I am not sure that “incels” as such really exist, but there is no doubt something very rotten in the way men and women interact today. Partly this is relational, a problem with the dynamics themselves; but it is also founded in the respective crises of men and women in the postmodern world, in misconceptions of identity and nature.

Peterson belongs to a peculiar class of intellectuals—present on the right for as long as it has existed—who recognize the root of social ills in the failure to find meaning, but fail to grasp (or even ask) what a recovery of such meaning would look like in substance and practice. Peterson in particular has always been focused on the structures and processes of meaning, dating back to his early academic works. And so the object of his later thought has been something like a reified order. But it is also a minimal order: not the reconfiguration of human society into conformity with divine law; just the moral imperative to clean your room.

Peterson, like Morgan, is a reactionary liberal: he hopes to restore some of the virtues of the premodern and early modern worlds without moving beyond or against the social and political arrangements of late modernity. If he wants to turn back the clock at all, it’s not by very much. When asked what he found admirable in England, he pointed to the common law, the tradition of free speech, and self-effacing humor.

Maybe he doesn’t have all the answers. (He doesn’t.) But what real harm has Jordan Peterson done?

If there is a genuine problem here, it’s hard to locate the fault with the professor. So it’s worth turning to Olivia Wilde—and to her very strange new film.