Last month at London’s O2 Arena, a few days after Justin Timberlake took to the stage, 6,000 people came through the doors to hear the psychologist Jordan Peterson. He was appearing with the writers Sam Harris and Douglas Murray, but to judge by my conversations Peterson was the main attraction.
“He’s the most important man on the planet,” one thirtysomething fan tells me. (There is a hint of irony in his smile, but he’s not just kidding.) Peterson, he says, exposes the falsehoods of “the cultural elite.” “They say he’s a Nazi, of course, but that’s to protect themselves. They can smell that the game is up.” And why does that make him so popular, I ask, gesturing at the queues stretching across the O2’s central hall. The man takes a copy of the New York Times—“our ****ing cultural arbiter”—out of his satchel. “Look at this. Page two.” He jabs his finger at a story about transgender representation. “That’s why.”
All this fits a certain view of Jordan Peterson: as the leader of an insurgency against political correctness and campus-left extremism. And it’s true that the author of 12 Rules For Life often plays this role: He first came to widespread attention while fighting a Canadian bill which threatened to make the use of “preferred pronouns” compulsory. His most viral YouTube appearance was a testy encounter with the feminist TV presenter Cathy Newman. He is scorned for “fascist mysticism” (New York Review of Books) and “cloak[ing] bigotry in pseudointellectual arguments” (Slate), to quote only two of the more inventive insults. Peterson’s fans admire his resolve against what one of them describes to me as “liberal fascism.”
But that’s not the main reason that people at the O2 tell me they like Peterson. Much more often I hear sentiments such as: “He’s studied all his life, and you can tell.” Or: “I like the way he argues, very politely and very specifically.” Or, on the subject of religion: “He’s made me reconsider the whole question.” More than anything else, the people I spoke with told me they appreciated Peterson’s seriousness and his willingness to discuss big subjects.
The atmosphere at the O2 didn’t feel like a mass political movement, or even an excitable fan club. Most of the people there were dressed in the nondescript uniform of youngish professionals. It was a very male audience, though there were quite a few couples, but I saw little sign of Peterson’s supposed “cult following” of lost adolescents looking for consolation and a cause.
Peterson is a mesmerising speaker. Trying to explain the legendary charisma of the poet Ian Hamilton, Clive James wrote: “He looked doomed.” Something similar could be said of Jordan Peterson. When speaking, he leans forward so that a shadow falls across half of his (often troubled) face. He pauses at length, fiddles with his wedding ring or rests his forehead on a clenched fist. Sometimes he speaks with an intensity close to anger, then at the pace of a deathbed scene in a movie. What grips the audience, and provokes applause, is less politics, more his discussions of how “poetic fantasy” helps us to live, or of the “overwhelming horror” of the “nihilistic void.” Indeed, at one point Peterson tells the audience: “I suspect many of you are actually here because you would like to see the void addressed.”
The economist William Davies, in his mordant report on the event for the London Review of Books, confessed: “To me this was a revelation. I thought we were here to watch a brain grenade being hurled at snowflakes and postmodernists.” Peterson’s popularity goes far beyond the culture wars.
So what is Peterson’s answer to the “void” and the plummet into nihilistic pessimism?
12 Rules for Life offers a mixture of hard-earned insight from the psychologist’s office—about accepting risk, communicating in relationships, dealing with suffering—and grandiose theories about Meaning. (The capital M is Peterson’s.) He also tells us about Being and the Way. These passages can be unintentionally comic:
“Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose . . . so that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good.” The bureaucratese (“increasingly successful attempt”) and vagueness, especially by contrast with Peterson’s lucid and gripping autobiographical writing, suggest that he is a preacher in search of a coherent gospel.
Peterson is ambivalent towards Christianity. He believes the world is so strange that he can’t rule out the possibility of Christ’s physical Resurrection. But his rereadings of Christian doctrine and Scripture are often wildly out of kilter with orthodox belief, and sometimes painfully banal. The feeding of the 5,000 is, he suggests, “a call to the pursuit of higher meaning as the mode of living that is simultaneously most practical and of highest quality.”
Here as elsewhere, it’s tempting to write off Peterson as a shallow thinker. He has remarkably little to say about politics. (“A tiny fraction of the world,” he has claimed.) For all that he encourages people to listen to and understand their opponents, there cannot be a feminist, postmodernist or Marxist who would accept Peterson’s brisk caricatures of their philosophies. He frequently praises the values of “Western civilization,” with a passion seemingly unmoderated by his hero Solzhenitsyn’s fierce critique of the West and its delusions.
But Peterson is not just offering self-help tips, or religious and political philosophy. He is best understood, rather, as a kind of poet. Throughout his work, whether he is remembering his childhood or denouncing population control, he expresses an awestruck fascination with human life.
There’s a moment just before the end of the evening which sums it up. Sam Harris, best known as an atheist polemicist, grows exasperated at Peterson’s discourses on the Father archetype and the challenge of the void. “I could change the valence of virtually every word you used there,” Harris tells Peterson, “and it would also sound profound and true. I could swap ‘Father’ for Mother’ and ‘void’ for ‘mountaintop’.”
“If it’s that easy,” Peterson shoots back, “You can write great novels. You can tell great stories.”
Peterson speaks, with more conviction than almost anybody else in the public sphere, for the value of the imagination, of art and myth and the tales of our ancestors. Against those like Harris who roll their eyes, Peterson is a defender of the mysterious.
True, he sometimes sounds absurd. But in a world dominated by materialism on the one hand, and frenzied, half-despairing political activism on the other, Peterson stands out. He offers the assurance that your life—in its simplest aspects of work, friendship and family—are part of a story which stretches from Adam and Eve to the present day. He is capable of reminding people that they are, in fact, alive, and that there might be a good reason for it. Even if every snowflake evaporated tomorrow, people would still be queuing up to hear him.
