Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore
Jordan Peterson gets animated during a 2018 speaking engagement.
"If you're searching for a self-help guru to motivate you to keep your room clean," I wrote derisively, "Peterson may serve some purpose."
I still believe all the facts in the piece to be accurate. Still, that implied reference to rule No. 6 in Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos — "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world" — was unduly snarky. It was dismissive of the service motivational speakers can provide.
Say what you will about Citizen Peterson's musings on climatology and global capitalism, he is by all lights a genuinely caring clinician and a loving husband and father.
In fact, those who expected the petty bickering on graphic display in Peterson's daily Twitter feed were sorely disappointed during his talk Thursday in San Antonio. We were instead treated to a pleasant, low-key evening on the topic of marriage as a romantic adventure, interspersed with anodyne pleas for bipartisanship in Washington and a less polarized democratic culture in general.
To fill a 1,500-seat theater on a weekday armed with only a rug, a never-sat-upon stool and some rambling ideas about the importance of listening and communication, all while captivating a surprisingly young audience, raptly hanging on every silence — well, that's nothing to sneeze at.
But did all these people really show up just to be reminded to resist the urge to take others for granted and to learn to accept compliments with grace? Or to chuckle along to marital advice and anecdotes about former patients' comic struggles to meet girls?
Peterson's applause-garnering comments also seemed relatively un-edgy. At first blush, anyway. Fresh off the heels of a trip to D.C., he lamented that congressional representatives spend 25 hours a week on the phone fundraising. This elicited a single loud "Boo!" from one attendee — the only outburst of the event — to which Peterson instantly retorted, "No-no, no-no, you can't say 'boo,' because it's your fault!"
Laughter then applause followed. Surely most Americans can agree on the prudence of long-overdue campaign finance reform.
"The United States works as well or better than any place that's ever worked in the history of humankind," Peterson continued. Applause. We may rank 26th on the Democracy Index, but it's difficult to argue with 222 years of peaceful, election-based transfers of presidential power, though last year was an atypically close call.
"I never thought I was a conservative, by the way," Peterson said. "Apparently, I am." Laughter, then applause. A little hokey, but maybe some of us misjudged him? Surely these aren't the sentiments of a "magical super-Nazi," something Peterson has claimed he's been vilified as.
In trying to understand Peterson's popularity, could the answer be as simple as why Robert Pirsig's 1974 philosophical travelogue Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or why the 1982 parenting tutorial Tough Love sold millions of copies?
Are folks just drawn to a 21st century update of New Age-adjacent metaphysical speculations and a scientific-sounding apologetics for traditional family values? Why then don't Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey leave political controversies raging in their wakes?
You'd have to be a greenhorn at subtext to miss that the remarks in Peterson's Thursday talk that generated the most effusive crowd response were thinly veiled replies to a menacing yet unnamed specter. See if you can discern its rough outlines.
"I certainly don't think marriage is an oppressive, patriarchal institution, and anyone who says that, you should just stop listening to." Applause. "Men and women are different." Unusually loud applause.
So, who isn't in on the joke? Feminists. Postmodern academics. Those who use the word "patriarchy" and "white supremacy" unironically. Those who allegedly reduce all personal relationships to power dynamics. Those who make audience members like Peterson's feel bad or stupid for being a little behind the times.
On this book tour, at least, Peterson has mastered the discipline of not saying the quiet part out loud. But isn't it a blatant contradiction of his "Ethic of Listening" to instruct his fans not to listen to less enthusiastic perspectives on marriage and gender stereotypes?
The real hammer-and-sickle in the room was how Peterson managed to go a whole two hours without mentioning his favorite scarecrow, Karl Marx.
One of the most egregiously out-of-context quotes in the English language is Marx's metaphor of religion as "the opium of the masses." Marx ruthlessly mocked the rabid atheists of his day, arguing that whatever one might think of the abstract propositions of religious dogma, that religious fellowship — its music, its architecture, its ancient history, its moral teaching — fulfills a fundamental human need for meaning, a need that is left gapingly unfulfilled by a culture fixated on commerce, competition and money. Here's a loose translation of the infamous 1848 passage:
"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the people's painkiller. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up the very condition that requires those illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."
In other words, to denigrate religion without helping to rebuild a profound sense of common purpose is akin to denying morphine to those in excruciating pain. Instead, we should assuage the underlying ailment — namely, the loss of hope for a brighter tomorrow here on Earth.
A mere decade ago, self-identified Christians comprised 75% of the adults in the United States. Today that figure is 63% and falling fast. Nearly a third of us categorized as "religiously unaffiliated." This more than any other indicator may explain Peterson's appeal.
The passing of an older order can induce a feeling of being unmoored and alienated within one's own country. Liberals and leftists alike should learn to sympathize with that, as we also learn to patiently and persistently share how reactive defenses of that older order at the expense of the vulnerable are irredeemably cruel.
Like feminists of yore, Peterson has tacitly accepted that the personal is political. But if so, telling kids they can't play sports as themselves, contradicting their innermost sense of identity, is wrong. As are subjecting racial minorities to police brutality and polluted neighborhoods; sacrificing the immunocompromised for consumerist convenience during a pandemic; ignoring the homeless, the poor, the exploited migrant, while worshipping billionaires as geniuses; and playing the fiddle of free enterprise while the climate burns.
Where do these traumas figure into Peterson's injunction to not take others for granted and to rekindle a conscientious American democracy? Mum was the word Thursday night.
Nevertheless, in spite of what critics may charge, Peterson isn't the type of patriot to lament the miscegenation of the white race or the type of man who makes misogynistic complaints about his wife when hanging out with other dudes. He is, however, the type to overreact when he feels "Western civilization" is getting singled out for interrogation and to freak when movements for equality trigger historical parallels to disguised impositions of ideological conformity.
At the crossroads of those two of his reflexes is the transgender community. Yet how could a trans person assigned male at birth now asking to be dignified as "she" or "her," or vice versa, somehow deny that "men and women are different?"
Perhaps the harshest critique one could level at Peterson is that he can serve as a mass enabler of intellectual laziness. I'm not persuaded, for example, that he's adequately engaged with the major works of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak or Judith Butler. Had he done so, he might have noted that Baudrillard, like himself, questioned feminists' alleged portrayal of women throughout history as passive objects until the modern era and ridiculed Foucauldians' alleged shoehorning of every intimacy into the grid of power relations.
Peterson could not stop himself from gushing over the brilliance of Nietzsche. Doesn’t he know that Frenchies such as Foucault and Baudrillard were implicitly fighting over who loved Nietzsche more when he was in high school?
Like James Lindsay, Christopher Rufo and others in the cottage industry of popular anti-intellectualism, Peterson offers his college-age admirers a grab bag of one-liners to justify never cracking open a book tagged "postmodernist" to judge for themselves whether anything inside is worthwhile.
If Petersons' invitation for dialogue is a bluff, it's incumbent upon us to call it. Because it's easy to agree with him about one claim: the demonization of Trump supporters, as exemplified by Hillary Clinton's boneheaded "basket of deplorables" speech, has indefinitely delayed a thorough soul-searching of why the Left has lost touch with a hefty segment of the working class.
To make progress on the causes we deeply care about, we will need to listen and communicate with those who drop everything to hear Peterson speak, and to those who find him not only unobjectionable but convincing.
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