The Passion of Jordan Peterson

The celebrity psychologist is still compelling, and still tortured

Jordan Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning, is unreadable. I know this because I once tried to read it. I don’t remember what percentage I managed to muscle through before finally giving up. It was only later that I realized if I were to skip past the pages upon pages of discursive ramblings on mythology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience, past the indecipherable diagrams of nested ovals with labels like “The Emergence of Christ from Group Identity and Chaos” and “The Alchemical Opus as Myth of Redemption,” all the way to the conclusion, I would find a moment where the whole mad merry-go-round stops dead, and Peterson does what Peterson would one day become famous for doing best, though no one knew it yet: He tells a story.

There’s this woman he’s never forgotten, he tells us, a woman he met at a clinic in Montreal, when he was a young intern fresh out of grad school. She looked like “a medieval peasant,” or at least his idea of one. She was pathologically shy, always looking down, always shading her eyes, as if an overpowering light were emanating from everyone she met. She was about thirty-five years old, but she looked fifty, with no beauty that anyone should desire her. Dirt clung about her clothes and hair. Her teeth were yellowed. She was illiterate and barely verbal. It was hard to pinpoint the cause of her dysfunction. Was it a congenital impairment? Was it PTSD from her violently insane, alcoholic boyfriend? No one knew. She lived with her mother and a bedridden aunt. She appeared to have only one friend: a small dog, which she faithfully walked every day.

Peterson’s team had been working, with little success, to raise this woman’s social IQ. They wanted to at least get her to the point where people wouldn’t cross the street to avoid her. But every time they thought they’d made progress, it was undone as soon as she stepped outside the clinic. She was never hostile or angry with them. She simply couldn’t lift her eyes to meet the world.

And yet, she did have this one idea, which she was urgently trying to convey to Peterson, even though he wasn’t really the right person to ask about it, but in her mind, he was as high above her as anyone else.

This was her idea: She knew the clinic was connected to a large psychiatric hospital. She knew the patients in that hospital were even worse off than she was. They were the ones too shattered to survive beyond its doors, the ones who huddled together in the basement during frigid Montreal winters, gibbering and wandering around the vending machines like the ruined souls in Dante’s Inferno. The woman knew all this because at some point, she’d been able to do some kind of limited volunteer work there. And she had the idea that maybe, if she could just figure out the right bureaucratic button to push, she could do something more to help one of those patients. Specifically, she thought maybe she could take someone outside for a walk with her dog.

A hopeless idea, the young Peterson knew, a completely unworkable idea. But it was hers, and it was all she had.

“I was not very successful in aiding her,” he recalls ruefully, “but she didn’t seem to hold that against me.”

What is the point of this story? For Peterson, the shy woman with a dog is nothing less than a living, breathing defeater of determinism. He couldn’t tell you if she was a saint or not. Maybe she was rude to her sick aunt. Maybe she kicked her dog. But from his limited perspective, in the time and place where his path crossed hers, “she seemed to me, rightly or wrongly, to be a symbol of suffering humanity, sorely afflicted, yet capable of courage and love.”

Peterson then quotes a section from Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in the famous passage where God surveys the fall of Satan and declares that he was created “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” “Such I created all the Ethereal Powers/And Spirits, both them who stood and them who failed.” When Peterson encountered the shy woman, he saw the spirit trapped within her broken body—free to fall, yet standing.

If, like me, you were following Peterson in the first year he exploded on the scene as a public intellectual, you might have heard him tell this story a few different times. The shy woman with a dog still haunted him. His thoughts still followed her. He couldn’t help bringing her up in a panel discussion where biologist Bret Weinstein said it seemed logical that where intelligence was stunted, “wisdom would fail to emerge” (from c. 41:00). He managed to keep it together in that telling, but he usually struggled to get through it without becoming emotional. My favorite version was probably from this audience-filmed lecture in Australia, starting around 53 minutes in, when he says, “You don’t have the right to use your tragedy to make the world a worse place.” Then he tells her story as proof that you can still attempt to make the world a better place, even amidst the most appalling of tragedies. By the end, the whole crowd is cheering for her. “I never forgot her,” he says, shaking his head. “I’ll never forget her.”

This was the Jordan Peterson who captivated that crowd, captivated hundreds more like it, and captivated me. The Peterson who could take a trivial-sounding tip like “Always pet a cat when you see one in the street” and turn it into the most heartbreakingly eloquent of meditations on how one can make tragedy merely tragic, and not hell. The Peterson who could somehow make young men sit still and listen to hours-long lectures about the Old Testament. The Peterson who would spend six minutes in Q&A telling one of those young men why he shouldn’t kill himself.

That was what separated Peterson from other articulate public intellectuals of his generation—people who were successful, but on nothing like this scale. More than merely articulate, more than merely passionate, he was compassionate. He didn’t simply talk to people. He actively loved them, so intensely that it seemed he was at all times attempting to take the burdens of all humanity on his own shoulders. Yes, he was also a polemicist, a political lightning-rod, a man with a knack for making all the most annoying people furious with him all at once. But we had many great polemicists. We had many great gadflies. What we didn’t have was a great humanist. That was the subtitle I chose for my contribution to an anthology of essays trying to condense his appeal for a popular audience: Peterson as Humanist. The best prof you ever had. The best coach you ever had. The best father, perhaps, you never had.

I’ve been speaking in the past tense, as if he’s dead. Thankfully he’s not, although he did come dramatically close to it. Some have said he hasn’t been the same since. He continues to sell books, draw crowds, and pump out all manner of widely viewed content for the Daily Wire, from podcasts to panel discussions to documentaries. Yet even his fans will say that he’s never recaptured the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of his first emergence on the world stage. His second popular book, Beyond Order, was a more labored read than 12 Rules for Life. But that’s nothing compared to his newest book, We Who Wrestle With God, a Herculean attempt to translate the substance of his Old Testament lectures from stage to page. Gone is the pithy, folksy wisdom of his blockbuster hit. Here instead is another meandering, painfully stitched together patchwork quilt of multiple academic disciplines, towards a grand unifying theory of science, religion, and human history, with the stated aim of ushering in a new era of human self-understanding. A work he’s announced as nothing less than the demolition of atheism, whatever that means coming from a man who hates to be asked if he believes in God. “It’s not like people are going to throw themselves at the feet of God and worship,” he clarifies. “It requires a reconsideration of what we mean by belief.”

This is that singular combination of vulnerability and hubris which continues to draw attention and provoke a response, even past what most would consider Peterson’s peak. You can see it nascent in Maps of Meaning, when he quotes his younger self in a letter to his father—somehow both arrogant and touchingly innocent:

If you’re interested in me telling you more (I can’t always tell if someone is interested) then I will, later. I don’t know, Dad, but I think I have discovered something that no one else has any idea about, and I’m not sure I can do it justice. Its scope is so broad that I can see only parts of it clearly at one time, and it is exceedingly difficult to set down comprehensibly in writing. You see, most of the kind of knowledge that I am trying to transmit verbally and logically has always been passed down from one person to another by means of art and music and religion and tradition, and not by rational explanation, and it is like translating from one language to another. It’s not just a different language, though—it is an entirely different mode of experience.

Anyways

I’m glad that you and Mom are doing well. Thank you for doing my income tax returns.

Jordan

Peterson is now much older and wiser and doing his own income tax returns, but he remains utterly confident that he’s discovered something no one else has any idea about. However, atheist polemicists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins remain unconvinced. Peterson’s recent dialogue with Dawkins felt like a wearier, abridged retread of his multiple rounds with Harris in 2018. Like Harris, Dawkins was utterly immovable, insisting that Peterson just stop dancing and answer certain basic questions: Do you believe in the Virgin Birth? Do you believe in the Resurrection? Now, as then, when pressed, Peterson falls back on an uneasy agnosticism. At a certain point, moderator Alex O’Connor notes that whereas Peterson sees himself building a stairway to heaven, others may see him as “dragging the divine down to the mundane.” To this, Peterson replies that “it doesn’t make any difference to me whether it’s the material reaching upward or the Divine descending downward.” Dawkins interjects, “You don’t. That’s exactly right. That’s the problem. You don’t see the difference.”

This is not going to be a review of the new book, which (Lord give me strength) I’ve now promised to write for someone else. Until I was approached, I didn’t even have immediate plans to read it. I already knew more or less what I would be getting—something likely not as tortured as Maps of Meaning, but closer to it than his other work, because this is the book Jordan Peterson has been desperately wanting to write since he started to sell books, and he’s now reached the stage where no editor can stop him.

And yet, as I procrastinate by scrolling through other people’s reviews, I can’t help detecting a certain smugness in assessments like this writeup by Rowan Williams in The Guardian, archly subtitled “a culture warrior out of his depth.” Williams notes that the book is poorly edited and goes off on political rabbit trails, with often tenuous connections to the Old Testament text supposedly under analysis at a given moment. Fair enough. But the former Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t content just to say this. He must go further and signal that unlike Peterson, that benighted culture warrior, he is politically correct—more nuanced, more feminist, more sensitive to people who want to discuss the patriarchy or gender fluidity or whatever the post-modern topic du jour may be. He sneers at how Peterson “predictably…sees any qualification of the simple binary of gender identity as equivalent to denying the difference between good and evil, a refusal of the basic polarities of reality.” The former Archbishop would have us know that “most serious discussions of gender fluidity do not deny evolutionary biology or sexual differentiation as such; they are asking for a more painstaking attention both to the social construction of roles and to the specifics of dysphoria. They deserve a better level of engagement.”

I believe it was Elizabeth Anscombe who had the best response to the patronizing claim that nothing is ever “black and white.” She pointed out that two things manifestly are: black, and white.

There is something amusing about a Church of England ex-cleric attempting to tone-police a figure like Peterson, a church outsider who has singlehandedly galvanized numerous young people into serious engagement with Scripture and the Christian faith. I just met one of them at a small party the other night, and not one designed to select for Jordan Peterson fans either. This young man just happens to live across the street from my friends. He was a militant Internet atheist until he encountered Peterson’s lectures, which inspired him to take the Bible seriously. On the autism spectrum himself, he knew he had encountered a kindred spirit. Eventually, a Catholic friend prodded him to go further, and by then he was open enough to listen. Within a couple of years, he was baptized. That was four years ago. He is now in Catholic seminary, diligently learning theology, and eagerly evangelizing everyone he meets.

Whatever he does wrong, Peterson has certainly done many things right. The former Archbishop seems less than curious about what those things might be. I can’t think why.

Then there’s Times columnist James Marriott, who has the admittedly legitimate grievance that Peterson’s publishing team plucked an out-of-context bit of praise from his negative review of Beyond Order, then slapped it on the paperback as if it were a rave review. His even more pointed pan of the new book is certainly entertaining, a flawless exercise in critical savagery. Yet it fails to acknowledge the seriousness of what Peterson is attempting to convey and ultimately explain, however clumsily. Marriott’s Beyond Order review cringed at Peterson’s suggestion that “the mundane failures and struggles of our lives are part of a grand drama of myth and legend…Believe in Peterson’s scheme and you’re not just a pizza delivery boy, you’re slaying the Dragon of Chaos one calzone at a time.” A lecture review similarly cringes at the suggestion that “everyone is a divine centre of intrinsic value,” snarking that the line between Peterson and Gwyneth Paltrow can be rather fine.

As an atheist writer, Marriott is free to cringe away, but he’s surely intelligent enough to know that the doctrine of imago Dei has been around slightly longer than Gwyneth Paltrow (even if saying we ourselves are “divine” is not quite on the mark). The world according to the Bible is a world in which the pizza delivery boy is, in fact, part of a grand drama.

And this is the passion of Jordan Peterson: to see the delivery boy, or the shy nonverbal woman, with all their foibles, all their sorrows, and all their triumphs, as infinitely valuable, even though he doesn’t know what that means. And more, to make people understand that whatever it means, a civilization failing to see it will wither and die. In our best moments, we all see it. Even James Marriott can see it, cynic that he is. That, more than anything else, will be what survives of Peterson’s legacy, long after his books have fallen out of print and been left to gather dust on secondhand shelves.

It remains to be seen whether or not he realizes that to finally solve his own mystery, to crack his own project, he must flip it upside down. He must perceive that there is, indeed, a difference between the mundane reaching up to the divine and the divine descending to the mundane. It is the difference between staggering uphill and being carried, between being lost and being found. It is the difference between man’s search for God and God’s search for man.