Jordan Peterson and the New Center

Michael Lumish

I find myself increasingly interested in the work of social media people such as Dave Rubin and academics such as Jordan Peterson around what is sometimes referred to as "The New Center."

Jordan Peterson, along with neuroscientist Sam Harris, is among the trend's most significant figures. The point of this emerging sensibility is to outline a rational political balance and to promote freedom of speech, particularly at the universities.

Peterson, out of the University of Toronto, is a clinical and evolutionary psychologist who is influenced by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Campbell became famous in the late 1980s through the PBS documentary, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. In the last few years, Peterson came to prominence due to his opposition to Canadian legislation mandating the use of non-gendered pronouns among certain professional types, such as university professors.

Some have even accused him of being "alt-right"...  whatever that is supposed to mean, exactly.

In truth, Peterson draws much from the hippie-counterculture inspiration of the twentieth-century that goes to scholars such as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and Timothy Leary.

If you listen to his discussion below, concerning psychedelics, you could easily mistake his sensibilities with the early careers of 1960s counterculture academicians like Richard Alpert, out of Harvard, who later became Baba Ram Dass.

To confuse someone like Peterson with a hard-line, right-wing political viewpoint is, from any reasonable historical view, simply mistaken.