Last week, Douglas Murray penned an adulatory article for the Spectator titled “The Curious Star Appeal of Jordan Peterson.” “Why,” Murray ponders in the lede, “are young Brits flocking to hear a psychology professor talk about morality?” It seems a good question, especially if you’re familiar with the phenomenon, and Murray answers it, even if he doesn’t realize he does. Peterson, professor at the University of Toronto, Murray identifies, “has become a mixture of philosopher, life-coach, educator and guru. He has the kind of passionate, youthful, pedagogical draw that the organized churches can only dream of.”
The key words in that brief biography of Jordan Peterson are, in increasing order of importance, “life-coach,” “passionate,” “churches” (in the given context), and “guru.” Put another way, Peterson’s star appeal isn’t curious at all to anyone who understands the inner mechanics of religious movements. Whether he realizes it or not, Peterson is leading one. That explains his star appeal effectively entirely.
If Murray understands this, he hides it well, possibly for good reason. Peterson’s growing throngs of fans don’t just flock to listen to him in public events around Britain (and elsewhere). Though such things are notoriously hard to track, they are increasingly well-known around social media for taking criticism of their YouTube educator rather poorly, to say the least. Partly, they’re vociferous in their defenses of Peterson for good reasons — much of what he has to offer is quite good, like his stance on free speech and resistance against social justice nonsense (which Peterson identifies simultaneously with postmodernism and Marxism, which he conflates to some degree). Still, as often happens with people in thrall to a religious-like leader, they exhibit a strong trend toward what falls under conventionalism, which means roughly that what they feel is good for them should be conventional and thus something of an imperative for everyone.
Pastor Jordan Peterson
Murray describes Peterson as “a counter-cultural (or counter-counter-cultural) hero who was willing to say what almost everybody else thought,” adding that he is also “someone not only with humanity and humor, but serious depth and substance.” For the most part, and so long as he isn’t talking about certain topics (like objective truth), this is an accurate characterization. Peterson comes off as genuinely genial, compassionate, engaging, friendly, informed, genuine, authentic, hard-to-flap (though not quite unflappable), humorous, charismatic, often perspicacious, and positively human, this last one being a trait which shows up far too rarely in public academic types, and he does so because in all likelihood he is all of these things. Still, these traits aren’t why Peterson commands so much interest and devotion. On their own, they’re not enough to have propelled Peterson to the “curious star appeal.” That takes something more.
Murray understands this, too. In fact, it simply beggars belief that Murray finds Peterson’s star appeal “curious” at all, as he even puts his finger right on the damn thing.
“He sees the vacuum left not just by the withdrawal of the Christian tradition, but by the moral relativism and self-abnegation that have flooded across the West in its wake. Furthermore, he recognizes — from his experience as a practicing psychologist and as a teacher — that people crave principles and certainties.”
That is, Peterson is leading a nascent religious movement, one we might see as neo-traditionalist, as does Christianity Today and, to some degree, even Peterson himself. Murray understands this on some level, as he even tells us exactly who the new Petersonite converts are. In Murray’s words, which echo Peterson’s own, Peterson “recognizes that people — particularly young people, and young men most of all — are badly in need of help.” And he’s probably right. As Murray puts it,
“He sees a generation being urged to waste their lives waving placards about imaginary problem [sic], or problems far beyond their (or anyone’s control) and urges them instead to cut through the lies, recognize the tragic and uncomfortable position we are in as humans and consider afresh what we might actually achieve with our lives.”
All that’s needed to see this growing movement for what it is, then, is to ponder some of Murray’s phrasing. “Moral relativism” and “self-abnegation” almost certainly refer primarily to the terrible false choice between proxy religions young people presently face, especially young men. In the apparent cultural vacuum that has been left by the retreat of tradition and religion, seekers today largely have to choose between social justice leftism and alt-right idiocy if they seek some deeper sense of meaning and belongingness in their lives. Here, Peterson offers a middle way.
Unfortunately, the “principles” and “certainties” that Murray claims people crave, and that the viability of this third path depends upon, ultimately refer to a rather nasty fly in Peterson’s soup. These mean precisely the kind of dogmatism that Christopher Hitchens famously and rightly pointed out “poisons everything.” They are the root of what Jonathan Rauch called the “fundamentalist impulse,” which is the perennial enemy of liberal society against which American Enlightenment figures urged we must always retain vigilance — specifically because people crave them so. It isn’t coincidental, then, that “principles” and “certainties” are precisely what the social justice left and alt-right (not to mention the Islamic State) are selling by the truckload to disaffected Western kids. Peterson is clearly aware of these concerns and sees himself explicitly as offering an alternative.
“Waste their lives waving placards” is a fairly obvious reference to the protest culture of today’s lefty youth, and we needn’t guess which “imaginary problem[s]” Murray is referring to here because he does us the kindness of telling us explicitly.
“Peterson has made one of the most unpopular but vital realizations of our time: that we are creating a generation of men who (especially if they don’t belong to any ‘minority’ group) are without hope, foundation or purpose. Everything in the culture insists that they are terrible: proto–rapists when they are not rapists; proto-racists when they are not racists; condemned for their ‘privilege’ even when they are failures and their every success dismissed as undeserved. … Peterson is one of the very few to take this problem seriously and to help young people to navigate towards lives of meaning and purpose.”
From this, we can surmise that Murray means “feminists” and other social justice leftists more than anyone else. Picking on these lefty culture warriors in this way and in this context is eminently justified, however. If they are to satisfy the social justice types, especially under late feminism, most young men trying to figure out who and how to be in this world are offered a small set of dismal choices that range along an unpleasant spectrum from dispiriting to annoying to downright insulting.
Not all young men walk with their backs bent by today’s supercilious approach to feminism, and not all of these men are interested in embarrassing themselves in the putrid Men’s Rights or alt-right arenas. But to find obvious male role models for many young men remains a struggle. They could, for example, join some of their peers in a turn toward mega-alphas like retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink and his hard-assed advice to get up and work out as hard as they can at 4:30 in the morning. If that sounds unpleasant, it’s because it’s meant to be, and Willink is glad to point out in varying degrees of subtlety that if you don’t like it, it’s mostly because you don’t have discipline and aren’t a real man. Far from being the spirit of manliness to inspire the students at the University of YouTube, it’s generally demotivating for almost everyone. (It’s great for the handful of people it works for, we can suppose, but — come on.)
Enter Peterson, billing himself as an accessible hero archetype who was “raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta,” and who “has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt plane.” Rather than telling men who refuse to suffer the nearly insufferable that they are weak, Peterson reaches to them by lecturing in two-hour blocks with a message of “clean your own room” before setting out to change the world, to think deeply, be reflective, become competent, and stand up for yourself and what you believe is right. These are all very good messages, and he delivers them with all of the humor and humanity, and the substance and depth, for which Murray rightly congratulates him.
Good advice, however, is cheap. Similar messages to many of Peterson’s are available in any number of self-help books, especially for the young entrepreneur or businessperson. That kind of thing has never before been enough to inspire a generation of lost boys, who mostly want to find their way to winning in a way that truly resonates with them — to some kind of masculine success. So Peterson urges them in intentionally inflected tones to be, for example, powerful and instructs them so by riding on a claim that it’s what women really (secretly) want from men more than anything else. Wink, wink. After all, it was true when men were men and women were women, and we can all know it because this mythological story about snakes from the Bible bears it out. And so by tossing in some pop-psychology and pop-evolutionary theory, partially rooted within his own expertise, Peterson gives this melange of advice the full appearance of “depth and substance.”
This is why Murray is right to bring us imagery from the pulpit when describing Peterson and his appeal. That Peterson is charismatically delivering an apparently much-needed, meaning-laden message to a crowd thirsting for it explains much his popularity. Religious allusion also explains the strangest piece of the Peterson puzzle: the peculiar devotion of his fans, many of whom simply know you’ll love Peterson too once you’ve heard enough of him to hear him correctly. To put it simply, they, like their social justice-infused nemeses, are members of a largely unorganized emerging religious movement. This, of course, is a polite way of calling the Petersonites a nascent cult, though it isn’t at all clear whether Peterson leads or merely inspires his not-too-motley crew of the culturally fed-up.
Peterson and Religious Psychology
To better understand the phenomenon, perhaps the most fascinating clue comes from Peterson himself, from a lecture he published to YouTube about a year ago: part two of “Marionettes and Individuals” from his 2017 Maps of Meaning 3 series. About three quarters of the way through this lecture, Peterson devotes several minutes to explaining the phenomenon of how groups of this kind form a sort of conspiracy with their charismatic leader. Using the example of Adolf Hitler, Peterson explains how a disgruntled speaker talking to a similarly disgruntled crowd can establish a feedback loop in which, rather than the leader taking the crowd to dark places in an intentional way, the leader and the crowd go into the shadowlands together. In listening to this segment of this year-old lecture at this point in his career, it’s difficult not to imagine the charismatic Peterson, fed up with the excesses of social justice leftism, reaching to a crowd that feels the same way he does but doesn’t know how to articulate it. In fact, unless entranced by it, this irony is almost all one can think about.
At bottom, what Peterson is describing in “Marionettes 2” is the fundamentals of religious psychology. It’s difficult to ascertain how much religious psychology Peterson formally understands, but from his nearly seamless incorporation of religious themes and recognition of their cultural and affective importance into his lectures, it’s clear he’s not entirely ignorant on the subject. In fact, this short description of Hitler’s rise to popularity establishes fairly convincingly that Peterson has at least a very solid informal understanding of the psychology he’s exploiting in his own crowd.
This isn’t to lay blame. Peterson himself in his “Marionettes 2” lecture indicates that this relationship is rarely intentional — the psychological processes that wed the leader to his crowd are, in fact, quite subtle and sophisticated, and they will conquer most people easily without their realizing it — and to all appearances, this seems to be contributing to Peterson’s “curious” star appeal. In fact, this seems to be a moment for Peterson to reflect and, perhaps, to take his own medicine.
Consider, for example, Peterson’s recent interview with Cathy Newman on BBC Channel 4. To be sure, the vast majority of this interview shows Peterson at his absolute best, handling an aggressive and distorting Newman with ease, wit, grace, and — most crucially — data, and it demonstrates why he’s both very likable and a serious public intellectual well worth taking seriously in much of what he says. Nevertheless, in his first few minutes with Newman, Peterson demonstrates elements of his more concerning side and, particularly, a hint that he may be going somewhere quite unintended along with a crowd that’s making him just as he is making them. While explaining to Newman how men need to “grow up” and get their lives in order, for example, Peterson catches himself in a moment of clarity on the very point he made a year earlier in “Marionettes 2.” He remarks, “I’ve been telling young men — but it’s not — I wasn’t specifically aiming this message at young men to begin with; it just kind of turned out that way.” Indeed, the leader and the crowd very often walk together. In these cases under Peterson’s own advice, it’s clear that it’s up to the superior leader to figure out where he and his followers going and to make exceedingly careful decisions about the whole affair.
Understanding religious psychology can only help. While the empirical study of the psychology of religion is slow to characterize specifically what constitutes a religion, or more loosely a religious movement, it is quite clear on how religion works at the psychological level and informative on what makes them what they are. At the very bottom, as I elaborated upon in Everybody Is Wrong About God, as sets of ideas, religions are cultural structures that help people meet a variety of psychological and social needs, primarily needs for meaning making, control, and sociality. That is, people turn to religions to make sense of their worlds both functionally and meaningfully, to feel more in control of (shall we say) chaotic circumstances, and to establish and maintain a social order to which they belong, in which they can place themselves, and from which they can derive esteem.
There’s a lot going on here that makes a structure like this work — and in terms of what makes it religious. People often think it’s God or gods that make a belief structure religious, but that’s not quite right. Religions are more accurately a kind of community, known as a moral community, built not so much around deities as around certain kinds of symbolic cultural narratives. Particularly, religions provide meaning by offering a symbolic mythological narrative into which life, society, and the broader universe are contextualized. (The mythological aspect of religions is where God usually comes in and seems to be, in fact, the crucial divider between religious structures and mere ideological movements.) Furthermore, religions not only provide and maintain the community in which the religious subculture thrives but also utilize the underlying mythology to provide structure and order for that society. They also deliver their mythology and philosophy for life by means of psychologically elevating messages; protect their mythological structure from challenges, either from other competing mythologies or from rational inquiry that probes too deeply, by making use of nonstandard epistemologies that serve to support and protect the mythological structure at their cores; and usually have some mechanism by which conversion to the faith can be achieved and is marked. Religions tell people in an emotionally salient way what’s going on, how things are best ordered, and who and how to be, and they provide means for knowing their own.
Resisting Domination
It isn’t hard to see how Peterson’s message operates in the religious way for a disaffected group of lost young men, specifically those who have had enough of being told who and how to be by the excesses of social justice progressivism (but who don’t want to have to turn to either of the embarrassing idiocy of the alt-right or hyper-alpha masculinity that seems to be offered as the only contemporary alternatives). In stark contrast to these bad options, Peterson offers a means for the everyman, especially the one smashed under the feminist’s thumb, to tap into and evoke his own inner Nietzschean übermensch. In plainer language, Peterson is offering an accessible and contemporary vision of manliness that, whether for right or wrong (and probably some of both), seems to have been lost to the cultural changes of the past several decades. It reaches to the vulnerable, as religious conversion mechanisms nearly always do, and “red pills” them, which marks their conversion and roughly means that he breaks them free of the cultural assumptions that dictate upon their times.
This view of manliness appeals to the downtrodden young man by helping him “straighten his back,” as Peterson puts it, so that he can make something more of himself. At least to a few layers down, this sounds great, but there’s more to it than that for our lost boys. As Peterson admonishes Cathy Newman, “Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful.” This is telling, isn’t it? Peterson’s message reaches these young men not only for the higher purposes at the end of his sentence, but also for the usual ones at the start of it — so they can become what women really want, which is to say so that they can get laid.
Not only that, Peterson promises more than sex from women who desire them to his acolytes. He also makes sure they won’t have to be dominated by those women in return for a sexual relationship. “You can’t dominate a competent partner,” he tells Newman, “so if you want domination….” Unfortunately, Newman cut Peterson off before he could finish that fascinating sentence, but he finally continues by saying that “women who have had their relationships with men impaired and who are afraid of such relationships will settle for a weak partner because they can dominate them.” In a conversation with Camille Paglia a few months earlier, Peterson made similar waves by remarking, “I don’t think men can control crazy women.” Though the context was different — Peterson was urging other women to check their more intense sisters, seemingly meaning aggressive feminists, and to do so because men can’t be violent against them — the implicit message of powerlessness against feminism for his lost boys is the same.
Why so many young men would want to be sexually desirable is no mystery and never has been, but why all of Peterson’s talk about female domination would resonate with them is a more curious matter that again evokes the religious appeal Peterson carries. Religion often offers an emotionally tangible solution to some vexing problem that leaves people feeling powerless (often, it’s death), and here, for more men than at any point in history, that problem is feminism. Like their guru, Peterson’s fans have had enough of the kind of domineering feminism that considers their very being to be “toxic,” and they can’t stand the poisonous “social justice” activism that dismisses them for being intrinsically “privileged.” Feminism, in many regards, has gone much too far in the 21st century, and it has created a cultural circumstance, as Murray rightly diagnoses, “destined to produce societal resentment and disengagement on a generational scale.”
Of all brands of snake oil that can be sold, the kind that answers societal resentment is the most potent kind, and it is the sort that has the highest likelihood of turning toward the religious. Wherever it will go in time, Peterson’s message currently does exactly this. What Peterson provides his audience is a sweeping explanation that tells a frustrated people “here’s why things are going bad for you and why you feel out of control of your life, and here’s what you can do about it within yourself, starting now.” How very Biblical, or Quranic, or Buddhist, or Woke. This is an invitation to being born again, and moral rebirth is always an exercise in remaking oneself in a new moral image that enables you to regain control over the broken parts of your life. Peterson’s “order out of chaos” message equipped with plenty of implicit hearkening back to a lost time when men were men and women were women sets the stage perfectly for this mechanism. Like all religious movements, it also sets itself up to become a self-fulfilling prophesy by remaking society in its image by valorizing the traditional roles it claims to rely upon.
Maps of Mythology
Religions can sell such a sweeping change to such a wide audience because they offer a meaning-making framework that appeals to emotions and rests upon myth. They then draw copiously from real world examples to show how one’s life is likely to be out of control outside of that framework and more under control within it, making themselves self-fulfilling cultural prophesies. As psychologists of religion Ralph Hood, Jr., Peter Hill, and Bernard Spilka explain,
“The attribution [meaning-making] process described earlier represents not just a need for meaning, but also for mastery and control. Especially when threatened with harm or pain, all higher organisms seek to predict and/or control the outcomes of events that affect them. This fact has been linked by attribution theorists and researchers with novelty, frustration or failure, lack of control, and restriction of personal freedom.” (p. 17)
This need for control works for people especially when it provides a subjective feeling of control, even when that sense of control is illusory (like with religious reliance upon magic such as intercessory prayer or a belief in transcending death). It’s potency is ultimately rooted within the search for world-contextualizing meaning.
The advantages of having a mythological core within such a meaning-making framework are numerous and allow people to bring messages home. Particularly, mythological structures provide grand explanatory narratives and emotionally resonant symbols. They’re also essentially unfalsifiable. One cannot debunk a myth because the myth itself is a story, and anything in a symbolic story that is falsified is and always was obviously metaphorical. This reliably leads to problems. Drawing from an admirable essay about “Wokeness and Myth on Campus” by Alan Jacobs, which in turn draws upon the work of Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s book The Presence of Myth, a mythological core
“describes that aspect of our experience ‘not revealed by scientific questions and beliefs.’ It encompasses the ‘nonempirical unconditioned reality’ of our experience, that which is not amenable to confirmation or disconfirmation. …the mythical core describes our most fundamental relation to the world. It is our metaphysical background, the elements prior to our manipulation and control. For Kołakowski, the failure to distinguish between the mythical and technological cores leads to a failure to understand many social trends and events.”
Jacobs, still following Kołakowski, points out another significant advantage of mythological structures that makes them into their own rather tremendous problem. Myths aren’t merely stories; they represent a “way of being in the world,” and as such, they present deep affective connection for believers and inspire devotion. As an unfortunate consequence, myths cannot be questioned in any significant part lest doubt threaten the integrity of the whole structure. As Jacobs neatly articulates, though using the example of social justice left “woke” activists on campus,
“Something even more deep-seated is at work when student protesters’ interpretations of events, and their proffered remedies for historical or current injustice, are challenged and the students reply, ‘You are denying my very identity.’ This response makes sense only within the mythical core, not the technological core [approximately, in Jacob’s words: a stance toward the world that is instrumental and manipulative, in relatively neutral senses of those words]. One cannot analytically pick apart a complex, integrated mythical framework and say, ‘I choose this but not that’ without tearing holes in the web and leaving it dangling and useless. That is what instrumental reason always does to myth.”
The mythological appeal of Peterson’s message is, perhaps, its most overt feature. He openly and frequently appeals to Christian symbolism, Western cultural mythology, Jungian archetypes, and idealized visions of gender roles and dynamics to make his points — and to make them more visceral. This is, in fact, roughly what his book Maps of Meaning is about. It also works. As Murray observed, describing one of Peterson’s public events,
“Going back to the time when we lived in trees and feared fire and snakes, he explored the psychological and mythical reasons why the snakiest of all snakes [dragons] might have lodged itself in each culture as the representation of evil. And from there we went to Eden and the Gulag via the Judeo-Christian tradition’s discovery that even if we chase down every snake in the land we cannot fully destroy the one inside ourselves. Motes, beams and eyes were discussed in relation to his advice to a generation hooked on public displays of morality: ‘Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.’”
All of this feels immediately resonant to anyone familiar with the legends. This, as Murray indicates, does more than connect Peterson’s audience to ideas and “give them a home,” it sets them within an overriding mythological web that cannot be picked apart in part lest it be left dangling and useless in total. And Peterson isn’t just some secularized prosperity-gospel charlatan cynically selling a resonant message for praise and profit; he almost unquestionably deeply believes exactly what he’s saying and thus convincingly communicates not only a message but a vision for the world. Again, in Murray’s keen assessment, “as well as being funny, there is a burning sincerity to [Peterson] which only the most withered cynic could suspect.”
That seems perfectly true, even recalling Peterson’s own “Marionettes 2” warning about and for charismatic public figures, but the essence of secularism — as an antidote to the privileging of any particular moral mythology — is that sincerity (or conviction) covers exactly none of the ground toward validity. This is why Peterson’s message demands more care than he’s giving it. Whether he understands this or doesn’t, the movement building itself around his unique presentation — and around him — almost certainly will not. Movements rarely understand such things. The need for care falls upon the leader and should be inspired in the followers, and it depends upon epistemology, a workable theory of knowledge. The trouble is, mythological structures are, as a general rule, permanently allergic to robust epistemologies, and Peterson’s seems no exception.
Utility and Truth
Rather than rigorous approaches to ascertaining truth, many mythological frameworks of attribution rely upon alternative or even what we could call “island epistemologies,” which are roughly what our friends on the far left and in the churches might refer to as “other ways of knowing.” Calvinist theology, for example, relies upon the island epistemology known as “Reformed Epistemology,” which in its simplest essence insists that people can feel the presence of God directly and thus can directly assert theological knowledge. Feminist theology, especially the intersectional sort, similarly relies upon an island epistemology known as “standpoint theory,” which theorizes that the oppressed can see more of our social reality than can dominant groups and thus possess keener insight than privilege allows. Without being quite so far out to sea as these island epistemologies, Peterson’s approach to truth leaves a lot to be desired except by those who wish to preserve his mythology.
Peterson, in Maps of Meaning, lays out a very relativistic approach to truth that seems almost openly postmodern. It directly appeals to “ancient” knowledge and seems to put it on some kind of a level with scientific epistemology.
“How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense? … Is it not more likely that we just do not know how it could be that traditional notions are right, given their appearance of extreme irrationality? Is it not likely that this indicates modern philosophical ignorance, rather than ancestral philosophical error? We have made the great mistake that the ‘world of spirit’ described by those who proceeded us was the modern ‘world of matter’ primitively conceptualized. This is not true — at least not in the simple manner we generally believe. The cosmos described by mythology was not the same place known to the practitioners of modern science — but that does not mean it was not real.” (p. 8, emphasis original)
Treating Peterson’s approach to epistemology so simplistically, as with much about the man, misses the mark and requires many more words to tangle with. Rather than being naively postmodern or relativistic, with a consequential departure, Peterson essentially adopts as an epistemology the pragmatism of another great symbologist in his tradition, William James.
The short essence of pragmatism, as James laid it out, is that truth isn’t particularly relevant; what matters is what is useful. In developing pragmatism, James was trying to sidestep the thorns and brambles that functionally define all philosophical inquiries about truth and to focus upon utility instead. For James, rather than asking is it true? we are better off asking what use is it? and pursuing that which is most useful. It’s a compelling philosophical take that even bootstraps itself — pragmatism should become that which is most pragmatic itself and thus needn’t justify itself as true because it is inherently (optimally) useful — but it merely adds complexity to the problem of truth. In every conceivable example, the central proposition of pragmatism, P is useful, still has to be examined for truth, not merely utility, and this has to be done the old-fashioned way.
Nevertheless, for those familiar with Peterson’s confusing discussions on the topic of truth, his reliance upon James’ pragmatism is obvious, and for those also familiar with James, so is Peterson’s fundamental betrayal of it. In fact, Peterson makes no bones about the fact that his approach to truth is ultimately rooted in pragmatic utility. So far, so good, but Peterson diverges from James by being willing to call true that which passes his usefulness test. In this way, Peterson is able to effectively play Three-card Monte with the idea of “truth” and to wed his more careful and well-founded statements to his underlying mythological core, which ultimately constitutes the magic of his message.
So, if (mis)using James’ pragmatism in this way isn’t quite an island epistemology in the same way as standpoint theory, it’s a bulb on the end of a very narrow peninsula in the epistemological landscape. By constructing “truth” as he does, Peterson is able to dodge the kind of rigorous epistemology that would tatter the mythological core at the center of his message (and popularity) while using it to generate a social movement around himself that therefore cannot course-correct. Dealing with new information effectively requires one of two things, after all, either a solid approach to ascertaining truth or a truly fortunate choice in leader who can do it for you. This is a problem Peterson warns about in other cult-like ideologies than his own, but it might help him at this point to ponder the beam in his own eye. It won’t be easy, though. In “Marionettes 2,” Peterson recognizes the difficulty of precisely this problem and offers the example of Ghandi’s extreme asceticism as a prophylactic against drinking his own Kool-Aid. Asceticism aside, it isn’t clear Peterson is being so careful.
The Guru Mechanic
This is the precise guru mechanic that Martha Nussbaum adroitly pinned upon “Professor of Parody” Judith Butler with regard to the cult of gender performativity that follows her, to Peterson’s likely chagrin. Though Peterson keeps both of his feet well out of the chaos in the quote below, much in the relevant part of Nussbaum’s criticism applies,
“When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that ‘direction for thinking,’ what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.”
Peterson’s problem, of course, isn’t that he fails to state his ideas clearly, unless they’re his ideas about what makes a thing true. He typically is. Instead, by couching his message his own rather unique application of Biblical exegesis combined with Jungian archetypes, he is forcing the crowd to depend on his interpretations to make sense of the next new thing. This is the guru mechanic at work. This is the stunt of a preacher, and given his broad appeals to science to support his emotionally salient connections, a slightly bent variant of James’ pragmatism is the perfect slippery epistemology needed to get the job done. Remember, in this view if it’s useful it’s true, and what method of verification could possibly be worse for a self-sustaining, emotionally salient social movement that appeals to a disgruntled and disaffected populace? It is, in fact, exactly what Peterson himself warned us about in his “Marionettes 2” lecture.
The mechanism that makes this work, as articulated and warned against since antiquity, is rhetoric. Clearly unlike Judith Butler and most theologians, Peterson isn’t for the most part an obscurantist (except about truth), but he is a subtle and powerful rhetorician. Sometimes this is quite welcome, and at other times, it’s a bit worrisome. In his interview with Cathy Newman, for example, we see both. Throughout much of the interview, Peterson effectively turns the tables on nearly every one of Newman’s questions (or misinterpretations of what he had just said) and exudes confident charm while doing so. At one point, he even catches her completely off-guard, leaving her unable to articulate why she should be able to risk offending him while insisting he shouldn’t do what he, in his professional and considered opinion, thinks is the best way to handle the trans pronouns issue.
On the other hand, in the shakier early part of the interview, Newman asks Peterson, “what’s in [your message to young men] for the women?” to which he replies “Well, what sort of partner do you want? Do you want an overgrown child or someone to contend with that’s going to help you?” This is a response that, however genuine and for whatever truth it contains behind its false choice, lights up powerful emotional triggers that do much of his work for him. And much of his presentation is like this. It’s generally good advice given for mostly good reasons on reasonably plausible justifications that still manages to be broken and misleading in fundamental ways. Tucked within all of the care, learning, and sincerity, Peterson promotes a worldview dripping with a kind of seductive simplicity delivered in powerful undertones of moral worthiness.
This is how Peterson appeals to people so much more than seems to offer a ready explanation. He reaches to people, mostly young men and their sympathizers, with sweeping cultural narratives about masculinity and femininity that seem to explain their crappy lot while offering them a means for redemptive action. This most strongly affects those who feel dispossessed or even oppressed by a culture that has marginalized them and who are generally anomic in our largely post-religious secular society, and it is elevating. It gives them an identity, which in turn gives them a sense of society and their place in it, and an appeal to a kind of traditional conventionalism that feels more secure than what seems to be getting them down. He’s giving them a mythology and a hero narrative in which they can throw off their own feelings of oppression and become übermenschen in their own tractable ways, and he’s suggesting that society should be structured by them in ways that naturally reward this position. It’s all very grand, romantic, and Manichean while it advocates an ideology of traditional roles and macho nonsense: order versus chaos, the forces of good against corruption, and powerful men against feminist domination. Turning back to his “Marionettes 2” lecture, we might pause to ask: what could go wrong?
And Peterson’s potent message of worthiness can be far subtler than this. A scene documented by Murray gives a sense of it.
“On Sunday night, one young woman asked what advice Peterson would give to a student like her. He told her to ignore those professors who aimed to wither the souls of their students. Instead, he urged her to use her student years to cultivate the greatest possible friendships. Many of these friendships would be with people who — as Peterson put it — were dead; people whose feet the deconstructionists and resentment-cultivators of modern academia were not worthy of touching.”
It’s one thing to provide this message: spend your time at university making great friendships and digging into literature, reading the greats, and engaging with ideas that make you question what you’re being taught by the prevailing cultural theory — to “raise themselves above the ideas of the time,” as Voltaire put it. It’s quite another to phrase it in such overtly moralistic and symbolic language with such affective rhetoric. Surely, it brings the point home better, but it also led Murray to have to describe the tone and tenor of the “wonderful” Peterson event he attended in this way: “…this was not a Christian revivalist meeting. At least not explicitly or intendedly so.”
So perhaps Murray is pretending not to know why Peterson is so popular, but it’s pretty clear. Peterson is reaching to a generation of lost boys and telling them his inspiring view on how to become real men, become successes, and (nudge, nudge) go fuck the prom queen at the end of the night. So much for the “curious” matter of Peterson’s popularity, then. It’s simple, and Murray got it in a word: whatever his substance and depth, humor and humanity, Professor Jordan Peterson is a guru for young men and their sympathizers who don’t know who or how to be in today’s post-everything world.
This article was originally published at Areo Magazine
21 comments
Very good points, James.
And someone else here rather succintly stated, that too many are looking at Peterson for solutions to all their problems, and heaping it with a bit a relgious zealotry (whether they know it or not.)
James criticizes feminisim all the time, but here I can see he has touched a nerve with some commenters for going after their sacred cow, the flip side ideology of the feminist coin: MGTOW and redpilling, which shares all the negative traits of feminisim with the roles flipped.
Disappointing because I thought more people were capable of critical thinking and not throwing hissy fits like the left when someone dissects their ideology.
Men’s right is putrid. Really? Men are not often afflicted by some shitty fate only because of their sex?
Oh ok .
Irving Babbitt, the American conservative scholar, defined the modern spirit as “that which takes no authority as final”. He was remarkably generous towards this spirit for a conservative thinker, but then spends the rest of his essay on Rousseau to pursue a detailed study of how this critical spirit threatens to “dissolve the world into a mist of illusion”. He holds up a positive alternative; the view of the classical man “that gets at his truth through a veil of fiction”.
When an educated person becomes detached from the standards of his time and place, like in that Voltaire quote, she’s only gone part of the way– Babbitt says Rousseauist thought appeals most of all to the “half-educated”, those who detached themselves from the local standards but did not attain to new standards that would have to be grasped through what he calls “a right use of the imagination”.
I’m not convinced Peterson passes this acid test, especially the way he can weld together Freud and Nietzsche with the teachings of Buddha, who was not only opposed in thought and spirit to these would-be holy men urging man to give in to his expansive impulses (or apply a frigid and gray control that would make the gnostic idea of a world-prison something of a reality in Freud’s case), but also gave to the ages a teaching that was as strict in its empirical means as it was in its humble asceticism. I don’t think Peterson has ever read Babbitt but his treatment of Rousseau didn’t touch on any of the real issues with that one fella’s tyranny over thousands of minds for generations. “Rousseau gave the wrong answers to the right questions” is one of Babbitt’s insights not being asked that I think would put these debates into a more fruitful temper.
It also helps that Babbitt makes arguments using hundreds of primary sources, including Rousseau’s own letters, and he’s a scholar who studied both the ancient and early modern worlds, unlike Foucault who was famously vacant when it came to anything before the 17th century.
Also, why would you try to bang the prom queen? She’s already dealing with an entire class of guys trying to make moves on her. You have to find the hot girl who just isn’t noticed by most of the guys, who are likely too intimidated to ask her out if they do notice. There’s one in every school or workplace. But the Petersonians must have the prom queen.
See Douglas Murrah extol Peterson as a potential prophet of a new religion that “we’re all totally available for” given a potential war or catastrophe….
https://youtu.be/meZ2Dqv1teQ
Always appreciate your work and as a JP fan, and someone who has been in cults before, I read this carefully.
My problem with this article, unlike most of your work, is that it feels like it is starting with the conclusion, and finding facts that line up with it. Which works for anyone that already agrees with you, but doesn’t fly for anyone else.
I definitely see what you see in Peterson as something to watch for, and I take that away from this article, but the larger accusations in this article require larger proof to be credible. You have more Douglas Murray quotes than JP. The idea that DM’s colourful descriptions of JP are part of the problem is taken, but repeating DM’s take on JP doesn’t add more evidence why JP is so dangerous.
Thanks for all you do. I’d appreciate a long conversation with you and JP. (Not a debate) My favourite JP conversations are with Jonathan Haidt, as Haidt often challenges JP and brings out the best in both.
It’s weird isn’t it how on just this one thing you disagree with him on he’s clearly starting out with a conclusion and then erroneously arguing his way to it. Just as well he doesn’t do that on any of the subjects you desperately want to agree with him on huh?
Thank you, thank you, thank you, James!
This reads like a hit piece. It also feels like you dressed Peterson in religious garb made of straw. I can understand however, why a secular atheist would be tempted to interpret Peterson’s appeal as demagoguery and those who appreciate his insights as dupes.
I don’t think he presents Peterson’s followers as dupes. He is saying that you should consider Peterson’s work with a bit of skepticism, and you should be concerned to be following his directives without question.
I’ve listened to and read a lot of Jordan Peterson, and have found his idea (or Carl Rogers’ really) about trying to tell the truth to be very useful. It wasn’t, however, until I listened to your talk about authenticity and applied it to this paradigm of telling the truth that I really started feeling changes in my life. So, for what it’s worth, thank you!
First of all, I must say that have the utmost respect for your work, generally. But I can’t help but get the impression that you dropped the ball on this one. In your most recent youtube video, where you declare your intention to vote for trump in the next election, you mention in passing your result in the political compass test. I had never passed it before, but thought it could be useful to mention here. My score is pretty similar to yours : -6.25 for the left, and -7.44 for the libertarian. I generally have values that align with what I have read in your work. I’m strongly atheistic, and scientifically minded. So let’s just say that while I have plenty of respect for JBP for some of his work, I have the most profound distaste for his opinions on religion, and his love for the cult-like pseudoscience that is psychoanalysis. My distaste for psychoanalysis being even more strongly informed by the fact that I am French, a country where it is still practised in it’s purer forms, unlike overseas where it has been blended in with more rigorous forms of psychology, and where the cult-like part of it are even more apparent and harmful, and is particularly noticeable for people like me who, while not being experts in psychology, have learned more about the rigorous science based part of it than even some of the less scrupulous clinicians who graduated in it.
A good part of my respect for Peterson has to do with the fact that he is very good at communicating very important concepts of scientifically based psychology to people who aren’t academics, and who are indeed deeply in need of those.
I’m most certainly not one of his cult follower. I have often criticized him for his views I don’t agree with. Quite openly, even in his own youtube comment sections, or in places that were openly praising him. If he has toxic fans, I have yet to encounter them. That’s not to say that they don’t exist, just that I’ve not really noticed them.
As proof for the fact that he has a toxic fanbase, you point to his tweet asking to the people who “follow” him to be nice after the interview with Cathy Newman, which was a response in the immediate aftermath of that event to C4’s attempt at damage control where they claimed that they had to call security experts. Maybe if you wrote that piece just after that tweet went out, I could have understood you doing that. But what actually transpired then was, first of all, that anybody can call security expert, and that doesn’t mean they are doing so for any good reason, and that analysis of the tweets that ensued from the debate showed that of all the abuse that resulted from that event, [the biggest part was directed at JBP himself, not at Cathy](https://hequal.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/cathy-newmans-feminist-fans-sent-30-times-more-violent-sexist-abuse-to-peterson-his-supporters-than-vice-versa/amp/?__twitter_impression=true). Which makes that event of them claiming they had to call security experts the final case of Cathy Newman twisting the reality surrounding JBP and his followers to try to make him look like the bad guy in a sort of post debate “So you’re saying”.
Now, that might actually been false, but, like often when the woke figureheads claim they are being abused, we never get to see the actual proof of that. and while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, given their general temperament, if they had 10 tweets that were considered really abusive, I’m fairly confident they would have paraded them all over the media to finally “expose him and his toxic followers”.
And this case seems to illustrate most of what I reproach to your article. While you usually seem to do your proper research, or at least to try to represent fairly the points of those you oppose, like is advised in books like “how to have impossible conversations” or “a manual for creating atheists”, and while you yourself have been on the receiving end of the woke propaganda machine, many of the claim you make seem to be more based purely on the biases, hearsays coming straight from woke media and other public misrepresentation of those you critique than from actually having tried to give a proper critique of what is actually going on. I would have expected that, even when it comes to quackery surrounding religious psychobabble, at least your experience with the first few articles of the grievance studies would have shown you that there can be actual messages contained in those things that seems obviously bad to you that can make obvious to those who are fluent in it that you haven’t actually done your homework. And that your critique of critical social justice would have taught you that even that can have valuable points.
Urusigh, up above, has done a very good job pointing some of those places where you have run blindly into a wall. I want to point out a few more. Like I said, I’m no big fan of religion or psychoanalysis. So I haven’t listened to most of what he said on the topic. But He still gave me a very interesting perspective, and one that I think you missed and as a consequence misrepresented in your article : Most atheists that actually engage on the topic of religion are aware that there is nothing more Darwinian that religions. They adapt to their environment or die. That’s why we can see Christians right now claiming that Christianity is what motivated the abolition of slavery. That’s why we already see churches that celebrate gay marriages, and I’m willing to bet that in maybe less than a century, if civilization doesn’t crumble, Christian churches will claim that Christianity is what motivated gay acceptance. But that has actually an implication for myths. Particularly myths that are collected from oral traditions. Those myths too went to a selection process. They were selected for being memorable. Which means that there is actually something inherent to them that makes them stick to the human mind. In a sense, it can make sense to look at those myths as pieces of the puzzle that, put together, constitutes the human mind, with all of its biases an heuristics that it contains. They are kind of an impression in a clay made of stories of what is significant to humans. And so there can be a legitimate interest for someone interested in human psychology, in looking at those and asking “what do they tell us about how the human mind operates?”. I’m not saying that, from then, all of his “insights” based off psychoanalysis are false. But they aren’t necessarily as groundless as you make them appear in that piece.
Basically, while you appear to begrudgingly praise him, saying that he says things that “appear good” and all that, you seem to want to insist on only making that praise as void as possible and won’t extend to him even the credit you are willing to extend to critical social justice. Basically, in this piece, you have thrown away the principle of charity, often aligning your opinions on the biased representation of the woke media, a media that I thought you knew better than to trust when they criticize people who don’t align with wokeness.
And that’s really the crux of my issue here. After all, I don’t care much if you malign Peterson, fairly or unfairly.
No, the real crux of my issue is when you say this :
“Not all young men walk with their backs bent by today’s supercilious approach to feminism, and not all of these men are interested in embarrassing themselves in the putrid Men’s Rights or alt-right arenas.”
As someone who’s French and not that interested in politics, I don’t know or care much about the alt right. It’s completely possible that they are just as bad as what the woke media paint them to be. Distasts for them seems to also come from non-woke people, although the woke seem to call alt-right pretty much everyone and anyone who isn’t woke.
But I am really curious to know why you call the Men’s Rights movement putrid. What is putrid about a bunch of men and women who insist that it’s important to recognize men’s rights to genital integrity and to protect it in the same way that we protect women’s rights to genital integrity ? What’s inherently putrid about a bunch of men and women who insist that male victims of rape and domestic violence also deserve to have access to resources to help them, contrary to what is currently the common practice of either ignoring them or even treating them as if they were actually perpetrators ?
I’ve been involved in the MRM for around a decade. It is filled with people of all political leanings, of all genders, races and sexuality. I have seen the woke media call it things such as putrid. But I have yet to see a good proof why. I mean, beside simply squashing opposition to wokeness.
You of all people should know what I’m talking about. Every single tactics they may have used against you, they have tested it on the MRM. In your talk “the truth about critical method”, on your youtube channel, you speak of your feeling of being a prophet no-one listens to, to be shouting into the void while everyone dismisses you as some kind of conspiracy theorist, while you insist “just read what they say, it’s clearly explained, it’s their own words”.
Well, the MRM has been aware of the issues of wokeness at least since the 70s, and has been shouting into the void about it since then. it has been pointing exactly at it saying “just read their own words, it’s all there”, and the woke media and academia, and the infected bureaucracies have been wielding their power to smear and silence them, while the MRM was pointing exactly at the process of low level bureaucrats using their power to enforce unjust policies in order to then affect laws and society at large.
In the 70s, Erin Pizzey, in the UK, opened the first modern refuge for battered women. She soon realized that most of the women she helped were just as violent as the men they were fleeing from. So she decided that she would also open a shelter for battered men, while she tried to raise awareness of the issue for men too. Feminists took over her shelter, and threatened her life, threats which escalated until her familly dog was killed and she had to flee the country. How many political refugees from the UK are you aware of ? there aren’t that many. Since the beginning, feminists have been actively suppressing evidences of female perpetration and male victimization. And don’t take my word for it. Instead, take theirs. read their paper [the feminist case for acknowledging women’s acts of violence](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2790940). It has everything in it. The ideological basis for the suppression of proof, a justification of it, an explanation that they actually used public funds from the government in order to pursue political change, the fact that the ideology is what matters above all… every single dysfunctions you have been talking about, laid bare and talked about as the matter of course that it is how things should be done.
Warren Farrell was a member of the board of the NOW, around the 90s. He wanted to help women, heard about the wage gap, and wanted to find out what was actually behind it, so he set out to make research about it. He found out that all of the difference could actually be explained by the fact that women made different life choices. He thought “great ! that means that we can empower women with this knowledge, so that those who want to earn more can actually know what choices to make to achieve it! They aren’t condemned to powerlessness about the issue by some form of active oppression”. And so he tried to bring this message to women. As a result, he became persona non grata in the circles where he used to be extremely popular. He lost his place at the board of NOW, his public speaking engagements, and so on. He’s still very left leaning, still very concerned about women. He’s one of the most soft spoken and overall nice men out there, and very much the opposite of anything even remotely macho. He’s considered by many as the father of the modern MRM.
The MRM has been aware of all the issues of wokeness. And it has been warning about how those concepts were creeping into society, and having a very negative, destructive impact. They have seen people tell them “you’re just pointing at a few extremists, that really means nothing and has no impact”, just to see the thing they were pointing out become mainstream a few years later down the line. And they have been maligned for it while people seemed strangely stuck by selective memory loss when a few years later people of the MRM were saying, we have been right about the concept creep of all those extremist ideas up to then, and now, those are in line, and people were acting as if those concepts had always been mainstream, the overton window hadn’t moved at all, and none of this ever happened.
They have seen the gender studies comming, they have seen mansplaining and manspreading comming, they have warned about the loss of due process and “believe all women” years before #metoo, they have warned about critical race theory, and the like, long before it ever went mainstream.
The people that compose it are of all sorts and creeds, but at its core, many of its ideals are more aligned with the left than the right. Many (and I might dare even say most) of the most respected people in it are actually women. The basis is very much grounded in science and facts, and the challenging of ideas, as given the pressure that feminism applies against anyone who doesn’t fall in line, bad arguments tend to not live long.
The things that MRAs are concerned with include (but are not limited to) :
– the right to genital integrity
– the recognition of men being raped by women as rape in the eyes of the law
– the correction of unconstitutional laws forcing men into conscription or selective service while absolving women from that same obligation (many hoping to actually see conscription go away)
– the correction of the biased policies surrounding domestic violence that result in men being often treated as the aggressors and being arrested even when they are obviously the victims of domestic violence
– the provision of services for men and boys victim of domestic and sexual violence , and the correction of the services and awareness campaigns that actively discriminate or dismiss men as victims of those crimes
– the correction of the biased collection of data and reporting on those crimes
– the correction of the biased family courts that deprive men of their possessions and of access to their children (honestly, really look into how child support works in the US if you want to have nightmares. The governments has actually ensured debtors prisons to be filled to the brim, as the states get rewarded by the federal government for having as many people owing as much child support as possible, to which the states answered by ensuring that as many people as possible were in as much crippling debt as was possible. You want an example of policies based on theories of privilege affecting institutions in a way that cripples a country ? you have it there.)
– providing care for men’s mental health, particularly care that is adapted to more masculine approaches to mental health, and that is not based in theories of toxic masculinity
– providing more safety at work to help reduce the amount of death and injuries on the job
– correcting the enormous imbalance in funding for men’s health compared to women’s health
– either getting rid of female specific programs and government agencies or having agencies and programs dedicated to men as well
But as we are all aware, many of the woke are convinced they are the good guys of moral standing grounded in reliable scholarship. You’re someone I respect. So when you call the Men’s rights movement “Putrid”, I really want to know if you have a good basis for that claim. Am I deluded in all those things, or are you maybe not aware of the subject and just repeating what the ambient wokeness has drilled into you when you weren’t paying attention ? If I am deluded, I want to know it, as I would much rather men hadn’t all those issues that need tackling.
I am french and I am also an MRA.
I agree with you. All woke tactics are feminist textbook tactics. Nothing that woke people do surprise me because it was always happening to MRA.
I am also appealed by how he still defend feminists by using quotes marks around “feminism”, using the old “not real feminists” argument. This is surprising since in his last video about “elite overproduction” he mocks how communists use that argument too.
While I greatly respect your work, in your referring to the “putrid Men’s Rights arena“ and loading “Men’s Rights“ and “alt-right” into the same sentence, you reveal that you have not taken the time to study the the facts which motivate the advocates for men’s rights . I encourage you to do so.
Some of the most articulate advocates for men’s rights happen to be women:
Karen Straughan
Christina Hoff Summers (Philosophy prof)
Janice Fiamengo (English Professor)
Cassie Jaye (Feminist filmmaker)
Camille Paglia (Art Professor)
Hannah Wallen
Bettina Arndt (Counselor)
Alison Tieman
Erin Pizzey (Founded the 1st women’s shelter)
Kate Andrews – Economist Adam Smith Institute (wage gap)
Karen Straughan Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/user/girlwriteswhat
Hannah Wallen’s Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyRwczIsk2BBsRP1wJbZQKjLgd9uFjdCL
==================
The Grandfather of men’s rights, a former NOW Board member, is Dr. Warren Farrell, a wise and good hearted man and the author of many fine books on men and boys that remain respectful of women and girls.
I’m conflicted. This is a very well written article with clearly deep expertise and thought behind it. There are entire paragraphs I want to save just to use as quotes in later debates (yours and several of those you’ve used). That said, this symphony has some flat notes all the more noticeable for their contrast to the otherwise excellent piece.
“Still, as often happens with people in thrall to a religious-like leader, they…”
I’ll grant time-limited exceptions, i.e. “The masterful orator held his audience enthralled for hours”, but using “thrall” in this wide-open sense is vaguely insulting.
From the dictionary: “Thrall; the state of being in someone’s power or having great power over someone; a slave, servant, or captive.”
Your usage here seems to deny the agency of Peterson’s fans and that of religious believers in general. JBP certainly holds great intellectual influence and undeniable charisma, but no coercive power over anyone. Lest I be accused of reading too much into a single word, you’ve repeated the sentiment later in the article as well: “In these cases under Peterson’s own advice, it’s clear that it’s up to the superior leader to figure out where he and his followers going and to make exceedingly careful decisions about the whole affair.” Perterson’s formulation was equal, “Going together”, a situation of mutual influence, but you specifically place the agency entirely with JBP, denying any to his “inferior” audience, as if they were necessarily unable or incompetent to make their own decisions about where they wish to go with their own lives. This is a critical distinction, JBP is a GPS navigation device for individuals driving their own metaphorical cars to a destination of their own choosing, not a metaphorical bus driver transporting them to a destination of his own choosing.
You’ve implicitly excluded the possibility and likelihood otherwise supported in the article that his fans adopt JBP’s advice so enthusiastically because “what they feel is good for them” actually IS good for them (which is doubly odd given that you acknowledge that “much of it is quite good”), that their willingness to adopt his teachings are in fact also explainable as the independent choices of rational actors working from the Technological Core and a strict interpretation of Pragmatism: “They listen to him because his advice works for them.” is a much more straightforward and defensible claim than the roundabout assertion that they are in some sense his brainwashed slaves because they crave a priest to rule over them.
You don’t come right out and say it, but you seem to have a negative opinion of JBP’s fans. You highlight negative characteristics of his fanbase, i.e. “taking criticism of their YouTube educator rather poorly,” call them “thralls”, and imply that they have authoritarian tendencies, i.e. “something of an imperative for everyone”, but I can’t find a single example or implication you make that casts them in a positive light or reflects the multitude of testimonies of young men who were being radicalized into toxic ideologies or living highly self-destructive lifestyles that turned their lives around and became functioning, successful members of society by following JBP’s “Rules for Life”. Why is there such a disconnect between you admitting his advice is good and yet not acknowledging that his fanbase has genuinely benefited from it? A discourse on JBP’s success is inherently incomplete without noting the corresponding success in the lives of his audience.
“These mean precisely the kind of dogmatism that Christopher Hitchens famously and rightly pointed out “poisons everything.” They are the root of what Jonathan Rauch called the “fundamentalist impulse,” which is the perennial enemy of liberal society against which American Enlightenment figures urged we must always retain vigilance — specifically because people crave them so. ”
Your namedropping does nothing to hide the weakness of this argument, but rather highlights it. Hitchens isn’t right, nor is Rauch, and there are many excellent books arguing those points, so you do your article a grave disservice by associating it with the bankrupt philosophies of the New Atheists and Apatheists. Your quote of “American Enlightenment Figures” is even more disingenuous as you’ve implied the very opposite of the quote’s meaning. From your own link: It can be traced back, ultimately, to John Philpot Curran’s statement, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” A man who starts by invoking God as Creator and giver of Liberty can scarce be accused of hostility to religious principle and certainty, he’s using it as enthymeme to his argument. It might be clearer to also include his preceding sentence for context, “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active.” In short, vigilance is required to defend one’s Liberty because those who fail to defend it will lose it.” So the total thought is “God gave man Liberty, but men must vigilantly defend it or they will lose it to other men”. There is no reasonable way to twist this into an attack on the man’s own religion (Protestant) or religion in general (he was famous for befriending and legally defending Catholics), or even against principle and certainty in general. This is a man who learned his definition of “Liberty” at Trinity College, which is most certainly not a John Stuart Mills version of “Liberty” that “consists only in doing what one desires”, but rather aligns more with how Edmund Burke defined Liberty, ‘The only liberty I mean is a liberty connected with order, that not only exist along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them.” Religious principle and certainty are not antithetical to Liberty, but an inherent prerequisite to it, else we are and can be no more than as Hume said “a slave to the passions”. You err badly in quoting him as supporting vigilance AGAINST religious principles and certainties “because people crave them so” when both his meaning and the reality is that we must be vigilant in their defense and our freedom to live in accord with them precisely because we NEED them so.
“Good advice, however, is cheap. Similar messages to many of Peterson’s are available in any number of self-help books, especially for the young entrepreneur or businessperson.”
Apples and Oranges. While JBP eventually released a very popular book, his rise and core audience are built on Youtube, not his books (Maps of Meaning sold quite poorly), and his given “goal” of a meaning and purpose in life is starkly different than the “goal” of financial success found in self-help for young entrepreneurs or businesspersons. You might have gotten much closer by comparing him to other popular speakers on the “Motivational Speaking” or “TED Talk” circuit who have similar numbers of subscribers, like GaryVee (~2.7M vs ~2.6M). Unlike most of them though, JBP’s “controversial” views have earned him recurring and widespread airtime to spread awareness of his brand outside the niche of people who actively seek out self-help. I know who JBP is, but until actually looking up “Top Youtube Motivational Speakers” I’d never heard of GaryVee, but this difference has nothing to do with their respective advice and everything to do with JBP becoming entangled in the controversy over Trans nomenclature. Go back to where it all began, “Professor against Political Correctness” and you’ll not find preaching or mythology but a very academic argument about legal wording, legal traditions, and philosophical rights.
“He remarks, “I’ve been telling young men — but it’s not — I wasn’t specifically aiming this message at young men to begin with; it just kind of turned out that way.”” “
He reaches to people, mostly young men and their sympathizers…Peterson is reaching to a generation of lost boys…”
You misrepresent Peterson’s meaning (and his audience composition) here by implication. His message is not and never has been aimed specifically at young men. He explains in multiple interviews that the gender gap in his audience is largely an artifact of his chosen medium: YouTube’s userbase skews male, so his subscriber base similarly skews male. You can demonstrate the direction of causation here fairly easily by comparing against his lectures as a college Professor: The university student body skews female and so does attendance in his classes. His message’s appeal is not particular to aggrieved males.
““Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful.” This is telling, isn’t it?”
No, it’s an accurate statement borne out by a massive body of both psychological and sociological research. It’s as banally accurate as similarly noting that women (on average) want men who are physically attractive and/or wealthy. That may be impolitic to mention in polite company, but you’d be hard pressed to find a credible academic who denies it and has the data to make such a case. It’s certainly no less a factually justified gender stereotype than your own statement of “Why so many young men would want to be sexually desirable is no mystery and never has been”,
“why all of Peterson’s talk about female domination would resonate with them is a more curious matter that again evokes the religious appeal Peterson carries. Religion often offers an emotionally tangible solution to some vexing problem that leaves people feeling powerless (often, it’s death), and here, for more men than at any point in history, that problem is feminism.”
Converse error. I’ll grant it is a problem that radical feminism makes men feel powerless, likewise I agree that religion offers solutions to problems, but that doesn’t make every solution to a problem necessarily religious in nature. My computer being on the fritz would also be a vexing problem that leaves me feeling powerless, but that doesn’t make a phone call to tech support equivalent to a prayer to Saint Isidore.
“Of all brands of snake oil that can be sold, the kind that answers societal resentment is the most potent kind, and it is the sort that has the highest likelihood of turning toward the religious. Wherever it will go in time, Peterson’s message currently does exactly this.”
“Snake oil” is a term that means “a product, policy, etc. of little real worth or value that is promoted as the solution to a problem”. According to your own admission, Peterson’s advice is “quite good”, addresses a genuine problem for many people, and it “works for them”. A product/policy that actually solves the problem is by definition NOT “snake oil”. Again, you’ve failed to establish any particularly religious character here, it doesn’t require faith to buy a product with proven results.
Regarding Pragmatism and Truth, you seem no better than the man you examine when it comes to slippery semantics. I count no less than three Speakers here (You, JBP, and James) using the word “Truth” but not one of you defining it. At best I can infer that You mean something like “empirical fact” in the scientific sense and Peterson means something more akin to “TRUE” in the propositional logic sense, of which the quote you gave regarding “admirable ancient civilizations” is an example, it’s classic Modus Tollens:
“How is it that complex and admirable ancient civilizations could have developed and flourished, initially, if they were predicated upon nonsense?”
If P, then Q: Civilizations predicated upon nonsense (P), then fail to develop and flourish to become complex and admirable (Q)
Not Q: Complex and admirable ancient civilizations did develop and flourish.
Therefore Not P: Therefore those ancient civilizations were not predicated upon nonsense.
“It’s all very grand, romantic, and Manichean while it advocates an ideology of traditional roles and macho nonsense: order versus chaos, the forces of good against corruption, and powerful men against feminist domination.”
You provide no argument anywhere in this article as to why this list would qualify as “nonsense”.
Urusigh – what a great comment. It’s always nice to come across well developed and supported critiques. They create value within a given forum and yours has added a lot.
The imputation that ancient civilisations were predicated upon ‘sense’, presumably manifest in their myths, religions, ideologies, etc., has some prima facie appeal. However, we know from evolutionary biology that genes need not always confer some advantage or ‘use’; simply doing little or no harm to the organism can result in them being passed on to subsequent generations. Therefore, it could be that successful civilisations had properties that offered them no advantages whatsoever.
Thanks for this interesting write-up. It didn’t begin with the obligatory disclaimer – “Jordan Peterson is obviously very intelligent” – just to attempt to fend off the inevitable JP fan club knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of JP himself. I’ve lost count of the number of “unbiased” (another basically empty trending term) reviews of Jordan Peterson’s work that always begin with some variation of, “he’s very intelligent”. But you did break down very well why his work resonates, how it serves a cultural and psychological function, and why there is such a big audience: a LOT of men, especially young men, who are constantly annoyed or insulted by the media and general society. You make a good point. He’s basically a religious movement. A drowning man will clutch at straws. We have a generation of drowning men. What worries me a lot more, is that we have practically an entire generation of young men, waiting for inspiration, to be told how to live their lives, to find meaning in their lives, to use their nature as men. Can you imagine if someone more competent, more focused (and more unscrupulous) than JP came along to provide it to them? Very few people see how dangerous this situation is in our generally Western society.
Someone commented on a YouTube video (one, like countless others, “defending” Jordan Peterson against criticism) that, “Just because someone criticizes the radical left, doesn’t make them alt-right.” I think it would be better to say: just because someone criticizes the radical left, doesn’t make them right.
The key question is whether or not Peterson has become a Guru. Certainly some of his audience act as if he were a guru but I see no evidence that he has accepted this role or narrative.
It’s certainly worthwhile having the debate, but I can’t help feeling that some people would welcome Peterson ascending to guru-hood because it would be easier to dismiss his views.
Well put.
And I think there is a difference between guru and religious leader. As I commented above, a religious leader relies on a leap of faith to accept the supernatural. A guru can simply be a trusted specialist in a subject who you respect a lot for his wisdom and insight to it. Could be an auto mechanic who continually has the right answers for your car problems, as a result of his many years of education and experience repairing cars. Jay Leno talked about how he looks for “that guy” who’s a specialist in just one type of classic old car — knows everything about it, what goes wrong, where to get parts, etc. He’s the ____ guru. As such, you gradually come to trust his insights and opinions. And the longer his opinions turn out to sync with reality, the deeper that trust and respect becomes. Might it get to a point to where you no longer think for yourself and just look to him for answers? Yes. But reality can still smack you in the face, if it turns out he’s off the mark (unlike religious leaders, for whom erroneous ideas about God can be difficult to dispute). Maintaining that trust and respect is an ongoing task.
“I see no evidence that he has accepted this role or narrative.”
One of Jordan Peterson’s defining traits is that there is no one Jordan Peterson. Everyone has their own personal version of Jordan Peterson. Much of what he writes and says is talking a lot and saying very little. It’s hard to understand exactly what he’s saying a lot of the time. A few people have noticed that this is a good way to make your audience feel smart: you can project what you want to hear onto his words, and feel all the smarter for it – because only you are intelligent enough to understand the hidden meaning of his words, while other people don’t. Hence all the claims of, “you’re misinterpreting him” and “you need more context” and from JP himself: “I didn’t say that”. Even after he seemed to say just that. He always leaves himself wiggle room so you can’t pin him down on something. He doesn’t label himself a guru because being noncommittal and vague is his business model. Call it postmodern, call it neoliberal, call it a conservative Deepak Choprah.
There are far too many examples to include in one comment. One example is his religion: at one point he calls himself a Christian, another time he says he’s a cultural Christian, then later he says he’s not a Christian anymore. Just choose which Jordan Peterson you want to buy into. Jordan Peterson is a brand and he’ll produce and supply you with whichever Jordan Peterson model you want to buy!
I disagree. The appeal is that he has knowledge, wisdom and insight to share, and does so in a very eloquent, accessible, interesting, down to earth, concise manner. And is not afraid to challenge radical left (or the alt-right, though they are insignificant fringe). Same goes for any public speaker, including the contributors here at New Discourses. JP is just extraordinarily good at it. The best. That’s the reason for his fame.
In religion there are appeals to divine authority. It requires a “leap of faith” to believe it. There is no leap of faith with Peterson. He makes a case for his opinions, supports them with reason, and frequently notes the limits of his capabilities. Even after becoming world famous he continued to persuade, not make appeals to authority.
He talks like a good psychologist, professor, and role model. Not a preacher or cult leader.