“men have to toughen up”, jordan b. Peterson writes in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, “Men demand it and women want it.” So, the first rule is, “stand up straight with your shoulders back” and don’t forget to “clean your room”. By the way, “consciousness is symbolically male and has been since the beginning of time.” oh, and “the soul of the individual is eternally hungry for the heroism of the genuine self.” Many of these pronouncements, both didactic and metaphysical, ranging from the absurdity of political correctness to the “burden of being,” have made Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube sensation and bestselling author. of sales in various westerns. countries.
12 Rules for Life is only Peterson’s second book in twenty years. Packaged for people raised on buzzfeed lists, Peterson’s brand of intellectual populism has risen with astonishing speed; and it is fueled, like the political populisms of our time, by frenzied, predominantly male supporters, who seem ever ready to pummel their critics on social media. it is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that hierarchies of gender and class are ordered by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the most influential public intellectual in the West. because his apotheosis speaks of a crisis that is at least as deep as the one that meant the unexpected leadership of the free world of donald trump.
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peterson diagnoses this crisis as a loss of faith in old truths. “In the West,” she writes, “we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centered cultures.” Peterson offers to alleviate the resulting “despair of meaninglessness” with a return to “ancient wisdom.” it is possible to avoid “nihilism,” she claims, and “find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience” with the help of “the great myths and religious stories of the past.”
Following Carl Jung, Peterson identifies “archetypes” in myths, dreams, and religions, which have apparently defined truths about the human condition since the dawn of time. “Culture,” says one of his typical arguments, “is symbolically, archetypally, and mythically male,” and that is why resistance to male dominance is unnatural. men represent order, and “chaos, the unknown, is symbolically associated with the feminine.” In other words, men who resist the perennially fixed archetypes of male and female, and fail to toughen up, are pathetic losers.
Such self-evidently timeless truths are no longer offered in a modern university; Jung’s speculations have been largely debunked. But Peterson, armed with his “maps of meaning” (the title of his previous book), has only contempt for his fellow scholars who tend to emphasize the socially constructed and provisional nature of our perceptions. As with Jung, he presents some idiosyncratic quasi-religious views as empirical science, frequently appealing to evolutionary psychology to back up his ancient wisdom.
Closer examination, however, reveals Peterson’s timeless insights as a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own time: right-wing devotions seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.
Peterson himself attributes his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to reflect deeply on “the evils associated with beliefs” like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago. this is a common intellectual trajectory among western right-wingers who swear by solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads directly to the guillotine or the gulag. a recent example is the english polemicist douglas murray, who deplores the attraction of young people to bernie sanders and elizabeth warren and wants the idea of equality to be “contaminated by an ideological garbage equivalent to that accumulated on the concept of borders”. Peterson confirms his membership in this far-right sect by never identifying the evils caused by the belief in profit or riches: slavery, genocide, and imperialism.
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Reactionary white men will surely be delighted by Peterson’s hatred of “social justice warriors” and his assertion that divorce laws should not have been liberalized in the 1960s. Those who fight political correctness on college campuses will wholeheartedly endorse Peterson’s assertion that “there are entire disciplines on college campuses that are frankly hostile to men.” Islamophobes will take heart from your speculation that “feminists avoid criticizing Islam because they unconsciously yearn for male dominance.” Libertarians will applaud Peterson’s glorification of the singles wrestler and his stern message to stragglers (“Maybe it’s not the world’s fault. Maybe it’s you. You failed to make the mark”). the demagogues of our time do not read much; But, as they ruthlessly crack down on refugees and immigrants, they can draw much philosophical support from Peterson’s subchapter titles: “Compassion as a Vice” and “Toughen Up, Weasel.”
in all respects, peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. the “tradition” he promotes goes back no further than the late nineteenth century, when a sinister correlation first emerged between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and caudillo politics. this was a period during which intellectual charlatans flourished hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism wavered. Many artists and thinkers, from the German philosopher Ludwig Klages, a member of the hugely influential Munich Cosmic Circle, to the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich and the Indian activist Aurobindo Ghosh, assembled Peterson-style collages that are part occult, part psychological, and part notions. biological. These neoromantics responded, like Peterson, to an urgent need, arising from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in what reassures and comforts.
This new object of belief tended to be exotically and esoterically pre-modern. the East, and India in particular, became a screen onto which needy Westerners projected their fantasies; Jung, among many others, went on tediously about India’s timeless, feminine self. In 1910, Romain Rolland summed up the general mood in which progress under liberal auspices seemed like farce, and many people seemed eager to replace the Enlightenment ideal of individual reason with such transcendental coordinates as “archetypes.” “The door of dreams had been reopened,” Rolland wrote, and “on the train of religion came little whiffs of theosophy, mysticism, esoteric faith, and occultism to visit the chambers of the Western mind.”
a variety of enterprising intellectuals, from theosophists and vendors of Asian spirituality such as vivekananda and d.t. Suzuki to Asian scholars like Arthur Waley and fascist ideologues like Julius Evola (Steve Bannon’s guru) set up stalls in the new marketplace of ideas. WB Yeats, adjusting Indian philosophy to the needs of the Celtic revival, pontificated on the “old self”; Jung wove his own variations on this obviously ancient unconscious. conceptually nebulous categories such as “spirit” and “intuition” became widely diffused; Peterson’s favorite words, being and chaos, began to appear in all caps. Peterson’s own lineage among these healers of the soul of modern man can be traced through his repeatedly invoked influences: not only Carl Jung, but also Mircea Eliade, the Romanian scholar of religion, and Joseph Campbell, a professor at Sarah University. Lawrence, who, like Peterson, combined a mainstream academic career with mass-market musings on heroic individuals.
The “despair of meaninglessness” that was widely felt in the late nineteenth century seemed especially desperate in the years following the two world wars and the holocaust. Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, all accredited by university education, found general bafflement in suggesting the existence of a secret, almost Gnostic, knowledge of the world. Seeking to shed light on recesses of the human unconscious, they acquired huge and fanatically loyal fan clubs. Campbell’s 1988 television interviews with Bill Moyers elicited a particularly extraordinary response. Like Peterson, this popularizer of archaic myths, who believed that “Marxist philosophy had taken over the university in America,” was remarkably attuned to contemporary prejudice. “Follow his own happiness,” he urged an audience that, during an era of neoconservative rise, was ready to make sure that some deep ancient wisdom lay behind Ayn Rand’s hymns to unrestrained individualism.
Peterson, however, appears to have modeled his public persona on Jung rather than Campbell. The Swiss sage wore a ring adorned with the effigy of a serpent, the symbol of light in a pre-Christian Gnostic cult. Peterson states that he has been included in “the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe of the Pacific coast”; He is clearly proud of the Native American longhouse that he has built in his Toronto home.
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peterson may seem like the latest in a long line of pretentious but harmless intellectuals who fall in love with the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung unwisely generalized about the higher “Aryan soul” and lower “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of the fascist Romanian Iron Guard. Campbell’s hatred of “Marxist” academics at his university concealed a virulent hatred of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was an ardent Russian expansionist who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.
Nowhere in his published writings does Peterson consider the moral failings of his gurus and their political ramifications; he seems unbothered by the fact that thinking of human relationships in terms of domination and hierarchy is all too easily connected to nascent evil such as misogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia. he could argue that his maps of meaning are aimed at helping lost people rather than racists, ultranationalists, or imperialists. but she cannot plausibly claim, given her oft-expressed hostility to feminists’ “killer fairness doctrine” and other progressive ideas, that she is above the fray of our ideological and culture wars. /p>
Indeed, the modern fascination with myth has never been free of an illiberal and anti-democratic agenda. Richard Wagner, along with many German nationalists, became famous for using the myth to regenerate the Volk and stoke hatred of aliens, mostly Jews, who he claimed polluted the pure community rooted in blood and soil. In the early twentieth century, ethnic-racial chauvinists everywhere (Hindu supremacists in India and Catholic ultranationalists in France) offered visions to uprooted peoples of an entrenched organic society in which hierarchies and values had been stable. . As Karla Poewe points out in New Religions and the Nazis (2005), political cultists would typically mix “pieces of yogic and Abrahamic traditions” with “popular notions of science, or rather pseudoscience, such as concepts of ‘race’, ‘eugenics’ or ‘evolution'”. it was this opportunistic amalgamation of ideas that helped nurture “new mythologies of possible totalitarian regimes.”
peterson criticizes today’s “softness” and argues that men have been “pushed too far to feminize themselves”. In the best-selling book Degeneration of Him (1892), the Zionist critic Max Nordau amplified, more than a century before Peterson, the fear that Western empires and nations are populated by weak-willed, effeminate, and degenerate people. French philosopher Georges Sorel identified myth as the necessary antidote to decay and the spur to rejuvenation. Sorel, an intellectual inspiration to fascists across Europe, had a particular nostalgia for the patriarchal systems of ancient Israel and Greece.
Like Peterson, many of these hypermasculinist thinkers saw compassion as a vice and urged insecure men to harden their hearts against the weak (women and minorities) on the grounds that the latter were biologically and culturally inferior. hailing myth and dreams as repositories of fundamental human truths, they became popular because they addressed a widely felt spiritual hunger: that of men desperately seeking maps of meaning in a world they found opaque and uncontrollable.
It was in this (eerily familiar) context – a “revolt against the modern world”, as the title of evola’s 1934 book put it – that demagogues arose so quickly in 20th-century Europe and managed to exalt the myths national and racial. as the true source of individual and collective health. the drastic individual makeover demanded by visionaries turned out to require a massive and forced retreat from failed liberal modernity to an idealized traditional realm of myth and ritual.
In the end, the desk-bound pedants and fantasists helped cause, in the words of Thomas Mann in 1936, widespread “moral devastation” with their “worship of the unconscious,” which “knows no values, neither good nor evil.” evil, nor morality”. .” nothing less than the foundations of knowledge and ethics, politics and science, collapsed, finally unleashing the cataclysms of the 20th century: two world wars, totalitarian regimes and the holocaust. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a similar intellectual and moral collapse, one that seems to herald great calamity. Peterson correctly calls it “psychological and social dissolution.” but it is a disturbing symptom of the malaise for which it promises a cure.
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