"Comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant ... half nonsense, half banality ... the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train."

An "idiot du jour" and a "professor of piffle."

Oh yes, and did I forget to mention - a fascist.

No, these are not descriptions of Donald Trump or even David Irving. They are actual quotations from intelligent and sophisticated people about Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, YouTube broadcaster, best-selling author (of Twelve Rules for Life) and Bible expositor - and no more introduction than that should be needed for readers of a website like this, or indeed anyone not living in a dungeon for the last year or so.

The extremity and dishonesty of the language used about Peterson by some people would make Joseph Goebbels blanch. Peterson provides intellectual cover for bigotry; he is a racist (this according to the former Chair of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission); he sympathizes with the alt-right; he promotes white nationalism (the Guardian); is a "transphobe" (Vice) who tends to "incite hatred wherever he goes" and is (according to the well-named online magazine, Jacobin) "full of shit." Anyone who has watched the videos of violent student protests against Peterson at North American universities can see for themselves just who is most appropriately characterized as a hateful bigot, and then savour the irony.

One can perhaps - up to a point - overlook or forgive the zealotry of the young. It is harder to do so in the case of university professors, journalists and literary intellectuals. Such as Pankaj Mishra, the Indian essayist and novelist who casually slurs Peterson by association in the New York Review of Books. To take one instance, he says (correctly) that Peterson is influenced by Carl Jung who (this is controversial) was "initially sympathetic" to the Nazis - and invites readers to draw the evident conclusion. No matter that Peterson's defining political attitudes are his classically liberal support of free speech, and his vehement opposition to authoritarianism and totalitarianism in all forms. We can, it seems, ignore all that. This has the same structure as the dubious syllogism: Heidegger was a Nazi; Professor X likes Heidegger; therefore Professor X ... - all without even the attempt to show that the ideas in Heidegger that Professor X likes have any connection to Nazism.

Peterson rejects the idea that unequal outcomes (more men than women in engineering, say) necessarily indicates unfair treatment (rather than, perhaps, different interests and choices). He thinks religions and myths contain archetypal truths that are still relevant to modern life. Put these two ideas together and we see that he must be a "fascist mystic," says Mishra.

Peterson pays close attention to relevant biological science, so he must be a biological determinist who believes nothing in society can change. He believes hierarchies of competence in some form or other are essential to society, so he must believe all hierarchies (of race or class, say) are eternal and good (he doesn't). This is the level on which Mishra's article operates.

*

Much of the bile directed at Peterson is, like that of Mishra, motivated by a kind of political monomania. More interesting is a species of hostility that is motivated by a certain conception of what sound intellectual life is. The pejoratives of these authors are more intellectual and academic than political: Peterson is a "YouTube crank" or "charlatan," a (money-grubbing) "televangelist," an "intellectual fraud" and an "obscurantist."

These critics are inhabited by a conception of intellectual life that exalts an impersonal ideal of objectivity and rationality modelled heavily on science. It is apt to be dismissive of anything that smacks of religion or mythology. It is uncomfortable with and suspicious of the humanities - of literature, for example - except as a diversion, or in so far as it has extractable propositional theses to be appraised by independent criteria. Its disenchanted and rationalistic worldview prides itself on the refusal to raise personal questions about human life of the sort we might call existential or even religious. (It does address "ethics" but in a sanitized form, stripped of the wider context of human life that ethics depends on.)

These questions are, of course, precisely those Peterson has made central to his life's work.

Take religion. Peterson reads the biblical stories firmly bracketing their historicity and their metaphysical implications. It is not that he is uninterested in these dimensions, but that they are not what he sees as being of supreme importance. He reads the Bible - along with fairy tales, Disney movies and many other stories - as what I would call (these are not his words) pictures of human life. (The phrase is inspired by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who often spoke about religious pictures of the world.) For instance, consider the biblical theme that human beings are made in the image of God, or as Genesis 1:27 is rendered in the King James Bible:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Reading this in a Petersonian spirit, we can connect it back to that chapter's first three verses:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, "Let there be light: and there was light."

Then we can plausibly see the outline of a picture of human life something like this: just as God creates - by speaking ("And God said, Let there be light ...") - order from chaos in the creation of the world, so too it is by the light of truthful speech (truthful since there is no falsity in God's speech) that human beings can bring order out of chaos in their lives. It is by truthfulness that we can make our lives, our societies, better: that we can mend broken marriages, families, friends, relations with colleagues, allies, enemies.

Truthfulness is much more than veracity. It is - inter alia - the willingness to face demons (fears, neuroses, distress, rancour) in our lives that we would rather hide from, to search for the truth, often hidden below the threshold of consciousness, of our emotions and motivations, to inspect our lives with a demanding (but merciful) scrutiny, and to live without what the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch called "consoling fantasy," ego-centred mirages about power or sex or love or career or intellect, which blind us to our lack of justice or compassion or genuineness, to our pride or cruelty or laziness or thoughtlessness.

If we speak and live that way - in that spirit of truthfulness (the word "spirit" need imply nothing "spooky") - then we live in a way that is in accord with (in a manner admittedly difficult to elucidate) the ordered world's emerge from primeval chaos. We line up on the side of order against chaos (though not too much order, for that is stifling and self-defeating), of civilization against barbarism. (Speech, rather than action is made central in the Genesis story, and that may seem odd. But it may be because language is uniquely human and integral to much of our action which depends on speech: think of the place of conversation in human companionship, or in human institutions, and indeed of the importance of stories.)

Now one can disagree with this reading, of course, and ask all sorts of questions about it - that is perfectly reasonable. But to simply dismiss it as fatuous nonsense is a signal failure to be serious that clearly comes from a depth lower than conscious thought (I almost wrote "than the conscious reasons offered," but then remembered that typically no reasons are offered, just abuse). It is hard to understand where this depth of irrational hostility is coming from.

To try and answer this, it might be helpful to begin with the corresponding question of what it is in his work that so deeply appeals to so many other people. Peterson connects themes like that above about Genesis with his longstanding work as a hands-on clinical psychologist. Working with people crushed by life, he encourages them - en-courages, a word he prefers to the cant term "empowers" - to "know thyself," and to (as he puts it) "pick up your cross" and bear it, assuming responsibility rather than retreating into grievance and malevolence. Only that can give life the sort of meaning that will make its inevitable pain and suffering endurable.

What Peterson offers, one might say, is nourishment for people's souls. He is speaking to deep human needs that are being ignored by the mainstream culture (both popular and academic) - even by the churches - and he is doing so frankly, fearlessly, intelligently, passionately and without doctrinal baggage.

I suspect that deep down the intellectuals are embarrassed by this. While they gripe at him, to their astonishment and frustration his video-audiences grow, his book sales rocket, the queues at his speaking events lengthen. He has exposed the estrangement of their theorization and their lives from the human issues about which one might have thought (of philosophers and psychologists especially) they would have something serious to say.

The intellectual culture recoils from the kind of conversation Peterson has in something like the way we recoil from talking too honestly about death or avoid someone who has just lost a loved one. It is the subject of an unacknowledged taboo, so potent it needs to be hidden away and approached at all only under a protective cloak of cold intellectual distance. The fear that we might be personally involved, that we might have actually to deal with the needs and emotions of others and ourselves, and that we need to call on human qualities beyond those of scholarship, factual knowledge and ratiocinative agility, goes deep. Or at least, such personal involvement - however much it may be present in one's person life - is not something to inform one's academic work. To let it do so is a kind of Victorian indelicacy.

(I should acknowledge that John Kaag, a philosopher whose article on Peterson I criticize below, is perhaps at least one of the partial exceptions to this generalization, judging by reviews of his book American Philosophy: A Love Story. This just makes it all the sadder that he could be so unjust to Peterson.)

*

In an incredibly hostile article on Peterson in Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson's chief complaint is that Peterson is "so consistently vague and vacillating that it's impossible to tell what he is 'actually saying'." He offers as proof, for example, Peterson's aphorism that There is no being without imperfection and mockingly comments "no shit." But it is only on a banal and literal-minded reading of Petersen's statement - as if it were some sort of quasi-scientific claim - that it can appear so platitudinous. We all know that, don't we? Or as Robinson puts it: "It's not actually insight, of course; it's stuff everybody already knows, dressed up in gobbledygook."

But this misses the point entirely. Has Robinson never noticed that some people don't know this? Of course they know "in their heads" that they are not as strong as an elephant or as smart as Einstein, but do they really know it "in their hearts" - in the way they live? We sometimes say, "Young people think they're immortal." We don't mean that they would fail a biology test. We mean, for example, that in their reckless disregard for their own and others' safety - the way they drive fast cars or get into a fight or engage in dangerous sports - some young men seem not to treat the prospect of their or others' death seriously, acting as if they were "bullet proof." Or less spectacularly, in the full bloom of youth and health, and living in prosperous societies, death is such a distant prospect that thought of it is airbrushed out of our lives (as Simone Weil remarked, we are mortal, but we would rather die than admit it).

Something similar is also true for limitations generally - how often do we fantasize about our brilliant careers? Again, in the head we may know an ambition is unrealistic, but how often is this clouded in our hearts by wounded pride? (That pride is easy to see in others of course. Donald Trump, say. But do I see it in myself?)

Recognizing our limitations is actually a very difficult thing. In the mortality case, it usually takes death to loom up close to us for us really and truthfully to live with the knowledge that we will die. Death in this context is not a mere biological event, but one charged with meaning - death is the end of all our hopes and dreams, the destroyer of Iris Murdoch's consoling fantasies, the thing that recalls us to humility and compassion, the common terminus of all lives that more than anything else binds us together in a common humanity. If poets from time immemorial keep reminding us of this, it is because it is the kind of knowledge we so habitually, automatically, push away (for example, by reducing it to a platitude that we all know).

The problem is not that Peterson is too vague, but that his world is too big and too rich to inhabit unless one is willing to think in this kind of intimately personal way.

Despite having read his books, Robinson makes no attempt at all to summarize or characterize Peterson's thought and come to terms with it. He relieves himself of that responsibility by dismissing it as quite literally incomprehensible drivel. Instead, he just takes quotations from Peterson's book Maps of Meaning out of their context in the book and in Peterson's thought as a whole, and holds them up to ridicule without any serious attempt at all to discuss them (after all, you can't discuss what is incomprehensible).

Readers familiar with Peterson can judge for themselves my estimation that the passages quoted, though sometimes difficult and expressed in dense prose, are nowhere near as bad as Robinson makes out. He also reproduces hand-written diagrams from Maps in order to deride them as "masterpieces of unprovable gibberish." One might as well reproduce, without explanation, an unfamiliar chart from a book of physics or chemistry to prove that these disciplines are quackery. With a bit of effort in reading through Maps, the diagrams are, for the most part, quite comprehensible. The real difficulty in them is the difficulty in the strange (to us) mythic ideas they express, and it is really these that Robinson seems unwilling to try and understand.

Sometimes Robinson has a point, but usually it is pedantic nit-picking based on the sort of literal-minded reading on exhibit in the case about imperfection discussed above. He has a gift for picking the fleas out of elephants.

For instance, he targets Peterson's (extempore) remark that the future is the place of all potential monsters and pronounces, "The future is the place for all potential everything." Well, yes - and one will think this takedown to be proof of what a sloppy thinker Peterson is if one is not told the context. People forget about the monsters lurking in their future. They are careless about their futures. People do this all the time. Peterson made the same point on another occasion with an example from The Simpsons where Homer downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. Marge says, "You know, you shouldn't really do that." And Homer responds, "That's a problem for future-Homer. I'm sure glad I'm not that guy!"

Peterson relates this to his theme that humanity had to slowly learn from hard experience the utility of deferring immediate gratification to make one's life go better in the long run, a truth that supposedly "primitive" peoples expressed in stories - and practices - of sacrifice. In mythic terms, we had to emerge from the Peter Pan existence of Eden, where God looked after everything for us so we need have no fears for the future, to the real world of history where sacrifice for the future is a condition of survival. Again, one can argue about the biblical interpretation and the anthropology, but to react at the philistine logic-chopping level Robinson does is just blind.

In the same vein Robinson mocks Peterson's understanding of human life as involving a perpetual balance or struggle between chaos and order, quoting this passage:

[Chaos is] what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines ... It's the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes ... the hidden anger of your mother ... Chaos is symbolically associated with the feminine ... Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That's the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position, and authority. That's the structure of society. It's the structure provided by biology, too ... It's the flag of the nation ... It's the greatness of tradition, the rows of desks in the school classroom, the trains that leave on time ... In the domain of order, things behave as God intended.

Robinson then comments: "It's very easy to hear the echoes of authoritarianism, even fascism, in this." All those references to hierarchy, authority, trains running on time! Here Robinson sinks to the same level as Mishra. It never occurs to him to allege that Peterson is an anarchist - all those references to chaos! Never mind either that Peterson has declared his detestation of fascism over and over, just as he has of communism, having made a lifetime's study of both. But like so many others these days, Robinson sets the bar for being a fascist very low. Real opponents of real fascism do not use the word so lightly.

Robinson would probably say this just shows how slippery Peterson is, that he never makes an honest claim one can prove or refute, remaining always vague enough to escape accountability. But Peterson is not trying to make a moral or political claim here. Nor is he attempting to quantify degrees of chaos or order as a social scientist might try to do. He is giving a very - very - general description of the structure of human life. He observes a salient distinction we can draw in just about any domain and offering it as a tool, or perhaps an observation point, from which we can view human life sub specie aeternitatis - in one of its most elemental dimensions.

All sorts of questions can be fairly raised about this - including whether it is too general to be helpful. (But then what kind of help are we looking for? In Macbeth or King Lear the kingdoms teeter on a precipice between order and chaos, and so do the souls of the characters - like yours and mine.) But the pressing will only be fruitful if it done in the right spirit and with some understanding of what Peterson is trying to do.

*

So, let's return to the question of why Peterson is subject to such extreme hostility. I have already suggested that the prevailing academic and intellectual class is embarrassed at how he has captured a popular audience by speaking about things people clearly have a deep need to speak about, and which conventional intellectual life avoids. I have already said something about the intellectual class's febrile dislike of thought conducted in an essentially personal key, the preference for abstract theory-construction to protect against it, and the neglect or denial of unconscious and pre-rational forces in intellectual life.

The American philosopher Jonathan Lear has identified one of the characteristic intellectual postures of our time as what he calls knowingness. Knowingness is a kind of presumption of one's own self-sufficiency and sense of imperturbability and accomplishment, a kind of confident swagger in one's way around the world. Oedipus exhibits knowingness, Lear says, when he regards the meaning of the Delphic oracle as "immediately available to his conscious understanding," treating it not as a mystery to be awed and humbled by, but as an instrument for his advantage, something he can readily understand and manipulate: he treats it as the source of a "hot tip from a very good source." It is his knowingness that brings him undone.

For intellectuals like Peterson's hostile critics, knowingness includes an impatient confidence that there is nothing in the world - especially not in history or tradition, or in art and (horror) myth and religion - that a mind with a razor sharp logical training, abetted by empirical science, cannot, in principle, comprehend and judge, or could with enough time, resources and so on. That it might judge us is an unknown thought. The knowing mind is impatient to subsume phenomena under familiar (and perhaps barely noticed) pre-conceived intellectual schedules. The condescension towards the past, to what is merely customary and traditional and not the product of a worked-out theory, and the reluctance to admit the influence of pre-conscious forces on intellectual life, help ensure those schedules are typically absorbed from the surrounding spirit of the time. (Intellectuals are not uniquely vulnerable to fads and fashions, but they far from immune either - and they are especially talented at rationalizing them.)

The knowing mind conducts intellectual life entirely at the conscious level. There is a set of explicitly worked out "positions" and theories, and arguments for and against them, which the thinker's conscious mind constructs, reworks and appraises. Every topic, even the most basic in human life, is made an object of speculative reason, sanitised of its real human importance to make it more manageable to the self-sufficient intellect. The knowing mind is impatient for "progress" and "results" - conceived as "solutions" to "problems" - and it wants these in clear, fully explicit and articulate form.

The knowing mind habitually demands a premature exactitude that strangles subtle and complex (and not merely complicated) ideas of the room they need to grow. It is petulant and quarrelsome in its style. It displays a carping, fault-finding, "gotcha" mentality that values cleverness above anything that might approach wisdom. It prefers new discoveries to the patient recovery, study and transmission of old ones.

Of course, I am describing an ideal type here, even a caricature, and one to which there are literally thousands of honourable exceptions. But the virtue of an accurate caricature is that it can reveal a salient tendency that, just by dint of its familiarity, may go unnoticed.

*

Some of Peterson's most thoughtful and sympathetic commentators have been Christians. Though wary of his distancing of metaphysical and historical claims, they appreciate the insightfulness of his biblical series and perhaps envy, in a good-natured way, his reach (which is such that he can almost be credited with single-handedly reviving biblical literacy). I especially recommend the British theologian Alastair Roberts reflections in an insightful article and video discussion.

Roberts is a particularly fine observer of Peterson's palpable integrity:

Listening to Peterson speak ... one of the most striking things to observe is how carefully he weighs his words, the way he manifests his core conviction words matter and that the truth matters. People hang on his words, because they know that he is committed to telling the truth and to speaking words by which a person can live and die. The existential arising of life and death are foregrounded when someone speaks in such a manner.

We live in a society that is cluttered with airy words, with glib evasions, with facile answers, with bullshitting, with self-serving lies, with obliging falsehoods, and with dishonest and careless construals of the world that merely serve to further our partisan agendas ('truth' really becoming something that allows us to 'destroy' or 'wipe the floor with' our opponents in the culture). In such a context, a man committed to and burdened with the weight of truth and who speaks accordingly will grab people's attention.

At Peterson's best - which, I'd say, is most of the time - Roberts's praise rings true. And more than that, I am inclined to say that even when he is (say) exaggerating there is usually still more truth than error - or more significant truth - in what Peterson is saying.

For example, in one video, in which he has said that we should always strive to be truthful, he is asked about the morality of lying and whether it is ever justified - when the Gestapo come knocking at your front door and you are hiding Jews in the attic. Peterson's reply is that things only get to that stage because too many people have been untruthful in their lives, not just in the narrow sense of telling lies but in the broader sense of not living truthfully - by, say, making compromises with the emerging Nazi movement, not speaking out when the worst consequence was to lose their reputation or their job (as Peterson points out, it is nearly always best to speak out against an evil from the first opportunity - the penalties only escalate as time passes and the evil grows).

Now, of course, he can be accused here of just evading the question: Would you or would you not tell a lie to save the Jews you are hiding? And if you answer "yes" does that not contradict your original assertion that we should always try to be truthful? Gotcha! But while it is true that Peterson does not answer the question in the terms in which it was asked, his response is not an evasion but a form of pointing to what is really at stake when we talk about truth. It is, in effect, pointing to a bigger evasion on the part of the questioner. It is a way of saying: "don't try to trap me with pedantry - here is what really matters." G K Chesterton once said that truth lies in proportion. He might equally have said it lies in significance. Peterson is concerned with ideas that matter and he really is concerned with them and their implications for people's lives. He does not trifle of flirt with them.

Of course, Peterson is sometimes guilty of exaggeration, over-simplification and carelessness. But even his mistakes have a weight of seriousness in them that contrasts with much academic and journalistic careerism and flippancy (and fanaticism). As Roberts puts it later in his piece, "Peterson is declaring these things as if they really mattered, as if in his speech he is actually reckoning with reality in all of its power, scariness, and danger."

*

Looking at the same man I do, the philosophers David Livingstone Smith and John Kaag, in an article in Foreign Policy, see something different: an authoritarian demagogue, whose attractiveness to people is a function of Weber's phenomenon of "charismatic authority," which gulls the vulnerable by pandering to prejudice and which offers oneself as a messianic saviour with simple solutions to complex problems. They compare him explicitly to Donald Trump. So is Peterson fostering a cult of personality? Let's look in more detail at the differences and at why some of the grounds offered for regarding him as authoritarian are specious.

First, Smith and Kaag describe the view of British psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle (based on study of Hitler in the1930s) that "charismatic authoritarian leaders first elicit depression and despair in their audience, then paranoid terror of a deadly enemy, before finally offering salvation though a redemptive order that abjures reasoned discourse." Just how, exactly, does Peterson attempt to "elicit depression and despair in [his] audience," let alone "paranoid terror of a deadly enemy"? Far from encouraging depression and despair Peterson's work is entirely aimed at encouragement, at helping people assume responsibility and live constructive and happier lives. Over and over again he warns against the collapse into life-resenting despair and its destructiveness.

Perhaps they think his warnings against the doctrinaire tendencies of the far left constitute the inculcation of "paranoid terror of a deadly enemy"? One can argue his concerns are exaggerated, but (to repeat) anyone who has watched the videos of student protestors attempting to shut down speakers on U.S. university campuses can hardly miss their transparently illiberal tendencies; we would be fools in the extreme to entrust any kind of power to such people. Smith and Kaag have not a syllable of criticism of that, which far more resembles inculcating "paranoid terror of a deadly enemy" (that is, Peterson) than anything Peterson himself says. To apply that description to him is just wild.

Far from "offering salvation though a redemptive order," Peterson's practical advice to people is plain, straightforward, even commonsensical often - it is the opposite of messianic. Far from the snake-oil salesman's offer of some magical nostrum to all ills, Peterson has a hard-headed realism about the difficulties of life and the ubiquity of danger, failure, back-sliding and suffering. The advice to take up one's cross is no easy bromide, and a "redemptive order" of any kind is precisely what he rejects, preferring instead self-help under cautious, prudent and moderate government.

And finally, as to abjuring "reasoned discourse," this is a bizarre way to describe a stalwart champion of free speech who repeatedly meets his critics face-to-face in open and honest debate, something I am not aware of Hitler ever doing.

Second, there is the very fact of truthful speech pointed to by Roberts and already discussed above. Trump is systematically mendacious. He treats words as tools to manipulate an audience regardless of truth. I am astonished that anyone could look at Peterson's videos and attribute that to him. One can, of course, think that he fails to understand things and is badly mistaken - but they are quite different matters.

Part of the problem here is that the prevailing individualist ethos of knowingness so elevates the value of autonomy and individual choice that we readily confuse being authoritative with being authoritarian. To quote Roberts again:

Our society has tended to shrink back from authoritative words, as such words threaten people's autonomy ('who am I to tell you what to do, man?'). Speaking authoritatively seems to shame, judge, and make claims upon people, all of which are anathema to contemporary individualistic society. However, carefully spoken words of authority can be life-giving. They can give direction and meaning to people who are lost, hope to those in despair, light to those in darkness, and clarity to those in doubt. People desperately need to hear wise and loving words of authority from people who know what they are talking about, rather than being left without authority or harangued by leaders without the depth of character to speak the words they utter.

This is profoundly true and the existence of demagogic and mercenary simulacra of such authority is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some people are knowledgeable on a topic because they have studied it and are deeply experienced in it. But they are genuinely authoritative about it in the relevant sense when that knowledge and experience informs the sort of serious and truthful speaking and living Roberts mentioned in the earlier quotation. Attention to truly authoritative speech and people actually builds others up to be more independent. It helps them obtain some authority of their own. (So does free speech - at least, when it is thoughtful and properly informed, which it will never get the chance to become if it is shut down.)

In the New Testament the word charisma designated various divine gifts to believers. One can argue that authority in the sense outlined was one of those gifts (Jesus was the model: "For he taught them as one having authority"). Weber's "charismatic authority" is a diabolical inversion of it. Taking God out of the picture for present purposes, and likewise any suggestion of infallibility, we can say that Jordan Peterson too is someone who has charisma in that genuine sense.

Third, the charge of right-wing authoritarianism is in direct conflict with the political value Peterson consistently and vocally announces and fights for: free speech. Peterson is a Millian liberal who has spent his life studying the totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century and much of his work is motivated by the fear that those events cannot safely be seen as behind us. If he fears that the threat comes at present more from the left than the right - and one can disagree with him about that - that is largely a function of his being an academic who has had to witness and endure the very real attempts by radical left students on North American campuses to silence speakers they disapprove of, including himself.

There is undoubtedly, and understandably, a personal element here. As he explains in answer to a question about this in one video, if he is more angry at the left it is because they are the ones who have come after him. This video of his talk at La Fayette University is one of the best for getting a sense of his overall political outlook, which is nothing if not centrist and moderate.

Fourth, the accusation of authoritarianism against Peterson is often levelled on the basis of what he says about social hierarchies. This concern is odd, since university professors are not noticeably chary of the prestige which comes with academic hierarchies - but let that pass. Peterson is not interested in hierarchies based on vanity and self-importance, or on political opinion. He does believe (plausibly) that hierarchies in some form are inevitable and that they are best based on competence and ability (which is one reason he opposes hiring based on other criteria like sex and race). Where these do not exist they get replaced by far crueller ones - in recent times, by one's based on political purity - and as he keeps warning, we have seen in the twentieth century where these go.

Hierarchies of competence tend to dissolve those based on other criteria like family and property, political view, religion, race and sex. Reasonable people can disagree, of course, with Peterson's opposition to preferential hiring, but it is not reasonable to demonize that view as racist, misogynistic and so on - that demonization is far more authoritarian than anything Peterson says.

Moreover, careful and fair-minded readers and viewers of Peterson will remember that he has repeatedly expressed his concern for those at the bottom of competence hierarchies, such as unskilled workers losing their jobs with the advance of automation. He has also acknowledged that the growing inequality of the economically advanced nations is a serious problem. To my knowledge, Peterson has never discussed economic policy questions in detail. While he is certainly no socialist it is far from clear that he would oppose the welfare state in all forms - for example, he has said, with reservations, that he prefers Canada's more socialised medical system to that of the United States.

More importantly, Peterson has not only expressed concern for the less well off, he has actually spent much of his life doing something tangible to help them (especially, in his practice as a clinical psychologist, those whose lives are demoralized and desperate). Smith and Kaag smear Peterson as an advocate of ruthless self-interest and Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest. But he is the creator (with others) of a remarkable online self-help course called the Self-Authoring Program that actually helps the lives of struggling students (and others). He claims that when it was rolled out for up to 7,000 students at the Rotterdam School of Management, the result was a significant improvement in grade point averages and a decrease in the dropout rate. It was especially beneficial for minority students who earned 44% more credits, and whose retention rate increased by 54%.

It is true that Peterson tends to favour self-help over government action (and again one can certainly disagree about that) and that he regards the default stance of aggrieved victimhood as catastrophically disastrous for the morale of the poor, women and minorities (though it can confer advantages on those in some better-off domains where it can be a rival to competence in the allocation of prestige and authority). And obviously, he is talking about 2018 not 1958. But this emphasis is partly a result of his background as a clinical psychologist where the professional focus is on helping people overcome the internal obstacles to improving their lives. The much-derided admonition to "clean up your room" is not a finger-waving moralism, but practical advice for wounded and sometimes broken people. Break your problems down into small and manageable bits so that they are not overwhelming. Then take your first step on the road to health by doing the simplest thing you can (then congratulate yourself) and build up gradually from there. Peterson's critics sneer at this as cracker-barrel folk wisdom, insipid hokum or whatever. The people it helps cannot afford to come from such an august height.

It is true also that Peterson advises people to put their own lives in order before setting the rest of the world to rights. His irritation with the genuinely authoritarian elements in the campus left does lead him to overstate the point - obviously, popular political protest is often of critical importance, as in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s or the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. But he does have a point about less grave circumstances and about government policy and public administration. In government, it is actually very difficult to make things better or even to prevent them from getting worse. And it is very easy, inadvertently, to make them worse (the law of unintended consequences always applies).

A steady hand on the till is not a very dramatic virtue, but it is one of the most important in government. The simplicities of protest (I do not use that phrase pejoratively) against patently unjust laws or tyrannical rulers are of little use by themselves in this context. Ideologues are particularly liable to oversimplify and to resort to force when their armchair plan won't work as expected. Some experience and maturity and moderation are needed for good government.

Fifth, Peterson is often reviled for the strong interest in his work taken by young men, including those who feel de-masculinized and disenfranchised by the influence of radical feminism. Peterson does indeed have sympathy for their concern and he strongly dislikes the more extreme claims made by radical feminists. But the substance of his position is not anti-women or inconsistent with a moderate liberal feminism. An example will make the point here. When he is asked about school shootings in the United States, he does not respond at the level of policy (about guns and so on) but at the deeper level of human motivation - about the sickness in the souls of the young men who do these things.

One thing he says (not the only one or the main one, but the one currently relevant) is that it is deeply untrue and unhelpful to say that the problem here is "toxic masculinity." In fact, the reverse is the truth: the problem with these young men is not that they are hyper-masculine, but that they are not masculine enough. They are wimps who are afraid even to speak to a girl, who cringe from social contact, submit to and hide from school-yard bullies, and so on. And their cruel deeds are not those of men, but of cowards. The ideals of masculinity in our history are a mixed bag of good and bad, like most things, and on the good side they include conceptions of courage, honour, self-reliance and chivalry. The stew of adolescent self-pity and resentment - as Peterson rightly says, a hatred of life itself - into which these killers withdrew until the force of it erupted could not be more removed from those ideals.

Young men (especially between puberty and their mid- to late-twenties) are inclined, much more than young women on average, to an aggressive physicality, and a need to prove their courage, grit and fortitude. These impulses are potentially very dangerous: untutored they lead quickly to delinquency and a life-style that ends in prison. Which is why wise societies have always had forms of initiating adolescent males into manhood, to channel these impulses in safe and constructive directions, so that their strength is used for kindness and justice and truth, and their capacity for aggression used only when it is justified.

That initiation is best done by men, not because women are incapable of tying knots, going camping or rafting, or playing physical sports, but because (since men are physically stronger and temperamentally more aggressive) the young man needs to prove himself against, and with, other men, and he is best tutored in that by someone who has gone through the same experience. This includes exemplifying what is needed - from the man's point of view - in the courtship of a woman, and in subsequent love and marriage. He needs exemplars of a gentleman, that is, a gentle man who is also a strong man, one who can bear the burdens of life (and the same goes for women).

This is not, as Smith and Kaag try to paint it, an advocacy of men dominating women. They seem to take movies like the Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon series - with their celebration of gratuitous cruelty if it is done by the good guys - as an accurate representation of what our society has understood as masculinity. They attribute a less overt version of this to Peterson and do everything they can to insinuate that he is a chauvinistic thug in an academic gown. They quote as damning evidence his assertions (in Twelve Rules) that healthy women want men not boys as life partners; that they want "someone to contend with; someone to grapple with"; and that, "If they're tough, they want someone tougher. If they're smart, they want someone smarter."

Fair enough that perhaps Peterson should have said "equally" tough or smarter in the last quotation, but otherwise the assertions are unexceptional truths. Ask any woman if she wants a Mummy's Boy as a life partner. Or ask yourself whether a wife having to mother a husband (or vice versa) makes for a healthy marriage. Most women and men know a certain hardiness is necessary just to pay the mortgage, feed the kids, and live as a minimally decent human being. Anything more than that requires modest heroism. By contrast timidity begets resentment which begets poisoned relationships and a poisoned world.

Saying these things is not the royal route to popularity. In particular, it is feared that this must imply some sort of deep hostility to forms of family other than the traditional one. But Peterson has gone out of his way to make it clear that he is not damning other arrangements such as single-parent families and same-sex couples. In fact, asked about this by a gay man he said: "more power to you. I hope you can do a good job of it. I think there is room in the world for a diverse range of approaches to complex life problems like having kids." What makes him unpopular with some is that he also says that single-parent and same-sex families face difficulties about providing male or female mentors, and they have responsibilities to provide for this in other ways (for example, in the case of boys, by bringing a man other than the biological father closely into a boy's life).

*

Jordan Peterson is not perfect. Sometimes, usually when he is angry and hurried, he falls below his own standards of truthfulness and generalizes recklessly about feminism, Marxism, postmodernism and the condition of the universities. Sometimes his passion can take on a hectoring tone. And as with any genuinely interesting and important thinker, there is much to discuss, disagree with, and criticize in his body of work as well as to learn from.

One of the most disappointing features of the current polarization surrounding him is that (to my knowledge) there is yet to emerge any genuinely constructive critique of his work, one that would enable us to get a better sense of both its strengths and weaknesses. But such a critique can only come from those with a largeness of mind and spirit that does not dismiss ideas not immediately tractable to the Zeitgeist, that is ready to find truth in what may at first seem confusing and elusive because it does not come readily packaged in a neat theory.

Such an evaluation is impeded by the culture of knowingness, and most of all by its more unscrupulous representatives, who have not been reluctant to vilify a good, courageous and - yes - inspiring man.

Andrew Gleeson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Flinders University, Adelaide. He is the author of A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil. He is grateful to Vlad Popescu for comments and discussions in the preparation of this article.