dear jordan peterson - postmodernism is not the problem

i am a reasonably educated man for my time - a qualification in this day and age that effectively undoes the adjective - and i focused quite a lot of my studies on postmodernism after having my mind cracked open by some of james hillman's writings and a particularly brilliant professor. you have spoken at length about the evils of postmodernism, and while i absolutely agree with your assessment of the subject of your speech it worries me that you have labelled it "postmodernism" when it's anything but.

postmodernism, in my estimation, can be summarized by the awareness of narrative as a super-structure that at its core teaches us the dangers of ideology and provides proto-tools for defending against precisely the kinds of dangerously subversive ideologies we're facing today.

it is ironic, then, that the flag of marxism - a perfectly modernist movement - is being carried by educators and activists who consider themselves postmodern when they have fallen into the very trap that postmodernism warns us of. all these things that you have described are not attributes of postmodernism, they're attributes of poisonous ideologies that twist aspects of postmodern theory for their own, blindly modernist agendas.

berger and zijderveld laid out the underlying causes of fundamentalism in their work "in praise of doubt", establishing it as a counterstrike against the potential nihilism of postmodern awareness, but i don't think they took the idea far enough: it's not just fundamentalism in religion that has become the opiate of choice for those wrestling with postmodern anxiety, nor even fundamentalism in any other ideology (scientism, marxism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism), but fundamentalism in almost any aspect of life. we see this predominantly in things like fitness culture, sports fanaticism and all the isms relating to dietary choices; these days it seems people can find comfort and meaning in pretty much anything.

---i find your suggestion that people need to understand statistics a vast oversimplification. i believe a number of things need to start happening in order for us to prevent more radical left (and right) zombification^[*].

we need to build a bridge between the sciences and the humanities. scientists who don't understand what it means to be operating in a subjective mapping of the physical world have a tendency to produce bad science and useless engineering, which we've been seeing quite a lot of in recent years. humanities students who cannot see beyond the subjective mapping to the physical world will dive into nonsensical wonderlands without even bothering to look for corroborating data, the idea of evidence being meaningless to them. at the very least we need to be teaching younger students the fundamentals of the scientific method and enough philosophy and psychology to develop of a basic understanding of ideology to be able to think critically in context.
this bridge needs to be built early on, long before we give our primary or secondary students choices of which subjects to drop and certainly before the average dropout leaves school.

we also need to improve access to information. since the advent of the internet, universities and their systems have rapidly devolved from being generators and disseminators of knowledge to gatekeepers and hoarders. even if the stranglehold on humanities you describe was to be relaxed, the relationship between research and education needs to be reexamined for the new paradigm. we need to dismantle the paywalls**, find better ways to store academic papers and research data, and we need to do this fast before all the good that universities produce is lost to chaos. putting lectures online for free is a wonderful first step, but public access to raw data and peer-reviewed analyses needs to happen too.

another important thing that needs to happen is that education needs to go viral, and you have almost single-handedly demonstrated how thirsty the world is for rationality and knowledge. that you have any followers at all brings me hope and i would like to take a moment to thank you for being a beacon of light in a predominantly dark age.

---** aaron swartz took an extreme position, but there are many potential models that could make open access economically viable. off the top of my head i can propose cheap individual monthly subscriptions, or microcharges for each paper accessed... this isn't rocket science.