Book Review: The truthfulness, courage and optimism of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Jordan B. Peterson
Random House Canada
Jan 23, 2018
448 Pages

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Introduction

The Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has been an internet sensation since releasing a series of videos in late 2016 on his YouTube channel. In the videos he challenges political correctness as well as the Canadian government’s infamous Bill C-16. His website has been viewed over 40 million times since its creation, but his fame has grown exponentially since his interview with Channel Four’s Cathy Newman in January (seven million views and climbing) and the release of his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos which has shot to the top of the international best-seller lists.

Peterson is beginning to look like a twenty-first century C.S. Lewis, or even a Western Solzhenitsyn; certainly the colossal response he is garnering across the English speaking world astounding. What is it about this son of the Northern prairie of Canada which has brought him to such intellectual stardom? If I were to distil it down to three things they would be: his commitment to truth, his raw courage and his profound optimism. These three elements are woven through the fabric of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos – in a sense they are the distillation of his twelve rules.

Commitment to truth

“That’s just not true, it’s wrong!” is something of a catch cry for Peterson. We find it throughout the book, and said often with exasperation in many of the interviews he has given, particularly since the release of the book. It is a reflection of a deep, personal and emotional commitment to the truth.

Peterson is widely read in the great twentieth century analysts of dystopia: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Viktor Frankl and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and is aware that ideologies are based on “simple ideas” which explain away the complexity of the world; “Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangers when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no matter for the complexity of existence” (Foreword).

Peterson’s fear of the prospect of a postmodern dystopia (think of Pope Benedict’s “dictatorship of relativism”) fuels this commitment to truth and passionate rejection of the untruth. Totalitarian regimes, he tells us, are built on lies. Soviet Russia, as described by Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago, was propped up by the “almost universal proclivity of the Russian citizen to falsify his own day-to-day personal experience”. Viktor Frankl was lead to a similar conclusion from his Nazi Germany experience: “deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism”. These murderous regimes required many lies at the micro level, before building the macro level lie: “For the big lie, you first need the little lie” (Rule 8: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie).

Another factor playing into Peterson’s commitment to truth is his robust common sense – a quality which often evaporates at the dizzy heights of ivory tower academia. His sometimes homespun and even folksy common-sense belies the academic qualification of a one time Harvard lecturer and author of the serious work Maps of Meaning: The The Architecture of Belief. Such life experiences as his student summer job alongside tough men on a railway line crew in Saskatchewan, his life as a husband and father, as well as his work as a clinical psychologist have produced a very grounded individual.

There are three features of his dedication to truth which strike me as particularly Aristotelian: the first is one which Peterson himself mentions in connection with Aristotle’s study of virtue: the Nicomachean Ethics, a book which is, he writes, “based on experience and observation, not conjecture…” (Foreword). I think the same can be said of 12 Rules for Life.

Secondly, Peterson as a psychologist, like Aristotle, takes the animal substrate of human nature seriously, famously when comparing the role of serotonin in the lobster and in man. The fact that he takes our animal substrate seriously leads him to conclusions at times at odds with PC dogmas (such as taking differences between men and women as significant).

Thirdly, Peterson has recourse to wide-ranging sources for his insights into human nature: myth and religion, literature and cinema, science and philosophy. This has earned him a few sniffy sneers (“the stupid man’s smart person”, “not an original thinker”). Whereas much of the charm of the book, and the real smartness of Peterson, lie in his esteem – in true Aristotelian fashion – for perennial wisdom, wherever it is to be found – including in Judeo-Christian sacred scripture. He draws lessons from the Cain and Abel story as well as from the story of the sacrificial death of Christ in Rule 7 (Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Does he take Christianity to be literally true? It isn’t clear (neither are the answers Peterson gives when asked about this in interviews) and to my mind his ambiguity is a justified defence against being pigeon-holing, but more importantly it reflects Peterson’s refusal to embrace the modern world’s science-saturated dichotomy: science = truth, anything else = false.

Courage

The second feature of Peterson’s presentation of his ideas in 12 Rules, and in every YouTube video I have seen, is the clarity with which he presents uncomfortable or unfashionable truths. He is clearly an unusually courageous man who would rather jeapordise his academic career than keep silent about the truth. He has certainly embodied the book’s eighth rule: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.

Underlying his courage lies the conviction that speaking the truth is essential to the ordering of reality: “When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order through our speech …. Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering” (Rule 10: Be precise in your speech).

Much of what he writes flagrantly deviates from postmodern orthodoxy, in particular his ideas about the differences of the sexes, marriage and parenting, eg. “Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance” (Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them).

Peterson challenges, head on, the Marxist-postmodern assault on the “dominance hierarchies” of Western civilisation. He does not buy into the view that that humankind, especially the male of the species, is the enemy of creation. He rebutts the ultra-feminist expression of this dogma: that human masculinity – the patriarchy – is the source of all that is wrong in the world. Masculinity is not an evil thing: boys must allowed to be boys, and for their part,“Men have to toughen up” (Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding).

How often do we hear parents tempted to raise snowflakes being admonished that “It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them”? How often are people told to “Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous” (Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back)?

Incidentally, it is a delight to watch online the intelligence, candour (and charm) with which Peterson answers the kinds of questions that make many of us Catholics blanche (or at least apologise). When asked about cohabitation before marriage for instance, his answer is that the cohabitating couple are simply saying to one another: “You’re better than anything else I can trick, but I’d like to reserve the right to trade you in … conveniently.” And on abortion: “Abortion is clearly wrong, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. You wouldn’t recommend that someone you love have one.”

Peterson speaks clearly; it is the most salient feature of his communication skills. It comes as no surprise to learn that as a lecturer in Harvard he was nominated for its prestigious Levenson Teaching Prize.

Optimism

The third and final key characteristic I take to be optimism. This might be surprising since he speaks at length about both suffering and human brutality. But it is precisely because Peterson does not brush suffering and moral evil under the carpet that his optimism is potentially genuine.

Regarding suffering, he sees it as an inescapable and significant part of human existence. He writes extensively of the experience of his own daughter’s suffering: she was only a toddler when diagnosed with severe juvenile arthritis requiring multiple joint replacements and a great deal of extreme pain. He writes (Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street) of how the experience of such suffering in a loved one can tempt us to reject Being itself, and certainly God – one thinks Stephen Fry’s rejection of the God who would allow eye-worms and bone cancer.

The reality of suffering “brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it” (Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient).  The only correct reaction to unavoidable pain is sacrifice: “Pain and suffering define the world. Of that there can be no doubt. Sacrifice can hold pain in abeyance, to a greater or lesser degree ….”

Peterson does not go down Fry’s path of rejection when faced with suffering; what is needed instead is a “conscious decision to presume the primary goodness of Being.”

Regarding moral evil, he asserts frankly that “Each human being has an immense capacity for evil” (Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient). He refuses to explain evil away in medical or social terms. He presents the examples of the early twentieth century American serial killer and rapist Carl Panzram, whose “destructiveness was aimed in some fundamental manner at God himself…. Panzram raped, murdered and burned to express his outrage at Being” (Rule 6: Set your house in order before you criticise the world).

There are evil actions for which no excuses are available. Essentially Peterson is confronting the inexplicable mystery of evil: “The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity to evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out” (Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping). But he sees such evil as a fundamental rejection of Being – of God and his creation. Actions such as the 1999 Columbine school massacre have at their root a nihilistic – we might say diabolical – rejection of creation.

Peterson looks squarely at the evil lurking in the heart of every man (and quotes Solzhenistyn’s famous observation that the line separating good and evil passes through the heart of each individual person); and yet he sees the person as full of unbounded potential. Peterson’s optimism about man is not superficial and polyannish; it is metaphysical – Dorothy Cummings McLean sums it up nicely:

Peterson is a man who truly loves humanity, not just as a grand concept, but as individual members of a race of beings, none of whom ought to be sacrificed to save the whales or usher in the latest Five Year Plan. Love for the individual human being fuels Peterson’s rejection of Soviet-style totalitarianism no less than it condemns the anti-humanism of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold (Catholic World Report, February 11, 2018).

There is a profundity at the core of this work belied by its simple bluffness. Peterson tackles the fundamental causes of the malaise of our epoch with a bewitching frankness. The result is a book is destined to become a classic. Read it!