Gender Über Alles

Not sure if you've seen it, but this 30-minute interview with Jordan Peterson is fascinating. In it, he discusses gender pay gaps, sexual differences and transgender pronouns. His interlocutor is some British chick who is the perfect model of a modern progressive evangelical. Her world is perfectly described by progressive politics and her belief in them is deeply religious.

That may seem like an almost-unsupported generalization and I may indeed have her wrong, but consider the way she restates almost everything Jordan says as shown in the video below.

She's unable to understand what he's saying because it violates her deeply religious world view. Everything gets pulled back into sexism and later, transphobia. When he argues that reality is too complex to be described only in terms of gender, she dismissed it and the remainder of her questions make it clear that, to her, you really can describe everything in terms of the identity politics laid out by the left. His use of the term "multivariate" goes right over her head. My guess is that she didn't understand the word and didn't bother to ask because, well, gender über alles.

Another thought on this was how intellectually exhausted the left is. She has one point - women get paid less than men, but she can't discuss it. She can only say it in terms of gender injustice. Sexual dimorphism seems to exist in a separate reality as do the ways in which the sexes sort themselves out in careers.

Finally, this is the first time I understood Dr. Peterson's assertion that our modern preoccupation with race and gender is Marxist. The evolution goes something like this.

• Workers all over the world are members of a class which will band together and overthrow the bourgeoisie.
• When World War I showed that British workers were perfectly happy to fight German workers, this changed to workers within a nation are members of a class which will band together and overthrow the bourgeoisie. That's where national socialism and fascism arose.
• When the Soviet Union collapsed as well as Argentina, Cuba and all the assorted socialist failures occurred, that morphed into people of color and women and gays within a nation are members of subsets which will band together and overthrow the white patriarchy. That's where we are now.

It's all the same concept, we've just reclassified the oppressed group as each preceding concept turned out to be utter rubbish. This one is, too and you can see the interviewer struggling with that.