By David French
Monday, May 21, 2018
Rarely in my life have I read a more hostile or vicious
takedown of a public figure than last week’s New York Times profile of Canadian author and psychologist Jordan
Peterson. Rarely have I witnessed a more bizarre and bad-faith interview of a
public figure than journalist Cathy Newman’s January interrogation of Peterson
on Britain’s Channel 4 News. Few public figures inspire more vitriol and
mockery on Twitter than, you guessed it, Jordan Peterson. And never before have
I seen vitriol so out of proportion to the “threat” of the man’s underlying
message.
I don’t claim to be an expert on everything the man’s
said, but I read and reviewed his most recent book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, and I’ve watched many of
his most popular YouTube videos — and the contrast between the actual content
of his message and the rage and mockery it elicits never fails to surprise me.
Have we really reached the point where the basic argument that men and women
are different, or that free men and women will often make different choices in
large part because they are
different, or that religion and ancient traditions can inform and guide our
lives today, are now so toxic that their advocates must and should face a
relentless campaign to drive them from the public square?
Or, given the obvious crisis that young men face — with
rising rates of suicide and drug overdose, and diminishing educational outcomes
— why the extraordinary hostility to a man who is reaching those same young men
with a message of hard work, personal responsibility, honor, and integrity?
After all, if you’re a theologically conservative Christian
or Jew — a person who is Biblically literate and strives to live according to
Biblical morality — the flaw of the Peterson message is that it feels a bit
basic. As I wrote in my review, “readers who are already grounded in a Biblical
worldview will find some of the counsel extraordinarily elementary.”
But that’s the issue. If Peterson were writing to a
Christian audience, he’d be one voice among many. An interesting and quirky
voice, to be sure, but his core message about men and women would be conventional,
not revelatory. Instead, however, Peterson stands out because he is playing in
the Left’s cultural sandbox. He’s disrupting an emerging secular cultural
monopoly with arguments about history, tradition, and the deep truths about
human nature that the cultural radicals had long thought they’d banished to the
fringe.
That’s the reason for the fury. That’s the reason for the
rage. When Peterson walks into a secular university or a secular television
studio and addresses a secular audience by referencing ancient theological
arguments, the effect is not unlike inviting a genderqueer women’s-studies
professor to a Baptist Sunday-school class. Some things (in some places) are
just not said.
Then, when people actually respond to that message, the shock is even more seismic. It’s
difficult to overstate the extent to which the Left has long been (and,
crucially, felt) culturally ascendant in America’s secular spaces. The academy,
pop culture, mainstream media, corporate America — all of these spaces have drunk
deeply of the Left’s cultural Kool-Aid, especially when it comes to matters of
sex and gender. The holdouts are in the church and synagogue, and their borders
are shrinking under relentless cultural assault.
That’s the arc of history, you see, and the only place
where its ultimate triumph was in doubt (or, more precisely, delayed) was in
politics — and those setbacks were transient and temporary until the “coalition
of the ascendant” could claim its rightful place at the pinnacle of political
power.
The problem, however, was a failure to thrive. The new
culture left too many young men behind. The new, fractured family claimed too
many lives. When “deaths of despair” are so prevalent that the world’s
wealthiest and most powerful nation now faces declining life expectancies, it’s hard to argue for the unqualified
success of the modern leftist cultural project
And so, as the secular Left pressed up against the
church, it looked behind and saw the flames in its own camp. Peterson held the
match, but the kindling was all around him. It’s not that men (and many women)
failed to adjust to the new gender ideologies, it’s that the new gender
ideologies too often fail to reckon with our deepest human longings and fail to
recognize our fundamental human nature. As Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “We cannot invent our own
values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls.”
No one should believe that Peterson is always right, or
that his every utterance is profound, but he has served a truly invaluable
cultural service. His success and — critically — his method, which relies as
much on scripture as it does on psychology, should serve as a clarion call for
Biblical Christians and Jews. There is no need for the defensive crouch. In the
spiritual wasteland of secularized America, the harvest is plentiful, and
ancient truth can indeed provide the seed for new beginnings.
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