Is Jordan Peterson Just Making It Up as He Goes?

Jordan Peterson’s marketability has always been a bit surprising given his weirdness. He speaks exclusively in a glottal cadence that sounds like Kermit the Frog after a night of heavy drinking. He calls hostile interlocutors “bucko.” He breaks down in tears when discussing children’s cartoons and has occasionally been known to dress like the Joker. But these days, the reactionary right is miserably bereft of real intellectuals, and a decade or so ago, Peterson stepped into this void and was rewarded with global success. That success, improbably, comes from a unique fusion of obscurantism and conservative pomposity. There’s a certain genre of left-coded writing, for example, that’s rightly derided for its convolution, even meaninglessness. Perhaps the most common hallmark of this style is the incessant bracketing of words in scare quotes, a tactic that often allows the author (or “author”) to assert ideas or concepts while remaining aloof and evasive about what it is they’re actually saying. Sometimes, there are random capitalizations as well, or particular sentences are italicized for no discernible reason. In this genre, everything—right down to the very act of writing itself—plays out in linguistic abstraction, and at a convenient remove from anything tangible or concrete. The worst reactionary prose, on the other hand, is often the precise inverse, its most recognizable hallmark being the needless adornment of extremely banal thoughts or truisms with pompous verbiage designed to make them sound smart. Thus, as Nathan Robinson observed in a 2018 essay, someone like Peterson simply cannot bring himself to write “the man’s cancer metastasized” when the sentence “the man fell prey to the tendency of that dread condition to metastasize” is readily available.

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The incredible thing about Peterson is that, in writing and speech, he somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook. He is a master of faux-Confucian aphorisms—“There is no being without imperfection”—and spouts kindergarten morality with the self-serious gravitas of a bearded prophet who has just been handed stone tablets by the Almighty. But he’s long been equally prone to deconstructive cul-de-sacs and conceptual negations that save him from ever having to explain what he actually thinks or means. (“You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.”) Robinson again: “The multiplicity of possible interpretations [here] is very important. It makes it almost impossible to beat Peterson in an argument, because every time one attempts to force him to defend a proposition, he can insist he means something else.” All of this is quite ironic in light of Peterson’s appeal. If there’s one thing that’s made him attractive to some people, especially some young men, as a public figure, it’s the idea that there’s a fundamentally deeper order at work beneath the disorienting tumult of twenty-first-century life; that social roles and the relations that arise from them are ultimately rooted in nature; that reality—whatever the Marxist university professors, godless postmodernists, and intersectional Tumblr teens might insist to the contrary—rests on foundations that are fixed and immutable. The left, Peterson says, may dislike inequality and hierarchy, but they’re right there in the animal kingdom. Just look at how the humble lobster has lived since time immemorial. Peterson’s longstanding bête noire has been the scourge of postmodernism, alternatively represented in the catch-all signifier “postmodern neo-Marxism.” Once again, the irony here is not just that Peterson’s own writing so regularly mirrors the worst stylistic tendencies of both post-structuralist academia and social media identity politics. It’s that his work and ideas are fundamentally postmodern in substance. Consider Peterson’s much-discussed exchange with Richard Dawkins last October, which, among other things, included a protracted debate about dragons. (I’ve edited down the exchange somewhat for clarity.) Peterson: “I read a book a while back that described the biological reality of the dragon. Say, well, there’s no such thing as a dragon, it’s like, okay . . . is there such a thing as a predator?” Dawkins: “Of course.” Peterson: “Well, that’s a meta category. What’s the category of predator? Bear, eagle . . . if you’re a primate, fire . . . is fire a predator? Well, it’s complicated because a fire kills you, okay? So, is there a worse predator than serpentine flying fire-breathing reptile? Is that not the imagistic equivalent of predator? So, in what way, if predator is real, in what way isn’t dragon real? Doesn’t take that much imagination to see the identity. And then wouldn’t the fundamental task of edible primates be to figure out how to overcome the dragon forever?” Dawkins: “I don’t know why you say dragon. I mean we have lions, we have tigers, we have sabertooth, we have T-Rex . . .” Peterson carried on in this vein for a while longer until the host mercifully intervened to summarize his rather obvious point. (“So a dragon is a pictorial representation of the abstracted concept of a predator?”) For some reason, however, Peterson then continued to dig in on the idea that meta-categories have as much solidity as real ones—an insistence made still more confusing by his simultaneous invocations of biology. Host: “When you say escaping from, but when you say the biology of a dragon, you must understand how that can be misleading [when it comes to the] enterprise that you’re engaging in because we’re talking here about narrative, we’re talking here about art, we’re talking here about representations in literature . . .” Peterson: “I don’t think the category of dragon is any less valid than the category of lion.” Host: “Any less biological?” Peterson: “Well, it depends on your level of analysis. We have the term “predator,” which implies that all predators have something in common because otherwise we wouldn’t have the term. It’s like there’s no reason to assume ontological priority for the category of lion over the category of predator.” That Peterson is, at this point, quite obviously a charlatan is beyond dispute. But I’m not sure anyone has ever straddled the oft-opposed worlds of online postmodernism and reactionary prejudice as successfully. To wit: Peterson is someone who believes “a woman is a woman” but will also insist that dragons are every bit as valid as lions. Like plenty of others on the right, he makes incessant appeals to biological determinism, yet his own scholarly work (such as it is) has been concerned with how we “generate meaning” based on stories and mythical archetypes. A few days ago, this very slippage caused Peterson some trouble during a YouTube debate show, where he’d been cast as the resident Christian facing off against twenty young atheists. For reasons no one can discern, however, Peterson obstinately refused to identify himself as a Christian and opted to channel Michel Foucault instead. Q: “Do you believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good notion of God? Peterson: “What do you mean by ‘believe’?” Q: “Do you think it to be true?” Peterson: “That’s a circular definition. What do you mean when you say you ‘believe’?” Q: “How is that circular?” Peterson: “Because you added no content to the answer by substituting the words ‘true’ and ‘believe.’” What is “belief”? What is “truth”? Is God (or “god”) simply a concept through which we measure our pain? Is the mark of the author not merely the singularity of his own absence? Peterson is a bad and lazy thinker, and an even worse writer. But he is also symptomatic of a more generalized decline in the quality of public intellectuals. Here, I think Robinson was exactly right to conclude that Peterson’s success is at least partly an indictment of the intellectual left, or at least the segments of it who have spent the past several decades retreating into solipsistic abstraction. In an increasingly secular and pluralistic age, the kinds of metaphysical certainties that were once available to people are always going to be elusive to most. But at its best, the organized left has still been able to offer social and political narratives that give people real meaning, and in their absence, the reactionary right has had fertile terrain from which to advance its own noxious alternatives. Importantly, however, as Peterson so clearly demonstrates, the contemporary right clearly suffers from its own lack of intellectual self-confidence and is often quite visibly hamstrung by the very postmodern impulses it so viciously decries. Whatever else, I guess we’re lucky they aren’t sending their best. Adapted from “Jordan Peterson, Postmodern Bullshit Artist” by Luke Savage (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.The post Is Jordan Peterson Just Making It Up as He Goes? first appeared on The Walrus.