2022/06/24

Jordan Peterson - Wikipedia

Jordan Peterson - Wikipedia

Jordan Peterson

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Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson by Gage Skidmore.jpg
Peterson in Dallas, Texas, in June 2018
Born
Jordan Bernt Peterson

12 June 1962 (age 60)
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Occupation
Spouse(s)
Tammy Roberts
 
​
(m. 1989)​
Academic background
Alma mater
ThesisPotential Psychological Markers for the Predisposition to Alcoholism[1] (1990)
Doctoral advisorRobert O. Pihl
Influences
Academic work
DisciplinePsychology
Sub-disciplineClinical psychology
School or tradition
Institutions
Notable works
InfluencedGregg Hurwitz[6]
Websitejordanbpeterson.com Edit this at Wikidata
Signature
Jordan Peterson Signature.svg

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 12 June 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist, YouTube personality, author, and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.[7] He began to receive widespread attention as a public intellectual in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues, often described as conservative.[8][9][10] 

Peterson has described himself as a "classic British liberal"[11][12][13] and a "traditionalist".[14]

Born and raised in Alberta, Peterson obtained bachelor's degrees in political science and psychology from the University of Alberta and a PhD in clinical psychology from McGill University. After teaching and research at Harvard University, he returned to Canada in 1998 to permanently join the faculty of psychology at the University of Toronto. In 1999, he published his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which became the basis for many of his subsequent lectures. The book combines psychology, mythology, religion, literature, philosophy and neuroscience to analyze systems of belief and meaning.

In 2016, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing the Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (Bill C-16), passed by the Parliament of Canada to introduce "gender identity and expression" as prohibited grounds for discrimination.[a] In October 2016 specifically, while on the University of Toronto's campus engaging in dialogue surrounding Bill C-16, a protester approached Peterson and filmed a video that was then released online, making it one of his most viral videos, subsequently propelling Peterson's image online. He argued that the bill would make the use of certain gender pronouns "compelled speech", and related this argument to a general critique of political correctness and identity politics. He subsequently received significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism.


Peterson's lectures and conversations, propagated mainly through YouTube and podcasts, soon gathered millions of views. By 2018 he had put his clinical practice and teaching duties on hold, and published his second book: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. 

Promoted with a world tour, it became a bestseller in several countries. That same year, columnist David Brooks described Peterson as "the most influential public intellectual in the Western world."[15][16] Throughout 2019 and 2020, Peterson's work was obstructed by health problems in the aftermath of severe benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome. In 2021, he published his third book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, resigned from the University of Toronto, and returned to podcasting.

Early life

Peterson was born on 12 June 1962, in Edmonton, Alberta,[17] and grew up in Fairview, a small town in the northwest of the province.[18] He was the eldest of three children born to Walter and Beverley Peterson. Beverley was a librarian at the Fairview campus of Grande Prairie Regional College, and Walter was a school teacher.[19][20] His middle name is Bernt (/ˈbɛərənt/, BAIR-ənt),[21] after his Norwegian great-grandfather.[22] Peterson grew up in a mildly Christian household.[23]

In junior high school, Peterson became friends with Rachel Notley and her family. Notley became leader of the Alberta New Democratic Party and the 17th premier of Alberta.[24] Peterson joined the New Democratic Party (NDP) from ages 13 to 18.[25][26] As a teenager, Peterson decided that "religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious" and hoped for a left-wing revolution, a hope that lasted until he met left-wing activists in college.[23]

Education

After graduating from Fairview High School in 1979, Peterson entered Grande Prairie Regional College to study political science and English literature,[27] studying to be a corporate lawyer.[4] During this time he read The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, which significantly affected his educational focus and worldview.[27][4] He later transferred to the University of Alberta, where he completed his BA in political science in 1982.[25] Afterwards, he took a year off to visit Europe, where he began studying the psychological origins of the Cold War; 20th-century European totalitarianism;[27][11] and the works of Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,[19] and Fyodor Dostoevsky.[11]

Peterson then returned to the University of Alberta and received a BA in psychology in 1984.[28] In 1985, he moved to Montreal to attend McGill University. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology under the supervision of Robert O. Pihl in 1991, and remained as a post-doctoral fellow at McGill's Douglas Hospital until June 1993, working with Pihl and Maurice Dongier.[27][29]

While at McGill University and the Douglas Hospital, Peterson conducted research into familial alcoholism and its associated psychopathologies, such as childhood and adolescent aggression and hyperactive behaviour.[30][31][32]

Career

From July 1993 to June 1998,[33] Peterson lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, while teaching and conducting research at Harvard University, where he was hired as an assistant professor in the psychology department, later becoming an associate professor. During his time at Harvard, he studied aggression arising from drug and alcohol abuse.[30] An article in The Harvard Crimson said he possessed a "willingness to take on any research project, no matter how unconventional".[25] While at Harvard, he switched his primary area of research from familial alcoholism to personality and authored several academic papers.[34][35][36][37][38][39] Author Gregg Hurwitz, a former student of Peterson's at Harvard, has cited Peterson as an inspiration of his, and psychologist Shelley Carson, former PhD student and now-professor at Harvard, recalled that Peterson's lectures had "something akin to a cult following", stating, "I remember students crying on the last day of class because they wouldn't get to hear him anymore."[6] Following his associate position at Harvard, Peterson returned to Canada in July 1998 and eventually became a full professor at the University of Toronto.[28][33][40]

Peterson's areas of study and research within the fields of psychology are psychopharmacology,[41][42] abnormal,[43] neuro,[44] clinical, personality,[45][46] social,[46] industrial and organizational,[33] religious, ideological,[27] political, and creativity.[47] Peterson has authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers[48] and was cited almost 8,000 times as of mid-2017; at the end of 2020 almost 15,000 times.[49][50]

Beginning in 2003,[51] Peterson appeared on television, speaking on a subject from a psychological perspective. On TVOntario, he appeared on Big Ideas in 2003 and 2006,[52][53] and in a 13-part lecture series based on Maps of Meaning, aired in 2004.[28][53] In a 2007 BBC Horizon documentary, Mad but Glad, Peterson commented on the connection between pianist Nick van Bloss' Tourette syndrome diagnosis and his musical talent.[54][55] From 2011, TVOntario's The Agenda featured Peterson as an essayist and panelist on psychologically relevant cultural issues.[56]

For most of his career, Peterson maintained a clinical practice, seeing about 20 people a week. He has been active on social media, and in September 2016 he released a series of videos in which he criticized Bill C-16.[24][57][58] As a result of new projects, he decided to put the clinical practice on hold in 2017[59] and temporarily stopped teaching as of 2018.[20][60] In February 2018, Peterson entered into a promise with the College of Psychologists of Ontario after a professional misconduct complaint about his communication and the boundaries he sets with his patients. The college did not consider a full disciplinary hearing necessary and accepted Peterson entering into a three-month undertaking to work on prioritizing his practice and improving his patient communications. Peterson had no prior disciplinary punishments or restrictions on his clinical practice.[61][62]

Regarding the topic of religion and God, Bret Weinstein moderated a debate between Peterson and Sam Harris at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver in June 2018. In July, the two debated the subject again, this time moderated by Douglas Murray, at the 3Arena in Dublin and The O2 Arena in London.[63][64] In April 2019, Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek at the Sony Centre in Toronto over happiness under capitalism versus Marxism.[65][66]

In the fall of 2021, Peterson resigned from the employment of the University of Toronto, becoming professor emeritus.[7]

Works

Books

Maps of Meaning (1999)

Main article: Maps of Meaning

In 1999, Routledge published Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, in which Peterson describes a comprehensive theory about how people construct meaning, form beliefs, and make narratives. The book, which took Peterson 13 years to complete, draws concepts from various fields including mythology, religion, literature, philosophy, and psychology, in accordance to the modern scientific understanding of how the brain functions.[25][67][68][69][70][71]

Peterson at the University of Toronto in March 2017

According to Peterson, his main goal was to examine why individuals and groups alike participate in social conflict, exploring the reasoning and motivation individuals take to support their belief systems (i.e. ideological identification)[25] that eventually result in killing and pathological atrocities such as the Gulag, the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the Rwandan genocide.[25][70][71] Influenced by Jung's archetypal view of the collective unconscious in the book,[6] Peterson says that an "analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality."[71]

In 2004, a 13-part TV miniseries based on Peterson's book aired on TVOntario.[19][28][53]

12 Rules for Life (2018)

Main article: 12 Rules for Life

In January 2018, Penguin Random House published Peterson's second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, in which self-help principles are discussed in a more accessible style than in his previous published work.[6][59][72] The book topped best-selling lists in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the US, and the United Kingdom.[73][74][75][76]

To promote the book, Peterson embarked on a world tour.[77]

Beyond Order (2021)

Main article: Beyond Order

Peterson's third book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, was released on 2 March 2021.[78] On 23 November 2020, his publisher Penguin Random House Canada (PRH Canada) held an internal town hall where many employees criticized the decision to publish the book.[79]

YouTube channel and podcasts

Jordan B Peterson
YouTube information
Years active8
GenrePsychology and religion lectures, interviews on science, personal growth, culture
Subscribers4.41 million
Total views285,014,786
Associated actsJoe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Dave Rubin, Rebel Wisdom, Akira the Don, Russell Brand, Jocko Willink, Holding Space Films
Updated: 3 January 2022

In 2013, Peterson registered a YouTube channel named JordanPetersonVideos,[80] and immediately began uploading recordings of lectures and interviews. The earliest dated recordings are from Harvard lectures in 1996. By the end of 2013, content on the channel included the lectures from Harvard, some interviews, and additional special lectures on two defining topics: "Tragedy vs Evil" and "Psychology as a career".

From 2014, uploads include recordings from two of his classes at University of Toronto ("Personality and Its Transformations" and "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief"),[81] special lectures ("Potential" for TEDx, "Death of the Oceans"), interviews, experiments in Q&A format, and video essays.

In March 2016, after three years of basic uploading of course videos, Peterson announced an interest to clean existing content and improve future content,[82] including a new experiment in crowdfunding through Patreon.[82]

The channel gathered more than 1.8 million subscribers and his videos received more than 65 million views as of August 2018.[58][83] By January 2021, subscribers on JordanPetersonVideos numbered at 3.4 million and total views reached over 200 million.[80]

From early 2017, funding for projects dramatically increased through his use of Patreon. Peterson hired a production team to film his 2017 psychology lectures at the University of Toronto. Donations received range from $1,000 per month in August 2016 to $14,000 by January 2017; more than $50,000 by July 2017; and over $80,000 by May 2018.[24][58][84][85] With this funding, a number of projects and lecture series were proposed: more interviews, regular live Q&A sessions, public lecture series on the Bible, conversations with Muslims in Canada and the US, and an online university. From May through December 2017, a lecture series on biblical stories was recorded and released on YouTube. A series of live Q&A events, appearing approximately monthly, were released beginning April 2017, through January 2018, then shifting to an irregular schedule through 2019. Regular donations for the YouTube channel were interrupted in January 2019, when Peterson deleted his Patreon account in public protest of the platform's controversial banning of another content creator, Carl Benjamin (also known as Sargon of Akkad).[86][87] Following this, Peterson and Dave Rubin announced the creation of a new, free speech–oriented social networking and crowdfunding platform.[88] This alternative had a limited release under the name Thinkspot later in 2019, and remained in beta testing as of December 2019.[89]

Peterson has appeared on many podcasts, conversational series, as well as other online shows.[83][90] In December 2016, Peterson started The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.[91] In March 2019, the podcast joined the Westwood One network with Peterson's daughter as a co-host on some episodes.[92] Peterson defended engineer James Damore after he was fired from Google for writing Google's Ideological Echo Chamber.[72] In January 2022, Peterson was interviewed by Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience. During the interview, Peterson claimed that the Earth's climate is too complicated to accurately model. Several climate scientists criticized Peterson, saying that he misunderstood climate modelling.[93]

Biblical lectures

Peterson speaking in front of St. Stephen's Basilica, Budapest, Hungary, in May 2019

In May 2017, Peterson began The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories,[94] a series of live theatre lectures, also published as podcasts, in which he analyzes archetypal narratives in Book of Genesis as patterns of behaviour ostensibly vital for personal, social and cultural stability.[72] In October 2020, Peterson announced plans for a lecture series on the Book of Exodus and the Book of Proverbs.[95]

In March 2019, Cambridge University rescinded a visiting fellowship invitation to Peterson. He had previously said the fellowship would give him an "opportunity to talk to religious experts of all types for a couple of months," and that the new lectures would have been on the Book of Exodus.[96] A spokesperson for the university said there was no place for anyone who could not uphold the inclusive environment of the university.[97] Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope explained that a photograph of Peterson with his arm around a man wearing a shirt reading "I'm a proud Islamophobe" led the faculty to the rescindment due to a conflict between Peterson's "casual endorsement by association" and the school's commitment to interfaith dialogue.[98][99] The Cambridge University Students' Union released a statement of relief, considering the invitation "a political act to ... legitimise figures such as Peterson" and that his work and views are not "representative of the student body."[100] Peterson called the decision a "deeply unfortunate ... error of judgement" and expressed regret that the Divinity Faculty had submitted to an "ill-informed, ignorant and ideologically-addled mob."[101][102]

Self-Authoring Suite

In 2005, Peterson, with colleagues Daniel M. Higgins and Robert O. Pihl, established a website and company to deliver an evolving writing therapy system called The Self-Authoring Suite.[103] It consists of a series of online writing programs: the Past Authoring Program (a guided autobiography); two Present Authoring Programs, which aids analysis of personality faults and virtues; and the Future Authoring Program, which aids in developing a vision and planning desired futures.

To understand the statistical benefits of the suite academic trials have been conducted, and several studies published. Peterson states that more than 10,000 students have used the program, with drop-out rates decreasing by 25 per cent and grade point averages rising by 20 per cent.[19]

The Future Authoring program has been used with McGill University undergraduates on academic probation to improve grades, and since 2011 by the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.[104][105]

A 2015 study published in Palgrave Communications[b] showed a significant reduction in ethnic and gender-group differences in performance, especially among ethnic minority male students.[105][106] In 2020, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) published a study[107] within its Access and Retention Consortium.[108] As HEQCO (with ARC) is an agency of Ontario government, this study represents published research for broader public awareness and application. To support this, several institutions were represented in the research: Mohawk College, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, Queens University.[109] The program was tested at Mohawk College, and found similar results as with other studies.[c]

Views

Peterson has characterized himself politically as a "classic British liberal"[11][12][13] and a "traditionalist".[14] He has stated that he is commonly mistaken as right-wing.[83] The New York Times described Peterson as "conservative-leaning",[9] and The Washington Post described him as an "aspiring conservative thought leader."[110] Yoram Hazony wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "[t]he startling success of his elevated arguments for the importance of order has made him the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation."[8] Wall Street Journal editorial page writer Barton Swaim wrote, "I wouldn't describe [Peterson] as a conservative—his interest lies in individual rather than societal order, and he says little about public policy. But it's true that he not infrequently winds up holding conservative viewpoints on cultural matters."[111] The American Conservative wrote that, while Peterson has "abjured any connection to modern liberalism or conservatism ... the biggest tell that Peterson is a conservative is simply that his general disposition toward life and society is conservative."[112] In the Los Angeles Times, libertarian journalist Cathy Young commented that "Peterson's ideas are a mixed bag."[113] Nathan J. Robinson of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs writes that Peterson has been seen "as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected."[114]

Academia and political correctness

Peterson suggests that universities are largely responsible for a wave of political correctness that has appeared in North America and Europe,[58] saying that he had watched the rise of political correctness on campuses since the early 1990s.[115] Peterson believes the humanities have become corrupt and less reliant on science, in particular sociology. He contends that "proper culture" has been undermined by "post-modernism and neo-Marxism."[11]

Peterson's critiques of political correctness range over issues such as postmodernism, postmodern feminism, white privilege, cultural appropriation, and environmentalism.[90] His social media presence has magnified the impact of these views; Simona Chiose of The Globe and Mail wrote that "few University of Toronto professors in the humanities and social sciences have enjoyed the global name recognition Prof. Peterson has won."[58] Writing in the National Post, Chris Selley said that Peterson's opponents had "underestimated the fury being inspired by modern preoccupations like white privilege and cultural appropriation, and by the marginalization, shouting down or outright cancellation of other viewpoints in polite society's institutions,"[116] while Tim Lott stated, in The Spectator, that Peterson became "an outspoken critic of mainstream academia."[11]

According to a study conducted by Peterson and his student Christine Brophy on the relationship between political belief and personality, political correctness exists in two types: "PC-egalitarianism" and "PC-authoritarianism", which is a manifestation of "offense sensitivity".[citation needed] Jason McBride claims that Peterson places classical liberals in the former, and so-called social justice warriors, who he says "weaponize compassion", in the latter.[19][27] The study also found an overlap between PC-authoritarians and right-wing authoritarians.[citation needed]

Psychologist Daniel Burston has critiqued Peterson's views on academia. On Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, Burston faults Peterson's thought as oversimplified.[117] On the general state of academia, Burston generally agrees[118] with Peterson's criticisms of identity politics in academia,[121] as well as Peterson's charge that academia is "riddled with Left-wing bias and political correctness."[118] On summarizing the decline of the university, Burston disagrees with Peterson's critique against the Left, arguing that Peterson overlooks the degree to which the current decline of the humanities and social sciences is due to university administration focus.[118]

Postmodernism and identity politics

Peterson says that "disciplines like women's studies should be defunded", advising freshman students to avoid subjects such as sociology, anthropology, English literature, ethnic studies, and racial studies, as well as other fields of study that he believes are corrupted by "post-modern neo-Marxists."[122][123][124] He believes these fields propagate cult-like behaviour and safe-spaces, under the pretense of academic inquiry.[123][122] Peterson had proposed a website using artificial intelligence to identify ideologization in specific courses, but postponed the project in November 2017 as "it might add excessively to current polarization."[125][126]

He has repeatedly stated his opposition to identity politics, stating that it is practiced on both sides of the political divide: "[t]he left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride." He considers both equally dangerous, saying that what should be emphasized, instead, is individual focus and personal responsibility.[127] He has also been prominent in the debate about cultural appropriation, stating that the concept promotes self-censorship in society and journalism.[128]

Peterson's perspectives on the influence of postmodernism on North American humanities departments have been compared to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, including his use of "Cultural Marxism" and "postmodernism" as interchangeable terms and his take of postmodern philosophy as an offshoot or expression of neo-Marxism.[73][129][130][131][132]

Several writers have associated Peterson with the so-called "intellectual dark web", including journalist Bari Weiss, who included Peterson in the 2018 New York Times article that first popularized the term.[133][134][135][136][137]

Gender and gender expression

Peterson has argued that there is an ongoing "crisis of masculinity" and "backlash against masculinity" in which the "masculine spirit is under assault."[18][138][139][140] He has argued that the left characterises the existing societal hierarchy as an "oppressive patriarchy" but "don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."[18] He has said men without partners are likely to become violent, and that male violence is reduced in societies in which monogamy is a social norm.[18][138] He has attributed the rise of Donald Trump and far-right European politicians to what he says is a negative reaction to a push to "feminize" men, saying "If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology."[141]

In the UK he first attracted considerable attention in a 2018 Channel 4 interview in which interviewer Cathy Newman's manner of questioning on the topic of the gender pay gap was notable.[142][143] He disputed the contention that the disparity was solely due to sexual discrimination.[143][144][145]

Peterson believes that "order" is masculine and "chaos" is feminine, and that these are inherent to human existence.[146] To Peterson, "culture" is "symbolically, archetypally, mythically male," while "chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine." He has expressed that while it may be considered "unfortunate" that this is the case, any attempt to change or subvert these traits would result in a loss of humanity, saying, "You know you can say, 'Well isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine'—well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter because that is how it's represented. ... And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn't be human anymore. ... We wouldn't be able to talk to these new creatures."[146][147]

Bill C-16

Main article: An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code

On 27 September 2016, Peterson released the first installment of a three-part lecture video series, entitled "Professor against political correctness: Part I: Fear and the Law."[24][148][57] In the video, he stated that he would not use the preferred gender pronouns of students and faculty, saying it fell under compelled speech, and announced his objection to the Canadian government's Bill C-16, which proposed to add "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and to similarly expand the definitions of promoting genocide and publicly inciting hatred in the hate speech laws in Canada.[a][149][148][150]

Peterson speaking at a Free Speech Rally in October 2016

Peterson stated that his objection to the bill was based on potential free-speech implications if the Criminal Code were amended, saying he could then be prosecuted under provincial human-rights laws if he refused to call a transgender student or faculty member by the individual's preferred pronoun.[150][151] Furthermore, he argued that the new amendments, paired with section 46.3 of the Ontario Human Rights Code, would make it possible for employers and organizations to be subject to punishment under the code if any employee or associate says anything that can be construed "directly or indirectly" as offensive, "whether intentionally or unintentionally."[152][better source needed] According to law professor Brenda Cossman and others, this interpretation of C-16 is mistaken, and the law does not criminalize misuse of pronouns,[151][153][154][155] though commercial litigator Jared Brown has described a scenario (albeit one he thinks unlikely) in which a person could end up in prison for contempt of court for persistently refusing to comply with a court order to refer to another person by their preferred gender pronouns.[156]

The series of videos drew criticism from transgender activists, faculty, and labour unions; critics accused Peterson of "helping to foster a climate for hate to thrive" and of "fundamentally mischaracterising" the law.[157][24] Protests erupted on campus, some including violence, and the controversy attracted international media attention.[153][158][159] When asked in September 2016 if he would comply with the request of a student to use a preferred pronoun, Peterson said "it would depend on how they asked me. ... If I could detect that there was a chip on their shoulder, or that they were [asking me] with political motives, then I would probably say no. ... If I could have a conversation like the one we're having now, I could probably meet them on an equal level."[159] Two months later, the National Post published an op-ed by Peterson in which he elaborated on his opposition to the bill, saying that gender-neutral singular pronouns were "at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century."[160]

In response to the controversy, academic administrators at the University of Toronto sent Peterson two letters of warning, one noting that free speech had to be made in accordance with human rights legislation, and the other adding that his refusal to use the preferred personal pronouns of students and faculty upon request could constitute discrimination. Peterson speculated that these warning letters were leading up to formal disciplinary action against him, but in December the university assured him he would retain his professorship, and in January 2017 he returned to teach his psychology class at the University of Toronto.[24][161]

In February 2017, Maxime Bernier, candidate for leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, stated that he had shifted his position on Bill C-16, from support to opposition, after meeting with Peterson and discussing it.[162] Peterson's analysis of the bill was also frequently cited by senators who were opposed to its passage.[163] In April 2017, Peterson was denied a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant for the first time in his career, which he interpreted as retaliation for his statements regarding Bill C-16.[49] However, a media-relations adviser for SSHRC said, "Committees assess only the information contained in the application."[164] In response, Rebel News launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign on Peterson's behalf,[165] raising C$195,000 by its end on 6 May, equivalent to over two years of research funding.[166] In May 2017, as one of 24 witnesses who were invited to speak about the bill, Peterson spoke against Bill C-16 at a Canadian Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs hearing.[163]

In November 2017, Lindsay Shepherd, the teaching assistant of a Wilfrid Laurier University first-year communications course, was censured by her professors for showing, during a classroom discussion about pronouns, a segment of The Agenda in which Peterson debates Bill C-16 with another professor.[167][168][169] The reasons given for the censure included the clip creating a "toxic climate," being compared to a "speech by Hitler,"[26] and being itself in violation of Bill C-16.[170] The censure was later withdrawn and both the professors and the university formally apologized.[171][172][173] The events were cited by Peterson, as well as several newspaper editorial boards[174][175][176] and national newspaper columnists,[177][178][179][180] as illustrative of the suppression of free speech on university campuses. In June 2018, Peterson filed a $1.5-million lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier University, arguing that three staff members of the university had maliciously defamed him by making negative comments about him behind closed doors.[181] As of September 2018, Wilfrid Laurier had asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it was ironic for a purported advocate of free speech to attempt to curtail free speech.[182]

Climate change

Peterson doubts the scientific consensus on climate change,[14][183] saying he is "very skeptical of the models that are used to predict climate change",[184] and that "you can't trust the data because too much ideology is involved".[183][185] Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2022, Peterson stated that "there is no such thing as climate" and questioned the accuracy of climate modeling. Climate scientists accused Peterson of being "stunningly ignorant" and of confusing weather forecasting with climate modeling.[93][186][187][188] In response to various criticisms, Peterson cited climate-skeptic Fred Singer as a source.[189]

Religion

In a 2017 interview, Peterson was asked if he was a Christian; he responded, "I suppose the most straight-forward answer to that is yes."[190] When asked if he believes in God, Peterson responded: "I think the proper response to that is no, but I'm afraid He might exist."[59] Writing for The Spectator, Tim Lott said Peterson draws inspiration from the Jungian interpretation of religion and holds views similar to the Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich. Lott also said that Peterson has respect for Taoism, as it views nature as a struggle between order and chaos and posits life would be meaningless without this duality.[11] He has also expressed his admiration for some of the teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church.[191][192]

Writing in Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University, Daniel Burston argues that Peterson's views on religion reflect a preoccupation with what Tillich calls the vertical or transcendent dimension of religious experience but demonstrate little or no familiarity with (or sympathy for) what Tillich termed the horizontal dimension of faith, which demands social justice in the tradition of the Biblical Prophets.[193]

Influence

In 2018, Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker that Peterson "is now one of the most influential—and polarizing—public intellectuals in the English-speaking world."[141][194][15]

Personal life

Peterson married Tammy Roberts in 1989;[24] the couple have a daughter, Mikhaila, and a son, Julian.[19][24]

Starting around 2000, Peterson began collecting Soviet-era paintings.[26] The paintings are displayed in his house as a reminder of the relationship between totalitarian propaganda and art, and as examples of how idealistic visions can become totalitarian oppression and horror.[6][60] In 2016, Peterson became an honorary member of the extended family of Charles Joseph, a Kwakwakaʼwakw artist, and was given the name Alestalagie ("Great Seeker").[26][195]

Health problems

In 2016, Peterson had a severe autoimmune reaction to food and was prescribed clonazepam, a benzodiazepine.[196] Later that year, he went on a strict diet consisting only of meat and some vegetables promoted by his daughter, "a nutrition 'influencer' with no medical credentials",[197] in an attempt to control his severe depression and the effects of an autoimmune disorder including psoriasis and uveitis.[20][14] In mid-2018, he stopped eating vegetables altogether, and continued eating only beef, salt and water.[198][197]

In April 2019, his prescribed dosage of clonazepam was increased to deal with anxiety he was experiencing as a result of his wife's cancer diagnosis.[199][200][201] Starting several months later, he made various attempts to lessen his intake or stop taking the drug completely,[197] but experienced "horrific" benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome.[202][203][199] According to his daughter, Peterson and his family were unable to find doctors in North America who were willing to accommodate their treatment desires, so in January 2020, Peterson, his daughter (Mikhaila), Mikhaila's husband, and Mikhaila's daughter flew to Moscow, Russia, for Jordan's treatment.[204] Doctors there diagnosed Peterson with pneumonia in both lungs upon arrival, and he was put into a medically induced coma for eight days. Peterson spent four weeks in the intensive care unit, during which time he allegedly exhibited a temporary loss of motor skills.[199][205]

Several months after his treatment in Russia, Peterson and his family moved to Belgrade, Serbia, for further treatment.[196] In June 2020, Peterson made his first public appearance in over a year, when he appeared on his daughter's podcast, recorded in Belgrade.[196] He said that he was "back to my regular self", other than feeling fatigue, and was cautiously optimistic about his prospects.[196] He also said that he wanted to warn people about the dangers of long-term use of benzodiazepine.[196] In August 2020, his daughter announced that her father had contracted COVID-19 during his hospital stay in Serbia.[206] Two months later, Peterson posted a YouTube video to inform viewers that he had returned home and aimed to resume work in the near future.[95]

Bibliography

Books

Select publications

Films

Notes

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b The phrase "a prohibited ground of discrimination" means it is illegal to discriminate against an individual or groups of people on the grounds of (based on) race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, etc.
  2. ^ In 2020, the journal Palgrave Communications changed its name to Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
  3. ^ Examining some statistics from Using Future Authoring to Improve Student Outcomes, the study found the Future Authoring component of Self Authoring "had a decreasing effect on the overall leaving rate (14.8% for control group) of participants by 3.3 to 4.3 percentage points", "the estimated effects tend to be larger in magnitude for students who typically have higher leaving rates (e.g. males vs. females, certificate vs. advanced diploma...) For example, males in the treatment group had leaving rates 5.9 to 8.0 percentage points lower than those in the control group (17.1% leaving rate), while the difference in leaving rates between the experimental groups for females is small and statistically insignificant".

References

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  2. ^ Jordan Peterson (1999). "Preface: Descensus ad Infernos". Maps of Meaning. Routledge. p. xvii. ISBN 978-0415922227. I read something by Carl Jung, at about this time, that helped me understand what I was experiencing. It was Jung who formulated the concept of persona: the mask that "feigned individuality." Adoption of such a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us- and those around us - to believe that we were authentic. Jung said...
  3. ^ Paglia, Camille (2019). Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex, and Education. New York: Vintage Books. p. 679. ISBN 978-0-525-43386-6.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b c Jordan Peterson (1999). "Preface: Descensus ad Infernos". Maps of Meaning. Routledge. pp. xiii, xiv. ISBN 978-0415922227.
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1802 Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity | The New Yorker

Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity | The New Yorker

Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity
How did a once obscure academic become the Internet’s most revered—and reviled—intellectual?
By February 26, 2018







Jordan Peterson is alternately a defender of conformity and a critic of it.Illustration by Ross MacDonald







Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

In February, 2000, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a concise review of a not-at-all-concise book. The book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” was nearly six hundred pages long, and, although it was published by the academic press Routledge, it fit neatly within no scholarly discipline. The reviewer, a sympathetic professor of psychiatry, bravely attempted to explain such forbidding phrases as “the grammatical structure of transformational mythology.” Then he admitted defeat. “Doing justice to this tome in a two-paragraph synopsis is impossible,” he concluded. “This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized.” But he expressed the hope that curious souls would nevertheless discover this curious book, and savor it “at leisure.”

Eighteen years later, the author of “Maps of Meaning,” Jordan B. Peterson, has produced a sequel, of sorts. It’s called “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” and it has become an international blockbuster. Peterson, formerly an obscure professor, is now one of the most influential—and polarizing—public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. Lots of fans find him on YouTube, where he is an unusual sort of celebrity, a stern but mercurial lecturer who often holds forth for hours, mixing polemics with pep talks. Peterson grew up in Fairview, Canada, a small town in Northern Alberta, and he has a fondness for quaint slang; his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America. His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities. And he has learned to distill his wide-ranging theories into pithy sentences, including one that has become his de facto catchphrase, a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: “Sort yourself out, bucko.”



Peterson is fifty-five, and his delayed success should give hope to underappreciated academics everywhere. For a few years, in the nineteen-nineties, he taught psychology at Harvard; by the time he published “Maps of Meaning,” in 1999, he was back in Canada—teaching at the University of Toronto, working as a clinical psychologist, and building a reputation, on television, as an acerbic pundit. His fame grew in 2016, during the debate over a Canadian bill known as C-16. The bill sought to expand human-rights law by adding “gender identity and gender expression” to the list of grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited. In a series of videotaped lectures, Peterson argued that such a law could be a serious infringement of free speech. His main focus was the issue of pronouns: many transgender or gender-nonbinary people use pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth—including, sometimes, “they,” in the singular, or nontraditional ones, like “ze.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission had found that, in a workplace or a school, “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would probably be considered discrimination. Peterson resented the idea that the government might force him to use what he called neologisms of politically correct “authoritarians.” During one debate, recorded at the University of Toronto, he said, “I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.” Then he folded his arms, adding, “And that’s that!”

Such videos reached millions of online viewers, including plenty with no particular stake in Canadian human-rights legislation. To many people disturbed by reports of intolerant radicals on campus, Peterson was a rallying figure: a fearsomely self-assured debater, unintimidated by liberal condemnation. Students staged rowdy protests. The dean of the university sent him a letter warning that his pledge not to use certain pronouns revealed “discriminatory intentions”; the letter also warned, “The impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining your ability to conduct essential components of your job as a faculty member.” Last fall, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario, was reprimanded by professors for showing her class a clip of one of Peterson’s debates. (The university later apologized.) The reprisals only raised Peterson’s profile, and he capitalized on the attention on his Patreon page, where devotees can pledge monthly payments in exchange for exclusive Q. & A. sessions and online courses.

Earlier this year, Peterson appeared on Channel 4 News, in Britain. The interviewer, Cathy Newman, asked what gave him the right to offend transgender people. He asked, cheerfully, what gave her the right to risk offending him. Newman paused for an excruciating few moments, and Peterson allowed himself a moment of triumph. “Ha! Gotcha,” he said. David Brooks, in the Times, said that Peterson reminded him of “a young William F. Buckley.” Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, called the exchange with Newman “one of the great interviews of all time.”

Given the popularity of these online debates, it can be easy to forget that arguing against political correctness is not Peterson’s main occupation. He remains a psychology professor by trade, and he still spends much of his time doing something like therapy. Anyone in need of his counsel can find plenty of it in “12 Rules for Life.” The book is far easier to comprehend than its predecessor, though it may confuse those who know Peterson only as a culture warrior. One of his many fans is PewDiePie, a Swedish video gamer who is known as the most widely viewed YouTube personality in the world—his channel has more than sixty million subscribers. In a video review of “12 Rules for Life,” PewDiePie confessed that the book had surprised him. “It’s a self-help book!” he said. “I don’t think I ever would have read a self-help book.” (He nonetheless declared that Peterson’s book, at least the parts he read, was “very interesting.”) Peterson himself embraces the self-help genre, to a point. The book is built around forthright and perhaps impractically specific advice, from Chapter 1, “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back,” to Chapter 12, “Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street.” Political polemic plays a relatively small role; Peterson’s goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: “You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.” Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide. He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.

Like many conversion stories, Peterson’s begins with a crisis of faith—a series of them, in fact. He was raised Protestant, and as a boy he was sent to confirmation class, where he asked the teacher to defend the literal truth of Biblical creation stories. The teacher’s response was convincing neither to Peterson nor, Peterson suspected, to the teacher himself. In “Maps of Meaning,” he remembered his reaction. “Religion was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious,” he wrote. “I stopped attending church, and joined the modern world.” He turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking an explanation for “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world,” and each time finding himself unsatisfied. (This was the Cold War era, and Peterson was preoccupied by the possibility of nuclear annihilation.) The question was, he decided, a psychological one, so he sought psychological answers, and eventually earned a Ph.D. from McGill University, having written a thesis examining the heritability of alcoholism.

All the while, Peterson was also pursuing a grander, stranger project. He had fallen under the sway of Carl Jung, the mystical Swiss psychology pioneer who interpreted modern life as an endless drama, haunted by ancient myths. (Peterson calls Jung “ever-terrifying,” which is a very Jungian sort of compliment.) In “Maps of Meaning,” Peterson drew from Jung, and from evolutionary psychology: he wanted to show that modern culture is “natural,” having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to reflect and meet our human needs. Then, rather audaciously, he sought to explain exactly how our minds work, illustrating his theory with elaborate geometric diagrams (“The Constituent Elements of Experience as Personality, Territory, and Process”) that seemed to have been created for the purpose of torturing undergraduates.


The new book replaces charts with cheerful drawings of Peterson’s children acting out his advice. In the foreword, Peterson’s friend Norman Doidge, a prominent psychiatrist, tells about meeting him at an outdoor lunch at the house of a mutual friend; Peterson was wearing cowboy boots, and determinedly ignoring a swarm of bees. “He had this odd habit,” Doidge writes, “of speaking about the deepest questions to whoever was at this table—most of them new acquaintances—as though he were just making small talk.”

Throughout the book, Peterson supplies small and strange interjections of autobiography. He recalls the time an old friend named Ed came to visit, accompanied by another guy who was, in Peterson’s estimation, “stoned out of his gourd.” Alarmed, Peterson staged a kind of intervention. “I took Ed aside and told him politely that he had to leave,” Peterson writes. “I said that he shouldn’t have brought his useless bastard of a companion.” Ed took his friend and left—fearing, perhaps, to discover what a less polite admonition would have sounded like.


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Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In “Maps of Meaning,” he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, “You don’t believe that. That isn’t true.” To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful. In “12 Rules for Life,” Peterson recounts a similar experience when, as a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia. He says that such patients are “almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood,” and so he redoubled his efforts to say only what he meant. “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
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If he once had a tendency to shut himself up, Peterson has wholly overcome it. “Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding,” he proclaims (Rule 11), but the expected riff about “overprotected” children leads elsewhere: to a grim story about a troubled friend who committed suicide, and then to a remembrance of a professor who boasted that he and his wife had made an ethical decision to have only one child, and from there to an argument that both the unhappy friend and the arrogant professor were “anti-human, to the core.” Elsewhere in the chapter, he writes that “boys’ interests tilt towards things” and “girls’ interests tilt towards people,” and that these interests are “strongly influenced by biological factors.” He is particularly concerned about boys and men, and he flatters them with regular doses of tough love. “Boys are suffering in the modern world,” he writes, and he suggests that the problem is that they’re not boyish enough. Near the end of the chapter, he tries to coin a new catchphrase: “Toughen up, you weasel.”

When he does battle as a culture warrior, especially on television, Peterson sometimes assumes the role of a strident anti-feminist, intent on ending the oppression of males by destroying the myth of male oppression. (He once referred to his critics as “rabid harpies.”) But his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members. In this way, he might be seen as an heir to older gurus of manhood like Elbert Hubbard, who in 1899 published a stern and wildly popular homily called “A Message to Garcia.” (What young men most needed, Hubbard wrote, was “a stiffening of the vertebrae.”) Peterson is an heir, too, to the professional pickup artists who proliferated in the aughts, making a different appeal to feckless men. Where the pickup artists promised to make guys better sexual salesmen (sexual consummation was called “full close,” as in closing a deal), Peterson, more ambitious, promises to help them get married and stay married. “You have to scour your psyche,” he tells them. “You have to clean the damned thing up.” When he claims to have identified “the culminating ethic of the canon of the West,” one might brace for provocation. But what follows, instead, is prescription so canonical that it seems self-evident: “Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.” In urging men to overachieve, he is also urging them to fit in, and become productive members of Western society.

Every so often, Peterson pauses to remind his readers how lucky they are. “The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West,” he writes, “is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.” This may sound strange to readers in the United States, where a widespread perception of dysfunction unites politicians and commentators who agree on little else. But Peterson does not live in Donald Trump’s America; in Canada, the Prime Minister is Justin Trudeau, who seems to strike Peterson as the embodiment of wimpy and fraudulent liberalism. Recently, after Trudeau tried to cut off a rambling questioner by half-joking that she should say “peoplekind” instead of “mankind,” Peterson appeared on “Fox & Friends” to register his objection. “I’m afraid that our Prime Minister is only capable of running his ideas on a few very narrow ideological tracks,” he said.

Peterson seems to view Trump, by contrast, as a symptom of modern problems, rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump’s rise was unfortunate but inevitable—“part of the same process,” he writes, as the rise of “far-right” politicians in Europe. “If men are pushed too hard to feminize,” he warns, “they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides. During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, “I’ve had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who’ve moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos.” But he typically sees liberals, or leftists, or “postmodernists,” as aggressors—which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the “radical right” as victims. Many of his political stances are built on this type of inversion. Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. Liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion—and yet “there’s nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion.” (This horror, he says, is embodied in the figure of the “Freudian devouring mother”; as an example, he cites Ursula, the sea witch from “The Little Mermaid.”) The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.

Peterson thinks that this danger has a lot to do with men and women, and the changing way we think about them. “The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals,” he writes, by way of arguing that human beings are bound to care about this division. During his Channel 4 News debate, Cathy Newman pressed him on whether he supported gender equality, and he replied that it depended on what the term meant. “If it means equality of outcome, then almost certainly it’s undesirable,” he said. “Men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories, if you leave them alone.” (He mentioned that in Scandinavia, an unusually egalitarian part of the world, men are vastly overrepresented among engineers, and women among nurses.) Convictions such as these inspire in him a general skepticism of efforts to redress gender inequality. He has argued that traditionally feminine traits, such as agreeableness, are not historically correlated with professional success. (He says that, as a psychologist, he has often counselled female clients to be more assertive at work.) When Newman suggested that this correlation might merely reflect the ways women have been shut out of corporate leadership, Peterson sounded doubtful. “It could be the case that if companies modified their behavior, and became more feminine, that they would be successful,” he said. “But there’s no evidence for that.”

Peterson is not primarily interested in policy, but he was eager to join the debate over C-16, the Canadian bill forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. In opposing the bill, Peterson claimed the mantle of free speech. “There’s a difference,” he explained, “between saying that there’s something you can’t say, and saying that there are things that you have to say.” But if laws against discrimination also prohibit harassment, they will necessarily prohibit some forms of verbal harassment—and they will therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, limit speech. Canada already limits speech in ways that the U.S. does not: a law against “hate speech” was repealed in 2013, but the government still bans “hate propaganda.” From an American perspective, such laws may seem ill-advised, or even oppressive. Still, like many free-speech arguments, this one was in large part a debate over the political status of a minority group.


The C-16 debate is over, for now—the bill passed and was enacted last summer. But Peterson remains a figurehead for the movement to block or curtail transgender rights. When he lampoons “made-up pronouns,” he sometimes seems to be lampooning the people who use them, encouraging his fans to view transgender or gender-nonbinary people as confused, or deluded. Once, after a lecture, he was approached on campus by a critic who wanted to know why he would not use nonbinary pronouns. “I don’t believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run,” he replied.

So what does Peterson actually believe about gender and pronouns? It can be hard to tell. Later in that campus conversation, when asked whether, in the absence of legal coercion, he would be willing to use pronouns such as “they” and “them” if a trans person asked him to, Peterson demurred. “It might depend on how they asked,” he said. One of his foundational beliefs is that cultures evolve, which suggests that nonstandard pronouns could become standard. In a debate about gender on Canadian television, in 2016, he tried to find some middle ground. “If our society comes to some sort of consensus over the next while about how we’ll solve the pronoun problem,” he said, “and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems to solve the problem properly, without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns, then I would be willing to reconsider my position.”
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Despite his fondness for moral absolutes, Peterson is something of a relativist; he is inclined to defer to a Western society that is changing in unpredictable ways. In discussing the many women who have criticized him, he has talked about how verbal disagreements commonly contain an implicit threat of violence, and about how such implicit threats are “forbidden” when men are addressing women. And yet, even when the topic is as elemental as male-female violence, our norms are changing: in the United States, laws against spousal violence were first enacted in the middle of the nineteenth century; laws against spousal rape are only a few decades old. Not long ago, these laws might have seemed intrusive and disruptive; now, many people shudder at the notion that it might ever have been legal for a man to physically assault his wife. Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before. In the case of gender identity, Peterson’s judgment is that “our society” has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn’t quite an argument that we shouldn’t. And this judgment isn’t likely to be persuasive to people in places—like some North American college campuses, perhaps—where the singular “they” has already come to seem like part of the social fabric.

Adifferent kind of culture warrior might express hostility to nontraditional pronouns in religious terms—in the United States, the fight against legal rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people has largely been led by believers. But Peterson—like his hero, Jung—has a complicated relationship to religious belief. He reveres the Bible for its stories, reasoning that any stories that we have been telling ourselves for so long must be, in some important sense, true. In a recent podcast interview, he mentioned that people sometimes ask him if he believes in God. “I don’t respond well to that question,” he said. “The answer to that question is forty hours long, and I can’t condense it into a sentence.” Forty hours, it turns out, is the approximate length of a lecture series that he created based on “Maps of Meaning.”

At times, Peterson emphasizes his interest in empirical knowledge and scientific research—although these tend to be the least convincing parts of “12 Rules for Life.” There is an extended analogy between human beings and lobsters, based on the observation that male lobsters that have proven themselves dominant produce more serotonin; he suggests that when people “slump around,” like weakling lobsters, they, too, will run short on serotonin, which will make them unhappy. The fact that serotonin has varied and sometimes contradictory effects scarcely matters here: Peterson’s story about the lobster is essentially a modern myth. He wants forlorn readers to imagine themselves as heroic lobsters; he wants an image of claws to appear in their mind whenever they feel themselves start to slump; he wants to help them.

Peterson wants to help everyone, in fact. In his least measured moments, he permits himself to dream of a world transformed. “Who knows,” he writes, “what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?” His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: “Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not.” No doubt there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies—when it comes, in other words, to politics—our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent. The “highly functional infrastructure” he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent. We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn’t mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else. ♦




Published in the print edition of the March 5, 2018, issue, with the headline “Sort Yourself Out, Bucko.”


Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. He is the author of “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.”
More:Jordan Peterson“12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”BooksPsychologyDiscriminationFree SpeechGender

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