Have We Hit Peak Peterson?

From "12 Rules" to "Mastering Life" and Jordan Peterson AI

You know these food companies, they know that they have us. You can just tell some of the names that they give their products, it just gives you a sense that they're very confident. “Life” cereal. You can't have more balls than that.

- Jerry Seinfeld

This bit came to mind as I was reading and reviewing Jordan Peterson’s new book We Who Wrestle With God. It’s not his best work, but it is ballsy: effectively a Jordan Peterson study guide to the Old Testament. He’s expanded the scope far beyond 12 Rules For Life, yet this ambitious project is the least disciplined of his three recent books. He needed an editor, but he’s clearly surrounded exclusively by “yes-men.”

Since he signed with DailyWire, Peterson has been given carte blanche for “uncensored” takes (e.g. “Up yours, woke moralists. We’ll see who cancels who.”) and commentary on everything imaginable. Some of the stuff is just plain goofy. Just watch the first 5 seconds of this, and you’ll see what I mean. He has a bigger platform and production than ever, but it’s getting harder to take him seriously.

He’s created the (modestly titled) “Mastering Life” series, covering everything from The Foundations of the West, to negotiation, marriage, depression, masculinity, vision, Exodus (with a forthcoming one on the gospels), and more. Then there’s his online university Peterson Academy and his international organization Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC).

He used to keep it simple: make your bed, stand up straight with your shoulders back, and climb the dominance hierarchy—lobster-style. He offered pithy statements like: “The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.” He revolted against the compelled speech, the political correctness, and the moral equivocation of the academy. 

But he’s slowly progressed from personal development to cultural conflict and the defense of “the West.” As part of this shift, he’s begun speaking more about Christianity, the Bible, and its role in Western Civilization—hence, We Who Wrestle With God and a forthcoming book about the New Testament. The trouble is, he’s gone from very specific directives—12 Rules—to mealy-mouthed Christian-adjacent ramblings. 

He likes the symbolism and the stories of the Bible, but the whole thing feels a bit hollow. It feels like a fad.

Source

Just listen to the opening spot from his Ben Shapiro interview:

It's more definitive in the Old Testament accounts that whatever God is is beyond categorization. God is outside our category structures. Now does that make him real? Well, I would say God is hyperreal. God is the reality upon which all reality depends. That's a different kind of category. It's an atheist game. Is God real like a table is real? Well, the insistence of the entire biblical library is that God is not real in that manner. God is outside of time and space, for example, and all material objects are inside of time and space and so God is a reflection of the substrate that makes time and space themselves possible.

This sort of high-flown circumlocution is classic academic-speak, something Peterson used to avoid. It’s very hard to pin him down on basic commitments.

Well what about the Bible?

He writes, “for better or worse, [the Bible is] the story on which our western psyches and cultures are now somewhat fragilely founded.” It is “the library of stories on which the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated—the foundation of the West, plain and simple.” 

For better or worse? Wouldn’t it be, “for better?”

He always returns to the idea of “aiming up” as the fundamental religious dictum. Aim at the highest thing you can possibly imagine because God is something like that. Ironically, this is actually a diminution of real theology. Whereas he once cut through the namby-pamby self-help talk, now he’s reducing the complexity of a mystical relationship with the Lord of the universe to vague directional guidance. 

As I read, I thought, “What about Julius Caesar killing a million Gauls? Did he not ‘aim up’ and accept the adventure of his life?” As best I can tell, Peterson’s argument would be that Christianity wiped out Paganism, so Caesar’s aim was inferior to, say, St. Paul’s aim to be crucified with Christ because Caesar’s civilization didn’t last. He’s concerned with utility not truth.

From Person to Parody

With any popular figure, there is a temptation over time to become an exaggerated version of yourself to pander to your audience and the pressures of the attention economy. This is typically called “audience capture,” and you can probably think of examples of public figures you once respected who went off the deep end.

For this book, he created a Jordan Peterson AI model, trained on all his writings and speeches. This strikes me as a form of audience capture at a linguistic level. It encourages you to repeat what’s been popular and what your fan base is likely to find palatable. Contrary to common usages of AI as a research assistant or grunt worker, Peterson would use his model when he came to a Biblical passage that he couldn’t make sense of.

The default then becomes the model’s interpretation, which he must manually alter if he disagrees. It creates a bias toward cautious fan service rather than trailblazing intellectual work. It creates a bias toward more words rather than fewer because editing is the primary burden, and while this is the case with any AI-generated writing, it’s even more of a temptation when it’s already in your voice. It’s flattering!

We can’t know what proportion of this book was written with the aid of this LLM, but the prose is wordy and undisciplined. It piles up clauses and allusions that make Dr. Peterson appear quite erudite but make for a slog as the reader. In other words, it feels like AI wrote a lot of it. After 20 seconds of flipping through the book, I found a representative passage on David:

Thus, the shepherd is an image of the mightiest hero, albeit in ordinary guise, armed with little but courage and faith, successfully confronting the worst in nature and man while devoting his service to the least and most vulnerable. These are precisely the crucial yet paradoxical masculine virtues captured by Michelagnelo’s statue of David, with its great hands, and stance of strength, grace, and ready alertness. That statue is simultaneously ideal and reproach, target and judge, and contains within it the terror of the beauty that eternally does the same thing, and that frightens and intimidates people into a careless second-rate taste and aesthetic ethos. Kitsch does not discriminate or judge, appealing cheaply to sentiment and the hypocritical moral virtue of the reflexively compassionate. Hence, for example, the sentimental attractiveness of the ceramic plates adorned with kittens famously favored by J.K. Rowling’s Delores Umbridge, underworld queen of the do-gooding authoritarians.

The whole book is like this, like a parody of Jordan Peterson. We Who Wrestle With God is fine to use as a reference book if you want to hear his take on a specific story. The connections are sometimes interesting. But it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most diehard Peterson fan wading through over 500 pages of this.

We Who Wrestle With Jordan

Paul Kingsnorth

had some great lines in his recent Erasmus lecture about Peterson’s misbegotten attempt at mobilizing Christianity as a cultural weapon. Kingsnorth referenced Jordan Peterson’s “Message to the Christian Church,” which was notably light on mentions of Jesus: 

[Jesus] gets not one mention in the entire film. Neither does God the Father. Neither does the Holy Spirit. Instead Peterson's civilizational church is to be a self-help club for young men. It's to be a cultural institution fighting back against the woke and the bloody Gaia worshippers and the feminists and the life sapping cultural Marxists. It sees life as a catastrophe and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants in other words is a church that looks like Jordan Peterson. “Your churches, for God's sake,” he exclaims at one point, in the only mention of God in the entire film.

Kingsnorth points out that Peterson slips between this rant against the cultural Marxists, something Christian conservatives may be sympathetic to, to ideas completely at odds with Christianity:

Some of these fanatics, [Peterson] tells us, believe that there should be extreme limits on our wants even on our needs. “Extreme limits on our wants?” Whatever would the desert fathers say.

Now, Peterson is talking about the extreme privations of hardcore climate fundamentalists, not praising abject hedonism. But the broader point stands. As Anne Lamott says, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Peterson’s church has plenty of conquest and adventure, but it’s lighter on the humility and submission.

If you’re turned off by all the civilizational warfare talk, you can follow Paul Kingsnorth, who agrees with the religious artist Hilary White: “Christian civilisation is the secondary fruit of Christian mysticism.” Kingsnorth believes that prayer and Christ are the heart of the matter, and “without the heart, there’s no body. Trying to work backwards, trying to build a body, as it were, with no heart is an impossibility. The notion of pretending to believe in Christianity because you approve of its fruits and you want somehow to see them return is a dead end.” 

Instead, he points to the decidedly unpragmatic, apolitical approach of St. Seraphim of Sarov, “Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved,” or St. Anthony the Great, who gave up his riches to live in a cave for decades. Whatever impact they had, it wasn’t through political, civilizational machinations. He quoted C.S. Lewis offering the alternative path:

Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to “sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation,” do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the “World” are those who really transform it.

Saint Anthony the Great and Saint Paul the Anchorite (1634) by Diego Velázquez

Kingsnorth asks, “Do we want civilization or do we want Christ?” Perhaps you think that’s a false dichotomy and oversimplification. I was there, and the room clearly bristled at parts of his lecture, but his point is worthy of consideration if not entire implementation.

At one point, he referenced Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and Spengler’s theory that Western, materialist, “Faustian” culture had “already begun to ossify at the beginning of the 19th century and that it was rotting from within even as it dominated the world.”

“Rotting from within even as it dominated the world.” That’s Spengler on the West, and if Peterson succeeds, we may say the same of him and his church some day. I hope it doesn’t come to that.