Probably Jordan Peterson needs no introduction. He’s the Canadian psychology professor who first gained public notoriety for opposing a law mandating the use of gender-neutral pronouns. (He has said he was willing to defer to an individual person’s pronoun preferences but opposed a law that could threaten a person’s career for failure to comply with the demands of political correctness.) In 2018, he published a kind of self-help book titled “12 Rules for Life” that has sold millions of copies and helped to fuel worldwide interest in Peterson’s writings, public appearances, You-Tube videos and the like.
One might be puzzled by the success of Peterson’s “12 Rules,” since much of his advice seems like pretty obvious common sense — things like stand up straight, tell the truth and get your own house in order before you presume to change the world.
But I guess his common sense is not obvious, since his counsel strikes many vigilant commentators as dangerously right-wing and threatening to hard-won progress in equality and tolerance. (Peterson is quite refreshingly outspoken, notably, on differences between boys and girls, men and women, and has gained quite a following among young men trying to figure out what it means to be a man.) Common sense is clearly not so common these days, and so all credit is due to Professor Peterson for being willing to brave political correctness to make some elementary principles of a good and responsible life available to another generation.
In any case, Peterson’s scholarly contributions are limited to simple common sense. Two decades before “12 Rules,” he published a heavy, scholarly tome, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” which ranges over vast areas of mythology, religion, anthropology and literature, as well as psychology in the search for human universals; he seeks to understand how human stories have responded to a world that threatens to engulf them in violence and chaos.
Peterson tells us most directly why his research matters in an affecting letter to his father included at the end of the book. He was long gripped, he explains, by the problem of war, and sought its sources in the way our history conditions everything about us. Finally, he realized “that history is in your head,” and that, unless we understand “the traditions of mythology and religion,” we can never understand ourselves, or do anything to solve our problems. In this realization he confronted an overwhelming choice: “I believe now that everyone has this choice in front of them, even when they do not know or refuse to admit it; that everyone makes this choice, with every decision and action they take.”
It is not very clear here just what is involved in Peterson’s choice to confront and assume the deep history that is “in our heads.” The answer may be found earlier in his conclusion. There he confronts the classic question, raised by Dostoyevsky, among others: “How can a good God allow for the existence of a suffering world?” To respond, Peterson first distinguishes willful harm from “tragedy — subjugation to the mortal conditions of existence,” a tragedy consummated in “Christ’s full participation in and freely chosen acceptance of his fate (which he shares with mankind).” “But why is life tragic?” he asks.
What if a tension, an opposition inherent in all things, is the very condition of existence?
“The best I can make of it is this … Nothing can exist without preconditions. Even a game cannot be played without rules. … Perhaps the world is not possible, as a world, without its borders, without its rules. Maybe existence wouldn’t be possible in the absence of our painful limitations. … If we could have everything we wanted, merely for wishing it … if all men were omniscient and immortal — then everything would be the same, the same all-powerful thing, God, and creation would not exist.”
This is philosophical and religious speculation at its boldest: What if a tension, an opposition inherent in all things, is the very condition of existence? What if, without moral agency, the capacity to act as well as to be acted upon, without the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, there could be no God and no existence?
But should the world exist? Should God have created it — and us? Peterson’s answer: “Perhaps we could reserve an answer to the question of God’s nature, his responsibility for the presence of evil in creation, until we have solved the problem of our own.” We won’t see clearly what is good, he suggests, until we have learned to take “full advantage of every gift we have been granted.” And so, as Peterson strains for his most ambitious insight into the meaning of all things, he returns in a way to his most elementary advice: Clean up your room before changing the world. There is no truer way to see reality than through the eyes of moral agency. Uncommon sense, indeed.
Ralph Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs. His views are his own.
Correction: An earlier version misstated the year Jordan Peterson’s book was published. “12 Rules for Life” was published in 2018, not 2012.