It is not easy to review any book by Jordan Peterson, the prolific Canadian psychologist turned lifestyle sage. The temptation is to respond not to the work but the person (or persona): irascible, derisive, uncompromising, contrarian. But here, the work itself poses problems; it is a sprawling, repetitive text that could have done with some ruthless editing. Ostensibly a step-by-step guide through the biblical narratives of Genesis and Exodus (and, for some reason, Jonah), with the goal of uncovering wisdom to help meet present-day moral challenges, it in fact returns persistently to some of Peterson’s favourite tropes about modern culture, its flabbiness and confusion.
At one level its structure and argument are clear enough. The scriptural text confronts us, says Peterson, with a set of life-and-death choices. We can conform our rebellious fantasies and myth-driven aspirations to the underlying moral structure of reality, or we can refuse. If we refuse, we wreck our own lives and those of others. If instead we recognise reality, we then face two sorts of pressure.
There is the social pressure to adjust, not to reality itself, but to fashionable orthodoxies – particularly around gender fluidity, racial sensitivities, the reluctance to call people to responsibility for their actions. And there is the internal pressure of a self-serving, sentimental quest for low-cost answers to challenges of moral significance – false compassion, over-identification with the supposedly vulnerable, cheap indulgence of the surface wants of self and others. But if we are prepared to stand firm in the face of these pressures, the reward is a life of integrity, inner strength and the capacity for living with “adventure” (a favourite word). The stories of Jewish scripture – read with a strong admixture of Christian material – provide stark illustrations of the consequence of dishonesty or unreality, and powerful images of the kind of integration and strength generated by obedience to the truth.
Two points to begin with. One is that Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.
The second point is connected. Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.
The effect is somewhat one-note; the actual way in which the stories develop, speak to one another, correct one another, handle internal tensions and debates is muted at best. This is the sort of thing that classical rabbinical exegesis in fact relishes, and that some more modern Jewish discussion – by Emil Fackenheim, Jonathan Sacks, Nathan Lopes Cardozo and others – models very powerfully. Peterson is rightly hostile to antisemitism, and this might have led him to engage a bit more with the rich world of Jewish interpretation. Instead, he relies a lot on rather dated Christian commentaries (and seems to have a limited acquaintance with Hebrew, a drawback for a project like this).
In fairness, he does pick out some distinct trajectories within the stories, for example, in the narratives about Moses, . But the expositions constantly shade into meandering polemic about a range of modern issues, especially gender, on which Peterson has made his position pretty clear elsewhere. Eve’s yielding to the serpent’s temptation, for instance, is viewed as the characteristically female error of sentimental, pseudo-compassionate acceptance of the unacceptable that you see in bad parents, especially mothers, who “cripple their children so that they can make a public show of their martyrdom and compassionate virtue”.
Well, there is certainly a discussion to be had about toxicity in parenting, but finding it in the second chapter of Genesis requires impressive single-mindedness (and it is worth noting that Jewish exegetical tradition, unlike Christian, has never been that interested in Eve). Peterson claims that analysis of the patriarchal subtext of the biblical stories is a ridiculous distraction, observing that Genesis depicts both men and women negatively. What he does not seem to acknowledge is that discussing patriarchy is about recognising patterns of social power embedded in the stories, rather than whether specific men are painted in favourable or unfavourable lights. This makes it impossible for him to grant that such discussions can help us avoid some of the spectacularly destructive exploitation of biblical material that has reinforced the demeaning of women throughout Christian history.
Predictably (for those familiar with his online battles), he sees any qualification of the simple binary of gender identity as equivalent to denying the difference between good and evil, a refusal of the basic polarities of reality. But most serious discussions of gender fluidity do not deny evolutionary biology or sexual differentiation as such; they are asking for a more painstaking attention both to the social construction of roles and to the specifics of dysphoria. They deserve a better level of engagement.
And so on, with other issues as well (most bizarrely, the conclusion of the Book of Jonah is made the occasion for a tirade about valuing the “natural” world over human life, which seems to have something to do with Peterson’s hostility to some kinds of environmental ethics; not really what the text is about). These rabbit holes do no great service to the broader challenges Peterson wants to draw attention to. There really are corrosive manifestations of hedonism, relativism and infantilism in our culture; there really is a mentality that deludes us into thinking that we can be whatever we want to be, and that any notion of short-term sacrifice for a more durable and fully shareable good is unimaginable.
But the insistent contempt for nuance and disagreement (“idiotic”, “addled”, “egregious”), and the reduction of any alternative perspective to its most shallow or trivial form, does not encourage the serious engagement Peterson presumably wants. This is an odd book, whose effect is to make the resonant stories it discusses curiously abstract. “Matter and impertinency mixed”, in Shakespeare’s phrase.
• We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine by Jordan B Peterson is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
