The cult of Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson’s new book is titled “We Who Wrestle With God”. Quite what God has done to provoke this fight is not clear. Open it, and two things become apparent. First, this is a friendly skirmish: the Canadian psychologist is less wrestling God than trying to understand him.

He retells the big hits of the Bible—the fall, the flood—through a mixture of theology, psychology and symbolism. Often, alas, that symbolism comes from Disney. So the story of Adam and Eve is compared to “Beauty and the Beast”, and Cain is likened to evil Scar in “The Lion King”. The overall effect is as if a Victorian vicar had been given a streaming subscription to Disney+ (and possibly some opium), then sat down to write his sermon.

The second thing that becomes clear is that by far the greater struggle here is between Mr Peterson and his prose. Mr Peterson has never been an easy read: even an academic review once described one of his books as a “tome”. This doorstopper is little easier. Flip it open at random, and your eye will invariably light on phrases such as this one: “The modern meta-Marxists, the post-modern power players, have, as it were, metastasised Marx.” Got that? Good. Because there are hundreds more pages where that came from.

Those of you who wrestle with Jordan Peterson might wonder why you would want to fork out good money to wade through nearly 600 pages of Mr Peterson wrestling with God. For many the answer will be celebrity. Both sides are well known. God is God. Mr Peterson is a contrarian who has hitherto wrestled with students over free speech (he won); feminists over whether you can compare lobsters to men (it was a draw); and Richard Dawkins, an atheist biologist, over the reality of dragons (it was excruciating).

These fights have propelled Mr Peterson from academia to celebrity. He has been called both “the world’s most famous public intellectual” and “the stupid man’s smart person”. He is certainly hard to place. His most famous work, “12 Rules for Life”, offers a strange mix of humdrum domesticity and existential philosophy, as if a nanny was mixed with Nietzsche and started barking orders: Stand up straight! Shoulders back! Consider the existential void of modernity! His (mostly male) fans loved it and bought over 10m copies.

Millions despise him. In 2017 academics at the University of Toronto signed an open letter to take away his tenure, in part because he objected to being required by law to use gender-neutral pronouns. He later resigned. For a time, to have an opinion on him felt both socially necessary (he came up so often) and socially dangerous (the wrong answer could bring odium). No mere man, he was a purity test personified.

Like Donald Trump and Joe Rogan, an American podcaster, he is one of a group of men who despite—or perhaps because of—being disdained by intellectual sorts are beloved by their “bro” followers. The number of authors who can, as he does in this new book, use phrases like “the collective meta-space of human imagination”, and also fill arenas with fans, is tiny. Probably it totals one. Few, least of all him, saw this coming. “In a sensible world”, he has said, “I would have got my 15 minutes of fame.” That was in 2017. He is still going.

On November 18th a crowd gathered for the first night of his book tour in a village near New York City. It felt more like a concert. There was merch (Peterson posters and mugs) and a guitar warm-up act. When he came on stage, in a three-piece linen suit, the crowd—by no means all young or male—whooped. The subject for this evening’s sermon, he told the congregation of fans, was sacrifice.

An entire Peterson industry has flourished for those willing to sacrifice their money: there is a Jordan Peterson newsletter (“Mondays of Meaning”), a “Peterson Academy” ($500 a year gets you lectures on manly things by people with beards) and a “self-authoring programme”. People who spend time writing about themselves, it promises, “become happier, less anxious and depressed”. Who knew? Certainly not Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf—or, apparently, Jordan Peterson. As he reached the climax of the evening’s talk, his voice cracked. He is famous for weeping in speeches: YouTube offers a video compilation of “Jordan Peterson crying”.

Mr Peterson’s new book is as old-fashioned as his appearance. It reads as if it “could have been written in the 1950s”, says a publisher. Or, indeed, the 1850s. It refers to sermons and Victorian biblical scholars. The reader has to wade through pages of archaisms from the King James Bible such as “liveth”, “heareth”, “beeves” (an old plural of “beef”) and phrases like “an handful” of grain. The reader’s “beeve” with this is not that the King James version lacks beauty. It does not. But when added to those metastasising post-modernists, it is all a bit of an handful.

However, to really understand Mr Peterson, forget his books. Do not look at the “supply side”, but instead consider the “demand side”, urges Richard Reeves, author of “Of Boys and Men”, a book about how the modern male struggles. In other words: look at his fans. Not long after Mr Peterson came to prominence in 2016 with a public debate about gender-neutral pronouns, the #MeToo movement started to spread. Phrases like “toxic masculinity”, “mansplaining” and “manspreading” were gaining ground, and there was anger at men’s treatment of women.

But young men also had problems. The world has long been moving to an information economy that favours brains, not brawn. Women thrived. Men? Not always. In America and Britain boys lag behind girls in primary, secondary and university education. The appeal of Mr Peterson, and even Mr Trump, is “really driven by a big…socio-economic shift”, says Francis Fukuyama, a professor of political science at Stanford University.

Discussing men’s problems can prompt pushback and questions of “Is there a violin small enough?” according to Mr Reeves. But not for Mr Peterson. “Boys”, he wrote in “12 Rules for Life”, “are suffering, in the modern world.”

After America’s recent election, the consequences of all this are well known. We “rolled our eyes at young men when they said ‘I’m suffering’,” says Mr Reeves. So “of course they went somewhere else.” Mr Trump is one beneficiary. Mr Peterson is another, because he was “offering something people needed”. Which—in true nanny style—was partly sympathy and partly a dose of stern advice. As he wrote in “12 Rules”: “Toughen up, you weasel.”

From the stage in New York, he spoke for well over an hour about pain, death, “the void” and the “full existential catastrophe of life”. Then he told his rapt fans how to deal with these things. Broadly speaking it was a softer version of: “Toughen up, you weasels.” His audience scurried into the November night, looking absolutely delighted. ■