Criticism of Chapter Six of Jordan Peterson’s Book “12 Rules”
March 06, 2018
Due to some of my friends having a positive view of Jordan Peterson’s work, I am sometimes exposed to videos of his. That was the case recently and I watched him narrate an excerpt from his new book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”. The video is Jordan Peterson reading chapter 6 of the book, entitled “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”. It is addressed directly to school shooters in the US, keep that in mind, when reading this or watching the video, as it puts his points into an even more troubling context.
As a short introduction to Jordan Peterson, he is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
He first became well known for his refusal to comply with being legally compelled using students preferred gender pronouns in regards to Canadas Bill 16-C. As far as I am aware he made this stance mainly on the gender pronouns of transgender people. If he has also raged against not being allowed to call for the genocide of minorities, I am not aware of it. A consistent stance against any compelled speech is hard though, and it is easier and more profitable to single out transgender people, a very marginalized group.
In response to the controversy, academic administrators at the University of Toronto sent Peterson two letters of warning, one noting that free speech had to be made in accordance with human rights legislation and the other adding that his refusal to use the preferred personal pronouns of students and faculty upon request could constitute discrimination. Peterson speculated that these warning letters were leading up to formal disciplinary action against him, but in December the university assured him that he would retain his professorship, and in January 2017 he returned to teach his psychology class at the University of Toronto
He has since made a very lucrative career our of leveraging this “victim status”. He has a very successful Patreon and Youtube Channel, published popular books, and features prominantely in many Interview shows lately. His newest book is the aforementioned 12 Rules, in which he gives advice for a better life.
Before I start going into it, I must point out that he couches everything in “mights” and “mays”, but for criticism to work at all I’ll have to take some of the things he wrote as something he actually believes or at least wants to say something with. Fans of his will often use his vagueness to defend him, claiming that critics misrepresent him. However when done often enough it reduces his points to such simple levels that they are hardly worth talking about. So for this I will use my interpretation of what he wants to says, and assume that he feels he has something important to say when he dedicates a book to it. Of course you can judge for yourself whether my criticism is accurately reflecting his point, by reading or listening to the chapter.
There are two parts to my criticism. In the first part I will go through the chapter and address aspects I feel are misleading or contradictory in the second part I want to address what he is really saying in this chapter and why it is not good.
He starts off by saying that it does not seem reasonable to call the perpetrators of the Sandy Hook school massacre, the Colorado Cinema massacre and the Columbine school massacre religious people. And while that may be true in these cases he picked, it is certainly not true for all mass shooters, many of which are specifically motivated by their religious beliefs, and many more of which are religious, but their deeds seem to be unrelated to that fact. From the later points he makes it seems that this non-religiousness he refers to has to do with an anger at the world (from time to time he will use the word God instead), and a sort of nihilism that follows from it.
I point this out in particular, because he will take these few examples, and without examining why it would be an acceptable leap, and without mentioning that he even makes the leap, present it as if it was the basis for all mass shootings, and further implying that it is the basis for all bad in the world. That is however not the case. He will cite the statistic that in the US 1000 mass shootings were perpetrated in 3 years, and this statistic does exist, however the majority of these mass shootings were not perpetrated by people out of a hatred for the world. The vast majority are organised crime and gang related or domestic violence, others are terrorist attacks, which, rather than being an expression of nihilism, are designed to effect change in the world due to a deeply held belief. It is not a big part of this chapter, but I feel it shows an intellectual dishonesty that is very telling.
It is further interesting that he seems to relate to this rage against the world in some regards:
“Under such conditions, vengeance seems a moral necessity. How can it be distinguished from the demand for justice? After the experience of terrible atrocity, isn’t forgiveness just cowardice, or lack of willpower? Such questions torment me. But people emerge from terrible pasts to do good, and not evil”
Remember that we are talking about mass shooters whose anger at the world led them to kill innocent bystanders. I don’t think most people would say that this is the logical, moral conclusion of injustices in the world. I certainly don’t think that “burn it all down” is the conclusion I come to, rather I think for many people the injustices in the world are a reason to fuel their desire to make it better. I think him missing this very simple alternative, perhaps because it is not the point of view he comes from, is at the root of how he tries to explain that people do good regardless of it.
Perhaps one can claim that this is only the case of those that are struck by particularly harsh injustice, whoever may get to define that, but you can decide for yourself whether you think that forgiveness is cowardice and in how far murder can be considered equal to getting vengeance on the world.
Next he talks about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who certainly lived a very interesting life.
“During his many trials, Solzhenitsyn encountered people who comported themselves nobly, under horrific circumstances. He contemplated their behaviour deeply. Then he asked himself the most difficult of questions: had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life? If so, how? He remembered his unquestioning support of the Communist Party in his early years. He reconsidered his whole life.”
One might ask themselves if that is a general case Peterson is making. If all victims of World War 2, of the Soviet Gulags personally contributed to the catastrophe of their lives. This question however is not addressed, and in the rest of the chapter is implicitly treated as if it was the case. Here he also hints at the “clean your house” part of the argument. He claims that Solzhenitsyn had to first reflect on his complicity to then be able to make a functional critique. This seems at best a very flimsy connection, and certainly doesn’t warrant the absolute statement “set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.” (emphasis mine, but c’mon, “perfect”? Really?)
“Whole peoples have adamantly refused to judge reality, to criticise Being, to blame God”
This immediately follows his praise for and example of Solzhenitsyn who apparently wrote a book judging Communist reality so harshly that it ceased to exist. And of course it is featured in a book by Peterson that judges reality to be wanting and the people in it in need of following rules he likes.
You can handwave that with some arbitrary “Oh, Solzhenitsyn and Peterson have first set their house in order…it’s just all those people who criticise the parts of reality Peterson likes who are mistaken”, and that does seem to be the modus operandi, Peterson claims or implies a lot of very outrageous things, however he brings these claims back to a very simple message, something you could summarise in an inspirational quote or “Bad people are bad, it would be better if they were good”, which sure, we can all agree on, it’s just the 30 other minutes of the video that are a problem.
“This is life. We build structures to live in. We build families, and states, and countries. We abstract the principles upon which those structures are founded and formulate systems of belief. At first we inhabit those structures and beliefs like Adam and Eve in Paradise. But success makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention. We take what we have for granted. We turn a blind eye. We fail to notice that things are changing, or that corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality—of God? Or do things fall apart because we have not paid sufficient attention?”
Lets unpack this. Who is “we”? Now most of this chapter is about individuals and their believes and actions, but I believe that when he says “we” here he talks about the system that humans have created. In the subsequent paragraph he goes into Hurricane Katrina, and how some or all of the fallout from that would have been preventable (which btw, is by itself a good point, if you’d like to watch a good video about the man made aspects of natural disasters I’d suggest this two part series by youtuber Mexie: part1 - part2).
However he conflates the totality of the system, the reality we live in, albeit human-made and perpetrated by humans, with the individual. The system has failed the people of New Orleans, the system has failed the people of Grenfell Tower, and no amount of them tidying their room would have helped, only structural criticism resulting in structural change could have helped, something that this chapter, while at times paying lip service to, is designed to work against this.
From a moral level I have to ask, is it right to even imply that perhaps there was complicity of the individual? I find it, at the very least, distasteful.
I leave the reference to an apparent Garden of Eden in humanities history for everyone to ponder themselves. From what I understand I can not find much perfection in human recorded history, and pre-history certainly comes with it’s own set of suffering. I’m not even sure Peterson would disagree, perhaps it is only meant to be taken metaphorical, but then, too, I would like to know what it is referring to, sandwiched between a reference to Jewish history and the Hurricane Katrina.
In the final part we come to the crux of his argument under the heading “Clean Up Your Life”. Here he suggest that we should first take a look at how we can improve small things, our personal relationships, our career. And here comes the two main points of my disagreement. Firstly while I think people should strive to be moral in their personal life, I don’t think we should think of it as a requirement to effect moral change on a systemic level. You don’t have to be a nice person to your brother to help a lot of people through other means. Mahatma Gandhi, an example he cites earlier, was not a perfect person, there are a lot of things he did that were bad in his personal life, however his positive impact for the people under colonial rule is seldom denied nowadays.
Now some may say that that is not what he means, and maybe it isn’t, but it’s certainly an easy takeaway. Take the final sentence of this chapter: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.” Not clearly addressed is how perfect we have to be before advocating for positive change at a systemic level. What he also does not examine is how this advice is really no different to the suggestions that those advantaged by a system give to those disadvantaged by it, “first bring your own house in order, then we’ll consider improvements”. Using this advice you can silence anyone, because no one is perfect. Compartmentalising the world into the personal that you need to work on first and the structural or systemic that should be tackled later heavily favours a) the current system and its victors and b) people not playing by this arbitrary rule.
Rather than decoupling it, I would say that striving for a positive systemic change is one of the things you need to get in order first. If you are not trying to make the world better for everyone, you are not the best you that you can be. Peterson seems to decouple that part of self improvement however, and the only people profiting from such a decoupling are those already favored by the system.
Secondly, when he says “you can use your own standards of judgment. You can rely on yourself for guidance.”, in essence, saying “listen to your gut”; That is terrible advice. The systems we have created are incredibly complex and many actions that appear positive using “common sense”, turn out not to be when inspected more closely. Behaving morally is sadly not something that you can just wing, you have to put some effort in to make sure that what you do is actually helpful.
At any rate, if you can take something positive from his work, that’s great, it is very vague, so you can think of it as a Rorschach test of morality. But please don’t take from it that you have to be some form of perfect being before you can effect positive change in society, nor that you should solely listen to what feels morally good, try to understand the context in which your behaviour exists, things aren’t always as simple as they seem, and common sense approaches can be more harmful than helpful.
If you want to be very benevolent you can craft something positive from it. Something like “try to be better in your personal life”, yes definitely, but don’t do it at the exclusion of systemic improvement, and don’t base it solely on your own standards of judgement, do some research, ponder the greater implications of what your “common sense” standards may imply, then yes, this could be a good piece of advice. Alas, it is not written as such in the text, and that is a shame.