Pilloried for Speaking Sense
Just imagine that somebody told you that men and women are biologically different, that people ought to take responsibility for their own lives, and modern life often seems hollow and meaningless.
Imagine that this person went on to say that young men often lack a sense of initiative, too many university courses have fallen victim to trendy dogmas, and free speech sometimes means telling people what they don’t want to hear.
Would you shudder in horror? Would you rush onto social media to condemn him as a dangerous lunatic? Or would you, perhaps, nod in agreement at what seemed like plain common-sense?
Only a few years ago, sentiments like these would have seemed utterly uncontroversial. But it is, I think, a damning reflection of the hysterical self-righteousness and blind intolerance of our times that the man making these arguments, the academic Jordan Peterson, is now one of the most controversial figures in the English-speaking world.
A clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto, Peterson is the academic equivalent of a rock star. Millions of people have watched his YouTube lectures about everything from the importance of free speech to the deeper meaning of the Book Of Genesis.
On Twitter, he has more than 365,000 followers. And in the U.S. and his native Canada, his book 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos, a blend of philosophy, psychology and self-help, is a No 1 Amazon best-seller.
Yet in Britain, Peterson is something of an unknown to the wider public — or, at least, he was. Then, last month when visiting London to promote his book, he was interviewed on Channel 4 News by Cathy Newman.
Their acrimonious half-hour exchange, which ignited a firestorm of accusations and abuse, has already been watched almost 5.5 million times online.
Even now people are still arguing about it. Newman’s producer claims he had to call in security consultants after vile threats from her online critics.
I’ll come back to the interview later, because it is worth emphasising that Peterson did not arrive in the television studio without considerable baggage.
Until two years ago, the 55-year-old Canadian was simply a saturnine, clever and intense man who taught psychology in Toronto. But then, in the autumn of 2016, Peterson released a video announcing his opposition to an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, designed to protect people’s human right to ‘gender expression and identity’.
Peterson was having none of it. He was horrified, he said, that the Bill would turn him into a criminal if he refused to call a transgender student by whatever pronoun they wanted.
Bizarre as it may sound, transgender activists in many North American universities insist that their tutors use the invented words ‘zhe’ and ‘zher’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ and ‘his’ or ‘her’. (I promise I am not making this up.)
Almost uniquely among his academic peers, Peterson had the backbone to say no.
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