I’ve been enticed back into reading about Jordan Peterson
and his exemplary lobster. For the uninitiated, Peterson – ‘classical liberal’
and self-help guru – believes we should be inspired by the not so humble lobster,
willing to fight all-comers (well other lobsters) for the best places to live.
The lobster (and also the merciless wren, the chicken, the chimpanzee etc.) is
an example of nature’s dominance
hierarchy which is a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. Older than
trees in fact.
Humans, according to Peterson, are just as subject to the
unforgiving laws of this dominance hierarchy. Despite our cultural pretensions
and elaborate societies it still operates under the surface. “It’s inevitable,”
avers Peterson, “that there will be continuity in the way animals and human
beings organise their structures”. Thus, brutal economic inequality – the fact
that 85 ultra-wealthy people at the top of society have as much as three and
half billion at the bottom – is given a biological justification.
Read the memo: it’s inevitable, get used to it and don’t –
the ultimate Peterson sin – start getting resentful.
The immediate temptation, to which many have succumbed, is
to say Peterson’s examination of the natural world is hopelessly partial. Why
choose to focus on the lobster or the status-obsessed chimpanzee and pass over
the egalitarian, sharing bonobo
or the unaggressive, vegetarian gibbon? An argument that can be traced back to
Kropotkin’s highlighting of mutual
aid among animals, in contrast to the simplification of the survival of the
fittest.
Civilised hierarchies
However, this argument rather misses the point, or to be
more precise, it concedes too much before it gets to the bone of contention.
Because human hierarchies – that is actually existing hierarchies that have
dominated the history of human civilisation before reformers, revolutionaries
and utopians messed with them – are radically and qualitatively different to
animal dominance hierarchies. In fact the latter don’t merit the appellation ‘hierarchy’
at all, the word originally applying to the rule of the high priest in ancient
Greece, a uniquely human dispensation.
Only in early hunter-gatherer societies, can human
arrangements be said to resemble dominance ‘hierarchies’ among animals in the
sense that charismatic and talented individuals might acquire power. And even
then, the evidence suggests tribal members were aware of the dangers of power
becoming entrenched and embodied in certain individuals and took steps to
ensure that, uniquely in the natural world, economic
relations, family structure and political life were regularly shuffled.
The history of civilisation
in all parts of the world, by contrast, and despite its undoubted benefits, is
the history of dynasties, aristocracies, land-owners and empires on the one
side and serfs, slaves, indentured labourers, and workers on the other. Slavery
was an unmissable feature of ‘civilised’ society for thousands of years. It’s
not a Western invention or imposition; it was only abolished in China in 1908.
In such societies, the facts of birth and inheritance were
all-important. Intelligence, cunning, physical strength, charisma – or whatever
other attributes Peterson thinks differentiates winners from losers – would at
best have enabled the lucky incumbent to progress within their caste or class. Only
very rarely would they have permitted them to rise within the hierarchy itself.
Hannah Arendt’s description of the “caste conceit” of the British aristocracy
in the 19th century – “the pride in privilege without individual
effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth” – could be applied to ruling
castes and classes throughout history the world over.
‘God hath placed them
there’
Such hierarchies were, in Murray Bookchin’s description,
were “clothed in ideologies” because they were anything but natural. They were,
however, intended to endure and such longevity was not merely secured by
immense military power but also because most people, especially those oppressed
by such hierarchies, were assiduously convinced of their, often
divinely-ordained, legitimacy. Something animals obviously can’t be. Lobsters
don’t bequeath their hiding places to their offspring nor insist to other
lobsters left with stringy pieces of seaweed as camouflage that it’s blasphemy
to object to such inequality because it’s been prescribed by the great lobster
god.
Hence belief systems like the medieval ‘Great Chain of
Being’ in which everyone – serfs, vagabonds, yeomen, lords etc. – had a
recognised position because ‘God hath placed them there’. In 17th century England, parish
priests issued weekly instructions for servants to obey their masters and
behave “lowly and reverently” towards their betters.
In such societies, the personal attributes and characters of
rulers might be a source of regret or rejoicing, but they were irrelevant for
determining the power they wielded. As Bookchin
noted about now infamous European monarchs:
Figures like Louis XVI of France
and Nicholas II of Russia, for example did not become autocrats because they
had genetically programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen
minds. They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously stupid
men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who lived in times of
revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was virtually absolute until it
was curtailed by revolution.
But, but ... I’m
guessing Peterson would instantly interject were he to be – unlikely I know –
reading this: what you’re saying might be true for human hierarchies deeply
ensconced in tradition and time-encrusted practices, but since the advent of
liberal-democracy and capitalism and the demise of ancien regimes it has been possible for people born in difficult
circumstances to, through their own native ability and self-discipline, rise in
society and transform their lives.
“… the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term
success in Western countries,” says Peterson “are intelligence … and
conscientiousness.”
As a precursor, “success” needs to be defined. Because so
much intelligence, conscientiousness and talent that doesn’t fit into
money-making purposes and interest those organizations that hire people to do
their bidding (and into which democracy is not permitted to intrude) simply
withers or is actively suppressed.
Yea, even unto the
Middle Ages
However, the other side of the coin is that liberal capitalism’s
reputation for social mobility – progressing up the income scale during your
lifetime – has been greatly exaggerated even on its own terms. So many of our
current political leaders have emerged from privileged backgrounds and wealth
amassed before y’know everyone had a crack at it. David Cameron is descended
from King William VI and was brought up in a stately home, Boris Johnson’s full
name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Donald Trump inherited his
fortune from his property tycoon dad.
Social mobility’s heyday under capitalism was actually in
its post-war social-democratic incarnation when the rich were heavily taxed and
finance forced into productive investment. Since the 1980s, after capitalism became
more purely capitalistic, it’s gone down. A
2017 report found that in the US after the ‘inflection point’ of 1980,
inequality skyrocketed and social mobility started “declining sharply”. The
British Social Mobility Commission reported last year that inequality is now “entrenched
from birth to work” and according to the UN
Development Programme a “great new divergence” is taking place around the
world, leaving educated young people stuck in low wage, dead-end jobs:
“What people perhaps 30, 40 years ago were led to believe and often saw
around them," an UNDP administrator says, “was that if you worked hard,
you could escape poverty.” Yet in many countries today, he says, upward social
mobility is “simply not occurring” anymore.
This is modern-day capitalism, where intelligence and conscientiousness aren’t,
after all, enough to help you lead a better life. And by the way, this
conclusion is not impaired by Peterson’s revelation that human and lobsters
share “basic neuro-chemistry” so you can administer an anti-depressant to a
lobster and it will fight “harder and longer”. Anti-depressants have been administered
to millions of human beings since the late 1980s, making evidently no
difference to rates of social mobility.
Entrepreneurs and
capitalists
Why, you might ask, does it have to be this way? Because capitalism is
at heart a system where great wealth is extracted by people who do nothing to
earn it. It isn’t, despite the advertising, a justice dispensing machine where,
notwithstanding the rough edges, diligent and creative entrepreneurs are
rewarded for the improvements they bring to people’s lives.
As author David Schweickart has astutely
shown, the entrepreneur is capitalism’s “white knight”, routinely unveiled to
justify ‘returns to capital’ that have nothing to do with inventions or
improving methods of production. Vast fortunes are made and replenished daily
simply by virtue of the ownership of real or financial assets:
In a capitalist society,
enormous sums are paid to people who do not engage in any entrepreneurial
activity or take on any significant risk with their capital. Trillions flows to
shareholders who make an entirely passive contribution to production.
In fact, despite the enormous changes wrought by the economic system
known as capitalism, the capitalist bears an uncanny resemblance to the
landowners and landlords of past centuries who commandeered immense wealth and
power without doing anything to deserve it. Indeed, capitalism has frequently
coexisted with small coteries of landowners in most parts of the world. Which
is why land reform was such a seminal political issue for numerous countries in
the 20th century – something you might be aware of if you manage to
get over a fixation with capitalist white hats and communist black hats.
Don’t complain
The awkward problem is that wanting human society to replicate the daily
fights for survival, nourishment and safety evident in the animal world
requires not a laissez-faire approach, but massive government intervention in society.
It demands severe taxation of the rich and punitive restrictions on
inheritance. It compels instituting downwards
as well as upwards social mobility, which means abolishing private
education that works, in effect, to over-promote a small section of the
population and lavish resources on them. And even then, the result would be a
pale imitation of animal ‘hierarchies’.
But western societies are intent on the diametrically opposite
policy. Every time in recent history – for example the 2008 financial crisis or
the current Covid-19 crisis – the wealth of the moneyed and propertied has been
threatened, governments stepped in to artificially
protect it and institute bogus stock market booms.
Isolated conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ may have objected to
this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich but the vast majority –
Peterson included – raised not a whimper of protest.
The grain of truth in Peterson is the emphasis on personal
responsibility and the insistence that, whatever your circumstances, no-one,
apart from yourself, determines how you react. But others before have expressed
this anti-determinism better. “It makes no sense to complain since nothing
foreign has decided what we feel, how we live, or what we are,” said Jean-Paul
Sartre, trickily also a Marxist, in 1943.
But ignoring the structures of society that are not amenable to
individual efforts to change them but can, nonetheless, still be changed
collectively, is not only wrong but is liable to lead to depression and
resentment, the very things Peterson says he wants to alleviate.
* my son
