I have listened to this 3 times now, always thought-provoking. Cormac's characters are deep as ith insights on violence. RIP 🙏 Cormack McCarthy. I bought his last when they came out before he past. Thank you, Dr. Sugre.
Great to see new discussions from Michael Sugrue. Been subscribed hoping for new content since last year when I listened all of your lectures from the 90s
This mans lecture of The Stoic Ideal saved my life in my darkest hour. It gives me the ability to lean on my good nature instead of letting tragedy wrestle it away from me.
Yes! I've been burning through your Princeton lectures, and I am STOKED to see new content. Thank you Dr. Sugrue for your well crafted and articulate thoughts on these interesting subjects! Also, I want to echo others in the comments...more from Shakespeare! The Merchant of Venice!
This was so special to hear from Dr. Sugrue's analysis of the novel, "Blood Meridian " by Cormac McCarthy. I love McCarthy books, lots of books I love actually. William Faulkner, Doedysifsky, Tolstoy, I could on and on. Clockwork Orange, a masterpiece film, loved Stanley Kubrick's work also. Moby-Dick, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Mason and Dixion. Tovadine sat with his boots on crossed before the fire. No man can aquant himself with everything on this earth. IF McCarthy does not want us to regard the judge as a gnostic archon, or supernatural being the reader may still feel the need it hardley seems sufficient to designate Holden as a 19th century Western American Diego,( I read this novel at least once a year, always to gather insight into the complexities of the characters. Thank you again sir.❤️ American history on all sides. Howard Zinn's " A People's History of the United States of America."
Truly insightful lecture on "Blood Meridian" and the core themes addressed in the book, such as moral chaos, fragility of civilization, and the ubiquity and timelessness of evil. Such themes evoke Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange", and "The Epic of Gilgamesh."
THANK YOU! I've read Blood Meridian 10 times over the past 15 years. And joined the Cormac reddit discussion group. And your 30 min lecture is such a deep fascinating interpretation, I love BM even more. Thank you souch for sharing your scholarship
Perfect timing. I was just talking about this book when speaking to some peers about freedom from and freedom to. Time to be reminded of all the important points I missed!
1:43 This man has studied and taught extensively 3:27 [Start] An Epic Journey 5:02 The Weak are Consumed by The Strong Does Suffering have a purpose? 5:59 Reads like Faulkner, long powerful sentences, a gravity of writing. 7:00 Violence to Survive, killing all the way through 8:00 _Garden of Earthly Delights_ A Meditation on Evil Clash of Civilizations 8:54 The Kid’s Coming of Age The Judge - Adversary To God, Devil/Mephastafilies “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Satanic Pride 11:05 Lying Judge 12:27 Blank Notebook 📒 Megaloniacle True Pandemonium 15:13 Escaping The Judge 15:46 Moral Decision _A Clockwork Orange_ by Anthony Burgess 17:21 Shooting to Kill, but he CANNOT BE KILLED Death is the Life of The Darkness The Judge does not age 18:57 You still have clemency for the heathen 21:15 Killer Judge 22:45 _Epic of Gilgamesh_ callback Sudden Death, Fear , Suffering Shedding Skin 24:27 “Evil never gets old, Death is always reaching out it’s Dark and Sparkling hands.” 25:24 Anecdote of The Jaw Creating Coherence and Order in The State of Nature *Q&A* 28:07 Violence has no good reason, no symbols 30:32 Dostoyevsky, Faust, Gilgamesh 35:32 Philosophy of Resignation Evil won’t Die Evil won’t End 36:38 “Everybody wonders where evil comes from, but nobody wonders what that implies for The Good.” 38:38 What inspired McCarthy to write this? • USA History • Camanches violence 41:54 Civilization is a think crust over hell. 44:24 Anti-Manifest Destiny 45:40 Caged Subconscious
It's great to learn about this book. Of course, I'll never read it because I don't want to flood my mind with the horrors of violence. But, I can deal with an intellectual analysis of it. I'm definitely looking forward to more of these lectures and discussions. This Webinar continues to haunt me. When you get a chance, please check out Dr. Jordan Peterson's youtube videos on the Big 5 personality traits. It seems that in a society, large or small, that is in anarchy, the most evil people have the greatest latitude. Rational people of goodwill do exist and are, in fact, the majority. But in the condition of anarchy it's almost impossible for them to subdue the malovelant psycopaths. But i don't think that means we all have an inner psychopath that only needs to be released by necessity. Just a thought.
Excellent lecture, sir. My favourite modern novel discussed by my favourite modern thinker, what a treat. Would you consider doing/releasing more lectures on Shakespeare? Your lecture on Measure For Measure was some of if not the best Shakespearean analysis I've ever seen, so I'm sure I speak for much of your audience when I say that I would love to see more.
Having read and listened to (on audiobook) BM several times; having watched the Amy Hungerford lectures from Yale and the quintessential interview with Harold Bloom on PBS, among many other widely available BM content; having read Notes on Blood Meridian by Sepich; Prof Sugrue still illuminates parts of this masterwork I haven’t heard discussed elsewhere. Would have loved to participate to posit other considerations like: -Is Judge Holden the “author” (e.g. how are we to understand the use of the N-word as it appears in BM)? If the judge is the author, the epilogue reads like a thumbnail sketch within his portmanteau from a scouting expedition. -Is the kid a cipher for the reader themselves? -Or is the reader Sargent Aguilar, that is, a witnessing 3rd party? -When the judge says “My book or some other book. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all,” it’s as though McCarthy unearthed this knowledge and you’re holding it in your hands. In real life. Frightening. -When the judge says “Time to be going. I have errands,” his return later at the end is after… the US civil war. Frightening. Many other Qs I’d have liked to ask Prof Sugrue as he is clearly a careful reader of the book. Also could not be more thankful for this YT channel.
Thought-provoking book and lecture! Has the moment of revelation that the Judge is a serial child predator been minimized in its impact since the novel was released due to the series of child abuse scandals disclosed over the past forty years? In other words, are we more inclined as an audience to view the judge’s conduct through the lens of cyclical, aberrant psychology rather than as a force of elemental, historical or religious perversion? If so, do we have a harder time seeing this as a component of the bargain struck between Glanton and the Judge? Thank you!
Aye, I’ve not heard that of that angle before. The more common reading that I’ve come across and that lines up more with my memory of the text is that the judge enters the kid/man in the bathroom and entices him to rape the girl owner of the dancing bear, and that the man leaving the Jake’s is the man after the judge possessed him spiritually into fully accepting evil, and the scene in the bathroom The two cowboys are horrified by is the broken body of the girl. This makes sense given the reaction of the villagers at the start of the novel to the story that the preacher had raped an 11 year old, or the glanston gang members reaction to the judges killing of the Indian baby, etc. Children still hold a place of innocence in the mind of the brutes, not all the time Obviously given that the kid himself shoots that lad and they all massacred Indian babies etc. But there are a few choice moments in the book that point to the special status the depravity of defiling a child has, especially a white child. That combined with the description of the man leaving the toilets as being unremarked on (ie not described as looking like the judge in any way) and the detail of the father of the girl looking for her, this reading is still more compelling, but that fact that sugrue was able to take his reading from the same text, I wouldn’t be surprised if mcarthy put enough of both scenes in there to hold them both aloft in possibility at the same time.
Do you think the book at all insinuates a parallel between the American concept of Manifest Destiny and Yahweh's land covenant with the Israelites for Canaan? I interpret Blood Meridian that way and at the very least think the Judge displays aspects of both the Old Testament God and the Devil.
Professor Sugrue's discussion of Blood Meridian made me want to read the book and it's very good if difficult to read. I don't think the Judge though is a Gnostic. That would be like calling the Devil a Christian. I think he is instead an Archon in the Gnostic sense. In fact I think the whole book is set within a Gnostic cosmology and could be described as a Gnostic tragedy.
Death hilarious. It reminds me of an Alan Watts lecture where when a man being tortured begins to laugh hysterically, the torturers will put him to death immediately- because he has seen through the game.
I think it is quite reductionist to make the finale of Blood Meridian a 'good vs. evil' type of scenario. What The Judge holds against the kid/man is that he didn't act according to his own nature, that he remained removed and uncommitted during his whole life. He has no will on his own to impose onto others. And that's a much bigger threat to Holden's world view than Tobin whom he praises for becoming what he always was, depite being in denial about his own nature as a man of faith for long. The judge represents violence as an emergent and convergently evolving phenomena ingrained into the fabric of reality. But not just physical violence, also verbal violence and the jurisdiction as a battlefield in which he excels and imposes his will onto others.
Seems that the point of Blood Meridian is that there is no way to mythologize evil into Evil, because The Judge dances naked in the saloon singing, "he will live forever" which is true about evil. And then to even conceptualize a reason for misery and despair in the world would just be another means to mythologize evil into a story that we can understand. Not that evil doesn't exist, it certainly does. But we have no meaningful way to conceptualize it because it persists and persists and persists, through everything. I do think that it is good to value our civilizations for what they are, a way to quarter ourselves off from nature and the "war of all against all" but ultimately don't think of it as the ultimate answer for our own inner piece of mind because that would be a mythologizing good and subsequently mythologizing evil, by subtraction. Putting ourselves back into the same loop of trying to mythologize evil and missing the point of what the state of reality is really like here on Earth for everyone. I don't have a universal theory though for what is good or what is evil by any means but I do think that when you see good or evil, you know it. It's just that integrating these rules or beliefs into a system that a society can use meaningfully and still be "fair" or "righteous" is extremely hard.
I think an important point in the book is when a woman looks at the Glanton gang's treatment of "the wild man" and basically says, "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" It's important because it's the first time a woman has had a say on the goings-on of the novel-- almost a fourth-wall break. Throughout the novel there are endless ruminations on the heart of Man and the evil that men do... but precious little to do with women. The women we do meet tend to be mere figurants, old women or cannon fodder or whores. There's much to be gleaned from this, I think. I was reminded of the quote from A Field in England: "What this party lacks is the civilizing influence of women."
I think the Professor in this discussion draws so much on Harold Bloom, that there is hardly anything original. Whether he admits it or not is up to him. I truly adore this man, but maybe it's hard to say much more than Bloom has already said.
“[McCarthy] is not writing history but he’s writing something more accurate than history… it is truer than history, it is more real than history in a way. What he is showing us the underlying reality of the human condition. We are lucky to have the civilisation we have - stop whining about it”
Where does the professor find that the Man's Bible comes from a "frozen bag?" And, he claims that the Man is wearing the Judge's white suit in the jakes at the end of the book and I just cannot find where he would pull this interpretation from. But, either way, I appreciate the discussion of this book.
The bible is easy to miss and i don't think it's super important. Also dead kid in the suit is not what i saw. The kid killed the girl in the bathroom. What i see is the kid got free of the judge on the west coast, and for a while the "war" was not in his system. But, when he shot the boy who collects the bones he summoned the judge because he is a demon of war and violence. So the kid got the taste of the old days, and the judge was in the saloon waiting for him, trying to turn him to the dark side. And he succeeded.
Man, I'm a year-plus late to this one; Dr. Sugrue... Benjamin Franklin's closing remarks at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, or 1789, (I forgot the year), he basically says Despotism (self-fullfilment through War) will be all that can guide the American people. I know it's a year late and you got Cancer, so, if it's just passed the time, it's how it goes; but, someone like Franklin, a signer of that Declaration of Independence, basically having no faith in the future that they can stay clear of love of War in the young and old and succumbing to a Government of War like Russia, it just seems very important when talking about anything modern times and dystopian with regards to War. A founding father was like, "Yeah, it's gonna happen. Can you pass the salt?" And that remark at the end, with the last questions, about the Who and the song "Won't Get Fooled Again". There's a line: "Now the party of the Left Is now the party on the right. And you know it didn't get there Overnight." They switched sides to Roger Daultrys view? Anyone else see how the Right wingers are more Liberal that the Left wingers? It's as if the Right think the Left can't left wing as good as the right. "Any thing you can do, I can do better."
I dont think Blood Meridian is solely about the Hobbsian superiority of civilization to "chaos". Sure a scalped head from hundreds of thousands of years ago mayve been found, but so has evidence been found for prehistoric disabled people who were fed so many fruits that their teeth fell off, cause their loved ones wanted to keep them happy. As many people that have been consumed by the strong, as many again have been saved by the strong who chose to do so. People are not any more good or evil under tribalism or under the grander tribalism of civilized nations. All that changes is the scope of bloodshed. Even in the book, the Mexican "civilized" government is the one paying for scalps.
Did the kid explicitly kill anyone in Blood Meridian? He seemed absent from all the battles and murder scenes, and when we last see him, the judge makes some comment about how the kid held himself apart from the gang, like he was separating himself from the worst of the bloodshed.
On the contrary, the Kid is smack in the middle of the violence in the book. And yes, he does kill people in the book although it's not explicitly stated until he's the Man towards the end of the book.
Not being either a literary critic, nor familiar with all of McCarthy’s writing, I will nonetheless try to make a comment worthy of consideration regarding the Kid’s acquisition of the frozen Bible. Since McCarthy’s writing style does not leave us privy to the characters’ internal worlds, much needs to be inferred from other clues. One such clue might be a matter of interpreting the decisions characters make as seen through their actions. One example may the Kid’s decision not to kill the Judge, even when being encouraged to do so by the ex-priest. There may be a number of motivations for this decision, but we don’t know for certain. And, in such hermeneutic approach is, there might be a thin line between interpretation and projection. In an effort to excavate McCarthy’s meaning, we run the risk of imputing our own meanings onto the text. A clue to a different understanding of the Kid’s decision to take the Bible comes the series events preceding or leading up to it. It comes from the context. Not long before he took the Bible, he had been recovering from the surgery to his injured leg and was hobbling around town for a while on a crutch. He was also alone. So, others, especially those with predatory intentions, might have seen him as vulnerable, as easy prey. And that is what happens. He falls prey to others, including being perceived as a male prostitute. This reminds me of what is known in Ethnomethodology as a status degradation ceremony. From the beginning, the Kid has essentially had no name, no identity. There is nothing special about him and he is not special to anyone, most especially not even to his father. Unlike the Judge, he has no education and is illiterate. So, he starts off life in a kind of degraded state. Separated from the protection of others, he undergoes this next degradation or humiliation. And, after it in the wake of those experiences that he somehow acquires a gun and a horse. McCarthy does not say how he does this. The Kid also acquires the scapular of ears, which he wears from then on. Somewhere in this process, it seems the Kid experiences a kind of status elevation. McCarthy notes that people started to treat the Kid with a kind of deference. McCarthy does not explain this, but it seems as though the Kid has gone from a kind of status degradation to a status elevation. Maybe now he is someone, or at least becoming no longer the Kid and is becoming the Man.. It is as if The Kid as created an image of himself that now keeps him safe. From that perspective then, it does not matter if he cannot read. The mere possession of the Bible is part of the new persona he creates in order to protect himself. He is still alone and does not ever seem to create the kind of connections with others that could foster the development of empathy and compassion we might normally hope for in real life. Real life stories don’t always follow the Hero’s Journey. They don’t always give us a protagonist’s moral arc that leads to happy endings.
@27:45 Why the shooting of the bear? Perhaps to recover the member's weapons, boots and other useful implements or possessions that are in short supply in the desert... @34:00 why does the judge wear a hat crafted from two hats? He "wears several hats". He is the man with the silver tongue and the God of War, at least. White is also the lack of all color.
Between Blood Meridian (which I read) and No Country For Old Men (which I saw) the endings differ in that Chigurh is wounded and shown to be somewhat human, and in fact not a personification of death itself like we are led to believe throughout the story. The opposite is true for the Judge, who is the personification of Satan and claims to be immortal. idk, I could be misinterpreting. just a thought I had. As always a really nice lecture.
Ahab was dragged under by the white whale. Bound to the whale by his own harpoon. The judge talks of the contest of wills, and the forcing of unity. Two hats made one. White clothing. A man of singular determination. Perhaps the judge is some sort of literary rebis. Edit: Sugrue mentions the judge as whale a little further in. Then he says the judge is a giant infant. There's that line in the opening, something like, "the child the father of the man"
Sugrue would see straight through Peterson’s carny culture warrior act. Peterson can’t even correctly define postmodernism. Sugrue, meanwhile, is a font of philosophical, historical, and literary knowledge.
Can't take him seriously imo. He's vapid and uses long, drawn-out paragraphs for very simple ideas or just for word vomit. I suggest you read a current affairs article on him, they do an excellent job of humbling him.
@@post-structuralist Nathan just conducting a strawman exercise there. Nothing substantive in his critique. Seems to just be jealous of Peterson’s much greater stature and traction.
@@irondon "Search Current Affairs Current Affairs Sounds Like Something You Ought To Have Heard Of Hide MENU LOG IN SEARCH The Intellectual We Deserve Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape… Nathan J. Robinson filed 14 March 2018 in PERSONAGES If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.) Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train. But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.” And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect? Before we address the mystery of Peterson’s popularity, we need to examine his work. After all, if the work is actually “brilliant” and insightful, there is no mystery: he is recognized as a profound thinker because he is a profound thinker. And many critics of Peterson have been deeply unfair to his work, mocking it without reading it, or slinging pejoratives at him (e.g. “the stupid man’s smart person” or “a Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits.”) This has irritated Peterson’s fans, and when articles critical of him are printed, the comments sections are full of people (usually correctly) accusing the writer of failing to take Peterson seriously. An infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, in which Newman repeatedly put words in Peterson’s mouth (“so you’re saying X”), confirmed the impression that progressives are trying to smear Peterson by accusing him of holding beliefs that he does not hold. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic said Peterson is the victim of “hyperbolic misrepresentation” and encouraged people to examine what he is “actually saying.” But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected. This is immediately apparent upon opening Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning, a 600-page summary of his basic theories that took Peterson 15 years to complete. Maps of Meaning is, to the extent it can be summarized, about how humans generate “meaning.” By “generate meaning” Peterson ostensibly intends something like “figure out how to act,” but the word’s definition is somewhat capacious: “Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path” “Meaning is the ultimate balance between… the chaos of transformation and the possibility and…the discipline of pristine order” “Meaning is an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it” “Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose” “Meaning means implication for behavioral output” “Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world” Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain “archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us. But here I am already giving Peterson’s work a more coherent summary than it actually deserves. And after all, if “many human stories have common moral lessons” was his point, he would have been saying something so obvious that nobody would think to credit it as a novel insight. Peterson manages to spin it out over hundreds of pages, and expand it into an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory that encompasses everything from the direction of history, to the meaning of life, to the nature of knowledge, to the structure of human decision-making, to the foundations of ethics. (A good principle to remember is that if a book appears to be about everything, it’s probably not really about anything.) A randomly selected passage will convey the flavor of the thing:
@@irondon I disagree. Everything this article claims is valid against Peterson. His paragraphs are long and bulky, but seem to contain a very simple claim that could have been made more coherent with less. The reason why he does this, and this is personal opinion, is to appear intelligent. In reality, if his words don't have a massive lacuna between them, there is something vaguely true enough for people to pick up on and say it was "brilliant". It's no use comparing his work to other long works because those works usually have depth to them. Hegel's phenomology of the spirit is a good one, long and drawn out. However, Hegel has GOOD reasons, and his words aren't so empty. Long and drawn out paragraphs there have much to extrapolate from. This is not there with Peterson.
@@post-structuralist One of my kids (the socialist in the family:) sent me this article when it came out. I knew that Nathan was either lying or being disingeuoius when he stated that he just randomly selected a passage ("A randomly selected passage will convey the flavor of the thing:") BS...he picked something to deliberately try and put Peterson in the silliest context (and Peterson can get a bit fanciful and verge into woo woo on the disney stuff and archetypes). I also saw his appearance on the Majority Report and they all had a grand time ridiculing the professor. Just trying to control the narrative in case their audience starts drifting off course. Got to make sure everyone knows who are the enemies to the cause. So I get where Nathan is coming from. Trying to punch up to get some attention. Definitely not dealing in good faith - just being dickish to get attention. I have read other articles by Nathan that are pretty good analysis (but he has this habit of trying to bite the ankles of larger personalities to try and raise his own brand). JMHO. Peterson is a pretty good psychology professor and while not really profound (breaking new ground)- is a good arguer and has some good insights into the dangers of totalitarianism. Many of his psychology lectures are good, I mostly like him because of my affinity for Jung. Overall, I think he is a force for good. One of the Sugrue lectures synthesizes the dislike of the left ("intellectual class") with guys like Peterson: ua-cam.com/video/n9e0g5s_LCk/v-deo.html
Does the cinematographer know nothing about image composition?? This looks like a talking head rising up from the floor, with its chin imissing for the most part, except when the talking head tilts backwards. And what in heaven's name is so important about the image above the talking head? It's not even in focus. Neither is the talking head. And the lighting... Oh, nevermind.
50:03 The passage in question: “A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
THANK YOU! I've read Blood Meridian 10 times over the past 15 years. And joined the Cormac reddit discussion group. And your 30 min lecture is such a deep fascinating interpretation, I never heard any of these ideas before. I love BM even more. Thank you for sharing your scholarship 🙏
I will miss Mr. Sugrue.
Yes. Very sad.
Thank you eternally, professor.
Great lecture. I love both Blood Meridian and Dr Sugrue so it’s wonderful to hear his views on this novel.
I have listened to this 3 times now, always thought-provoking. Cormac's characters are deep as ith insights on violence. RIP 🙏 Cormack McCarthy. I bought his last when they came out before he past.
Thank you, Dr. Sugre.
rip dr sugrue too 😢
Great to see new discussions from Michael Sugrue. Been subscribed hoping for new content since last year when I listened all of your lectures from the 90s
A true Socrates. A beautiful beard, a beautiful soul.
This mans lecture of The Stoic Ideal saved my life in my darkest hour. It gives me the ability to lean on my good nature instead of letting tragedy wrestle it away from me.
I just want to say thanks for the lecture, Mr. Sugrue.
I do hope the Dr. continues to create content on whatever interests him as it's the best scholarly content on UA-cam.
Yes! I've been burning through your Princeton lectures, and I am STOKED to see new content. Thank you Dr. Sugrue for your well crafted and articulate thoughts on these interesting subjects! Also, I want to echo others in the comments...more from Shakespeare! The Merchant of Venice!
This was so special to hear from Dr. Sugrue's analysis of the novel, "Blood Meridian " by Cormac McCarthy. I love McCarthy books, lots of books I love actually. William Faulkner, Doedysifsky, Tolstoy, I could on and on. Clockwork Orange, a masterpiece film, loved Stanley Kubrick's work also. Moby-Dick, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Mason and Dixion. Tovadine sat with his boots on crossed before the fire. No man can aquant himself with everything on this earth. IF McCarthy does not want us to regard the judge as a gnostic archon, or supernatural being the reader may still feel the need it hardley seems sufficient to designate Holden as a 19th century Western American Diego,( I read this novel at least once a year, always to gather insight into the complexities of the characters. Thank you again sir.❤️
American history on all sides. Howard Zinn's " A People's History of the United States of America."
Truly insightful lecture on "Blood Meridian" and the core themes addressed in the book, such as moral chaos, fragility of civilization, and the ubiquity and timelessness of evil. Such themes evoke Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange", and "The Epic of Gilgamesh."
THANK YOU! I've read Blood Meridian 10 times over the past 15 years. And joined the Cormac reddit discussion group. And your 30 min lecture is such a deep fascinating interpretation, I love BM even more. Thank you souch for sharing your scholarship
Your voice dropped and Octave but you still have the same engaging cadence and tone.
Always love your videos.
Perfect timing. I was just talking about this book when speaking to some peers about freedom from and freedom to. Time to be reminded of all the important points I missed!
1:43 This man has studied and taught extensively
3:27 [Start] An Epic Journey
5:02 The Weak are Consumed by The Strong
Does Suffering have a purpose?
5:59 Reads like Faulkner, long powerful sentences, a gravity of writing.
7:00 Violence to Survive, killing all the way through
8:00 _Garden of Earthly Delights_
A Meditation on Evil
Clash of Civilizations
8:54 The Kid’s Coming of Age
The Judge - Adversary To God, Devil/Mephastafilies
“He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”
Satanic Pride
11:05 Lying Judge
12:27 Blank Notebook 📒
Megaloniacle
True Pandemonium
15:13 Escaping The Judge
15:46 Moral Decision
_A Clockwork Orange_ by Anthony Burgess
17:21 Shooting to Kill, but he CANNOT BE KILLED
Death is the Life of The Darkness
The Judge does not age
18:57 You still have clemency for the heathen
21:15 Killer Judge
22:45 _Epic of Gilgamesh_ callback
Sudden Death, Fear , Suffering
Shedding Skin
24:27 “Evil never gets old, Death is always reaching out it’s Dark and Sparkling hands.”
25:24 Anecdote of The Jaw
Creating Coherence and Order in The State of Nature
*Q&A*
28:07 Violence has no good reason, no symbols
30:32 Dostoyevsky, Faust, Gilgamesh
35:32 Philosophy of Resignation
Evil won’t Die
Evil won’t End
36:38 “Everybody wonders where evil comes from, but nobody wonders what that implies for The Good.”
38:38 What inspired McCarthy to write this?
• USA History
• Camanches violence
41:54 Civilization is a think crust over hell.
44:24 Anti-Manifest Destiny
45:40 Caged Subconscious
It's great to learn about this book. Of course, I'll never read it because I don't want to flood my mind with the horrors of violence. But, I can deal with an intellectual analysis of it. I'm definitely looking forward to more of these lectures and discussions.
This Webinar continues to haunt me. When you get a chance, please check out Dr. Jordan Peterson's youtube videos on the Big 5 personality traits. It seems that in a society, large or small, that is in anarchy, the most evil people have the greatest latitude. Rational people of goodwill do exist and are, in fact, the majority. But in the condition of anarchy it's almost impossible for them to subdue the malovelant psycopaths. But i don't think that means we all have an inner psychopath that only needs to be released by necessity. Just a thought.
Excellent lecture, sir. My favourite modern novel discussed by my favourite modern thinker, what a treat. Would you consider doing/releasing more lectures on Shakespeare? Your lecture on Measure For Measure was some of if not the best Shakespearean analysis I've ever seen, so I'm sure I speak for much of your audience when I say that I would love to see more.
That would be great.
Having read and listened to (on audiobook) BM several times; having watched the Amy Hungerford lectures from Yale and the quintessential interview with Harold Bloom on PBS, among many other widely available BM content; having read Notes on Blood Meridian by Sepich; Prof Sugrue still illuminates parts of this masterwork I haven’t heard discussed elsewhere. Would have loved to participate to posit other considerations like:
-Is Judge Holden the “author” (e.g. how are we to understand the use of the N-word as it appears in BM)? If the judge is the author, the epilogue reads like a thumbnail sketch within his portmanteau from a scouting expedition.
-Is the kid a cipher for the reader themselves?
-Or is the reader Sargent Aguilar, that is, a witnessing 3rd party?
-When the judge says “My book or some other book. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all,” it’s as though McCarthy unearthed this knowledge and you’re holding it in your hands. In real life. Frightening.
-When the judge says “Time to be going. I have errands,” his return later at the end is after… the US civil war. Frightening.
Many other Qs I’d have liked to ask Prof Sugrue as he is clearly a careful reader of the book. Also could not be more thankful for this YT channel.
Thought-provoking book and lecture! Has the moment of revelation that the Judge is a serial child predator been minimized in its impact since the novel was released due to the series of child abuse scandals disclosed over the past forty years? In other words, are we more inclined as an audience to view the judge’s conduct through the lens of cyclical, aberrant psychology rather than as a force of elemental, historical or religious perversion? If so, do we have a harder time seeing this as a component of the bargain struck between Glanton and the Judge? Thank you!
Holy shit Michael talked about Blood Meridian? Incredible
The suggestion that the man (kid) is wearing the Judge’s suit at the end is very interesting.
Aye, I’ve not heard that of that angle before. The more common reading that I’ve come across and that lines up more with my memory of the text is that the judge enters the kid/man in the bathroom and entices him to rape the girl owner of the dancing bear, and that the man leaving the Jake’s is the man after the judge possessed him spiritually into fully accepting evil, and the scene in the bathroom
The two cowboys are horrified by is the broken body of the girl. This makes sense given the reaction of the villagers at the start of the novel to the story that the preacher had raped an 11 year old, or the glanston gang members reaction to the judges killing of the Indian baby, etc. Children still hold a place of innocence in the mind of the brutes, not all the time
Obviously given that the kid himself shoots that lad and they all massacred Indian babies etc. But there are a few choice moments in the book that point to the special status the depravity of defiling a child has, especially a white child. That combined with the description of the man leaving the toilets as being unremarked on (ie not described as looking like the judge in any way) and the detail of the father of the girl looking for her, this reading is still more compelling, but that fact that sugrue was able to take his reading from the same text, I wouldn’t be surprised if mcarthy put enough of both scenes in there to hold them both aloft in possibility at the same time.
Rip legend I love this book !!!
Doc, when you said you don't know if there is any symbolism with the Judges hat, i knew you are the real deal.
Because a hat is well, a hat
inspiring; your storytelling style, Michael. A later stage of gravitas too
You know it's a good weed when everything is making perfect sense lol 😂
This one of the best comments ever 😂
Great as always, thanks 🙏
In my opinion, one of the best American novels ever written.
One of the best 👌
Do you think the book at all insinuates a parallel between the American concept of Manifest Destiny and Yahweh's land covenant with the Israelites for Canaan? I interpret Blood Meridian that way and at the very least think the Judge displays aspects of both the Old Testament God and the Devil.
Professor Sugrue's discussion of Blood Meridian made me want to read the book and it's very good if difficult to read. I don't think the Judge though is a Gnostic. That would be like calling the Devil a Christian. I think he is instead an Archon in the Gnostic sense. In fact I think the whole book is set within a Gnostic cosmology and could be described as a Gnostic tragedy.
Welp now i really have to pick up this book
How to approach to this playlist?
I am unaware of how to watch all these episodes chronologically.Please help me.
Interesting. Thank you
Excellent!
Death hilarious. It reminds me of an Alan Watts lecture where when a man being tortured begins to laugh hysterically, the torturers will put him to death immediately- because he has seen through the game.
"Aww yeah, hit me harder daddy ❤️" that ought to do it
Reminds me of the French film Martyrs.
Thank you!
Just incredible.
I think it is quite reductionist to make the finale of Blood Meridian a 'good vs. evil' type of scenario. What The Judge holds against the kid/man is that he didn't act according to his own nature, that he remained removed and uncommitted during his whole life. He has no will on his own to impose onto others. And that's a much bigger threat to Holden's world view than Tobin whom he praises for becoming what he always was, depite being in denial about his own nature as a man of faith for long.
The judge represents violence as an emergent and convergently evolving phenomena ingrained into the fabric of reality. But not just physical violence, also verbal violence and the jurisdiction as a battlefield in which he excels and imposes his will onto others.
Seems that the point of Blood Meridian is that there is no way to mythologize evil into Evil, because The Judge dances naked in the saloon singing, "he will live forever" which is true about evil. And then to even conceptualize a reason for misery and despair in the world would just be another means to mythologize evil into a story that we can understand. Not that evil doesn't exist, it certainly does. But we have no meaningful way to conceptualize it because it persists and persists and persists, through everything. I do think that it is good to value our civilizations for what they are, a way to quarter ourselves off from nature and the "war of all against all" but ultimately don't think of it as the ultimate answer for our own inner piece of mind because that would be a mythologizing good and subsequently mythologizing evil, by subtraction. Putting ourselves back into the same loop of trying to mythologize evil and missing the point of what the state of reality is really like here on Earth for everyone. I don't have a universal theory though for what is good or what is evil by any means but I do think that when you see good or evil, you know it. It's just that integrating these rules or beliefs into a system that a society can use meaningfully and still be "fair" or "righteous" is extremely hard.
I think an important point in the book is when a woman looks at the Glanton gang's treatment of "the wild man" and basically says, "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves?" It's important because it's the first time a woman has had a say on the goings-on of the novel-- almost a fourth-wall break. Throughout the novel there are endless ruminations on the heart of Man and the evil that men do... but precious little to do with women. The women we do meet tend to be mere figurants, old women or cannon fodder or whores. There's much to be gleaned from this, I think. I was reminded of the quote from A Field in England: "What this party lacks is the civilizing influence of women."
What can you say about the book title itself?
There was speculation that the judge killed a kid in Sam Chamberlain's Recollection of a Rogue.
Dr Sugrue, wasn't Saint Augustine symbolized as a bear in medieval art?
Not to my knowledge.
I think the Professor in this discussion draws so much on Harold Bloom, that there is hardly anything original. Whether he admits it or not is up to him. I truly adore this man, but maybe it's hard to say much more than Bloom has already said.
“[McCarthy] is not writing history but he’s writing something more accurate than history… it is truer than history, it is more real than history in a way.
What he is showing us the underlying reality of the human condition. We are lucky to have the civilisation we have - stop whining about it”
“You can find meanness in the least of creatures. But when God made man, the devil was at his elbow.”
Does anyone know what is that picture behind the Professor?
I know hes far from doing movie reviews lol, but It wouldve been so interesting to pick his brain about the movie "Jacobs Ladder".
thanks
Where does the professor find that the Man's Bible comes from a "frozen bag?" And, he claims that the Man is wearing the Judge's white suit in the jakes at the end of the book and I just cannot find where he would pull this interpretation from. But, either way, I appreciate the discussion of this book.
The bible is easy to miss and i don't think it's super important. Also dead kid in the suit is not what i saw. The kid killed the girl in the bathroom. What i see is the kid got free of the judge on the west coast, and for a while the "war" was not in his system. But, when he shot the boy who collects the bones he summoned the judge because he is a demon of war and violence. So the kid got the taste of the old days, and the judge was in the saloon waiting for him, trying to turn him to the dark side. And he succeeded.
Compare the Judge to Prighozyn and Wagner to the Glanton gang. What an association!
Man, I'm a year-plus late to this one;
Dr. Sugrue... Benjamin Franklin's closing remarks at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, or 1789, (I forgot the year), he basically says Despotism (self-fullfilment through War) will be all that can guide the American people.
I know it's a year late and you got Cancer, so, if it's just passed the time, it's how it goes; but, someone like Franklin, a signer of that Declaration of Independence, basically having no faith in the future that they can stay clear of love of War in the young and old and succumbing to a Government of War like Russia, it just seems very important when talking about anything modern times and dystopian with regards to War. A founding father was like, "Yeah, it's gonna happen. Can you pass the salt?"
And that remark at the end, with the last questions, about the Who and the song "Won't Get Fooled Again". There's a line:
"Now the party of the Left
Is now the party on the right.
And you know it didn't get there
Overnight."
They switched sides to Roger Daultrys view? Anyone else see how the Right wingers are more Liberal that the Left wingers? It's as if the Right think the Left can't left wing as good as the right. "Any thing you can do, I can do better."
I dont think Blood Meridian is solely about the Hobbsian superiority of civilization to "chaos".
Sure a scalped head from hundreds of thousands of years ago mayve been found, but so has evidence been found for prehistoric disabled people who were fed so many fruits that their teeth fell off, cause their loved ones wanted to keep them happy. As many people that have been consumed by the strong, as many again have been saved by the strong who chose to do so.
People are not any more good or evil under tribalism or under the grander tribalism of civilized nations. All that changes is the scope of bloodshed. Even in the book, the Mexican "civilized" government is the one paying for scalps.
Did the kid explicitly kill anyone in Blood Meridian? He seemed absent from all the battles and murder scenes, and when we last see him, the judge makes some comment about how the kid held himself apart from the gang, like he was separating himself from the worst of the bloodshed.
On the contrary, the Kid is smack in the middle of the violence in the book. And yes, he does kill people in the book although it's not explicitly stated until he's the Man towards the end of the book.
Not being either a literary critic, nor familiar with all of McCarthy’s writing, I will nonetheless try to make a comment worthy of consideration regarding the Kid’s acquisition of the frozen Bible. Since McCarthy’s writing style does not leave us privy to the characters’ internal worlds, much needs to be inferred from other clues. One such clue might be a matter of interpreting the decisions characters make as seen through their actions. One example may the Kid’s decision not to kill the Judge, even when being encouraged to do so by the ex-priest. There may be a number of motivations for this decision, but we don’t know for certain. And, in such hermeneutic approach is, there might be a thin line between interpretation and projection. In an effort to excavate McCarthy’s meaning, we run the risk of imputing our own meanings onto the text. A clue to a different understanding of the Kid’s decision to take the Bible comes the series events preceding or leading up to it. It comes from the context. Not long before he took the Bible, he had been recovering from the surgery to his injured leg and was hobbling around town for a while on a crutch. He was also alone. So, others, especially those with predatory intentions, might have seen him as vulnerable, as easy prey. And that is what happens. He falls prey to others, including being perceived as a male prostitute. This reminds me of what is known in Ethnomethodology as a status degradation ceremony. From the beginning, the Kid has essentially had no name, no identity. There is nothing special about him and he is not special to anyone, most especially not even to his father. Unlike the Judge, he has no education and is illiterate. So, he starts off life in a kind of degraded state. Separated from the protection of others, he undergoes this next degradation or humiliation. And, after it in the wake of those experiences that he somehow acquires a gun and a horse. McCarthy does not say how he does this. The Kid also acquires the scapular of ears, which he wears from then on. Somewhere in this process, it seems the Kid experiences a kind of status elevation. McCarthy notes that people started to treat the Kid with a kind of deference. McCarthy does not explain this, but it seems as though the Kid has gone from a kind of status degradation to a status elevation. Maybe now he is someone, or at least becoming no longer the Kid and is becoming the Man.. It is as if The Kid as created an image of himself that now keeps him safe. From that perspective then, it does not matter if he cannot read. The mere possession of the Bible is part of the new persona he creates in order to protect himself. He is still alone and does not ever seem to create the kind of connections with others that could foster the development of empathy and compassion we might normally hope for in real life. Real life stories don’t always follow the Hero’s Journey. They don’t always give us a protagonist’s moral arc that leads to happy endings.
The story is an anecdote for the horror we see in the world today.
"For man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward."
YESSSSSSS
Interesting
@27:45 Why the shooting of the bear? Perhaps to recover the member's weapons, boots and other useful implements or possessions that are in short supply in the desert...
@34:00 why does the judge wear a hat crafted from two hats? He "wears several hats". He is the man with the silver tongue and the God of War, at least. White is also the lack of all color.
Wow ! Top dog
Perhaps the kid represents temporality to contrast the Judge's permanence? We get to wear this God suit for a short time.
Very interesting, though when I think of the Western Cannon in this context, I’m thinking more about Cowboys, less about Gilgamesh
Yes, but McCarthy is a polymath whose work presupposes a well read reader.
@@dr.michaelsugrue While I have your attention, I'd like to say thanks for all these lectures. I've learned a lot from you. Happy New Year.
Western or no western, the genre is vampirism; The judge IS a vampire.
now :)
Between Blood Meridian (which I read) and No Country For Old Men (which I saw) the endings differ in that Chigurh is wounded and shown to be somewhat human, and in fact not a personification of death itself like we are led to believe throughout the story. The opposite is true for the Judge, who is the personification of Satan and claims to be immortal.
idk, I could be misinterpreting. just a thought I had. As always a really nice lecture.
Ahab was dragged under by the white whale. Bound to the whale by his own harpoon. The judge talks of the contest of wills, and the forcing of unity. Two hats made one. White clothing. A man of singular determination. Perhaps the judge is some sort of literary rebis.
Edit: Sugrue mentions the judge as whale a little further in. Then he says the judge is a giant infant. There's that line in the opening, something like, "the child the father of the man"
Would love to see Dr Sugrue shoot the breeze with JP.
That would be torture for Sugrue.
JP's ideas are fraught with baggage.
Sugrue would see straight through Peterson’s carny culture warrior act. Peterson can’t even correctly define postmodernism. Sugrue, meanwhile, is a font of philosophical, historical, and literary knowledge.
Thanks, much respect Dr Surge, but I disagree that Settler Genocide is as bloody as Indigenous warfare.
I think that Blood Meridian should be made into a high production animation film.
Jackson Frank Lopez Jose Lopez Eric
Smith Steven Garcia Gary Jones Edward
Just started to read the book. And gosh, how I miss conventional punctuation. Especially in term s of dialogue attribution :-)
God i hope there aren't a bunch of idiots asking about "racism" like during the Robinson Crusoe stream
Uhm kinopilled
I think I'm missing something... This looks nothing.. nor sounds anything LIKE Dr. Sugrue.
what do you think of jordan peterson sir??
Can't take him seriously imo. He's vapid and uses long, drawn-out paragraphs for very simple ideas or just for word vomit. I suggest you read a current affairs article on him, they do an excellent job of humbling him.
@@post-structuralist Nathan just conducting a strawman exercise there. Nothing substantive in his critique. Seems to just be jealous of Peterson’s much greater stature and traction.
@@irondon "Search
Current Affairs
Current Affairs
Sounds Like Something You Ought To Have Heard Of
Hide
MENU
LOG IN
SEARCH
The Intellectual We Deserve
Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape…
Nathan J. Robinson
filed 14 March 2018 in PERSONAGES
If you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)
Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.
But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.” And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect?
Before we address the mystery of Peterson’s popularity, we need to examine his work. After all, if the work is actually “brilliant” and insightful, there is no mystery: he is recognized as a profound thinker because he is a profound thinker. And many critics of Peterson have been deeply unfair to his work, mocking it without reading it, or slinging pejoratives at him (e.g. “the stupid man’s smart person” or “a Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits.”) This has irritated Peterson’s fans, and when articles critical of him are printed, the comments sections are full of people (usually correctly) accusing the writer of failing to take Peterson seriously. An infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, in which Newman repeatedly put words in Peterson’s mouth (“so you’re saying X”), confirmed the impression that progressives are trying to smear Peterson by accusing him of holding beliefs that he does not hold. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic said Peterson is the victim of “hyperbolic misrepresentation” and encouraged people to examine what he is “actually saying.”
But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.
This is immediately apparent upon opening Peterson’s 1999 book Maps of Meaning, a 600-page summary of his basic theories that took Peterson 15 years to complete. Maps of Meaning is, to the extent it can be summarized, about how humans generate “meaning.” By “generate meaning” Peterson ostensibly intends something like “figure out how to act,” but the word’s definition is somewhat capacious:
“Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path”
“Meaning is the ultimate balance between… the chaos of transformation and the possibility and…the discipline of pristine order”
“Meaning is an expression of the instinct that guides us out into the unknown so that we can conquer it”
“Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose”
“Meaning means implication for behavioral output”
“Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world”
Peterson’s answer is that people figure out how to act by turning to a common set of stories, which contain “archetypes” that have developed over the course of our species’ evolution. He believes that by studying myths, we can see values and frameworks shared across cultures, and can therefore understand the structures that guide us.
But here I am already giving Peterson’s work a more coherent summary than it actually deserves. And after all, if “many human stories have common moral lessons” was his point, he would have been saying something so obvious that nobody would think to credit it as a novel insight. Peterson manages to spin it out over hundreds of pages, and expand it into an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory that encompasses everything from the direction of history, to the meaning of life, to the nature of knowledge, to the structure of human decision-making, to the foundations of ethics. (A good principle to remember is that if a book appears to be about everything, it’s probably not really about anything.) A randomly selected passage will convey the flavor of the thing:
@@irondon I disagree. Everything this article claims is valid against Peterson. His paragraphs are long and bulky, but seem to contain a very simple claim that could have been made more coherent with less. The reason why he does this, and this is personal opinion, is to appear intelligent. In reality, if his words don't have a massive lacuna between them, there is something vaguely true enough for people to pick up on and say it was "brilliant". It's no use comparing his work to other long works because those works usually have depth to them. Hegel's phenomology of the spirit is a good one, long and drawn out. However, Hegel has GOOD reasons, and his words aren't so empty. Long and drawn out paragraphs there have much to extrapolate from. This is not there with Peterson.
@@post-structuralist One of my kids (the socialist in the family:) sent me this article when it came out. I knew that Nathan was either lying or being disingeuoius when he stated that he just randomly selected a passage ("A randomly selected passage will convey the flavor of the thing:") BS...he picked something to deliberately try and put Peterson in the silliest context (and Peterson can get a bit fanciful and verge into woo woo on the disney stuff and archetypes). I also saw his appearance on the Majority Report and they all had a grand time ridiculing the professor. Just trying to control the narrative in case their audience starts drifting off course. Got to make sure everyone knows who are the enemies to the cause. So I get where Nathan is coming from. Trying to punch up to get some attention. Definitely not dealing in good faith - just being dickish to get attention. I have read other articles by Nathan that are pretty good analysis (but he has this habit of trying to bite the ankles of larger personalities to try and raise his own brand). JMHO. Peterson is a pretty good psychology professor and while not really profound (breaking new ground)- is a good arguer and has some good insights into the dangers of totalitarianism. Many of his psychology lectures are good, I mostly like him because of my affinity for Jung. Overall, I think he is a force for good. One of the Sugrue lectures synthesizes the dislike of the left ("intellectual class") with guys like Peterson: ua-cam.com/video/n9e0g5s_LCk/v-deo.html
Big Boy spat.
Does the cinematographer know nothing about image composition?? This looks like a talking head rising up from the floor, with its chin imissing for the most part, except when the talking head tilts backwards. And what in heaven's name is so important about the image above the talking head? It's not even in focus. Neither is the talking head. And the lighting... Oh, nevermind.
Horrible interviewer, great performance from Sugrue however
Sounds like an author who wanted to make it on the NY Times bestseller list and sell books. I'll pass.
😂
50:03 The passage in question:
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
THANK YOU! I've read Blood Meridian 10 times over the past 15 years. And joined the Cormac reddit discussion group. And your 30 min lecture is such a deep fascinating interpretation, I never heard any of these ideas before. I love BM even more. Thank you for sharing your scholarship 🙏