Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Jordan Peterson is an unserious scholar whose own sources contradict the very claims he uses them to make.

"Last fall, in preparation for a paper I gave at a conference on Peterson and his influence, I read Maps of Meaning (1999), his 400-page magnum opus. In this volume, he lays out the philosophy he expounds upon in his newer book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos [...]

"While doing this research, I discovered an author who-despite his obvious passion for mythology and religion-does not study sacred texts in their historical contexts. In addition, he does not bother to investigate contemporary scholarship on any of the texts he cites. Instead, his understanding relies heavily on a handful of early- to mid-20th century authors like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell-three popularizers of myth who share, as religious scholar Robert Ellwood put it, 'intellectual roots in the antimodern pessimism and romanticism that helped give rise to European fascism.' This is not to say that these authors have no value: I read them voraciously when I was younger, and I can tell you what I still think is useful about each. But simply reading the books you find in the religion section of your local used bookstore does not make you a religious scholar, no matter how many YouTube videos you post.

"Peterson uses myths to suggest that his own personal worldview indicates a natural, evolutionarily determined process, and he does this by assuming that myths, too, are generally formed according to a similarly natural, evolutionarily determined process. But even ancient narratives have origin stories, and failing to understand a text in context is often a recipe for profoundly misunderstanding its significance."

-- Emily Pothast, "The Barely Hidden Flaws in Jordan Peterson's Scholarship", 2019-03-22 [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting from this or another version of the same essay earlier.]