Jordan Peterson might be today’s most influential public intellectual, having achieved that fame in only two years, following a long career as an academic and a practicing clinical psychologist.
He burst onto the media scene with a hard stand against forced speech imposed by a law in Canada. Then, he became a symbol of resistance against the wild excesses of postmodern identity politics.
The media have yet to figure this out, but their jeering attacks on him have unleashed a lion.
Today, he travels the country and the world, selling out theater venues like a rockstar, with tickets going for $60 to $300 each, along with hats and t-shirts being snapped up in the lobby and a long line of people wanting pictures for their social profiles. He has just booked another 50 appearances, in addition to the 50 currently on the list, with the venues getting larger by the week.
A Singular Figure
It’s perhaps true that Noam Chomsky could have filled up such a theater at the height of the Vietnam War. Maybe William F. Buckley could have done the same at one point in his career. But I’m not sure either one of these could have gone on tour and reliably filled thousands of seats with paying customers night after night, for month after month. Ayn Rand is another possible case, but I doubt her demographic draw would have been as vast and varied.I’m trying to think of any other living intellectual—a pure intellectual, not a comedian or sports star or musician or rabble-rousing political commentator—who could pack a house of 3,000 people paying this amount to see him. Maybe I’ve overlooked someone, but I can’t think of anyone.
And so you wonder what’s really behind this remarkable rise of this man and his show. If you look him up, you will find no shortage of opinion pieces that suggest that Peterson is all about anger, resentment against modernity, some rebellious and maybe bigoted movement of reaction and authoritarianism.
Appearance
Last night, I attended a lecture at a venue outside of Hartford, Connecticut. The show seemed to have every seat filled: people from all walks of life, but they mostly tilted in the young direction. There was an announcement regarding a no-video policy, otherwise, our view would have been blocked by hundreds of cell phones held high for 90 minutes.The announcer further said there would be no heckling of any sort allowed, under any circumstances. The people cheered, I among them. I think we are all pretty well fed up with tribal wars being fought with screams, signs, and anger. We came to listen and learn. That’s all.
Then, Peterson came onstage, and revealed an authentic sense of gratitude and appreciation for those who came just to hear him talk for 90 minutes. He had no magic opening to get people going. On the contrary, he seemed anxious to lower expectations. He began with some small observations about the tour and his book, the strange place in which he finds himself, and some fascinating anecdotes from his long career, spotted with some vignettes from political and economic history.
He is sometimes inadvertently funny, so sometimes, the audience would laugh affectionately. This would make him laugh in turn, and then wonder out loud why people thought what he said was funny.
His humility is endearing, really a model. His absolute refusal to engage in any kind of manipulative demagoguery is a fantastic relief. He made it clear within the first 10 minutes that if anyone had come for red meat, he or she will be deeply disappointed.
Improvisation
A captivating aspect of listening to Peterson in any venue is merely to observe his uncommon erudition. His vocabulary is vast and effortlessly transferred from mind to voice, flowing from sentence to sentence with penetrating power that seems almost without limit, without a single utterance of “uh” or “hmmm.”He unveils gradually, with a powerful inner fire, the contents of his mind as it pertains to the great topic of understanding and navigating ourselves and the world around us. It’s not clear if he had a particular plan for what he would say that night but he might have; regardless, his speech is different every single time.
Hope
Once the speech got going, he chose to talk first about the things about the world that aren’t getting the headlines today. If you pick up the papers, you would think everything around us is collapsing. But if you look at the data, what you see is very different.Poverty is falling at a rate never seen in history. Many fatal diseases are being eradicated. War is less common than ever. Violence is falling. Technology has brought information to the masses. The standard of living around the world—even where it never before existed in any form —is rising at an amazing rate, with only one exception: where political totalitarianism keeps people down.
And here, he began that real point. It’s not enough to rattle off the phenomenal statistics about the improvement of the human condition. We must understand the “why.” His answer was clear as a bell: Growing amounts of freedom are unleashing creativity within the structures of capitalistic institutions that are encouraging people to enter into networks of productivity, cooperation, and marvelous achievement.
At this point, I heard his clearest statement yet about his ideological commitments. He is a proponent of human freedom and human rights, a liberal in the classical sense, which is to say, a genuine liberal who believes in freedom of speech, association, and trade. That seems rather simple to observe but, apparently, not.
Truth
The last of those claims is truly infuriating. If anything, he has done herculean work in drawing people away from both rightist and leftist versions of identitarian collectivism. People who worry about the rise of identitarian nationalism and racism as a reaction to the social-democratic left should be deeply grateful to him, since he explains that there is a liberal alternative.At this point, he revealed much about what is really driving him. He explained that his study of 20th-century totalitarian bloodshed showed him that all modern cases of absolutist despotism weren’t really about bad men leading good people into Hell. These experiences were about the willingness of vast numbers of people around the leader and ruled by the leader to lie—or at least decline to tell the truth—because they lacked the conviction to speak the truth, or were too lazy, or feared the consequences.
The lie, he said, is the reason for the loss of liberty and the good life. The reverse also is true. The key to building and maintaining freedom is to think and speak the truth, even when confronting a world bent on ignoring and disparaging that truth.
At this point in his lecture, the audience entered into a new level of engagement. Rapt attention. Mouths wide open. No one checking their phones. Everyone still. And so it lasted for another full hour as Peterson’s mind traveled through more history, philosophy, sociology, economics, and moral psychology.
Faith
He demonstrated what the search for truth looks like in his riff on religious faith. It somehow manages to be deeply respectful of the religious narratives, without pushing an implausible piety that today’s students would find tendentious and tedious.His now-famous commentary on Genesis struck me as truly creative, with an argument that the key to the Western faith is its conviction that humans are made in the image and likeness of God—with the spark of Divinity—and possessing of some features of the creative power that led to the invention of the world itself. If we lose that story, we risk the destruction of the deepest cultural foundation that undergirds our freedom, rights, and prosperity.
His point isn’t that students should be taught religious dogma. Rather, his point was that a real education should lead not to nihilism but a paradigm of meaning that informs the way we conduct our lives. It isn’t enough just to tear everything down and cause students to believe only in power as the one real thing, whether good or bad. Educators and intellectuals have a duty to inspire the search for truth and to assist in the discovery of the good in their own lives and the world around them.
He gave the following vivid illustration of the life of a post-graduation senior just entering the wiles of the workforce and regular life, with all its confusions and challenges. Imagine a helicopter dropping a 22-year-old in the middle of the ocean and the pilot yelling through a megaphone: “Find your way to shore!”
Meaning
He finally turned to the issue of meaning in life, and the need for adventure, somewhat circling back to his list of modern achievements for human well-being. Human achievements came about because people dedicated themselves to an impossible idea. They took risks. They confronted their deepest fears. They overcame envy, bureaucracy, doubts, and smears. They stood for truth. And they very likely didn’t get the credit. But they lived and are living lives of great adventure and meaning.So should we all.
You might be wondering where politics fits into all of this. If any members of the mainstream press who have been smearing this man as nothing but a waterboy for the titanic shift in national and world politics are reading now, please know this. He made himself extremely clear: The key to a good life isn’t to be found within politics, it is to be found from within.
And you know what? The audience cheered. Cheered! What does this tell us about what is happening at these Peterson events? For one thing, it tells me that my initial impressions of him from two years ago were entirely wrong.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought he was just another political pundit on the make, a man who would exploit our anger to gather a cult around himself. I was dead wrong. My presumption reflected my personal exhaustion with this mode of public manipulation that always collapses into some kind of unseemly personality cult or financial racket.
It Ends
Every great demagogue has a rehearsed and inspiring ending to his speech, something to give people a desire to do something wild and inspire devotion to the person who inspired them to do it. Peterson again defied expectations. He maintained the soft delivery style he used for the entire speech, and finished a final point about being a good person, living a great life, and getting along with others. He then waited a few seconds and quietly said, “And that’s all for now.”The audience rose in applause immediately, out of respect for the man but mainly out of appreciation for his message. As I waited to go backstage, I asked three young men why they had come to this event. The first one, a senior in college and a major in engineering, said very quickly: “I’m searching for meaning in life.” His other two colleagues concurred. That was the beginning and end of it. They were thrilled to be here.
Politics promised to give us a meaningful life. It failed. Now, we have to find it elsewhere. As the poet Virgil led Dante through Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, Jordan Peterson is the tour guide of the modern world in its confrontation with our inner selves.
