Jordan Peterson was an obscure psychology professor in Canada until young men discovered his YouTube lectures. People struggling for direction watched hourlong videos in which Peterson delivered lessons about responsibility. Normal people in a normal time would regard this as a positive. Unfortunately, we live in a deranged age filled with paranoid neurotics who labeled Peterson a fascist. After becoming a household name, he suddenly vanished. Now, he’s back with a new book.
Beyond Order is filled with wisdom that will help young people who have never encountered Peterson before. But his voice no longer claps like thunder. Things have changed in Peterson’s absence, and his larger political project can be seen as an attempt to hold together a world that’s already disappeared.
Beyond Order is organized into 12 chapters based on 12 different rules. These include “do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement” and “do not hide unwanted things in the fog.” Every chapter follows a general pattern. Peterson shares a concrete story from his experience as a clinical psychologist, and then he explores how the story is connected to much larger and more complex forces before bringing it back to practical advice. Those who have watched his videos or read his prior book will find a lot of familiar material. He has a truly original vision that blends psychology, myth, evolution, and game theory.
There’s no mystery as to why Peterson rose to fame. For the intellectually curious, it’s simply entertaining to see him find patterns that connect Egyptian myths to biology and life in corporate America. Social conservatives are drawn to him because he offers novel defenses of traditional values that don’t stink of mothballs. But his mass success is mostly attributable to the wisdom of his practical advice. In a chapter about the need to address small problems before they accumulate, he writes, “You age as you drift, just as rapidly as you age as you strive.” Peterson packages advice like this in a heroic narrative that resonates with young men.
Sometimes this eclectic style causes the book to stumble. Peterson swings between the grandiose world of myth and the everyday world of practical advice in a way that can make both seem absurd. For example, the chapter “Don’t Do What You Hate” is about what to do when your job sucks. Peterson advises that you must “confront the organizational mendacity undermining your spirit, face the chaos that ensues, rescue your near-dead father from the depths.” What does this mean? Apply for a new job. To be fair, “don’t do what you hate” also refers to how to navigate societal breakdown, which is why the language resorts to the mythic, but Peterson’s wild shifts in register highlight why many have trouble with him.
Critics often struggle with his style because he discusses so many topics at once that it requires good faith to sort them. Those who focus on his political message end up looking callously indifferent to the young men who are trying not to become fentanyl statistics. But part of Peterson’s initial success was because he offered a rallying point to those opposed to the woke movement. Peterson affirmed 20th-century liberalism and gave people a vocabulary for rejecting the new ideology on multiple levels. But both Peterson and wokeness are examples of how the internet has changed everything. That change only accelerated in Peterson’s absence, and the old status quo can no longer be preserved.
The words and values we inherited from 20th-century politics don’t describe reality anymore. Consider that Peterson defended “authority” and the authorities condemned him for it. He told students to respect “institutions,” and university professors denigrated him. Powerful people did everything they could to decrease Peterson’s power because he said power hierarchies are an unavoidable fact of life. Clearly, the words we use don’t mean the same thing to everyone. This situation is reminiscent of another time when words lost meaning.
Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is the story of a democratic empire at a time when its old value system had fallen apart. Athens inherited words and ethical concepts from the Homeric age that lost meaning at a moment of crisis. As the war intensified, the Athenians lost their ability to speak intelligently about justice. After Athens put down a colonial rebellion, the people decreed that all the men from the rebellious colony should be executed and that all women and children be sold into slavery. The next day, the Athenians decided to reassess this choice.
The politician Cleon argued that they should stick with the original decision because compassion would go against Athenian interest. The politician Diodotus responded with a rhetorical tour de force that outmaneuvered Cleon. Diodotus won in the short term, and the colony was spared, but his novel argument sidestepped the fundamental question of justice. The people agreed with Diodotus because they still had prejudices toward justice and mercy, but they could not explain why. Their inchoate prejudice would not survive the war. The next time justice came up, the Athenians rejected it, saying that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Peterson is our Diodotus.
Like Diodotus, Peterson justifies old values in new ways. Readers often tell him that he explains what they already know but couldn’t put into words. This is evidence that Peterson helps people defend their inherited values and culture after they’ve lost the tradition needed to sustain them. That’s a good thing, but you’re already in deep trouble if you need to rely on Jungian myth analysis to defend the basic pillars of society. Peterson rose to fame at a time when people needed a way to defend the status quo from wokeness. But wokeness has now been institutionalized by every powerful organization from Goldman Sachs to the military. It cannot be stopped with appeals to myth and evolutionary psychology.
The limits of Peterson’s approach are demonstrated by a concrete error in the final chapter: “Be Grateful Despite Your Suffering.” Peterson discusses the inevitable tragedies every person must face and gives the father-figure advice needed to stave off nihilism. He references Jesus Christ’s words on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And he says, “This appears to strongly imply … that the burden of life can become so great that even God Himself can lose faith.” It’s easy to understand why Peterson might find this idea interesting since he spent the past few years dealing with extreme personal difficulties that at one point left him nearly half-dead. But this is interpretive chaos. Christ is quoting Psalm 22. At the most horrific moment, Christ quoted the opening lines of a passage that ends with a declaration that all who seek the Lord will find him. Even despair, even alienation from God, is sanctified as prayer.
Those who recognize the peril of our current political and cultural situation will find a useful friend in Peterson, and anyone who knows a young man who needs to get his life together should send him Beyond Order. But Peterson’s work, however valuable, is not an end in itself. It should instead be recognized for what it is: an invitation to find firmer ground to resist what may be coming.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
