counter-argument, quoting a section of an article in Vox which references others as well
Peterson became more than just an internet celebrity on January 23, 2018. Thatâs when his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was published by Random House Canada â and skyrocketed to the top of international best-seller lists. It was after this bookâs publication, and the following press tour, that David Brooks pronounced him the worldâs most influential public intellectual.
Each chapter of the book is devoted to a specific, somewhat strange-sounding rule. The first chapter is called âStand up straight with your shoulders backâ; the last is âPet a cat when you encounter one on the street.â
The book is a kind of bridge connecting his academic research on personality and his political punditry. In it, Peterson argues that the problem with society today is that too many people blame their lot in life on forces outside their control â the patriarchy, for example. By taking responsibility for yourself, and following his rules, he says, you can make your own life better.
The first chapter, about posture, begins with an extended discussion of lobsters. Lobster society, inasmuch as it exists, is characterized by territoriality and displays of dominance. Lobsters that dominate these hierarchies have more authoritative body language; weaker ones try to make themselves look smaller and less threatening to more dominant ones.
Peterson argues that humans are very much like lobsters: Our hierarchies are determined by our behaviors. If you want to be happy and powerful, he says, you need to stand up straight:
> If your posture is poor, for example â if you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory, against attack from behind) â then you will feel small, defeated, and ineffectual. The reactions of others will amplify that. People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently.
âLook for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back,â he concludes, in one of the bookâs most popular passages.
The lobster has become a sort of symbol of his; the tens of thousands of Peterson fans on his dedicated subreddit even refer to themselves as âlobsters.â
This is classic Peterson: He loves to take stylized facts about the animal kingdom and draw a one-to-one analogy to human behavior. It also has political implications: He argues that because we evolved from lower creatures like lobsters, we inherited dominance structures from them. Inequalities of various kinds arenât wrong; theyâre natural.
âWe were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones,â he writes. âThere is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.â
The relationship between human and lobster brains is outside Petersonâs area of academic expertise. Experts in the field who have evaluated his claims have found them lacking, as lobstersâ and humansâ neurological systems are radically different. One important distinction is that humans have brains and lobsters (technically speaking) do not.
âIf nervous systems were computer games, arthropods like lobsters would be âSnakeâ on a first-generation mobile phone and vertebrates would be an augmented reality (AR) game,â as Leonor Gonsalves, a neuroscientist at University College London, puts it in a review of Petersonâs argument at The Conversation. âThe human brain is hugely malleable ⌠believing that it is ânaturalâ that some people are âlosersâ because thatâs what lobsters do can have dire consequences.â
But Petersonian lobster theory, and the other things like it in the book, arenât really questions of truth. Theyâre about providing the sort of alienated young men who are attracted to his broader work a sense of purpose and meaning. It fulfills roughly the same role in their life as religion might; itâs perhaps unsurprising that Peterson is quite interested in the Bible and discusses it often.
âI think his mass following suggests the existence among a substantial cross-section of young men of a deep hunger for moral order that may well be ultimately a religious yearning,â Yuval Levin, vice president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, tells me. âPeterson is actually fairly careful to distinguish the teaching heâs offering from an explicitly religious teaching, but I think he does that because he grasps that some significant portion of the people looking to him are really looking for something like a religious teacher.â
The difference is that Peterson is reaching people who, for whatever reason, arenât getting what they need from organized religion alone. In fact, some of his followers are actively hostile to religion, seeing it as fundamentally irrational. Heâs a moralist who can appeal to the New Atheist set, even though he doesnât share their hostility to religion.
This aspect of Petersonâs work is far more sympathetic than his ill-informed and frankly nefarious politics â especially since some of his cardinal rules, like âtell the truth,â are perfectly good moral precepts to live by.
Itâs worth watching a five-minute excerpt from a BBC interview about his role as a mentor for young men. Peterson openly starts to cry at the beginning:
âLast night, I was at this talk I gave. And about a thousand people came, and about 500 of them stayed afterward. And most of them are young men,â Peterson says, starting to tear up. âAnd one of them after another comes up and shakes my hand and says, âIâve been listening to what youâve been saying ⌠I started cleaning up my room, and working on my life, and Iâve started working hard on myself, and I just want to thank you for helping me.â
When you watch this interview, you get a sense of what Peterson must have been like with his patients as a clinical psychologist â empathetic, passionate, deeply concerned with the welfare of his patients. Itâs moving, really.
But Peterson has inextricably intertwined his self-help approach with a kind of reactionary politics that validates white, straight, and cisgender men at the expense of everyone else. He gives them a sense of purpose by, in part, tearing other people down â by insisting that the world can and should revolve around them and their problems.
This painful contrast is on display later in that very interview, in which he explicitly argues that concern for sexism is to blame for the plight of the Westâs young men.
âWeâre so stupid. Weâre alienating young men. Weâre telling them that theyâre patriarchal oppressors and denizens of rape culture,â he says. âItâs awful. Itâs so destructive. Itâs so unnecessary. And itâs so sad.â
The empathy that he displays for men and boys in his BBC interview and 12 Rules for Life is touching. The problem is that he canât seem to extend it to anyone else.
