Why Can't We Look Away?

Why is the internet (and me) still so interested in Jordan Peterson? Because we need mad intellectuals like he used to be.

Jordan Peterson’s already infamous appearance on Jubilee. Credit: YouTube

Last week I published a quickly written “emergency” article responding to Jordan Peterson’s woeful appearance on Jubilee’s debate channel. Within 15 hours it was my most liked, viewed and commented article, knocking from the top another article from earlier this year about, you’ve guessed it, Jordan Peterson. It’s been read 50,000 times, and counting.

Perhaps his Jubilee appearance has particular significance in the trajectory of his fall from Jung-inspired psychology professor to infuriating, saint emblazoned babble merchant, and the sheer number of similarly viral reaction videos to it reflect what a car crash it was, but even before this article I’ve found simply mentioning Jordan Peterson draws an audience like nothing else.

The obvious question is why? Why should any of us care anymore? Peterson’s zenith was arguably now nearing a decade ago, and most people have figured out that not a lot lies behind his insinuation of profundity when he says things like “it depends on what you mean by God.” Besides some quasi-philosophical pragmatism-lite, there really isn’t much it seems he does believe in.

But there’s something about him that remains irresistible. I find myself distinctly interested in his career and trajectory even now when he is in many ways, as I wrote last week, a shell of an intellectual, not because as a believer I’m hoping for some conversion and in spite of the fact that I find him so infuriating he borders on unbearable, but just because I find him constantly curious.

So while my notifications have been going bonkers this week with responses to my article, I’ve been thinking a lot about why.

I am, I suppose, in the Peterson generation. I was in my late twenties when he rose to success and I was probably in the category of young men he believed himself to be speaking to. I was certainly not someone who would say he saved me from the dragon of chaos that was my untidy room, nor was I ever impressed with his ridiculous theories about lobsters, I just found him mildly interesting. I’ve written before about his biblical lecture series, all of which I have listened to several times. While they are frustrating, mad, and sprinkled with unfalsifiable gibberish and self-help gospel, they are tantalisingly interesting. Anyone who listened to them listened to Peterson changing the religious conversation in real time.

Naturally not everyone thought that, David Bentley Hart at the time called them “ghastly,” said Peterson was a “hack” and that there could be no sincere reasons for any young person listening to them that was not a reflection of intellectual impoverishment combined with a need for a self-help Father figure.

Firstly, I don’t think this is a fair criticism. Yes, Peterson has certainly always had a skim-read understanding of a lot of thinkers, and tended to engage quite sweepingly with strawmen/cliches, something that has got worse with time (by this point “postmodernneomarxists” is completely meaningless), and he certainly leans towards the mad, but he was still reasonably well read and perhaps more obviously, he was exactly what he was: an eccentric Canadian psychology professor. If you expected that, you got it, it was interesting and infuriating in due measure; but if you expected a saviour of religious learning who could supply a robust pragmatic resurrection of the biblical traditions, not so much.

Secondly, the fact that young men want self-help that is rooted in intellectual credibility or a reminder of the relationship of meaning and responsibility is hardly something to condemn them or Peterson for. This probably should be the role of the pastor or preachers, and the fact is that Peterson for a moment fulfilled a vacuum probably left in a lot of young men’s lives by the failure of well meaning but inept youth pastors, perhaps Fathers. His self-help advice wasn’t really Christian, but it was perfectly laudable and it seemed to anecdotally help a lot of young men. I don’t think that was or is something to mock.

And something happened in this era to Peterson that I think it’s hard to solely blame him for. He was both idolised and condemned in a way so extreme that it seems absurd that anyone could go through it with their ego intact. Wherever he went young men would be thanking him for saving their lives and interviewers would be asking why he wanted to spread hate speech, with little in between. Peterson always seemed to have a slightly forthright streak that bordered on angry, and while in his early interviews he remained composed, as 2018–19 went by he often seemed to become more tearful or angry in interviews, suggesting that these extremes took an unsurprising emotional toll.

Then, I suppose you know what happened. I am not a doctor, and I don’t know whether eight days in a medically induced coma to treat benzodiazepines withdrawal is likely to have a detrimental effect on your cognitive state, but I don’t think I’m in a minority suggesting that Peterson’s state of mind in the era after his return from collapse has never been the same. The pre-covid Peterson was sharp, concise and formidable in interviews, whatever you thought of his points. Now he cries regularly during interviews, meanders in his responses, posts videos addressed to literally ‘all Christians’ or ‘all CEOS,’ berating the camera angrily, he talks over everyone he interviews on his podcast, and his content became and has become increasingly messy, at times nonsensical. His ARC conference speeches are so absurd they border on self-parody, and his latest book is tough sledding even for a sympathetic Peterson fan. I’ve written before about his strange appropriation of Christianity during this time, and to cap it all off he signed a deal with the Daily Wire to host his podcast and start making paywalled content on everything from marriage advice to the gospels. Peterson’s transition from interesting professor to self-appointed culture war saviour was complete, and it was not the same Jordan Peterson as the one who first appeared on Canadian TV to object to an obscure bill about pronouns.

So why do we still care? There is certainly an element of the car crash phenomenon, where the traffic builds in the opposite direction simply because everyone can’t help but slow down to have a look. Not to mention that the more Peterson engages with forthright, angry assertive energy the more he fosters a love-to-hate response that at times he is hardly undeserving of. His attitude, especially when it comes to adopting Christianity, has reached a painful level of pomposity, perhaps reaching its climax in his condemning of Candace Owen on Twitter with a stream of bible verses, in which he accused her of using Christianity to foster her own success. For someone who does interviews in blazers covered in saints and sells courses on the gospels behind a Daily Wire paywall in spite of not actually being a Christian, the hypocritical accusation of hypocrisy is almost painful in its irony.

Yet for all that, Peterson is still capable of saying things that are interesting and of hinting at conclusions many thinkers are nowhere near. He is, or was, at the very least determinedly unique and interesting. The reason no one would care if I wrote an article about someone like Wes Huff, a now popular evangelist, is because Huff is saying nothing that suggests any particular individual insight, and most of what he says is nothing you wouldn’t have found on an apologetics bookshelf for the last twenty years. If you’ve heard it before it might not just be that you don’t agree but that you’re unlikely to care, because Huff is just reading established ground in apologetics and repeating it like a salesman.

In fact there is another reason why I think Hart was wrong about Peterson’s biblical lectures. While they contained plenty of nonsense, it wasn’t just nonsense. There were plenty of incredibly insightful observations throughout it, plenty of moments that made you go ‘huh.’ Peterson just came at everything so sideways and churned the riverbed up so much that he —  perhaps you might even say incidentally — produced something weirdly interesting.

Is it his fault millions of fans interpreted that feeling of insight with the belief in his status as saviour? Perhaps, Peterson certainly rode the wave, and he seemed to believe his own hype as much if not more than anyone. Being vilified didn’t help no doubt, but in reality there weren’t enough people suggesting everyone just needed to shut up and let him go be a psychology professor who did the odd public lecture series.

After all, a healthy society needs thinkers who churn the stagnant water, they wake us up from a kind of slumber. The trajectory of Peterson’s career may have been an inevitability of his ego that couldn’t say ‘that’s enough’ and had to pursue ARC conference culture saviour status, or it may be the fault of those who expected him to be more than he was. Either way, the failure of Jordan Peterson is a failure of culture, a failure of public intellectualism, a failure of a new media system that boasted a positive replacement to the legacy media and instead replaced it with siloed professional talkers who tour podcasts in a stagnant intellectually listless wasteland.

But perhaps that’s enough, he won’t be the middling psychology professor he was because he’s Jordan Peterson now, that guy everyone knows. If he was my Dad, as he is about the age to be, I’d wish he took up fishing or some hobby and went and quietly wrote a book about something he loved, spent some time with his grandkids, maybe got an allotment. At this point, doing Oxford Union debates, ARC conferences or Jubilee shows is hurting his career and his legacy, and by the looks of it, his mental health. For all that I’ve mocked his bizarre recent lectures and commented on his downfall, I sincerely hope someone in his family is brave enough to tell him that and he is able to find some retirement peace, maybe even eat a salad once in a while. The nobody Toronto lecturer he used to be deserves better.