Chapotraphouse

Interesting. Thanks for getting back to me. I’ll try to be brief as well.

He helped pull me out of a rightish-wing phase myself. I say rightish because I thought I was being a enlightened centrist liberal. Antifragile made me feel like I was very smart. He didn’t trigger the breakdown and reconstruction of my beliefs, but I got into his stuff at a critical time in my life and I think most of what I read certainly didn’t hurt. But the more I learned about him the more I felt I had to quickly outgrow him (leftward).

I don’t have any links because I don’t use Twitter, but when I looked him up after reading the book and looking into him, I was surprised to see that he was prolific on there. Basically his whole schtick about not obsessing over the news cycle and short term stuff seems more important to me now than ever and he seems to buck that entirely by trying to be a Twitter guy.

Like him, I’m also from Lebanon, I’m also from the same sectarian community. Christian nationalism in Lebanon is a very very specific thing and it’s very different from what you’re used to seeing in the west. Long story short I read him and his public persona as a Christian nationalist influencer. His opinions on language and culture in the context of Lebanon, meat-glued together by “west is best (and as Lebanese Christians, we count as west)” really make me feel like he’s a dangerous influence. I somewhat articulated some thoughts on Lebanese Christian supremacy here, but I understand linking him to it might be hard to do briefly here.

I don’t wish to dox myself but a lot of my acquaintances are researchers of linguistics and he’s been very helpful in boosting the study of our Lebanese dialects, helping them get study participants and stuff. Like too eager. To separate our eloquent language from the barbaric Arabic that the rabble around us uses. In a vacuum it’s fine to be into studying our language, in practice…

There’s an old tweet I remember seeing where someone asks him if it’s okay to say “شكراً” (shukran), which is “thank you” in formal modern standard Arabic. He says no, either use “يسلمو” (yeslamo) or merci (French). The first of these is derived from the old languages and not Arabic, it’s what most people in Christian areas say. If you say it there’s nothing wrong, but if you insist that this one and the French one are more correct than the standard Arabic one most urban Muslims use… it’s a tiny example but it’s the only one I can write with this little context. Going for brevity here, if you can believe it. There’s more examples.

I broadly see him as a “better” or less harmful Peterson for what that’s worth. Maybe to you he’s been a novel critique of capitalism (seems he’s more interested in analyzing it than smashing it though), to me he’s a textbook example of the smarmy “intellectual” I thought I wanted to be. I think he’s a dyed in the wool Lebanese Christian nationalist though and I can’t endorse him for that. I’m sorry I don’t know enough about your culture (or even mine honestly) to build a compelling explanation of what that means. To me, Lebanese Christian nationalism is indivisible from Lebanese Christian supremacy, Islamophobia, and even a begrudging admiration of the Zionist project and a yearning to do something similar. It’s likely he’s not extreme in his views, but he’s also spreading them very far and wide and presenting them alongside pop philosophy.

The Peterson analogy works for me because at the center of their fame is/was a cool jaunt into a topic that feels underdiscussed in the mainstream, and they both have/had a type of charisma that really appeals to some people. Using past tense for the lobster man because his crashout has been very publicly visible and his “credibility” has fallen apart.

I hope this was interesting. And I hope you had a nice hike. I didn’t go for a hike. I made soup for five hours. It came out okay.

Edit: found it