f you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say, there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of” or “many moral values are similar across human societies.” Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language drawn from many different academic disciplines, so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work. Construct elaborate theories with many parts. Draw diagrams. Use italics liberally to indicate that you are using words in a highly specific and idiosyncratic sense. Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. (It does help if you are male and Caucasian.)

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.

But we do not live in a reasonable world. In fact, Peterson’s reach is astounding. His 12 Rules for Life is the #1 most-read book on Amazon, where it has a perfect 5-star rating. One person said that when he came across a physical copy of Peterson’s first book, “I wanted to hold it in my hands and contemplate its significance for a few minutes, as if it was one of Shakespeare’s pens or a Gutenberg Bible.” The world’s leading newspapers have declared him one of the most important living thinkers. The Times says his “message is overwhelmingly vital,” and a Guardian columnist grudgingly admits that Peterson “deserves to be taken seriously.” David Brooks thinks Peterson might be “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.” He has been called “the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today” a man whose work “should make him famous for the ages.” Malcolm Gladwell calls him “a wonderful psychologist.” And it’s not just members of the popular press that have conceded Peterson’s importance: the chair of the Harvard psychology department praised his magnum opus Maps of Meaning as “brilliant” and “beautiful.” Zachary Slayback of the Foundation for Economic Education wonders how any serious person could possibly write off Peterson, saying that “even the most anti-Peterson intellectual should be able to admit that his project is a net-good.” We are therefore presented with a puzzle: if Jordan Peterson has nothing to say, how has he attracted this much recognition? If it’s so “obvious” that he can be written off as a charlatan, why do so many people respect his intellect?

Before we address the mystery of Peterson’s popularity, we need to examine his work. After all, if the work is actually “brilliant” and insightful, there is no mystery: he is recognized as a profound thinker because he is a profound thinker. And many critics of Peterson have been deeply unfair to his work, mocking it without reading it, or slinging pejoratives at him (e.g. “the stupid man’s smart person” or “a Messiah-cum-Surrogate-Dad for Gormless Dimwits.”) This has irritated Peterson’s fans, and when articles critical of him are printed, the comments sections are full of people (usually correctly) accusing the writer of failing to take Peterson seriously. An infamous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, in which Newman repeatedly put words in Peterson’s mouth (“so you’re saying X”), confirmed the impression that progressives are trying to smear Peterson by accusing him of holding beliefs that he does not hold. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic said Peterson is the victim of “hyperbolic misrepresentation” and encouraged people to examine what he is “actually saying.”

But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

Spinozasgalt wrote:There's been a little more critical commentary come out recently though. If you want a take on Peterson's "marxism" charge against postmodernism and the conspiracy vibe he's got going about universities, there's this from Shuja Haider.

I disagree with Haider on other stuff, but I like that he tackles that "identity politics as cultural marxism" nonsense here. Makes it interesting even if you don't care about Peterson.