Pinker pred anđelima bolje prirode

The result is a warped vision in which those who do not partake in the benefits of progress are simply not seeing things as they should and any politics based on them would not be “evidence-based” and thus flawed. In the heydays of Stalinism, such considerations where denounced as ‘subjectivism’—and so, it seems, under high neoliberalism.

So the story basically comes from the scheduled debate between Douglas Lain and Jordan Peterson. Obviously that debate never happened, Peterson dropped out at the last minute with no explanation. When he was finally pushed into giving an answer, it basically amounted to “Douglas Lain isn’t famous enough for me” but he still kept on going around saying that no Marxists would debate him. Being greatly annoyed by this, we decided we’d host a debate between Peterson and a Marxist of a relatable popularity. We eventually ended up securing Richard Wolff who is easily as popular as Peterson and one of the most prominent Marxists in academia and the world. We had the conference date set and were in the midst of securing funding when we contacted Peterson in order to secure his attendance. We were informed by his agent that he would not be able to attend on the days we had selected due to him being busy. That’s actually not a huge thing, we selected a date in October and this was early July so we could maybe reschedule. We were also informed his minimum speaking fee was 50 thousand dollars. To put it shortly, that’s more than any of us make in a year, a damn shade more than we could ever get funding for, and just a frankly ludicrous amount to demand. To underscore this, if we decided to hire him, we’d be paying him to come and defend his own reputation on a day that was not of our choosing and now he wanted 50 thousand dollars just for that. We were not demanding he do it for free, Wolff has agreed to speak for five thousand and so we were planning on offering him the same since that seemed more than fair. However, we simply couldn’t afford the new amount and we decided we shouldn’t have to negotiate with some right-wing pseudo-intellectual just to be able to debate him so instead we reorganized the conference around responding to him as a thinker and used the extra money to hire more speakers and to allow more people to be able to present there own works on him. Tl;dr: Lobster Daddy wouldn’t debate us unless we payed him so instead we’re just critiquing him.

It’s telling that a Nietzschean conservative like Peterson would have such an easy time praising a seemingly wishy-washy, quant-liberal like Pinker. What they share is a fundamental rejection of activist politics and the worldview of resentment that they see underwriting it. What they share too is high praise for humility, and a constant invocation of human limits — both epistemic and moral.

But this odd bromance is more than a one-off peculiarity. It is indicative of a long-standing tendency of liberals and authoritarian reactionaries to embrace one another in times of political upheaval. Pinker voices the standard liberal reservations about Peterson, especially his faith-based philosophy and anti-humanism. At the same time, he is quick to defend Peterson against critics on the Left. What they share is a primal fear, not of elitist hierarchy, but instead of rabid populism from below.