None of the criticisms are about that.
really? From the jacobin piece:
Echoing the worst features of nineteenth-century social Darwinism, Peterson uses this example of lobster hierarchy to analyze human society.
Peterson’s positivism — the dualism between descriptive facts and values — makes his Nietzscheanism possible. If the world is an atomized chaos of facts, it needs a strong will to define it and impose order.
When we theoretically confront Peterson, we need to do more than refute his pseudo-scientific claims, his bad pop psychology, and his Cold War–inflected version of history.
Ironically, Peterson’s critique of postmodernism is itself very postmodern.
So, check neo-Darwinism, check atomism, check Cold War tropes, check ironically incoherent epistemology. The claims are clearly there, you don’t get to dismiss as lies and misrepresentations an argument you’ve just failed to read.
sometimes criticize his use of the term post-modernism.
so they
are about his understanding of philosophical history? Or are they not
really about that but something else?
The argument/criticism is over interpretation of theory vs actuality of the ideas in practice. Peterson rails against what occurs from the ideas as they've been put forth in practice, which I hope you understand.
are the ideas in question here moral relativism, a rejection of biological sex, and/or constraints on the freedom of expression? And they purportedly germinate in 20th century Marxist thinkers -maybe the Frankfurt school- travel through the French poststructuralists and eventually end up in the heads of student activists today? Because i can tell you, that causal chain is a lot harder to demonstrate than it looks, and Peterson hasn’t provided a convincing case for it.
Honestly, the gist of what Peterson says is pretty harmless by philosophical standards.
the gist of what he says is an apologia for reactionary ‘dominance heirarchies’. It’s also at turns baseless, incoherent, and superficial.
