Towering intellectual genius? He sounds more like Captain Mainwaring!
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life Jordan B. Peterson A llen Lane £25 ★★☆☆☆
On the cover, The New York Times describes Jordan B. Peterson as ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world’.
Inside, he reminds us quite how successful he is. His previous work, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos, will, he says, ‘have sold something like four million copies in English by the time the present volume is published’ and ‘will be translated into 50 additional languages’. Meanwhile, his YouTube and podcast appearances ‘on my own channels, in interviews on others’ have ‘been watched or listened to hundreds of millions of times’.
His fame has been fanned by controversy. Last November, when Penguin Random House in Canada announced that it would be publishing Beyond Order, several staff members called a meeting to object.
‘He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy... I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,’ said one of these protesters. Another reported that people were crying in the meeting.
Trudging my way through this book, it struck me that the Peterson balloon must be reliant on the hot air of those who object to him. Much of it is obvious, old-fashioned, best-foot-forward advice that might have been barked by Captain Mainwaring or Lord Sugar. ‘We cannot live without food, water, clean air and shelter,’ he announces on page nine.
Most of the time he sticks to the well-trodden path of self-help clichés. ‘To maintain good relationships with your colleagues,’ begins another passage, ‘means, among other things, to give credit where credit is due; to take your fair share of the jobs no one wants but still must be done; to deliver on time and in a high-quality manner when teamed with other people; to show up when expected; and, in general, to be trusted to do somewhat more than your job formally requires.’
I can imagine bursting into tears at such stuff, but they would be tears of boredom. It’s hard to imagine how a grown man – let alone ‘the most influential public intellectual in the Western world’ – could think such bland truisms worth publishing. Whatever next? ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’? ‘The early bird catches the worm’? ‘Look before you leap’?
In fact, Peterson might have saved us all a lot of time by reducing his advice to the single phrase: ‘Mustn’t grumble’. For the most part, his Rules For Life are an elongated version of the advice Robert Baden-Powell first offered in his landmark Scouting For Boys back in 1908.
Later, in 1934, Baden-Powell offered this acrostic on the word SCOUT:
Smartness
Courtesy
Obedience
Usefulness
Trustworthiness
By chance, these are also the watchwords of Peterson. Rule 1 of Peterson’s last book was ‘Stand up straight with your shoulders back’. In this new book, he says, ‘Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence.’
My own Rules For Life would include, ‘Never wear a cravat’ and ‘Don’t bother to wash your car – it’ll only get dirty again’, but Peterson tends to prefer airy generalities to anything more specific. Each of his 12 new rules – ‘Do not hide unwanted things in the fog’, ‘Do not do what you hate’, ‘Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant’ – is allotted its own chapter. Rule 12 – ‘Be grateful in spite of your suffering’ – is placed right at the end, presumably to offer solace to any reader who has managed to get that far.
The majority of Peterson’s advice is so unexceptional as to be inarguable. After all, who would ever suggest that you should hide things in the fog, or do what you hate, or allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant?
He usually pens his truisms in a wordy, portentous style, possibly designed to disguise their vacuity. ‘To have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be,’ he writes. Who would have thought it?
Any competition to find the most banal slice of Peterson wisdom would be hotly contended. The longlist would include, ‘We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same. Otherwise, we would not all be human,’ (p310) and ‘Past, present, future – they all matter,’ (p86). Extraordinary to think that this sort of guff will soon be translated into 50 languages. Or – who knows? – perhaps it reads better in Urdu.
Sometimes he reads less like the world’s most influential public intellectual than the holiday replacement for a magazine agony aunt.
For Rule 10 – ‘Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship’ – he rattles through all the usual tips: make space and time for romance, extramarital affairs lead to people being hurt, before venturing into more hands-on territory. ‘It would not be too bad an idea to have a shower. A little lipstick – that could be good. Some perfume. Some clothing that is attractive and erotic. Buy some lingerie for your wife, if you are a man, and wear it, with some courage, if you are a woman.’
Come again? In philosophical terms it’s a bit like turning over a page of Immanuel Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason only to find an advertisement for Ann Summers. And, once started, he cannot stop: ‘Try some nice soft lighting – maybe some candles (and someone has to buy the candles, and should be encouraged to do so...)’. Is he being paid by the word? Before long, he throws in yet another rule: ‘Here is a rule: do not ever punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing. Particularly if it took some real courage – some real going above and beyond the call of duty – to manage.’ What’s he on about? As in so much of his writing, he stops short of providing details.
One of the characteristics of his prose is a propensity for clusters of adverbs and adjectives. It’s almost as though he’s taking advantage of a Buy-One-Get-Two-Free offer. For instance, a successful marriage is ‘a tangible, challenging, exceptional and unlikely achievement’, slaves are ‘miserable, wretched, angry and resentful’, you must always act ‘reliably, honestly, nobly’, and people who can’t commit end up ‘lonely, isolated and miserable’. And so it goes on.
But every now and then, from out of the mists of sombre platitude pops something as daft as a brush. In a footnote, Peterson claims to have viewed 1,200,000 paintings on eBay while decorating his house, adding, ‘that has to be some sort of record’.
Elsewhere, he suddenly announces, ‘Nature is doing her best to kill us’. At another point, Peterson tells the story of one of his clients – he used to be a clinical psychologist – who was ‘profoundly unhappy’ and slept for 15 hours a day, fuelled by Valium and sleeping pills. Her problem, he felt, was that ‘she could not deal with the cruelty she saw everywhere around her. She was a vegan, for example, and that was directly associated with her acute physical terror of life.’
Vegans may be disturbed to hear that Dr Peterson’s cure involved taking her to a butcher ‘to help her overcome her fear of life’. There, she watched carcasses being cut up and ‘shaking and in visible tears’ placed her hand on the meat. ‘Excess sentimentality is an illness, a developmental failure,’ he explains. Later, the client announces, ‘I think I need to see an embalming’, so he takes her to a mortician, and she watches him making surgical alterations to a corpse and injecting embalming fluid.
‘My client had learned something vitally important about her tolerance for the terrors of life,’ boasts Peterson, before adding, as an afterthought, that he is ‘by no means claiming complete success in her treatment’.
Perhaps the publishers might consider expanding the paperback to include Rule 13: ‘If you have nothing left to say, don’t write a follow-up.’