Jordan Peterson

Observing the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis's election, the man the New York Times' David Brooks called “the most influential public intellectual in the ...

Peterson’s “individual categorization” is the ideological justification for ignoring this fact and continuing to treat groups — and the individual members of those groups — badly. It treats all people as members of a group, and there are some groups the people running the system want to keep down. But he shouldn’t sneer at the pope for speaking as a Christian. Wringing your hands worried that Black homeowners are not being “individually categorized” leaves them still unable to get a loan for the home in the white neighborhood. Which, one suspects, is the point. “First, yes it is,” he tweeted, “because it is predicated on group rather than individual categorization; second, we see damn little of ‘authentic’ social justice @Pontifex and a lot of ideology.” It looks objective and fair, but as study after study has found, it was used unobjectively and unfairly to enforce segregation. But he has taught a necessary ideal of mercy and human solidarity. Now he’s focused on the pope — that was not the only inept criticism he made — and doing no better than he did criticizing Sports Illustrated and Yumi Nu. Francis had said that “authentic social justice is not antithetical to Christianity,” which seems the equivalent of a doctor telling older people to eat more fiber. But then he went from a very smart man thinking about things to a pundit or even a guru, or even a pontiff. When this well-respected but obscure university psychology professor first came to public notice, for rejecting an anti-academic restriction on the way he spoke, I felt sympathy for him.