It was just seven years ago that Canadian Jordan Peterson leapt into the UK’s public consciousness. Already known across the Atlantic for his YouTube series criticising Canada’s C-16 gender rights bill, his interview with Channel 4 journalist Cathy Newman in January 2018 propelled him to stardom. He was ennobled by Fox News as ‘The Left’s new Public Enemy No. 1’, solidifying his self-perpetuated image as a man of science, taking down the hysteria of the woke establishment. Barely six months after said interview, Peterson was invited to speak at the Oxford Union, returning in December 2021. And – joy of joys – he’s back for a third appearance this term.
Despite labelling himself as a “classic British liberal”, Peterson has long been a flagbearer of the right in the culture wars that have gripped our social media age. His critiques of the left and assertions of traditional archetypes championing masculinity have won him millions of fans across the globe, and he now stands as a shaman for the anti-woke, inviting such luminaries as Tommy Robinson (the founder of the EDL) to his Youtube channel which has over 8 million subscribers. In the vein of Andrew Tate, Russell Brand, and Ben Shapiro, he has long now been a leading voice for a generation of ‘disaffected’ and ‘marginalised’ white males.
Unlike the above figures, Peterson has a background in clinical psychology and an academic pedigree that occasionally provokes genuinely thought-provoking discourse. Unfortunately, his playbook is filled with the kind of vacuous pandering about the injustice of the white male existence and the steps needed to correct this we’ve seen from figures like Tate and Brand. His content is largely nonsense: his bestselling 2018 book ’12 Rules for Life’ features such groundbreaking insights as, “tell the truth,” and, “pay attention.” Moreover, like his fellow right-wing commentators, he combines exceedingly obvious self-help advice such as the importance of making one’s bed in the morning with a cutting, decisive rhetorical style that has won him millions of hits online. Peterson augments his rhetoric with pseudo-philosophical technical jargon which endows him with the gravitas of a rigorous academic.
Peterson asserts himself as a man of science but fundamentally much of his discourse stretches the limits of credulity. It’s time we came to the lobster. Perhaps his most well-known claim is that human male-dominated hierarchies are not a social construct and are in fact a scientific actuality as proven by our sharing of a common evolutionary ancestor. Despite there being no factual basis for this claim, for years it was a core part of Peterson’s diatribes. He has been much mocked for his crustacean obsession, but it is far from his only questionable claim: in a recent interview he tried to convince Richard Dawkins of the “biological reality” of dragons.
Peterson’s scientific contentions may be spurious, but I believe they represent a dangerous trend, in which such political commentators turn to increasingly outrageous and incendiary comments in order to maintain relevancy. The most obvious example is Tate, whose credo of overt, hectoring misogyny aims to deliberately rile up his supporters. Peterson is not as indefensible as Tate, who faces criminal charges for sex trafficking, yet he is still deserving of criticism because he portrays himself as a respectable, science-backed figure. In a world where 80% of young people get their news primarily from social media, the existence of such men spouting aggressive and divisive content to their millions of followers is highly concerning.
Peterson’s most recent book, ‘We Who Wrestle with God’, a study of the Biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, exemplifies another worrying trend. Peterson is a firm believer in the philosophy of Carl Jung, who leaned heavily into the idea that there exists an underlying collective consciousness of ancient archetypes which still impacts our psychology. Applying this to the Bible, Peterson finds universal truths within such archetypes. For example, he finds similarities between Cain, that symbol of envy who murdered his brother Abel, and “Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me Fame” and “Syndrome in The Incredibles”. Eyebrows might be raised at the scholarly credentials of a man whose work is founded on lobsters and Despicable Me.
Where the danger lies, as James Marriott has noted in The Times, is that such readings “induce a kind of symbological paranoia”. If Disney villains are seen as personifications of true original sin, where does one stop looking for allegory and allusion? Peterson’s claim that the golden snitch in Harry Potter is the “manifestation of the spirit Mercurius” really seems to be a stretch. As Marriott notes in the same piece, what we are seeing here is “Biblical scholarship as conspiracy theory”. Marriott’s own allusion here is particularly apt because that is exactly how commentators such as Peterson thrive. For their viewers, the world is a murky place of conspiracy controlled by shadowy cabals: what they offer is a ‘red-pilled’ view of the world, their confident voices shining like a beacon in the mist.
In a time when young people are increasingly isolated from one another thanks to the ossifying force of social media, the gospel of masculinity preached by Peterson and his cohort is inevitably going to be attractive to many young men. He is a skilled orator and polemicist, and clips of him ‘destroying’ interviewers are red meat for his followers. While it must be noted that Newman hardly covered herself in glory in that original interview, the shocking abuse she suffered online at the hands of Peterson’s supporters is prime evidence of the danger of such rhetoric. Peterson is not necessarily a leader of the alt-right, but his confident support of their beliefs is undoubtedly worrying in its affirmation that they are on the right path.
Peterson returns to Oxford for round three in a few weeks, then. I do not believe he should be de-platformed, as some argued in the university’s student pages before his first arrival back in 2018. It is as vital as ever to hear from a number of viewpoints, and perhaps especially those we do not agree with. However, what I do hope, is that he comes in the guise of an academic, here to illuminate with his wealth of clinical knowledge, and not in the form of dangerous ideological firebrand. For if it’s the latter, let me save you some time and money: make your bed and go to the gym. And thank God for lobsters.