The Man They Couldn’t Cancel

The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness” before it, is a comical expression for an ugly cultural pathology. To be canceled—an older, closely related term is “blacklisted”—is to have your public persona or influence assailed, typically by a sizable mob, for some real or perceived offense against progressive orthodoxy, whatever that orthodoxy may hold at the moment. For that to happen, you must possess some form of authority in the first place: an academic post, a political office, a role in the entertainment industry, employment with a “mainstream” media organization, a voice as an intellectual or imaginative writer.

But the targets of cancellation, having derived their legitimacy from consensus left-liberal culture, are typically not very good at defending themselves, or even understanding what happened to them. Often they apologize, despite having said or done nothing wrong, which only emboldens the cancelers. Or they fall back on pieties about free speech and the marketplace of ideas, as if their tormentors still believed in those principles.

One target of cancellation who is able to speak intelligently about it is Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto clinical psychologist, YouTube lecturer, and author of “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” (2018) and “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” published in March

Since then he has been denounced as racist, misogynist, fascist and transphobic. Occasionally violent protests against him have taken place on the University of Toronto campus, and he is regularly shouted down at speaking events. When Penguin Random House Canada announced that it would publish “Beyond Order,” its staff “confronted management,” according to media reports, in a tearful town-hall meeting.

Contempt for the “working class” by North America’s “liberal educated elite,” is a major reason for his popularity, he says. “There aren’t very many people with an encouraging voice,” Mr. Peterson says. “Most of the things you read by intellectuals—not all, but it’s a failing of intellectuals—most of it is criticism. Look what you’re doing to the planet. What a detestable bunch of wretches you are, with your rapacious structures and your endless appetite and your desire for power. . . . Look at what your ambition has done to the planet. How dare you!”

Mr. Peterson doesn’t directly challenge the substance of these dreary criticisms. Rather he protests that they’re unnatural and unhealthy. “The proper attitude toward young people is encouragement,” he says—“their ambitions, their strivings, their desire to be competent, their deep wish for a trustworthy guiding hand. I think our culture is so cynical that it’s impossible, especially for the established intellectual chattering critics, to even imagine that encouragement is possible.” . . .

In the end, Mr. Peterson hasn’t been successfully canceled. He retains his academic post; his YouTube lectures and podcasts have not been scrubbed from the internet; and his publishers stuck with his books, which are available for purchase. This is true for basically two reasons. The first is that he has tried to understand his would-be cancelers and thinks of them almost as outpatients. He speaks in gentle, clinical terms about a reporter for the New York Times who in 2018 wrote a scathing piece about him headlined “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy” and later posted online what sounded like a confession (“The roar of Twitter on my side meant the kill was justified and good”). He has, as best I can tell, genuine pity for this writer.

The second reason follows from the first. The cancelers’ strange fixations mean that apologizing to them is folly. Mr. Peterson hasn’t apologized or disavowed any previous statement. Now there’s a rule for his next book: Don’t apologize when you haven’t done anything wrong.

The Soviet Union was a formidable entity.

They killed and lied and bullied.

Yet, they are gone.

We did not nuke them nor did we use conventional weapons against them.

Yet, they are gone.

They were not true communists.

The people saw this.

The Russian people got rid of the Soviet Union because the leaders were thieving liars.

It is something our leaders should remember.

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