CHAPTER 24
If Jordan Peterson is Dangerous, God Help Us!
I was surprised to see a picture
of Jordan Peterson covering three quarters of the front page of the INSIGHT section of the Toronto Star (Saturday, May 26, 2018)
to highlight a piece by Jordan Peterson’s former colleague and friend Bernard Schiff
(who claims to be responsible for hiring Peterson’s at the University of
Toronto), Jordan Peterson in a three-piece suite in the midst of emphasizing a
point with his arms in the air and a look on his face that reflected the
gravity of his message, and the picture had the arresting headline: “I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest
supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous.”
And if that wasn’t enough to pull
the reader into the article, at the bottom of the picture was written: “Former U of T colleague examines the
bestselling author’s increasingly controversial positions and concludes that
the teacher has become a preacher—using fear to unleash ‘dark desires.’” Wow!
I dove into Schiff’s opinion
piece and read it through without highlighting anything as I often do when
reading about Jordan Peterson (I did that in my second reading), just to see
what kind of impression his former colleague would have on me, and I was
stunned.
I had to read it again to confirm
my first impression, but from everything that I knew about Jordan Peterson from
all the lectures I had seen online plus all the articles I read on him and his
talks and interviews and his book12 Rules
for Life that I had just finished closely reading, I could not believe how his
former colleague and friend could have drawn the conclusion that he was
dangerous. “If Jordan Peterson is
dangerous, God help us!” I said to myself; but I refused to read the Schiff
piece again until I had some distance from it…
I have home delivery for the
Saturday and Sunday Toronto Star, and
I drive into Midland to pick up my weekend Globe
& Mail and National Post; but
I couldn’t stop thinking of Bernard Schiff’s article as I drove into Midland later
in the day to pick up my papers, and I made some mental notes to check out when
I re-read the article, one point in particular which got under my skin—Schiff’s
comment about Pankaj Mishra’s review in The New York Review of Books of Peterson’s
book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to
Chaos.
Schiff called Mishra’s review “a
thoughtful and informed critique of 12
Rules for Life,” which only confirmed his bias and misunderstanding of
Jordan Peterson, suggesting that Mishra’s review was objective and fair; but I
had to read Mishra’s review again (“Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism”), which
I did, and it only re-enforced my initial impression that it was a malicious hatchet
job on Peterson’s book, with a cheap shot on Jordan Peterson’s character thrown
in for good measure. But I had to read Bernard Schiff’s piece once more to
confirm my feelings about these two disaffected men, one a former colleague and
friend of Jordan Peterson and the other a resentful critic with a big axe to
grind.
But when I got home from my morning
jaunt into Midland (I often do some grocery shopping also when I pick up my
papers), instead of diving back into Schiff’s article as I had intended, I went
straight to Conrad Black’s column in the National
Post first because I can’t resist what he has to say, regardless of what he’s
writing about; that’s how much respect I have for his new perspective on life that
was born of his metanoic change of
heart after serving time in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of
justice; and as coincidence would have it, Black’s column was on the recent Munk
Debate on political correctness.
It was as obvious to Conrad Black
as it was to most viewers that Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry had won the
debate in their argument that political correctness has gone too far, and as
always with his editorials, Conrad Black left me smiling; a feeling of goodness
that I always get whenever he calls a spade a spade, especially on indigenous issues.
And that’s the problem that I have with most of Jordan Peterson’s critics; they
seem to exhibit a tragic flaw that they are completely oblivious to, their self-deception
and resentful nature.
But to confirm my impression of
the unconsciously biased Peterson critic, I re-read Bernard Schiff’s opinion
piece again, slowly and carefully and with my blue highlighter, and the first
thought that came to me upon completing the article was that Jordan Peterson’s
former colleague and friend wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
And this is what disturbs Bernard
Schiff and other resentful critics about Jordan Peterson’s fundamental message
that one cannot have their cake and eat it too, because that’s a misperception
that flies in the face of life and common sense.
It’s a hollow claim for one to believe
that they can have their cake and eat it too without the sacrifice that life
demands of us in order to have our cake and eat it too, and for Bernard Schiff
to call Jordan Peterson dangerous for spreading the message that you cannot have
you’re your cake and eat it too misses the whole point of Jordan Peterson.
All weekend long I watched videos
on Jordan Peterson and read the latest reviews of his book and opinion pieces,
and I couldn’t get over the devastating effect that his message was having as
he went from city to city (60 in all, across North America, Europe, and
Australia) promoting his book 12 Rules
for Life: An Antidote to Chaos; and my initial impression was confirmed
that today’s crazy world desperately needs someone to clear the way of all this
pernicious postmodern nihilism and radical political correctness to help
society transcend itself, which religion, science, and politics have failed to do;
and if his former colleague and friend sees this as dangerous, it’s only dangerous
in the most ironic sense.
Jordan Peterson was called to his
destined purpose, as everyone will be called when life has made them ready for
their path to wholeness and completeness, like the celebrated poet Adrianne
Rich for example, who inspired the following spiritual musing:
The Two Hands of Life
“Adventure most
unto itself /The Soul condemned to be;
Attended by a Single Hound— /Its own
Identity.”
—Emily Dickinson
It happened on
Country Road 6, another perfectly-timed coincidence that confirmed the reality
of the moment, a conversation that we were having on our way to Midland to pick
up my weekend papers and a few items for the Spanish Chicken and Rice recipe
that Penny was making for dinner; I was telling her about the American poet
Adrienne Rich who wrote something that inspired today’s spiritual musing.
She wrote: “A life
I didn’t choose to live chose me.” And
this radically different life that chose the gifted young wife and mother of
three was the life of a lesbian poet activist that David Zugar described in Poet and Critic as “a life of prophetic
intensity and ‘visionary anger’ bitterly unable to feel at home in a world
‘that gives no room /to be what we dream of becoming.’”
“Robert Frost
meets Emily Dickinson in Adrienne Rich,” I said to Penny, as we drove into
Midland; but I had to explain what I meant by my insight into the
lesbian/activist poet’s life.
This insight came
to me the night before while watching an online video of a memorial tribute to
Adrienne Rich shortly after her passing at the age of 82, the impression
forming in my mind that she was a natural amalgam of Robert Frost and Emily
Dickinson, and I said to Penny, “I’m
glad I’m not going to my grave angry. That’s my gift to myself.”
“What do you
mean?” she asked, intrigued by my comment.
“My gift to myself
is that I’m not going to die angry,” I replied, with an ironic smile at the
price that I had to pay for my precious gift. “I’ve been doing some research on
the poet Adrienne Rich, and I understand now why she was so angry at life.
That’s why I wrote Old Whore Life:
Exploring the Shadow Side of Karma. I know her anger well, sweetheart. I
was no less angry, if not a thousand times more; but I managed to resolve my
anger. Adrienne Rich did not.”
“How do you know
she didn’t?” Penny asked.
“Her poetry
doesn’t speak resolution. On the contrary, it speaks to the messy human
condition, especially the life of women. That’s why she became an outspoken
feminist. But hers is a strange story. Her father was a Jewish doctor who
taught at Johns Hopkins University, and her mother was a Christian concert
pianist who gave up a career in music for her husband. Her father encouraged
his daughter to read and write poetry, though; and she graduated with a degree
in English from Radcliffe College. She married an economics professor when she
graduated and had three children, but her marriage was so strained that she had
to leave her husband. The same year she left her husband he committed suicide,
and a few years later she moved in with her lesbian lover. Adrienne Rich
experienced the whole gamut of a woman’s life: gifted young poet, housewife,
mother of three boys, and confirmed lesbian; not to mention being Jewish and
Christian. She had a lot of issues to work through, that’s what fueled her
poetry with so much passion.”
“We all have
issues,” Penny said, with a wry smile.
“True. But some of
us have more karmic baggage than others. That’s life. But it doesn’t matter who
we are, unless we learn to resolve the two sides of our nature we’re always
going to be in conflict with life. That’s the human condition. That’s what
Adrienne Rich’s poetry is all about—the messy human condition. “The war poetry
wages against itself,” she wrote in one of her poems. That’s why she was so
angry. Robert Frost said, ‘Poetry grabs life by the throat.’ Adrienne Rich
grabs life by the throat with her poetry, just like Robert Frost did; but she
was also driven like Emily Dickinson to find her own identity. But you can’t
find your true identity until you resolve the two sides of your nature, and the
only way to do that is to make our two selves into one, the inner like the
outer neither male nor female with no hypocrisy—”
“The hands of life!” Penny exclaimed, excitedly.
“What hands of
life?” I asked, confounded by her remark.
“Didn’t you see
them?” she said.
“No. What?”
“There were two
gloves on the side of the road. One up and one down. The two hands of life,
just like you were saying—”
Penny’s not a great
articulator, but she has amazing intuition. “What
a coincidence,” I said, and smiled as I always do whenever synchronicity
speaks to us; and I turned the car around and went back to confirm what Penny had
just seen that symbolized what I was explaining.
And there they
were on the side of the road: two discarded white gloves, one facing up and the
other facing down, just like the two sides of our nature—our conscious ego
personality and our unconscious shadow self, confirming with symbolic certainty
what I was saying about Robert Frost meeting Emily Dickinson in the angry
visionary poet whose shadow lesbian life chose her to help resolve the
bifurcated nature of her identity— and
what an adventure it proved to be as Adrienne Rich explored the alluring
country of her conflicted soul with prophetic intensity and visionary anger.
———
And whether he knew it or not,
that’s the path that the good professor was called to when he spoke up for free
speech, the path of a visionary hierophant compelled by his own oracle to point
the way out of the nihilistic impasse of today’s crazy world of identity
politics and radical political correctness; is it any wonder that his message
is getting through to our disillusioned young people looking for direction and
purpose?
How
many people today, especially young men, feel as Adrianne Rich did, “bitterly
unable to feel at home in a world ‘that gives no room /to be what we dream of
becoming’”? Isn’t this Jordan Peterson’s massive appeal? Aren’t they flocking
to his talks because he explains with passionate intensity and good-faith logic
why our world is so crazy?
I’m
not a stupid person, but I had no idea what was going on out there; that’s why
my muse expressed my frustration in my poem “What
the Hell Is Going on Out There?” My creative unconscious spoke the
frustration of our crazy world, and professor Jordan Peterson was called to
offer an explanation; but because his message cuts to the bone, the nefarious
forces of the false shadow side of life that inhibit society from transcending
itself have rallied to take the good professor down— “a mean, mad white man” Michael
Dyson called him in the Munk debate—as they always do whenever someone dares to
step outside the suffocating box of compromised thought and points a way out of
the paradigm of our crazy world of moral relativism and political correctness
gone mad.
I
can’t remember how many times young men have said “I get it now!” as they listened to Jordan Peterson’s message,
sudden epiphanies that awakened them to the stark reality that they cannot have
your cake and eat it too without sacrifice and hard work, an intensely
passionate message that his resentful critics call alt-right, toxic, and
dangerous.
What a crock! It’s no wonder the good professor loses
his patience every now and then, like he did with Pankaj Mishra who wrote “Jordan Peterson and Fascist
Mysticism” for The New York Review of
Books; and, in all honesty, I really don’t know how he manages to stay so
cool when he is brutally assaulted with malicious intent and bad-faith logic,
like he was in the Cathy Newman interview and the hit piece by Nellie Bowles in
the New York Times (“Jordan Peterson,
Custodian of the Patriarchy”) that took Peterson’s words out of context to make
him look like a misogynist—pernicious, unfair, and evil; the very thing that Jordan
Peterson’s is unveiling with his iconoclastic message of hope.
Let’s just hope
then that the “messiah virus”—the
salvific imperative of the Logos that everyone who is called to a higher path can
easily fall prey to—does not infect the good professor the way his former
colleague and friend Bernard Schiff fears it has.
But I doubt it
will, because anyone who stares into the face of their own false self and commits
to the authentic life develops a healthy respect for the Logos, and professor Jordan
Peterson has more than enough Jungian wisdom to ward off the “messiah virus.”
“All I want to do
is help young people make a better life,” he keeps iterating in his talks and interviews;
and I take the good professor at his word…
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