A Philosophy of Government for Jordan Peterson

A friend turned me on to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a Canadian professor known for his reasonable defenses against the excesses of political correctness, as well as his lectures demonstrating that the major themes and archetypes of Christianity are "true" in a higher and valuable sense irrespective of the question of whether or not they were true literally.

We don't know exactly what Jordan's philosophy of government is, if he even has one. But based on everything I have seen and heard from him, he fits the profile of someone who would be a localist. That is, a localist as described in "Localism, a philosophy of government" operationally and the lesser-known "Localism Defended" philosophically.  What he is saying about good and evil, truth and lies, and complexity and dialogue over pat answers strongly points to a human who would agree wholeheartedly about what Localism has to say about us and our government.

Localism is all about a continual process of government adjusting its parameters in order to meet the needs and desires of the population it purports to serve. It respects tradition and stability without being irretrievably bound by it. It is not locked into any particular place on the left-right spectrum, though its inability to enforce large-scale coercion makes it incompatible with authoritarian forms of government from any part of the political spectrum. It is in the middle of the up-down spectrum between the stifling authoritarianism of the central state and the lawless chaos of anarchy.

The quote in the picture above, where Peterson equates evil with the force which believes that its knowledge is complete, is very much in line with what Localism says about humans and government. That is, since no system of human government is perfect, what matters most is the ease with which one can do a "reset".

Since different people are in different places culturally and morally, the right answer for them about where the lines should be drawn may not work for different people in a different city hundreds of miles away. Localism recognizes that our knowledge about what government should do is not complete. The answer will vary as the situation and population varies, and we should be willing to sleep well at night even if people we have never met in a city we have never visited are not doing things the way that we think that they should. Other philosophies of government, including those which prattle on the most about liberty, regularly lack this basic humility. The few over-arching restrictions in localism have the sole purpose of preserving decentralization of political power and thus protecting individual self-determination from all enemies both foreign and domestic.

What I am arguing here is that Peterson's views on humanity and the very nature of our struggle with truth necessitates a view of government which does not ascribe unmitigated virtue to either the common man or some set of "elite" rulers. This is just the sort of balanced view prescribed by localism. I once called it "The Dark Knight of Political Philosophies" because it is not the one we want. It does not flatter us. But its the one we need because it tells us the truth about ourselves whether we are rulers or ruled. We all need "sorting" from time to time because we are not intrinsically good (properly related to truth), we are intrinsically "unsorted", to put it mildly.

Yet even though Peterson equates certainty of knowledge with evil, he believes that truth exists and that the life-long search for it is good. These are the hallmarks of a classical thinker rather than a post-modernist thinker. Localism is built upon exactly those classical rather than post-modernist foundations. It is the combination of the classical view that truth exists and is noble to pursue combined with the humility of recognizing that we will never get all the way there. This exact balance is why I believe that localism is essentially Jordan Peterson's world-view applied to a philosophy of human government. Central-state authoritarianism can too easily come from a classical view of truth without humility, while lawless anarchy springs from post-modernism premises.  Peterson embraces classical thinking but with the intellectual humility which makes it open to improvement and ultimately bearable. This is precisely the localist view of things.

I notice on his lectures about "Nationalism vs. Globalism" he speaks favorable of nationalism. The reasons he gives for favoring it are even more applicable to localism than they are nationalism. He talks about units that the typical citizen is able to relate to. He talks about the broken or delayed feedback mechanisms when the controllers are too distant from the controlled. Every argument he makes for why nationalism fares better than globalism would work even better for localism, even compared to nationalism.

I don't want to oversell it. The first book in particular is from a very American perspective. The second book is more explicitly theistic than Peterson in that Peterson only says the concepts from Christianity are useful while localism posits that we cannot rule out the existence of God and therefore what the existence of God might say about human government. It is not from a view of a "disciple" of Peterson. It is not a "result" of anything Peterson had to say, but rather a confluence of thought from two people who share a similar basic world view in may important respects. Peterson addresses much broader themes and may even find the idea of application of his premises to human government as a tedious and derived topic best left to more narrow thinkers. If that is the case, I am humbly willing to be one of those thinkers.