(THREAD) Supposed post-postmodernist Jordan Peterson got famous opposing Bill C-16 in Canada—discussing his opposition in a lecture ("Fear and the Law"). But Peterson knows nothing about law—and a real post-postmodernist would've held a different view. Hope you'll read and share. 
1/ This thread incorporates my thread from yesterday discussing how Jordan Peterson is a retrograde pre-Modernist thinker masquerading in plain sight as a post-postmodernist in order to gain attention, respect, and support from young as well as old people.
2/ The part of Bill C-16 Peterson harped on was the provision making it a criminal offense to promote hatred because of gender identity or gender expression, which Peterson said would criminalize speech by punishing with criminal penalties those who misgender transgender persons.
3/ Peterson has since then used the fallacy of composition—taking a part of a whole and attributing its traits to the whole—to argue that a small pocket of neo-Marxists in toothless academic cloisters a thousand miles from any public policy significance represent the entire Left.
4/ As I said yesterday, the trait of this particular quadrant of the Left—again, with limited significance from a policy-making view—that Peterson is focused upon is its combination of deconstructive thinking and dialectical combat, all of which is predicated upon power dynamics.
5/ Postmodern (more specifically post-structuralist) dialectics turns every situation into a tilt between two opposing forces that must do intellectual battle until one is vanquished. In the context of Bill C-16, the supposed post-postmodernist Peterson waged war via dialectics.
6/ To be clear, many of Peterson's adversaries in the C-16 debate also used a dialectical mode of debate—in fact, the very same aggressor-victim dialectic that Peterson himself used. Peterson and his opponents merely took a different view of who was an aggressor and who a victim.
7/ Some C-16 supporters said misgendering a transgender person is an aggressive act that victimizes—thus, misgendering is a violent act and therefore an exertion of power. Peterson said criminalizing misgendering deploys power and victimizes him by restraining his free speech.
8/ Agreeing to dispute the issue within a two-dimensional aggressor-victim binary makes Peterson *seem* a postmodernist, when of course he's a pre-Modernist. Peterson's pre-Modernism arises in his explanation for opposing C-16—which really has nothing to do with the law or power.
9/ Peterson is hostile to transgender persons—even regularly mis-citing data on such persons and on being transgender—because he holds an essentialist view of gender that originates in myth. So his postmodernism hides a retrograde philosophy. But where's his post-postmodernism?
10/ Were Peterson an actual post-postmodernist—and if he had knowledge of the law—he'd know that the law is more nuanced than two-dimensional binaries. The aggressor-victim binary only dominates the law if all you do is watch Law & Order all day. It's more complicated than that.
11/ For instance—separate from the C-16 debate and drawing no analogy—in tort law we have comparative negligence, or non-absolute contributory negligence, which says that in some situations a party can accuse another of victimizing them civilly and the law can find fault in both.
12/ In the case of C-16, a lawyer would know that "fighting words doctrine" is a possible non-binary solution to the binary debate that made Peterson famous; either he didn't know what that was or wanted to milk a dialectical mode of debate he doesn't believe in to become famous.
13/ By the same token, a post-postmodernist would know that to overleap the dialectical mode of debate one must—as a thought experiment—palimpsestically overlay dialectical binaries, thus imagining what would happen if each actor *simultaneously occupied several competing roles*.
14/ For instance, what could it possibly mean—a post-postmodernist might ask—for a person misgendering another person to simultaneously be aggressor and victim? By the same token, what would it mean if a transgender person who was being misgendered was both aggressor and victim?
15/ To be clear, these are metamodernist (post-postmodernist) thought experiments, and they are inductive—meaning, they muse on how overlapping metanarratives could produce a novel solution to an otherwise intractable problem. They do not assume a certain result is the right one.
16/ If we ask the facially silly but fundamentally metamodern and utilitarian question, "Could a person who is misgendering another—or who is being misgendered themselves—ever occupy the role of *both* aggressor and victim?" we suddenly discover that we've come to a new solution.
17/ In many jurisdictions, a criminal assault is reduced to a non-criminal violation if the two parties mutually consented to enter into physical combat—the term often used is "mutual combat." In such situations, the parties' implied consent to fight makes the fight non-criminal.
18/ Within the context of "mutual combat" we have something called the "fighting words doctrine"—which says that certain insults aren't protected by the First Amendment because they fundamentally operate as an invitation to a fist-fight and therefore run counter to public safety.
19/ So—for instance—if a white man calls an African-American man the n-word, in many jurisdictions if the African-American man then assaults the white man "fighting words doctrine" will be an affirmative defense against a criminal conviction. It theoretically acts as a deterrent.
20/ Having a "fighting words doctrine" is preferable to a "prior restraint" on speech—a government telling people what they can and can't say—because it discourages (rather than restrains) certain speech by saying that the law might not be on your side if you get your ass kicked.
21/ A metamodernist thought experiment imagining how or when a person misgendering another person and/or a transgender person being misgendered might be both aggressor and victim at once would immediately light upon the possibility of mutual combat in response to a misgendering.
22/ When we imagine a transgender person who is misgendered as a victim only, the only possible result is a statute protecting that victim. Allowing for only that one possibility allows demagogues like Peterson to get famous by playing one side of a artificially narrow question.
23/ But what if we told those who want to deliberately misgender others as a personal insult that if you do and if you then *get your fucking ass kicked*, the law may not deem that a crime because your deliberate misgendering constituted "fighting words" (i.e. consent to combat)?
24/ This configuration of the C-16 question has the value of a) maintaining avoidance of prior restraints, b) strongly discouraging intentional—rather than accidental—misgendering and c) underscoring the strength and resolve of a class of persons otherwise seen as purely victims.
25/ Metamodernism is solution-oriented—as is any post-postmodernism, as post-postmodernisms must be reconstructive rather than deconstructive and dialogic rather than dialectical. Peterson's war on C-16 was deliberate demagoguery and *proves* that he's no post-postmodernist. /end
PS/ This is only a thread about the element of C-16 Peterson was harping on; it wasn't on non-discrimination statutes generally. Covering transgender persons under non-discrimination statutes for me is a no-brainer—it's a clear yes (i.e., we should)—but that's a different thread.
