence are desireable and should be promoted.

Did you know that the classical philosophers of the radical left did not actually assume that hierarchies of competence would be totally done away with per their philosophies? Karl Marx in Critique of the Gotha Program describes what he refers to as a lower phase of communism as having accounted for the fact that humans are not all equal in ability, capacity, talent or will. Friedrich Engels similarly demolishes the liberal assumptions of intrinsic egalitarianism embodied by those of Herr Duhring in a chapter of his book Anti-Duhring by pointing out that humans are not inherently equal in will and capacity. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the father of mutualism and the grandfather of anarchism (and also, in my opinion, one of the earliest examples of a libertarian philosopher), stated to have said “the superior worker, who understands and executes faster than another, and who turns out more products of better quality, will receive a larger reward” and in The Principle of Federation he even spoke of hierarchy itself as a principle found in nature. These were some of the most important figures of socialism, and they were not hyper-egalitarians who assumed that everyone possessed some kind of taxonomic equality. What they wanted, however, was equality of power, that is to say they wanted the worker to have democratic control over the workplace, of the means of production etc. But you’ll never hear this from Jordan Peterson in any of his descriptions of radical left political philosophy.

As to the main point itself, this is yet another area where the basis of competence is to be established, or that matter the basis or shape of the hierarchy. There are several ways to manifest such hierarchies, even within cooperative or collective enterprises. So, really, what do you want? More to the point, as I see it, hierarchies do not necessarily have an intrinsic moral value any more than any other social construct. They are created in response to material conditions and needs. For the earliest parts of our history as a species we did not live under hierarchical relations, but instead lived under hunter-gatherer societies, which were comparatively egalitarian. This mode of organization suited the conditions of the time: a time when man had not discovered its capacity or the resources for agriculture and thus was forced to wonder the environment in search of nourishment and other resources. It was only after the discovery of agriculture that societies began to settle, and we needed to figure out how to distribute the resources, and so hierarchical relations were born. This, in addition to lacking the infrastructure and resources conducive to a more socialist mode of organization until relatively recently, is why they were considered desirable during our history. As material conditions change, you will eventually see the desirability of many of the old and currently established hierarchical modes of organization change with them, much like we went from feudalism to capitalism. But, the appeal of said hierarchical structures has also been greatly socialized over the years, through many philosophical ideas such as the feudalist conception of the “great chain of being”, which underpinned the medieval European societies at the time.

Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of countries that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.

This is really three points in one, and the first two can honestly be treated, once again, with an “on what basis?” question. As in, what is the basis for the reasonability of borders? What scopes of limitations are necessary, and why? This is not to be construed with a pro-open borders stance, but rather a simple call for a more concrete proposal rather than a wishy-washy pretense of common sense that seems purposefully designed to avoid giving away what you actually mean. Also, if you support limits to immigration, whatever your basis and scope is for it, and free market capitalism at the same time, you are going to run into contradictions because one of the major bases for free market capitalism is freedom of movement: that is, the free movement of immigrants across borders, and from there the free flow of capital and labor between countries so as to accumulate profit for private entities. At some point, you have to make the choice as to which is more valuable – capital or the nation state? If you’re a libertarian, you also have to contend with the problem that Murray Rothbard pointed out of how this means the state becomes the sole director of property, which is inescapably problematic to libertarian philosophy.

The third point, however, is more interesting. Essentially he is saying that you cannot expect people who are not from Western countries (or countries that have adopted similar societal bases to Western countries) cannot hold the same values as Western cultures, which seems similar enough to the way ethno-nationalists talk about immigration that lead me to think Peterson is being entirely disingenuous whenever he tries to say he isn’t right wing. There is the assumption that people cannot accept our shared values because they don’t even come from the same background as us. This ignores the fact that values simply aren’t embedded in people as a general rule, but are in fact socialized, as is social behavior in general. In fact, let me put it rather bluntly: the fact that there are people out there, all over the world, who adopt the behaviors of an animal from a young because they spent their developing years among animal families instead of human ones is enough to convince me that what we call human behavior is very much socialized. The norms and ideas we cling to are not magical constructs: without the socialization of the behaviors and values we take for granted, we would not be much more than base animals. Therefore it stands to reason that people of other societies could possibly be socialized into accepting our values. Indeed, I think many of my country’s problems relating to Islamic populations stem from either the fact that we do not socialize many migrants enough into our values system or the fact that they will always be counter-socialized to the attitudes of their own more insular communities.

Incidentally, by the way, the kongsi federations/republics of Borneo, such as the Lanfang Republic, were established in the 18th century by Chinese settlers, and they were highly democratic compared to other societies to the point that the United States of America is one of the few comparisons you can draw. As far as I know, this developed outside of the influence of European powers, in fact the kongsi republics only lasted a short while before they were disbanded by invading Dutch merchant powers. Kind of makes you think.

People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties.

This precept is very much a product of the capitalist mindset, and may also tie into Peterson’s own Christian morality to some extent. The underlying assumption is that people are selfish enough that they will only perform socially useful and desirable duties if they are granted monetary compensation. It is thus implicitly assumed that humans cannot operate in any other manner economically. Of course, this assumption is demolished by the existence of cooperatives, which are organizations run democratically by the workforce and do not necessarily operate in the interest of profit first. These organizations have been shown to be more efficient than the private enterprise model, but they remain unable to compete with private business because of the material conditions they operate in under capitalism. It is very clearly possible that other modes of economic operation are possible, but we are largely socialized into thinking otherwise.

I would like to explore the point of selfishness further for a bit here, as there is a point I think is worth considering. Supporters of capitalism point to rational self-interest as a moral justification for those that simply accumulate wealth, for the owning class operating as it does, yet, if we think about it honestly, once a member of the proletariat attains class consciousness and realizes what happens under capitalism for his class, is it not entirely within his own rational self-interest to resist the exploitative nature of the system and seek the reconstruction of the economic basis of society? After all, if it is the bourgeoisie who benefit more than he does within the system, it would certainly seem to him that there is no much benefit to be gained for him within the remit of the current system, thus he must in accordance with his self-interest against the system.

Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labour

And this is actually the thing I made fun of in a Minds post earlier. Not because of the content by any means, but because Jordan Peterson, the same guy who constantly shills against socialism and the radical left and blames all of our problems on Marxists (or “neo-Marxists” or some such sophistry), is actually advocating for a socialist/Marxist idea here. Think about it: one of the main reasons we find capitalism to be a largely exploitative force is because as the boss/holy job creator hires you out for your labor, he/she profits off of it, which means some of the money you might otherwise attain for your labor is subtracted from you. This is what we identify as a result of the capitalist system of wage labor. Though I suspect he might not have meant it in that way.

It’s funny though, he reminds me of one of Richard Wolff’s lectures (by the way you should definitely check out Richard Wolff’s ideas) where he talks about cooperatives and how, often times, they are started out not by people who are already committed to socialist ideals but by people who hate their old jobs, quit and then decide to form a collaborative enterprise between themselves and set their own rules. Wolff then describes meeting some of these people to tell them that they were actually enacting a form of socialist enterprise as opposed to a capitalist one, and the people find themselves quite shocked to hear that because, oddly enough, they were conservatives. Even more amusing, Abraham Lincoln, one of the Republican Party’s most celebrated presidents, said in an annual address in 1861, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration”. So it’s funny how you often find conservatives who are arguably crypto-Marxists in their thinking, yet it is the liberals who are supposed to crypto-Marxists infiltrating your universities and turning your kids into communists, as Peterson say. Now if only those conservatives would come around…

It is more noble to teach people about responsibilities than about rights

I honestly believe this is a product of his general sentiment of antipathy towards the idea that people can change society by demanding rights from it through protest. As in, he outright said years ago that he thought it was pointless and served no purpose. One wonders what would have happened if the civil rights movement of the 1960’s heeded his advice and focused more on being responsible to a society that they saw as profoundly unjust towards them. This is in many ways one of the errors of Peterson’s philosophy of life: it paralyzes the individual as an actor within society by having them focus on upholding ones’ duties to a static notion of society as well as being too inwardly focused to actually change the world (as evidenced by his sentiment that you should not try to change the world unless you “set your house in perfect order”). It is perhaps the product of, ironically enough, a kind of individualism that negates any social externalities that might justify actually changing society. If the radical right followed his advice, they’d be stuck with the society they hate because they’d be too busy sorting themselves out (and, by God, judging from a lot of the actors within the radical right there seem to be many things in need of sorting out), but Peterson would probably endorse a few of them anyway because they are necessary to pushing back the liberal marketable society he opposes.

I would argue, instead, that we do away with the dichotomy and teach both responsibilities and rights, along with teaching class consciousness so as to slowly awaken the mass progressive force of the proletariat before the collapse of capitalism happens. But, alas, I might not get my way.

It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise

Now you see that Peterson is essentially a social conservative, and the pretense that he is not a social conservative is simply that: a pretense. His ideal is that we do “what everyone has always done”, in essence he asks that we conform to society, or rather his conception of it. The main problem here is obvious: society is an eternally changing construct. There is no conception of what we have always done that hasn’t radically changed over the millennia. Going back to slavery, if we followed Peterson’s advice then the abolitionists would have largely just done what everyone else has always done, which was to own slaves. And before abolition, slavery as I said before was indeed a fabric of ordinary life for the middle and upper classes, so it was considered quite normal to the point that seemingly everyone did and, indeed, always did it. Democracy as we know it is fairly recent. For thousands of years, we have almost always organized society by the rule of the one or the few over the many without any democratic say.

Indeed, the idea of “what has always been done” tends to be pretty socialized when you think about it, for a lot of the behaviors we want people to perform are socialized (as I’ve explained earlier). People have not simply always done things the way we did them in the 1950’s or something. Without socialization to some extent those behaviors would not be prevalent within society. The idea that we’ve always done them is pretty much just a device by which we ingrain desired behaviors into the minds of people.

Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change

Without the French Revolution, the classical liberalism that Peterson uses as a shield for his social conservatism would not have overtaken the aristocratic regimes of Europe. Without the overthrow of the Roman monarchy in 509 BC, we would not have the Roman Republic and with it much of the foundations of what we base Western civilizational values on. Had America not waged revolutionary war against the British, we would not have the United States of America as we know it to begin with. This shows a profound error of Peterson’s philosophy, and indeed the error many liberals and conservatives when they denounce radical change. They fear any kind of radicalism, denounce it as a moral and political evil, but without it they would not have any of the constructions they take for granted today. I mean fuck it, this guy doesn’t like protests much so I guess we can throw in the civil rights movement to some extent too: without that, non-whites would be treated rather differently in America, and they would probably not be treated in a way Peterson would find favorable to him. Before the American Civil War, or perhaps before the British emancipation, the abolition of slavery was a radical position, and those who agitated against slavery occupied the fringes, but had they not pursued the kind of change they sought, we might not have abolished slavery and we might not have exiled slavery as a way of life in the West both legally and morally.

And frankly, to say that we should denounce radical change in a time of radical change - that is, when the situation calls for it - is one of the most naive philosophical statements you can think of from him. It is pure fear of revolutionary activity overtaking even common sense because of the simple observation that, when the conditions invite a society into the arms of revolt, you cannot stop them with bourgeois appeals to temperance. If one desires a radical new mode of political organization, then, at some point, revolution often does become an option. This idea that we should just avoid radicalism is nothing more than moral and political paralysis. Particularly now when we are slowly entering into a set of material conditions that the liberal democratic consensus is not equipped to handle. Frankly, I’m convinced that even reactionaries would prefer to see revolution in their country than put up with a few more generations of what they see as liberalism gone mad. Now, as a socialist, I will say that we are probably not in the phase when we need revolution just yet. But what I do say is that, at some point, reform can only work for so long, or be held back for so long, that it will eventually become necessary.

By the way, the primary philosophical argument he presents against those who wish even to simply protest against the structures of society at large is that such desire is supposedly illegitimate if you can’t even “clean your own room”, or “set your house in perfect order. The irony here is that Nietzsche, who I’ve heard is one of his favorite philosophers, if he were alive today, he would think he was full of shit. He said in Kritische Studienausgabe, “There is a false saying: “How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”. This seems to suggest Nietzsche thought that you don’t need to “save” yourself in order to save the world, which is of course in direct contradiction to what Peterson likes to tell people.

The government, local and distal, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible

Now this is probably the most agreeable precept I can see here. I prefer a decentralized mode of governance that doesn’t try too much to direct the public to its whims. That said, in a more federated, decentralized system, it is probable to imagine that, for the democratic system to work, it might be necessary for the agents of such polity to be somewhat more involved with the local communities and close to their actual needs. This not need to mean that we have our elected represented. A major problem with modern democracies is that the state is alienated from the needs and wants of the people, and thus fails to represent the people adequately and instead inevitably gravitates towards the ruling class. I personally am a fan of participatory democracy as opposed to the kind of democracy we have now, and favor of ideas such the Popular Congress or the All-Industrial Congress as alternatives to parliamentary democracy and the US system. The latter is a system proposed by DeLeonists in which the worker is represented not by senators and congressmen but the functional representatives of industrial constituencies, voted in by the workforce and recallable whenever necessary. I have no reason to believe it will produce the maladies of the kind of nanny state government Peterson might be talking about here, and in fact the main intent of the All Industrial Congress is to negate the threat of bureaucratic usurpation of the will of the people.

Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity

I assume he is talking about the nuclear family here, so I will start by pointing out that human civilization has been around for thousands of years and the nuclear family did not always enter the picture, let alone in the beginning. What we know call the nuclear family become prevalent with the industrial stage of the British economy, where the material conditions emanating from rapid industrialization influenced the growth of the nuclear family, which was also socialized by the church. However, it is said to have originated within the medieval period in Northwestern Europe during the 14th century. I should note that this is not me opposing the concept of a nuclear family, rather it is me saying that, as with pretty much everything else, there are material reasons for the emergence of the social norms we take for granted. And, more to the point, given that we don’t have much in the way of evidence for the prevalence of the nuclear family before the 14th century, how do we know that all the societies that came before lacked stable polity? Not to mention, these are social norms you’re talking about. Stability comes from a material source, not an ideal one. We can easily observe that it is not simply laws and codes that establish stability, but the willingness to enforce them, to support them with the threat of force for violating them. But even then, it is silly to reduce the stability of a polity to simply a social construct, or even to force necessarily, and therein lies the problem with Peterson’s thinking here, in that it is quite reductionist. It is the product of society having had a predominance of nuclear family structures for hundreds of years and the idea of having it as the basis of a society being socialized for so long.

We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias.

It is ironic that Peterson thinks of Marxists as the most arrogant people on Earth when really it’s him. He positions conservatism as the only political ideology that bases its assumptions on systems that operate outside of it, when in reality many people try to do the same, all the time. He also assumes anything that hasn’t yet been realized must be a utopia. It’s the kind of bullshit Thomas Sowell spews regarding the two visions, the constrained and the unconstrained, through which he positions conservatism as the realist position and liberalism as the utopian vision. It’s just a framing device positioned under the guise of common sense political advice.

It is bitterly ironic that Jordan Peterson is presented as anti-establishmentarian philosopher purely because of liberal marketable society when, in reality, the philosophy outlined in his principles of conservatism is a call for us to simply preserve what we have, what we have been taught for generations, and to reject anything that might overturn this. His philosophy is the paralysis of the individual, for it asks him not to change society and instead constantly check himself to see that your house is in perfect order (while simultaneously opposing those who tell you to check your privilege before speaking out against them). But beyond all that, it is such a milquetoast and wishy-washy worldview doesn’t to appeal to common sense, which is really all conservatism exists to do: oppose radical change by appealing to our constructions of common sense with bourgeois idealism. I say idealism, because it neglects material externalities in its assessment of the way societies and people operate. And yet he calls his opponents utopians.