Jordan Peterson and Luke Skywalker

Ever since Jordan Peterson’s fans started getting in my face online, I’ve been exploring his work. He’s a fascinating and disturbing character. On the one hand, he’s a respected academic and clinical psychiatrist (or, he was until recently.) He dispenses valuable self-help advice, especially for depressed and anxious young men. This fan video gets across the core of his appeal. “Tell the truth and aim high”–who could argue with that?

On the other hand, Peterson has some ideas about gender politics and politics generally that range from old-fashioned to unhinged. He has a paranoid vision of Western civilization being undermined what he calls “postmodernism,” by which he appears to mean “egalitarianism.” Peterson’s understanding of actual postmodernism is as shallow as a puddle. His main point is that efforts toward social justice will inevitably result in Stalinism. Let’s dive in!

Peterson’s most visible catchphrases sounds like the plot of a Greek myth, or a Hollywood action movie: “Rescue your father from the underworld.” In the web site for his book Maps of Meaning, Peterson says:

Maps of Meaning is about the fundamental levels of the human psyche. It’s about the Christianity upon which the West is, and must be, founded. It’s a call to a new way of being and, simultaneously, a reunion with the past. It is the responsibility of every man to rescue his dead father from the underworld. That’s the oldest story of mankind. Without that, there is only chaos.

Peterson isn’t talking about your literal father. He means your heritage, the collective knowledge of your culture. Your responsibility is to “translate, transform, and transmit” this knowledge. Peterson is smart–rather than presenting this idea as the dry scholarly exercise that it is, he frames it as as a daring adventure. His preferred analogy is Pinocchio rescuing Gepetto from the belly of the whale.

Rescuing your father from the literal or figurative underworld is a resonant metaphor. For example, it’s what Luke Skywalker does at the end of Return to the Jedi.

It’s also what Rey does for Luke over the course of The Last Jedi. (I’ve been watching a lot of Star Wars with my kids this summer.)

Peterson’s book sales, YouTube views and Patreon donations demonstrate that a great many people out there find him inspiring. His fans aren’t all young white men, though the most vocal ones certainly are. When I was a depressed twentysomething, I probably would have been a Peterson fan too. Cracked is on point about his appeal:

Peterson’s young white male fanbase is eating up his argument that privilege is nonsense, because many of them are in fact struggling. No amount of this supposed privilege has given them a good life or a sense of purpose. In Peterson, they’re finding both. When 12 Rules was published, there was a joke going around Twitter about a mom who couldn’t get her son to clean his room, but Peterson could by arguing that cleaning your room helps keep the dragons of chaos at bay. But guess what: When you’re struggling, that kind of melodrama genuinely helps. Every religion on earth has figured that out. His fans, meanwhile, repurpose those jokes into memes about how great Peterson is. Why would they be shamed out of liking the guy who saved their life?

The problem here is that Peterson is mobilizing these young men, intentionally or not, to join the alt-right. His rousing calls to greater wisdom and purpose come paired with atavistic politics. From a New York Times profile:

The left, [Peterson] believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,” he said.

Sure, our society is totally meritocratic right now! That explains why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

I’m no historian, but I’m not sure this is the actual reason why monogamy emerges.

But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.

When pressed on this point, Peterson says he’s actually in favor of civil rights legislation as a way to combat racism. But he’s horrified by the idea that we will otherwise undermine meritocracy by misguidedly trying to stand in the way of the natural order of things. The only hope we have is to embrace individualism.

Peterson is witty and charming, and an uncritical listener might well find this lecture convincing. But Peterson either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the world is in fact full of hard evidence of white privilege, and his glib dismissals don’t have much to say about this evidence. For example, how would Peterson explain America’s yawning racial disparities in criminal sentencing? Does he really think that white people commit so much less crime than black people? If he does, he’s very badly mistaken.

Here’s a similar clip of Peterson’s, one that his fans are particularly fond of, explaining how everybody is oppressed and the only solution for a just society is the free market:

Here’s Eric Levitz’s excellent analysis of this clip and its ideological content. Some quotes:

Does Peterson genuinely believe that “free markets” are the best solution “the West” has found for a woman whose “genius son” can’t afford to go to college? Or for a mother with a sick child? Is he unaware of the existence of public universities, and his home country’s single-payer health-care system? Or does he not understand that people had to organize collectively — around shared identities of oppression (as with workers in trade unions or people who suffer from disabilities, in lobbying groups) — to bring these kinds of public goods into being? And is the question of “who will get to decide” whose oppression the state should prioritize redressing really so confounding? Didn’t “the West” develop republican institutions precisely so that the people’s elected representatives could adjudicate such claims, and be voted out of office if they do so in way that displeases a majority of the public?

But the core problem with Peterson’s argument — the one that best justifies the left’s contempt for him — is that it proceeds from the premise that it is impossible to draw a categorical distinction between oppressions that are rooted in race, gender, or class, and ineluctable misfortunes like “being less tall than one might prefer.” A moment’s scrutiny reveals the absurdity of this idea. But for anyone who finds comfort in Peterson’s claim — anyone who does not wish to believe that he has benefited from unearned privileges, or that America has racked up unpaid debts to the poor, to women, or its black citizens — the notion is superficially plausible enough to be taken at face value. Which is why it is so popular; and therefore, dangerous; and therefore, contemptible.

What follows is an elementary history lesson on twentieth century racial politics. It’s a history that Peterson is either of ignorant of or is cynically pretending doesn’t exist. He’s too smart and well-read a person for me to believe the ignorance angle.

That Peterson packages his 11th-grade libertarianism, and pseudoscientific misogyny, with genuine insights from clinical psychology, and stimulating reflections on mythic archetypes only makes him more dangerous; because it enables center-right ideologues like Caitlin Flanagan to blind themselves to those parts of his work that threaten their identity and ideology — just as they blind themselves to those parts of our society that do the same — and to then ask, incredulously, why the left is so afraid of engaging with their ideas.

To his credit, Peterson is not an ethnonationalist.

But Peterson does express constant anxiety about the likes of me and my fellow progressives, and the threat we pose to the established patriarchal order of the world. His love for the comforting certainties of the Bible, Nietzsche, Jung, and Disney movies speaks to his alarm that we’re in danger of being swamped by chaos. From Maps of Meaning:

Involuntary exposure to chaos means accidental encounter with the forces that undermine the known world. The affective consequences of such encounter can be literally overwhelming. It is for this reason that individuals are highly motivated to avoid sudden manifestations of the unknown. And this is why individuals will go to almost any length to ensure that their protective cultural “stories” remain intact (18).

John Ganz and Peter Klein think Peterson is less a scholar and more a teller of comforting bedtime stories, to himself and to his followers.

Peterson’s core conceptions cannot just be thoughts like any other, subject to error or dispute, revision or rejection; no, they are made from the very stuff of reality itself. Doubt, ambiguity, and all the terrors of existence are banished, the meaning of all is revealed, our location in the cosmos is established. But this is not just some harmless reassurance: The people who challenge this picture are not just wrongheaded, but sinister, part of a conspiracy to assault the very foundations of meaning.

De Beauvoir’s serious man, living in his “infantile world” of absolute values that he cannot bear to see as contingent or conditioned, shares the quality of immaturity that Kant applies to pre-Enlightened humanity. The notions that are uncritically hung onto by the serious man can be pulled from nearly anything.  As de Beauvoir writes, “The serious is not defined by the nature of the ends pursued. A frivolous lady of fashion can have this mentality of the serious as well as an engineer.” Science, nature, psychology, Western civilization—even “the Enlightenment”—they can all provide serious men with the alibi that lets them off from the need to think for themselves. Peterson, combining his cheesy, Dad-like, self-help advice (“Make your bed,” “clean your room,” “Sort yourself out, bucko”) and his mythical worldview, tells these just-so stories.

I noticed Peterson’s Dad-like qualities too. It’s part of his undeniable appeal. My dad is the one who did most of the reading of bedtime stories to me. Like Peterson, he combined prairie folksiness with big city book learning. And like Peterson, he liked old-fashioned heroic narratives. I found Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain to be comforting too–what young white boy doesn’t?

Whiteness is itself a protective story we tell ourselves. Geraldine Finn, in White noise: Composition, colonization, and colour, draws an analogy between the would-be transparency of the no-myth mythology of Western metaphysics (i.e. Enlightenment rationality) and the “non-color” of white light:

White light does not draw attention to itself as light, i.e., to its own materiality, substance, or sensibility, but as light (as the essence of light) draws attention to the materiality, substance, and sensibility of others: their shape, texture, and colour, the specificity of their sensory configuration. Just as the white mythology of Western metaphysics does not draw attention to itself as mythology, metaphor, or physis, but rather, as the (white) light of Reason, illuminates the mythology, the metaphoricity, the physis of others (68).

Jung connected myths and dreams, and Jordan Peterson does too. In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts an interview in which a journalist asks him about police killings of black men, and whether he still has hope. He feels like she’s asking him “to awaken her from a most gorgeous dream” (10-11). On the way that Prince Jones was forgotten by white America, Coates says:

The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans (143).

Peterson’s dispensing of intellectual comfort food might make him an effective therapist, but he’s a malign social influence. Kate Manne argues that Peterson pretends to encourage his young white male followers to do some critical self-examination, while actually validating their resentments.

Peterson might have done a good thing by reaching and trying to talk young white men out of their unwarranted resentment, which is the predictable result of social norms changing for the better and the fairer. Some historically subordinate group members can sometimes now compete with and defeat the historically dominant person, who may subsequently have to master the art of losing gracefully. This might have been said with the candour, and sometimes ruthlessness, which Peterson clearly prides himself on being capable of elsewhere. Unfortunately, when it comes to this morally important battle, Peterson shrinks from conflict, and thereby avoids provoking – or improving – his readers.

Peterson and I have things in common. Like me, he’s done a lot of writing on Quora. Like me, he’s at ease on camera. And like me, he’s turning academic credibility into a broader public platform (though he is much further along in his project than I am.) Also like me, he seems to have had a complicated relationship with his dad, and like me, he’s worked hard to examine that relationship so he doesn’t replicate it with his own children. Finally, like me, Peterson likes to tie in big ideas across disciplines. I like to imagine myself someday having a Peterson-sized audience. But I’d like to believe that I’d try to motivate that audience not just to feel better about themselves, but to be critical of self-deluding myths, and to work against oppression of others.