Artikel im Wallstreet Journal über Jordan Peterson, den Mann, der einige gescheite Ansichten hat, aber zuweilen auch etwas anstrengend wirkt. Jedenfalls einer der interessantesten und provokantesten Intellektuellen auf dem Parkett – wobei es dazu möglicherweise heutzutage nicht allzuviel braucht.

A few rules from his latest book: “Do not do what you hate,” “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens,” “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.”

Those who despise Mr. Peterson think of him as a member of “the right” or even “the far right.” I wouldn’t describe him as a conservative—his interest lies in individual rather than societal order, and he says little about public policy. But it’s true that he not infrequently winds up holding conservative viewpoints on cultural matters. In “Beyond Order,” for example, he makes the case for marriage over cohabitation and readily acknowledges that children do better in two-parent families than in single-parent ones. He also writes and speaks frequently on the differences between masculinity and femininity. 

In the course of that controversy Mr. Peterson remarked that he would refuse to use contrived pronouns in his classes. “I regard these made-up pronouns, all of them, as neologisms of a radical PC authoritarianism,” he said in 2016. “I’m not going to be a mouthpiece for language I detest.” 

Part of what drives these young moralistic firebrands, he thinks, is the despairing outlook of the contemporary left. “Whenever you see that level of contempt manifest itself, that desire to flog and destroy, you have to ask yourself: How deep is that? The idea that we’re a cancer on the planet—well, what do you do with cancer? You eradicate it. I’ve heard environmentally sensitive types say that, and it’s horrifying. They’re completely blind to what they’re saying. If they weren’t blind to it, they’d be traumatized by it.”

“They leave this nihilistic nothingness in their wake, and what happens?” he says. “These kids turn to radical political correctness.” Messrs. Harris, Ridley, Fry, et al. aren’t happy about political correctness, Mr. Peterson notes, but “what did they expect to happen? Did they expect these kids would settle for their insipid rationalism?”

This search for a metaphysical teleology denied young people by “insipid rationalism,” in his view, is also “what motivates antifa and Black Lives Matter and white nationalism and all these other romantic revolutionary rebellions. It’s the romance and the heroism these movements offer.”

https://www.instapaper.com/read/1408645540