Jordan Peterson, Dead Babies, and Demonic Possession…

My wife, who is now a lawyer, was a national championship level parliamentary competitive debater in college. She tells me that her team had a saying for those moments when a debater slipped into some overzealous, perhaps even hysterical, argumentation: “There’s Dead Babies on the flow!” The ‘flow’ was the term for their sheet of notes whereon they track the state of play, including their opponents’ points and their plans of rebuttal. When they hear someone say “… and if we continue to allow our children and single men to run their bathroom taps while they brush their teeth, all the whales will die,” or “… if our societies lose their faith in God, morality will no longer have a foundation and everyone will rape and murder each other,”– that’s ‘Dead Babies on the Flow.’

These are points that you’re going to want to poke holes in, because though they may be missed during the course of a skillful rhetorical presentation, when pointed out most judges will typically consider these hyperboles sub-optimal argumentative strategies.

This is a little thinking tool that I have found useful to include in my kit when evaluating arguments, it helps me notice places in people’s arguments where they really let it rip, often indicating places where their Chimps are overpowering their Angels and they are slipping up in one way or another. One individual whose speech is littered with Dead Babies is Jordan Peterson.

I’d like to present an example for your consideration.

During one of the recent Pangburn Philosophy dialogs between Peterson, Sam Harris, and some guy who sits between them, the topic turned to immigration policy. Harris presented the following:

“…let’s take the extreme case of an ‘open borders’ ethic: ‘Borders are illegitimate, borders are just in principle a sign of selfishness and xenophobia and unearned privilege.’ Right? None of us can take credit for the fact that we were born into the societies we were born into. And yet we have all of the advantages of having been born there… The concern here is that… ethically speaking, this is a totally illegitimate situation… It seems evil to in any way perpetuate this lottery… There is no bright line where any of us well meaning people… can say ‘Aha! That’s the solution that we know is ethical’… There is an ethical core to it that is difficult to dismiss.”

Though Harris stops short of endorsing the open borders position [his counterargument being the osmotic reductio that if we go open borders then the motivation to cross them will be removed by a diminution of the quality of life in the ‘developed’ nation], Harris does think that the open borders position has an “ethical core”, and is worthy of consideration.

I believe that Peterson, given a combination of obvious body language [explicit nodding, etc] and verbalizations surrounding this conversational neighborhood, would agree with Harris to the following moral luck argument:

One potential way to attempt to resolve this conundrum, suggests Harris is the ‘radical leftist’ response of ‘open borders’:

It is in this context that Peterson took this turn:

“Ok, so, the issue is: borders exclude, right? and that’s a postmodern proposition. Maybe you could take that even further, that borders exclude and privilege those within in the borders– it’s like, ‘Yes!’ Ok, so let’s take that seriously, part of that seriousness is: poor innocent children are hurt at borders– that happens all the time. Ok, the question is: Are you willing to give up the borders?”

Peterson begins his response by explicitly accepting Premise 2) of the moral luck argument for open borders: “…borders exclude and privilege…” Earlier in the conversation, Peterson already indicated acceptance of Premise 1). I think that he thinks that 6) is a genuinely difficult and interesting social-political question which he is interested in engaging, or at least encouraging, debates about. But what he is about to go on to do, under my interpretation, is make an argument that the ‘open borders’ resolution attempt is off the table! Harris thinks that it has an ethical core and is worthy of consideration, even though he does not adopt it. But Peterson is much more hostile. Our concern here, of course, is not the immigration debate itself, what we are concentrating on is not Peterson’s position, but his argument. Which begins here:

“Now let’s think about what borders are…”

Up until now I think it is clear that we had been talking specifically about national borders [no one thinks “poor innocent children” are hurt at the phospholipid bilayer of the 3rd cell from the northwest in my liver]. We should notice that Step 1 of Peterson’s argument is to pivot from specificities to a very high level of abstraction and talk about ‘boundaries’ as a general concept. Which, as we will see, he does not even attempt to do. I would personally enjoy thinking about what borders are, generally, but this is not what happens.

“Your skin is a border, okay, and you’re prejudice[d] in protection of your skin. For example you won’t just sleep with anyone. You reserve the right to keep that border intact, right?, and to be choosy about the manner in which it’s broached.”

Step 2 of Peterson’s argument attempts to show that there are some borders that he suspects ‘everyone’ would agree should not be ‘open’ by requesting the audience consider “your skin” as a ‘border’, and notice that you would prefer to “be choosy about the manner in which it’s broached.”

“You likely have a bedroom, it probably has walls. You have clothing, you have a house, you have a town, you have a state, you have a country– and those are all borders. It’s borders within borders within borders within borders; and you need those borders because otherwise YOU WILL DIE.”

And by Step 3 we reach Peterson’s conclusion: fatal consequences follow directly from a removal of [some?] borders. I think we could fairly summarize Peterson’s argument with this reconstruction:

In my opinion, among its foibles, this highly enthymematic argument participates in equivocation and faulty generalization. But for today I’d like to concentrate on the Dead Babies Premises: 2 and 4.

Notice the anological rhetorical move made in the sub-argumentation for Premise 2) when he discusses your skin and being “choosy about the manner in which it is broached”:

Immigration is Rape.

In the context of a discussion of immigration [i.e. the ‘broaching of a national border’] Peterson level-jumps up to the general category of ‘borders’, where he helps himself to another class member [“your skin”], so he can make an analogy that he thinks will be more widely amenable to his position than the immigration question directly. The purpose of shifting the conversation from national borders to skin broaching is that this analogy will evoke in an audience thoughts of: promiscuity and/or rape. Considered from the point of view of the person as agentive subject, one who is not “choosy about the manner in which [their skin] is broached” would be ‘slutty’, which in Peterson’s opinion has a general negative valence in his culture. Considered from the point of view of the person as passive object, if one is not allowed to “choose” the manner of “broaching”, that would constitute rape, another category of behavior which Peterson thinks has a negative valence in his culture.

So with this move, Peterson’s rhetoric strikes me as a clear case of Dead Babies on the Flow. We have very quickly moved from considering the position of ‘Should we consider, on ethical grounds, the possibility of fighting for open borders,’ to the analogical claim that immigrants are figuratively ‘raping’ the country to which they immigrate. Just as a rapist “broaches” the ‘border’ of someone’s ‘skin’, the immigrant “broaches” the ‘border’ of some nation.

For those watching closely, Premise 4) does not follow strictly from anything previously put forward. My most charitable interpretation includes the assumptions that the “…you will die,” claim stems from either I) assuming that shelter is a human necessity, Peterson did mention ‘houses with walls’, or II) reverting back to the ‘skin’ premise and making a point about a medical necessity, if you take an existing human being and make no alterations other than complete skin-removal they would soon perish. Neither of these options are obviously the intent, but they are my best guesses. Personally, I find I) more likely to be the intent but also highly disputable. I do not think that ‘lacking houses with walls we would all die’. II) is probably correct, given current medical technology and the current state of sapiens evolution, but quite a stretch argumentatively, but let’s say someone did make that alteration to Premise 4).

Ok, agreed. However, this appears to me that plugging this premise into our reconstruction of Peterson’s argument creates a straightforward case of faulty generalization. I would need further argumentative motivation to reason from ‘some boundaries are necessary’ to ‘[partially] closed national borders are necessary’.

Premise 4) as presented by Peterson strikes me again as a Dead Babies rhetorical fallacy, and my best attempt at rehabilitating it out of that problem leads it to become an instance of Faulty Generalization. My interpretation of the purpose of this passage by Peterson, is to ‘argue’ that not only is the open borders proposal not advisable, but that it is so radically and obviously a bad idea that we should not even give it consideration. My evaluation is that he entirely fails at this goal, as far as I can see he does virtually nothing to make progress toward his desired conclusion. Instead he gets hysterical and ends up telling us that if we go for the open borders proposal we will all die.

To be clear, I do not think that Jordan Peterson thinks that immigration is [akin to] rape. And I do not think that Jordan Peterson thinks that if the United States instituted an open borders immigration policy that you and I, dear reader, would literally die. However, I do think that Peterson placed ‘on the record’ a text wherein he attempted to provoke those thoughts in his audience.

I do not think that Jordan Peterson is an idiot. I think Jordan Peterson ‘knows’ that the [extemporaneous, verbal] text he created here is a poor argument. That if I were to sit down with him and go over this section in depth, that he would express regrets. Which leads me to question: Well, if he doesn’t think those things, and he would agree that this is a bad argument, why did he construct this text? My answer comes from the second meme in the clickbait-y title of this post.

I am told that some people [once] believe[d] in a phenomenon sometimes labelled ‘demonic possession’. The oversimplified basics being: Some type of malevolent external entity can metaphysically co-opt a human body, temporarily wresting control from the person’s will, and substituting behaviors selected and caused by the possessing demon. Of course we are too enlightened and sophisticated to subscribe to this profligate ontology, but maybe I may make an analogy of my own but one which drives toward the middle rather than the edge.

My explanation for Peterson’s behavior here, is that he is ideologically possessed. As are most of us part of the time, to differing degrees and manifesting in diverse contexts. How can we explain how otherwise apparently intelligent people temporarily fall prey to flights of absurd rhetoric that they would agree, if considered in cold blood, are epistemically irresponsible? That we appear to be the sorts of animals which are subject to a ‘possession’-style phenomenon, if we aren’t careful, wherein some deeply embedded ideology can ‘co-opt’ our communicative apparatus [or worse, our fists] to their purposes.

I don’t think Peterson is alone in this, though he does seem to be a frequent victim. I think that all of us have these ideological demons, these malevolent memes, clamoring over one another to take momentary control of the system. But I also think that there are practices we can engage in, individually and together, to exorcise these spirits– to attempt to remain, as best we can, as the responsible authors of our own texts.

Concentrating on argument analysis strikes me as one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal. The more often more people request precisely stated arguments which they can then collaborate to dispute and resolve– the more often we can make sense, make progress, and reach genuine agreements. I fail to see how yowling about Dead Babies does us any good, though I can understand why a demon may wish to do so through our very corporeal mouths.