Peterson impresses amid arrows from leftists
“Revolution” might overstate the impact of Jordan Peterson on our modern and often precarious culture. But something ’s definitely happening as the Canadian psychologist, with deep Saskatchewan roots, brought his 12 Rules of Life Tour to Regina and Saskatoon this week.
With Naicam and Nipawin in his DNA and having spent many summers of his life at the Saskatchewan family cottage, Peterson returned to Canada 20 years ago from Harvard and was a popular, though hardly famous, professor at the University of Toronto. But that changed two years ago, when Dr. Peterson expressed concern over compelled speech as the Trudeau government passed a bill on transgender rights. On the receiving end of predictable and virulent attacks from social justice warriors, Peterson fearlessly pushed back against the tide of political correctness that has consumed our universities. He also pointedly called out the exaggerated influence and moral decay of many of today’s Marxist and postmodern professors who hold sway over the academy.
Peterson came to prominence when the U of T administration chose the wrong guy to pick on by threatening to discipline him for simply expressing his views. In the ensuing months, his Youtube channel got tens of millions of views, his podcasts went viral and an international speaking tour followed.
The professor and longtime clinical psychologist moved into pop culture legend status when he dispassionately (and rather sympathetically) destroyed an abrasive British TV host, now viewed on video more than 11 million times.
He was recently described by the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world” and it’s easy to see why. Having interviewed and chatted socially with Dr. Peterson several times over the last couple of years, I had not seen his speaking tour until now. The lecture is different every night. Peterson paces the stage and weaves psychology, religion, politics, anthropology and neuroscience as he riffs on the themes underlying his international bestselling book, 12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos. A couple of hours later, the crowd is left with his message of finding strength and a sense of purpose from challenging ourselves.
And the experience is no evening of pop psychology; it’s different, more thought provoking and demanding. At the end of the night, the crowd — overwhelmingly young men and women — doesn’t bolt to the car but stands around outside in small groups discussing what they’ve heard.
The current issue of The Atlantic explores the Peterson effect in “Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson.” Journalist Caitlin Flanagan writes that Peterson’s “stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline and deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.”
And as Flanagan chronicles a number of the left’s recent failures, “in the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse.”
The Atlantic piece states, and even a cursory check of the internet confirms, that the organized left, its media and proxies are on a desperate and often frantic campaign to “unperson” Peterson by trying to discredit and destroy him. But it’s not working, in part because direct access to his podcasts, videos and lectures — without needing the permission of traditional left-wing gatekeepers — is kryptonite to the leftist world view that has discouraged informed and independent thought and a vigorous debate.
Sometimes in life it’s said that the right person comes along, as if someone of Jordan Peterson’s rare and valuable talents just showed up one day. But this brave professor has been here for years — it’s just that now a society at a confused cultural crossroads has reached out to embrace smart ideas and the man behind them.