In which J.E.H. Smith TOTALLY OWNS Peter Thiel and his Silicon Valley Girard-Bros!!

“It has been compellingly said of Jordan B. Peterson that he is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like. I would not say the same of René Girard, at least not without modifying the formula: he is a practically-minded person’s idea of what a theorist is like.”

Justin E.H. Smith’s “Hinterland” is currently the newsletter I most look forward to reading on Sundays (usurping Warren Ellis’s, now self-cancelled in consequence of a rapaciously roving and blinkered libido). Yesterday Smith took on René Girard, whom I’ve gassed on about from time to time, often for reasons loosely akin to Smith’s — Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley venture capitalist extraordinaire, is a former student and vigorous evangelist of Girard’s, which is kinda, well ... bonkers.

I promised my wife that by post's end I'd tie Chuck Girard to René: keep reading!

Smith is a fun read — for a tenured prof he’s a surprisingly engaged and engaging hep-cat. In his newsletter he keeps his prose limned of academia-speak — it’s clean, like Orwell’s newspaper prose, albeit with frequent enough quotes in a given source’s native tongue to keep Smith’s pro bona fides from receding entirely from view. For newcomers Smith’s words-on-the-page will likely conjure clipped British tones: amused, peeved, aloof — dude’s an academic, right? But once you actually hear him, the voice never leaves your head. He’s Californian through and through, and his cadences and vowels stretch and flatten similarly to Erik Davis’s Sativa-burnished drawl.

And Smith is cheeky, which is a plus. Profs get grumpy in their 50s — Smith isn’t quite there yet, but he’s dropping hints he’s close. When Smith huffs, “If we were living in a culture dominated by grown-ups ...” well, who is the Chronicle of Higher Education to disagree?

Getting back to yesterday’s newsletter: I have but passing acquaintance with both Thiel and Girard, but the tie that supposedly binds them has always struck me as suspect. So it brings me great pleasure to watch Smith gore that particular hot-air balloon, causing it to founder on the hillside as its wealthy passengers rub their bruised noggins and search for the next source of uplift.

And yet, and yet . . . reservations rear their nettlesome heads.

Smith’s measured equating of Girard to Peterson is a canny near-perfect triangulation of mimetic desire (bravo, sir!). Neither Peterson nor Girard require my defending but I kinda feel like the average slobs grokking them do, just a bit — kids, mostly, College/University types in their 20s. Dudes, more often than not. Smart enough to read widely but not hardly practised enough to read well. 

“A dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like” — sure, okay. And maybe Lenny Bruce is a humourless person’s idea of a funnyman. But these characters happen for a reason.

Reading carefully is an acquired skill, and a person doesn’t often learn it in university. Kids coming out of uni these days typically claim they have learned to read “critically,” which I take to be another way of saying they have learned how to sort out what they’ve read in a way that pleases their profs. Certainly that’s how it worked for me in '89.

When unaccompanied by adults most university texts — at least the ones in the Humanities — are primed to nudge young readers into depression or mania, or both. “It is however somewhat a shame that the everything-explainers, the hammerers for whom all is nail, should be the ones so consistently to capture the popular imagination,” sighs professor Smith. Fair enough. But in an age of perpetual anxiety everything-explainers like Girard and, yes, Peterson can throw a little sand under a kid’s tires.

The everything-explainer’s universe is explicable — threatening, horrible, terrifying to be sure, but also navigable and even reassuringly (if all-too-briefly) wonderful. In this universe a reader is not required to regard and discard 6000 years’ worth of competing histories, religions and literature due to their recently tarnished rep as aids to hegemonic class oppression. Within this shifting body of knowledge is, potentially, a key or two to wisdom and maybe even some consolation to be gleaned.

Smith suggests “practically-minded” has its limits, but hey it also has its uses. Let the kids keep reading these everything-explainers. With a little luck they’ll get to the footnotes.

Other reading: Rock 'n' Roll Preacher and fourth-cousin once-removed Chuck Girard breaks down triangulation of desire, and Christ the final Scapegoat. Alright, so I didn’t make good on my promise to my wife. But check this: David Perrell did a lot of legwork sorting out Peter Thiel’s Religion. Perrell is thrilled. I am ... horrified?