When a Real Man Cries: A Meditation on Jordan Peterson’s First Rule for Life

Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back

I begin this meditation with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek as I respond, somewhat saucily, to Dr. Peterson’s assertion in his first chapter of Twelve Rules for Life, which chapter this meditation is treating, “Most people don’t often think about lobsters.” Evidently, Dr. Peterson has not spent a good deal of time in Maine. Downeast, where I live, you can’t throw a pebble without hitting a lobster motif. My children sleep with lobster stuffed animals. My eldest has a real lobster trap in the dooryard and he hopes to be a lobsterman one day. Most of the bedtime stories I read to my children involve lobsters, from Leroy the Lobster to The Lobster Lady. Thanksgiving dinner in Maine as often as not includes lobster stew next to the turkey. I worry about the lobstering industry as I always have, and support it by choosing a lobster roll as a once-a-year Mother’s Day treat.

But as the first chapter of Twelve Rules is not really about lobsters, neither is this meditation. “Standing up straight with your shoulders back” isn’t just about physical posture; it’s about taking one’s place, as the lobster does, in the competence (not dominance) hierarchy. It is about standing up for what you believe in and not letting the world bully you into submission. It is about taking responsibility and facing down the dragon and building the ark that will protect your family from the floods of tribulation that are bound to come. Standing up straight with your shoulders back is, as Harry Potter thought,

“the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew … that there was all the difference in the world” (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince).

Dr. Peterson has had the privilege and responsibility to teach an entire generation of young men and not-so-young women (I speak for myself) how to do just that, by example. But standing up straight with your shoulders back isn’t just about taking your place in the competence hierarchy. When we stand straight, we are not hunched over protecting the most vulnerable parts of our bodies. We have made our hearts, our soft middles, and other areas more vulnerable still a target for attack.

Want some new merch while supporting free speech? Check out our store!

Wrong Speak T-Shirt

---

When my children were tiny, I spent most of my days and nights bent over, nursing and nurturing the little ones in my arms. My entire body wrapped around their soft vulnerable bodies in order to protect them. Now that they are a bit bigger, I have had to abandon my protective posture and stand up straight. And there is nothing more vulnerable for a mother than to watch her children, pieces of her heart walking around outside her body, go off to make their way in the world.

It is not just our fragile flesh that is vulnerable to hurt; our hearts and spirits are more vulnerable still. Dr. Peterson wonders, sometimes, what it is about his work that has made him so popular; I contend that it is because he does not give advice, he gives his heart. He gives himself, as the Greatest Teacher taught us to do on the very night He was betrayed. And in standing up straight with his shoulders back, and in giving his heart, Dr. Peterson has made himself more vulnerable than most of us would care to become. I can only say for myself that it was this very vulnerability that showed me it was safe to open my own fragile heart to him.

But in so doing, he has exposed himself to more ridicule than one could shake a stick at. “Jordan Peterson cries all the time,” fans (distinct from friends) bellyache in the comment sections. “How can I respect someone who is always dissolving into tears?”

The more that expects men to be tearless is historically rather a recent development in our Western culture. Historical and literary accounts from the Old and New Testaments, the Illiad, and Beowulf, down through history to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings show us manly men from monks to soldiers to kings weeping openly, with their heads held high, unashamed of their grief. An account that deeply moves me is from Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, in which an old Quaker patriarch announces to his family, as the tears roll down his cheeks, that the War Between the States has begun. Through much of history, men would have been ashamed not to weep at death and war and human suffering.

The tearless man is also a cultural more that our First Nations brothers and sisters find absurd. I was surprised to find, in reading Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit, that great warrior leaders like the legendary Crazy Horse and Black Elk viewed tears as a strong, heroic, manly expression of sorrow from good men. Like Dr. Peterson.

It takes one kind of courage to stand up straight with your shoulders back for what you believe to be true. It takes another kind of courage to stand up straight with your shoulders back as the truth you must stand up for cannot be expressed in words, only in silent tears running down your cheeks. And the truth is, as Gerald Manly Hopkins reminded young Margaret,

As the heart grows older, it will come to such sights colder, by and by;
And yet, you WILL weep, and know why.

If Dr. Peterson had the intellect that he has but without the heart that is as big as all outdoors, he would be one of the most dangerous individuals on Earth. The tears he sheds are not for himself; they are for the “world sorrow” that Gerald Manly Hopkins sings of. Jordan Peterson has taught an entire generation of young men to stand up straight, to tell the truth, to clean their rooms, and to get their lives together. Now, it is his privilege and his responsibility to teach that generation of young men how to weep unabashedly, because no one else is teaching them.

Author’s Note: If you have enjoyed this essay, look for the continuation of my meditations on the Twelve Rules.