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I’m upset at Jordan Peterson, even though I already know it’s foolish to say this online. I’m upset because he forced me to read a nearly unreadable 505-page book about God, and I’m even more upset because I now have a splitting headache and, worse, a head full of verbose sophistry and foolish misogyny from a big-word spouter dressed like a would-be St. Augustine, dressed in Russell Brand’s robes.
“As you start to gain a deeper understanding of your society’s structure and your own spirit, set yourself right in intent, aim, and purpose. Take a trip through the greatest stories ever told with Jordan Peterson. Dare to challenge God.
That’s what the self-aggrandizing press statement that goes with Peterson’s new, heavy doorstopper, We Who Wrestle with God, says. It’s as ambitious as it is unreadable by the average reader. A lesson in overcommitting and underdelivering, if there ever was one.
For the highly controversial pop-psych “public intellectual” who went from lecturing to earning outrageous sums of money by advising young men to “straighten up and fly right” on YouTube, I’ll say this: he doesn’t hesitate to set lofty goals. The Creator Himself could hardly be a more challenging subject to address. This was not always the case for Peterson, the son of a school teacher father and a librarian mother, who was raised in a rather Christian household in Alberta, Canada. Before reverting to what he views as a “traditional” understanding of the universe and the Good Book, Peterson completely renounced Christianity in his teens and embraced revolutionary socialism. Before starting a career as a teacher at Harvard and then as a professor in Toronto, where he got married and started a family (his daughter Mikhaila is also a podcaster), he earned degrees in political science and clinical psychology.
The book walks us through some of the most important passages in the Old Testament and makes the case that the archetypes it contains serve as the prism through which we are predisposed to view the world. The Tower of Babel is a timeless lesson in hubris; Abraham is the first true adventurer; Moses is a hero and savior of the oppressed; Jonah is the ultimate warning against shirking responsibility; Cain and Abel is a cautionary tale about not giving your all (and, of course, the perils of sibling rivalry); Noah is the only Good Man in a sea of chaos; and Adam and Eve are the eternal father and mother of all and the originators of sin.
Fear not if it sounds strange to argue that the foundation of Western society as we know it is based on the principles of Christianity while concentrating on the Old Testament rather than Jesus! Peterson is working on another book about the New Testament that will probably be just as hench. That being said, I keep returning to the same questions as I futilely attempt to wriggle my way through the tangled jumble of bluster and waffle, needlessly archaic language, and broad, unambiguous claims masquerading as absolute truths: for whom is this book intended? For what purpose is it used? And why in the world would a discredited former professor of psychology feel the need to write it?
Regarding this final issue, a brief review of Peterson’s development over the previous ten years offers some hints. He remained virtually unknown outside of academia while serving as a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto until the mid-2010s. His first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, was released in 1999. He also launched a YouTube account in 2013 and posted some of his scholarly lectures there. So far, so dull.
After that, in 2016, Peterson started posting videos on social media criticizing Canada’s Bill C-16, which outlawed discrimination against gender identity and expression. His anti-trans attempts in the cultural wars gained him almost two million YouTube subscribers in just two years. He became dependent on the anti-anxiety medication Clonazepam, a depressant of the benzodiazepine family, about this time. By 2020, his addiction had gotten so bad that he had to fly to Moscow to be put in a medically induced coma (after being refused this treatment in North America). After spending eight days in that condition and a month in critical care, he declared his recovery later that year.
When Peterson’s second book reached bookstores and bestseller lists worldwide in 2018, his fame grew even more despite his addiction. The self-help book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which was especially popular among disillusioned young men, was a huge financial success. It combined pseudointellectualism with practical advice. He sold out 1,000-seat theaters during a global book tour, was featured in The New York Times, and was asked to share his opinions on podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience, where he disclosed that he only eats beef, salt, and water, probably in an attempt to make scurvy cool again.
Peterson became the unofficial patron saint of the manosphere after he was accused of misogyny for declaring that “enforced monogamy” was a reasonable solution to lonely men committing mass murder and that the current hierarchy, which sees men dominate positions of power, “may be predicated on competence.” “Jordan Peterson” quickly became a household name after being a sensation on the internet.
Against this context, he was betrayed by his own profession. The College of Psychologists of Ontario’s Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee looked into Peterson’s claimed “transphobic, sexist [and] racist” remarks in 2020. After determining that his public utterances contained language that was “disgraceful, dishonorable, and/or unprofessional” and that “posed a moderate risk of harm to the public” by “undermining public trust in the profession of psychology,” it ordered him to undergo particular training in 2022. He denied any wrongdoing and dismissed the allegations.
Perhaps it’s not unexpected that Peterson would feel empowered to address the topic of the Messiah given the similarities—a whirlwind that took him from relative obscurity to a recognized influencer with millions of contemporary believers and, later, a “martyr” punished for his beliefs. Although he has written on God and biblical allegory before, this most recent attempt is the first time he has devoted a whole book to the topic.
For a practicing Christian, reading We Who Wrestle with God is undoubtedly a rather odd experience. Of all people, shouldn’t I be appreciative that Peterson has chosen to use his tremendous influence to support a cause as noble as bringing biblical insight to a modern audience? In the end, I don’t dispute that the Bible and its teachings serve as the foundation for Western civilization in a way that has largely been forgotten in a culture that is becoming more and more secular. Theoretically, I support the Good Book’s teachings being reintroduced into popular culture. However, I just had to read the first few pages to realize that Peterson’s most recent study is not going to be helpful.
First, I have to go back to my initial query: for whom is this book intended? For heaven’s sake, I can’t figure it out. Academics are a niche literary market that rarely needs intensive and costly promotion and marketing, thus it’s hardly targeted at them. If it were, it would be reasonable to wonder if Peterson was qualified to write it as a professor of psychology rather than theology. “Genesis 2 therefore extends the characterization of God, presenting him as the spirit that warns against overreach – against the cardinal sin of pride,” writes Peterson at one point in an apparent ironic moment. What could it mean to overreach? Maybe it’s the idea that you can just be interested in something, rather than an expert, and publish the next Very Important Book on the Divine.
Therefore, it must be assumed that this book is intended for lay readers, presenting to the general public basic facts about the human condition as they are presented in the Bible’s stories. However, that interpretation is also unsupportable.
At its most fundamental level, struggling through We Who Wrestle with God is an extremely unpleasant experience. Writing a bewilderingly comprehensive book seems like a strange method to introduce a new generation to the advantages of putting God and biblical morality at the center of a well-ordered society. One feels forced to constantly stopping to take in sentences once, twice, or three times while sifting through the quagmire-like confusion of academic jargon and self-important bombast, yet the meaning is still elusive.
When I read passages that appear to be expressing universal truths but, upon closer examination, actually mean something else, I can feel myself steadily spiraling into insanity. What exactly? “The Great Father is the a priori structure of value, derived from the actions of the spirit that gave rise to such structure, and composed of the consequences of its creative and regenerative action,” one such line reads. Return?
It’s no wonder it’s almost 500 pages long; practically every time, 100 words are utilized when ten would be more appropriate. Peterson is arguably the literary personification of the new intellectual movement. There is no attempt to make concepts clear, readable, or even comprehensible; this is not someone who seems to want his reader to comprehend. Instead, it’s the manner of someone who wants to show that they are really intelligent by burying meaning beneath an obscure “word salad” that would probably fall apart if you ever got to the heart of what was being stated. Regretfully, that endeavor is as futile as attempting to affix mist to the wall.
In We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson purposefully and tellingly employs the King James version of the Bible rather than the much more popular New International Version when quoting from it. Although many literary types enjoy the lyricism and poetry of the older translation, which was completed in the early 1600s, it is all “spaketh” this and “goeth” that—old terms that were rendered obsolete centuries ago and merely act as an instant and needless obstacle to comprehension for the present reader. Given that Peterson frequently uses words that were last in use 200 years ago (think “import” instead of “importance” and “privation” instead of “deprivation”—it’s like stepping into the pages of Pride and Prejudice) it should come as no surprise.
The novel thus mirrors the formula that has propelled Peterson to his present status as a “public intellectual”: a projection of brilliance based on the flimsiest foundation, a potent concoction of outdated terminology, whataboutism, posturing, and obfuscation. The audience doesn’t ponder why a man so intelligent can’t articulate himself well; instead, they believe that because they can’t understand what this guy is saying, he must be intelligent. It’s difficult to resist clinging to his occasionally understandable statements like a life raft amidst the sea of uncertainty, which is problematic when the statements are as likely to be terribly misogynistic rhetoric as they are to be sound life advise.
As atheistic academic Richard Dawkins recently found, debating someone like that is like battling a shape-shifting sand opponent—there is nothing substantial to grasp. In response to Dawkins’ direct question on whether he believes in a literal Virgin birth, for instance, Peterson delivered a master class in straw man arguments masquerading as responses before he finally acknowledged, “These questions I don’t think of them as They’re failing to get to the point.
To be fair, beneath the book’s sloppy grammar and technical vocabulary lurk some sound, timeless principles and pearls of wisdom, as is the case with many of Peterson’s works and talks. “There is no sense in establishing a society that fails to care for the people who compose it at every stage of their development, from vulnerable to able, productive and generous” is a profoundly socialist-sounding worldview that Peterson draws from Deuteronomy, and I will gladly nod along with ideas like that.
However, behind all the nonsense, as in many of Peterson’s works and talks, lurk disturbing ideologies. His approach to “interpreting” the Bible creates serious concerns. He reverse-engineers hypotheses by examining the world around him, determining what he believes men and women are like, then applying this confirmation bias retroactively to the Bible rather than using the stories and archetypes to learn something about what humans could be like. One example is Peterson’s interpretation of Adam and Eve and the Fall, in which he comes to the conclusion that Eve’s choice to give in to temptation and consume the forbidden fruit was driven by the sin to which “all” women are vulnerable: a conceited and “all-encompassing” compassion. However, the myth doesn’t explain Eve’s motivation. It’s more like starting with 5 and conclusively asserting that the sum must have been 2 + 3 when it might have just as easily been 1 + 4, 2.5 x 2, or even 20 ÷ 4. It’s less like adding 2 + 2 and getting 5.
While we’re talking about Eve, Peterson also uses her as a springboard to discuss a worldview that holds that women are not very valuable outside of their roles as mothers. Perhaps it is no accident that the hallowed picture of women is more of a mother and baby than a woman. Alone, what is a woman? A victim of transient sexual pleasure,” he writes. Oh, the ancient paradigm of the Madonna/whore! A cliche that is as widespread as it is harmful.
Though I’m sure his many admirers will disagree, I can only assume that Peterson isn’t quite as smart as he believes himself to be. I believe that the ability to use intelligence to make difficult arguments understandable is the real test of a public intellectual. It’s not about simplifying; rather, it’s about figuring out how to convey concepts in a way that your audience can follow, comprehend, and possibly be persuaded by the arguments you’re making. In terms of theology, CS Lewis, for instance, was a master at it; through his theological essays and allegorical fiction, he was able to communicate the most profound truths and the highest notions regarding the nature of God. Even though they could have more sexist arguments to make against childless women, I doubt anyone would finish We Who Wrestle with God knowing anything more about God.
The silver lining in this whole situation? I seriously doubt that Peterson’s book will be read by many people. Yes, they will purchase it, put it on bookshelves and coffee tables, and sometimes quote it incorrectly in public. But persevere through those wretched 505 pages? I don’t think so. After all, battling Peterson’s cumbersome, incomprehensible “magnum opus” would undoubtedly be more difficult than battling God himself.
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