What I’m Reading #1: “12 Rules for Life,” by Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson debates students at the University of Toronto (EDUARDO LIMA / METRO NEWS)

I am introducing a new element to the podcast. These episodes will be shorter usually, clocking in anywhere from 5 to 15 or 20 minutes.

It’s a simple concept. What are you reading? And what kind of new or interesting thoughts is it sparking?

We start a lot of books. We don’t always finish them. Even harder than finishing books is developing polished thoughts or takes.

I was sitting in church the other day, thinking about the two books I had recently started. I wasn’t feeling all that great. But the thought of those books, that got me excited.

Here’s a little bit about one of those books.

I had vaguely heard of Jordan Peterson — something about some comment that had upset some folks somewhere. But the University of Toronto psychology professor wasn’t really on my radar until I got a message about two weeks ago from a fellow journalist, a photographer, a guy in his early 30’s, who sent me — out of the blue — a Twitter thread about Peterson by an African-American theology professor named Anthony Bradley.

My friend said he’d been “devouring” YouTube videos of Peterson and that Peterson was “exploding in my circles.” Bradley’s thread asked the question: “Why are young guys into Jordan Peterson?”

This got my attention. I didn’t realize young guys were into Peterson. I didn’t know at that time that Peterson’s YouTube videos had racked up around 40 million views as of late January.

Professor Bradley’s tweet thread increased my interest. Much of his critique was aimed at the American evangelical church. The broad sweep of Bradley’s thread was also fascinating. He had a command of decades of cultural and religious history over the past half-century, and was placing Peterson within that context. In short, he said the evangelical church had spent most of its energy trying to shame young men into behaving, and that Peterson’s message is more of an exhortation mixed with encouragement to — in his words — grow the hell up. He said very explicitly in a recent interview that “I don’t think young men hear words of encouragement … young men are starving for this sort of message.”

I picked up another clue from James K.A. Smith, a philosophy professor at Calvin College, a Christian university in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who wrote a book I read last year called “You Are What You Love.” Smith made a comment on Twitter showing a photo of a Bushmaster rifle ad. The ad portrayed an AR-15 next to the words, “Consider your man card reissued.” Smith mocked the idea that manhood was “under attack,” and called it a “myth.” It was either Smith or someone else that I saw mention Peterson in the same breath as Milo Yiannopoulos, the provocateur of the alt-right. The point this person made was that they’d rather see young men reading or listening to Peterson than Milo, which I guess was sort of a compliment to Peterson, but also a form of damning by faint praise.

Then I saw Peterson had done an interview with Jay Kang on Vice, and had complained afterward about the segment that had aired. I watched the segment, watched an extended clip of the interview, and watched part of Peterson’s complaint. I wasn’t impressed with Peterson’s critique of Kang’s journalism, which he made in front of an audience during a question and answer session after a speech. But what stood out from watching that clip was the adulation that seemed to roll off the crowd toward Peterson. It was that adoration that seemed to tempt Peterson — successfully — to take an easy out and dismiss Kang’s interview as unfair.

So after all that, I bought Peterson’s book: “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote To Chaos.”

The book is laid out simply, with 12 chapters, one for each rule. Here are the 12 Rules:

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
8. Tell the truth — or at least, don’t lie
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
10. Be precise in your speech
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Pretty compelling and intriguing stuff. I skipped right to Chapter 11, the one about kids skateboarding. And so far I’ve read that Chapter, the introduction, and Chapter 1. There’s things to like on the surface at least. Take care of yourself before you criticize others. Seems pretty straightforward. Is there a huge problem with people not doing that? I don’t know. Maybe I’m out of touch, but I’m also pretty busy dealing with my own imperfections to worry a whole lot about others.

Some of Peterson’s stuff, actually a lot of it, seems pretty basic. The whole “get your act together” schtick is tired and shallow to me. He actually kind of reminds me of the kind of high school or youth sports coach who thinks the key to leading young men is to “fire them up” with tough talk and yelling. I’d call this “false bravado.” I think it’s a sugar high form of leadership.

And when I see people throwing around broad terms like “social justice warrior” and “the authoritarian left,” my BS radar goes up. That’s not because I think there’s nothing to the critique embedded in those terms. I do. But I’m skeptical of people who throw those terms around because it’s easy to do, it might signal a form of intellectual laziness, and doesn’t signal to me that someone is interested in learning and dialogue and conversation. It signals to me they’re more interested in verbal combat, often from a defensive and insecure posture.

But here’s what has stood out to me so far in the two chapters I’ve read.

Forward

• He’s skeptical of utopianism, according to the introduction by a fellow named Norman Doidge. His skepticism is grounded in a study of the history of the Soviet Union and of Nazism. He has a “concern about our human capacity for evil in the name of good.”
• I can get on board with that. I too cross the street when I see utopians coming.

Introduction/Overture

• He defends the idea of “hierarchy” as not all bad.
• “A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value — a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued” (xxxi).
• He is concerned with finding a balance between social order and social chaos (xxxiv). His concern appears to be that relativism and postmodernism have created a belief system where equality is the highest good, and he seems to believe that the believers in forced equality have the flavor of totalitarianism. He has been shaped in this belief by his experience in the university setting. He has refused to use gender pronouns that some transgender people have requested that he use, and he sees a sinister force at work in the attempt to censure him for his refusal.
• He ends his introduction, which he refers to as an overture (kind of pretentious), with the line: “If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish.” A non-objectionable and vague sentiment that signals more than anything what he emphasizes — personal responsibility — and what he does not emphasize — collective or systemic impacts on the individual.

Chapter 1 — Stand up straight with your shoulders back

• A lot of words here to say something pretty simple: stand up for yourself. He talks about lobsters that become more cowed as they lose fights, and compares it to people who don’t stand up for themselves, and grow resentful, and invite further abuse from others.
• I read the whole chapter and underlined parts of it, but nothing in it stood out enough for me to repeat it. It’s not an impressive chapter to me.

Chapter 11 — Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

• The basic point of the chapter title is that we shouldn’t deprive others of their ability to take risks, because this provides a great deal of meaning to human beings. “Overprotected, we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full of opportunity suddenly makes its appearance, as it inevitably will” (287).
• He quotes Nietzsche as saying, “You preachers of equality … your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue” (288). That sentiment seems pretty central to his worldview. He says two pages later that “people motivated to make things better usually aren’t concerned with changing other people — or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first).” Again that’s a sentiment I can get behind, but is he responding to a real problem, or is this a straw man he’s erecting? I don’t see data or evidence yet to back up the claim that this is a endemic problem.
• He tells a very dark story about a friend of his named Chris who went to school in Canada with Native American kids and wouldn’t fight some of these kids when picked on because of his guilt over the genocide of Native Americans by European settlers. Peterson then says that Chris “developed a deep hatred for masculinity” (291) but does not explain how this is linked to his guilt over treatment of Native Americans. He then says Chris was influenced by Buddhism to believe in the “negation of his own Being,” and “came to believe that the same applied to others.” He connects all this to Chris being so angry that he snaps side view mirrors off random cars, and Peterson even says that when Chris came to live with him and his wife, he had to talk his friend down from killing them one night (294). He ends this section by describing a Ted talk by a professor who said humans were a “threat … to the survival of the planet” and advocated for people only having one child. The professor recommends this to everyone. Peterson feels this man to be “animated” by the same “dread spirit” that had infected Chris. But this professor had done what Peterson just pages earlier had recommended, applying his own principles to himself first before advocating them to others. But Peterson compares this professor’s talk to Mao’s Cultural Revolution “and its one child policy.” (295)
• He says the Columbine killers “appointed themselves judges of the human race” (296). He connects this to Richard Attenborough’s statement that humans are a plague. He then states, “Why does it so often seem to be the very people standing so visibly against prejudice who so often appear to feel obligated to denounce humanity itself? I have seen university students, particularly those in the humanities, suffer genuine declines in their mental health from being philosophically berated by such defenders of the planet for their existence as members of the human species. It’s worse, I think, for young men. As privileged beneficiaries of the patriarchy, their accomplishments are considered unearned” (297). This is where he’s getting into the stuff that draws young men, for obvious reasons.
• He says the modern schooling system is set up to inculcate obedience more than anything else. On this, I’m sympathetic, as I’ve been persuaded by what I’ve read by Seth Godin about this.
• He goes on to defend the idea of hierarchy.
• “Culture is an oppressive structure … It must be rescued, repaired and kept at by … It crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential. But it offers great gain too … To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous” (302).
• “Any hierarchy creates winners and losers … 1.) The collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at that pursuit no matter what it is) and 2.) it is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning. We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself — and then there would be nothing worth living for” (303).
• Even thought I think Peterson engages in hyperbole at some points, this is thought-provoking, and I do find merit in parts of this. In fact it connects quite profoundly with some of the deepest, most subterannean sentiments in culture that I have been mulling over as it relates to how people think about politics, about parties, and about institutional prerogative versus individual choice. But then Peterson goes off on a tangent right after this about how it is “perverse to consider culture the creation of men” (303) and he uses the example of men creating tampons and anesthesia for “painless childbirth” to argue that men’s contributions to culture were great for women. He says that “education, social work, art history, gender studies, literature, sociology and, increasingly, law actively treat men as oppressors and men’s activity as inherently destructive” (305). Here he has crossed firmly into “war on men” territory, and again, while I have not read the whole book yet, he is making this claim without any supporting evidence. I certainly don’t feel besieged or threatened as a man. This is what James K.A. Smith was referring to when he called Peterson a “manhood-under-attack purveyor.”
• Peterson then moves on to discussing Marxist and postmodern philosophers such as Max Horkheimer and Jacques Derrida, who saw culture solely through the lens of power. And he then moves into a very Ayn Randian (“We the Living”) tale of the communists in the Soviet Union, where those with wealth were killed or sent to gulags. “Wealth signified oppression, and private property was theft. It was time for some equity,” Peterson writes (308). He then moves back to discussing Derrida, who he says refused to recognize the brutality of the Soviet regime. Peterson notes: “The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role” (311).
• “To understand Peterson’s worldview, you have to see the connection between his opposition to gender-neutral pronouns and his obsession with the Soviet Union. He believes that the insistence on the use of gender-neutral pronouns is rooted in postmodernism, which he sees as thinly disguised Marxism. The imposition of Marxism led to the state-sponsored slaughter of millions. For Peterson, then, the mandated use of gender-neutral pronouns isn’t just a case of political correctness run amok. It’s much more serious than that. When he refers to the “murderous ideology” of postmodernism, he means it literally.” https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-s-So-Dangerous-About/242256
• He then spends 20 pages discussing gender, which I found mostly tiresome. But to come to the point, 20 pages later, he writes that “if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology” (330). There may be some truth to this, but the unfortunate thing is that instead of building an argument for statements like this, using evidence and logic, he’s just talking for page after page, he’s all over the place, and so statements like this are just part of a word salad.
• He ends the chapter with this clever statement, which explains part of his appeal: “If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

So that’s what I’ve read so far of Jordan Peterson’s book “12 Rules for Life.” It’s certainly causing a stir, and so hopefully that gives you a flavor of what the book is about and what Peterson is about.

If you want to read a good profile about Peterson that gives really great background about who he is and what drives him, check out Tom Bartlett’s piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education.