Matthew Barlow

Jordan Peterson is a bore.  He appeals to the basest instincts of masculinity, believing that men are under attack in this world.  He also believes, fundamentally, that order is a masculine trait and chaos is a feminine one.  This reflects the age-old misogyny of Christian thought in the West that said that reason was masculine and nature feminine.  One is ordered and disciplined, one is chaotic.

Peterson stepped off the deep end a long time ago. Peterson rose to fame in Canada a few years back in opposition to Bill C-16, which gives legal protection to transgender people.  As the CBC notes, it added the term ‘gender identity or expression’ to three parts of Canadian law: 1) The Charter of Rights and Freedoms; 2) The Criminal Code, in those parts that deal with hate crimes; 3) that part of the Criminal Code that deals with sentencing for hate crimes.  Peterson was appalled, arguing wrongly that this would criminalize the failure to use an individual’s preferred pronouns.  He himselfrejects the idea of non-binary gender identity (indeed, this became the rallying cry of the right in both Canada and the US, where Peterson warned Americans that this was coming for them in an article in The Hill).  But he went further, as he is wont do, claiming that Bill C-16 was an attack on freedom of speech in Canada, the greatest such attack, as a matter of fact.  And so he joined the conservative hysteria that we were all going to be jailed for not using the proper pronouns.  He also received a letter of warning from the University of Toronto, where he teaches, informing him that he must accord to people’s wishes wth their preferred pronouns.

Coupled with this misogyny is a subtle form of racism.  Peterson thinks that white privilege simply doesn’t exist.  He has, to be fair, clearly and loudly rejected white supremacy and prefers his followers to do so as well.  But, frankly, you cannot claim there is no such thing as white privilege and not be racist.  The idea of white privilege is meant to point out that we live in a culture dominated by white people and those who are not white have a more difficult time in getting ahead (I wrote about this here).

But back to the misogyny.  Beyond Peterson’s claim that order is masculine and chaos feminine, Peterson has concluded the problem is feminism, as it seeks to level inequalities, which he argues are simply the way things have always been.

Peterson favours what he calls ‘enforced monogamy.’  In the wake of the terrorist attack in Toronto last spring, in which an ‘incel’ drove his truck into a crowd, killing at least 10, Peterson told the New York Times that male violence toward women happens because they are involuntarily celibate (hence the term ‘incel’).  He said of the killer, “He was angry at God because women were rejecting him.  The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”  He goes on:

“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”

I laugh, because it is absurd.

“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.”

That, my friends, is sexist.  Plain and simple.  Peterson’s idea of ‘enforced monogamy’ is meant to help men, and therefore it would be coercive to women.

He goes on.  He read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and concluded that:

it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby. For Christ’s sake.

In his book, 12 Rules for Life, he argues that ‘healthy women’ want men who are better than them, men who are smarter than they are, who will dominate them, and control them through status.  ‘Healthy women’ want to be dominated.

Peterson’s ultimate problem is he believes that there is such a thing as a natural hierarchy in the social world and he believes that these hierarchies are essentially god-given and therefore right and natural.  He thinks gender equality overthrows this natural order, as Kate Manne makes clear in a discussion of 12 Rules. Manne defines misogyny as a desire to control women (which she differentiates from a hatred or fear of women in the heart of men).  And, to return to Peterson’s argument about ‘healthy women’ wanting to be dominated, well, that is misogyny.

At any rate, Peterson was in Canada’s lesser-known and read national newspaper, The National Post, last week ranting about the American Psychological Association’s new guidelines for treating men and boys.  This is the first time the APA has issued guidelines for treating men and, of course, you’re noting right now that psychology cut its teeth normalizing the behaviour of (white) men.  But these guidelines are focused on the pratfalls of masculinity in the early 21st century and, to a degree, toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity is the form of masculinity that is vicious, violent, and generally dangerous for all, including its practitioners.  I grew up in a milieu of toxic masculinity.  It means alcoholism, drug addiction and violence directed towards those weaker.  This is not what masculinity is supposed to be, it is not how men are supposed to act in society.

So back to Peterson’s fit in The National Post.  Peterson argues that the APA’s guidelines are ‘an all-out assault on masculinity — or, to put it even more bluntly, on men.’  Indeed, men, gather your guns, we’re under attack!!!

He then goes on a rant denying scientific consensus about masculinity and gender roles.  And then complains about what he sees as a war on traditional masculine roles and behaviours.  Except, the thing is? No one really questions that part of masculinity.  We question the assoholic behaviour of men and Peterson denies that being an asshole is damaging to men.  The evidence, which he ignores, suggests otherwise, of course.

Next, he postulates about violence and notes that boys are indeed more likely to be violent than girls.  He then does what he accuses the authors of the APA guidelines of doing: citing himself to prove his point.  His point appears to be that violence is not a learned behaviour, but an innate one.  But then he also notes that the boys who grow up to be violent come from fatherless families.  He also claims that the experts have all agreed on this.  I’m not a psychologist, but even a cursory glance at the literature suggests otherwise.  But why would Peterson let facts get in the way of a good argument?

But all of this is just a precursor to another of his favourite flogging horses: the idea that there is a war on Western society, that Western civilization is apparently seen ‘as an oppressive patriarchy: unfairly male-dominated, violent, racist, sexist, homo-, Islamo- and trans-phobic — and as uniquely reprehensible in all those regards.’ Oh brother.  Here we go again.  (This, of course, is why he denies white privilege exists, which, of course, is easy for a white, heterosexual, tenured male university professor at one of Canada’s élite universities).

This is lazy scholarship and rhetoric. In fact, his rhetoric crosses the line into hysteria and paranoia.  Bill C-16 was the ‘greatest attack’ on freedom of speech in Canadian history.  The APA has declared war on men.

This allows Peterson to claim that anything that he doesn’t like about the modern world is because we’re cannibalistic in the West, we like to eat our own.  It means that it is easy for him to blame the feminists and their fellow travellers.  He’s the intellectual equivalent of those pseudo-Christians in the US who complain about the ‘war on Christmas’ each each year and attack Starbucks for its holiday cups.

Peterson long ago stopped being an academic or even and intellectual or a thinker.  Instead, he is just an ideologue.  And a rather boring and predictable one at that.  But he’s made all the more dangerous because he is well-dressed and is a university professor and uses the instant credibility that brings to go on ideological rants, rather than engage in discussions about ideas.  And ultimately, that’s because Peterson has no more ideas.  And they are built on slippery and false logic.

This makes him boring and a bore.