The message from Jordan R Peterson that attracted sometimes hysterical attention was relatively straightforward. Life is tough, so stand up straight. Stop moaning. Tidy your bedroom. Ditch the victimhood and the identity politics, and, if you are male (as 80 per cent of his YouTube viewers are), man up. Get a job. Get a wife. Have children and bring them up properly. This is what worked for previous societies and it will probably work for you. We review his much vaunted sequel to 12 Rules For Life — Beyond Order.
“What calls you out into the world,” Jordan Peterson says in his new book, “is not ease . . . It is struggle and strife.” While 12 Rules For Life, his second book, focusses on the dangers one faces from an excess of chaos, Beyond Order is concerned with the risks of abundant structure and the concomitant deficit of valuable chaos. Suffering is put forward as a simply unavoidable — even a centrally defining — feature of the universal human condition.
12 Rules for Life was an international phenomenon, selling more than five million copies in more than 50 languages. His YouTube videos have been watched by hundreds of millions. His global book tour reached a live audience of more than 250,000 people and included debates on religion with the evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein and on happiness with the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
The message that attracted this sometimes hysterical attention was relatively straightforward. Life is tough, so stand up straight. Stop moaning. Tidy your bedroom. Ditch the victimhood and the identity politics, and, if you are male (as 80 per cent of his YouTube viewers are), man up. Get a job. Get a wife. Have children and bring them up properly. This is what worked for previous societies and it will probably work for you.
Peterson’s Beyond Order has much esoteric musing, but masses of passion and wisdom.
The message is presented with such a dizzyingly erudite and often witty cornucopia of history, philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology and literature that you feel as if you’ve been invited to join a charismatic gentleman scholar on his Grand Tour. By the end of it I was ready to sign on any dotted line. “Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful and the True,” he says in the last chapter. Well, who could resist that?
12 Rules for Life had the subtitle An Antidote to Chaos. It was about finding stability in a world that has thrown out too many babies with the bath water. Beyond Order offers 12 More Rules for Life, but this time attempts to balance that message with some necessary chaos. Too much order, Peterson argues, leads to stagnation. We also need “novelty, unpredictability, transformation and disruption”. This probably sounded more attractive before an invisible speck of protein brought us more than enough of each.
Like 12 Rules for Life, Beyond Order has a chapter devoted to each of the 12 rules, boiled down from a longer list tested on the Q&A website Quora. As in 12 Rules for Life, Peterson offers a mix of story, anecdote, myth and personal experience to illustrate why the rule is needed and how it works.
It’s hard to argue with the rules themselves. “Do not do what you hate”, “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog” and “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens” all seem eminently sensible principles, and ones Peterson has shown to have had positively transformative effects on many lives. With his “abandon ideology” rule, he’s back on one of his favourite stamping grounds, one in which he laments the dehumanising effects of swapping complex thinking for a set of rigid beliefs.
He’s fierce on the radical-left takeover of many universities and the zeal of eco-warriors who seem, to him, to regard humans with distaste. For these views he’s often lumped in with the alt-right. The ground he’s claiming is centre rather than right and on this I think he’s right. It is, he thinks, about finding the balance between the conservative who sees the traditional world as “wise king” and the liberal who sees it as “authoritarian tyrant”. His own view is along the lines of move slowly if you’re going to break things and see to the beam in your own eye first.
There’s masses of passion, masses of wisdom, and a deep, deep yearning for us all to seek the beauty, truth and meaning Peterson has sometimes glimpsed and is desperate for us to find. He has had tens of thousands of letters from people who say he has helped them to find it. How many writers can say they have done that?
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
www.thelittlebookshop.co.nz/p/beyond-order-12-more-rules-for-life