Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson

I've really been trying to understand the underlying psychology of postmodernism and its relationship with neo-Marxism, and then the spread of that into the universities and the effect on the culture.

And what I would like to start with is a description of your understanding of that, because I've presented to the people who are listening to me my understanding of it. But I interviewed Stephen Hicks recently, and he wrote an interesting book called "Explaining Postmodernism," which I liked quite a bit. It's been criticized for being too right-wing, although I don't think he's right-wing at all. I think maybe you could characterize him as middle-of-the-road conservative, but I would say he's more like a classic liberal.

But I'm really curious about your views about, well, what— what Postmodernism is first of all. I know you've— you've identified it with the— with the general tricksters Derrida and Lacan and Foucault. And Foucault in particular you've talked about. But I'd like to know what you think about postmodernism and also why you think it's been so attractive to people.

Well, my explanation is that there is no authentic 1960s point of view in any of the elite universities, but rather the most liberated minds of my generation of 1960 did not go on to graduate school. I witnessed this with my own eyes. I saw genuine Marxists, okay, at my college, which was the State University of New York at Binghamton, upstate New York, Harpur College, which had a huge cohort of very radical downstate New York Jews, okay, who— In fact, Harpur used to be called Berkeley East.

I saw genuine passionate Marxists with my own eyes. They were not word choppers. They were not snide postmodernists, right? They were in-your-face aggressive. They used the language of the people. They had a populist and energy, okay? They dressed working class. They were nonmaterialistic, okay? These are people who lived by their own convictions. They were against the graduate schools, all right?

When I— When I, uh, went on to graduate school, and it became known that I was going to go to Yale, I was confronted by a leader of the radicals on campus, in broad daylight in front of everyone, who denounced me for— he said, "Grad school is not where it's happening. You don't— You don't do that. If you have to go to graduate school you should go to Buffalo."

Now, I had applied to SUNY Buffalo, because the great leftist critic Leslie Fiedler was there, who had a huge impact on me. He's practically created identity politics, but without its present distortions, all right? And Norman Holland, the psychoanalytic critic was there. I would have been very happy to have gone on to Buffalo, but I needed the library at Yale, so I continued on to Yale.

There were no radicals in the graduate schools, okay, from 1968 to '72, when I was there. Only one radical, Todd Gitlin, who went on to have a career success, okay? The actual radicals of the 1960s, okay, either went off— dropped out of college, or went off to create communes, right, or they were taking acid and destroyed their brains.

Now, I have also written about that, the destruction of the minds, okay, of the most talented members of my generation through LSD. It was going on all around me, right? So, what's happened is the actual legacy of the '60s got truncated. The idea that these post-structuralists and postmodernists are heirs of the 1960s revolution is an absolute crock, okay?

What they represent, as Foucault shows— Foucault said, okay, that the biggest influence on his thinking, okay, was Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," okay, which was a post-World-War-II play, written in Paris, that was about the disillusionment and nihilism experienced after Hitler went through, occupied France, right, and all of Europe was in ruins.

It had nothing to do with what— "Waiting for Godot" has nothing to do with the authentic legacy of the 1960s, which was about genuine multiculturalism, a movement toward India, toward Hinduism, a transformation of consciousness through psychedelics, which I did not take, but whic...