Jordan Peterson is a man
But he isn’t Socrates
This is a response to an article by Aaron Huertas, “A Field Guide to Jordan Peterson’s Political Arguments” (Aaron Huertas)
Peterson is a hero of mine. And I am well aware that sometimes heroes have feet of clay. Peterson may be clay all the way up to his belly button.
But Aaron’s article misses the mark in a couple of places and I want to address those.
First of all, he describes Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos this way:
And now Peterson is making the interview rounds promoting a new self-help book for young men, which has improbably become a best-seller.
It is not a self help book for young men.
Peterson’s audience is largely, by a huge margin, young men. However, I have not met a lot of young men who would (a) read a self help book or (b) read a book. Young men (of at least my acquaintance) won’t give something a second glance unless it comes packaged as a video game or unless the pages are illustrated with naked women. It’s my understanding that violent video games usually have naked women in them. That’s not first-hand knowledge though, I could be wrong.
The problem with spending your life working at Taco Bell and playing video games during the rest of your waking hours is that it’s empty and meaningless. And useless. The young men who feel empty, meaningless and useless usually don’t know why they feel that way, they are merely miserable.
Jordan Peterson talks to them and explains it. I like to listen in.
Although he frames his remarks to his audience in terms of being a man, it’s pretty clear to me that he’s really teaching them how to be worthwhile adult human beings. That’s a message a lot of people could do well to hear.
Weirdly, Peterson himself has even used the “ah, but have you watched all my videos?” gambit when confronted by trans rights activists at a rally.
If you watch even a fraction of his videos, you quickly discover that he hates Hitler (cruelly dashing the hopes of the alt-right) and all kinds of vile and murderous oppression. Those ideas are not subtle and nuanced and not difficult to glean from his talks and lectures.
Yes, he can slip and slide off stuff he doesn’t like. He has ignored a slew of lawyers and lawmakers who explained that he was just dead wrong about Bill C-16.
You correctly pointed out that postmodernism is not a thing and neither is cultural marxism. He really should relax about those.
He’s read Gulag Archipelago too many times. The ride from Toronto University to the USSR is not an express train. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that all brutal communist regimes grew out of brutal dictatorships, not vibrant democracies. If you add Marx to Tsarist Russia you get Stalan. If you add Marx to democracy you get Sweden.
So Peterson’s political arguments suck. I agree. He’s not a political theorist or a social scientist. He’s not even a very good philosopher. He’s a good speaker and has a brilliant mind but smart people are extremely good at fooling themselves with rationalizations (not you or me, of course, but other people.)
In Peterson’s area of expertise he can’t be beat. He’s excellent. I avoid his political stuff as much as possible. It has a certain “get off my lawn!” quality. But he was a clinical psychologist for decades and his psychology lectures really are a learning experience. He’s a teacher before he’s anything and he has a lot to teach.
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