The comment by Jack B Nimble gets into some of my issues with Peterson, though I doubt he and I are cut from the same cloth exactly either.
Well, that guy's post really doesn't seem to offer much, except a seemingly spurious notion that the word "predator" didn't exist until 1920, or, even if that were true, that this preclude our premodern ancestors from having cognitive categories of things that want to eat/kill them? Peterson's point is that the idea of "dragons" is as real as any other thought. In this sense, "dragon" is as real as any other mental representation of anything at all. The fact is that you, anyone, as a creature capable only of interaction with the world through the means of mental representation, necessarily exist because mental representations are real. If they were not, you couldn't be conscious at all and I don't see how you would consciously ever do anything.
He links to an article which does raise some good points, but ultimately falls into the same trap. For example:
Peterson extolls classic Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as upholding primordial gender roles, but objects to Frozen for violating those norms. “It might be objected (as it was, with Disney’s more recent and deeply propagandistic Frozen) that a woman does not need a man to rescue her,” Peterson writes in 12 Rules of Life. “That may be true, and it may not. It may be that only the woman who wants (or has) a child needs a man to rescue her—or at least to support and aid her. In any case, it is certain that a woman needs consciousness to be rescued, and, as noted above, consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time (in the guise of both order and of the Logos, the mediating principle).”
The argument here is that Frozen is propaganda because it violates mythical tropes that have existed since “the beginning of time.” But are myths really so unwavering and static?
Even the quoted portion of Peterson's book flatly states "That may be true, and it may not" yet, the article just plows right along, as if Peterson (in expressing his opinion that Frozen is akin to propaganda) said this was an absolute fact. Instead, what Peterson goes on to say is that archetypally speaking, women need men. This is plain to see every day. The same goes for men needing women. It's rather easy to frame that as being misogynistic, if one chooses to do so. But then we are going to have to define existance as misogynistic, by the very nature of biology, being that a women needs a man to have a child at all. I don't see where this reductionist thinking brings us though. That is Peterson's point, really. That we can, "liberally" choose than women should not need men at all, but where does that put us as a society comprised of men and women then? This is where Peterson, conservative leaning, is concerned with liberalism going "too far." And it's a valid question to ask, can liberalism go too far?
Not only that part, but the article goes on:
Blake re-wrote the Bible, just as Frozen re-wrote the Disney princess by making the traditional witch figure (the magic-powered Elsa) into a heroine. That’s the way culture works. Myths are not just handed down in unchanging fashion; they are repurposed, tweaked, and sometimes inverted. Contra Peterson, witches aren’t real. More importantly, the cultural meaning of witches changes over time (as with the feminist effort to reclaim witches as heroines).
Well, I think the author of the article of off the rails now. One, Elsa is not the hero in Frozen. She nearly kills everyone, including her own sister who was only trying to save her. It's Anna, who is the hero. Anna who saves everyone. So, yes, Frozen is an "inversion" of sorts, but not of what this person is trying to say at all. Anna does have a "feminist" role as hero, but what Peterson is trying to get at (not in a well articulated way though) is that this role is actually somewhat antithetical to femininity. Note that I say, "somewhat" though. Because Anna does, in the end, display something that could be construed as "feminine virtue" in her sisterly love. But it is through the method of taking the "traditionalist masculine" role. That is to say, Anna isn't really a paragon on feminine virtue, but rather, is a woman who willfully takes on the masculine role.
There isn't anything wrong with that, per se, but Peterson's concern (I think) is that if we take the line that women should "heroically" be more masculine, then what do we say to men? Be hyper-masculine? Or are we saying that men should then be more feminine? Why is the masculine role to be aspired to and the feminine one not? This is the violence to femininity that feminists rightly decry. Yet, a "feminine" hero, like say the new Wonder Woman movie, does not really show her embody much by way of feminine virtue, rather, she is just a female who displays masculine virtue.
Not only this part, but this small bit also goes directly against the very idea the author posited earlier. "Witches aren't real" but then goes on to describe how the idea is pervasive enough to be included into mainstream movies, have femanists want to reclaim it, and have it be representative of "heroines." You can't have it both ways, unfortunately. Either the idea isn't real, then we can dispense with it all together, or it is and it can be re-purposed.
When I dig into Peterson I find myself nodding sometimes in agreement, and cringing at the silliness in other cases...That said it is hard to pin down exactly what Peterson has said and what has been misconstrued about what he has said. Extending him charity - by which I mean trying to be factual without ascribing motives - I'd say while I guess our politics differ he's not wrong in a "meta" sense, that the Ground of democracy is rooted in Myth - specifically for the West this is a Judeo-Christian Mythos, though as the Greeks and others have shown this isn't necessary.
If you can, read Peterson's
Maps of Meaning. It's far better than him trying to apply what he talks about in there to politics. And I think it's more Peterson's point that it is less that democracy is rooted in Judeo-Christian Mythos, but rather that Western culture itself is.