Even though Jordan Peterson lives and works in my own back yard, and my ecumenical colleagues in theological studies at the University of Toronto debated his merits and demerits endlessly for a season, I had other things on my mind and did not follow the kerfuffle any more closely than to be vaguely aware of it. This is to say that I have no opinion of the man or his book, other than perhaps to envy his overnight ascendancy to cultural superstardom.
Dr. DeVille’s review need not be the final word in Orthodoxy in Dialogue by any means. If you are Orthodox (preferably) and would like to contribute a contrasting perspective to this discussion, reach out to us at our editorial email address.
Giacomo Sanfilippo, Editor
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Jordan B. Peterson
Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018
Jordan Peterson’s Jungian best-seller is banal, superficial, and insidious
The real danger in 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is its apologia for social Darwinism and bourgeois individualism covered over with a theological patina.
I was a high-school student in 1990 when Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men came out. I ordered a copy and read it in a couple of evenings confined after foot surgery. It was a runaway bestseller then, just as Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is today.
Shortly thereafter, in 1991, Sam Keen’s Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man came out, and I read that as well. It was very similar in content and approach to Bly. The two of them, over a quarter-century ago now, claimed to have discovered that “today’s” young men were lacking direction and wondering about their identity, much as Peterson claims now.
Then as now it all seemed so gimmicky and cleverly packaged, lacking substance and having only one purpose: to sell books. But that’s not quite fair. What I found in all three are attempts at theologizing in a Jungian fashion. And none has done that more than Peterson, whose many Christian fans seem blithely unaware that what Peterson advocates today is merely third-rate recycled gnostic paganism rejected by the Church in the fourth century.
To cite perhaps the most egregious example: Jung thought we all have a “shadow” side where evil resides, and none was exempt from this, including Christ. Peterson wholly accepts this when he claims that “Christ is always he who is willing to confront evil—consciously, fully, and voluntarily—in the form that dwelt simultaneously within him and in the world (180; my emphasis).
