Jordan Peterson: Instead of what?

A short evaluation and critique of the phenomenon and some remarks on the thought itself.

I'd like to offer some side notes on the phenomenon of Jordan Peterson. I will attempt to examine the influence of his public persona while also offering a more intellectual critique that reflects my personal viewpoint. Let's begin with his public image.

It seems to me that Peterson is an update of an old phenomenon for our era, and the fact that he specifically succeeded in crossing the Rubicon demands examination. The phenomenon of the public intellectual itself is not new and dates back, in the variation familiar to us, at least to Rousseau. However, as is known, this phenomenon is generally in free fall in the era of popular politics, and some would say since the rise of new media altogether. It's not exactly that there are no public intellectuals - one can think of Žižek, for example, or Harari - but that these are perceived by the public, with varying degrees of justice, as elitist. More accurately: their target audience is inherently limited compared to the level of influence Peterson has achieved outside traditional institutional means.

In other words, what's curious about Peterson's public figure is that his competition isn't exactly other people's books or ideas, nor particularly original or deep takes on contemporary culture, but rather TikTok and YouTube videos that are inherently designed for a wide audience. As far as I know, Peterson is the first public intellectual whose solid public standing came specifically from psychology courses (we'll get to the discipline soon) rather than content tailored for popular taste that typically characterizes the mediums he has mastered.

In these respects, before we get to analyzing the reasons, I think we should welcome Peterson's rise. He has, to some extent, restored the idea that intellectualism can be popular. Note: not necessarily that public intellectuals are a successful institution worth preserving - one can certainly doubt that. Rather, intellectual life in general has experienced a certain decline in prestige in the mass media era, which is certainly a negative phenomenon, as this is undoubtedly a critical way of life for Western culture.

But there's a catch. The reason Peterson is so popular isn't that profound. As mentioned, his competition isn't with other intellectuals. What excites people about Peterson is actually his moralistic side. Peterson teaches from the starting point that life has purpose and that there are a series of rules of thumb, usually trivial or specific to an absurd degree, that will make life bearable. I seriously doubt how many of his devoted admirers have ever read his doctoral dissertation (by the way, a very interesting book). That in itself isn't particularly interesting. What is interesting is how much this style seems to be missing for the audience, a lack that should itself serve as a flashing red warning light for anyone concerned about the state of general education in our culture. The role of providing such rules is usually assigned to parents and direct educators of young people, as they are the ones with unmediated access to these young people's lives. Something very deep must be wrong for people in their teens and beyond to seek these rules specifically in mediums like YouTube, but that's not our concern at the moment.

Another aspect of Peterson's popularity is his role as a freedom fighter, fighting against the establishment, which again, characterized the institution of public intellectuals in the past. In this specific sense, I personally have nothing but admiration for him. Peterson fights for freedom of speech precisely for the things that freedom of speech is supposed to ensure: free and public inquiry into what constitutes a good life. His opponents, who have managed to entrench themselves within the establishment, in this sense do present a concerning political phenomenon that may be at the foundation of the sharp movement toward populist politics we've seen in recent years. As you may recall, Peterson himself received at least one of the first boosts to his career when he publicly refused to submit to the vile rhetorical demands of his opponents.

After reviewing the public aspects of the Peterson phenomenon, things that I believe have received enough echo elsewhere as well, let's move to a somewhat more personal and intellectual assessment. In these respects, as we shall see, Peterson is a much more problematic phenomenon than appears at first glance.

To illustrate this, I'd like to tell a short story. A few years ago, a friend and I were traveling in Europe. We had both already heard many of Peterson's lectures at that point, and our opinions were divided. I argued that Peterson, as a psychologist, is undoubtedly an interesting and unconventional figure. But whenever he strays from his specific discipline, say to cultural criticism, general ethical thinking, or thoughts on religious texts, his charlatan side emerges. This is a phenomenon that has improved in recent years, but not by much. According to that friend at the time, I might be right, but he speaks to a broad audience, and if there are incorrect things he preaches, he's always willing to correct his position - but critics should make their voices heard. The opportunity wasn't long in coming. Peterson's public debate with Žižek was announced, and we were provided with an opportunity to examine our positions.

Up to that point, Peterson had made a career criticizing "Marxists in academia." Many times, I argued, he simply didn't know who or what he was talking about. The public debate with Žižek was the perfect opportunity to test this, and not only was I not disappointed, but I couldn't believe the depth of the problematic issues revealed when Peterson had to confront a figure no less broad than himself, a more established public intellectual. The topic of the debate? Marx.

Peterson came to the debate having read from Marx only the Communist Manifesto. Marx, an especially prolific philosopher who wrote countless things that are at the very least interesting, was worthy in his eyes to be judged based on a pamphlet in which he was a co-author. Žižek, whose orientation in Marx is deep, stood dumbfounded. When Peterson was asked who the Marxists in academia were, where they were, names please, he couldn't answer. Fine. Let's move the debate to the side Peterson represents in the discussion, the conservative position and discussions about religion. Here too, the gap between Peterson and Žižek was phenomenal. Žižek poured forth interesting ideas that Peterson didn't know at all, probably because he didn't see the need to open a book by Žižek before the debate. But more horrifyingly, when Žižek mentioned the name Chesterton, Peterson didn't even recognize the name. As we'll soon see, this debate is more than slightly indicative of how Peterson approaches fields that are not Jungian psychology, cognition, or personality typology.

Over the years, Peterson has garnished his lectures with insipid and generic summaries of Foucault. But in practice, Peterson doesn't really see the need to delve deeply into what others have thought about the subjects he discusses. Here are a few examples, which obviously won't cover years of lectures:

1. Peterson frequently recommends reading books by Mircea Eliade, undoubtedly a first-rate intellectual giant who founded comparative religious studies. Recently, for example, he suggested this to Andrew Huberman, host of an interesting podcast on cognition and self-improvement. The suggestion is usually offered with an air of broadening horizons, either for the general public or for natural scientists who, as Charles Snow noted in "The Two Cultures," rarely read books in the humanities these days. All this is well and good. However, Eliade as an intellectual figure is problematic. While there were undoubtedly aspects of original thought in his personality that should be discussed today, many of his theories have received justified criticisms that Peterson largely ignores. For example, Eliade's theory of stages of religious development. Briefly, since Eliade wrote, much water has flowed under the bridge. Some currents have shown that examination of historical evidence that has become available since then shows, for instance, that shamanism, which Eliade saw as a universal human religious form, is actually not, and in all likelihood represents a development of a people or persons of a certain origin who migrated in prehistoric times. Other currents have noted that Eliade's theory finds universal structures where they definitely are not. On a personal level, Eliade's emphasis on the saga of personal renewal is certainly not a universal characteristic as he portrays it, but a secularized expression of the Christian emphasis on repentance. Beyond that, Eliade is not examined as a thinker in light of his tendencies toward esotericism and fascism. All of this, to the best of my recollection, doesn't receive discussion when Peterson recommends Eliade.

2. Peterson launched a series of lectures on the Bible that largely pride themselves on new and original interpretation of Biblical texts. Again, on a popular level, there's nothing wrong with this. But intellectually, in many of the interesting points, he was preceded by interpreters like Northrop Frye whom, as far as I've heard - and I may not have heard everything - he doesn't even mention, much less engage with the genre as one that has been written and thought about before him. His secularized presentation of Bible reading contains a special tension, which I think isn't entirely honest. On one hand, it tries to be a secular interpretation in the sense that it's accessible and can be agreed upon by any person regardless of their religious beliefs. On the other hand, it quietly moves between atheism that characterizes, as contemporary conservative thinker Jeremy Moller wrote, "conservatives who think it's good for other people to be religious," to highly pietistic religiosity that Peterson tends toward from time to time, without presenting these things to the audience as they are.

3. Peterson attempts, even in his doctoral dissertation, to write a bit about phenomenology with an impressive degree of misunderstanding. But in philosophy in general, he shows very little interest. For example, his favorite book by Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil, which is, as mentioned elsewhere, also my favorite book by Nietzsche - which he likes to recommend, receives very sparse discussions. The insights Peterson extracts from Nietzsche could often have been extracted from a much less impressive thinker, Albert Camus. Furthermore, his interpretation of Nietzsche typically suffers from an interesting but characteristic flaw in the Anglo-Saxon reception of Nietzsche. If we use Ernst Jünger's distinction, Peterson tends to read Nietzsche as a "St. Petersburg nihilist" rather than a "German nihilist." The difference, of course, is that Peterson actually reads Nietzsche almost exclusively in relation to his insights on life as biography and impossible choices, as if he were Dostoevsky, whom he greatly admires. Needless to say, if that's what you're opening Nietzsche for, it's better not to open him at all.

All these are small points I'm writing from memory, but in practice, almost every time he ventures outside the fields in which he truly has expertise, he presents similar problems of lack of seriousness. This isn't an inevitable fate. If someone has the time to lecture others on certain things, one would expect them to also have the time to read the relevant literature. In any case, let's move on to a somewhat deeper critique.

Much of Peterson's project rests on remodeling modern psychological and neurological knowledge to produce a subject that functions properly on the symbolic and ethical level. This in itself is a very interesting project, and in my opinion, there is much to discuss in his doctrine in light of this story. However, in parallel, Peterson's frequent jumps to the social level, which, as Durkheim warned in his time, should beware of too deep an analogy to the individual level, often rest on biological bases that don't sufficiently take into account the historical and social thinking that exists on these topics, and therefore move assertively between trivial arguments - a functioning hierarchy is a good thing - to far-reaching conclusions about human existence as such.

But beyond that, Peterson has a serious problem with Protestant ethics. His moralistic discussions are framed in terms of the rise of moral discourse from around the seventeenth century. The egoism-altruism axis plays an important role for him, but he subjects it to a critical sublimation. The topic he talks about most is how in our proper functioning we sacrifice our current selfhood for our future self. This type of discussion for him specifically returns to Jung's insights on this subject. This is not a "methodological" problem like the other problems, but an internal problem with his thought. But if we use the terms of the Israeli philosopher Halbertal, there is an interesting distinction between "sacrificing for" and "sacrificing to." Sacrificing for refers to our ability to sacrifice for all kinds of things we see as valuable in our practical lives. Sacrificing to refers to our ability to sacrifice for God, or transcendent ideals that exist beyond the horizon of our practical lives. The deliberate blurring of this boundary creates an ethic with a serious problem.

Self-sacrifice is a sublimation of the idea of human sacrifice. In practice, it is a type of it, and Christianity specifically turns them into part of the same continuum. But self-sacrifice is not part of the functioning of normal life. It is an exceptional marker that there is a real danger in making it a foundation of ordinary life. Self-sacrifice may be expressed in glorious martyrdom, but it may also serve ideals that are violent toward life itself, similar to Nietzsche's famous critique of ascetic life. The Protestant ethic in Peterson works overtime here as it makes the classic move of sublimating the Catholic monastic ideal into everyday life, with all the danger such ethics pose to the hierarchical social structures that Peterson so values.

So far, Peterson's figure has been examined primarily in light of being a problematic public phenomenon. But in my last remarks, I'm actually aiming at a discussion that almost doesn't take place - the discussion of the problematic aspects of his thought itself. His public presence often overshadows, in the interest it generates, the content of the things themselves. It seems to me that the time has come to think a bit more seriously about the problems his thinking creates, preferably from figures who are no less intellectually capable than him, another depleting resource of the planet that receives too little attention.