A specter is haunting North America — the specter of postmodernism. Or at least, that’s what Jordan Peterson would have you believe. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has entered into an unholy alliance with all the powers of the alt-right to exorcise this specter. Though he calls himself a “British classical liberal,” Peterson’s appeal feeds into the most reactionary tendencies in contemporary politics. He rose to fame when he was captured on video at a protest on the Univer
But Peterson has just released a new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos . It is his first since 1999’s Maps of Meaning, a study of myth in modern thought. In that book, Peterson based his thinking on the mysticism of Carl Jung, following a pattern initiated by Joseph Campbell, whose influence is now primarily seen in Star Wars rather than scholarship on myth. Peterson neglected to engage with unanimously recognized predecessors in the field of study, like anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who h
The new book, as its listicle-esque title indicates, is a self-help manual. But amid the bootstrapping pablum and folksy anecdotes that are standard for the genre, Peterson includes a pointed political argument. If his readers are struggling, he says, it is because contemporary society has fallen into disorder. In spite of the abundance and comfort offered by capitalist innovation, we have abandoned the stability of traditional society, one in which the fittest among us held power and resources, in which co