Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson?

When a British interviewer tried to shut him up, I knew he had something interesting to say.

.. Mr. Peterson is called “controversial” because he has been critical, as an academic, of various forms of the rising authoritarianism of the moment—from identity politics to cultural appropriation to white privilege and postmodern feminism. He has refused to address or refer to transgendered people by the pronouns “zhe” and “zher.” He has opposed governmental edicts in his native Canada that aim, perhaps honestly, at inclusion, but in practice limit views, thoughts and speech. 
..  scholarly respect for the stories and insights into human behavior—into the meaning of things—in the Old and New Testaments. (He’d like more attention paid to the Old.) Their stories exist for a reason, he says, and have lasted for a reason: They are powerful indicators of reality, and their great figures point to pathways. He respects the great thinkers of the West and the Christian tradition.
.. Mr. Peterson states clearly more than once that grasping at political ideology is not the answer when your life goes wrong. There’s no refuge there, it’s a way of avoiding the real problem: “Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”
.. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits.” Drugs, drinking, not showing up, hanging around with friends who are looking to lose, who have no hopes for themselves or you. “Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated,” he writes. “Surround yourself with people who support your upward aim.”
.. “It is true that many adults who abuse children were themselves abused. It is also true the majority of people who were abused as children do not abuse their own children.”
.. When people, especially those in a position of authority, like broadcasters, try so hard to shut a writer up, that writer must have something to say.

When cultural arbiters try to silence a thinker, you have to assume he is saying something valuable.

So I bought and read the book. A small thing, but it improved my morale.

Too Much Activism Without Enough Inner Work, Insight, Examination of Conscience Leads to Violence

We shouldn’t confuse various kinds of inner work, insight-gathering, or introspection with contemplative spirituality. Contemplation is about letting go of the false much more than just collecting the new, the therapeutic, or the helpful.

.. if you and your personal growth are still the focus, I do not think you are yet a contemplative—which demands that you shed yourself as the central reference point.

.. Jesus said, “Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it remains just a single grain,” and it will not bear much fruit (John 12:24).

.. Thomas Merton warned against confusing an introverted personality with being a contemplative. They are two different things.

..  Too much activism without enough inner work, insight, or examination of conscience inevitably leads to violence—to the self, to the project at hand, and invariably to others.

If too much inner focus risks narcissism and individualism,

I guess too much outer focus risks superficiality, negativity passing for love of justice, and various Messiah complexes.

You can lack love on the Right and you can lack love on the Left—they just wear two different disguises.

Mark Beeman: Northwestern University: Creative Brain Lab

Research Interests

I want to know how people think. I am particularly interested in “high-level cognition,” such as how people understand whole stories, and solve complex problems. I particularly want to know how the brain thinks. All research on the brain and on thinking or perceiving, without regard to the brain, is interesting and useful. But I find it particularly satisfying to try to link the brain’s wetware to the mind’s software. Not just for the sake of connecting the mental realm to the physical, but because evidence from each domain helps constrain theories in the other, hopefully providing novel insights into both. Which brings me to my research…

Solving Problems with Insight

We had predicted this area might be involved because it seems also to be important for drawing distantly related information together when comprehending complex language. This is just what is needed to overcome impasse and solve a problem with insight. This fMRI result is also consistent with previous results from our lab demonstrating RH advantages in solution priming (fast responses to solution words) and solution decisions, for words presented to the RH, via the left visual field, compared to words presented directly to the LH, via the right visual field (Beeman & Bowden, 2000Bowden & Beeman, 1998; Jung-Beeman & Bowden 2003).

.. The EEG experiment provided two additional pieces of information. First of all, the RH temporal lobe activity appeared as a sudden burst of high-frequency (gamma band) activity, relative to solutions achieved without insight. This neural activity is often associated with complex cognitive processing, in particular binding elements of a percept together as it comes into a consciousness.

A second, unexpected EEG effect also was observed: About 1.5 seconds prior to insight solutions, an increase in lower frequency (alpha band) activity appeared over the right posterior cortex. This effect disappeared precisely when the high-frequency activity began over the right temporal lobe. This may reflect “gating,” or attenuation, of visual input, allowing initially weak solution-related activity to gain strength, then burst into consciousness as an insight. This is like closing your eyes so you can concentrate when you are trying to solve a difficult problem but in this case, your brain is blocking out just the visual inputs to your right hemisphere.