Emma Castellino – Review

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
by Jordan B. Peterson
(Random House, $39.95,
432 pages)

In the book of Numbers, the Israelites are complaining in the desert, so God sends snakes to bite them. Moses directs them to tie a bronze snake to a post in the middle of their camp. If you are bitten and look at it, he says, you will not die. 

I heard this at Mass in the summer of 2016, already hundreds of hours into Jordan Peterson’s YouTube courses. Like many others, I began listening to his psychological lectures in the wake of his initial controversy with Bill C-16. A musician by training, I was working at a bike shop and found myself as a consequence of listening to Peterson, becoming less passive, more organized, and more attentive. That Sunday, I was delighted to find myself in a position to put Peterson’s allegorical observations to good use. It turns out that we are full of snakes, but if we confront them, then we are less likely to be bitten by them. Here it was in the Bible, and also in my life.

I am incredibly grateful personally and practically to Jordan Peterson, not least because I learned that snakes and adventure – and stories – are real. The significance of his work struck me again with this new book as I found myself thinking throughout, “Ok, ok, of course”. It seems to me that the more profound archetypal importance a message possesses, the more likely it is to be taken for granted with naive haste. Not that long ago these things were not obvious to me.

In Beyond Order, Peterson outlines “12 More Rules” for life, using examples from his clinical psychological practice, cosmogonic myths, and recent history to illustrate the bearing of these rules on our daily lives. Chapters such as “Do not do what you hate” address burdensome predicaments in which we frequently find ourselves. Peterson then walks us through the personal-practical-teleological treasure of meaning and responsibility that is to be unearthed therein. What is good for me should also be good for the community, which should be good for the whole order of things — and vice versa. Good stories convey these things across time. 

Several weeks ago, I purchased the collected works of Hans Christian Andersen with the intention of reading them to my one-year-old. I loved them as a child, and had retained a vague self-satisfaction about how the original works were better than Disneyfied modern versions. I started with “The Tinderbox.”

“The Tinderbox”, in its unexpurgated form, is the tale of a soldier who is given huge amounts of money by an old witch whom he proceeds to kill because she will not tell him what her tinderbox is for. He goes on to live lavishly and gains many friends. Eventually he runs out of money, but discovers that there are dogs living in the tinderbox who will grant any of his wishes. Wealthy again but unsatisfied, he wishes for the cloistered princess in order to gaze upon her at night. He is eventually caught by the King and Queen and sentenced to be hanged, but he is able to get to the tinderbox. The dogs kill the King and Queen, and he marries the princess. He becomes King. And that is the end of the story.

I was totally bewildered by this story. There is no moral, and no justice. I thought, perhaps fairy tales are not so instructive after all. Perhaps I will just skip this one, when the time comes. But I did not want to hide unwanted things in the fog (another chapter in Beyond Order), and so while the baby napped I tried to think about the story in a better way.

Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of the amoral world, Peterson tells us, was to create our own values – or succumb to nihilism. Is it possible to create one’s own values? Simply to enact a minimum moral obligation is an extremely delicate and complex endeavour, involving one’s future self as well as the existence of other people. Over several chapters, Peterson takes us through what it means to aim for the highest possible goal, to work intensely at just one thing, to notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated; in other words, how to pay attention to the unique and volatile circumstances available only to you. The circumstances in which one discovers what is valuable are not by any means necessarily chosen. We do choose, however, how to respond. Cain and Abel both make a sacrifice to God, and God does not accept Cain’s sacrifice. Instead of adjusting his ideas (“Abandon ideology”) about what constitutes an acceptable gift, Cain decides that he will make reality conform to his values, and he becomes resentful and murderous. It is plain that “I’ll do whatever I want” — the self-made man — will not work at any level of analysis but the sociopathic. 

“The Tinderbox” runs all the way across town with the Nietzschean maxim of the Uber-mensch: the only way to really do whatever I want is only if I can actually do whatever I want, in a magical world where I have a box of magic dogs and where nothing, absolutely nothing, is out of my control. Even so it is de facto murderous. In the real world, I cannot make one hair on my head grow.

Peterson helps us, in his lectures and in his books, to think properly (even if we do it badly), and to go deeper than mere opinion or reaction. Since the publication of Beyond Order, I have been struck by several of his podcast interviews because Peterson himself does not stop at the material in his books. He does not stop at mythology, and he does not stop at archetypal Jungian psychology. His intense desire to enter into the heart of things was a stumbling point even for a religious interviewee. Peterson was given hypothetical answers, as if a grown, professional man couldn’t possibly be desperate to know about salvation. For me this is the real credibility of Peterson’s influence — if he has helped us to get our lives together, it is because he himself is continually stumbling beyond order.

Emma Castellino, a regular contributor to The Interim, lives in Hamilton.