Is Jordan Peterson all bad?

Is anyone?

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Dr. Jordan Peterson is one of the last people I would normally choose to spend an evening with. And yet, there I was, in a sold out theater on a cold January night in Spokane listening to him insist on the power of gratitude.

Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, professor and media critic best known for his controversial commentary on cultural issues, was in town to promote his newest book, We who wrestle with God.

That’s why he was there, but why was I?

I had coughed up the hundred bucks for a cheap seat to check out the crowd and to check my own biases. Even though we are some years past his heyday as catnip to the neocon manosphere, I wanted to see for myself why so many younger white men still find Peterson so compelling. Like a lot of my friends in Los Angeles and New York, I had my silhouette of Peterson, but what would it be like to see him on a stage in Spokane, Washington?

I had known about Peterson primarily through cultural commentary from the left, casting him as a demagogue of the right, someone intent on stirring up the MAGA faithful and coating fascism with a slick coat of pseudoscience. Given that impression of him, I had secretly hoped to pose as a left leaning spy in a mob of jackbooted Spokane Peterson devotees. I could then be appalled and easily confirm my suspicions of him being a bad person.

In this regard, I was disappointed.

The crowd was overwhelmingly white, but in Spokane, that tracks. And perhaps composed of more men than would be the norm at an opera but perhaps the same percentage at a Tony Robbins seminar. There were plenty of women as well and a large number of young men in sports jackets and ties, encouraged no doubt, by Peterson’s own typically professorial wardrobe. Certainly not a queer forward sort of event, but again, on brand for Spokane generally.

It being the day after Trump’s second inaugural, I overheard partisan conversations that quickly moved to conservative talking points about the disastrous Democrats. Three men behind me were talking about the last time they had seen Peterson and the two burly young men next to me were playing chess together on a single cell phone. You get the picture. Male, white, and conservative, but hardly a crush of Proud Boys itching for a fight.

The program began with a young white man on stage playing a guitar in front of a huge screen featuring a yin and yang symbol that proceeded to spin. It was replaced in the next song with sheets of music in a pulsing pattern and then, in a final song, a montage ending in a cross of light. Polite applause as the theater filled. Still, not a MAGA hat or swastika in sight.

It’s worth noting that I was looking for these sorts of symbols, symbols that I could dislike, that I could use to paint the crowd as a bunch of racist hooligans. Apparently I have been primed on the left to expect the right to always be extreme rather than often just different.

The video screen then featured a couple of glossy commercials, first for a writing app developed by Dr. Peterson and his son and then an invitation to enroll in the Peterson Academy, an online product that promised ‘Education, devoid of ideology.’ To me, that seemed a stretch, but like the rest of us, he has bills to pay.

Dr. Peterson’s wife Tammy came on stage next and in a subdued manner welcomed us to the evening. She mentioned that they were just back from Washington D.C. There was some supportive clapping, and she said it was a lovely event. They had even attended a couple of balls which she found to be very much like high school dances, but she was glad they had been there, because it was ‘important to show support.’ My ears perked up and I thought this was the start of confirming my suspicions about the evening’s program and audience.

But then she spoke a bit about her experience with resentment. Apparently, she knew the emotion intimately and shared with us how damaging it can be. This was received politely and she then introduced her husband to the stage and, as he walked on, the crowd became enthusiastic.

Peterson, a slim man in his early sixties and elegantly dressed, comes across as serious, articulate, and intelligent. It is obvious that he has been the expert in front of crowds for decades. He is accomplished without being slick, and is so clearly in command of his own synthetic approach to several areas of thought, that it is only later that the listener might wonder, does it all hold together?

He is famous for not giving the same presentation twice when on tour. And the title of the evening, An Evening to Transform your Life, was vague enough to apply to just about any combination of topics. He proceeded to weave together a whole range of scientific insights, historical incident, literary theory, personal anecdotes, humor, biblical studies, and just the tiniest bit of red meat thrown to any cultural warriors who might have been in the audience.

He mentioned, only in passing, his own treatment by the Canadian higher education system and the failures of government in general and then he got to what I took to be the heart of his presentation. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with his selection of material for this assembled crowd.

If I had the opportunity and platform to speak to younger white men, I too would speak about resentment. As a group, they are predisposed to feel excluded, ignored and left behind in the larger, generally forward movement of our culture. Having, as a demographic, been the unchallenged recipients of an overwhelmingly large share of cultural, societal and economic advantages for centuries, the shift towards sharing those advantages can be felt as personal loss rather than societal gain. And of course, that shift has been seized upon by political forces eager to exploit the sense of dislocation.

I hear this resentment and grievance in the voices of my brothers and nephews. We all read about it in larger voting blocks in our political landscape. I am certain it is in the hearts and minds of Peterson’s followers. And he addressed this tendency towards resentment.

Peterson’s approach was to use the story of Cain and Abel to speak about the corrosive nature of resentment. He outlined Cain’s inability to accept responsibility for his own failures to act justly and blaming instead his context, his brother and God. Peterson drew a line from Cain’s inability to take personal responsibility to the building of resentment which in turn fuels violence.

And then Peterson suggested, emphatically, that only gratitude will dislodge the dark sharpness of living with resentment. He urged us to develop a practice of gratitude, of intentionally naming all that we have been given, and to see the goodness in our lives and move toward a life lived in gratitude.

Wait, so that is the content of Jordan’s demagoguery? I’ve preached the same from the pulpit! In Jordan, I saw someone with whom I generally do not agree politically, outlining a way to deal with a psychological darkness that leads to violence. Turns out he and I want the same things, at least in this instance.

So what do I do with this experience? Well, I have to recalibrate my relationship with an actual human person who is, like all of us, a mix of contrasting elements. Considering Peterson’s history of consistently exaggerating the excesses of the left and downplaying the dangers of the far right, I continue to find Peterson problematic. But, I am somewhat encouraged to have witnessed him urging a large gathering of folks to avoid violence and seek maturity. These are folks to whom I don’t have access, being urged towards values I too share.

This gives me hope.

Maybe it’s the sort of a faint hope, a ‘better than nothing,’ a sort of hope for a bit more unity in our shared country.

And that’s not nothing.

If I might stand on my own soap box for a moment and urge us all to challenge our temptation to demonize other people. Other people are more like us than we usually know and when we lose track of this truth, we are prone to defining ourselves by all our differences and from there it is a short journey to our own forms of violence.