Anti-Intellectual? Try Anti-Human

The Monoculture comes for Sean Tatol.

Jordan Peterson appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience, video still (source linked below)

Sean Tatol’s recently discussed essay¹ makes a compelling set of claims:

In the contemporary context, becoming cultured requires a resistance to the prevailing culture, and could ironically be considered countercultural. Nevertheless the pursuit remains necessary, and perhaps even unavoidable, because it is intrinsic to our nature. Cultivation is the growth into a distinct individuality by means of culture, an understanding of oneself and the world that always seeks to more fully encompass this understanding, a knowledge of life, an intelligence. This aspiration reaches toward an absolute, an omniscience that is both desired by and denied to humans: something I might call God if I were religious, but that for our purposes we can call the good. This good is something we can only put ourselves in service to. Good art, by extension, is good by its achievement of the good, a channeling of an external sense of life into an artwork. Good criticism seeks to recognize this good in art as much as it can. 

The second part of Ben Davis’s reaction notes correctly that this is the most interesting aspect of the essay. He begins to deal with why before diverting into his default tendency, which is defending the progressive brand. I first called out Davis for that inclination in 2016, naming it Red Fragility.

In another essay, I will analyze Tatol’s conception of the absolute. For this one, I will expose Davis as an agent of the Monoculture.

Davis replies to Tatol:

In part, there is a backlash against the fact that a lot of canonical works of art that have been deeply meaningful to large numbers of people have been the subject of confusing and reductive critique in the recent period in the name of social justice, so that by now a critical mass among the smart set seems to view the term “social justice” itself as a synonym for anti-intellectualism…. The danger is that all this accumulated frustration can be channeled in a lot of different directions, and various sorts of ideological entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on it.

Ideological entrepreneurs such as whom? Ibram X. Kendi, who gets paid $207 per minute for lectures that he contractually prohibits his taxpayer-supported hosts from rebroadcasting? Robin DiAngelo, who charges $213 per minute for talks that are not only virtual, but pre-recorded? Kike Ojo-Thompson, similarly compensated by the same ghoulish grift?

Of course not. Davis is talking about Jordan Peterson.

I have developed interest in several figures regarded as bêtes noires by progressives: Tarl Warwick,

Curtis Yarvin

, Alex Perez, Carl Benjamin, and others. I never latched onto Jordan Peterson. He seemed to dispense Sunday school advice, neither objectionable nor exhilarating. He also seemed to be helping people, which I regarded well even if I wasn’t one of them. I have paid him little mind. But the progressive reaction to Peterson has been fascinating. Peterson criticized a Canadian federal amendment to add gender identity to the the country’s Human Rights Act in 2016. For this, progressives responded so outlandishly that it occurred to one of them to try to garrote him.

The example of Peterson is apt, but not for the reason Davis cites, that Tatol’s argument bears resemblance to Peterson’s “babbling on about how ‘Western culture’ and ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are under assault by demonic feminists and perfidious cultural Marxists.” It doesn’t. Rather, Peterson reveals how a fairly intelligent man dispensing obvious-if-you-think-about-it wisdom, catching on big with an audience hungry for truth-telling, causes progressive thought leaders to react like World War Three was about to break out. (Which is striking, given their indifference to the prospect of World War Three breaking out.)

“Publishers are not obliged to give bigots like Jordan Peterson a platform,” squealed the Guardian in 2020, when employees of Penguin Random House went full snowflake upon the company’s announcement that it would, unsurprisingly, publish a sequel to a Peterson book that sold five million copies. “At a company town hall meeting, some employees were reportedly in tears as they described how Peterson had radicalized people in their lives,” related the article. Radicalized them to do what, I wonder? Pet neighborhood cats?

Such has been Peterson’s life since 2016. He is currently being made to endure an indoctrination by his professional organization that is clearly politically motivated and connected to complaints from zero patients. This, for dressing like a Batman villain, calling it “authoritarian tolerance”² when Sports Illustrated graced its cover with the image of a woman whose age (26) was roughly the same as her dress size, and other transgressions against taste. Certainly not the kind of bullying demonstrated by Kike Ojo-Thompson or the despotism that spills out of Ibram X. Kendi when he can no longer contain himself.

But why Peterson? Because Peterson acknowledges the existence and worth of hierarchies—not in a weird, judgmental way, but in the obvious way that some things are better than other things. Davis quotes him:

The role of artists in a healthy culture is to bring to public awareness elements of being that have not yet entered public consciousness… Artists move us forward into the unknown… With young people you want to say… Look, there are true qualitative distinctions between things… There are heights that you can ascend to that are genuinely high, which means they are above where you are now. But the fact that there are those things to pursue gives your life deep meaning and significance and gives your struggle nobility and validity. And the postmodernists—neo-Marxists, as far as I am concerned—are absolute enemies of qualitative distinctions. So what they do is destroy everyone’s ambition.

While admitting the value of qualitative distinctions, Davis objects, regarding Tatol:

But if the vision for culture being offered is different from cultural conservatism in either its old-school or new-model forms, where a call to reassert aesthetic hierarchies is read together with a call to reassert social hierarchies, there’s good reason to be clear about how.

The Monoculture, you’ll recall my saying (emphasis added):

…is the aggregate of culture workers who compel themselves and each other toward priorities of safety, agreement, and equal, predictable outcomes. The Monoculture turns artists into servants of power. This is in contrast to culture, a natural, unpredictable process of emergent order that produces diversity and hierarchies by allowing artists their due freedom. Culture lets artists serve their hearts.

By pulling lightly in the direction of his own independence of conscience and dropping a some spicy remarks, Tatol has triggered the postliberal progressive immune response in the same way that Peterson does. It subtracts nothing from his achievement to point out that Tatol’s moxie is not enormous, but it appears so in contrast to his milieu’s will to abject agreement and safety.

Connect the following if you can: One, the discovery of better and worse art is tantamount to an assertion of hierarchical artistic value. Two, said artistic hierarchy is co-morbid with social hierarchy. Three, a Petersonian social hierarchy would be terrible, as if we don’t already have a progressive-enforced social hierarchy in the arts that’s as toxic as a dioxin sundae with asbestos sprinkles.

There’s an anti-intellectual component to it all, and Davis is right to note it. His example of “confusing” is linked to the Philip Guston cancellation, and “reductive” linked to the Hannah Gadsby-curated Picasso show at the Brooklyn Museum. But from my vantage, this concession looks like it was necessitated because the credibility of the Monoculture is collapsing so dramatically. That Davis has to acknowledge pushback from the “smart set” and not his usual cartoon gallery of right-wing meanies, like Peterson, is telling. Davis’s position has deteriorated rapidly since only nine months ago, when he was trying to link Vivek Ramasawmy to the alt-right.

But that retreat still plants the flag too far forward. The larger Monocultural project is not just anti-intellectual, but anti-human. The anti-intellectualism of “social justice” as conceived on the postliberal progressive template (noted as so-called because it’s an insult to the real thing) is an extension of its fundamental cruelty. The attitude that the MFA Boston took toward Guston and the Brooklyn Museum took toward Picasso was not merely stupid, it was dehumanizing. So was the Tate Britain’s attitude toward Hogarth. So was the Portland Museum of Art’s attitude toward N.C. Wyeth.

Those were not isolated mishaps. Gary Garrels, Mark Godfrey, and Nancy Spector did not lose their jobs for thinking too hard, but because the agents of “social justice” targeted them for vengeance. Extinction Rebellion just forced the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to shut down for the second time. After the closure of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe following more than four decades of operation, one of its last administrators blamed a “colonial model of philanthropy that’s based on the fact that older white people who come from heritages of wealth have the money and deem an organisation important enough to give to.” (The center was subsequently revived under the leadership of an older white man.)

You don’t have to lie in proverbial bed with right-wingers to come to feel that there’s something rather wrong with all this, particularly since the ensuing circumstances injure progressives more often than not. So this criticism from Davis is not substantive:

When Tatol writes “becoming cultured requires a resistance to the prevailing culture, and could ironically be considered countercultural,” obviously, “becoming cultured” is a very charged term at a time of Category 5 “culture war” politics—yet there’s only a cursory attempt in “Negative Criticism” to set what Tatol is saying off from the surrounding climate of “anti-woke” bluster.

I’ll do it for him: Tatol is merely trying to reclaim territory in which art can operate with some autonomy and responses to it can form accordingly. This is benign stuff, and the fact that the Monoculture has responded to it with OMG JORDAN PETERSON just goes to show that it cannot tolerate any dissent whatsoever.

…I do wonder whether on some level the “quasi-theological” turn, the call to root art criticism in an orientation toward “absolute” values that exist beyond all context, doesn’t serve as a way to avoid reckoning with the more unfortunate resonances of that call in our own actual fractious contemporary context.

I regard it as purposeful that Davis offers a remedy that promises not to fix anything:

The simplest and philosophically cleanest way to make this differentiation is just to incorporate the reality of aesthetic pluralism as a positive force into the theory—to say that it is not always a name for intellectual laziness but can also be a name for intellectual curiosity, that it is not a barrier to having standards but their desirable starting point.

In fact, the opposite needs to happen. I will do so in a forthcoming essay.

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During the week of September 11 we will begin an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy soon.

An exhibition of my work is up at the Fuller Public Library in southern New Hampshire through September 30, with a reception in the morning on September 23.

Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.

1. Archived here.

2. See also toxic gentleness.