I felt a little embarrassed that we, in Canada, offered the world Malcolm Gladwell with what always struck me as a sort of naive embrace of clever optimistic liberalism. But I never gave him too much thought and in his influence seemed largely benign. Now we have offered up Jordan Peterson. What to say? I was initially surprised when I found out that the Jordan Peterson of international fame and controversy was *that* Jordan Peterson of boring reactionary soundbites on CBC.

In any event his influence appears to be growing for now and seeping into my church and denominational circles so I figured I should at least have some sense of informed response.

I don’t think it is too difficult to cut to the core of how to position yourself in relation to Peterson. He makes his orientation pretty clear when he talks about some of his primary academic research.

“I was comparing and contrasting two narratives—let’s say the narrative that drove the Communists and the narrative that drove the West. I was curious in a postmodern way, I suppose, about whether or not these were just two arbitrary narratives. Because that’s a possibility, right? We’re all socially constructed. We can organize ourselves according to whatever narrative we want. What I figured out was that the narrative of the West is not arbitrary; it’s just right. We got it right—that the individual is sovereign. That’s the right answer to the problem of tribalism. I don’t care if it’s tribalism on the left or the right.”

Despite packaging Peterson’s position is boring and predictable. Why would there be any surprise that a white western male ‘discovers’ that the myth of individualism premised the exploitation of so many groups for the founding of the modern world, a myth which has served him so well is indeed correct. Of course there is all the ‘research’ to which Peterson will point showing that his position somehow has nothing to do with realities of race, gender, etc. But to put in terms my denominational colleagues might understand, to claim that the individual is sovereign is actual equivalent to the prosperity of gospel of claiming that if you have enough faith you will be healed. It is the history of might makes right, winners write history, blah, blah, blah.

And as though his basic premise of individualism is not sufficient reason to discredit him he makes clear how he positions this individualism in relation to left/right social expressions.

“I’ve been thinking about the difference between the right and the left, because obviously the right can go too far. If you’re on the right, as soon as you start making claims of ethnic or racial superiority, you can put those people in a box and you can say no. On the left, we know the left can go too far, but we don’t know when. I think it’s because it’s a multivariate problem. You can’t point to one thing, one policy, one ideological axiom on the left that has the same degree of self-evident toxicity that racial superiority does, though I think equity comes close, the demand for equality of outcome”—i.e., the anti-capitalist idea that we should all more or less end up with the same number of marbles, no matter how we play the game.” [emphasis mine]

So working at some level material/economic distributive equality is close to the toxicity of racial superiority. This quickly circles back to his premise. To claim that the West was right in claiming the sovereignty of the individual is in fact akin to claims of racial (and gender) superiority as we know which individuals in history were sovereign. All of this spins out in his claims that he is trying to get young men to take responsibility . . . take the responsibility of their sovereignty I suppose (which includes a seemingly oh-so benevolent patriarchy).

In any event whatever ‘good’ can be found in his work can be found in better forms elsewhere. Don’t give Peterson the time and let him fizzle out or self-conbust.