Monsters, Birthday Cake, and Jordan Peterson’s New Book
By: Steve Qj
Tags: Ideas, Free Speech, Cancel Culture, Reading, Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson’s new book, “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life”, will be released next year by Penguin publishing and some of their staff are extremely unhappy about it. According to Vice Magazine, at an internal meeting announcing the book, staff members “cried and expressed dismay” as they tried to persuade the management team to reverse its decision.

For those who are unfamiliar, Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor, who gained notoriety in 2016 for speaking out against Bill C-16, a law aimed at increasing protections for transgender people, by classifying failure to use a transgender individual’s preferred pronouns as hate speech. Peterson argued that legally compelling people to “speak in a certain way”, regardless of why you were compelling them to do it, was a dangerous overstepping of free speech laws.

Since then he’s become something between a self-help guru and a father figure for millions of people, preaching a message which spans topics such as personal responsibility, the dangers of postmodernism, and the hierarchical nature of lobsters. But while there’s certainly room to disagree with Peterson’s ideas, those who objected to his book seemed more concerned with making bizarre claims about potential and imagined harms.

One employee argued that Penguin shouldn’t be “platforming somebody who is popular in far-right circles”, an accusation based on the fact that many of Peterson’s supporters are white men. Another claimed that Peterson had “radicalised their father”, and a third claimed that publishing his book would, “negatively affect their non-binary friend”.

It’s worth noting that none of these people have read the book in question, but if you’ve been paying attention to the state of discourse over the past few years, especially on social media, this reaction won’t surprise you. It’s become almost impossible to find disagreement which isn’t couched in the most sensationalist possible terms.

Note that Peterson didn’t say something that the employee’s father agreed with, he “radicalised” the poor soul. The employee’s friend doesn’t simply disagree with Peterson about transgender pronouns, they will be “negatively affected” by a book which is completely unrelated to transgender people. What are those negative effects? Well, they can’t be limited to that particular individual of course. They’re a sort of nebulous, all-pervasive harm which suggests that a conflicting definition of terms is equivalent to physical violence against an entire community.

The saddest thing about this aspect of wokeness (though it’s almost certainly intentional) is that it takes with it any possibility of honest discussion. I don’t agree with everything Jordan Peterson has to say. I often find myself frustrated by his inability to answer a simple question simply or his unwillingness to use one word where seventeen will do. I think that too much of what he says is based on fear and pessimism about human nature. But describing him as an “icon of hate speech and transphobia” is so indefensibly ridiculous, that it makes it impossible to take anything else being said about him seriously.

Anybody who’s even passingly familiar with his work, anybody who’s read his first book, or listened to a single one of the three-hundred-plus hours of lectures he has on YouTube (not to mention the countless debates and interviews), even if they disagree with him, will know that he’s not a hate figure. Peterson engages with difficult, uncomfortable topics. Social hierarchies, evolutionary biology, sex and gender, race and religion, these are issues it’s almost impossible to talk about without saying something that somebody will dislike. If difficult conversations are allowed to become synonymous with hate speech, we’re all going to be worse off.

But here’s the thing, even if Peterson were as evil as he’s being made out to be, even if his book was filled with dangerous, hateful ideology like, say, Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” or Robin Di’Angelo’s “White Fragility”, that still wouldn’t serve as justification to ban it. One would have hoped that people who chose to work at a publishing house would understand this point. Disliking an author, or even disliking their ideas, doesn’t justify preventing anybody else from hearing them. Bad ideas only get stronger when they’re suppressed. Dangerous people become more persuasive when they’re silenced. The answer to bad ideas isn’t to hide them away, but to expose them for what they are. But to do that, you have to have the courage to engage with them.

Whatever else one might say about him, Jordan Peterson isn’t dangerous. He’s an imperfect human being (as we all are) who is nonetheless trying to do some good in the world. If more people had the intellectual integrity to read the opinions of those they disagree with, rather than uncritically swallowing the bad, cherry-picked takes of writers who are financially motivated to create drama, they might realise that there’s nothing to be upset about. They might learn that nobody’s opinion can “invalidate their existence”, and become stronger, happier human beings because of it. They might recognise that if a book by an author they dislike reduces them to tears, the publishing industry is probably the wrong career path. They might see, as I once did, that there’s no need to be afraid. After all, Jordan Peterson isn’t a monster, he’s just a man in a suit.