12 Rules for Life

I "discovered" Jorden Peterson on youTube a few years back. Some people may know him from his interview on the BBC that blew up. Before that, I had watched at least three times this talk on freedom of speech and political correctness. From that talk, I even bothered to read Volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago. 12 Rules for Life has been the best selling in may counties, tops lots of charts and has sold over 2 million copies (it of cause didn't appear on the New York Times best-selling list because he is Canadian - or because it wasn't about Trump).

Peterson is something of a phenomenon among the male 20 somethings. He is telling them to grow up and to take responsibility for their actions. He reminds me of a secular Mark Driscoll from around 2004. Back then Driscoll became quite popular with the male 20 somethings, telling them to grow up, take responsibility for their actions and to get married. Driscoll also was Christian, whereas Peterson is pseudo-Christian. You would think a message of hard work and responsibility wouldn't be that popular in our culture of experience, entertainment and enjoyment. But I think those are all surface level, simple ideas we get from marketing and that there is a deeper longing for things that are hard work.

When Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, there was much criticism of this biologist venturing into the realm of theology. It turns out that if you have a PhD in one area, it doesn't necessarily mean you are authoritative in a completely different field of study. However, in this book, Peterson, a clinical psychiatrist, talks about religion, quotes the Bible and mentions Jesus a few times. I find it interesting that people within Christian circles aren't giving him the same critique they gave Dawkins. Sure, Peterson isn't aggressively against Christianity, in fact, he is kinda for it, but I don't think he actually presents the Christian message about Jesus. He gives morals and good advice, but no grace or good news (gospel), which I think the world needs.

I gave these observations to an overseas speaker we had at church one weekend, and he said he is finding a bunch of male 20 somethings coming to church after reading Peterson. If this book is a gateway drug to Christianity, then the pragmatic in me thinks I shouldn't be too hard on the book. The speaker then said that he does worry about those who after reading Peterson who don't turn to Christ, where they will be in five to ten years? Will they still be enthused about picking themselves up from their own bootstraps and ultimately will they be able to see how well that works out for them in the face of the hard facts of existences.

The twelve rules Peterson has for life are:

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
8. Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't
10. Be precise in your speech
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

I'm not going to deal with these in detail, there are probably many other reviews online about them. This list came from a longer list of about 40 that Peterson once posted online. These rules touch on the fact that structures are inherent to human nature (and the animal kingdom), that you should concentrate on things you can change, like yourself, your own attitudes, your immediate environment and take responsibility for those. Be grateful for the good in your life, even when there is serious pain in your life because trouble and pain are always going to come. He endorses discipline in children, doing the harder thing, being careful in what you say and picking and working at friendships. To me, this all sounds a bit like the advice you get in the book of Proverbs, but Peterson doesn't really point that out.

Now, all of this is good advice. I think we shouldn't be encouraging the prolonged adolescence we seen in young males. I think it was Driscoll who said young men are like semitrailers: they go straighter with a load. Getting people to take responsibility for their room, their life and decisions is always a good thing. On the level of a self-help book, I thought the advice was useful and he said many things I had learned in some pastoral care classes. I even told an old non-Christian housemate who I hadn't spoken to in about a year that he should read it. Two days later he sent me back his Amazon receipt. I hope he liked it.

But my main beef with the book is when Peterson strays into theology and his approach to the Bible. Everything is an archetype, so events and people in the Bible don't necessarily have to be true, they are symbolic, they represent the eternal struggle of order and chaos, good and bad, yin and yang. Different ancient cultures have struck up different symbols and ideas to deal with the same human condition, we should pay close attention to how they dealt with the suffering of life.

We read that the story of Jesus on the cross is "the archetypal story of the man who gave his all for the sake of the better - who offers up his life for the advancement of Being  - who allowed God's will to become manifest fully within the confines of a single, mortal life. That is the model for the honorable man."

There is no mention of Jesus dying for sins, instead, he was an honorable man. Jesus' cross "was simultaneous, the point of greatest suffering, the point of death and transformation, and the symbolic center of the world". The only mention of hell is about something that can be experienced here on earth. There is no eternal perpective to this self-help advice, which to me I found quite unsatasifying. So what if I clean my room, become the most productive and happy person in the world, with great children and relationships only to die apart from God for eternity? I get that Peterson's goal wasn't to prepare people for eternity, but to only have a "here and now" focus surely is a little lacking. If someone's telos is only for their life here and now, then ultimate meaning and purpose is also for the here an now. I am reminded of a point Tim Keller made about true happiness. If you aim at Heaven you get Earth, but if you aim at Earth you get neither.

There are other nuances that got my goat as well. Peterson seems to buy into the JEDP document theory, which I thought was something scholarship had moved on from (maybe that is a reflection of the circles I move and read in). In one section of the book, Peterson draws a bigger and better parallel between Jesus with Cain, whereas I think a stronger theological point could have been made between Jesus and Adam.

Peterson also cites passages and stories from the Bible, the Gospel of Thomas, Vedic texts, priestess of Delphic Oracle etc... and to me treats them all as authoritative as the next. I am not saying the Bible has the only monopoly of truth, but if you end up saying Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Buddhist and Greek Pagan sources all have something to offer, then my guess is you are only on the surface of them all and haven't really dealt with the differences between them.

As a self-help book, I thought it was alright but ultimately lacking. There are worst books out there for 20 somethings to read, digest and agree with (like the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf). Peterson has tapped into something in our culture that is resonating with people and that alone should make us pay him a little attention to see what he is offering and how he he saying it.