Jordan Peterson needs a Twitter break
Julian Adorney
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In the latest installment of drama over whether or not the word “cis” qualifies as a slur, renowned psychologist and former psychology professor Jordan Peterson recently tweeted, “Call me cis to my face and see what happens.”
The implication, of course, is that someone using this word around him will receive a punch in the mouth.
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This is far from Peterson’s only bad take. In the past few months, his tweets have descended from deep and nuanced to reactionary, anti-woke territory. Earlier this month, he tweeted, “Borderline personality disorder is rife among the mothers of ‘trans’ kids.” The problem is that his source for the tweet was a 1991 study conducted on just 33 mothers.
Peterson is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto. His books Maps of Meaning and Twelve Rules for Life deal adroitly with a number of complex topics. The idea that he cannot see the epistemological limitations of a study that he’s tweeting about is more than a little absurd.
What’s going on? Peterson has an earned reputation as a serious thinker. He made a name for himself by taking a principled stand that married compassion for transgender people with a concern about compelled speech: He said he would address trans people the way they “[want] to be regarded,” while warning against the government’s “attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.” Now he’s reduced to threatening people who use words that he doesn’t like?
Peterson is an example of a trend we’re seeing more and more: smart people who are chronically on Twitter becoming less smart. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt documents this phenomenon in his Atlantic article, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Haidt argues that the chronically online are shooting dart guns into our brains as well as into each others’ brains.
Social media creates ideological echo chambers that make it hard to see the best arguments of the other side. It also encourages certain kinds of tweets; dunks on our opponents get rewarded with lots of dopamine-inducing likes and retweets, while nuanced takes tend to float in the void. Most perniciously, social media brings out the enforcers, political extremists, who Haidt said, “spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.”
For many of us, social media thus represents both a carrot and a stick driving us toward ideological orthodoxy at the expense of nuance. The carrot is that when we dunk on our opponents rather than grapple with the messy complexity of an issue, we’re more likely to go viral, flooding our system with dopamine from thousands of likes and retweets. The stick is that when we carefully consider the shades of gray of an issue, we’re in danger of getting called out as traitors by the political extremists on our own side.
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Both the carrot and the stick get more powerful the more followers that someone has. For a man such as Peterson, who has 4.4 million followers, is it any wonder that those two factors can sometimes overpower his natural desire to think deeply about a topic and turn him into an anti-woke reactionary?
The key to remember is that social media is a tool. If the tool starts using us rather than vice versa, then we can always set it down. For Peterson and anyone else who can see themselves getting more reactionary and less thoughtful on Twitter, that might be for the best.
Julian Adorney is a writer and marketing consultant with fee.org, and has previously written for National Review, the Federalist, and other outlets.