Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”: A Review
I have rarely started reading a book that has already earned so much response, some exquisite, some leaden, from some of my favorite places like The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times and elsewhere. I tried very hard not to be drawn into Peterson’s offerings on YouTube but was pulled into some of his conversations. And yes, this man likes his rules, even raising questions about whether there should be rules about women wearing lipstick and rouge at work to better define the sexual harassment landscape. He goes there, and his fans apparently love it. Petersen can at times be annoying, precise, enlightening, and persistent; and sometimes the nail on a classroom blackboard.
Someone must has said that Peterson’s 12 Rules are certainly not the Ten Commandments. Of course not. Peterson’s Rules are nice, homespun, understandable, catchy, understated eye-candy; phrases to capture the essence of his rich psychological advice; and archetypal re-enactments of the truth. He is a psychologist, after all.
However, the book’s psychological arc is uneven, perhaps because the landscape the author transverses is so rich, complex, and at times muddy. Early on we learn that Peterson is a fan of Jung who seems to have suggested the archetypal frame for this book. For Jung an image, a story, a fantasy and a dream represent psyche or soul. This is the source of essence and meaning. In this philosophical sense, this can be called Being.
Peterson seems at least to embrace the essence of this. He recounts the Creation stories from Genesis as an archetypal tale where man and woman are coming into consciousness and understanding the nature of good and evil. As I was reading this and related examples, I thought that Peterson wanted the story without any doctrinal overhang or weight but realized that the author’s approach was psychological and not religious in any narrow sense. He is simply returning to the original, foundational, mythic and archetypal tales, not unlike Jung, Freud, Joseph Campbell and others. The book in large measure is a pulsating, archetypal frame containing rules, lessons for life and some evangelizing.
The author takes the reader on an interesting journey, slipping in and out of archetypes, mythology and down-home psychology (Jung was no stranger to these places), and sometimes ending up in a lobster bed. Don’t worry, we are still in the same territory of Rules, Big Lobster, pecking orders, and what crustacean will win the serotonin wars. As we know, there will be winners and losers, the latter skulking along the bottom of the ocean floor, bereft of friends and lovers. Do I sense a note of determinism seeping into the conversation?
Rule 1 is to Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back. After the lobster tale the author informs us that he’s not talking just about posture; he also means standing up metaphysically; accepting the burden of Being; embracing the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. He adds: “It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended.” It means making sacrifices that are necessary to generate a meaningful reality. This this no small order.
I can’t remember reading a book in which I scribbled so many remarks, such as what, really, kidding me in the margins. These remarks usually occurred when Petersen seemed to overreach, such as when he drew a too certain line between Marxism and Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. He seems to stumble a little when he refers to the masculine as representing order and the feminine chaos, taking archetypal and mythological notions and giving them the same status in his notion of twenty-first century psychology. Peterson is less persuasive when he bangs this patriarchal drum. And there is a danger in conflating too closely this book and Peterson’s other writings, his interviews and his significant presence on YouTube. The archetypal patriarchy still has an oversized presence in the book but it doesn’t cast as large as shadow as in other venues.
Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker (March 5, 2018) suggests that much of Peterson’s advice in this book seems pragmatic, unobjectionable and even old-fashioned. He’s all about men being better husbands and fathers. The book is about taking stock; it’s a self-examination, a scouring of the psyche to find meaning and purpose. It’s about language and words and how to avoid lies and self-deception. The book is about accepting responsibility, about admitting that life is not the problem; we are. Peterson adds, perhaps with tongue slightly in cheek, “This is not theology, or mysticism. It’s empirical knowledge.” The man does have a sense of humor.
I found his chapter on Children (Rule 5) to be excellent, so much so that I shared it will an associate who was having problems with her children. As Peterson notes, in this chapter he calls on his clinical experience, disguising personal details, to buttress his position. It works and I think the book is better when it has a clinical, rather than political, focus. But the man is really good at getting riotous young boys to sleep. His politics intervenes a little when he wonders whether it was a good thing to liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960’s. The moral: “Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors.” The psychology: Parents should limit the rules and use minimum necessary force, and parents should come in pairs. “Parents should also understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful.”
In a sense the last few sentences capture at times the flow and movement of the book, from what appears to be sound, actional psychological advice parked alongside some moralism which, while not necessarily wrong or offensive, stands out, as if the Machine God had to get a word in.
On balance, however, the rules and advice seem homespun and practical: clean up your life, act with honor or don’t act, pursue what is meaningful, delay gratification, confront evil, tell the truth, be a listening person, be precise in your speech, and Know Thyself. This advice is wrapped in biblical stories, fairy tales, literature, and mythology and therefore takes on a religious and psychological tone, placing our behavior in time and eternity.
“12 Rules for Life” exists within the ethos of Christianity, marked by the Creation, Crucifixion and Resurrection stories. This is an archetypal association and is not an inappropriate lens through which to imagine a moral and ethical universe. Peterson writes that “it is nothing short of a miracle that hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such as the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong.”
While I don’t disagree with his take on Christianity, I wondered why he didn’t pay a little more attention to Jung in this regard, especially Jung’s “Symbols of Transformation” about how the church transformed or failed to transform libidinal energies. This seems central to the church’s dilemma today and has deep archetypal and symbolic roots. This matter seems central to the psychology of religion.
From his own dark night of the soul Peterson drew his fundamental moral conclusions. “Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death.”
He refers to Jung, who believed that the construction of a moral hierarchy was inevitable. For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual’s moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person’s ultimate value, that person’s god. It was what a person acted out. It was what that person believed most deeply. This is wholeness, and psychological integration; an inescapable, archetypal reality.
As I mentioned earlier, Peterson seems most authoritative and interesting when he reflects psychologically and morally on the vexing problems associated with human existence. His 12 Rules for Life might as well be a thousand.
I mean that as a compliment. I learned from the instruction.
