Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson review – a ragbag of self-help dictums
Few books in recent years have had quite so noisy a cultural impact as Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. With its odd mixture of Darwinian determinism, Jungian myth-interpretation and Heideggerian ontology (Being written with a capital B!), it was an unlikely self-help manual and an even unlikelier bestseller. But its dozen behavioural rules for leading a meaningful life rode a steep wave of frustration with the shibboleths of postmodernity.
Peterson’s radical traditionalism was seen as a bracing corrective to the notion that there was no objective truth, only a matrix of prejudicial power relations. Social hierarchies, he argued, were the product of evolution rather than of capitalist exploitation.
The book appealed to men who felt threatened by a loss of status, and Peterson reassured them that their historically superior position in society might have more to do with competence than patriarchy. His advice was to accept the reality of competition, stand up straight with your shoulders back, and stop complaining. To the sound of bootstraps being firmly pulled up, the book sold 5m copies in English, and was translated into 50 other languages.
Almost overnight, the Canadian professor of psychology had become the most divisive public intellectual of his generation, hailed as a visionary and denounced as a reactionary, the subject of both great hero worship and vilification. Depending on where you stood, he’d either swept away a lot of woolly thinking or produced a guidebook for the kind of embittered men who formed Donald Trump’s praetorian guard of Proud Boys.
Peterson seemed to relish the conflict, going on tour, producing a podcast, a YouTube channel and appearing on combative TV interviews, inspiring his supporters and provoking his enemies. But then stories emerged of his withdrawal from the frontline of the culture wars. In the “Overture” of Beyond Order, the follow-up to 12 Rules for Life, he details an extraordinary story of physical and psychological collapse, as an autoimmune response to something he ate led to a drastic change in diet and a dependence on the sedative benzodiazepine. He also suffered extreme anxiety, severe depression, insomnia, double pneumonia, his wife underwent surgery for cancer, and at one point he was put into an induced coma in a Moscow hospital in an unsuccessful attempt to free him from drugs. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that 12 Rulesfor Life was a self-help book that left its author in exactly the kind of hopeless state to which it promised to be an antidote.
However, Peterson appears unbowed by the experience, for Beyond Order, which is subtitled 12 More Rulesfor Life, continues in much the same vein. This time the writing is perhaps more laboured, and the arguments undoubtedly more familiar. Like the first book, it’s full of a messianic passion that can read like an unironic homage to Nietzsche. But there are rather too many passages like this: “Question: Who are you – or, at least, who could you be? Answer: Part of the eternal force that constantly confronts the terrible unknown, voluntarily; part of the eternal force that transcends naïveté and becomes dangerous enough, in a controlled manner, to understand evil and beard it in its lair; and part of the eternal force that faces chaos and turns it into productive order, or that takes order that has become too restrictive, reduces it to chaos, and renders it productive once again.”
It’s as if he’s addressing a convention of Dungeons & Dragons fans, an impression that’s only deepened by his close and repeated analysis of the archetypes in the Harry Potter books. In the first set of rules there was a lot of biblical exegesis, which led some of his critics to see him as a Christian evangelist, when he was really interested in old-fashioned moral concepts of good and evil, guilt and shame, chaos and order. This time round there’s plenty more from Christ, as well as the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, Potter, Disney’s Pocahontas, and indeed any text where there’s a clunking moral story to be unearthed.
If Peterson doesn’t excel as a literary critic, he is much more enlightening as a clinical psychologist. One of his strongest arguments is that therapy continues to repeat the same fundamental error of its founders by searching within people’s life stories for solutions to problems that exist outside in the world of complex social relations. As he writes, “Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health”.
Viewed in the most favourable light, Peterson’s rules are an attempt to locate people within society, to acknowledge the systems and structures that have long existed and, instead of seeking to tear them down, encourage his readers to find their most functional position within them. It’s unquestionably a conservative philosophy, albeit one that Peterson frames in an idiosyncratic and sometimes unconventional way. The problem arises when his ragbag of common sense dictums – “Do not do what you hate” – and whimsical fancies – “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible” – are taken themselves to be a kind of gospel.
Rule VI in Beyond Order is “Abandon Ideology”, in which he targets the likes of Marx, Foucault and Derrida, accusing them of reducing the multi-motivational aspects of human behaviour to single causes like economics or power. If there’s an element of truth in this critique (and it ignores a wealth of complexity in their work), it could equally be applied to Peterson himself. He calls this syndrome the “fatal attraction of the false idol”.
Peterson is not masculinity’s saviour, but nor is he the voice of evil as characterised by the staff at Penguin who wanted the book dropped. “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)” is another Peterson rule. Critically minded readers can come to their own conclusions about which course the publisher took with its multimillion-selling author.
• Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson is published by Allen Lane (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
He is not masculinity’s saviour, nor the voice of evil as portrayed by the staff at Penguin who wanted the book dropped