National Post (National Edition)
12 RULES for life, lived
MAURA FORREST TRIED TO LIVE ACCORDING TO JORDAN PETERSON’S PRECEPTS.
I first heard about Jordan Peterson in the same way you all did — he’s that professor who had the thing about the pronouns. I’ve always had trouble believing that freedom of speech was truly what Jordan Peterson was peddling.
Peterson’s rise to prominence on the wings of what seemed like a willful misinterpretation of a law, Bill C-16, which added gender identity and expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act, struck me as opportunistic at best.
But Peterson didn’t go away. He built a following. And then he wrote a book, which is still, more than 30 weeks after its publication, among Amazon’s top 20 best-selling books. With 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Peterson has become, as they say, incontournable.
Many better minds than mine have offered up their thoughts on our latest cultural icon. He is the “custodian of the patriarchy,” a “disturbing symptom” of our intellectual and moral breakdown, “dangerous.” But no, others insist. Peterson is actually “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” or, as he’s been described in these pages, “a warrior for common sense and plain speech.”
I confess I have only a passing interest in who or what Jordan Peterson is — conveniently enough, as he didn’t speak with me for this piece. But I am interested in what he is saying. And I am fascinated by the fact that some of his followers feel their lives were changed by a self-help book Peterson published based on a list of maxims he wrote on Quora one time. I did not understand it, and I wanted to.
The idea came to me one evening, while out with colleagues. I want to read the book, I told them, and try to live out the rules. So I have, and it’s been eye-opening, infuriating, challenging, and sometimes deeply boring, because there is nothing interesting about protein-rich breakfasts and washing floors, even if they are good for you.
I did not know where I would end up at the start of this, but I can safely say I didn’t think it would be here. I cannot despise Jordan Peterson, as I thought I might. I’ve spent time with some of his followers and I appreciate what he’s done for them, and what, to some extent, he’s done for me. But I won’t embrace him as they do. I can’t. Because I fear that, on some level, Jordan Peterson despises me.
I met up with Xander, Chris and Eric again at the group’s bi-weekly Sort Yourself Out meeting, at a pub overlooking the Ottawa River. Xander was in charge, and he went around the table asking each of us for a long-term goal and then one action we could take that day to move toward that goal. His own goal was to be working more than part-time, and he planned to draft an email to his bosses that day. Eric suggested he should arrange a video chat instead — more direct, harder to misinterpret.
It was kind of wonderful, like a group therapy session for the price of brunch. I found myself wondering why they needed Jordan Peterson for this, then decided that’s not the point. Peterson brought them together, and now they’re trying to help each other, and that can’t be a bad thing. “It’s a place where I can speak openly,” somebody said, “without repercussions.”
Before long, they started covering the material we’ve come to expect from Peterson’s adherents: modern society is toxically anti-male, white men are asked to atone for all of humanity’s sins, and the worst place for all of this is college campuses, where free speech is all but dead.
They asked me what I thought, and I answered as honestly as I could.
I told them I was uncomfortable with Peterson’s advice to men — toughen up, essentially — because of what it suggests for women. What is he saying to us?
“He doesn’t have the answer,” Xander said. “He’s just raising a difficult question.”
As we got up to leave, Eric asked me to chat a bit longer.
He wanted to know how I would feel if I put my career on hold to have children, or if I turned 50 and had no family. I had no good answers.
I asked him for the most important message he’s taken from Jordan Peterson. “Men are lost,” he told me, and Peterson offers them a useful role, an avenue for “positive masculinity.”
He wanted to know why I was so hung up on all of the gender stuff. I stammered out an answer, because the truth is, I’m not totally sure. Why should I mind, really, if men have a father figure telling them to sort themselves out? If they feel lost, then I guess they are.
But I can’t get past this. For all the perfectly reasonable advice about breakfast and housecleaning, I keep coming back to the lobsters, to Woman as Nature, to parents in pairs, to boys and skateboards. They say Peterson’s audience is largely male, and I believe that, but that doesn’t mean he has no message for women. It’s there, between the lines. If men need to man up, where does that leave us? Not back in the kitchen, necessarily, but maybe not around the boardroom table.
Eric and I sat together for a while, an unlikely pair having an unlikely conversation. He seemed to understand what I was trying to say. Or at least he wanted to understand, and I wanted to understand him.
Then we went our separate ways, maybe no more sorted out than before, maybe without any answers, but at least with a bit of common ground to stand on. We’d spoken openly, without repercussions.
IF THERE’S A GENIUS TO JORDAN PETERSON, IT’S HIS WILLINGNESS TO SHOUT FROM THE ROOFTOPS THE THINGS THAT A LOT OF US WOULD RATHER NOT SAY ... BUT I CAN’T SHAKE THE FEELING THAT I AM THE PROBLEM HE’S TRYING TO HELP MEN SOLVE.