Peterson’s place
Re: The sweet irony of Jordan Peterson’s fame, Rex Murphy, Dec. 8
Rex Murphy is definitely justified in joyfully interpreting two million purchases of Professor Peterson’s “12 Rules …" as a sweet vindication of Peterson’s intellectual value on the world stage. Also, no one would dispute the fact that Peterson’s celebrity status in popular culture is the result of his academic and psychological expertise, used cleverly in the media to challenge liberal ideas of social justice to achieve a high profile as a public intellectual.
However, to bestow the same status of being a truly transcendental intellectual achieved by Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye on Peterson’s body of work is a mismeasure of Canadian cultural greatness. There is no intellectual equivalency between them. Certainly, professorships at U of T they have in common. But their intellectual differences are profound. McLuhan’s and Frye’s approach to knowledge is original, open-minded towards change, and deliberately descriptive, whereas Peterson’s knowledge is derivative, closeminded about change, and primarily prescriptive.
McLuhan, in his book The Medium is the Message, shows that humans create media which then remakes them in its image. McLuhan developed media literacy tools to help users of the media to understand media changes in our culture. Thus media studies teach us that the world is for the making. If you don’t like the way it is then change it.
Frye, in his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, uses his innovative “anatomy of criticism” to reveal that religious archetypal stories continue to form the basic operating system of most Western literature. Biblical stories are fictions containing psychological truths which are still valid today.
Peterson is a public phenomenon because he capitalized on the media truth that all publicity pays off, whether good or bad. Media craves attention and it bestows it in turn on those seeking attention. Thus Peterson championed free speech to gain fame and profit with the YouTube generation. Yet Peterson, who is clearly a media creation, often states that all cultural change is bad and, since media is the major cause of cultural change, then left-wing media espousing progressive values is a danger to society. Ironically Peterson teaches individuals to change themselves but forbids societies from changing themselves with more social justice for all.
Give Peterson the notoriety he has created for his self-help counselling to lost boys to sort themselves out by cleaning their rooms and standing tall. But don’t exaggerate his intellectual credentials beyond belief.