The most crucial choice

     Despite his celebrity (in the eyes of some) or notoriety (in the eyes of others), I have not paid much attention to Jordan Peterson. Regarding what little I’ve heard him say, I agree and disagree in about equal proportion. Recently, I overheard snippets from an interview he gave. The worst of it was some annoyingly strained interpretations of biblical stories; his tendentious psychological reading of them, I admit, caused me to wince more than once. But he did say something in that same interview that I rather liked. I make no claims for its profundity, only for the satisfying contrast that he presented to his interlocutor, who had gone off on a tangent, rhapsodizing about psychedelics. I don't recall how the discussion – which seemed to operate on principles of stream-of-consciousness – came around to the subject of “my” generation. By then I had slipped into only halfway listening, but what Peterson said that instantly grabbed my attention was this: Timothy Leary should not have declared back in 1966 or 67: “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”; instead, Leary should have said: “Turn on, tune in, and grow up.” “Well, okay, Jordan,” I thought. “Good point.” I entered my teens in the 1960s, but I was too young to test Leary’s advice when he gave it. Still, even those of us who later made fun of Leary and “flower power” and the rest of it (I turned seventeen in 1973), who were cynical enough to appreciate Alice Cooper’s boast that what he represented had driven “a stake through the heart of the Love Generation,” nevertheless were actively, if somewhat obliviously, in sync with Leary’s dictum. Some of us continued down the road of “turning on, tuning in, and” – worst of all – “dropping out.” To be scrupulously fair to Leary, he never intended the last of his three exhortations to be taken as a blanket invitation to self-indulgent immaturity; he was a hand puppet of the era’s zeitgeist who just happened to come up with a snappy phrase. But despite his intentions, that’s how it was received in practice. He sincerely believed that he was prescribing the cure-all for the social and personal maladies of mankind; instead, he was only reinforcing the sentiments of a song that the generation to which he preached had been hearing each year on TV from their earliest childhood: Mary Martin as Peter Pan singing “I won’t grow up” (“I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up /Not me… Never gonna be a man, / I won't! /Like to see somebody try /And make me. /Anyone who wants to try /And make me turn into a man, /Catch me if you can…”).