The new 12 Rules are very like the old 12 Rules; there’s no sign that Jordan P has lost it ... Where he is more opaque but very much in American middle brow mode, is illustrating his ideas with assorted myth, legend or archetype: he gives us Mesopotamian epic to make a point about order and chaos, or the story of Osiris and Horus to illustrate a point about the importance of tradition plus youthful vigour. Sometimes the attempt falls flat as when he deploys Harry Potter anecdotes, and can I just say that he got Peter Pan all wrong when he asserts that Peter’s problem is that Captain Hook is his role model ... But Jordan Peterson is by profession a clinical psychologist and some of his most useful insights come from encounters with people ... most of this book is given to similarly humane and perfectly sensible observations about human nature. Indeed, when he describes his clients, you note the compassion as well as the rigour. And his prescription against chaos, that you should start by tidying your own room and sorting yourself out before you deal with the universe, has much to commend it ... there are useful big ideas here which are all the more useful in being, as he admits, unoriginal ... There’s plenty here for his critics to get stuck into.

YouTube is where [Peterson] flourishes: his charisma, authority and dazzling spontaneous intellect make his video lectures addictive. His prose is the opposite of addictive: repetitious, unvariegated, rhythmless, opaque and possessed of a suffocating sense of its own importance. It is a style that relies on readers knowing the author’s voice and supplying the cadences themselves ... Ideas that flit and glimmer in Peterson’s videos look bloated and dead when strapped to the page. The problem, I think, is that the internet favours personalities and Peterson is famous because of his personality, which is compelling, not because of his philosophy, which is bonkers. Curiously, though, the bonkers philosophy is the foundation for rules that are often anticlimactically sensible ... It may help to think of him as a lifestyle influencer as much as a philosopher ... That said, I tend to believe that society needs to be prodded by bonkers, renegade intellectuals such as Peterson (reading the new book you notice how much he has in common with bonkers renegade intellectual extraordinaire Camille Paglia). So long as employees at Penguin burst into tears on learning that the company is publishing Peterson’s latest book, or a lecturer at a Canadian university is reprimanded for showing a class one of Peterson’s videos it is clear that there is a strain of closed-minded liberal complacency that will only benefit from being rubbed up the wrong way. It does not follow that we are required to take his thinking seriously ... in many respects reads like a more chaotic rewrite of 12 Rules for Life ... nails together shower thoughts, random prejudices and genuine insights into a decidedly rickety structure ... Harry Potter, the Bible, Egyptian myths and Sumerian legends are polished into flattering mirrors for the Jordan Peterson view of the meaning of life, which, unsurprisingly, is just the sort of pessimistic heroic individualism you might expect from a baby boomer who grew up in remote Canada in the 1970s reading too much Nietzsche ... You notice quite soon that for Peterson almost every myth or story is valued according to how easily it can be bent to his philosophical will ... characterised by the same atmosphere of grinding undifferentiated portentousness you get in big-budget superhero movies where the plot is almost incomprehensible, but every fight is a fight to the death and requires inevitable, endless, wearying CGI explosions.

This book is humbler than its predecessor, and more balanced between liberalism and conservatism—but it offers a similar blend of the highbrow and the banal. Readers get a few glimpses of the fiery online polemicist, but the Peterson of Beyond Order tends instead to two other modes. The first is a grounded clinician, describing his clients’ troubles and the tough-love counsel he gives them. The other is a stoned college freshman telling you that the Golden Snitch is, like, a metaphor for '‘round chaos’ … the initial container of the primordial element.' Some sentences beg to be prefaced with Dude ... Reading Peterson the clinician can be illuminating; reading his mystic twin is like slogging through wet sand. His fans love the former; his critics mock the latter ... The prose swirls like mist, and his great insight appears to be little more than the unthreatening observation that life is complicated. (If the first book hadn’t been written like this too, you’d guess that he was trying to escape the butterfly pins of his harshest detractors.) After nearly 400 pages, we learn that married people should have sex at least once a week, that heat and pressure turn coal into diamonds, that having a social life is good for your mental health, and that, for a man in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch ... On the rare occasion that Beyond Order strays overtly into politics, Peterson still can’t resist fighting straw men ... Is he arguing with Gloria Steinem or princess_sparklehorse99 on Tumblr? A tenured professor should embrace academic rigor ... The book leaves you wishing that Peterson the tough therapist would ask hard questions of Peterson the public intellectual.

[Peterson] comes across in writing, for instance, as a recognisable kind of self-help sexist, with a tendency to over-interpret the data regarding personality differences between women and men; but there seems little reason to condemn him as a virulent misogynist ... Amid all this discord, it’s jarring to open Beyond Order to be reminded that Peterson isn’t best understood as a debater of politics or culture, but as a sui generis kind of personal trainer for the soul. He is stern, sincere, intolerant of fools, sometimes hectoring, fond of communicating harsh truths by means of Bible stories, ancient mythology, the works of JK Rowling and JRR Tolkien, and lengthy flights of Jungian-tinged abstraction about the Dragon of Chaos, the Benevolent Queen, the Wise King, and assorted other archetypes. Hari Kunzru’s description of reading Peterson’s last book – 'like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong' – has yet to be surpassed ... sometimes borders on the banal ... Peterson’s biggest failing as a writer is one he shares with many of his loudest critics: the absence of a sense of humour. He takes the agonising human predicament seriously – but boy does he also take it seriously. This is understandable, in light of what he’s endured; but the effect is to deny his readers another essential tool for coping with life. We need courage and love, but it also helps to find a way to laugh at the cosmic joke ... Still, in the end, it’s a good thing that there’s space on the self-help shelves for a book as bracingly pessimistic as this one. Ours is a culture dedicated to a belief in the perfectibility of social institutions, in our limitless capacity to know the world, and to bring it under our control, and in the infallible rightness of present day moral judgments. Peterson offers an invaluable reminder that we’re finite and inherently imperfect; that we can’t control everything, or even very much – and that every generation of humans since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia has thought itself morally unimprovable.

It’s hard to resist the conclusion that 12 Rules for Life was a self-help book that left its author in exactly the kind of hopeless state to which it promised to be an antidote. However, Peterson appears unbowed by the experience, for Beyond Order, which is subtitled 12 More Rules for Life, continues in much the same vein. This time the writing is perhaps more laboured, and the arguments undoubtedly more familiar. Like the first book, it’s full of a messianic passion that can read like an unironic homage to Nietzsche ... If Peterson doesn’t excel as a literary critic, he is much more enlightening as a clinical psychologist. One of his strongest arguments is that therapy continues to repeat the same fundamental error of its founders by searching within people’s life stories for solutions to problems that exist outside in the world of complex social relations ... Critically minded readers can come to their own conclusions about which course the publisher took with its multimillion-selling author.

Peterson’s call to responsibility, to depth, to seriousness, and to fidelity are welcome and powerful ... His description of bringing beauty into one’s life [...] and of the trials of keeping couples together [...] as well as his psychological advice sprinkled throughout the book, will find many grateful readers ... There is certainly rampant ideological crusading going on. The outsize reaction on both sides to Peterson’s own writing exemplifies it ... One wishes to rescue Peterson from the excesses of his own rhetoric.