Laying Ghosts : Jordan Peterson, Jeremy Griffith and the Denial of Truth

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) - What's he all about? Fucked if I know.

After discussing the reactions of Jordan Peterson and Jeremy Griffith to post-modernism, especially Jacques Derrida and de-constructionism, in a recent Facebook post I went looking for more information on the topic and found this account of Derrida’s approach which tends to back up Griffith’s contention that it is all about “proving” that there is such thing as truth. Of course, if there is no such thing as truth, you can’t prove that there is no such thing as truth. If it is an accurate description of the essence of the approach then I’m still a bit mystified as to how it became so popular. Playing games with words, based around unsupported and illogical contentions, to undermine the usefulness of actually saying anything, doesn’t strike me as something which would lead people to think : “Ah, this is a powerful tool we can use to achieve what we want to achieve.”

Griffith contends that this popularity is due to a need to deny that there is such a thing as truth as a desperate way to evade truths about ourselves which we can’t face. But, on a personal level, he is faced with the fact that most people are not interested in or accepting of his interpretation of them. What he sees as the truth is not what they wish to acknowledge as the truth. If what he expresses is the truth, then he may have a point, but the other interpretation is that it is his biased vision of truth and the indifference and rejection are due to its flaws, especially if those flaws are experienced by other’s as unfounded criticism within the body of what purports to be a defence for them. Instead of going back to the drawing board, there can be a tendency to shout : “You can’t handle the truth!”

I don’t know anyone who lives their life as if there were no such thing as truth or meaning. They may not believe in ultimate truth or ultimate meaning, but they have to base their actions in the world upon the assumption that some things are true and some things are not. If it is neither true nor false that it is raining, how do we know whether to carry an umbrella?

What I can see with Derrida is that he was concerned with texts. The question of truth in a text is not the same as the question of truth in the wider physical world. To what degree is the text trustworthy? But even here nobody I know lives as if there is no truth contained in a text. If the TV guide says that The Simpsons is on at 7.00 PM, that’s when we turn on the television and most of the time it turns out to have been true.

Texts range from car manuals which we tend to trust to fiction which everyone agrees is not literally true (though it may embody universal truths in symbolic form). When it comes to accounts of events in the news media or history texts we have reason to acknowledge that they can never embody objective truth. There is what we could call The Rashomon Phenomena. In Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film we see the same event replayed from the point of view of each of the participants. Each time we see a different story, because the way each of us relates an event is shaped by how it fits into our larger narrative, by our perception of who we are and how the event impacted us.

Then we have the area of beliefs. Beliefs are provisional, even the long standing beliefs expressed in cultural traditions such as religion. They are narratives which we use to bring coherence to our experience, but there is always the possibility of new experience and new data requiring us to update our beliefs.

Post-modernism, at least as it is perceived by its critics, seems to represent a kind of radical skepticism. Not a denial that the TV Guide is useful for finding out when The Simpsons is on, but a resistance to accepting belief systems and accounts of events.

If all belief systems and all accounts of events are viewed as personal bias, there is no reason not to assert that one’s own is as good as anyone else’s. This could lead to complacency about testing one’s own assumptions against contrary evidence which is how we arrive at improved ways of managing our relationship with others and with life itself. And it could lead to the idea that some belief systems, some narratives, are “privileged” because they are those held by members of society who hold more power in an unfair system. This is not an entirely invalid observation, for instance, in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church had the power to crush heresy through violence rather than allow their own worldview to be challenged by critical discourse. And, today, those who have a lot of money to invest in the media can promote ideas which might not survive as well on a level playing field.

Peterson puts forward the pragmatic approach to truth. Truth is what works. if you believe something to be truth, you base your decisions on that belief and if it helps you to more successfully manage the challenges which face you, then that is the only evidence on which we can decide what is true and what is not. This applies to science, too. Our scientific theories are tested by whether they work to predict phenomena and whether, when we make decisions based upon them, the results stand up.

So how do we find some common ground. Perhaps when we are in conflict with someone we can decide not to attempt to force our beliefs upon them, no matter how well supported by evidence they may be, but rather to see if we can find some things we can agree upon. 

My experience of psychosis leads me to believe that, when our beliefs do diverge from that which is supported by direct evidence and from social norms (to the extent that that term is meaningful), they do so for a reason, because there is something we have not been able to integrate. The “normal” ways of understanding one’s place in life are not working, so the mind experiments in ways that may be very erratic, looking for a new way - a new truth which works. To simply say “That’s madness!” and expect the individual to conform, doesn’t work, because they need to go forward, not back.

The way forward is through dialogue, but in this we may need to move beyond the oppositional approach. Those of us who have spent a great deal of time and effort developing the framework with which we interpret the world - and this is true of Peterson and Griffith - will tend to view ourselves as crusaders for our truth. But what is most effective with those who view things differently from ourselves is to draw them out and let them discover for themselves the limitations of their conceptual structure. I’m sure that Peterson is good at this, because he has been a very effective therapist, but media events don’t allow time for this kind of approach.

This is where improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone’s techniques as outlined in his book Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre seem so useful to me. They encourage us to look less at the content of our discourse than at how we are relating to and communicating with the other party. Are we listening to them and responding spontaneously to what they say or are we “blocking” them by negating anything which runs counter to the path we have decided beforehand to follow?

I have a worldview which I express in my book How to Be Free. Unlike Peterson and Griffith, I haven’t put much time or effort into developing it. It is simple and, although I arrived at it through much introspection, I’m not a researcher or academic. I don’t feel motivated to “go to battle” for that worldview. I put it out into the world with a sense of Peterson’s pragmatism. If it is true, it will work. If it gives me insight into what Griffith calls “the human condition” then it will help me to engage with people in meaningful dialogue about the experience of being human in a way from which both of us will benefit, without me needing to feel pressure to persuade them of anything.

Peterson talks about the problem of ideological possession. I’ve experienced it. There are times when I’ve absorbed ideas, not been able to integrate them, and found myself, when in an argument with someone of the opposing persuasion, spewing them out as if they had a life of their own and I was not in control. But what supports this happening is an encounter with another entrenched and biased worldview. Peterson’s worldview may be far more nuanced and supported by study of psychological research than that of many who react negatively to him, but it is necessarily partial. 

The ideologies which may possess us are like ghosts. In stories, the ghost represents unfinished business, an entity which cannot be integrated into the conventional order because some truth has not been properly recognised.

So if we find ourselves in conflict with the ideologically possessed it is a copout to blame the ideology which possesses them, as the way to lay the ghost is to look for what that possession tells us about what is missing from our own worldview.

Jesus told us to love our enemies. For those of us who are trying to help spread ameliorating understanding in the world it is worth asking ourselves whether we feel we have enemies or whether we think only in terms of people we have not yet achieved the ability to help. Do we assume the responsibility for our own success or failure or do we tend to externalise that responsibility.