by Ben Kolb, Binghamton University

“Jordan Peterson doesn’t understand Marxism!” shouts the Marxist. “Jordan Peterson hasn’t read Foucault!” exclaims the postmodernist. While these points may be true, the argument of this essay is that they miss the point. What is most fundamental to Peterson’s critique of the left is his positive project rather than his attempts at debunking. Leftist thought is merely the negation of this positive project. This is not a phenomenon unique to Peterson and has a long history in political rhetoric. First, I want to describe Peterson’s positive project and contrast it to contemporary findings in the humanities and social sciences, but in particular anthropology. Second, I want to locate that positive project in a tradition of right-wing (anti-)social science going back to the 19th century.

Whether it is philanthropists, sentimentalists, equalitarians, or postmodern neo-Marxists, the enemy remains the same: Anyone who critiques contemporary social hierarchies.



Peterson’s political enterprise is ultimately grounded in what I will refer to as an “anti-social science”—that is, an edifice of counter-knowledge that uses selective and one-sided readings of empirical findings to deny complexity and discount the possibility of alternate forms of social organization. This is not unique to Peterson or even one strand of political philosophy in particular, so it is necessary to characterize what Peterson’s version of it actually is. To sum up, human behavior is dictated by an evolutionary process which has endowed us with a stock of innate psychological archetypes, mechanisms, and binaries, especially that of order and chaos. Deviance from these inborn traits will eventually lead to the corruption of the soul and the downfall of society.

The concept of the “dominance hierarchy” is central to Peterson’s thinking. This is not simply a political or social phenomenon for Peterson, though, but one fundamental to perceiving and acting in the world. Peterson draws on the ecological psychology of James J. Gibson (1979) to make this argument. According to Gibson, humans perceive the world not as being made up of static, neutral objects but “affordances.” Affordances are possibilities provided by objects in the environment. For example, when I look at the handle of a coffee mug, I don’t see merely a semi-circular piece of ceramic, but something that allows me to grip the mug. As a consequence, all of our observations are value-laden.

Peterson takes this to be the basis of all hierarchies. If observations are value-laden, the importance of certain observations can be ranked hierarchically. Similarly, the possible actions we can take in response to the environment to reach our goals can and need to be ranked hierarchically. Furthermore, this is a fundamental biological adaptation. Organisms must value what is adaptive to stay alive. With the emergence of more behaviorally complex organisms such as primates and eventually humans, goals and the knowledge necessary to achieve them become scaled up to a social level. Societies, like individuals, attempt to self-perpetuate and develop their own hierarchies of value to adapt to their environments. Thus, biological and cultural evolution have created a set of formal natural laws that can be formulated in terms of concepts such as Jungian archetypes and the Pareto principle. Societies pass on this distilled wisdom through religion, mythology, literature, film, etc.

While one might understandably discount this as an extended naturalistic fallacy (it is), it is fair to keep in mind the saying attributed to Immanuel Kant that, “ought implies can.” If it is indeed impossible for humans to live out of tune with the eternal archetypes, Peterson must be on to something. The question then is, “Is he?” The answer is simply, “no.” While many of his ideas superficially resemble some standard social (and natural) science concepts in many places, the overall ingredients of his arguments are a mishmash of factoids mined from psychometrics, Jungian psychoanalysis, evolutionary theory, and comparative mythology forced through a politically conservative meat-grinder.

Because so much of Peterson’s grand narrative is evolutionary in nature, it is appropriate to start with evolutionary theory and its application to humans. According to Peterson (2018, 14), “All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence – and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years.” This betrays a profound misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. According to Darwinian evolution, what actually matters is survival and reproduction. If a species or trait has existed for a long time, all this means is that it hasn’t yet been wiped out by selective pressures or chance events, not that it is somehow more “adapted.” Rather, Peterson’s version of evolution is essentially conservative philosophy (what has existed longer must be superior) translated into pseudo-biological jargon. This brings us to the infamous lobster. Peterson’s lobster analogy, besides botching the fact that lobsters lack brains, is just that: an analogy. In evolutionary theory, an analogy refers to a trait that appears similar to another but shares different ancestry, while homology is similarity due to shared ancestry. A classic example of an analogy is bird and insect wings, which serve the same function, but have different evolutionary lineages. The lobster may be the ultimate specious analogy, as Peterson never demonstrates any homology with humans.

Moving closer to the present, Peterson does make some attempt at describing homologies with his remarks on primatology. A common tactic in politically-oriented pop science is to cite chimpanzees to back up right-wing politics and bonobos to back up left-wing politics as both species are equidistant from modern humans in evolutionary terms. Peterson naturally does the former, ironically citing none other than Frans de Waal’s (2007 [1982]) work on chimps. While Peterson mentions that violence is not the only tactic used to reinforce the chimp dominance hierarchy, no mention of de Waal’s or other work on bonobos is mentioned in either of Peterson’s (1999; 2018) magna opera. Nor is it mentioned the de Waal’s conclusions are radically different from Peterson’s. Omitting the less violent and less rigidly hierarchical bonobos from his work allows Peterson to engage in what de Waal (2003) himself refers to as “veneer theory.” Veneer theory is a repetition of the idea of the Hobbesian war of all against all, in which human morality is a thin “veneer” on top of a fundamentally selfish, violent, and rotten core. As Donna Haraway (1984) would say, this is truly “primatology as politics by other means.”