Jordan Peterson is on a crusade to toughen up young men. It’s landed him on our cultural divide.
By Karen Heller May 2 2018
[www.washingtonpost.com]
(Excerpts)
By Karen Heller May 2 2018
[www.washingtonpost.com]
(Excerpts)
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“I don’t really regard myself as a political figure,” Peterson says, but increasingly he is, embraced by conservatives and the alt-right, and viewed suspiciously by the left. It was politics that launched him to fame last year when he spoke out against a Canadian bill mandating the use of transgender pronouns, which he views as trammeling free speech.
A couple of years ago, Peterson was a respected though far from famous academic when he began posting his lengthy lectures online. Now there are hours and hours of his talks and interviews on YouTube, a viral Encyclopedia Jordanica with more than a million subscribers. Some of his video lectures clock in at 180 minutes with generous servings of biblical stories (but only for their moral teachings; Peterson abandoned organized religion as a teen) as well as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn and his hero, Jung. Even the least popular talks of recent months have racked up more than 100,000 views.
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Peterson elicits nearly every opinion except indifference. “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times, calling him “a young William F. Buckley.” Critics, and there are plenty, raise serious doubts.
“He takes a really simplistic approach toward gender inequality. It feels like a dressed-up version of misogyny,” says Gary Barker, a developmental psychologist who has studied ways to promote gender equality and violence prevention. “The scary part is it doesn’t provoke men to be better but to live with this inequality and get what you can out of it.”
Peterson rails against victimhood and “radical left-wing identity politics.” He’s an opponent of regulated equality and a skeptic of the notion of male or white “privilege.” Like many thought leaders who flirted with socialism in their youth, Peterson crusades against anything that he thinks smacks of Marxist tendencies and groupthink, which means a lot of inveighing against “postmodernist” scholars, who are probably a bigger nuisance at faculty confabs than in the lives of his fans.
His combative nature and mastery of video has proved to be catnip for extremely online young men. An interview with British broadcaster Cathy Newman
[www.youtube.com]
in which the two clashed on topics such as the gender pay gap, has been viewed more than 9 million times. (After Newman endured a hailstorm of misogynistic abuse on social media, Peterson cautioned his Twitter followers (now 642,000 strong) to “be civilized in your criticism. It was words. Words, people, words. Remember those?”)
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Peterson now follows a “ridiculous” diet of meat, salad and water, promoted online by his daughter, with only turmeric and salt for flavor. “Turmeric and salt! Turmeric and salt!” he sings in the middle of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, mocking the entire business with an impromptu jig. The regimen, Peterson says, helped him go off antidepressants, which he once assumed he would take for life, and shed 50 pounds