Jordan Peterson is a prophet—and a problem for progressives
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Peterson understands how ideology shapes culture—and that enrages his harshest critics.
More than four decades ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that we need moralists to challenge the self-destructive and dehumanizing drift of western culture. The writings, lectures, debates, and critiques of Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto psychology professor, reveal why we need them. Peterson has been called the “most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” and his YouTube videos have attracted nearly 50 million views. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Peterson has more than a half-million YouTube subscribers, and nearly 300,000 Twitter followers: “They devour the classics he deems must-reads—Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Orwell. When asked to compare him, they turn to historical figures like Plato, Diogenes, Gandhi. They insist he’s changed their lives.”
Although he has spent the past 20 years at Toronto, he is remembered fondly by his graduate students from his years at Harvard in the 1990s. In a 1995 article titled “Linking Mythology with Psychology,” The Harvard Crimson quoted Peterson’s students as saying that Peterson was “teaching beyond the level of anyone else…I remember students crying on the last day of class because they wouldn’t get to hear him anymore.”
During his Harvard years, Peterson became interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification. Understanding how ideology shapes culture still motivates him today—and that in turn seems to motivate some of his harshest critics. Peterson’s criticisms of the evils of postmodernism and gender theory led one faculty member at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University to compare him to Hitler. This comparison was a response to a decision by a teaching assistant on the Wilfrid Laurier campus to show her undergraduate students a five-minute clip of a debate featuring Peterson. A faculty committee was assembled quickly to investigate the T.A.; during the interrogation she received from the faculty panel, the T.A. claimed that she showed the video “neutrally” to teach her students that they needed to listen to all sides before reaching conclusions. But her supervising professor angrily rebuked her for showing the video—claiming that giving a platform to Peterson was like “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler.” The professor’s remarks were recorded by the T.A. and although he later apologized to her, the university has not sanctioned him for his bullying behavior.
Read also: The Curious Case of the Canadian Psychologist, Burkean Journal
Watch: Joe Rogan Experience #1070 – Jordan Peterson – YouTube
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