Summary: <br> Dan McClellan is a public scholar of the Bible and religion and author of the book YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I don’t much talk about Jordan Peterson, I don’t think that he is as interesting a character as the internet makes out, certainly not as interesting as he thinks he is himself.<br> <br> <br> <br> In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, he’s a Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor, who got a lot of attention for, what seemed to me, pretty basic psychological observations; I think he got that attention because he couched those observations in terms that appealed to a right-wing audience. I don’t think that it would be fair to call him alt-right, he doesn’t seem to like the extreme right, but they do seem to like him, because he was able to articulate criticisms of the left in an impressive-sounding way, and they were happy to ignore his criticisms of the right, which, to be fair, he did make.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> This fanbase has earned him sacks of money, from Patreon sponsorship, to massive book deals and speaking tours. So, fine, there are lots of authors that I’m sceptical of.<br> <br> <br> <br> And, I have to say, I think he made one case for conservativism, political conservativism, that I think is pretty convincing. Basically, he says that the way our society is set up has got us all here to where we are today. Over evolutionary time, more than 99 per cent of all species have gone extinct. Over the past few million years, a whole slew of hominids, our cousins, have gone extinct – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and so on.<br> <br> <br> <br> And, from prehistory to today, many societies of modern humans, many cultures, many groups have essentially been wiped out, either by forces internal or external. But we haven’t.<br> <br> <br> <br> By definition, whatever we have been doing up to now works, because it got us here. Peterson’s argument is, essentially, that we should be very careful changing what we know works for the latest fad, some bright idealistic way to reform society, because there is no certainty that idea will work, and we have certainty that what we have been doing up to now does work, for us anyway.<br> <br> <br> <br> That argument is not as strong as he thinks it is, because one of the things that has got us here today is that we innovate. That’s what humans do. We’re good at adapting to the new situations. Penguins live quite well in Antarctica, but I don’t think they would do well competing with lions in the tropical jungle. Humans, by contrast can live in both, and many more environments too.<br> <br> <br> <br> But despite that weakness, his point is valid. Now, Peterson started off by commenting based on his experience in psychology, and he is well qualified in that area, but since he hit the jackpot of book deals and speaking tours, he has massively expanded the areas that he is eager to comment on, everything from Brexit to Climate Change; and unlike with psychology, he has no qualifications to talk on these topics, and it shows.<br> <br> <br> <br> It’s very obvious that he is producing content on demand for his right-leaning audience. Despite his unfamiliarity with the topics he’s talking about, he still maintains the snarky tone of someone who knows that he is better qualified than his opponent, and wants to let everyone else know that.<br> <br> <br> <br> In this vein, he retweeted recently a chart from a climate-change denying Twitter account, which purports to show the last 10,000 years of temperature record, with the recent increase in global temperatures being dwarfed by much bigger swings in the Roman and Minoan warm periods.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> The chart is laughably wrong. Firstly,
