Let’s piss some more people off. That tends to happen a lot whenever I open my mouth on certain subjects so let’s do some more of that.

This is a multi-faceted post that’s going to wander and it comes from a number of different sources, mostly YouTube videos that I’ve seen in recent days. I’ll link to all of those below so you can go and see what I’m talking about.

But culture. What is it and why do people like Jordan Peterson get it so wrong? Other than the fact  that he’s an idiot? Let’s explore the idea.

So this requires a bit of an explanation. A little while ago, Jordan Peterson went on the Joe Rogan Experience and made some stupid comments about both Christianity and culture. I didn’t see it, I don’t watch Joe Rogan but I was aware in passing that it had happened.

Then, yesterday, I saw a video from Rationality Rules on said statements and you can click above to watch the video, I highly recommend that you do because it sets the stage for a lot of what I’m about to say. So go do that, I’ll wait until you get back.

Anyhow, my reaction was pretty much what Geralt’s was in his opening. Never go full retard and Jordan Peterson is a complete retard. He also, clearly, doesn’t understand what culture is. Lots of people don’t, including people like… say, Matt Dillahunty. Now I’m only using him in this discussion because I’ve done so a lot and generally, I figure, people can recognize where he gets a lot of his moral arguments wrong. In fact, he pulled his anti-slavery argument on a caller in a video posted on the same day (link here) and that’s what reminded me of all of this. There are rational ways to look at the world and there are emotional ways and his are clearly emotional.

Let’s get back to Peterson. His take seems to be that there is an established Judeo-Christian culture and every step that we take away from it is somehow a dissolution of western culture and that’s somehow bad. Except that’s not how culture works. It’s never been how culture worked. Culture, like morals (I’ll come back to that soon, I promise), is a moving target. It’s not something static that exists beyond human understanding, it’s something that exists in a specific form at a specific moment in time. Western culture isn’t dissolving as Peterson seems to think, it’s evolving. It’s always evolving. It isn’t what it was 10 years ago and it isn’t what it will be in another 10 years. That’s not how reality works.

Now I promised to get back to Matt Dillahunty’s slavery screed and here’s where it ties in because he does largely the same thing. Others do as well, don’t get me wrong, he’s just a visible proponent of this kind of thinking and he’s just as wrong as Jordan Peterson.

Just because you are convinced that your current views are the best views ever, that doesn’t mean anything. At the time when slavery was acceptable, whether you’re talking about Biblical times or the American slave trade, the views then were the views that existed. They probably thought in a manner similar to what Matt does. Slavery is fine and always will be! It say so in the Bible! Their source and their reasoning told them that it was eternally true. Then, times changed. Slavery was no longer acceptable and now Matt is doing the same thing that they were. Slavery has never been acceptable and it never will be acceptable, so there. His current views, colored by his culture and society, have him making universal proclamations that he simply cannot rationally back up.

Here’s the thing that a lot of people simply can’t understand. There is no universal right or wrong. There is no eternal moral or immoral. There is only now. We can only make decisions about what we consider right or wrong, moral or immoral now, based on the world which we live in today. In 20 years, it could be different. 20 years ago, it  certainly was. It’s the people who think that now is representative of forever that have problems and people like Matt and apparently Jordan absolutely fit into that category.

We are all a product of our environment. We always have been and always will be. Had Matt lived 200 years ago at the height of the American slave trade, he probably would have been a Christian and he might very well have been a slave owner, based on where he currently lives. There’s nothing “wrong” with that because that would have been the culture in which he lived, it would have been the norm where he grew up and whether anyone likes it or not, we are all colored by our surroundings. If I lived where my family was from back in the day, I probably wouldn’t have owned slaves because we were in the north, but that doesn’t make me better than him. I almost certainly would have been a Christian too. That’s just the reality of it.

Yet today, we get far too many people, like Matt and Jordan, who are convinced that there’s one way that things are “supposed to be” and that’s not really how any of it works. There isn’t a “supposed to”, there’s an “is”. This is how it is. How you react to it, that’s often up to factors completely or mostly beyond your  control. You might be convinced that  your current position is the best idea that you could ever possibly have, but that’s influenced by things like your upbringing and your surroundings and the ideas that you have access to. I’m sure that Matt was completely convinced that Christianity was absolutely correct, back when he was a theist, just like I did. Today, both of us are convinced that we were wrong. Things change. Clinging desperately to the emotionally comforting and not understanding the reality, it does no good for anyone.

Because here’s the thing. There’s never been a single, monolithic Western Culture. There have been all kinds of small, somewhat related cultures that fell under that umbrella. They were all changing and today, the idea isn’t even coherent anymore. Peterson is living in a past that never actually existed in reality.

But Matt is too. He’s absolutely convinced that slavery is wrong today. I am too, because we grew up in similar settings. If he was born in a place that slavery was still a thing today, he’d probably be Muslim and he might have slaves of his own. His views would very likely be different. Welcome to the real world. Because of this, his very emotional gotcha, that anyone who thinks that slavery was ever, or could ever have been justified, it ignores the clear historical context. Slavery, when slavery was accepted, wasn’t wrong, at least not in the eyes of those who agreed with it. You might  disagree and you’re  certainly welcome to do so, but that doesn’t change anything because you’re not demonstrably right, any more than they were demonstrably wrong. Morality is entirely subjective. It’s time people got that simple fact through their heads. No matter how emotionally attached you are to your ideals, that doesn’t make you automatically right.

That goes for Matt and that goes for Jordan. It goes for everyone. People really need to learn how to think critically. It’s sad watching so many who can’t.