Jordan Peterson and the nonsense machine

How mediocrity became the dominant force in Western culture

Dr Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, is arguably the most influential public intellectual of the modern era.

1. The fall of Western education

The quality of the Western public intellectual has declined in tandem with the fall of education. The decay of our schools and universities is now well-documented — the rampant grade inflation; the racialised “diversity quotas” by which once-prestigious course admissions are allocated; the politicised warping of curricula; and the pseudo-degrees in spurious “studies” that have burgeoned in recent years.

Yet, these subversions of traditional academia mark only the acceleration of a downturn that has been in motion for over half a century, catalysed by the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. The selective schooling in Britain, which had for so long provided a world-class education to talented children of all backgrounds, was abolished. During the 1960s, a set of British A-levels was the envy of the world; indeed, it was commonly considered the equivalent of an American undergraduate degree. Today, nobody would make such a comparison. Across Europe and the United States, school and university curricula lost their rigour and traditional focus on numeracy, book-learning, and rote memorisation of poetry and historical facts.

Even the centuries-old method for the teaching of reading, synthetic phonics, was cast aside in the middle of the twentieth century in favour of fashionable “whole-language” approaches, which have emphasised the full immersion of a child in complex written language. Synthetic phonics, by contrast, takes a child methodically through the simple building-blocks of sounds and syllables, allowing more complex words and sentences to be formed steadily as learning advances. The result of whole-language immersion is that many children become lost in a sea of scrambled symbols on the page, and struggle — often for life — to comfortably process letters and words in order. One study after another has shown that literacy outcomes soar when synthetic phonics is adopted as the primary method of teaching reading.

These changes, combined with the sad decline of recreational reading, have led to successive generations of poor readers by the standards of the pre-war era. Indeed, a recent study discovered that many English literature students at two Midwestern universities were unable to understand the opening pages of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House — a text that would not previously have been considered even moderately challenging to the average reader. On both sides of the Atlantic, professors are consistently reporting that they are receiving students who are ill-prepared to simply read and finish a full-length book, let alone critique it.

Furthermore, it was previously not uncommon for people to leave state schooling partially or wholly fluent in both Latin and Greek, and fully acquainted with the grand chronology of Western history, from the Classical civilisations, through the great events and battles of the Medieval era, and into the modern day. Such schooling is now exceptionally rare, even at the most expensive private schools.

George Orwell’s brilliant and moving memoir of his schooldays, Such, Such Were the Joys, is essential reading, not only for its own sake, but for its portrayal of a pre-First World War education that was so exactingly rigorous, classical and immersive as to have almost no comparison in the modern world. History was taught with factual precision; he read the great works of English literature, memorising dozens of passages; the dead languages were central subjects; and religious instruction was provided through the Bible and its parables. To be sure, Orwell criticised the boarding-house squalor and the mechanical rigour by why dates and facts were hammered into the boys’ minds. But his education was clearly transformative, for it provided not only an excellent grounding in general knowledge, but also inculcated the young Orwell with the Western cultural tradition itself. Quite simply, Orwell would not have been Orwell as we know him without this exact form of schooling.

This sophisticated system of knowledge and intellectual rigour has since been nearly entirely dismantled in the West. The decline was catalysed by the revolutionary zeal of the 1960s, and then steadily worsened through the remainder of the twentieth century. As the great literary critic and English professor of Yale University, Harold Bloom, remarked in 2004:

“It is certainly true that today’s students arrive at college less prepared for the study of literature than comparable students 30 years ago or 50 years ago…I’ve learned in the last 15 years not to assume anything. Unless students are religious, I can’t take the Bible for granted. I can’t say ‘this has some relation to the Book of Job’ because they might not know what that is.”

Thus, the reason that so many students today struggle to read full-length books, or write essays without the assistance of artificial intelligence applications, is anchored ultimately in the steady death of education, reading, serious thought, and the very transmission of the Western inheritance itself. Education, in the classical sense, has collapsed.

2. Dr Jordan Peterson: a very modern intellectual

Now, this brings me onto Dr Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and academic, whose lectures and books have accrued a massive global following. Peterson rose to prominence in the late 2010s, when he criticised a Canadian law prohibiting freedom of speech for the critics of “gender identity”. Since then, he has published three books, and his appearances on podcasts and debates have received millions of views. He is, to be sure, perhaps the most prominent public intellectual of the modern era. He appears frequently on platforms alongside the eminent historian Niall Ferguson, the conservative author Douglas Murray, the world-famous biologist Richard Dawkins, and many others. His commentary is supposedly of a broadly conservative — or, at least, anti-woke — character, and he has helped to promote a general revival of interest in the Christian inheritance, the traditional values and literature of the West, and the flourishing of human life.

Peterson should be commended for all of this — especially for the remarkable courage he showed in facing down the leftwing campus bullies and mendacious administrators that sought to destroy him during his early controversies. He has set an important example by acting upon his convictions: such men are precious and must be valued in any age.

The problem, however, is that we need scratch only an inch beneath the surface of Peterson’s discourse to discover that much of it amounts only to hollow, banal nonsense. I attempted some years ago to read Peterson’s bestselling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The book argues that suffering is innate to life, and that facing our struggles with confidence and grit is the best way to flourish. The rules are straightforward and somewhat obvious: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back”; “Make friends with people who want the best for you”; “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”. And on it goes.

It is essentially a self-help book, aimed largely at the young men that have been inhibited by the chronically indoor lifestyles and luxury victimhood complexes of the modern world. The book’s essential premise is sensible and important. Yet, it is in its execution that we see Peterson’s fundamental weakness — namely that he is a clinical psychologist, with very narrow expertise and academic training, masquerading as a serious conservative intellectual.

The book’s defining flaw is that it is almost unbelievably badly written. Take this short excerpt from Peterson’s exposition of Rule 2, “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping”:

“Humanity, in toto, and those who compose it […] deserve some sympathy for the appalling burden under which the human individual genuinely staggers; some sympathy for subjugation to mortal vulnerability, tyranny of the state, and the depredations of nature. It is an existential situation that no mere animal encounters or endures […] It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story.”

I can assure you that reading many such sentences and paragraphs in succession is not only wearisome and boring, but eventually highly aggravating. Peterson seems to lack a coherent comprehension of what he wants to say, and so strings the reader along for page upon page of musings, pseudo-profundities and tedious, pointless meanderings. You realise that you have been sold a pup only after a chapter or two of impenetrable sentences that express only the most simple and obvious of points. The book’s central thesis — the promotion of normal individual responsibility — simply cannot be sustained across 400-plus pages. The result is therefore a long diatribe in which a small handful of common-sense points are padded ad nauseum with adolescent, yawn-inducing gibberish.

This kind of opaque verbiage is not found in the works of serious or important thinkers. Crucially, Peterson’s style in fact mirrors the meaningless, abstracted jargon of the modern Left — the senseless bolting together of one big word after another; the neglect of proper style and syntax; and the refusal to write in plain English. It is what the late British philosopher Roger Scruton described as “the nonsense machine”: the relentless regurgitation of silly, vacuous ideas in the indecipherable private jargon of the modern academic.

Of course, in the case of the modern Left, this practice is much more harmful. For the ideas expressed are actively — and deliberately — destructive to the moral and social fabric. (Indeed, I have written previously on the use of our universities as the engine-room for the leftwing assault on our civilisation.) Yet, it is clear that in Jordan Peterson’s vaguely conservative rhetoric, too, we can trace this same decline in thought and expression. And why is this? The answer lies in the fall of Western education writ large, and the formation in the Academy of new and spurious pseudo-disciplines — the “social sciences”.

Peterson, like his opponents on the Left, is the product of the new untraditional curriculum that emerged in the post-war Academy. His university education began by reading political science at the University of Alberta, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1982. Political science developed as a field of study gradually over the course of the twentieth century, and was only available as a distinct degree programme from the mid-1960s. The subject is part of a family of new-age disciplines, including psychology and sociology, that emerged as independent faculties in the early 1960s, coincident with the broader cultural and social revolution that swept the Western world. These disciplines have always emphasised the critical examination, or “deconstruction”, of Western society, its history and culture, and the very workings of the Western mind itself. It was from these fields that the new and controversial pseudo-disciplines of “gender studies”, “queer studies”, “religious studies” and so on have been developed. Although neo-Marxist “critical theories” have now pervaded even the traditional subjects, it is these newer programmes that are the true epicentre of the nonsense machine, forging the most politically aggressive doctrines that subvert young students’ minds and define the modern culture-wars.

It is vital to understand, however, that these new spurious subjects are merely sub-branches of seemingly more respectable disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, which are themselves thoroughly corrupted by politicised nonsense. In his important 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the conservative philosopher and classicist Allan Bloom argued that these new disciplines had usurped the study of the great books in Western universities, substituting the traditional curriculum for abstracted, jargon-filled pseudo-studies, concerned only with the shallow politics of racial, sexual and social struggle. Bloom specifically criticised the study of psychology for its creation of a matrix of narcissistic, made-up identities, traumas, feelings and repressions — all of which are now familiar motifs of the mainstream culture. He argued perceptively that these new pseudo-intellectual abstractions, and the jargon in which they were described, had replaced the rich moral and religious inheritance of traditional scholarship.

Crucially, psychology is Peterson’s core discipline. He studied for a BA in psychology, graduating with his second undergraduate degree in 1984, before earning a PhD in clinical psychology from McGill University. Following a period of research at Harvard University, Peterson became a professor at the University of Toronto in 1998. His areas of expertise are the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the psychology of personality.

These are fields of study that did not exist in the Western Academy until, relatively speaking, five minutes ago. There is no meaningful tradition in academic psychology, and any attempts by modern psychologists to establish one refer only to loosely associated ideas in the older disciplines of philosophy, classics, history, literature and law. Psychology, like its sister-disciplines in the social sciences, is frequently criticised for its excessive reliance on esoteric jargon and abstracted verbiage. Moreover, the discipline’s credibility has been wracked by the “replication crisis”: the widespread recognition that most of the experiments on which its “scientific” claims are founded cannot be repeated with similar results, signifying that its entire methodology and intellectual framework are fundamentally bogus. Psychology, like the other social sciences, is an essentially nonsense discipline — a pseudo-academic confection of unprovable abstractions, strange jargon and false evidence.

It is from this standpoint, then, that we see Jordan Peterson’s intellectual shortcomings in sharper focus. For he is not the product of the traditional Western syllabus. Like the academics of the modern Left, he has been immersed since his undergraduate days in the woolly methodology and ephemeral verbiage of the new-age disciplines. Indeed, he is famed partly for talking senseless gibberish in long, verbose, stream-of-consciousness rants that go nowhere and bear no significant meaning. He has learned to write and speak in pseudo-intellectual riddles that brim with jargon, big words and seemingly deep ideas, but which are in fact entirely insubstantial. It was this hollow verbosity which made 12 Rules for Life almost unreadable.

The same trait is glaringly evident in his public speaking. His podcast appearances and interviews are full of incoherent, meaningless word-barrages. Take this example of Peterson attempting to explain to a podcast audience how the mind relates to the world:

“You can think about this from a perspective of Piagetian constructivism. So imagine that what you confront fundamentally in the world is unknowable. And what is unknowable in the world has an intrinsic meaning. It’s both frightening and compelling simultaneously…so that which you do not understand, which is something that you can conceptualise as that which has not yet been made a habitable world, has an intrinsic meaning. Re-conceptualisation of the meaning – of the ambivalent meaning – of the unknowable. Now, I know that’s a hard concept…”

Such unintelligible gibberish is redolent of how most modern academics in the social sciences routinely write and speak. The problem is not that Peterson is part of the leftwing attack on Western culture, like most of his colleagues, but rather that he lacks the training and intellectual rigour required to successfully contest the dogmas of the Left outside of very narrow parameters. As the British author Peter Hitchens remarked in 2018, he is not a false prophet — just a “very minor” one.

3. Peterson as theologian

Thus, as Peterson strays deeper into complex territory that demands exceptional general and classical learning, such as theology and deeper cultural critique, his limitations are being exposed in sharper relief. His latest book, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (2024), applies the social scientist’s lens to the foundational stories of the Bible, focusing on their allegorical, mythological and psychological importance. Recognising the centrality of the Bible to Western civilisation, Peterson writes:

“The Bible 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.”

Peterson recognises that a reappraisal of Christianity in the modern era is essential if the spiritual heart of the West is to be recovered and the civilisation saved from decay. And yet he examines the entire religion — its central events and parables, and its core meaning — through the lens of the dissociated anthropologist. Moses and Noah, for instance, are explored only as admirable psychological archetypes, whose perseverance in the face of struggle set examples for a civilisation. For Peterson, these stories are not important because they are true, even in some faintly historical sense, but rather because they capture timeless truths of human nature. On the story of Cain and Abel, Peterson writes that it captures “a meta-truth — a frame within which the facts of the world are held to reveal themselves; a structure that defines all the truths [that we] are capable of seeing and of acting on.”

Such statements relegate the Bible to just another canonised work of literature. He may as well have explored Achilles and Agamemnon of Homer’s Iliad in this same fashion, for he gives no account of the Bible’s unique religious significance in the Western inheritance. He offers only the dry, secular framing of the modern anthropologist — far removed from the rich apologetics of the tradition received from Augustine or Aquinas, or even many scholars of the pre-war period.

Indeed, Peterson refuses to straightforwardly address the metaphysics of Christianity — the objective truth (or otherwise) of its central claims. Did Adam and Eve exist? Did the Resurrection happen? Is God real? Peterson does not nail his colours to the mast. He is of course under no obligation to state his private religious views; but this question surely becomes important when one is writing a 500-page book on the meaning of the Bible. Instead, Peterson heralds its moral and psychological importance as a mere work of literature. The story of Jonah and the whale, for instance, is described as “the deepest of all fairytales”. But fairytales are not true; and by casting the Bible as a collection of profound fairytales, the central text of our civilisation is relegated to ordinary story, sitting alongside Homer, Virgil and Grimm.

As one intelligent reviewer, Brad East, has noted: “The great danger, which I expect Peterson wants to avoid, is that his method threatens to make the Bible just one more (if the best) book of rules for life.” Yet this is the inevitable result of championing the Bible as a morally and socially foundational text without permitting it divine status. For it was the near-unanimous belief in the Bible’s unassailable truth that inspired and sustained our civilisation through two thousand years of tumultuous progress and strife. Christianity was the central motivating factor in Western history precisely because our ancestors believed in the Resurrection with their whole hearts.

As St Paul tells us, if Christ was not raised from the dead, then all faith and preaching in the Cross is in vain. Without the real God and the real Resurrection, the Bible becomes a mere anthropological and literary artefact. As East states, “an unrisen Christ is no Christ at all.”

Peterson is thus having his cake and eating it: an apparent unbeliever, or agnostic, ushering his readers towards the Bible as the civilisational keystone, whilst seemingly indifferent to the objective truth of its core claims. He wishes to defend the Bible, but only in a modulated manner that denudes Christianity of its social and personal power. What purpose can Christianity serve if not a religious one? It is this same fundamental problem which plagues much of Peterson’s commentary: he is a new-age pop-psychologist, of limited training and ability, trying to play the much more serious role of a theologian and philosopher.

And when it comes the style and clarity of the writing, Peterson is characteristically garrulous. Take this impenetrable sentence on the apparent meaning of God:

“The Great Father is the a priori structure of value, derived from the actions of the spirit that gave rise to such structure, and composed of the consequences of its creative and regenerative action.”

Such sentences seem almost designed to mystify and obfuscate. Moreover, these stylised theological definitions run entirely contrary to the traditional definitions of God that date back to Plato. Peterson attempts to cast himself as a defender of the Western intellectual inheritance, and yet his own discourse lies entirely outside of that inheritance. The book is not written in the footsteps of Augustine and Aquinas, but of the psychologist Carl Jung and other modern, untraditional academic figures. It therefore fails by default to provide a conservative defence of the Bible against its leftwing assailants.

Similarly, these same problems — of verbosity, and of a lack of rigour and conviction — unhinged Peterson’s recent YouTube performance in “Jordan Peterson vs 20 Atheists”. Originally called “One Christian vs 20 Atheists”, the video name was subsequently changed when it became abundantly clear that Peterson does not profess to be a Christian. So why, then, is he even debating these atheists in the first place, and from which philosophical basis is he putting forth any arguments on the subject?

The students take it in turns to debate Peterson for short periods, often exposing the webs of nonsense he attempts to spin. Take this example of Peterson, once again, evading the basic question of Christian metaphysics with one student:

Atheist: Do you believe in the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good notion of God.

Peterson: What do you mean by “believe”?

Atheist: That you think it to be true.

Peterson: That’s a circular definition.

The atheist then, correctly, notes that his definition of belief was a reasonable one and that his question was perfectly intelligible. Peterson continues, remarking: “If you believe something, you stake your life on it…You live for it and you die for it.” The conversation then disappears down a pointless rabbit-hole in which they discuss whether you need to be willing to die for something in order to believe it — which is blatant nonsense, for we all believe a myriad of things on which we would never stake our lives.

The problem, yet again, is that Peterson is not arguing against atheism from the position of the classical Christian apologist. Someone trained in the philosophy of Aristotle, Aquinas and other theists of the Western tradition would present the traditional arguments for God’s existence, would stand by the established definitions of God, and could present robust, clear objections to the atheist case. Because Peterson cannot do this, and does not even seem to know what he believes, he shapeshifts the conversation from one ethereal realm to another, questioning the meaning of ordinary words and refusing to address the substance of the arguments.

As each interlocutor steps in, it becomes clearer that Peterson simply does not know what he is talking about. Without true expertise in real philosophy or theology, Peterson is at sea, and therefore resorts time and again to the domains of bluster and pseudo-analysis with which he is comfortable. The result is that Peterson is, frankly, taken apart by sharp students less than half his age — not because he is necessarily wrong, but because he lacks the proper training and intellectual rigour for the task. He fundamentally has no business entering such debates in the first instance.

Dr Jordan Peterson is an archetype of the modern Academy and its new-age soft disciplines. It is this which explains his detachment from the classical Western tradition, and his constant retreats to meaningless abstractions and deconstructions. Like the Left, he masks insubstantial, trivial ideas behind clouds of jargon and verbiage. He is virtually as unconnected from the roots of the Western inheritance as his supposed opponents on the Left, and therefore fails to meaningfully advance the conservative cause in the public realm. For it is only through the clear and detailed championing of that inheritance, the tradition contained within classical book-learning, that Western culture can be recovered fully.

In the place of Peterson, we should be reading and listening to the very finest conservative educators of our era. The Stanford classicist Victor Davis Hanson, the British historian David Starkey, the American philosopher Edward Feser, the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule and the late British philosopher Roger Scruton are examples of intellectuals that have defended the Western academic traditions, and who present lucid, intelligent ideas in clear and straightforward language. And as for defences of Christianity, Peterson’s audience should instead look to C. S. Lewis’ slim and absorbing book Mere Christianity.

It is in the works of these writers, and, above all, in the old great books themselves, that the heart of our civilisation truly lies.

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