Full review and highlights at https://books.max-nova.com/12-rules

Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life" has been setting the internet on fire lately. The (failing?) New York Times just published a hit piece on the Canadian clinical psychologist and university lecturer, calling him a "celebrity in the men’s rights community" and his "retrograde" views on gender and personal responsibility. What was this guy actually saying? I figured I'd go straight to the source and see what all the fuss was about.

I was surprised to discover that Peterson doesn't actually say anything new and wasn't even particularly provocative. As an autodidact with a voracious appetite for classic literature, Peterson is all-in on the Western canon. His book is bursting with references to and analyses of the Bible, Milton (especially "Paradise Lost"), Nietzsche (particularly "The Genealogy of Morals"), Dostoevsky, and Freud (see "Civilization and Its Discontents").

Unsurprisingly for a psychologist, Peterson is especially big into Freud. He's got a particular fixation on the relationship between boys and their mothers and he repeatedly mentions the psychological damage and dependence that overprotective mothers can inflict. The Freud obsession is a bit old-school but not completely disqualifying. After all, the great Yale literary critic Harold Bloom has Freud prominently featured in his "Western Canon". And like Harold, Peterson takes no prisoners when it comes to the "school of resentment":

tweed-wearing, armchair-philosophizing, victim-identifying, pity-and-contempt-dispensing social-reformer types frequently did not like the poor, as they claimed. Instead, they just hated the rich. They disguised their resentment and jealousy with piety, sanctimony and self-righteousness.

This blatant antagonism towards the postmodern academic left is I think what has actually landed Peterson in the media firing line. He refuses to accept the moral relativism, nihilism, and scientism of the left, but he dismisses these views with a hand-wavy common sense rather than closely-reasoned argumentation. This is a mistake on his part, but again, this isn't a new argument either. Both "Higher Superstition" and "Kindly Inquisitors" are far superior demolitions of postmodern academia and its tyrannical tendencies.

Peterson also inveighs against the neo-Malthusians but again fails to really back up his claims. See "The Bet" for a more thorough treatment of the important and perennially-relevant neo-Malthusian vs. Cornucopian debate. Interestingly, there were also some echoes of David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" - "Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource."

There's a fair dose of applied psychology in here as well. Peterson is a big fan of Carl Roger's conversational rule that "Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction." I had originally seen this idea in "Poor Charlie's Almanack" and hadn't realized it came from good old Carl! Peterson tosses in a bunch of child-rearing advice in too (mostly along the lines of "You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world").

In the end though, I don't get what all the fuss is about. Peterson's book is a ultimately just a grab-bag of old-school self-help advice. He tries to do too much and in too short of a book, but his ideas are not particularly radical. If you ask your grandma for life advice, she'll tell you essentially the same thing that Peterson does. Granted, his tone is a bit awkward and off-putting (he's prone to delusions of grandeur), but I found his philosophy on life to be pretty squarely in alignment with the Western canon. Does that make me a crypto-fascist?!

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