If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It's a one-sided, deeply ideological theory. Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from this presumption of social corruption, that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous. We have learned to live together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some social shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good, given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.
Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is apparently on track to becoming the best-selling Canadian work of nonfiction of all time. I work in a book store and have been surprised by the range of customers coming in to buy what is essentially a not very contentious self-help book, but I have been even more amazed by the controversy behind the scenes – the anti-intellectual, self-congratulatory attitude of my fellow booksellers who say that they have never read this book, will never because the author is “garbage”, and so far as they are concerned, this should be considered hate speech and not sold in public; the baseline assumption is that those people who do buy this book belong in the infamous “basket of deplorables” category, and that although some customers do come in with the “I haven't read this but can't believe you're selling it” confrontational attitude, we can be assured that the majority of right-thinking people are simply, politely, biting their tongues.
As for myself, I am guilty of judging these people for categorising a book they've never read as “hate speech” when I hadn't read it myself – but now I have, and after looking further into the controversy behind the book, I can only note the irony that it's the inflexible ideologues – those who are so convinced of the correctness of their beliefs that they're not open to listening to differing viewpoints – whom Peterson has been attempting to push back against. But all is not lost: were any of my coworkers to read this book with an open mind and desire for self-improvement, they would only need to put into practise Peterson's Rule #9 (assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't) and therefore be capable of an honest debate of facts instead of resorting to, “I heard something bad about this guy, and even though I don't know the details, he needs to be censored.” The book itself is standard self-help fare (make incremental changes until you're living the life you want; don't lie; discipline your children), but by adding autobiographical information of his own, sharing cases from his work as a professor and his practise as a clinical psychologist, by adding literary references from Dostoevsky, Bunyan, and the Disney fairytales, by referencing age-old archetypical references from the Bible, Taoism, Hinduism and Greek Mythology, by citing research that makes clear that the big debates are about facts and not opinions (and definitely not feelings), Peterson has crafted something much more valuable than, say, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck– a foul-mouthed, uncredentialed blogger's idea of self-help which my fellow booksellers frequently defend as the point of free speech laws; insisting that if customers are offended by its placement at the front of the store, they need to get with the times. 12 Rules has merit as a self-help book on how to change one's life for the better, but it's even more valuable as a look inside the mind of a man who feels it's his duty to push back against the totalitarian bent of modern Canadian progressivism. This is the end of the book review proper, but I'm going to use up some more space to preserve what else I've learned.
I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such persons have a perfect right to their opinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding. If radical right-wingers were receiving state funding for political operations disguised as university courses, as the radical left-wingers clearly are, the uproar from progressives across North America would be deafening.The main charge levied against Dr Peterson is that he's transphobic; that he has publicly stated that he refuses to use “made up pronouns” at the demand of trans students. When the Canadian government was debating Bill C-16 (which adds “gender identity or expression” to grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act), Peterson attended the Senate hearings and made the point that it's the Orwellian imposition of newspeak and groupthink that he objects to: he would rather risk hurting an individual's feelings by refusing to employ a made up pronoun (what he refers to elsewhere as “neologisms of radical PC authoritarians”) than submit to a government that has moved from restricting speech (“You can't say this”) to compelling speech (“You must say this”). Nevertheless, the Bill passed, and not much later, the “Lindsay Shepherd” affair transpired at the university that one of my daughters attends: in a nutshell, in a seminar on grammar in which Shepherd served as a TA, she showed a video of Peterson and another – on a nonconfrontational public television public affairs show – debating the validity of these grammatical neologisms. The Administration heard about this, compared the showing of Peterson in any context with airing a Hitler speech, accused Shepherd of creating a toxic and unsafe space in contravention of what they understood to be the limits defined by Bill C-16 (which they had woefully misinterpreted), refused to divulge how many complainants had come forward (which later turned out to have been none), and insisted that undergrads are too immature and unsophisticated to have been exposed to Peterson's ideas without her having explained to them that his were the wrong ideas (and what does that say about their valuation of the education they're providing?) If Shepherd hadn't been recording the meeting (transcript here), and if it hadn't created a backlash around the world, she would probably no longer be in the graduate program at Laurier. (As it is, she has tried to bring in a “controversial speakers” series to promote debate, but so far, the “radical PC authoritarians” of the progressive left have pulled a fire alarm to clear a lecture hall before one such talk and have threatened violence if there are any others, leaving the school and Shepherd's new club unwilling/unable to pay for insurance or security for future events.) This is exactly what Peterson warned against, and why, without actually looking into it, many of my peers think him guilty of hate speech.
Another person guilty of such prejudice is Cathy Newman of Britain's Channel 4 news who (in)famously spent half an hour willfully misinterpreting everything Peterson said and attempting to trap him into saying something deplorable (transcript here). Bringing up the “controversy”, they had the following exchange:
Newman: A trans-person in your class, has come to your class and said they want to be called “she”.That doesn't look like hate speech to me, but one would actually need to look into what the ideologues are assuring us is true in order to discover the truth of it. Among my peers, I've seen Peterson called an “icon to incels and neo-nazis”, with the added injunction that Peterson has claimed that the cure for incels is “enforced monogamy”; and while that is generally assumed to mean that he wants the government to step in and distribute a woman to every man to contain this trend – which can be attributed to Nellie Bowles of The New York Times and her hit job of an article that willfully quotes him out of context – “enforced monogamy” is actually an anthropological term that describes how human society has evolved in a way that removes the alpha males from circulation (through marriage and the presumption of fidelity) and thereby allows the beta to omega males to have a shot at the remaining females. This occurred naturally over time to contain male sexual-frustration-driven violence, but with Tinder and hookup culture and young people putting off marriage, those top males are getting all the females, and maybe that isn't good for society (and a major theme for Peterson, as a psychologist, is that the cultural and mental systems we have taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop can't quite be overcome by fiat). In addition to this pushback, if an incel actually read 12 Rules, he'd be given the tools to increase his own competence and confidence and actually rise in the hierarchy of males and the esteem of females. As for the charge that Peterson appeals to neo-nazis: 12 Rules has an introduction written by Norman Doidge (the grandson of Holocaust survivors) and he writes that what first attracted him to Peterson was the latter's horror of the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century and his lifelong research into the causes of identity politics and the harm they cause; his sensitive and sensible ability to speak on the topic. Peterson writes throughout this book of the dangers of totalitarians – from Mao to Stalin to Hitler and his Nazis – and no neo-nazi who read this would discover the slightest sympathy with his cause.
Peterson: That’s never happened. And I would call them “she”.
Newman: So you would? So you’ve kind of changed your tune a little bit…
Peterson: No. No. I said that right from the beginning. What I said at the beginning, was that I was not going to cede the linguistic territory to radical leftists. Regardless of whether, or not, it was put in law. That’s what I said. Then the people who came after me said: “Oh, you must be transphobic! And you’d mistreat a student in your class.” It’s like, I never mistreated a student in my class. I’m not transphobic, and that isn’t what I said.
Newman: Well, you’ve also called trans-campaigners “authoritarian“, haven’t you? I mean, isn’t that…
Peterson: Only in the broader context of my claims that radical leftist ideologues are “authoritarian”. Which they are!
Because we are so scientific now – and so determinedly materialistic – it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.I've read the charge that Peterson is a misogynist – he advocates for the patriarchy and refers to women as “chaos” (note the subtitle of this book is “An Antidote to Chaos”) – but beyond pointing out that it's the patriarchal system that has led us to the wondrous world we inhabit today in the west and that we'd tear it down at unknown peril, he also adds that it's an insult to claim that every man throughout time was interested only in dominating his women and that every woman throughout time felt oppressed instead of valuing the different skills and benefits that her partner brought to their relationship. And as for chaos itself: Peterson simply points out that, archetypically speaking, every society has considered order to be a masculine force and chaos to be feminine (from the two balanced halves of Taoism, to Pandora's box, to Eve getting the original humans expelled from paradise), and that speaking as a psychologist in the footsteps of Freud and Jung, the archetypes and mythologies that have survived the ages tell us something deep and wise about humanity. I have also seen criticism that by referring too often to the Bible, Peterson is guilty of spreading “right-wing religious propaganda”, but I didn't get that either from reading this book – the Bible (although obviously meaningful to Peterson himself as a document of faith, on which he says he has meditated heavily) is treated as a collection of mythologies, and in particular, the story of Adam and Eve: there they were, living in paradise, essentially in the animal state; dumb, brute, browsing-the-bushes animals; told only not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Eve ate of the fruit – introducing chaos (which is interpreted as the locus of creativity and self-awareness) into the world – and once Adam joined in, they were expelled; which actually refers to the moment we became human; doomed to work in the fields and suffer in childbirth and be aware of our own mortality. These are heavy costs to pay, but who would want to go back to the prehuman state? For, since all life is suffering, meaning can be built by perfecting our selves and our communities and our world and alleviating the general suffering of mankind (which, according to Peterson and others like Steven Pinker, we have accomplished to an astonishing degree), and I can't find anything misogynistic in this: whether it's Eve, Pandora, or Disney stepmothers who brings the chaos, there would be no meaning to life without it.
Which brings me, finally, to one of Peterson's main points: nihilism and cynicism and moral relativism may be popular modern positions, but not only do these viewpoints not bring meaning to life, but they set the stage for the rise of totalitarian systems. When we stand for nothing, we fall for anything; we accept incremental restrictions on our freedom of speech in the name of “kindness” until we get to a point where we're no longer being told what we can't say, but compelled to march along with what we must say. And all of this is couched in a self-help manual with twelve rules that anyone could apply to the betterment of their own lives. There's no hate speech here, and anyone who refuses to read this book because “it may have some good advice but I wouldn't read a cookbook by David Duke”, has actually fallen for the groupthink indoctrination of the authoritarian left that Peterson is attempting to buttress us against. At a minimum, one ought to have read this book before advocating its censorship.
Bonus material:
And another thought on compelled speech: I have found it uncomfortable every time I'm at a public event these days and the host or the program will make a statement acknowledging that we are on the traditional lands of the ______ people (whatever Native band occupied the area precontact). The first time I heard it, I brought it up with a young and progressive coworker of mine (who had recently completed some kind of Social Justice degree at the same Wilfred Laurier University I mentioned above), and try as I might, I could not get her to see the danger in the words - to see that "acknowledging" we were on someone else's land was tantamount to admitting that if we weren't going to give it back, we ought to at least better compensate the descendants of those original inhabitants (this politicising of language is also why I am uncomfortable with using our Indigenous People's preferred term "First Nations" when referring to them; language matters and the words we use subconsciously transform opinions about reality.) So it was interesting to me to read this article today entitled "Indigenous land salutes a nice idea that will backfire badly", which includes the following passage (of which Jordan Peterson might well approve):
Land acknowledgements are also becoming a way to control legitimate debate and compel speech. In a recent vote, the Ontario Medical Association rejected making a land-acknowledgement statement prior to their meetings as a meaningless form of tokenism. Dr. Nel Wieman, president of the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada, instantly denounced this decision as proof that “privilege and racism” run rampant throughout the doctors’ group. Once you had to do something explicitly racist to be declared one. Now anyone who chooses not to fall in line with current political fashion can be smeared with this horrible epithet.
It's of little wonder to me that in this environment, Peterson is finding an audience.
