It took a long time to settle on a title 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons. We require rules, standards, values-alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s Order.
12 Rules for Life, Introduction
If Maps of Meaning is a modern right Hegelian re-treading of The Phenomenology of Spirit then sure 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is the closest Peterson will get to The World as Will and Representation. Where the former book discusses (or rather, philosophically passes over in silence) the passage of consciousness towards the codification of a shared map of meaning in cultural mythology, religion and literature, the latter is much more straightforwardly directed at individuals. It is also the closest Peterson comes to writing a guide to moral and sound political behaviour, though this is hardly done in a systematic manner. More often than not one gets anecdotes, references and moralism in lieu of actual moral and political analysis. Much of this is delivered at a ‘lower’ resolution than his earlier work, signifying Peterson’s passage from academic to public intellectual with a mass following. Despite these limitations, it is important to discuss the book to truly understand why Peterson has become so synonymous with a critique of the Left and support for conservative and/or classical liberal positions.
At the centre of 12 Rules for Life are, surprisingly, a dozen rules to help human beings transcend the suffering Peterson argues is built into the structure of Being itself. His denotation of Being with a capital B is directly drawn from Heidegger, who was also an existentially minded thinker attracted to reactionary viewpoints. Unlike Heidegger, whom from the concluding chapters of Being and Time on often struggled to detach the ontological concept of Being from the limitations of phenomenological idealism, Peterson seems quite willing to interpret ontology in normative idealist terms. This has far more in common with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than Heidegger, who as philosophers of the will were willing to give Being a normative slant similar to Peterson’s. Beliefs still make and are the world in 12 Rules for Life, while for the later Heidegger our cultural beliefs about Being are highly flawed and need to be overcome through the end of philosophy and the movement to ‘thinking’. This is of course because Heidegger recognized that the course of mythologizing from Plato to Nietzsche resulted in the ultimate turn towards nihilistic modernity; which isn’t something a defender of everything Western like Peterson would want to hear.
One curious aside is worth noting. Peterson is well known for moralizing about the evils of invoking Marxist philosophy after the publication of the Gulag Archipelago laid bare the apparently cancerous nature of Marxism. Yet he has little to say about Heidegger’s participation in the Nazi Party and his unwillingness to apologize for it long after the publication of Mans Search for Meaning. This is quite a striking juxtaposition, since Marx died decades before Lenin ever sniffed at power, while Heidegger actively lived through the worst years of Nazi tyranny. All of the extensive debate about Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism gets passed over in silence, but the Jewish Jacques Derrida (who did actually take the Heidegger issue seriously in his book On Spirit) gets chided for apparently trying to make Marx great again. This initiates an annoying habit of Peterson’s which persists throughout the book, where the scandals of figures he admires are overlooked while (typically leftist) authors he does not admire typically get scolded for far less valid reasons than Nazis like Heidegger and anti-democratic illiberal perfectionists like Nietzsche.
Moving on from Being itself, we get to the 12 rules laid down by Peterson. These appear superficially mundane, and have therefore attracted a degree of scorn by leftist critics for their apparent banality. While I understand the inclination, the seemingly trite quality of the rules belies the (very) serious points about life and suffering Peterson is trying to get across. One might give him some credit for attempting to deliver such sermonizing rhetoric in a more humorous and down to earth fashion. The 12 rules are:
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.
Each one of these rules is detailed quite extensively in the book, with each one receiving a chapter’s worth of explication alongside the strange Heideggerian introduction and the summative conclusion. Now as psychological advice to individuals looking to set their personal life in order, I suspect Peterson’s 12 rules might be helpful to many. In particular to young men looking for such personalized guidance who are perhaps unconsciously seeking a symbolic father figure who provides tough love and stern life advice. In such circumstances Peterson may fit the bill, which should be the case given his decades of training and practical experience as a clinical psychologist. There is nothing wrong with suggesting that one make friends with people who will want the best for you, or insisting that people pet a cat they encounter on the street (my own feline is next to me while I write this, so perhaps he’s biasing me). Anyone in any political or social situation would benefit from having good and reliable friends, and finding gratification in small acts of kindness. The problem isn’t with such individualized psychological advice; it is with the frequently implicit and occasionally explicit political orientation which is delivered alongside the advice.
One of the inner polemics of 12 Rules for Life is against left-wing efforts to criticize the social and economic institutions characteristic of liberal capitalist societies, or to suggest they are responsible for a great deal of suffering around the world. This is made abundantly clear in Chapter One, ‘Stand up straight with your shoulders back’, which includes the infamous comparison between human and lobster hierarchies. While there is nothing untoward about suggesting there is evolutionary continuity between ourselves and our crustacean brothers, the point Peterson is trying to make is that hierarchy is natural and the hierarchies of liberal capitalism in particular are to some extent inevitable and justified. Chapter Six is also significant along the same lines. Peterson insists that an individual should put one’s house in ‘perfect order’ before criticizing the world. That interpreting this ‘precisely’ would mean that hardly anyone, anywhere would ever criticize the world—at least in developed countries where people are likely to read 12 Rules for Life—is one of the intentions behind the rule.
The deeper point this reflects is that the individual and their psychological problems are ontologically and morally prior to society and its injustices. Peterson has of course felt this way for a long time; he chronicled his decision to move away from the field of politics with its ‘economic’ explanations for problems to psychology in the opening of Maps of Meaning. But much as in this earlier work, this position is never really argued for so much as asserted with a great deal of confidence. And as with Maps of Meaning a more philosophical and dialectical analysis of the ontological relationship between the individual and society is lacking. But at least one now gets a better sense of the moral orientation behind the position. Peterson believes that individuals must solve their personal problems first before looking outwards to try and fix what they feel is wrong with the world. Moreover they need to pay close attention to those elements of society which serve a preservative, and not let utopian schemes incline them to inadvertently put the welfare of the abstract collective ahead of the ‘natural’ rights of the individual. Indeed, he often implies the conceptualization of individualized natural rights against the collective was an almost sacred development which must be defended with great care. As he put it in the paper ‘Religion, Sovereignty, Natural Rights, and the Constituent Elements of Experience’:
Even the chimpanzee and the wolf, driven by their biology and culture, act out the idea of sovereignty as inherent in the individual. Human beings have taken the idea much further of course. We have observed it in action and codified its consequences. We have turned it into religion and philosophy, implicit and explicit knowledge. No matter what an individual does, in modern society—even if he is in clear violation of the law—his natural rights remain intact. No matter how outcast he is, how apparently beyond redemption, his existence may still contribute something to the whole. This is not merely a ‘metaphysical’ (this again...) idea. Nor can it be dismissed, regarded as merely a rational construction, without such dismissal threatening the integrity of the modern state, psychological and social.
So it becomes clear that Peterson’s belief in the ontological and moral priority of the individual runs very deep. Everything in 12 Rules for Life hinges on it, the failure of the Toronto Maple Leafs flows from ignoring it, and abandoning this more than metaphysical idea would destroy the psychological and social integrity of the modern state. This would seem to make Peterson something close to a classical liberal or even a libertarian, with his absolute insistence on the natural rights of the individual against society. But if the individual is everything, why then does Peterson show such concern for ‘rules, values, standards’ and ‘tradition’ all of which entail some commitment to maintaining collective norms of behaviour and belief?
The answer is such a hyper-modernist position would obviously not be to the liking of someone like Peterson, for whom individualistic liberalism is both a blessing to be cherished and a cross to be borne. Far more than Maps of Meaning, which routinely emphasized the creative importance of the ‘revolutionary’ son in helping society progress, 12 Rules for Life is a far more openly conservative book. The critique of modernity central to the earlier work has evolved into a suspicion of permissiveness and occasionally almost open horror at the collapse of traditionalism and the various social hierarchies it supported. Maps of Meaning was the work of a younger scholar, who disliked modernity but remained highly concerned to protect the creative powers of the individual against the totalitarian impulse towards absolute order. This later book, subtitled An Antidote to Chaos, shifts emphasis and brings the conservative impulse for order to the fore. One sees this very clearly in Peterson’s rather loose efforts to naturalize the social hierarchy in liberal capitalist societies. This brings us, inevitably, to consider the lobster.
The first major chapter of 12 Rules for Life is undoubtedly the best known; and with good reason. It opens the text with a quirky, but telling, comparison between the dominance hierarchies of lobsters and those of human beings. The purported ambition of the chapter is to demonstrate the salience of Peterson’s rule that one should ‘stand up straight with your shoulders back’. But as we shall see the more implicit intention goes considerably deeper than a bit of well-meaning advice about posture like your mother might have given you.
Peterson points out the lobsters, like almost all animals we know of, have a compulsive need to ‘establish dominance’. This is paralleled by the evolution of practices and features to demonstrate submission, which is useful in enabling non-dominant members to survive violent encounters with their more assertive and powerful kin. Peterson recounts how lobsters, if moved to a new territory they are unfamiliar with, will invariably approach it through cautious exploration. If frightened, they will quickly seek shelter in the nearest available place to hide. This is obviously a significant advantage on the ocean floor, but it comes at a price. Other lobsters will also be on the lookout for premium shelters. They are also on the lookout for food and mates. Lobsters frequently encounter one another while exploring for these goods, and will quickly perform certain defensive or aggressive behaviours. These include releasing a spray which will inform other lobsters of their sex, size, health and mood. Smaller and more passive lobsters will frequently back down from conflict with larger ones, displaying behaviour like retreating in the face of their counterpart. More aggressive lobsters may get into a standoff, engaging in behaviour to assert dominance over the other. This can include moving antennae, advancing in a dangerous manner, and folding their claws downward. In the event that both lobsters feel especially roided up that day, they will engage in combat. Success is achieved when one lobster flips its opponent on its back, in which case the losing lobster will retreat. In some extreme instances, even this will not stop the horror and the lobsters will fight until there is a clear winner and loser. Typically the loser, and sometimes even the winner, do not survive the trial by combat. Interestingly, the story does not stop here. Peterson notes that such combat changes the brain chemistry of both the winner and the loser, determined by the output of serotonin and octopamine modulating communication between lobster neurons. Winning a fight increases the amount of the former chemical relative to the latter, while the opposite is true for the loser. The social result is that lobsters who win fights tend to have higher levels of serotonin, which makes them more assertive and confident. Lobsters who lose have higher levels of octopamine, which makes them more likely to act ‘defeated looking, scrunched up, inhibited, drooping, [and] skulking’. Those lobsters who have won a fight are also more likely to win the next one, while losing lobsters become more likely to fail in their quest for dominance.
This is all fascinating marine biology in its own right, but what might it be doing in a chapter about human psychology? Peterson’s point becomes immediately clear right after this tidy summation. There is an evolutionary continuity between lobsters and humans which apparently explains many features of our own social world. But of course Peterson is not simply concerned to explain these continuities, but to justify ‘the ways of God to man’. And in his opinion hierarchy is natural and inevitable. Moreover, it will frequently be stark and brutal, with immense spoils going to winners and the losers. But this is acceptable to Peterson since, as he points out, the exceeding lobster hierarchies are ‘exceedingly stable’.
It isn’t hard to infer the moral and political lesson Peterson intends us to learn. If anything, he is very transparent about it in the same section:
It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 per cent have as much loot as the bottom 50 per cent—and where the richest 85 people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion. That same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain—indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books...
Peterson then goes on to further vindicate this principle by appealing to economic theory and the Bible. He refers to Price’s Law, named after the economist Derek J. Price, and the arguments of Vilfredo Pareto. He also discusses the ‘Matthew Principle’ which refers to Jesus’s statement in Matthew 25: 29 that ‘to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken’. This is a rather tacky reference to a bastardized Biblical principle, given that Christ was invoking a parable to discuss the importance of storing up moral virtue in preparation for the day of his return. This virtue would be demonstrated in part by looking after the ‘least’ amongst us, including the hungry, the thirsty and the foreign. As Jesus puts it later in Matthew 25.
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for me.’
This is not the last place where Peterson will make a mockery of Christian doctrine by invoking its tropes to reinforce his admiration for social hierarchy. But it is one of the more ironic given he invokes the so-called Matthew Principle with scarcely an acknowledgement for what Jesus actually means.
In either case, Peterson goes on in the rest of the chapter to illustrate the variety of ways that human beings perform dominance or submissiveness in their interpersonal relations and linking these propensities to the generation of the stratified social and economic hierarchies we are all intimately familiar with today. The normative take away is that it is better to strive to be at the top of the pecking order than to find oneself at the bottom, and Peterson provides a variety of tips on how to achieve this goal. These include everything on how to appear more dominant, and thus attractive, towards the opposite sex, how to delay gratification in the moment for more enduring success later, and how to posture correctly by standing up straight with the shoulders back. Once a relative level of dominance and success is achieved, it becomes easier to maintain in no small part because like the lobster our brains will become hardwired to regard ourselves as successful people. The one thing we should not do is start blaming the existence of hierarchies on cultural or political factors, as Peterson tiresomely emphasizes.
All that matters from the Darwinian perspective is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social and cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism either for that matter. It’s not the military industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, arbitrary, malleable cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.
This sentence nicely encapsulates Petersonian morality in a nutshell. There is an implicit fear of efforts to break up dominance hierarchies by conceptualizing them as ‘malleable’; in particular economic, military and gendered hierarchies. By insisting that dominance hierarches are ‘near-eternal’ ‘unchanging’ and so on, Peterson insulates existing hierarchies from substantial criticism by naturalizing them. This helps preserve the ‘order’ he puts so much stock in, even when present amongst the lobsters, and ensures that the exercise of individual freedom is never directed towards potentially destabilizing efforts to transform overarching social structures associated with illegitimate dominance hierarchies. Instead the exercise of freedom is directed towards self-improvement that will allow the fortunate few to climb to the top of the dominance hierarchy. How this benefits everyone else is never really explicated in much detail throughout 12 Rules for Life. The closest I can infer based on Peterson’s varied comments about competence, intelligence and hierarchy is he believes that a system where the best or at least more competent will rise to the top will ultimately work to the benefit of all through establishing a more productive and orderly society. This is of course a classic argument of moralistic defenders of unbridled liberal capitalism, from Ayn Rand through to Rand Paul.
So what to make of all this? First one should note that, despite Peterson’s denunciation of figures who blame all dominance hierarchies on culture and politics, that no one I am familiar with has ever blamed all dominance hierarchies on culture and politics. This includes even the most egalitarian thinkers on the Left. This is perhaps why Peterson is unable to single out a specific individual who holds such a bizarre conception. Certainly some of Peterson’s favourite targets did not. Marx was well aware of evolutionary biology, and positively referenced Darwin’s theory of competitive evolution as a precursor to his own dialectical approach to history (though he was critical of Darwin for allegedly reading bourgeois values into the animal kingdom). Nowhere does Marx ever claim that the natural world is anything less than a competitive and antagonistic place, and he often points out that human history has almost always been the same. Feminist theorists like Simone de Beauvoir never denied that there was obviously a biological basis for the initial emergence of gendered divisions of labour; for instance the superior physical strength of males relative to females in hunter-gatherer societies lead to men enjoying greater independence while hunting. But they also argued that these practices quickly assumed ideological and cultural forms to justify the unnecessary and unjust oppression of women. The position of the various post-modern theorists is more complex, but certainly someone like Michel Foucault never argued that dominance hierarchies and the influence of power can ever be eliminated. Indeed Foucault often went out of his way to stress the productive qualities of power and hierarchy in varied contexts; for instance by guiding children to adulthood safely.
What critics attack is therefore not the necessity of hierarchy in general, but particular hierarchies that are unjustifiable. These may have some roots in our natural inclinations, but the specific form they assume in society is regarded as a deviation from a superior or more just alternative. To give one example, Rawlsian liberals and many social democrats argue that economic hierarchies and inequality can justifiably exist, but only if they are fair and demonstrably work to the primary benefit of the least well off. A more radical push against economic hierarchy came from Marx, but even the Marxists never called for the achievement of full equality along all dimensions of life. Indeed Marx was highly critical of the socialist calls for abstract equality between all persons, regarding it as ahistorical and utopian. Instead Marx wanted the elimination of class-based hierarchies in particular, since he regarded them as emerging from exploitative material conditions we would be better off leaving behind. Or to look at the feminist example, liberal feminists like Martha Nussbaum and even radicals like Catharine MacKinnon in no way seek to eliminate all forms of social hierarchy. This is in part because they believe the superior authority vested in legal institutions and actors can be exercised to eliminate patriarchal forms of oppression. And the list goes on. Now one might object to any or all of these calls to eliminate specific hierarchies, but the point is that none of the figures mentioned wanted to eliminate hierarchy in general. Addressing their arguments means looking at whether the specific hierarchies they want dissolved serve a useful function, not making extremely vague claims about how hierarchy of some sort or another will always exist.
Of course we will never get around to actually doing this because Peterson insists continuously that concern with social injustices should always be secondary to caring for our private self. This brings us to the next significant chapter in 12 Rules for Life, about putting one’s life in complete order before trying to change the world.
Alongside Chapter One the most important political ruminations in 12 Rules for Life appear in Chapter Six, ‘Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World’. This is a theme Peterson comes back to quite consistently, particularly with regard to youthful social justice advocates. This is also the chapter where Peterson’s inclinations towards a Burkean-style ordered liberty approach to politics become most transparent. He continuously insists that the complexity of the world is so vast that individuals who do not fully even have their own lives in order have no right to assume they can improve it. Far better to adopt the cautious approach of conforming to the expectations of the external social world, while working to develop one’s self-worth and success from within.
Peterson’s justification for this position is in fact highly consonant with the cautious and even pessimistic conservative philosophies articulated by figures like Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk and others. Though as always, political dimensions of such inclinations are less explicitly brought to the surface than in the work of those seminal thinkers. Chapter Six opens with a chilling analysis of the Columbine killers’ motivation, echoing the concluding sections of Maps of Meaning on the problem of evil. He points out how the killers appointed themselves judges of existence itself, and the human race in particular, and found them wanting. Their response was to take revenge against existence through a spectacularly impotent act of violence. Peterson points out that these figures, and evil in general, emerge because life in the world is invariably hard. Like the pessimistic conservative Schopenhauer before him, at points Peterson comes very close to accepting the wisdom of Silenus: that the best thing in life would be to have never been born, and the next best thing would be to die quickly. As Peterson puts it early in the chapter:
Life is in truth very hard. Everyone is destined for pain and slated for destruction. Sometimes suffering is clearly the result of a personal fault such as willful blindness, poor decision-making or malevolence. In such cases, when it appears to be self-inflicted, it may even seem just. People get what they deserve, you might contend. That’s cold comfort, however, even when true. Sometime, if those who are suffering changed their behavior, then their lives would unfold less tragically. But human control is limited. Susceptibility to despair, disease, aging and death is universal.
Given all this, it is understandable that some people may come away from the evils of life with a desire to do great evil themselves. But Peterson also points out that some may emerge from even tremendous tragedy without being defined by resentment and anger. They may come away with the conviction to do good, though what that means is not necessarily being good to others immediately or even indefinitely.
Instead we should recognize that life inevitably involves suffering, and do our best to mitigate it for ourselves before we take any significant strides towards eliminating alleged socio-political and economic causes of harm. What does this entail? It means taking care of the ‘small things’ in our life and recognizing the opportunities we have available to us. We should focus on issues such as are you working ‘hard on you career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment drag you down?’ Am I treating my loved ones with care? Am I taking care of my responsibilities? Am I trying to ‘make things around (me) better?’ If I am not doing all I can to perfect myself in these local areas then I have no business attempting to blame anyone or anything else for what I am going through. Am I saying or doing things that make me ‘weak and ashamed’ or am I only saying and doing things that make me ‘strong?’ It also means not just using our judgement, but recognizing the contributions of our ‘culture’ and that the ‘wisdom of the past’ passed on by our ‘dead ancestors’ has useful things to teach us. As Peterson puts it in the conclusion to the short chapter: ‘Don’t blame capitalism, the radical Left (thanks), or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility? If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? Let your own soul guide you.’
If we accomplish this task, our soul will become ‘less corrupted’ and able to bear the inescapable tragedy of life without it degenerating into ‘outright hellishness’. Our anxiety, hopelessness and resentment and anger may recede. We will see our existence as ‘genuine good’ even in the face of our own vulnerability and perhaps even become a more prominent example for others. Our ability to set our house in order will inspire others to strive to make the world a better place. This mantra that caring for yourself first and foremost is indirectly caring for others is not unique to this chapter. Peterson also brings up this point in another bastardization of Biblical principles, when he claims in the Coda that the proper response to the poor man’s plight is to strive through right example to be an inspiration to him. Or how he insists that Jesus’s efforts to show compassion to the prostitutes and sinners indicates only that he is the perfect man, while our own ambitions to improve their lot are motivated by a desire to ‘draw attention to...inexhaustible reserves of compassion and good will’. In each circumstance the proper interpretation of Christian doctrine is apparently, do what one can, but only after looking after yourself first and if it is expedient and undemonstrative.
When you boil it down, Peterson’s positions on these points often look like little more than a jazzed-up variant of WASPY wisdom. Our first obligations are always to ourselves and to those immediately around us. If something is going wrong, then it is likely either natural or we ourselves are to blame for it. Even if there may be cause to combat injustice, we should only do so if we have put our own life into order first. Criticizing such a position isn’t especially hard. The underpinning logic of this chapter is that there exists a tension between looking after one’s own life and engaging in political efforts to rectify injustices. But this by no means seems clear to me.
First, Peterson largely ignores that—while the existence of suffering generally may indeed transcend politics and be ineradicable—the specific cause of someone’s suffering may well have political and economic roots. Consider Peterson’s typical denunciation of the resentment people may feel throughout their career or in their job. As I pointed out in Chapter Two, invoking and criticizing unhappiness in the workplace as ‘resentment’ is a fairly typical approach by conservative authors. What it misses is, as Fredric Jameson points out in his critique of Nietzsche, that people may have justifiable reasons to be angry at the structural conditions of their workplace which hold them back. This can take a huge number of different forms. A Marxist might point out that one can feel exploited if the value created by my labour is appropriated by others for little compensation; for instance how Wal Mart employees are paid minimum wage while the Walton family enjoys hundreds of billions worth of inherited wealth. A Rawlsian might point out that someone who is inhibited from advancing their socio-economic status because they were born into a poor family might well criticize a social system which does not ameliorate these conditions, but offers tremendous advantages to those born into affluent circumstances. Dismissing these concerns about exploitation and unfairness as mere resentment is highly reductive, and demanding that figures in such circumstances just focus on their own life ignores that the basis of their problems rests in injustices we have moral responsibilities to end.
Peterson may reply that even if all this was granted people will still be better off just trying to improve their lot than rectifying such titanic problems. But this brings me to my second point. Many people may well resolve their problems through ‘criticizing’ and changing the world, and as an added point they would also resolve these problems for others rather than just themselves. The aforementioned person who feels exploited at work may do a great service to themselves and others by starting a union; an act which can take a great deal of courage in today’s corporate climate. Someone concerned with their ‘health and well-being’ may indeed be advised to quit their bad habits. They might also demand things like access to superior taxpayer funded healthcare. They might point out that two huge predictors of engaging in the aforementioned bad habits—everything from smoking to eating bad food to excessive substance abuse—are a lack of education, and poverty. So perhaps much can be gained by improving education and taking efforts to end poverty beyond just serving as an example to the poor. An individual who wants to treat their spouse and children with ‘dignity and respect’ might respond that this is exceptionally difficult to do given the stresses of precarious employment, stagnating or declining real wages, and the blurring of the work/life divide under the conditions of technological change.
Peterson has little to say on these issues, which may appear more mundane than reflection upon the soul. But this very lack of engagement is quite telling. It isn’t that Peterson is disinterested in issues of redistribution and political agitation, instead focusing on individual human psychology and efforts. Instead he wants a focus on individual human psychology and efforts to be the aim of politics. Individuals can make efforts and strive to become personally better off, but individuals should not make efforts and strive to make society better off except in extremely qualified circumstances. This is deeply reflective of the implicit but pervasive conservative ordered liberty approach to politics underpinning much of Peterson’s advice on how to live well.
This chapter is also where some of the major theoretical tensions in Peterson’s work emerge, though these are very rarely explicated clearly. This is perhaps for the best, since when they bubble up they reveal a more disturbing dimension to his work. Peterson consistently situates his work in a mélange of Judeo-Christian traditionalism and liberalism, which despite his protestations in Chapter Eleven about having some left-wing views, is very consonant with middle of the road North American conservatism. One is almost tempted to label it a form of neo-Fusionism. But there is also a darker dimension to his work that is more interesting, but also highly problematic. In 12 Rules for Life Peterson shares little of the optimism that occasionally emerges in the work of fusionist thinkers like Frank Meyer or William Buckley, who emphasized the creative potential of freedom and the joys that flowed from Christian grace. While the emphasis on individual creativity occasionally spruced up Maps of Meaning, by the twenty-first century Peterson often gives into the kind of reactionary pessimism well criticized by Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind. At these points Peterson comes very close to leaping past the Christian tradition and into what is sometimes referred to as perfectionism. He consistently invokes the Schopenhauerean-Nietzschean trope that the most important thing is to strengthen the self against the suffering of the world. The stronger one becomes, the greater and more worthy of respect and emulation by those around. This is of course dramatically in contrast to the Christian tradition Peterson invokes elsewhere, as both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche well knew. Jesus would not likely insist, as Peterson does in Chapter Eleven, that compassion can be a vice. The Lamb of God we are to imitate would never resent people for ‘walking all over’ him. In fact one suspects the truth of Christianity lies much closer to Shusaku Endo’s interpretation in his classic novel Silence. When a believer is faced with having to trample on an icon of Christ to save dozens of believing Christians, Jesus’ voice rings out after years of silence to proclaim: ‘Trample, trample. It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.’
This tension in Peterson’s thinking points to what is darkest in his work. What Peterson puts forward in these moments isn’t so much a kind of fusionism, as an effort to blend Nietzschean doctrines about superior people and an admiration of strength and power with a form of Christian traditionalism. He is of course not the first to aspire to draw from both wells; they were quite common in right and far-right circles in early twentieth-century Europe. Like Peterson, critics such as T.S. Eliot and Carl Schmitt often shared the modernist admiration of the strong and wilful individual on the one hand while drawing on traditionalism to castigate the materialism and nihilism of the modern era. They also shared Peterson’s distaste for social agitation and efforts to achieve greater equality, combining the elitist’s disdain for the mass with the snob’s appeal to historical authority. Underpinning each of these theories was of course a tremendous fear, often framed in the same apocalyptic language framed in 12 Rules for Life. The world was conceived of as a dark and wicked place, and only superior men with a deep understanding of history could restore value to the world through their efforts to rise above the mass. Politically this of course meant that efforts to extend democracy too far, to tolerate too much, or to redistribute power and wealth should be looked at with extreme suspicion as a kind of levelling. The natural hierarchy is not to be upended but restored to its proper parameters. One might claim such an association is unfair, but it is hard to tell how else to interpret passages such as the following in Chapter Eleven, where Peterson explains the attraction of right-wing populism.
The populist groundswell of support for Donald Trump in the US is part of the same process (of growing attraction to hardness and dominance), as is (in far more sinister form) the recent rise of far-right political parties even in such moderate and liberal places as Holland, Sweden, and Norway. Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it, even though they may not approve of the harsh and contemptuous attitude that is part and parcel of the socially demanding process that fosters and then enforces that toughness. Some women don’t like losing their baby boys, so they keep them forever. Some women don’t like men, and would rather have a submissive mate, even if he is useless. This also provides them with plenty to feel sorry for themselves about, as well. The pleasures of such self-pity should not be underestimated. Men toughen up by pushing themselves, and by pushing each other.
Passages like these show that if Peterson doesn’t entirely care for the emergence of these occasionally sinister far-right movements, he certainly sympathizes with elements of their programme. Sometimes the expression of these sympathies comes to the fore through the application of varying standards, as when he is willing to empathize with Heidegger in spite of his Nazism but cannot forgive the bastardization of Marxism decades after Marx’s death. But in Chapter Six, it is considerably more subtle. When he is at his worst in 12 Rules for Life, as across all of Chapter Six, the difference between Peterson and these more dangerous right-wing figures past and present is more a matter of degree than substance. The mass of people must recognize that their life will mostly consist of suffering, and not try to do much to change the social system and its already fragmenting cultural traditions to improve their lot. This will enable the exceptionally few competent people to rise to the top of the natural hierarchy where they belong. The most substantial differences between these past and present right-wing critics and Peterson is that he occasionally flirts with a kind of elitism more akin to Ayn Rand than T.S. Eliot, celebrating the creative superiority and contributions of the capitalist rather than the political sovereign or artist. Peterson also (mostly) decries the use of individual or social violence to maintain the natural hierarchy (though of course, there is an explicit acceptance of state violence to maintain the status quo if necessary). But these differences of degree are likely little consolation to people who are told not to change the social system, even if that would substantially mitigate the suffering that is our unequally shared burden.
This chapter was necessarily more speculative and interpretive than the earlier chapter on Maps of Meaning. This is in part because of the frustratingly imprecise manner by which Peterson expresses his concrete political positions. They are often presented anecdotally, through appeal to highly generalized natural analogies (consider the lobster again), and occasionally by reference to a mish mash of theoretical traditions which often conflict with one another. This makes it very hard to speak about his political positions with any high degree of specificity since they must be drawn out and explicated through interpretation. Peterson enthusiasts may object to such an approach, arguing it doesn’t respect the authorial intent since it reads in conclusions to his work which were never explicitly articulated. To that I would give two responses.
The first is that Peterson himself has long acknowledged that interpretation is in some respects ‘infinite’. Indeed he even grudgingly conceded in his lectures that post-modern theorists got that right. So even Peterson would concede that authorial intent is not determinative for interpretation once and for all since new positions will still be derived based on a reader’s own inclinations, the historical period and most importantly for our purposes the contexts surrounding a piece. My interpretation of Peterson is derived not just from any one given position at any point in 12 Rules for Life or his papers, but the total mass of comments, lectures and writings gone through for this project. This gives me confidence that the explication given from an ‘infinite’ sequence of possible interpretations is quite accurate relative to competing ones. My second response is that Peterson himself is in part responsible for the need to explicate his political positions through interpretation because of the lack of precision in his arguments. This belies his calls in Chapter 10 to be ‘precise’ in one’s speech. Peterson is a good stylist most of the time and his prose is clear, but the arguments are not. Clear prose does not necessarily mean analytically ‘precise’ reasoning; the logician Saul Kripke’s arguments in Naming and Necessity would be a lot opaquer for many people than a YouTube video by Steven Crowder. That doesn’t mean Steven Crowder is more precise in his argumentation than Saul Kripke; he just happens to speak more colloquially. This applies to Peterson’s positions. There are a number of points where he argues for a given position, for instance about the naturalness of hierarchy, without engaging in the specific arguments of his opponents. There are other points where Peterson simply asserts various claims, for instance about a discrepancy between sorting one’s own life out before trying to sort the world out, where it isn’t at all clear that such a divide exists. These ambiguities make it necessary to reconstruct Peterson’s positions to try and give them more consistency and precision in order to engage them effectively
These points aside, what is there left to say about Peterson’s concrete political positions? I think the National Review columnist Nate Hochman put it quite well in his 5 July 2019 column ‘The Intellectual Dark Web’s Quiet Revolution’. He pointed out that many thoughtful conservative intellectuals, most notably Michael Oakeshott, have opined that a movement to conservatism often begins not because one holds concrete settled convictions but rather because conservatives often drift towards the political right as a ‘reaction’ to the perceived excesses of the Left. They experience what Hochman calls a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction which encourages them to look for arguments to rationalize this distaste.
Now of course Hochman’s claim is precisely that Peterson and his associates in the Intellectual Dark Web provide a cogent intellectual defence of conservative positions, both constructive and those critical of the Left. To the extent that Peterson’s commitment flows from a deeper commitment to a kind of individualism, it is a highly tempered individualism which is very beholden to traditionalism and largely focuses on exercising freedom in private rather than to change anything substantial about the status quo. Petersonian man is a status-minded person focused first and foremost on promotions and raising children, not wishy-washy ideals like actually helping the poor by providing for them or demonstrating that one is worthy of respect through working to establish a political community where the dignity of everyone is treated respectfully. But I think it is easy to hypothesize that Peterson’s attraction towards a kind of ordered liberty type conservatism, with the occasional darker undertones bubbling up, was motivated as much by a knee-jerk reaction to the contemporary Left’s perceived excesses as any constructive commitments. Many of his constructive political positions, from the necessity of hierarchy to the need for political quietism, are presented as though responding to some perceived radical-Left calls for the elimination of all forms of social structure or the total politicization of all elements of life. To really understand Peterson’s politics, we need to look into his disdain for the Left, or at least the so-called ‘post-modern neo-Marxists’ one hears so much about.