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And how did Peterson respond? Well, thank the stars, he didn’t flee into Egypt or, as being more proximate and fairly cheap with Air Miles, Vermont. He stood his well-reasoned ground, exhibited stores of that most fugitive of academic virtues — intellectual courage — and more or less told the pack of puerile leftlings chasing him with pitchforks and torches that their grandmothers wore severely unstylish army boots.

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The only thing I regret as missing from that period, an element which would have poeticized this fable of his emergence on the world stage as a superstar academic, is that he didn’t don a chasuble and nail copies of Maps of Meaning (12 Rules was yet to come) to the doors of the U of T Library.

I’ve adverted to this point before, but it is such a vat of sweet ironic syrup, it’s worth a repeat. If, in place of honourably debating him, his opponents hadn’t tried to howl him down, tag him as a bigot, and have him fired, he’d today most likely still be placidly wandering the grounds and groves south of Bloor Street, one among many of the unsung pedagogues of the University of Toronto. Honourable men and women, all, but not, as a rule, to be found lecturing in Madrid one day, Oxford the next, felling shallow leftist interviewers on the BBC (redundancy) the next, podcasting to hundreds of thousands, and racking up more twitter hits than everyone except, maybe, Taylor Swift and Meghan Markle.

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So here he is, just two years on, with 12 Rules for Life surpassing two million in sales, YouTube his (almost) private dominion, his ideas radiated through all the old and new media, and saluted and high-certified by one of the most independent minds in this age of mush-think, Camille Paglia, as “restoring a peak period in North American thought, when Canada was renowned for pioneering, speculative thinkers like media analyst Marshall McLuhan and myth critic Northrop Frye.”