Who is this man, this Jordan Peterson,
academic clinical psychologist, tenured at the University of Toronto with
hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers, who has made a splash recently as a
voice of reason, battling the political correctness elites and upsetting the
academic grandees?
Less than a week ago, we got a stormy weather alert in an article that
appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "What's So
Dangerous about Jordan Peterson?" by Tom Bartlett, with the tease
"Not long ago, he was an obscure psychology professor. Now he
leads a flock of die-hard disciples." One might suppose,
considering Mr. Bartlett's choice of words, that Peterson is a Jim Jones-style
cult-leader, but instinctively, I knew I would like to find out about anybody
described as dangerous by the trade paper of American higher education.
Mr. Bartlett considers Dr. Peterson a threat because Peterson
deviates from the leftist academic canon – a conservative, traditionalist,
moralist anti-political correctness psychologist academic. He
objects to the speech police and the tyranny of the left. He that a
totalitarian-speech police state is developing in Canada, and, by instinct and
conviction, he objects strongly to the "good speech" laws demanding
the use of concocted or inapposite pronouns and labels preferred by the little
darlin's of the newly concocted gender-identity claxon, cowbell, and tin drum
army.
Peterson objects to speech police tactics, and he does it
eloquently. That's a threat to and dangerous for the academic
poobahs who live and breathe censorship and intellectual
tyranny. Bartlett's essay is an alert: watch out for this conservative
who has a bad attitude on lots of things and opposes our new pronoun gender
identity group project and our promotion of the grievance status of the newly
formed sex-gender-dysmorphist deviant group.
After I wrote to others about my discovery of Peterson, I was
directed by one reader to a recent Peterson media splash, a YouTube
interview cum debate by a feminist firebrand interviewer Cathy
Newman at Britain's Channel 4. Ms. Newman, a veteran U.K. TV
personality, engaged Dr. Peterson on her claim that unequal female pay and
power in business and other organizations are an example of gender persecution
and oppression by patriarchal Western societies. Ms. Newman came, all
armed up, shouting her flinty-edged argument that gender job inequalities are
due to bias and abuse by men. Then came a well deserved Peterson
social sciences buzzsaw refutation of her arguments, delivered with a smile to
the visibly frustrated and increasingly desperate Newman, who seemed relieved
when the 30 minute "interview" ended.
Peterson, to the delight of millions of
people who watched the video (it is nearing 4 million views, 150 thousand likes
to 3-some thousand dislikes) was the well prepared and skilled matador with
Newman, gently, politely reminding her that sex is not the only thing to
consider when there are male-female differences. Peterson took
Newman's arguments in mid-flight and decimated her attack, didn't miss
opportunities to point out her interrogatory misconduct. It was a
rout, highlighting his rhetorical skills, command of the social sciences
research literature, good sense, and overarching good humor. There
was a particularly good segment where Peterson reminded Newman that her
accusations and assertions were based on an incorrect and nonscientific univariate (one
cause) analysis blaming sex, when good social science research requires a multivariate (multiple
causes) analysis. He followed up with examples of many alternative
causes for inequalities – simple things like choice, preferences, conflicts of
personal and social responsibilities, female fertility time frames, emotional
constitution, physical energy realities, required time commitments, and
domestic and family priorities – and he pointed out that the variates list was
incomplete. Game, set, match, Peterson.
Peterson's expertise as a debater and interviewee is not the place
to stop this discussion. His great accomplishment is teaching,
counseling, and coaching people to urge them to live the good life, the
virtuous life. He has an impressive social media following
consistent with his success as a revered and respected classroom teacher
everywhere he taught, combined with a successful general clinical practice that
has a special effort devoted to career and life coaching.
Peterson teaches people to be better, stronger, faster, and more
competent and respected, including women looking for tips and coaching on how
to succeed. Coaching is his deal, his nature, his forte, and you can
see his intensity when he does intimate videos with just him up close to the
camera, with a look that reminded me of Vince Lombardi.
Peterson is as compelling filling up a camera as he is wandering
the classroom, appearing to be improvising on a theme, but doing it as
musicians do a cadenza, jazz artists an improvisation. The trick to
jazz improvisation is playing music on a theme that repeats with a disciplined
creativity that furthers the theme. Peterson has his game in order:
no lulls or empty places, a stay-awake lecturer, well aware of the theme,
effective because he is insightful and eloquent, but committed to teach and
modest in his attitude.
Peterson's got it and ain't gonna lose it. The only way
he might be ambushed is being targeting by the destroyers of the left with
their name-calling and politics of personal destruction. I never
underestimate the people-shredder political correctness crowd, which has vile
and vicious tactics down to an art form. I am reminded of the old
saying that faculty politics is so bloody because the stakes are so small – and
Peterson has a lot of natural and dedicated academic enemies.
Take a look at Peterson's website and his various lists of
rules for good living, and you get the picture: he is a classical stoic, and he
advises people on how to grow up and be adults with a mature and virtuous
approach to life. He says honesty is the key to civil behavior, and
courage and fortitude are essential. People on our side of the
cultural divide would have to agree with damn near everything he says.
Peterson objects to identity politics as the product of socialist
cant and ideology that wants to put people in groups based on grievance or the
socialist theory of deterministic societal struggle. He considers
socialism misanthropic at its core, dead to the importance of the
individual. He opposes the socialist mindset that is nihilistic
about the value and importance of the human spirit and human action and conduct
that subscribe to a moral code. That is a mouthful, but necessary to
be fully indicative of his superior intellect and good instincts about what is
good, what is right.
Peterson is a traditionalist, committed to teaching people to live
a virtuous life – and he thinks happiness is living the virtuous
life. Pursuit of happiness is his theme, how to be your best friend
in achieving real happiness, and he adheres to the
Aristotelian-Stoic-Buddhist-American philosophy that being a virtuous, honest,
courageous, engaged adult, a credit to society and to your friends and family,
is the way to achieve happiness. Peterson has staked out his
position and is at war with totalitarians and ideologues of the left in
academia and society in general as an old-fashioned stoic. A
fearsome sight for a leftist.
Peterson has written and lectured about rules for
a good life – ten rules, twelve rules, and a longer set of forty rules for life
that are discussed in his YouTube videos and
other media, including books. Some rules are mother wit, commonsense
reminders for the needy. Most are just wisdom, essential to a good
and happy life.
The label "Alt Right" is used as a weapon against
Peterson because it is an all-encompassing epithet, a flexible way to condemn
anyone with a conservative lean. It is being used now by critics of
Peterson to describe him, since he teaches from a conservative point of view –
and his enemies would be happy to label him misogynist, racist, homophobe,
dysmorphophobic, transgenderophobic, a moralistic, intolerant bigot who must be
destroyed.
Stoics know these things. Marcus Aurelius said:
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people
I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous,
and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from
evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil,
and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of
the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the
divine. And so none of them can hurt me.
I took a few days to absorb Peterson, a bright and fascinating
phenomenon, an articulate, smart, eloquent man doing some public counseling as
a lecturer in a classroom on a video, taking on politically correct tyrants on
the side. I have read his rules for a good life, listened to his
commentaries on the rules. It became evident that Peterson, who grew
up in a remote, very cold Fairview, Alberta, north and west
of Edmonton, and went on to great success in academia and as a
psychologist in practice and then a public psychologist and teacher,
exemplifies an old but important story. His life course appears to
be the story of the human search for meaning, wisdom, and purpose – the
Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, Taoist and Confucian philosophy, Christian concepts
of wisdom and virtue, the Roman and Greek Stoic meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
and the teachings of the Greek slave Stoic doyen Epictetus.
One thing Peterson has done is awakened a young audience,
predominately male, to the value of the virtuous life, the life of a
responsible, engaged, and effective adult male, or female, who is a credit and
an asset, a benefit for friends and family. That's the good
news. The bad news is that the academy and chattering class are
opposed to such teachings as promoting values of the evil and oppressive
Western tradition.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is a physician and inactive
attorney living in Brownwood, Texas.
