“12 Rules for Life” – Thoughts on Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson.  12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.  Random House, 2018.

Ever since reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life a few months ago, I’ve considered writing a post on it.  I’ve held back.  What do you say about a book so rich, so packed with ideas–not necessarily good ideas–so justifiably ambitious?  I don’t know where to begin.

I don’t even know whether to assign it a permanent place on my bookshelves or to pass it on to our local library, where there’s a wait of several months for each of their copies.

I have a rough and ready yardstick for assessing whether I think a book is good or not.  If I feel myself happier, wiser or more humane after reading it, I call it a good book, a worthwhile book–even if it gives me only one of the three, even if that “happiness” consisted only of a few good laughs or a few good thrills, followed by a satisfying ending.  It’s not a terribly high bar, but one that’s realistically placed.  There aren’t many books, in my experience, that don’t have at least some goodness in them.

I think I’m wiser after reading 12 Rules of Life.  Happier?  Definitely not; it’s not a feel-good book, and was never intended as such. (Contrast the self-help book by psychiatry professor David Burns, which is actually entitled Feeling Good, and beneath its slightly gimmicky surface is a very effective work of what Burns calls “bibliotherapy” for those encountering depression.  That one stays on my shelf for the long haul, to be dipped into when inspiration and hope are needed.)

More humane?  I’m not sure.  It depends on what you think of humaneness as involving.

In the “Coda” to his book, Peterson imagines his pen as an oracle to which he poses his questions about how to live one’s life, and which gives definitive though oracularly phrased answers.  (Supported by plentiful Biblical quotations–a remarkable feature in a book that I imagine to have been written by an atheist.)  Let me try something similar with my keyboard:

Is there wisdom in this book?  Definitely.  It’s full of wisdom.  Also full of Jordan Peterson, who seems most of the time to be pretty full of himself.  But then, wouldn’t I be full of myself if I had Peterson’s acclaim?  (“One of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years,” the blurb on the front cover calls him.)  Probably.  But then again, maybe not.  Humility–assuming for the moment that I have it–is a quality that doesn’t melt away in the sunshine.

There are times when I wonder if Peterson’s wisdom is profound or portentous.  If, as seems likely, it’s an admixture of both, then in what proportions?  Example: in his “Overture,” Peterson criticizes the notion that happiness is the proper goal of life.  “The inevitable suffering that life entails”–a recurrent theme throughout the book–“can rapidly make a mockery” of this cheery view.  Of course he’s setting himself against thousands of his fellow-thinkers, not all of whom can be dismissed as hedonistic lightweights.  Robert Ingersoll, the famous 19th-century critic of religion, who wasn’t entirely unacquainted with suffering, said flatly: the purpose of life is to be happy; the way to be happy is to make others so.  This may be shallow, but at least I can understand it.  And it’s kindhearted–no small virtue.

But what are we to say of Peterson’s alternative?

“Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.  Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart.  The black dot in the white–and the white in the black–indicate the possibility of transformation. … For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair.  To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.

“And that’s much better than happiness.”

I’m being unfair to Peterson with this truncated quotation; to grasp his thought, you need the context, in which he lays out what he means by “order” and “chaos.”  Reading it for the first time, in that context, my initial thought was: that’s true, that’s profound, that’s the fine basis of a mature ethic.  But then I asked myself: did I really know what he was talking about?  I went back and reread it, and realized I didn’t.  I didn’t have the slightest idea.

Which may be my limitation, not Peterson’s.  So I’m not saying: portentous.  I’m saying: I don’t know.

Does Peterson’s philosophy involve belief in God?  As far as I can tell, the answer is no, and that’s in spite of all his quotation and discussion of the world’s religious classics, primarily but not limited to the Old and New Testaments.  Atheists don’t normally talk about “the divine Way.”  But they do if they recognize the importance of religious language and thought even while denying its premises, and set as their task to maintain (in George Orwell’s words) a religious attitude toward life even while accepting death as final.  I think that’s where Peterson stands, though he doesn’t come out and say so.

Life is hard, its ending normally cruel.  That’s what he does come out and say, over and over.  If you and your loved ones don’t have any major tragedy in your lives now, just wait five years.  No caring Higher Power has your back; it’s just you and your fate.  And there isn’t a whisper in 12 Rules for Life of a future life where hearts are mended, tears wiped away from all faces.

Instead the message is: we are animals.  Our evolutionary history, what we were before we were human, is a major controlling factor in what we are today.  Our dominance hierarchies, ineradicable and unreformable–hence Peterson’s essential conservatism–are unchanged since the days of the lobsters (who are the central actors in his first chapter).  The Bible of Darwin, with all its depressing implications, is true.  But is the Bible of Genesis therefore false?

No, says Peterson, with the unspoken proviso that it must be read symbolically.  Here’s the other side of his conservatism: a conviction that the accumulated wisdom of humankind remains an essential guide for humans today.  The Scriptures are an essential repository of that wisdom, not to be discarded lightly (or at all).  That’s why so much of the book consists of a psychologically informed rereading of Bible stories.  Also the sayings of Jesus, including the exceedingly unpleasant dictum that “unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (Matthew 25:29).

Peterson:  “You truly know you are the Son of God when your dicta apply even to crustaceans.”

Psychologically informed reading of the Bible is a project after my own heart, and it’s expected but nonetheless welcome that Peterson should speak warmly of Jung and acknowledge his debt to him.  (Also, to my delight, Freud: you can tell Freud was a genius, Peterson remarks, “because people still hate him.”)  But Peterson’s attempts at such readings seem to me mostly to fall flat.  Example: He spends a few pages on the exegesis of what I regard as one of the most profound, powerful, and ambiguous stories in all literature, the two versions of Christ’s temptation by the Devil (Matthew 4, Luke 4), and after a few months I have no recollection of what he says about it.  But 50 years after reading Dostoevsky’s midrash on this tale in “The Grand Inquisitor,” I’m still haunted by it.

I’m 70 years old.  Would I give this book to a 20-year-old man, such as the 20-year-old I once was, as a guide to life?

No, I would not.  There’s too much harmful stuff in it.  Too many assertions that, whatever truth they may have–and they do have some–are apt to do bad things to the inexperienced and vulnerable.

“It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, ‘No!’  For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. … It is Nature as Woman who says, ‘Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.'”  (page 41)

Now that is one hell of a thing to be confronted with, when you’ve just been told, no, sorry, I’m busy that night.  Not just the one woman in question, with all her idiosyncrasies, has turned you down, but “Woman as Nature” or “Nature as Woman.”

What are you supposed to do, when Nature herself has stamped “inadequate genetic material” on your forehead?

Answer: go to your bookshelf, open David Burns’s Feeling Good, and reread what he says about “overgeneralization,” one of his list of ten cognitive distortions that can lead you into depression if you don’t counter them with logical, realistic thinking:

“The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization.  In its absence, a personal affront is temporarily disappointing but cannot be seriously disturbing.  A shy young man mustered up his courage to ask a girl for a date.  When she politely declined because of a previous engagement, he said to himself, ‘I’m never going to get a date.  No girl would ever want a date with me.  I’ll be lonely and miserable all my life.’  In his distorted cognitions, he concluded that because she turned him down once, she would always do so, and that since all women have 100 percent identical tastes, he would be endlessly and repeatedly rejected by any eligible woman on the face of the earth.”

Which is pretty silly, and which is exactly what Peterson would tell that young man.  Except he probably wouldn’t.  In chapter 9, where he speaks of himself as a psychotherapist, he shows himself to be both caring and effective, his humane instincts and his ability to listen to his patients having trumped his theorizing about stuff like “genetic material for continued propagation.”  So I wouldn’t mind at all if 20-year-old Dave, in acute self-doubt because he can’t find a girlfriend, were to make his way to Dr. Peterson’s office.

But I don’t want him reading Dr. Peterson’s book.  He feels bad enough already.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that Peterson is wrong.  Who knows?–in the grand scheme of things, the evolutionary imperative may indeed speak his brutal “well, bucko” language.  But we don’t live in the grand scheme of things.  What Peterson says is no help at all for the man or woman who’s just been turned down–by someone attractive, by an agent, by a publisher (to get a bit closer to where I am now)–for whom his or her next overture might bring a lovely surprise.

Indeed, there’s something degrading about the whole idea of “Woman as Nature” or “Nature as Woman.”  Here Peterson’s taste for grand abstractions badly leads him astray.  Maybe there’s some truth in his perception.  But there’s a more solid, tangible truth in the reality that we all know if we open our eyes to it: that women no less than men are human individuals with different tastes and different needs, who put themselves on the line just like us and often are answered with rejection, as we are.  Turn them into the stony, rejecting face of impersonal Nature, and you discount their humanness.

Which is to say: we’re not precisely lobsters.

I’d be willing to bet that Peterson knows that in his personal life and his therapeutic work.  But he doesn’t say that in his book.  Or if he does, and I simply haven’t remembered it, it remains true that he also says the contrary, powerfully and chillingly enough to override his better counsels.

It’s a good book, in many ways a wise book.  I’m glad I read it.  I think I’ll let the library have it.

by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on  Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Read about my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–coming in 2020 from Stanford University Press.
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog?  Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.