Answer:
On my last episode of charting Jordan Peterson’s abuses of history, we considered postwar French intellectuals (here’s my longer, more polished take). This time, we’ll be expanding to the nebulous but grandiose entity called “the West” or “Western Civilization,” which Peterson maintains is founded upon a “sovereignty of the individual” concept stretching back to antiquity and beyond. We’re upping the difficulty level immensely because the main object of ridicule is his “scholarly” published and peer-reviewed paper “Religion, Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and the Constituent Elements of Experience” (2006, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 5 citations). If you’re looking for a historical debunking as concrete as atheist Nazis, skip this long post since it will be a study in bad intellectual history rather than more material histories. That said, if scholarly journals demand the highest standards of work, then this is deeply embarrassing for both Peterson and the journal because he invested countless hours in this presentist pillaging and anachronistic orgy rather than merely dropping some casual bad history into a video or interview. We’re looking at the intersection of bad history, bad philosophy, bad social science, and bad theology, so there will be more muckraking on methodology than flogging on facts. Indeed he sometimes ventures into “not even wrong” territory because certain obfuscated statements and their negations seem equally plausible.
Step-by-step explanation:
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