I have mixed feelings about Jordan Peterson, whose 12 Rules for Life I have just ploughed through. There is much socially conservative psychobabble, and life-coachy earnestness, and it’s far too long. But I am in some sympathy with his project. I am interested in its semi-religiosity.
His core message is that people should aim high, ‘take the heroic path’, serve a vision of goodness and truth, though this entails sacrifice, and acceptance of the suffering intrinsic to life. No Christian should sniff at such rhetoric, and I do not. But we should sniff around its edges, to ask what exactly he’s up to.
His primary influences are the spiritual existentialists of the early twentieth century, especially Jung and Heidegger – he talks a lot about ‘Being’, meaning reality as it’s lived by humans with souls. Also, though this is unstated, he echoes Protestant theologians who were influenced by such ideas, such as Paul Tillich.
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