(Post Track:
Coal Miner's Daughter)
There are three basic traits about himself that Daniel wants to communicate to anyone who encounters his online oeuvre. They are in short order, his rapacious intelligence, sardonic wit, and his polemical skills. I daresay that the majority of his apologetic writings are largely dedicated to establishing the fact of those three traits and I’d like to explore some of those demonstrations. So let us return to Daniel’s testimony as it is found in
‘Mormon Scholars Testify’. In the last installment I quoted the final paragraph and in this installment I find it fitting to begin with the first paragraph (bolding mine):
Daniel Peterson wrote:I first paid serious attention to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints early in my high school years, because I found them attractive and intriguing. Very soon thereafter, I also began to suspect that they were true. I was impressed by a radical set of doctrines – radical in the best sense of the word, meaning deep down to the roots – that rested not upon inferences and speculation but upon credible witnesses. I continue to be exhilarated by the grandeur, vast scope, and cosmic sweep of Mormonism, as well as by its dramatic history, and I have long been firmly convinced that it is all that it proclaims itself to be.
Regrettably Daniel does not go into any details about the “serious attention” he paid Mormonism as a young adult and we’ll have to go elsewhere for them. I’ve found that a presentation Daniel gave in 2004 at the annual FAIR Conference titled
‘Autobiographical Notes on My Testimony’ sheds considerable light on this period of Daniel’s life. Predictably Daniel opens the presentation by trying to establish his sense of humor:
Daniel Peterson wrote:Some of you may know there was a cartoon done of me in Sunstone recently, a very flattering article about me. “Dannibel Lecter” right? (Laughter) I contacted Dan Wotherspoon about that; I wanted to know if I could get the original for framing. This will probably have to take the place because he told me Sunstone didn’t own the rights so I’d have to buy it from the artist and I’m not sure I like it that much.
Here we have Daniel trying to show he has a sense of humor and impishly suggesting that he takes a certain pride in being compared with the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter. This seems natural for Daniel because anyone familiar with Thomas Harris’ popular character knows that Dr. Lecter is known for his intelligence, urbane manners, and cultivated tastes. I wonder if Daniel actually acquired the original or if he was not able to overcome his hesitance at paying an artist for their work. Oddly enough the issue of wages and labor will crop up again here shortly.
Daniel Peterson wrote:I was born and raised in southern California. I was raised in a part-member family; my father was a non-member and my mother a partially active member. I can remember that my first serious thoughts about religious topics were essentially agnostic. I did not see anything particularly convincing about the Church that I was occasionally taken to–the LDS Church–or any other. It didn’t strike me as very interesting. In fact, what I can mostly remember about Church was that it seemed to me a virtually interminable series of incredibly boring meetings which is not an attitude I’ve changed altogether! (Laughter) And I realize that may be a reflection on my spiritual state, but nonetheless that’s there and that’s the fact.
I find this paragraph significant for a few reasons. As an apologist Daniel often finds himself in positions where he has to critique rival worldviews and besides American Evangelicalism and Fundamentalist strains Christianity (the wellsprings of Cult Ministries), the most common target are manifestations of secular and/or naturalistic worldviews. To draw an example from his 2009 Testimony from ‘
Mormon Scholars Testify’ we see Daniel making critical asides such as this:
Daniel Peterson wrote:For, by contrast, the secular, naturalistic position seems to me a constricted, flat, and ultimately meaningless worldview that trivializes all of human life.
Now for a statement like that to have any impact on its reader it has to come from someone who has meaningful experience and knowledge of that “naturalistic position”. Big picture, Daniel has a two prong strategy where he demonstrates some practical acquaintance with the natural/secular position in addition to claiming to have some kind of substantive knowledge of said position by way of reading and interacting with texts. Daniel is a scholar after all and one that deals intimately with texts, so this seems to be a reasonable assumption to make.
We should also take notice that Daniel’s admission of prior agnosticism comes with it a guilty plea that Daniel still finds the day-to-day religious life of a faithful Mormon boring. He is able to elicit laughter from an audience of what is ostensibly Mormon apologists by establishing common ground with its critics (you can hear the audience reaction in
this recording). It is a very interesting way to frame oneself as a strong advocate of something while also admitting that a ubiquitous criticism is true. It comes off as almost diplomatic.
Like a proper lolcow, Daniel’s lack of self-awareness means he will immediately abandon tried and true rhetorical devices and say things most people would be too embarrassed to say aloud. Daniel
must emphasize his intelligence and after joking about his “spiritual state” bluntly informs the audience:
Daniel Peterson wrote:I was kind of, maybe an exhibitionistically precocious kid at some points. I can remember reading Dante, and Bertrand Russell, and Nietzsche and so on at very young ages–probably not understanding much.
The purpose of name dropping the likes of Nietzsche and Russell is twofold. First is Daniel employs a lexical cue to signal to anyone paying attention that he is familiar with these authors and that he has done the work of actually reading them. Second is the fact that there isn’t one ubiquitous secular/naturalistic worldview and thus any criticisms of Bertrand Russell’s works simply will not carry over to anything Friedrich Nietzsche has done; acknowledging this fact forces Daniel to have to deal with philosophers, scientists, and other authors individually.
Now Daniel does admit that his early readings of Russell and Nietzsche didn’t confer any sort of meaningful understanding of the authors to his (“maybe”) exhibitionistically precocious young self. The context of this presentation doesn’t require him to demonstrate any sort of meaningful understanding of the authors, Daniel is only trying to establish that he’s been engaging secular/naturalistic rivals of Mormonism since before he consciously became a Mormon.
Daniel doesn’t stop here either, he promptly gives us a vignette from his childhood that I enjoyed in particular:
Daniel Peterson wrote:My father owned a construction business. I grew up in a pretty working-class family and so I made a point of reading Karl Marx at lunchtime–it seemed the thing to do. (Laughter) I mean I was a member of the working class, why not read Marx? It was interesting to me that none of the people around me found it even slightly interesting. The real working class didn’t seem to care about Karl Marx. They were all busy planning their weekend adventures in their campers and motor homes.
To fully appreciate this story it helps to remember that Mormonism is a community that uses tropes as a form of cultural currency. Every six months when General Conference transpires the same genre of tissue paper thin tropes gets uttered by the ecclesiastical authorities of mainstream Mormonism which in turn flood onto social media in waves of image macros (“memes”) and pious hashtags. The tendrils of influence these tropes posses make their way into every contemporary facet of Mormonism; you can find it loudly emanating from Claremont in California to inhabiting the very ink on every page Terryl Givens has ever published. Indeed, even my own work in this thread is pockmarked with them.
By its very nature then Mormon Apologetics is a discipline that requires its practitioners to make use of tropes in order to communicate important elements to its audience because it is simply expected. This means that even though Daniel’s audience are willing participants of a hobby and have actually paid money to hear Daniel deliver this “intellectual historical testimony”, they still have an expectation of being spoon fed well worn ideas.
Daniel obliges by recounting his practice of reading Karl Marx during lunch. Remember this comes right on the heels of Daniel telling everyone that as a young adult he was reading difficult material and “probably” not understanding it. When Daniel remarks that reading Marx at lunchtime “seemed the thing to do” he is greeted by laughter. This signals to us that the audience received the trope and found the self-deprecating elements.
The trope in question is the notion that those who typically read Karl Marx (especially if they are young) and find him persuasive are naïve of history and ignorant of human nature. This trope isn’t Mormon in nature, but has been borrowed from the world of American conservatism (a sphere that often overlaps with Mormon apologetics, but not always) and Daniel often likes to lay things like Soviet atrocities at the feet of secularism. This is another way Daniel is trying to signal to us that he has “been there, done that, and go the T-shirt”.
For those of us who have bothered to study Marx’s writings enough to understand the most rudimentary elements of his project, Daniel’s comments present us with some difficulties. First is that Daniel’s telling of the vignette commits fundamental category errors and the manner in which he tells the story puts him in an unintentional bad light.
Let us look at some parts from Karl Marx’s essay ‘
Wage Labour and Capital’ first published in 1849. Marx lays down some definitions and concepts here that become essential in his more well known work ‘
Das Kapital’. I’ll be pulling my quotes from the 2nd edition of Robert Tucker’s
‘The Marx-Engels Reader’ and the pagination will reflect that:
Karl Marx wrote:From various quarters we have been reproached with not having presented the economic relations which constitute the material foundation of the present class struggles and national struggles. (p.203)
The title of this essay is misleading because it gives the impression that it will bear resemblance to a modern economic essay; here is some data, and interpretation of that data, and finally a policy recommendation derived from that interpretation. Marx can be that, but he is often more in scope and substance. He not only considers the economic, but also explores the social, historical, and psychological factors as well. To invoke the same Russian scholar as I did in the previous installment:
Isaiah Berlin wrote:For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance…The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs...
Marx would be a paragon example of the hedgehog. This can help explain why one can find Marxist interpretations of not only economics, but sociology, political science, law, history, philosophy, anthropology, literature, social and industrial psychology, literature, and even psychoanalysis. Those devoted to and inspired by Marx can take his work and apply to any human endeavor.
Karl Marx wrote:Now, after our readers have seen the class struggle develop in colossal political forms in 1848, the time has come to deal more closely with the economic relations themselves on which the existence of the bourgeoisie and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers, are founded. (p.204)
We are seeing the typical trappings of Marx here; class struggle, the concept of the workers and the concept of the bourgeoisie, and the enslavement of the former by the latter. Recall how Daniel described the economic situation of his family:
Daniel Peterson wrote:My father owned a construction business. I grew up in a pretty working-class family and so I made a point of reading Karl Marx at lunchtime–it seemed the thing to do. (Laughter) I mean I was a member of the working class, why not read Marx?
Marx is writing about the struggles between classes like the workers and the bourgeoisie. Daniel tells us his family was working class so he read Karl Marx. Makes sense right? How does Marx define a worker? Well he’d say a worker is someone who works for wages.
In fact Marx postulates that if you asked a bunch of different workers from different industries about their wages, they might give different answers but those answers would share a common basis:
Karl Marx wrote:In spite of the variety of their statements, they would all agree on one point: wages are the sum of money paid by the capitalist for a particular labour time or for a particular output of labour. (p.204)
But Marx offer a correction and say that the workers don’t sell labour per se but that they sell labour power:
Karl Marx wrote:In reality what they sell to the capitalist for money is their labour power. The capitalist buys this labour power for a day, a week, a month, etc. And after he has bought it, he uses it by having the workers work for the stipulated time...Labour power, therefore, is a commodity, neither more nor less than sugar. The former is measured by the clock, the latter by the scales...labour power is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live. (p.204)
So why is this relationship bad? So intolerable as to cause a struggle?
Karl Marx wrote:The serf belongs to the land and turns over to the owner of the land the fruits thereof. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells himself and, indeed, sells himself piecemeal. He sells at auction eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, day after day, to the highest bidder, to the owner of the raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence, that is, to the capitalist. The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land, but eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong to him who buys them. (p.205)
Well the worker is something comparable to a slave or a serf, who is clearly chained to either a piece of land or to another person who owns him like livestock. What makes the worker worse off though is that they are truly owned by a class of people:
Karl Marx wrote:But the worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labour power, cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence. He belongs not to this or that capitalist but to the capitalist class, and, moreover, it is his business to dispose of himself, that is, to find a purchaser within this capitalist class. (p.205)
The worker needs to work to live and he cannot live without being employed by the capitalists. But what is a capitalist as Marx understands them? It is dependent on a notion of capital itself:
Karl Marx wrote:Capital consists of raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence of all kinds, which are utilized in order to produce new raw materials, new instruments of labour and new means of subsistence. All these component parts of capital are creations of labour, products of labour, accumulated labour. Accumulated labour which serves as a means of new production is capital. (p.207)
What Marx will go on to point out that these components are all organized and work synergistically in certain contexts. There is a web of relations (social and otherwise) that makes everything work and the favorable relationship that capitalists have in the complex web is with production:
Karl Marx wrote:Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois production society. (p.207)
The takeaway here is that the bourgeois class are capitalists who are able to exploit their relationship of production to keep the working class forever dependent on them by exchanging labour power for wages.
That means Daniel’s father, as a small business owner of a construction company who paid his employees wages, would actually be considered part of the bourgeois according to Marx. (one of the petite-bourgeoisie perhaps?) Daniel seems to be conflating a modern American sense of the working class pegged to economic performance as opposed to Marx’s sense of relation to production.
Conflating them.
In a story about how he used to read Marx during lunch breaks.
Even worse he went on to say this:
Daniel Peterson wrote:I mean I was a member of the working class, why not read Marx? It was interesting to me that none of the people around me found it even slightly interesting. The real working class didn’t seem to care about Karl Marx. They were all busy planning their weekend adventures in their campers and motor homes.
The subtle jab here is that this is how the trope-Marxist Daniel is invoking thinks, that those people working for his father didn’t care about Marx because they had interests apart from Daniel’s. This also serves to buttress Daniel’s sub-narrative about his youthful alienation and intellectual prolictivities; Daniel is searching for something, that is why he has his nose in a book during lunch.
Sadly Marx had an explanation for young Daniel as to why his father’s employees spent their lunchtime planning their fun instead of jumping into dialogue with him about their exploitation:
Karl Marx wrote:And the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads,etc—does he consider this twelve hours weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hours labour, on the other hand, has no meaning for him as weaving, spinning, drilling, etc, but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, to bed. (p.205)
I apologize for the rabbit trail down Marx's ‘Wage Labour and Capital’ but I thought the departure was worth it. It very well may be some sort of framing error on Daniel’s part where he forgot to mention details that would change the narrative to something. It could be that Daniel intended to say, “Oh man, I was so bad at reading back then that every time Marx mentioned the working class I thought he meant a certain income and I mistakenly thought I was being addressed as a worker.”
Just like the example of Archilochus, my observations about Marx may mean nothing. If Daniel C. Peterson had a real problem understanding and accurately representing other people’s beliefs, surely there would be more examples, examples that are more egregious, careless, and embarrassing. Surely.
(Post Track:
Work Song)
Better dead than red, anyways.
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