It’s not a shock to discover that Quillette — the house organ of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web — has given Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order, his sequel to his bafflingly popular 12 Rules: An Antidote to Chaos, a rave review.
And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the review is as muddled and rambling as Peterson’s own prose. I just wish the 2400-word appreciation had been a little shorter. Life itself is short, and I’ve already wasted more that enough time contemplating the big blob of prickly nothingness that is Jordan Peterson.
So how much does Quillette’s reviewer — London journalist Hannah Gal — love Peterson? Enough to call his book “an astonishingly illuminating look at the human condition” that “could positively impact society as a whole.” In other words, it’s much better than CATS; she’s going to read it again and again.
All this despite the fact that Peterson’s alleged insights into the human condition have always been a mixture of “tough love” cliches and muddled pronouncements about the profound insights supposedly contained in certain Disney movies.Gal praises one of his insights as being wonderously “mind-boggling” but, judging from the extended exegesis of his arguments she provides in her rambling review-manifesto, every point iillustrated with a quote or three from the man himself, Peterson is at least as boggled as he is boggling.
As is Gal’s review, which bounces from topic to topic with a kind of manic energy that disguises her and Peterson’s fundamental incoherence.
As expected, Beyond Order draws on literature, poetry, mythology, classic fairy tales, Nietzsche, Freud, and the New and Old Testaments—the 10 commandments are listed in full. There are moving references to Peterson’s family members, including his wife, his father-in-law, and his little granddaughter.
None of whom, I should mention, are ever mentioned again in the piece.
Another sample:
His many eclectic references and eccentric observations awaken the mind, inviting the reader on a path of contemplation and discovery, at the end of which awaits deeper understanding of the human condition. Elsewhere in the book, he explains why Thomas the Tank Engine has a face and a smile … .
She never bothers to explain what exactly Peterson’s point is with regard to Tank Engine Thomas, so I can only imagine that the reason he has a smiling face is that TRAINS ARE ALIVE and probably biding their time until they rise up and overturn human civilization.
Though the title of Peterson’s book is “Beyond Order,” and though there is very little order in Gal’s review, the main lesson she draws from her reading of Peterson is that rules are good.
His conclusions point to an urgent need for individuals and society to adopt traditional values—constructive discipline, responsibility, competence, hard work, apprenticeship, competition, acceptance of hierarchy, and respect for the past and basic order.
Then why, again, is the book called Beyond Order?
I guess I’ll never know, because based on her review I have less than zero inclination to actually read the book.
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TWELVE MORE RULES
https://youtu.be/uWXxlYzBCno
TWELVE MORE RULES
Do they also give him credit for founding Hydra and battling Captain America?
@Cat, so JBP wants his granddaughter to live in a world where she has no choice except to be a subservient little house wife. What a stand up guy /s
These two sentences cannot possibly go together.
“Order” means the lesser being doing what they are told by their superiors.
@Bookworm in hijab:
Hey JP, I think all of us went through a phase in high school where we stayed up late to ramble with our friends about our Vast Unifying Oh-So-Awesome Philosophies Of Life. I’m sure we all thought, at the wise ages of, say, 14 to 17, that we were absolute geniuses .
That’s about the same age at which a lot of us thought of ourselves as temporarily embarrassed witches, mutants, or anime action heroes; in fact, there’s a Japanese word for the phenomenon: chūnibyō.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Chuunibyou
How long do you guys think it will before the Peterson fanboys descend on this page to tell us about how great of man he is and dodge the question when we bring up his comments on “enforced monogamy”
Also ot
I wish I could show you guys the view I got up to this morning. My husband and I rented this cabin by one of the lakes as an impromptu to mini vacation for us. The sun made the water sparkle and there were all these ducks and swans on the water. We’re away from the city and other people and it’s just so beautiful.
Eh, I’ll read it when I get chance. Doubt it’s terribly original or interesting, last one weren’t, but even Captain Obvious here gets a chance when I’m bored.
Jordan Peterson walks into a crowded fast food restaurant where someone else is waiting for their takeaway vegan burger.
Cashier: “Who’s got the Beyond order?”
Peterson: “That’s mine! Also, I’d like a beef patty without any context.”
@Lumipuna:
Thanks, now I’m remembering one of my favourite lines from The Phantom Tollbooth, where the Everpresent Wordsnatcher (a nuisance with a habit of taking one thing you said and making extreme remarks based on it) says that he’s from a little town called Context, but that it’s such a boring place he spends almost all of his time out of it.
@Snowberry: probably both — they go together in RWNJ “thought”.
@Elaine: It sounds beautiful!
@Kat: “Hello hyoo-mons. I am one of you, and not a bunch of lobsters in a hyoo-mon suit. See my reassuring hyoo-mon mouth rictus?”
@Alan: Perfect. And I extracted myself from TV Tropes in less than an hour.
Because Nietzsche wrote something called Beyond Good and Evil and Peterson thinks that making a vague reference will make him sound smart?
I dunno.
Let’s not sully the good name of “The Amazing Alexander” by associating him with Peterson.
@ bookworm in hijab
Just got an email about this. It’s up for auction. I can’t afford it. But I thought of you when I saw it.
(It’s called “Universal Personhood“; by Shepard Fairey)
Alan, cool, thanks! I know Shepard Fairey’s work only from the series of protest posters he did. This one is lovely too.
Image downloaded and saved (take that, expensive auction!)
@ bookworm in hijab
Too right! And anyway, this is meant to be an auction about subversive art; so what could be more on point than just blagging it?
I do like his stuff though. I can’t have figurative art at home. Representations of people freak me out. But I do like some of his spoof record covers. Wouldn’t pay those prices though; even if I had the cash; which I don’t.
@Alan,
LOL. I mean…I do believe very strongly in the importance of paying artists for their work (since there seems to be this attitude out there of “but you love making art! If you reeeeeaallly loved it, you’d do it for freeeee!”)…but on my salary a phone-download is probably the best I can do.
You’re a lawyer, is that right? Did I violate copyright laws?! Uh oh.
That’s really interesting. Are you comfortable with talking about that? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
Honestly? That seems to have eased off. There was a time when it was like the Goddam batsignal for arseholes but I think the benzo/coma gap peeled away all but the hardcore.
Also, I was reading a terrific new biography of one of Jorpy’s bête noires, Jaques Derrida. Guess which one of them was actually arrested and briefly imprisoned by communists on trumped up drug charges for attempting to do philosophy lectures in Czechoslovakia on behalf of charter 77? Not the Canadian bloviatior.
@ bookworm in hijab
Now that is an interesting issue. There’s a general consensus in the art world that, when an artist consigns work (that is to say, puts it in a gallery or auction for sale), then any reproduction of the art for the purposes of advertising constitutes ‘fair use’. That’s one of those ‘standard industry practice’ things. Also, some contracts have that as clause; the artist grants a licence for that purpose. Well, when people bother with written contracts. Which is itself an issue. The art world is notorious for not doing. Still, keeps the lawyers employed when everyone falls out. But as I just reproduced it here to say it was up for sale I’m covered!
Even if you breach copyright though there’s the question of damages. Copyright holders can only sue for actual losses. You having a copy is unlikely to give rise to damages. It’s not like everyone is going to say “I don’t need to buy it now. I’ll just pop round Bookworm’s house and see it there.”
If you were to use it for any other purpose there can sometimes be nominal damages. The courts base that on what a reasonable license fee would be. That does crop up when people put stuff on websites. Getty Images are notorious for going after people.
Oh yeah. It’s not a difficult subject or anything. It’s just I can’t have anything ‘living’ on display at home. It really feels like there’s someone present. I guess thats the animist in me. Weirdly it doesn’t have to be a ‘naturalistic’ image. Even something fairly abstract has that effect if it evokes a living thing.
Of course, as you’ll know better than I, Islamic art has that prohibition (Well, sometimes. There is a long history of representational art in Islam). But that might be one of the reasons I like it. That and I just love abstract art anyway. I could ramble for ages about the universality of some abstract concepts. Maybe it’s that Jungian collective consciousness thing; or just neuro-psychology; but you see the same sorts of patterns in so many disparate cultures. From the earliest times we made art to the present day.
@Alan Robertshaw
That reminds me a little of this tweet from a few years ago.
@ Tovius
Brilliant! But scarily on point,
I also like the one below. Where she just wore the chromakey suit!
Alan, thanks, that was an interesting read! I always enjoy hearing other people’s perspectives on this. I’m torn, a bit, on the subject of copyright: on the one hand, of course artists should be paid for their work; on the other hand, I’ve heard of cases where artists are sued over copyright infringement if they use, say, corporate-owned images in the creation of protest art (something about a muralist who used a Coors beer image to make an anti-war point, don’t remember the details though). Where does riffing off of someone else’s ideas turn into ripping off someone else’s ideas? Like people who want to make money off their fanfics. And I know of many underfunded teachers who photocopy huge swathes of books so that all their kids have access, even though they’re not supposed to. But then those writers aren’t getting the revenues from the book sales.
Tl;dr: I feel like the legal, ethical, creative issues all tangle into one big (fascinating) knot.
Copyright doesn’t exist to ensure artists get paid. Artists, with a tiny set of superstar exceptions, typically get paid very little, and the superstar exceptions have no shortage of ways to monetize their fame, with appearance/speaking fees being one obvious non-copyright-dependent example.
Copyright exists to ensure the profits of large publishers, record labels, studios, and etc., and the huge passive incomes of their CEOs and boards of directors. It’s one more cog in the machinery of capitalist exploitation. One of the more obvious ones, since it explicitly creates a legal right to extract monopoly rents!
My understanding of copyright is that it doesn’t work like that in the US. In the US, if an artist registers the copyright, they can claim statutory damages and not just actual damages. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s always been what I’d heard and why I freaked out when my organization decided to nick some images from the internets and use them on our website without license.