A very minor prophet
Jordan Peterson may speak to millions – but not to me
PETER HITCHENSing this pressure, he overcame it — at least
for now.
But as a prophet of doom I need to add
that I am not sure he has won any really
significant victory in the long war against
radical speech codes and sexual revolu-
tion. I am ceaselessly amazed, as I look at
our media, political parties, schools and uni-
versities, how formerly conservative people
and institutions have adapted themselves to
ideas, expressions and formulations which
they once rejected and confidently mocked.
Almost everything that was once derided
as the work of the ‘loony left’ or ‘politicalcorrectness gone mad’ is observed daily
in grand, expensive private schools and is
the official policy of the Conservative and
Unionist party, or soon will be.
And despite Dr Peterson’s courage, I
cannot love his book. Most of it is written in
a conversational style intended to be friend-
ly and accessible. But for anyone educated
before the cultural revolution, used to the
orderly architecture of argument, it slides
about on the page like mental porridge. It
was not just my eyes that repeatedly glazed
over as I perused it on my homebound train,
but my brain and my entire body.
Various things seemed to keep com-
ing round again, especially his view of the
stories of Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and
Gretel, and his explanation of the Garden
of Eden. He recapitulates a lot. Perhaps the
book is like this because it is based on his
lectures. I was also urged to watch these, but,
when I did, my eyes and mind strayed.
The great Colin Welch once said that,
while trying to read Harold Wilson’s mem-
oirs, he found his attention irresistibly drawn
to the small print on discarded bus tickets or
beer bottle labels. It is not quite that bad. But
whatever it is that has made Dr Peterson a
hero to so many, I do not think it is his prose
style. Here is an example (page 201) of the
higher Peterson: ‘Meaning is when every-
thing there is comes together in an ecstaticN
ow that I seem to have become
a prophet of doom, I wonder
whether I should have been a guru
instead. Doom doesn’t sell. Bookshops hide
my books in back rooms. My recorded
harangues and TV appearances reach a few
thousand dedicated YouTube enthusiasts.
But Dr Jordan B. Peterson, supposedly as
reactionary as I am, speaks to millions. His
new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to
Chaos adorns the front table of every Water-
stones. Annoyingly, friends of mine recom-
mend his lectures to me, people on Twit-
ter tell me incessantly that I ‘must’ explore
his work. They become positively rude if
I express reluctance.
How has he done this? Is he a cult?
Should I too be a cult? Is it the way to reach
minds otherwise closed to conservative
thought? I sometimes receive rather mov-
ing letters from readers who assure me that
I have changed their lives for the better,
which I must confess I never set out to do.
Should I then write a self-help manual of
my own, with the working title Pull Yourself
Together! and bracing chapters such as ‘A
brisk walk — the cure for almost everything
you think you’ve got’ and ‘They put your
face on the front of your head for a good
reason’ (this is directed at the users of smart-
phones)? Perhaps not. I suspect it would not
be soppy enough. I suspect this especially
after spending several days glowering at the
pages of Dr Peterson’s new volume.
Let me say first of all that Dr Peterson’s
recent stand against the Thought Police
of his native Canada was noble and brave.
He refused to be bullied into using gender-
neutral pronouns. And by resolutely resist-I find it hard to applaud efforts
to help me adapt to a world which
I think has gone utterly wrong‘The BBC no longer trusts public
opinion on European matters.’Jeremy Corbyn is the master of ‘raising
issues’. He received an obscure prize
last year for his ‘work for disarmament
and peace’ — i.e. talking about it. He
‘raised issues about human rights in
Iran’, he said, when he worked for TV
there. It will be at the ‘centre of my
foreign policy’.
The ancient Greek for ‘word, speech’
was logos, and words could be regarded
as tricky and deceitful: mere talk, no
substance. Logos, however had another
range of meanings: ‘reason, rational
account, argument.’ It was in that sense
that Plato saw logos as the sole route
to the truth: using debate to produce a
reason-based account of the world.
The Athenian Thucydides, the
contemporary historian of the
catastrophic ‘Peloponnesian war’
between Athens and Sparta (431-404
bc), took on board both of these senses,
but asked the crucial question: what
did logos actually achieve? What was
actually done as a result of logos? More
importantly still, what fit was there
between man’s logos and the real world?
That was the point at which
Thucydides stalled. He came up with
plenty of examples of a leader alerting
his men to the way in which a battle
could be won and proving right. In
particular his hero, the great statesman
Pericles, seemed to have an uncanny
grip on the right policies for whatever
situation arose, and Athens flourished
under his leadership. That was, he
thought, because of Pericles’ high
intelligence: he saw ‘what needed to be
done’ for each occasion.
But reflecting over the course of
the conflict, Thucydides understood
that even a man like Pericles could
do nothing about the brutal external
realities of war, ‘a violent teacher’.
And Pericles knew it: for, as he said,
‘sometimes the course of events is as
arbitrary as the plans of men. That is
why we blame “chance” for whatever
does not happen as we expected.’ It
rendered man’s logos meaningless, no
match for unteachable events.
And that is all Corbyn — hardly
a Pericles — has to offer: an endless
‘raising of issues’ about peace and
human rights. And to what precise
effect? Winning a prize. That will
confront those brutal, external
realities all right. — Peter JonesANCIENT AND MODERN
The emptiness of ‘issues’