Jordan Peterson?

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In these moments, Peterson is filled with frustration that so many need his message, for want of what had once been common wisdom. At the refusal to address men in the language that summons them to embrace their better instincts. (Yes, Peterson is one of those problematic figures who believe that men have a nature that is best appealed to in ways consistent with that nature.) Why has no one ever set these young men straight before? Where were their fathers? Where were their teachers? Why have they left it up to him, a YouTube personality, to roust them from their hiding places and send them out into the world?

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Many of Peterson’s seemingly grandiose pronouncements are, in fact, quite modest. He is often derided for repackaging banal common sense in a vague and pretentious idiom, and there is something to this. Peterson is an apologist for a set of beliefs that we once took for granted but now require an articulate defense, such as: Free speech is an essential value; perfect equality inevitably conflicts with individual freedom; one should be cautious before attempting to reengineer social institutions that appear to be working; men and women are, in certain quantifiable respects, different. His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time. Viewed another way, Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization, to provide a rational justification for why the materialists of the digital age should root themselves in the soil of Christian ethics despite having long ago lost the capacity for faith.

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He and I talked about the extent to which he saw an illiberal progressivism penetrating academia. “Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways,” Peterson, who spent five years teaching at Harvard, told me. “They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.” I nodded, thinking of all the people I knew to whom those words applied.

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He spent his youth as a committed socialist before growing disillusioned with the character of his fellow travelers, whom he came to regard as motivated by resentment. At the same time, he met some conservative small-business owners who earned his grudging admiration. “It produced a fair bit of cognitive dissonance for me,” he says. “Because ostensibly, I didn’t admire the conservative ethos. But I certainly admired the people.”

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The young men who love Jordan Peterson love him for all the reasons that the smart set despises him. He gives them something the culture—sometimes it seems this way—wants to deny them. A sense of purpose in a world that increasingly defines their natural predispositions—for risk, adventure, physical challenge, unbridled competition—as maladaptive to the pacified, androgynous ideals of a bureaucratized, post-feminist world. Increasingly one hears that the problem menacing the world today is not the excesses of masculinity, but masculinity itself. That masculinity itself must—and can—be eradicated. He argues in 12 Rules that “if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.” He notes that “Fight Club,perhaps the most fascist popular film made in recent years by Hollywood, provides a perfect example of this inevitable attraction,” as do “the populist groundswell of support for Donald Trump in the U. S. and the rise of far-right political parties even in such moderate and liberal places as Holland, Sweden, and Norway.”

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Over the next few days, I watched on social media as a progressive consensus coalesced around the notion that Peterson was deliberately baiting the protesters. I read that he was part of a cynical reactionary plot to delegitimize universities, that the decline in support of free speech on campus was a right-wing myth. Others declared that “free speech” is merely a euphemism for punching down on the marginalized.

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Peterson’s fame on these subversive platforms is often used to paint him in ominous tones. “I have something in common with Nazis,” he told me, “in that I am opposed to the radical left. And when you oppose the radical left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.” But his refusal of the consolations of group identity also puts him at odds with the alt-right. “The alt-righters would say—and they’ve said this to me directly—‘Peterson, you’re wrong. Identity politics is correct. We just have to play to win.’ I think that’s a reprehensible attitude. But I understand exactly why you would come to that conclusion. What I’m saying with my YouTube videos is ‘Okay, there’s a different way of playing the whole game. Forget about the bloody group-identity framework and concentrate on what you can do as an individual.’

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