12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B Peterson, 368 pages

One of Jordan Peterson's first successful forays into the world of mass social media came when he began submitting answers to Quora, and produced a massively upvoted response to the question "What are the most valuable things everyone should know?"  As both a professor of psychology and a practicing clinical psychiatrist, it was a question he was well qualified to answer, but it was the combination of good humor and unflinching realism that distinguished his list of "rules for life."  12 Rules for Life is an expanded, revised version of that Quora answer.  In it, he provides advice on everything from job hunting to child-rearing, but it is the author's honesty about the world that makes it interesting.  For Peterson, the world is inevitably a place of trial and suffering, which can be minimized but never eliminated, and he insists that, while there are many things we cannot change, we are responsible for what we can.  This emphasis on personal responsibility is supplemented, in turn, by a strong awareness of man's social nature and the ways in which the present is conditioned by the past.

A part of Peterson's greater project involves reintroducing man and tradition after the long modernist estrangement.  Particularly, this means integrating what is valid in the wisdom of the ages with the discoveries of contemporary science.  Unfortunately, for Peterson this invariably means explaining the former in terms of the latter, and leads him to habitually misjudge elements of the tradition in crucial ways, as when he describes salvation history as "humanity's attempt, God willing, to set itself right."  And yet, his basic understanding of the primacy of truth over feelings - not that feelings are unimportant but that illusions only increase suffering - makes him a stronger advocate for that tradition than most of its ordained representatives.