Jordan Peterson interview: ‘We are weak in the West compared to the Islamic fundamentalists’

With his new book, the Canadian academic turns to the Old Testament to explain the necessity of faith to a fallen generation

What has fame done to Jordan Peterson? Eight years ago he was a clinical and research psychologist at Toronto University, highly cited but publicly little known. Today he is a conservative mega-star, a YouTuber with 8.3 million subscribers and two best-selling books, (including his 2018 book 12 Rules for Life) that push self-improvement, of the “make your bed” and “stand up straight” variety.
He promotes a rugged and self-confident masculinity. Many young men love him. A fellow in my gym couldn’t name the chancellor, but he knows who Jordan Peterson is.
You can, for example, watch a video of him psychoanalysing Donald Trump – in a leather chair, by a fireplace – breathlessly praising his “assertiveness” and “unpredictability”, his willingness to work with “surprising and stellar” people such as JD Vance or Robert Kennedy Jr. “I would vote for Trump just because Elon Musk has agreed to play a role in any administration.” And Peterson has interviewed Musk (7.1 million views on X), getting him to open up about his rift with his transgender daughter.
Today he’s on tour in the States promoting a brilliant new book, We Who Wrestle with God, which re-reads the Old Testament to explain the necessity of faith to a fallen generation. I speak to him remotely from his office in Washington DC and he appears on my screen like a prophet: bristly hair, ayatollah eyes, a jacket emblazoned with holy icons.
I tell him I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Jonah, the prophet who was told by God to evangelise in Nineveh, sailed in the opposite direction, and got eaten by a whale. Chastened, he returned to his task. It reminds me of me, because I have to fly at times and find it terrifying. It reminds me of him because Peterson has paid a high price for articulating what he regards as irrefutable facts about biology and gender. Peterson has been labelled sexist and transphobic; “custodian of the patriarchy” according to the New York Times, “academic persona non grata,” in his own words. He was disinvited from a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University and felt compelled to resign from Toronto. So, is he a latter-day Jonah, full of foreboding?
“Oh definitely… People have complimented me repeatedly on my bravery, which makes me very uncomfortable because it’s not true. Not really. Or maybe the notion of bravery has to be reconfigured.” We all have to figure out what the truth is and see where it leads, and that journey is “the adventure of your life”. In the Bible, Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, is introduced to us as “pampered, privileged… He’s in the socialist paradise. Abraham doesn’t have to lift a finger to satisfy his needs.”
But God calls him to leave his country for a new land where he will form a nation. “God is conceptualised, characterised in the Abraham story as the voice of adventure. And this is such a fascinating thesis because what it is implying is that the impulse in all of us that pushes us out beyond our zone of comfort into the world is equivalent to the voice of the divine.”
Risk creates tension and opportunity. “My family has learnt this so deeply now that whenever we get into trouble, we think, ‘oh there’s definitely some opportunity lurking around here somewhere’. It’s just a matter of finding it, because it’s happened so many times.”
Shortly before we spoke, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada said the Kremlin had bankrolled Peterson to spread anti-vax politics (Peterson tweeted: “Hey Russians! Where the hell is my money?!”) Weeks before that, he had prayed the Our Father with Russell Brand, the comedian turned lifestyle guru, at a populist rally in Washington DC.
“Russell’s actually a creative genius,” he tells me. “He’s the most articulate person on the creative side I’ve ever met” akin to “Friedrich Nietzsche”, the 19th century German philosopher who proclaimed the death of God, he jumps “from mountaintop to mountaintop, and he’ll jump to 10 at the same time.” Brand claims to have found Jesus. Sceptics note that this coincided with accusations of sexual assault. On whether or not the conversion is fake, Peterson says he is “willing to give people the benefit of the doubt”, adding that Brand makes “a good prodigal son”.
Given that he’s been advertising a talisman that protects the wearer from harmful wifi, cynics might ask how such a gifted analyst of human behaviour could be so naive? Others, that it’s another example of Peterson providing intellectual cover to dubious ideas.
I encounter an eminent psychologist who speaks in rich metaphor; quick to laugh and to cry, yet playing the all-important “does God exist?” card close to his chest. He is vulnerable. I tell him that I’ve long admired his work but worry that public life – all its ugliness and conflict – isn’t good for him, for anyone. His wife, Tammy, has had a traumatic brush with a rare form of kidney cancer. Peterson, who long suffered from depression, went downhill after his wife’s diagnosis – at a time when he was experimenting with an all-meat diet. To cope, he took benzos. His usage spun so far out of control, he had to be flown to Russia to be put into a medically-induced coma for a radical detox. Today, he seems well, but the old saw cuts; physician, heal thyself.
Jordan Bernt Peterson was born in 1962, the eldest of three children, and grew up in a snowy frontier town in Canada, where he hunted, trapped, canoed and fished. His father, a school teacher, was strict; his mother, a librarian, was gentle. He fell in love with his wife Tammy at the age of seven (she lived across the street).
The couple married in 1989 and have two children, Julian and Mikhaila (named after Gorbachev). Mikhaila, who has a career as a commentator and podcaster, endured terrible ill-health as a child and was the one who inspired the practice of eating just beef, salt and water AKA the Lion Diet. The family resides in Canada.
At college, Peterson studied political science, developing an interest in totalitarianism – he still collects Soviet realist art – and moved into clinical psychology. “I was looking into the heart of darkness. What, what are the worst things human beings are capable of? I read… extensive literature on serial killers and, and serial sexual slayers and, you know, fetishistic perversions and Auschwitz camp guards.” He published over a hundred papers, along with the superb book Maps of Meaning in 1999. His lectures at the universities of Harvard and Toronto, mixing scholarship with self-help, built a devoted fanbase.
The world discovered Peterson in 2016 when he publicly opposed a law that, he argued, would compel Canadians to use trans people’s preferred pronouns. The wider culture was embracing mutability, the notion that identity is fluid; also, passive-aggressive kindness – insisting everyone be nice about it. Peterson refused to humour fantasy. Biology is real, he said; behaviour is influenced by it. And the Bible, which communicates a wealth of experience and knowledge through stories, helps us understand the timeless facts of life.
For example, according to the Bible, or to Peterson’s reading of it, the ideal boyfriend is a shepherd. Consider Michelangelo’s famous statue: “With his gigantic hands and his calm demeanour, armed and ready, David is, what would you say, he’s the civilised monster… He’s taking care of the lambs and he’s dressed like little lord Fauntleroy, playing his pipes” but he’s also able to “fight off lions” to protect his flock. “That’s what women want”, a man who is “monstrous enough to fight off the real monsters”. He’s Gladiator. He’s Mr Darcy. He’s the subject, Jordan assures me, of countless pornos aimed at women.
I put it to him that feminists will say: “Jordan Peterson wants to reinforce archetypes that justify an old-fashioned view of men as protectors, women as carers, so he turns to the Old Testament, chock full of kings and handmaids, and he finds them.”
He snaps: “Bloody leftist critics!” On the first page of the Bible “men and women are both images of God”, so we can infer they are made equally. But they also have an “essential nature”. Women are “smaller and the world’s more dangerous to women, they’re sexually vulnerable… also they have to take care of infants”. The Left’s denial that men and women are different, that they need complimentary things from each other, is why “birth rates are plummeting”, because “men and women who are young are much less likely to engage in romantic relationships”.
This idea that we can be or do literally anything, beyond the bounds of nature or the moral code, is found in Genesis. The Garden of Eden is established as a moral order: total freedom, except to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve, Peterson says, is tempted by the snake/Satan to steal an apple and does so because she believes she can “make my own values”, “become like God” and “incorporate the inedible”. It’s an “overextension of the nurturing quality of the feminine” – women’s conviction that they can turn evil into good through love – and an idea that has spread through a society in which wickedness is tolerated under the auspices of being kind.
“It’s a real conundrum for women because they are attracted to some degree to poisonous men… It’s a notorious fact that vicious killers get many more marriage proposals, and it’s partly because women harbour the delusion that they could tame this man. Now, you see, there’s some truth in that because women do tame men. And then the question is, well, how much, who can you tame? You can’t tame Satan.”
I tell him I read this part of his book, then re-read Genesis. There is no mention of any of this: it is not spelt out that Eve has a mothering complex or likes bad boys. Is he “reverse-engineering”, taking what he regards as a problem of the modern world and then reading it into an ancient text? He replies that his interpretation is not exhaustive, adding, in the Jordanian style: “There’s a very large number of valid pathways, you know, and they, they echo at multiple levels… It fits with the neurobiological conceptualisation.”
Like the postmodernists he challenges, Peterson interprets a text by his own light; he doubts, however, the ability of others to do the same. He is scathing about Marxism, yet many sincere Christians find a protean socialism in the Sermon on the Mount. “It’s a rubbish claim,” he scoffs: “Christ, I can tell you why.” When Jesus hands out the bread and fishes, he’s teaching us to root our self-interest in the health of the community. “This is what hunter gatherers do.” The best hunter gives away his kill, that way “you establish a reputation as a generous provider and if you do that, people reciprocate… We sacrifice to make a community, we store our future provender in the reputation we establish with others… That’s the kingdom of heaven in which you’re to store treasure… In your stellar reputation, right?”
With this book, Peterson will cement himself as chief theologist to the “cultural conservatives”, a movement spooked by Western decline. Having largely abandoned faith in God, our civilisation appears left with two alternatives: the “hedonistic chaos” of liberalism vs “Islamic fundamentalist suprematism,” which is “not looking so promising either”, though it might conquer us in the end. “We are weak in the West compared to the Islamic fundamentalists.”
So, thinkers are returning to the Bible to rediscover what Peterson describes in We Who Wrestle as “the library of stories on which the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated.” Even Richard Dawkins, the atheist geneticist, uses the cultural Christian label – though Peterson calls it naive to think you can have a Christian culture without a foundational belief in God.
“That’s kind of like the idea that you go into Iraq and you take out the dictator and all the freedom loving people turn into a democracy.” The God gap is always filled with bad things, and since it opened up, “We’re not really creating our own values like Nietzsche thought, and we’re certainly not turning into Newtons, we’re degenerating into a fractious immaturity.”
This said, I still find Peterson vague on the nature of God: a truth, a metaphor or an evolved instinct? This might be deliberate, either because he wants to keep the atheists in his audience listening or because he genuinely hasn’t decided.
Moreover, his take on Christian life as a hard struggle to be better – “the more willing you are to face what’s most terrifying, the more God walks with you” – is not the whole picture. To millions of believers it’s about peace and reconciliation; we are lost sheep, Jesus is the shepherd. If I can force myself onto a flight, it’s thanks to my faith in God’s mercy rather than Peterson’s rugged advice on handling phobia. “What you should do is sit and literally imagine the worst,” he says – I guess he means hull-loss or a hijack – then breathe deeply. “Free your imagination.” You will find that you can cope because “new genes turn on. Physical transformation. Right? So now you determine that you’re going to confront the dragon voluntarily. Who do you turn into? Well, you turn into a closer approximation of the divine hero.” I can’t see myself travelling to Alicante pretending to be St George.
During our hour spent exploring Judeo-Christianity, Peterson only uses the word “love” four times. It is always in relation to his wife, Tammy. Her cancer was diagnosed in 2019. She was told it was terminal. I ask him what happened next and he begins to cry.
“My wife is a very tough person and she was told… very unexpectedly that she had 10 months to live and that there was no hope.” She broke the news to Julian – to whom “she was a very good mother” – and when she saw how much he loved her in return, “she had an experience of, well, divine love, I would say. And well earned, like she was a great mother”. This was her “baptism” into Christianity; “that was the descent of the Holy Spirit”.
Has he ever felt that too? “Not under the same circumstances as Tammy, but, uh, I’ve had my share of visionary experiences.” Tammy recovered while praying the rosary and has since joined the Catholic Church: would he consider doing the same? “No, I don’t think so. I mean, who knows what the future will bring, but the ambivalent position that I currently occupy – I’m on the border of things – that’s a very useful place to be.”
I put it to him, given all the stress and persecution that he’s faced, that if Peterson put Peterson on the couch, he might tell himself to retire. He disagrees. “I have an unbelievably privileged life… it’s complex and it needs to be managed, but it is a glorious adventure”. He could, at the sign of trouble, withdraw from the fight but “psychologically, that doesn’t work. There was no going back. That’s what happens to Lot’s wife. You know, she turns around and looks back. It’s like, oh, now you’re done.” (She was turned into a pillar of salt.) “Like, I lost my university position, essentially. It became impossible to continue with it. I lost my clinical practice, which was very annoying and very hard on my clients. And, you know, there was a lot of rough water, but what the hell did you expect?”
We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan Peterson, is out in November 18 (Allen Lane, £30); to preorder a copy for £25, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0808 196 6794
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