A North Korean at Columbia University
Jordan Peterson talks with Yeonmi Park on his YouTube blog.
As one high-raking North Korean defector put it: “[O]ur General’s life is a continuous series of blessed miracles, incapable of being matched even by all our mortal lifetimes put together.” Because of the total monopoly of the Kim dynasty-centric narrative, every North Korean’s life unfolds within a drastically circumscribed and impoverished reality. The ludicrous fantasies that smother North Korean culture in a stultifying miasma seem obviously nonsensical, but let’s not be too quick to believe that we in the ‘free world’ are not also in danger of our own insidious forms of psychologically flattening indoctrination.
This awkward truth has become especially clear to me recently through watching the Canadian academic, psychologist, and best-selling author Jordan Peterson’s podcasts on YouTube. Peterson is a controversial figure, and many on what he likes to dub the ‘radical left’ disdain him because his comments have been too easily picked up by the so-called ‘alt-right’ and made to sound racist and sexist. As far as I can tell, Peterson is genuinely trying to plough a straight furrow between extremes, appealing to scientifically verifiable data and common sense. But this is not a time to be ploughing such furrows, nor is his conviction that scientific data speaks ‘objectively’ for itself unproblematic, not least because all to often Peterson seems to smuggle in his own strongly subjective opinions under the cover of assertion that ‘the data speaks for itself.’ Maybe he is just doomed to fail, became this is a time of polarization, and however well-meaning his attempts to draw attention to the more extreme consequences of cultural relativism, Peterson cannot avoid being co-opted. For example, it is clear that one of the platforms he has opted for and utilizes obsessively – the YouTube blog – is inherently polarizing, and nuanced positions like his simply cannot be maintained once large audiences engage with them.
Many of the people Paterson interviews tell him stories of how core cultural institutions like the university and the press within which they work have become ideologically entrenched, and are now dominated by the new puritan zealots of what is dubbed ‘Wokeism’ , that is, dominated by people who embrace the sanctity of diversity, inclusivity, and equity above all else, and ironically often pursue these goals with overtly intransigent, aggressively adversarial, and condescending zeal. As an academic working in South Korea, I feel distanced from the culture war raging in the West, and it’s hard for me to believe that what Peterson warns about really is so threatening to the future of the open society. But a recent interview made me really sit up. In it Peterson talked with Yeonmi Park, a young woman (born 1993) who escaped from North Korea and subsequently wrote a book about her experience entitled In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (2015)
What Park went through is harrowing. Her life as a child in North Korea was a brutal struggle for survival, but nevertheless she managed to escape to China when she was a teenager. But once she and her mother got there they were immediately enslaved – sold to Chinese farmers who were in need of wives. Eventually, after much more suffering, in which she contemplated suicide, Park arrived in Seoul, and through sheer determination completed her high school education in record time and then went on to university. She talked to Peterson of the importance for her of George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, which made her aware of the extent to which the North Korean system had robbed her not just of freedom but also of possibilities inherent in the very concept of freedom. For Orwell recognized that the surest way to control the minds of people is to control the language they use. If they don’t know how the word ‘freedom’ can be used, what it can mean, then they won’t know that they lack it. For ‘freedom’ is an abstraction that only becomes real through the deployment of tangible analogies and metaphors. If these tangible references are corralled into a controlled and circumscribed narrative, then the abstraction exists only in relation to the key actors within that narrative, which in the case of North Korea is only one: the Kim dynasty narrative. So, freedom as a concept is only understandable in relation to the dominant Kim narrative, where it comes to mean something very different from how we think of it. In this way, and also through the more punitive expedient of keeping people hungry in the provinces, the North Korean system systematically reduces its citizens to ox-life compliance.
Inspired by Orwell and other such cultural lighthouses in the West, Park ended up enrolling at Columbia University in New York, and it was what she said about her experience there that was an especially surprising and dreadfully demoralizing part of the Peterson interview. For she had concluded that her three years of study were a complete waste of time. Why? Because she found not the support, encouragement, and an invitation to explore the open society but rather a terrible closing down of the intellectual mind. All her humanities’ professors – all – were in such thrall to the political correctness of diversity, inclusivity, equity advocacy that they displayed a pervasively antagonistic attitude to Western society that deeply alienated Park. She mentioned how one female professor chided her for allowing a man to open a door for her, and when Park insisted that she believed he had done so in good faith, the professor insisted that Park was sadly brainwashed by the patriarchy. Park had come to Columbia in order to continue to reap the benefits of cultural emancipation, and instead she found the intellectual elite in the West had lost faith in the very culture of which she had enthusiastically and gratefully placed her own faith as a bone fide life-saver.
You could plainly see in the interview how ashamed Peterson felt about Park’s disappointment. I felt ashamed too. Here was a young women who had gone through hell, and, against impossible odds, and fired by an appetite for freedom and knowledge, had got to study at Columbia. Here was a young woman whose will to survive was fired by faith in an at first inchoate and then copiously corroborated benefits of the broadly humanistic values of the open society, values she had come to believe were universally binding beyond the nightmarish reality of North Korea, only to find that the most coddled intellectual elite of the West, who have had no experience of the deprivations Park was born into, patronizingly informed her that she should realize above all else that the West is systemically racist, sexist, and predicated on the arbitrary exercise of power.
This manic compulsion amongst elite intellectuals to criticize and condemn is being stoked by many factors. I think Yeonmi Park’s disappointment should make us consider what role is being played by the extreme contrast between her own awful early life experience and the lives of the tenured radicals who felt justified in preaching at her. Could it be that these intellectuals feel guilty about their privilege, and that they try to hide the fact by taking up the cause of the oppressed and pushing their critique to an extreme?
Could it also be that their sheltered existence, their good fortune in living in a society that, despite the terrible injustices and inequalities that certainly exist, has been remarkably peaceful in their lifetime, has made them lose any sense of what is at stake in denigrating their culture to the extent they do? In lambasting humanism and baying for revolutionary change they betray the extent to which they lack personal experience of how fragile is the civilization that cossets and protects them. It’s easy to advocate revolution from an armchair one has never been thrown out of.
The phenomenon of cultural polarization also signals the overwhelming tribalism of human sociality, even of its elites. Individual member of a socially integrated group do not want to risk breaking rank on fear of being accused of the unforgiveable, and getting ostracised. Another of Peterson’s interviewees told a very sad story of her suspension with pay from a tenured position at a Canadian university because of what, on the face of it, were very innocuous comments made on her blog that drew ire from a few students as racist and sexist. The fact that the person accused is a female Muslim immigrant from Lebanon should give one pause for thought. It seems that within the present climate, the most dangerous figures are those cast as heretics, that is, those who should be content and grateful to follow the dominant line but refuse to do so.. What was especially disheartening was that none of this woman’s colleagues have publicly come out in her support. What cowardice! In this context, the ‘scapegoating mechanism’, as the cultural critic René Girard, terms it, which I discussed in a previous blog, is also an important causative factor. In times of crisis, groups seek to shift their anxieties onto a nominated ‘guilty’ party, which then carries and carries way their anxiety through being sacrificed. As Girard notes, for the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ to work, the accusers must be totally convinced of their scapegoat’s guilt, who when viewed from outside the dynamics of the mechanism, is seen for what it really is: an innocent sacrifice.
But to understand why no one wants to break ranks we need to delve deeper that just fear of being ostracised or being made a scapegoat. A more systemic or deep structural way of explaining the situation seems to me to be to view Park’s story as an individual instance, a particularly dramatic instance, of a much more generally pervasive and longstanding cultural phenomenon in the West. What I mean is that Park’s life is in a sense a speeded-up version of what the sociologist Max Weber recognized as the central drive of modernity on the level of values and meaning: disenchantment. In a decade, and on a very personal level, Park has gone through what our society as a whole went through over a period of at least two centuries. We can consider her as experiencing on a very personal level in a decade or so the entire Enlightenment ‘project,’ in the sense that she emerged from the darkness of prejudice and superstitious into the light of reason.
But this is not where the heroic ‘project’ ends. The process of disenchantment is like a tidal wave that gathers force as it demolishes traditions and beliefs, and the logic of disenchantment is actually perpetual disenchantment. In other words, continual and relentless critique. It is therefore inevitable that values and beliefs will be continuously overturned. As loyal heirs to modernity in the cultural realm the intellectual elite in the university and elsewhere must therefore continue the struggle of critique, even though it will eventually involve devouring their own children, because this loyalty is to the ‘not yet’, to a deep sense that the world as it is always deficient.
When seen in this light, Park is still intellectually at the stage the intellectuals in the West were at over one hundred years ago. She believes in humanist universalism, just like most of the intellectual elite once did. But for those most unreflectively committed to the ‘project’, this belief was just a way-station, because it was actually premised on the deeper impulse to critique and reject, which was initially directed at the pre-scientific religious worldview and the values of the pre-industrial aristocratic hierarchy. But the logic of disenchantment mandates a process of endless critique., something that was most evident first in Marxism, and then later transmuted into the critical impulse became enshrined in ‘post-structuralism’ or ‘postmodernism’, and now is encapsulated in ‘Wokeism’.
This is the logic of critique as a mode of historical consciousness, and it means that while the hinge of the critique may today be identity and diversity-inclusivity-equity, this is not actually what is really driving the protests. For the underlying motivation is disenchantment as a belief system, a mode consciousness, as guiding principle. In this sense, one could even argue that it really doesn’t matter what is being ‘disenchanted,’ because what is important is the will to disenchant, whose logical end can only be the tabula rasa – the blank slate. Only when there is nothing left to disenchant can the process cease. If this sounds nihilistic, that’s because it is. In this sense, however justifiable the struggle for justice may be it also conceals an underlying nihilistic will to reach a tabula rasa. Wokeism should really be called ‘Blank Slate-ism.’ This is certainly not to deny that obviously justifiable grounds exist for confronting social iniquity, but what I am arguing is that there can be an underlying dynamic to such protests that lies within a deep cultural phenomenon - a historical consciousness - which effectively turns the protest for justice into a cultural Terminator. Yeonmi Park has refused to adopt this next stage in the logic of disenchantment for obvious reasons. She is still in the first flush of a prior disenchantment, having freed herself from North Korean ideology. Will she resist the subsequent stages? Much depends on what kind of intellectual community she choses, who she admires. But it seems fair to say that it won’t be a community consisting of Columbia University professors.
A final reason for the stance adopted by increasing numbers of our intellectual elite is defensive and perversely therapeutic. This is a n age pervaded by an extreme sense of vulnerability caused by a confluence of factors over which we have very little control. Above all, ecological disaster poses a vastly more dangerous threat to humanity than the problems that Wokeism draws attention. When viewed in this context, the controversies over identity politics look like powerfully compelling distractions from a far more fundamental crisis, one which we have really no idea how to confront.
I end today’s post with a quote from Jonathan Lear’s book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006):
We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world –terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes—have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today –from all points on the political spectrum. It is as though, without insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it (p.7).