The Jordan Peterson We Deserve (2/30)

I'm writing 30 essays in 30 days, this is number two.

If you think Jordan Peterson is terrible and everything he does is terrible, I sympathize, though I disagree. If you’re wondering why, I have a video for you to watch, and some remarks to make. It’s an excerpt from one of his lectures that one of his fans has labeled “The BEST relationship advice EVER,” and, well, I think that’s an oversell, but maybe not by much. If you really detest Peterson, try to pretend this is just a seminar room you stumbled into, and you have no idea who this lecturer is. You might find that the lecture is really fucking good, and that it has nothing to do with Neo-Marxism or any of Peterson’s traditional bugbears.

Beyond that basic assessment, two points.

First, this little clip has made me a way better husband. Sure, the basic advice in it isn’t that unusual: tell your partner what you want, make your request easy to understand and implement, and use an avalanche of positive reinforcement every time they even try to please you along the specified lines. However, in the advice-giving game, presentation is everything. You’ve probably heard a ton off fantastic advice that would help you achieve a better life, but it just slid right off you because inadequate communication makes it seem like pablum rather than wisdom. Peterson’s presentation, weaving together behaviorist rat training and folksy therapy talk, is unusually charming.

Second, this clip is sad, because it implies a possible world in which Jordan Peterson spends a lot less time fighting the culture war, and a lot more time being a pure self-help guru. As the latter, Peterson is unbelievably effective. A quick perusal of, for example, the comments under this video will tell you that many people at least feel that Peterson’s advice has changed their lives for the better. This alone is a tremendous achievement. The felt sense that your life is improvable is, for many, a giant step. Some acquaintances of mine, knowing that I have an affinity for this side of Peterson’s, have suggested that this is easy: he’s just presenting a salad of platitudes dressed up in Jung and Dostoevsky. My response to that is simple and somewhat petulant. You try it. Record a YouTube video of yourself giving ten minutes of semi-extemporaneous life advice and see if people tell you that you’ve inspired them to confront their demons and live more intentionally. Peterson’s gifts in this field are rare.

On the other hand, Peterson as a culture warrior is a passably skillful player of an absolutely awful game. Peterson doesn’t have a sophisticated understanding of the Marxism he criticizes, and he makes giant missteps in his fight against the excesses of woke politics. At times, he’s a fine gladiator, but, while it’s sort of darkly gratifying to watch rhetoricians dispense of lesser talkers, triggering the libs is not cultural progress, in any direction.

I think the culture war is a misnomer. When I think of a “war,” I don’t think of two armies standing hundreds of miles away from each other, firing bullets in random directions, while claiming they’re fighting each other. But that’s basically what the culture war is. It’s a bunch of noises that don’t have much to do with how culture is actually shaped. The ascendance of woke politics didn’t happen because Robin DiAngelo won a war of ideas. It happened through institutional capture. And when wokeness fades from the zeitgeist, it’s not going to happen because Ben Shapiro, a trained broadcaster, can somehow out-talk a college student who hasn’t yet figured out his True Haircut.

It’s all just entertainment. The different sides of the culture war are, in fact, all employees of YouTube.

I think the culture war is more accurately described as a sports league. It recruits people with certain qualities: pugnaciousness, contentiousness, divisiveness, charisma, and so on. It then, like the NFL, flings them against each other until they get brain damage. And it’s hard to resist the incentives on offer. The compensation package can be generous: Peterson’s Patreon was certainly lucrative, and he sold a lot of books. But the price is that you become dumber when you enter a dumb arena where you argue with dumb people. People write nonsense about you like this, and you become stupider for engaging, and that, unfortunately, is your job. You’re rewarded for perpetuating the cultural miasma.

It’s true that Peterson’s persona isn’t actually a clean dichotomy. His reputation as a hard-nosed truth-teller comes, in part, from his criticism of left-wing thinking, and he did rise to fame for criticizing a progressive Canadian law, the import of which he arguably exaggerated. As well, his opposition to collectivist politics, to some extent, stems from the attention to identity and self-possession that makes him an effective advice-giver. His presentation is a bimodal distribution, where the two peaks are “here’s some compassionate, well-presented advice” and “the postmodern Neo-Marxists are ruining your children.”

But he definitely places different levels of emphasis on the two different poles at different times. The video above demonstrates this. And humanity is worse off for the fact that he’s not the person in that video more often. He could be that. He could quit the culture war, enter into earnest dialogue with his supposed foes, and try as hard as possible to spread his most genuine, helpful insights into human behavior. I hope he does, at some point. I look at the people who hate him most, and based on what they post on Twitter about their desperation and ennui, many could use the better side of Jordan Peterson. Possibly, he could too.