These lead, and have led in the 20th century, to catastrophe.
Since then the defence has either been ideology – most notably Marxism or fascism – or nihilism. Once, we had Christianity as a bulwark against that terrifying reality. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak and everything else is huge, complex and overwhelming. It might be encapsulated thus: “Life is tragic. Peterson’s worldview is complex, although 12 Rules makes a heroic attempt to simplify it into digestible material. Photograph: Vince Talotta/Toronto Star/Getty Images ‘Free-speech martyr or transphobe?’: Toronto student Cassandra Williams joins a protest on campus against the controversial Jordan Peterson. He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star. Even his biblical lectures have been watched 5m times – quite a figure for a theological analysis of the Old Testament. This may be why his YouTube videos have had 35m views. Peterson can take the most difficult ideas and make them entertaining. Although I am a lifelong atheist, for the first time the Bible started to make symbolic sense to me. I watched his videos on the psychological significance of biblical stories. His online videos contain extensive deconstructions of narratives and myths, both ancient and modern.
I first came across Peterson not in any political context but as a teacher of story. Peterson has largely been in the news for his blazing, outspoken opposition to much of the far-left political agenda, which he characterises as totalitarian, intolerant and a growing threat to the primacy of the individual – which is his core value and, he asserts, the foundation of western culture. But he also says – when challenged for being a reactionary – that “being reactionary is the new radicalism”. He defines himself as a “classic British liberal”.
This has led him to be branded a member of the alt-right – although his support for socialised healthcare, redistribution of wealth towards the poorest and the decriminalisation of drugs suggests this is far from the whole story. Apart from anything else, he believes most university humanities courses should be defunded because they have been “corrupted by neo-Marxist postmodernists” – particularly women’s studies and black studies. He certainly doesn’t sit well with the usually left-leaning academic establishment. More controversy followed when he publicly defended James Damore, the sacked Google employee who suggested there were innate gender differences, as being no more than the scientific consensus. Demonstrations broke out on campus, and he has been the subject of a campaign of protest by trans activists. Following this he was either hailed as a free-speech martyr or castigated as a transphobe. Peterson, 55, is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who shot into the headlines in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns at the university which new legislation, Bill C-16, compelled him legally to. He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star Camille Paglia estimates him to be “the most important Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan”. But then Peterson is in a different intellectual league from the authors of most such books.
I doubt it has the commercial appeal of The Secret (wish for something and it will come true) and it certainly strays markedly from the territory of How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is informed by the Bible, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung and Dostoevsky – again, uncommon sources for the genre. His book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is an ambitious, some would say hubristic, attempt to explain how an individual should live their life, ethically rather than in the service of self.
And yet, superficially at least, a self-help book containing these messages is what the Canadian psychologist Jordan B Peterson has written. This is hardly the staple of most self-help books. I t is uncomfortable to be told to get in touch with your inner psychopath, that life is a catastrophe and that the aim of living is not to be happy.