The Canadian behavioral psychologist Jordan B Peterson has become an Internet sensation in recent years , creating a series of videos and articles about all way of political and social issues. He is acerbic, combative and openly disdainful of his opponents, especially Marxists and "Postmodernists," for whom he has a special animus. He is an enthusiastic and prolific warrior of culture, who has no truck with "white privilege," "cultural appropriation" and a range of other ideas associated with movements of social justice. His inability to discuss transgender people by their chosen pronouns (unless they ask him to) has gained him a reputation as a transpose, and although his views have marginalised him within the academic community, they have bolstered his reputation in conservative circles.
His scholarly research includes several articles in which he attempts to explain political and religious belief in the so-called "big five" personality traits – openness, morality, extraversion, congeniality and neuroticism Because of his recent proposal to purge "corrupt" academic departments of courses and teachers he deems infected by this pathology, his work on the psychology of political correctness has raised eyebrows. This response summarizes much of what 12 Rules for Life, its long and sometimes odd foray into the field of self-help, tells for good and ill. It is a book mixing sound suggestions from his clinical experience with motivational anecdotes from his personal life, Accounts of his scholarly research in the field of psychology and a number of "great books" in cultural history, which he interprets in somewhat tendentious terms.
His publisher chose to gloss over his reputation as a controversial internet player, tactfully characterizing him as a "modern-day truth teller" and furnishing him with a page-long biography that begins: Jordan B Peterson, raised in the cold wastelands of northern Alberta, flew a hammerhead role in a carbon fiber stunt plane, piloted a mahogany sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored a meteorite crater in Arizona with a group of astronauts, Built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his home in Toronto and brought into the tribe of the Pacific coast.
After the testosterone fog has lifted (leaving behind the remaining doubt about why exactly one would like a long-house upstairs), the reader discovers that each of the 12 laws of Peterson is described in an essay in a baroque style. That combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with footnoted academic paper references and Blavatsky metaphysical flights. He likes to capitalize on the word "being" and speak about "simple, biological and non-arbitrary emerging reality." Within a page, we are told that "expedience is cowardly, shallow, and wrong" and "meaning is what emerges beautifully and deeply as a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God." The effect is bizarre, like a rugby coach in a sarong is shouting .
The stern preceptor persona of Peterson probably fits well in a clinical environment, where he likely meets people in need of an authority figure who can give an external source of order and stability. Most of his principles are about personal responsibility and making decisions about life that will allow a individual to work effectively in the world. We should choose our friends wisely, discipline our children lovingly, honor conventional wisdom and so on. He takes the view that from small-scale personal choices to wider social and political issues one should construct outwards. "Don't blame your rivals for capitalism, the radical left or the iniquity. Do not reorganize the state until you have put your own knowledge in order. Have humility. How can you want to rule a city if you can't bring peace to your own household? Unfortunately, he's not a man who's going to be content with a heuristic when he thinks he has to have a fundamental truth. He likes an archetype as a strong student of Jung, preferably one which he can ground in biology. Postmodernists, relativist that! If he tries to think about duality he sees it in "a gross morphological stage of the brain structure"Gender is not fluid, at all. "For us, male and female and parent and child are categories-normal categories, profoundly rooted in our systems of perception, emotion and motivation."
In 12 Laws for Existence the great duality is the conflict between order and disorder. As the subtitle says, the purpose of the rules is to provide "an antidote to disorder." Maintaining order is at the heart of Peterson's view of the universe. Order is fact. It is male and singular. Chaos is "the eternal feminine," a nebulous Jungian formulation that puts the author in the invidious position of promoting a manual of how to suppress the feminine principle. He fudges this by thinking about yin and yang, and "straddling dualities," But if chaos is indeed the "possibility, growth, and adventure" to which he occasionally recalls genuflection, it is obvious that he is mainly concerned with keeping it at bay.
Chaos is the world of misinformation, Jacques Derrida 's language of persuasion and ethnic studies and boys who believe they are girls. These things in themselves are bad enough, but they are mainly perfidious because they form a kind of gateway drug to totalitarianism. In an interview on podcast he explains:
Living in a truthful manner is not an easy thing, but the alternative is hell ... I learned a lot about the importance of spoken truth as the countervailing power against dictatorship and authoritarianism. It is not an alternative political structure which is the opposing force, It is truth spoken that is the countervailing force. Why would I be putting my job on the line to have an opinion on the pronouns required? Because speaking your truth is the bulwark against hell.
What makes this book so irritating is the failure of Peterson to follow many of the rules which he sets out with such conviction. He doesn't "assume the person he is listening will know something he doesn't know" Assume that the person who listens will know something that he doesn't. He is far from "accurate in his speech," allowing his own fundamental concepts (such as "being" and "chaos") to slide around until they lose any clear meaning Around them, until they lose any clear sense. He is pleased to dish out a stern injunction against straw-manning, but his "Postmodernists" and Marxists are the most flimsy of scarecrows, so his chest-thumping intellectual victories seem hollow. He seems genuine and, in his deep search for reality, admirable in certain respects, but he is far less far off on his quest than he feels, and one ends his punishing, hectoring book relieved to be free of him.
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