Jordan Peterson, postmodern bullshit artist

What is "belief"? Are dragons as valid as lions?

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There’s a certain genre of left-coded writing that’s rightly derided for its convolution, even meaninglessness. Perhaps the most common hallmark of this style is the incessant bracketing of words in scare quotes, a tactic which often allows the author (or “author”) to assert ideas or concepts while remaining aloof and evasive about what it is they’re actually saying. Sometimes there are random capitalizations as well, or particular sentences are italicized for no discernible reason. In this genre, everything — right down to the very act of writing itself — plays out in linguistic abstraction, and at a convenient remove from anything tangible or concrete.

The worst reactionary prose, on the other hand, is often the precise inverse: its most recognizable hallmark being the needless adornment of extremely banal thoughts or truisms with pompous verbiage designed to make them sound smart. Thus, as Nathan Robinson observed in a 2018 essay, someone like Jordan Peterson simply cannot bring himself to write “the man’s cancer metastasized” when the sentence “the man fell prey to the tendency of that dread condition to metastasize” is readily available.

The really incredible thing about Peterson is that, in writing and in speech, he somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook. He is a master of faux-Confucian aphorisms (“There is no being without imperfection”) and spouts kindergarten morality with the self-serious gravitas of a bearded prophet who has just been handed stone tablets by the Almighty. But he’s long been equally prone to deconstructive cul-de-sacs and conceptual negations that save him from ever having to explain what he actually thinks or means (“You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal of the things that frighten you.”)

Robinson again:

The multiplicity of possible interpretations [here] is very important. It makes it almost impossible to beat Peterson in an argument, because every time one attempts to force him to defend a proposition, he can insist he means something else.

All of this is quite ironic in light of Peterson’s appeal. If there’s one thing that’s made him attractive to some people (especially some young men) as a public figure, it’s the idea there’s a fundamentally deeper order at work beneath the disorienting tumult of 21st century life; that social roles and the relations that arise from them are ultimately rooted in nature; that reality — whatever the Marxist university professors, godless postmodernists, and intersectional Tumblr teens might insist to the contrary — rests on foundations that are fixed and immutable. The left, Peterson says, may dislike inequality and hierarchy, but they’re right there in the animal kingdom. Just look at how the humble lobster has lived since time immemorial.

Peterson’s marketability has always been a bit surprising given his weirdness. He speaks exclusively in a glottal cadence that sounds like Kermit the Frog after a night of heavy drinking. He calls hostile interlocutors “bucko.” He breaks down in tears when discussing children’s cartoons and has occasionally been known to dress like the Joker. But these days the reactionary right is miserably bereft of real intellectuals, and a decade or so ago Peterson stepped into this void to find his unique fusion of obscurantism and conservative pomposity improbably rewarded with global success.

His longstanding bête noire has been the scourge of postmodernism, alternatively represented in the catch-all signifier “postmodern neo-Marxism.” Once again, the irony here is not just that Peterson’s own writing so regularly mirrors the worst stylistic tendencies of both post-structuralist academia and social media identity politics. It’s that his work and ideas are themselves fundamentally postmodern in substance.