Uttering Broken Truths
I know I must have made some terrible life choices, because I felt myself professionally obligated to read Jordan Peterson's self-help book, to remain "informed" about the world of "ideas." 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is strongly reminiscent of Michel Houellebecq, who has been similarly lauded as a "tough realist" for espousing sexist and reactionary ideas. Houellebecq's early fiction is a primer in incel ideology before the fact: It is all about the inevitability of sexual competition and the plight of the male "losers." Peterson is similarly preoccupied with alphas and betas and the supposedly inescapable ramifications of sexual selection. (A few years ago I wrote about Houellebecq here, for what it's worth)
Much like Angela Nagle's book about the alt-right, Peterson's work is far less interesting than the debate and debunking it has inspired. Both Nagle and Peterson work to dignify the milieu of white supremacy and frustrated masculinism; the most effective responses must strip away that dignity without trivializing the threat that these subcultures represent.
That is a hard balance to achieve; it is very tempting to simply ridicule Peterson and implicitly mock the men who finds his work (Jungian claptrap combined with evolutionary psychology and social Darwinism) credible and his advice (find your proper place in the hierarchy and take personal responsibility for it) valuable. Those people seem to deserve shame rather than the benefit of the doubt: Reading Peterson makes it hard to imagine that anyone could in good faith be newly convinced by what he has to say; sympathetic readers must have come already convinced of his sexist worldview and are looking for pseudo-intellectual ways to rationalize it.
Critic Vincent Clarke makes a similar point in an essay for American Affairs, arguing that Peterson offers balm for the morally lazy:
What Peterson’s popularity shows is that there are a lot of people out there—mainly young men—who are craving some sort of religious moral system that can be discussed in an intellectual, rather than merely emotional, manner. But what Peterson is offering them is an irrational ideology that simply fits them out to be absorbed back into a highly dysfunctional society. That leads us to ask: why are these same young men not gravitating to something more substantial? ... Perhaps these young men are not gravitating to something more substantial because that would ask too much of them.
Peterson’s New Age spiritualism asks very little of those that it addresses. Sure, there is some stern father rhetoric about taking responsibility for your actions and so forth. But this is all done in an utterly vague way, leaving ample room for Peterson devotees to “interpret” the message in any way that they see fit. Peterson is not asking so much for sacrifice as he is for a simulacrum of sacrifice. In that, it is just another narcissistic consumerist ideology.
Clarke's own conservatism shows most in how he views Peterson as offering a lite postmodernism in the guise of a critique of it. "Peterson is pushing 'soft' radical psychoanalytical ideas that seem tame when confronted with the violent 'hard' radical ideas of the so-called postmodernists," he argues. "This is probably what makes Peterson so popular. He is telling his audience that they can embrace modern, late-capitalist, hyper-individualized consumer culture, with its vitalistic quasi-Darwinian 'will' ideology, while rejecting the same ideology pushed to its logical end point." In this reading, Peterson is a defender of the status quo against an accelerationism that is incipient in capitalist culture. Capitalism relativizes everything in its pursuit of new forms of value, new points of leverage for exploitation; Peterson offers spoonfuls of "timelessness" in the form of sexist archetypes to take the edge off this.
Jeet Heer's reading of Peterson at the New Republic supports this view. Heer suggests that Peterson dresses like a steampunk Vaudevillian and espouses outmoded right-wing myth criticism drawn from Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade because he is a reactionary arguing for the timeless truth of a particular set of power relations; he is essentially trying to freeze the development of the capitalist order in its Victorian expression.
Even if Peterson's practical advice can be boiled down to neoliberalistic individualism, as Clarke claims, he nonetheless seems to appeal mainly to men who are disaffected by neoliberalism and hope to reject what it demands of them — a flexibility and self-promotional mentality often coded as forms of feminization.
They are seeking ways to articulate and preserve what had been their privileged place in the old economic order without necessarily wanting to articulate it as a privilege (as in openly espoused patriarchial white supremacy) or have it politicized. That is, their perspective may have more in common with the one Whitney Phillips ascribes to the pre-political trolls in the 2000s in this Data & Society report on media amplification.
Trolls didn’t occupy the left or the right side of the political spectrum, at least not in any traditional sense. Rather, they occupied the side of pure privilege, in which they believed, first, that they had the right to sidestep any and all issues of consent, and second, that they didn’t have to have, or at least didn’t have to declare, a politics. They got to pick and choose the degree to which their personal beliefs aligned with their online activities—a courtesy they did not similarly extend to their targets, who weren’t just goaded into taking a side, but were punished the moment they did.
Asserting one's superiority or indifference to politics is of course a kind of reactionary politics that protects the status quo. Reactionary myth criticism doesn't explicitly laugh at people who care about politics, but it does express a similar idea that politics is beside the point, because eternal underlying truths dictate everything that must be.
But Peterson isn't really embraced by mainstream thinkpiece writers or the other would-be centrist voices of reason that can usually be found justifying the status quo. Instead, far right ideologues seem to have latched on to him and his "broken truths" as a gateway to indoctrination in fascism and outspoken white supremacy. The far right is generating new configurations of socioeconomic power that reinvent racism, sexism, and other forms of profitable discrimination for an era that has new technological means (e.g., the algorithmic control society) to exploit them. Peterson's insistence on the timelessness of a historically contingent set of discriminatory practices and beliefs helps sell the credulous on their inevitability. He thus helps make radical political ideas seem post-political. They become the means of fulfilling the fantasy of ending politics and the associated demands civil society places on its citizens, even those who think they were born with the right not to bother with them.