An ABC of Childhood Tragedy: Volume 1

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Husbands, ask your wives: What bothered you more, the terrible prose, the poor centering, the general sense of gesture without meaning, or the fact that the author is a bigot who talks like Kermit the Frog? (It’s OK, you can be honest.) However, while it's not structurally like anything else Peterson has written, followers of his work will recognize a common thread. Much (not all) of what he's written about involves the psychological toll of tragedy and trauma, particularly that inflicted during childhood. This book, while far from an academic treatise on the subject, provides a more visceral look at the topic, as each of the poems contain within their few lines a haunting revelation of the tragedies children all too often endure. Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, self-help writer, cultural critic and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance. These are quite literally stereotypical tropes as stories. Then justifying it as abuse towards children.

Even though the content of his poems can be a bit disturbing, I don't think the subject is wrong in itself. There are lots of books, even intended for children (this one isn't, I think), that deal with the subject of abuse: Matilda was abused by her parents; Harry Potter by his uncle, aunt and cousin; the Baudelaire orphans by Count Olaf and his henchmen; and so on. Peterson grew up in Fairview, Alberta. He earned a B.A. degree in political science in 1982 and a degree in psychology in 1984, both from the University of Alberta, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1991. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow for two years before moving to Massachusetts, where he worked as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University. In 1998, he moved to the University of Toronto as a full professor. He authored Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief in 1999, a work in which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide. Most of the poems in this book are just like this one, but some of them are more uncomfortable, given the topics they deal with. I don't think they are funny, and I certainly think they aren't deep. In the promotional video for this book, Peterson says that his goal was to "investigate the nexus between beauty and tragedy and humor". He makes equivalent claims about his other, more serious books. I believe it's some kind of defense mechanism: if you think the book is not good, then it means you didn't understand it, because you are not smart enough to find "the nexus between beauty and tragedy and humor".More haunting still is the realization that, though of course the cases are fictionalized and rendered in poetic form, they're inspired by Peterson's decades of clinical work. The individual children depicted may never have existed (at least under the names they're given in the book), but at the very least they represent an amalgamation of the horrors Peterson has witnessed throughout his career, and that fact alone ought to justify a study of this book. This alphabetical collection of four sentence rhymes revels in the torture of children with no purpose or payoff. The author-- a licensed psychologist from clown college-- clearly has a disdain for his patients, particularly youths, and secretly practices on the belief that they deserve the abuse they have endured. Peterson is a narcissist with aspirations of eugenics. For real. At least 3 of the poems are about children being sexually assaulted and for why? Because the parents had non-traditional values. That’s it. There’s no deeper message. There’s no “poetry about injustice and depth of humanity.” For an author who claims to be a counseling psychologist, the concept of trauma is poorly handled here. Which gives further credence as to why this person shut down their counseling practice and was let go of their professor job. I also don't care -at least, not in regards to this book- about Peterson's ideology or questionable ideas about parenting. There are way better poets with way worse ideas. Here, I just want to talk about the quality of Peterson's writing. Let's consider one of the most anodyne poems in his book:

It’s promised as “poetry about the justice and darkness of humanity,” and it reads about as deep as Ben Shapiro’s novels. This isn't necessarily what readers have come to expect from Jordan Peterson's work. His prior books include a deep (and admittedly fairly dry) academic text on mythology and belief structures and two works that fit within (even as they rise above) the self-help genre. This is something entirely different: a short collection of twenty-six brief poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by Juliette Fogra. Each verse has a simple rhyme pattern and uses lots of alliteration. Many of the rhymes don't really work. Like he rhymes "own/groaned" "them/men". Some nice word choices with the alliterations to demonstrate a large vocabulary. This books comes off as a self-masturbatory writing, coming off as the authors political revenge fantasy of torturing the children of those ideologically different from him, that the only jokes are, “lol, aren’t the left abusing children?” And even for that joke, it falls incredibly flat and obscured by bad writing. The real horror here, is that the description to sell the book is longer and more thought out than the “book” itself.I'm actually seeing Jordan Peterson live soon. I'm not a huge fan, but I think it'll be an alright use of an evening. Somehow he's selling out stadiums. The hype is insane. I wonder if he'll recite some poetry. It promises to be as dark as grim fairy tales, but at least those had a story. Those had a message. This is so very obvious pandering. Let's put aside the fact that this poem is about an ugly child. Again, this could be the topic of a good work of literature. I'm more concerned about its utter meaninglesness. Is there a story here? Where is even the tragedy that was promised to us? Did anything happened to Katie or this is just Jordan Peterson being mean? On the formal level, notice the easy rhymes, clumsy structure, unimaginative word choice... Yes, this poem is just bad. Wives, ask your husbands: What bothered you more, the terrible prose, the poor centering, the general sense of gesture without meaning, or the fact that the author is a bigot who talks like Kermit the Frog? (It’s OK, you can be honest.)

Let's create a hypothetical scenario where you and your spouse are shopping for child-safe content. We're going with a male / female coupling because statistically speaking if you are on the LGBTQ+ spectrum or a single parent of any kind you will probably dismiss the book outright. Indeed, readers of these genres will be equally attracted to this book as readers of Peterson's work in general. I've long argued that there is great psychological benefit in studying horror fiction (and related topics, including the darkest case studies in psychology or the most tragic moments in history) because they prepare us psychologically for the often-terrifying reality of the world in which we live, and remind us to be grateful when the world is anything but horrible. This book seems to come from a similar idea, and I think it should be applauded for its effort. And if you can look past the very shallow conservative politics and unfunny writing, the actual poetry itself is atrocious. To give you an example of how thought out this was, at one point he tries to rhyme wonton with flaunting, in a short story about a mother pushing her daughter towards her passions. But the rhyming and meter of it is way off. If you try to read these out loud, you will struggle a bit trying to figure out what even pacing and rhythm this was supposed to have.