Why We’re Writing a Book-Length Critique of Jordan Peterson

“Diverse as they may be, these four authors are united by a desire to confront Peterson on his own terms—that is, to eschew tawdry criticism and ad hominem attacks and instead to get to the nucleus of his thought.“

Introduction

“Modern man does not understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic ‘underworld.’ He has freed himself from superstition (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break up in world wide disorientation and dissociation.”

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Since 2016 Jordan Peterson has enjoyed a remarkable burst of popularity, due to attention-grabbing, anti-politically correct activism—alternative pronouns, no; enforced monogamy, yes—as well as a series of lectures and a bestselling book on how to find meaning in life. He has been embraced by both the far-right and stuffy classical liberals, writing columns for conservative newspapers and appearing on popular programs and podcasts which sympathize with his—how shall we say—unique worldview. David Brooks at The New York Times even lauded him as among the most influential public intellectuals of our time.

Naturally, Peterson’s popularity on the Right has made him a target of critiques from the left. He has been called everything from “the stupid man’s smart person” to a fascist sympathizer whose thought serves as a gateway to the far-right. Some of these criticisms have been interesting and adept—most notably Nathan J. Robinson’s and Natalie Wynne’s (that is, Contrapoints). Others have been less so. But almost all of them have been incomplete in the sense that they take issue with one element or another of Peterson’s oeuvre. Left-leaning critics either point out flaws in his understanding of so-called post-modern neo-Marxism, or they observe that his actual knowledge of left-wing thought and positions is dubious. Some point out that Peterson’s own political theorizing can be frustratingly vague, relying on bizarre homologies (his association of Jungian psychoanalysis with neurobiology) or fanciful leaps of logic (his frequent conflation of sociological data with evolutionary structures).  But so far no critique has sought to comprehensively address the body of his work as a whole. This is an oversight that our book Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson intends to correct.