http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/the-pseudoscience-of-evolutionary-psychology-tp7591207p7591289.html
Jordan Peterson doesn't list evolutionary psychology anywhere in his wikipedia article. He paints himself as much more of the Carl Jung variety psychologizer, which makes sense since his PhD is in Clinical Psychology. Then he tacks on
Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich as influences, which puts him pretty far out there for any kind of psychologist.
His principle work is Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief which looks on the face of it, and on his appeals to its authority, to be a strong appropriationist claim to understand everyone's belief systems better than the believers do themselves. This is why he attacks all his enemies at the universities, because he has identified postmodernism as crypto-marxist (ie, they claim to have rejected Marxism, but their maps of meaning are clearly still Marxist, as his many years of studying authoritarian thought systems allow him to see).
It's pretty obvious why dialogue with Peterson is awkward for people who do not grant his assumption that he understands why everyone believes what he thinks they believe. Those kinds of people are always awkward partners for intellectual discussions, they're always telling you to sit down, shut up, and listen. It's also clear why his secret decoder ring lectures for filing political opponents into pigeon holes could collect such a following, who wouldn't want to know what everyone really believes?
There's a funny part in the article where he describes "white privilege" as a totally unfair way of blaming whites because some of their ancestors were assholes, where I always think of it as calling out whites for being assholes in real life. I guess the meaning sort of floats around or flickers between those poles, also making dialogue awkward.
-- rec --
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
by Dr. Strangelove