Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson : A Christian Perspective [1 ed.] 9781683593621, 9781683593638, 2019953123

Citation preview

MYTH AND MEANING IN

JORDAN PETERSON A Christian Perspective

RON DART Editor

LEXHAM PRESS

Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective Copyright 2020 Ron Dart Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225 LexhamPress.com All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected]. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. Public domain. Print ISBN 9781683593621 Digital ISBN 9781683593638 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953123 Lexham Editorial: Jesse Myers, Elliot Ritzema, Jeff Reimer, Erin Mangum Cover Design: Jim LePage

Contents Introduction Ron Dart 1. Jordan Peterson and the Chaos of Our Secular Age Bruce Riley Ashford 2. Jordan Peterson the Counter-Revolutionary: Marxism, Postmodern Neo-Marxism, and Suffering Hunter Baker 3. Language and Freedom: Peterson as Champion of Free Speech (and Freedom from Compelled Speech) Alastair Roberts 4. Myth, Memoricide, and Jordan Peterson Ron Dart 5. Archetypes, Symbols, and Allegorical Exegesis: Jordan Peterson’s Turn to the Bible in Context T. S. Wilson 6. Jordan Peterson’s Genesis Lectures: Interpreting the Bible between Rationalism and Nihilism Laurence Brown 7. The Image of Christ: Jordan Peterson as Humanist Esther O’Reilly 8. Professor Peterson, Professor Peterson: What Is Your View on … Science and Religion? Esgrid Sikahall 9. A Kierkegaardian Reading of Jordan Peterson Stephen M. Dunning 10. Being and Meaning: Jordan Peterson’s Antidote to Evil Matthew Steem and Joy Steem List of Contributors

Subject and Author Index

Introduction The autumn of 2016 ushered Jordan Peterson from his research-lecturing-publishing job at the University of Toronto onto the public stage, with gender-neutral pronouns and compelled speech the occasion of the initial performance. Peterson’s position on Bill C-16, regarding the use of personal pronouns for transgender people, generated substantive reactions from both ideological progressives and the alt-right. A year later, the treatment of Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfrid Laurier University who dared to show a clip of Peterson in class, which some felt should not be done, further accelerated the brittle polarization in the culture wars. In January 2018, following the publication of Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, the highly animated and much-discussed debate of sorts between him and TV journalist Cathy Newman generated many more clashing interpretations, whereas the more measured, balanced, and insightful reflections by Catholic bishop Robert Barron in February made for a finer and more nuanced read.1 An anti-Peterson attitude in the liberal establishment was consolidated by the Munk Debate in Toronto between Peterson and Stephen Fry in May of 2018,2 the critical article in the Toronto Star by Peterson’s former colleague Bernard Schiff that same month,3 and his follow-up interview on CBC with Wendy Mesley in June.4 I first came across Peterson when my students began wanting to do papers, presentations, and guided studies on him. As I learned more about him, I found that he was obviously contributing something, speaking into a vacuum that a lot of people were timid about. I found that he was challenging liberalism primarily by drawing attention to two things: first, the fragmentary nature of postmodern thought, which says you can’t say anything substantive; everything is perspective. The second is the politically correct aspect of liberalism, which insists there are some things you just can’t say. The response to these two things is often a reactionary conservatism, which is equally problematic. Those who feel caught between these pathways are not satisfied with them, and they find in Peterson a nimble thinker who can’t be pigeonholed. In addition to finding an audience among people who are dissatisfied with the current ideological options, Peterson has also gained an audience among those who know that science is unable to answer the deeper longings of the human heart for meaning and purpose. This plays out in particular in his lectures on biblical themes. In the right wing of the Enlightenment (those who followed biblical criticism), the biblical text was dismissed as irrelevant. In the Reformed tradition, the way to approach the Bible was in a literal, historical, grammatical way that lost the contemplative, mystical elements that were used by patristic exegetes. Peterson, by contrast, recognizes the limits of science and understands

how myth can speak to people. He takes biblical stories in a mythical sense, not getting hung up on the historicity of them, and will ask almost what a spiritual director would ask: “What does this story mean for you on your journey?” All of a sudden, people realize that the text can speak to them. Peterson’s approach to Scripture is in some ways a recovery of something that has been lost. For the fathers and mothers of the church, there were six levels of interpretation. The lowest was the grammatical-historical, but there are also more nuanced and layered ways of interpreting the text. The appeal of Peterson is that he’s pointing out the perennial relevance of the stories of the Bible to today’s context, saying the genius of the Bible is that it transcends time and history and speaks to the human soul. The stories told in the Bible are as relevant to us today as they were back then. For him, whether things literally happened is not the point. It’s an approach to exegeting the text that speaks to people on their all-too-human journey. In that sense, he’s drawing a lot of people, in his honest and doubting way, to consider how the text might speak to the questions they are asking on their journey. This book is an attempt to understand from a Christian perspective what has caused so many people to resonate with Peterson. Central to that resonance has been people’s perception of Peterson as a person of integrity. He initially came to prominence through his insistence that there are standards higher than the three standard tribes of postmodernism, political correctness, or a reactionary conservatism, and you need not buy into one of the three. None of these positions are intellectually coherent, and he came along and said so. He came across as a person with integrity who paid the price for speaking with integrity, and people are drawn to that kind of honesty. He was clear that simply because he critiqued the Left, that didn’t mean he was part of the alt-right. The initial attraction was that he was willing to come on the public stage and face opposition for saying the emperor had no clothes. Then, as people began to trust him as a person with integrity, people gave credence to his reading of the Bible as relevant to people’s life journeys. He catches people at different places in their questioning and directs them to the Bible. In this collection of essays, contributors are exploring three aspects to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, trying to find a middle way between hagiography and demonization. They are asking three sorts of questions: 1. Why is he so prominent on the public stage? What is the gap that he’s filling that a lot of people are not speaking into, and doing in a way that’s creating diverse reactions? 2. What is the good he’s contributing to the public discussion? 3. What critical questions are there to ask of Peterson? What are some of his blind spots, his Achilles’ heels, his overreactions? As they address these kinds of questions, the authors are also asking, Where will Peterson go from here, and where should he go? Peterson has shown that he is good at getting people into first gear. But inevitably you have to translate the personal into the communal, the ecclesial, the corporate. You can’t read the Bible and not transition from the personal to the

nation and the church. This is where you run into people who are different from yourself. Peterson excels at getting people out of a personal morass, but what does this look like when you shift into second, third, and fourth gear? People are asking bigger questions. The degree to which he makes the transition to addressing more than the individual will determine whether he becomes a more significant public person with a longer-lasting impact. The task of any mature person is how they bring together theory and practice in the personal, communal, and public. It’ll be interesting to see where Peterson goes—whether he makes this transition, and how, or whether he has his moment in the sun and fades from view.

1 Jordan Peterson and the Chaos of Our Secular Age BRUCE RILEY ASHFORD

Jordan Peterson has been described as “one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years,” and the author has a point.1 Peterson attracted very little public attention until 2016, when he publicly opposed Canada’s Bill C-16, a proposal to compel citizens to use the preferred gender pronouns of transgendered persons. Peterson’s opposition to this bill thrust him into the international spotlight, going from being virtually unknown to being perhaps the most famous public intellectual in the world in 2018. As of March 2019, Peterson’s YouTube channel had more than 350 videos, nearly 2 million subscribers, and upwards of 70 million views. Since 2016, his Twitter account has gained nearly 1 million followers, and his book tour in support of his international bestseller 12 Rules for Life has reached over 300,000 people. Not only has 12 Rules for Life sold upwards of 3 million copies in its first year, but its success has caused Peterson’s previous book, Maps of Meaning—a massive tome on psychotherapy—to suddenly become a bestseller two decades after it was published.2 Many reasons can be given for Peterson’s rapid ascent and expansive influence. Some have noted Peterson’s genuine concern for individuals and for society as a whole, which seems evident in his live talks and videos. Others point out that he has mastered the language of a specific audience—young men—helping them develop confidence, order their lives, and find meaning in a chaotic and disorienting world. Still others highlight the way Peterson exhorts and encourages his audiences in a manner one might expect from a pastor or priest, but comes in under the radar, so to speak, because he is a social scientist rather than a religious leader. Certainly each of these factors plays a part in Peterson’s appeal. But more than anything, Peterson’s ascent—and ability to connect—is due to the way he responds to a certain set of conditions inherent to our secular age. MAPPING OUR SECULAR AGE Before the dawn of the twentieth century, Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied the death of God, by which he meant that the cultured Europeans of his day had ceased to believe in God in any meaningful way. By mid-century, the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer

confirmed Nietzsche’s prophecy, speaking of Europe as a “world come of age,” by which he meant a European civilization that had learned to manage life without reference to God.3 During the ensuing decades, a number of cultural commentators explored the roots and fruits of Western secularity, diagnosing its ills and offering prognoses for the future. Four of these commentators—Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, George Steiner, and Augusto Del Noce— provide unique maps of our era. Taken together, these maps help explain the intuitive and powerful appeal of Jordan Peterson for many young people in the West today.

PHILIP RIEFF’S CULTURAL MAP Philip Rieff (1922–2006) was a Jewish-American sociologist whose corpus provides a cultural mapping of our secular age. Rieff, a prodigy who was offered a faculty position at the University of Chicago before he had completed his bachelor’s degree, was quickly recognized as the doyen of Freudian studies during an era defined by therapy and cultural change. In The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966), Rieff set forth his view of Freud as the most significant social scientist of the twentieth century and as a major cultural figure who gave birth to “psychological man.” As Rieff explains, Freud noted the proliferation of neuroses in Western man and discerned that they were caused by modern people’s difficulty in finding meaning and purpose in their lives. Premodern forms of authority had once provided a matrix of meaning and a normative code of morality, but these authorities were disintegrating. God was dying, and the human psyche was suffering as a result. But Freud was not interested in returning to religious authority to heal the neuroses. Instead, he wanted psychoanalysis to help humanity to live autonomously, without God or religion. Toward the end of Rieff’s career, he published his magnum opus, the “Sacred Order/Social Order” trilogy—My Life among the Deathworks, The Crisis of the Officer Class, and The Jew of Culture.4 These volumes reflected Rieff’s mature thought on the Western experiment—described so well by Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, and Freud—in firing God from his post and living autonomously. Central to his analysis and evaluation of the West is the concept of cultural “deathworks.” In Rieff’s conception, a deathwork is a cultural product or institution that arises from the soil of a culture but subverts that culture and its central values. He writes, “By deathwork I mean an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.”5 In Rieff’s view, some of the more prominent architects of deathworks were Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Robert Mapplethorpe. Yet these purveyors of deathworks were just the vanguard. Rieff argues that we are currently experiencing an explosion of deathworks as the Judeo-Christian order disintegrates. Rieff excavates the disintegration, referring to it as a historically unprecedented attempt by cultural elites to sever social order from sacred order. The sacred order, while abstract, becomes tangible in culture. And culture, in turn, upholds social order, serving as a “vertical in authority,” or, as Rieff playfully calls it, a via. He writes, “A culture is the vertical in authority, that space between sacred order and social order which is the world made by world

makers.”6 In other words, cultures are mediators who translate sacred order into social order. A society is healthy to the extent it has a strong sense of the vertical in authority. Without it, culture cannot do its job; bereft of sacred order, culture causes social decay. Rieff argues that in the West, elite cultural power brokers have tried to render sacred order powerless, hoping that social order will take care of itself.7 They think society can live by a new set of rules, or an ever-changing set of rules, but they won’t allow the rules to arise from within a Judeo-Christian framework.8 Thus many of the West’s recent cultural works are agents of social decay, serving to transgress, debunk, and otherwise subvert the very sacred order that gave the culture health and strength through the ages. According to Rieff, the therapeutic and atheistic effort to undermine social order will necessarily fail. Humanity’s instinctual religiosity “simply cannot be killed.… We simply … cannot live as if life were meaningless, without purpose; as if life were merely material or mechanical or not spiritual.”9 Furthermore, this elite therapeutic project is already breaking down, as the “long period of deconversion … appears all but ended.”10 Thus Rieff urges the West toward a new era, one that recovers the Judeo-Christian consensus on which our culture grew strong. Yet this recovery cannot be a mere retrieval of premodern religion, but a genuinely contemporary construal of monotheism for a modern world.

GEORGE STEINER’S METAPHYSICAL MAP George Steiner (b. 1929) is a French-American literary critic and philosopher whose metaphysical mapping of modernity complements Rieff’s project. In Real Presences (1989), Steiner calls out Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, and others, but especially Jacques Derrida, for breaking what he calls the West’s covenant between Word and world. At the heart of Derrida’s program is the belief that there cannot be any fixed meaning. A written text cannot, he argues, communicate a specific meaning. Texts can produce all sorts of meanings—even meanings that were not intended by the author—because it is the nature of a text to be full of contradictions and ambiguities. In other words, each text contains the seeds of its own destruction and, ultimately, the destruction of the author. Steiner recognizes in Derrida’s program not only the death of the human author but also the death of the divine Author-Creator, whose word called the world into existence and whose word secures the possibility of meaning. Derrida and other deconstructionists have removed the “postulate of the sacred” such that there is now a “break with any stable potentially ascertainable meaning of meaning.”11 Against Derrida, Steiner argues that meaning is possible, but only if we postulate the existence of God.12 Human discourse can only be underwritten by a theological guarantee—God’s presence. Thus, he urges the postmodern West to “wager on transcendence,” to read texts as if God exists, as if meaning is possible.13 In Grammars of Creation, Steiner turns his attention to God as the Author of creation, arguing that we must reject the late modern rejection of God’s creative word. “I believe this

dislocation, this tidal wave against the word, to be more severe and consequential than any other in modernity.”14 Without God’s creative word, there is nothing to fund and shape human creativity. Let us suppose that a genuine atheism will come to replace the aspirinagnosticism … now awash in our post-modernity. Let us suppose that atheism will come to possess and energize those who are masters of articulate form and builders of thought. Will their works rival the dimensions, the lifetransforming strengths of persuasion we have known? What would be the atheist counterpart to a Michelangelo fresco or King Lear?15 Thus we must reject the attempt at desacralization that undermines the most basic human enterprises, such as communication and creativity. Instead, we must re-envision the world, wagering on transcendence and living as if God exists.

AUGUSTO DEL NOCE’S POLITICAL MAP Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989) was an Italian political philosopher whose painful experience living under fascism caused him to explore the corrosive effects of late modern secularization. Central to his work is the thesis that the West’s secularization has left a religious void now filled by scientism and eroticism—ideologies that persecute religion, weaken cultural institutions, and leave the door open for totalitarian politics.16 Del Noce argues that as the twentieth century unfolded, historic Christianity lost its grip on the imagination of the Western elite, and scientism—the view that empirical science is the only rational path to achieving objective knowledge—moved in to fill the vacuum. As the only rational path, science becomes the primary cultural authority available to throw off the yoke of religious superstition. Scientism, in Del Noce’s view, is especially dangerous because it is a metaphysic that hides the fact that it is metaphysical. It feigns neutrality and displaces Christianity from the public square, all the while sneaking its own metaphysics in through the back door.17 Scientism persecutes religion indirectly, but effectively, by privatizing it. Scientism removes the thick religious and metaphysical significance of cultural institutions, making them mere instruments toward the end of satisfying people’s material and psychological needs. Once institutions lose their solidity and symbolic gravitas, the individual is left isolated, stranded beneath the state. With religion thus weakened and institutions instrumentalized, politics has no guardrails and is free to intrude into every aspect of society. What politics can do, Del Noce noted, politics will do. With regard to eroticism, Del Noce recognized that the real engine for emancipatory (progressive) politics is sex.18 The Sexual Revolution is utterly incompatible with the preservation of cultural heritage. Inherent to it is a drive to radically revise, and ultimately render impotent, the very institutions—church and family especially—that could protect the individual from the encroachments of the state. It uses freedom as a mask for its intention to

destroy religion and reduce the human being to a producer and consumer. If sex can be stripped of its religious and moral dimension, it can become a mere transaction, something produced and consumed, governed only by consensuality. Together, scientism and eroticism have created what Del Noce calls a “totalitarianism of disintegration.”19 Their reign slowly causes society to decompose.20 Politics is absolutized, having forced ethics and culture into a posture of submission.21 And with transcendent moral frameworks and cultural institutions thus neutered, the state rarely needs to resort to coercion because the progressive revolution has destroyed the very realities that could transcend politics. Thus emancipatory politics, with its totalitarianism of disintegration, makes us think we are being liberated when in fact it is enslaving us and persecuting us in the depths of our being.22 In response to this reality, Del Noce argues that Christians should draw on the gospel and the Western metaphysical tradition to redirect modernity toward its truer and better end—a genuine liberty, a freedom from unnecessary constraint and for a life of virtue.23 Thus the church should eschew the temptation to accommodate itself to modern ideologies that corrode religion by their very nature. Christians should resist the temptation to operate from a defensive posture, from a position of weakness, and instead draw on the church’s inner resources to serve the public good. In particular, the Christian community needs to set forth a public philosophy that reflects the religious dimension.

CHARLES TAYLOR’S EXISTENTIAL MAP Charles Taylor (b. 1931) is a Canadian philosopher whose writings, such as Malaise of Modernity and A Secular Age, explore the existential feel of living in the type of world that Rieff, Steiner, and Del Noce have described.24 In the late modern West, Taylor argues, people imagine life and manage life from within the “immanent frame,” with no real reference to the transcendent. But within an exclusively immanent frame, a person can take no solace in having a divine purpose or a transcendent meaning. Life has no sense of mystery, and there is no higher wisdom from which to draw. There is no divine revelation, no need for grace, and no possibility of personal transformation. If God is dead, we intuitively know that nothing matters. And this is a burden too heavy for us to bear. In the secular age in which we now live, Christianity has not only been displaced from the default position; it is also contested by myriad religions, ideologies, and takes on life. Not only does Christianity feel implausible and even unimaginable to nonreligious or otherreligious people, but all people—both religious and irreligious—have difficulty believing what they say they believe.25 As I have summarized elsewhere, This new context brings with it a new “feel” in which theists and non-theists alike are haunted by doubt. Within the immanent frame, we search for meaning, and find an explosion of different options. As a result, we are “fragilized”; surrounded by competing options in close proximity to ourselves,

we lack confidence in our own beliefs. We are “cross-pressured”; caught between the modern disenchantment of the world and the haunting of transcendence, we find ourselves in perpetual unease.26 This is the unique malaise of modernity. Fragmented and radically pluralized, our social order lacks any real order, and individuals lack the confidence of our own convictions. Taylor, a Catholic, urges Christians to avoid trying to prove Christianity’s truth in a secular age. Our time would be better spent by working to undercut our neighbors’ confidence in the secular take or spin on the world, and by encouraging them to be open to transcendence. The immanent frame of reference, after all, is wholly unnatural and is a severely inadequate source for meaning and morality, leaving our secular neighbors starving for transcendence.27 Thus, as our neighbors lose confidence in the secular take, we can offer Christianity as essential for personal identity and social order.

OUR SECULAR AGE Taken together, these four complementary maps portray our secular age as one in which the West—and especially its elites—has severed the connection between sacred order and social order, leaving the latter to float on its own. Having thus repudiated the theology and metaphysic that historically have shaped culture and society, chaos has ensued. We are left metaphysically alone in this world, experiencing life within an exclusively immanent frame of reference, our lives shorn of God-given meaning or transcendent norms. As the JudeoChristian framework disintegrates, secular ideologies and takes rush in to fill the void. In response to this desacralization, these four authors provide distinct, though complementary, paths out of our societal insanity. Rieff and Del Noce emphasize that we should not despair; although chaotic secularism is ascendant, there are cracks in the foundation and soon the building will collapse. Each, in his own way, encourages religious believers not to accommodate themselves to the failing modern project but rather to draw on the inner resources of their religious communities to help their society move forward through and beyond late modernity. Religious communities must lead the way in reenchanting the world, regaining the notion of transcendence, and recovering the beauty of the “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.” Rieff and Taylor encourage religious communities to undermine society’s confidence in the secular take and spin on reality; thus disconcerted, secular neighbors might be open to transcendence. Taylor especially urges believers to eschew the smug confidence and condescension of their secular age and instead to engage in a program of re-enchantment with humble confidence and genuine concern. Each of these four thinkers, but especially Steiner, instructs us to “wager on transcendence,” to live as if God exists.28 EXPLAINING PETERSON’S APPEAL BY MAPPING HIS RESPONSE TO THE CHAOS OF OUR SECULAR AGE

It is against this backdrop that Jordan Peterson enters the stage. And although there are many reasons for his popularity—his status as a secular psychologist, his response to certain hotbutton social movements and political issues, his ability to engage large audiences substantively and with genuine concern for their well-being—his primary appeal lies in the fact that he, like Rieff, Steiner, Del Noce, and Taylor, has unmasked secular modernity. What’s more, he has articulated a proposal for how to overcome it. In significant ways, Peterson is taking up the challenge articulated by our four thinkers: the challenge of resacralizing the West, of revisioning Christianity and repurposing Christian teaching for Western people caught in the malaise of modernity.

BRINGING ORDER TO CHAOS Like our four thinkers, Peterson recognizes that many of the West’s power brokers, together with social and political activists, are engaged in an attempt to bring the Christian moral order to its knees, weakening it and undermining its credibility. But public squares are never bereft of religious or ideological frameworks; thus, as Christianity is being decentered, multiple ideologies—such as secular progressivism, socialism, and the alt-right—are moving from the periphery toward the center. Moreover, Peterson argues, revolutionary ideologies reap unintended and sometimes devastating consequences, and thus the West should reject the revolutionary impulse and revive the Judeo-Christian worldview as a way of bringing order to chaos.29 One of the negative consequences of Christianity’s decentering is that individuals lack any sense of transcendent meaning or significance for their lives. In rule 2 of 12 Rules for Life, “Treat Yourself Like Someone You are Responsible for Helping,” Peterson hones in on that felt need, urging his readers to take responsibility for themselves and the world around them by making the world a little bit more like heaven and a little bit less like hell. “That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M,” Peterson writes. “That would justify your miserable existence. That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.”30 Similarly, in rule 12, “Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street,” Peterson encourages readers to find meaning in their lives not by pursuing pleasure but by locating their lives in the midst of the Bible’s story of the world. The Christian story of creation, fall, and redemption is, Peterson argues, like other religious narratives in that it represents a millennia-long attempt by our ancestors to provide sophisticated answers to life’s most serious questions: [Human beings] invented ritual. We started acting out our own experiences. Then we started to tell stories. We coded our observations of our own drama in these stories. In this manner, the information that was first only embedded in our behavior became represented in our stories. But we didn’t and still don’t understand what it all means. The Biblical narrative of Paradise and the Fall is

one such story, fabricated by our collective imagination, working over the centuries.31 Drawing on the biblical narrative, we can appropriate the wisdom inherited from our ancestors, a wisdom that orders our lives and teaches us to delay gratification, live virtuously, build society, and flourish.

REJECTING TOTALIZING SOLUTIONS Throughout his writings, Peterson warns of the dangers inherent in social revolutions. In rule 8, “Tell the Truth—Or, at Least, Don’t Lie,” Peterson urges his readers to live in the truth rather than succumbing to the temptation to embrace “life-lies.” Many of the patriarchs of social science, such as Viktor Frankl, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, were “centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, [and] came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.”32 Even innocent lies, Peterson argues, can eventually foster a great crisis. He illustrates the problem by drawing on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the Soviet Union. As Solzhenitsyn perceived, there was a direct connection between Soviet citizens’ proclivity to “falsify [their] own day-to-day experience [and] deny [their] own state-induced suffering” and the Soviet state’s ability to get away with tyranny and mass murder.33 The state could retain power and credibility because the people had learned to embrace small lies and eventually were willing to embrace big ones. Peterson sees a similar danger in the twenty-first-century West, arguing that modern political ideologies can claim for themselves a kind of final truth that compels them to deny any facts that might refute that finality: It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown. But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being.… That denial is the meaning of rebellion against “the most High.” That is what totalitarian means: Everything that needs to be discovered has been discovered.34 We see this totalitarian impulse most vividly, Peterson argues, in Western universities’ departments of humanities, many of which have been overtaken by Marxist humanism. The result is that all differences are considered the result of power, and power is the only way to overcome differences to achieve equality.35 Marxism is inherently totalizing, and, in fact, many of these universities explicitly aim to overturn comprehensively the culture that gave birth to them. Thus we should resist Marxist humanism and its demolition of our culture.

ADOPTING AS MUCH RESPONSIBILITY AS POSSIBLE In resisting the various ideologies that seek to fill the increasing vacuum left by Christianity’s decentering, Peterson urges individuals to adopt as much responsibility as they are able.36 This call for personal responsibility is one of the primary threads woven into 12 Rules. It is no accident that Peterson leads with rule 1, “Stand up Straight with Your Shoulders Back.” He means this both literally and figuratively. For instance, he describes how lobsters inhabit a dominance hierarchy in which posture cues (e.g., slouching, strutting) signal to other lobsters their perceived status in the hierarchy. Peterson argues that humans do the same thing: hierarchy is inherent to our societies, and human posture cues signal our status to others. What is true physically is also true socially and spiritually. We must recognize that we are spiritual beings whose lives should reflect that significance. Our metaphysical status demands that we stand up, that we voluntarily accept the burden of Being and determine to face life head-on in a way that pleases God.37 Even—and especially—when we are suffering, we should take stock and re-aim.38 When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it—often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus. If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague. The destination remains unproclaimed. The fog of uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world.39 It is up to us to reestablish order in the midst of chaos, which brings us to Peterson’s rule 6: “Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World.” No matter what circumstances we have inherited, we must stop blame-shifting, making excuses, or becoming cynical. Instead, we should clean up our own lives, stop doing what is wrong, and begin doing what is right.40

REVISIONING RELIGION AND REGAINING SOCIAL ORDER It should be clear by now why Peterson’s exhortations appeal to many Christians. Through his bestselling books and sold-out talks, Peterson has captivated the attention of our secular age, drawing attention to the Bible and the Christian tradition as he urges his readers not only to order their personal lives but also to help regain order on the societal level. But Peterson’s Christianity is not of the historic and orthodox variety. It is a Christianity revised for our modern secular age. For example, Peterson recognizes the Bible as the founding document of Western civilization, but views the Bible’s origin and durability in Jungian and Darwinian categories: The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of

good and evil). It’s the product of processes that remain fundamentally beyond our comprehension. The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It’s a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which itself is the product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time. Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other matter.41 Similarly, while he recognizes New Testament teaching as vital to the West’s growth and health, he refuses to affirm its truth. Rather, the ethics of the New Testament are, for Peterson, useful. He writes that to follow its teaching is “to aim at the Improvement of Being with a capital ‘I’ and a capital ‘B.’ ”42 This is a worthwhile aim, but hardly an accurate summation of what the Bible has to say about the way we order our lives. To adhere to Christian imperatives in our late modern age must mean more than improving our being. It must mean believing in God as if he were really there and treating the Bible as if it were really true.43 Consider the way Peterson employs scriptural reasoning in rule 2 to exhort his readers to cultivate self-respect. He begins by pointing out that the ancient worldview reduces to an irresolvable but necessary tension between Chaos and Order. The Bible’s creation account, he avers, is an iteration of the ancient worldview. It should be viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology as a narrative that accounts for moral self-consciousness. Just as Adam was unwilling—as reflected in his shame and hiding—to walk with God, so we feel a sense of shame and share an aversion to walk with God. The solution to this shame, Peterson argues, is to trace the Bible’s redemptive arc toward the New Testament, where we realize that Christ embodies the way forward, revealing to us the path of virtuous self-sacrifice, acceptance of finitude, and heroic perseverance on the hard path of suffering. Instead of victimizing ourselves, we take responsibility and move forward.44 In Peterson’s construal of the biblical narrative, the ultimate act of responsibility is to live as Jesus lived, to overcome the types of temptations Jesus faced in the desert, to throw off the desire for earthly power. Instead of seeking an earthly kingdom—one in which we “control and order everyone and everything”—we should seek to establish God’s kingdom on earth: There is a powerful call to proper Being in the story of the third temptation. To obtain the greatest possible prize—the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, the resurrection of Paradise—the individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike, no matter how powerfully and convincingly and realistically those are offered, and dispense, as well with the temptations of evil.45

Indeed, the establishment of God’s kingdom requires us to act like the spiritual beings we are, to act as if to please God.46 In doing so, our personal lives acquire meaning and our society a value system that points us to a higher order, stabilizes us, and causes us to flourish.47 Whether such a project can be maintained remains to be seen. But the careful reader will recognize that this approach to biblical ethics frequently omits central orthodox themes— such as the necessity of Christ’s atoning death and the bodily nature of his resurrection— while importing psychological categories not friendly to orthodoxy. IS JORDAN PETERSON THE HIGH PRIEST WE NEED? Peterson speaks as a social scientist. In our secular age, this is like speaking as a high priest. In an era in which religious authority has been diminished and decentered, social science has moved to the center. Economists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists—all use hard data to draw their conclusions about human being and personal identity. As a psychotherapist, Peterson is received as a sort of high priest whose life-coaching combines the cultural authority of the social sciences with the spiritual appeal of religious intimations. Peterson’s disposition adds to this mystique. Numerous analyses of Peterson’s appeal point to his penchant for deep listening, for his ability to understand the other. He demonstrates his ability to listen not only on a societal level—as evidenced by his grasp of the inner logic and appeal of Marxist intersectional identity politics—but also on the interpersonal level. Peterson’s education and experience as a psychotherapist have fostered in him the ability to listen, to sympathize, and to communicate with other people in a way that cultivates genuine respect and dialogue.48 (Even though Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who has published more than a hundred scientific papers in his field, he—unlike most tenured psychology professors at research universities—has maintained an active clinical practice, seeing up to twenty patients per week.) In fact, it is not uncommon for commentators to note that Peterson’s approach resembles that of a religious prophet, priest, or pastor.49 Thus it is not surprising to find that Peterson is popular among conservative twentysomething males and other disaffected castaways of secular modernity. These are the people who hunger for the security of meaning and significance, and they seem to sense that Peterson has found it. Consider the March 2019 scene at a large Christian university where Peterson’s convocation speech was interrupted by a young man desperate for help and to “know [Peterson] better.”50 We know little about the young man’s background, but his desperation and the hope he attributes to Peterson illustrates well the angst of those awash in modernity. Likewise Peterson, placing a comforting hand on the man as the university chaplain prays for him, reveals a genuine pastoral care befitting of the role in which he has been cast.51 To his credit, Peterson’s encouragement of Westerners to live as if transcendent meaning exists, and his declaration that such transcendence finds its greatest expression in the Judeo-

Christian tradition, is a powerful antidote to the chaos of secular modernity. To live as if transcendent truths really exist is to provide a tangible existential buttress against our culture’s slide into confusion, despair, and nihilism. Indeed, as Christians we can affirm that living as if God exists can result in net benefits for society as they can lead individuals in the direction of actual faith and it can, albeit superficially, keep chaos at bay in order to allow social institutions, such as churches or Christian universities, to flourish. However, there is also a danger in this, as individuals can easily place their faith in the power of civil religion itself, and never move beyond to personal belief in God himself, which provides the transcendent meaning and which alone grounds social order. In this sense, Peterson’s solution is insubstantial. Metaphysically, it is little more than a banquet of crushed ice and vapor. Living as if God exists might temporarily bring some order to the chaos, but it cannot, in the end, solve the problem. Peterson wants us to genuinely live as if there is a God because he understands well the disastrous consequences of desacralization. But what good is Rieff’s “vertical in authority” if what stands above us is only a projection devised by the ancients, an evolutionarily useful figment of the imagination? As a high priest of traditional Western values, Peterson’s temple ultimately is no less empty than the secularists against whom he prophesies. To draw on Taylor’s terminology, Peterson seems to find historic Christian teaching rather implausible. Ultimately, Peterson is right about many things, but not always for the right reasons, from within the Christian perspective. Indeed, we cannot live meaningfully without meaning having been bestowed from above. The very reason that belief in God is a personal and societal good is not because belief itself is worth anything, but because there actually is a God who created the world and endows it with meaning and significance. For Christians, therefore, the encouragement we should gain from Peterson’s example is not first or foremost that he has advice we should follow. Instead, his meteoric rise is proof that many of our secular or nominally Christian neighbors are experiencing a moment in which their hunger for transcendence is evident. Peterson’s sold-out talks, bestselling books, and gargantuan social media stats are evidence that our neighbors are recognizing the malaise of our secular age and are, it seems, willing to live as if God exists and the biblical narrative is mythically true. But, as Scripture teaches, if Christ has not really risen, then our as if is futile (1 Corinthians 15:17). This provides for Christians a golden opportunity to stand up straight with our shoulders back, extending to our neighbors the good news “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4 NASB). He is risen, and he is the high priest we so desperately need (Hebrews 4:14–16).

2 Jordan Peterson the Counter-Revolutionary: Marxism, Postmodern Neo-Marxism, and Suffering HUNTER BAKER

In Dean Koontz’s novel The Silent Corner, the female protagonist speaks of her young son and the kind of world in which she hopes he can live and grow: “I want for him a world where people mean more than ideas. No swastikas, no hammer-and-sickles, no bowing down to inhumane theories that result in tens of millions dead.”1 The Canadian psychologist and social media phenomenon Jordan Peterson has expressed his own convictions in almost identical terms. He remembers the great totalitarian threats to human liberty and flourishing that delivered catastrophic levels of death and slavery to those caught in their sway in a relatively short period, and references them often. His view of totalitarianism is more holistic than that of younger generations. While Hitler and his National Socialists absorb the lion’s share of the blame in today’s popular imagination, Peterson relentlessly points to the cruel legacies of the Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin and his Chinese counterpart Mao Zedong.2 He insists on the moral equivalence of the Communists of Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and North Korea, and the National Socialists of Germany. Though some would excuse the former group for having better intentions—they sought the economic liberation of mankind as opposed to Hitler’s racist vision—Peterson believes the Communists lost their moral authority once the fruit of their ideology began to be evident and the body count grew exponentially. From his perspective, those who fail to see the “murderous” nature of Communist regimes show an ignorance of history that is “a kind of a miracle.”3 In the wake of the passing of the macro-tragedies authored by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Peterson points to the contemporary lack of freedom in North Korea and the slow starvation of Venezuelans as its government resorts to ever-moredramatic interventions, with diminishing effectiveness. There is a kind of prudence that should come now that “we’ve run the experiment.”4 By itself, Peterson’s focus on maintaining the critique of the Communist side of the Communist/National Socialist disaster of the twentieth century is important. There is little question that our popular historical memory is strong on Hitler and weak on Stalin and Mao, despite the impressive body counts compiled by the latter two. Peterson’s broad view of totalitarianism resembles that of Peter Drucker, who in his early work understood both

Communism and Nazism as social organizations that set themselves up as substitutes for existing structures and promised to exorcise demons of unemployment and inequality. In both cases, party membership offered a way to reinvent oneself and achieve a kind of liberation from ordinary economics.5 While his insistence on remembering historic atrocities is intense and clearly heartfelt, Peterson is more than a chronicler of the evils of collectivist totalitarianism in the mode of The Black Book of Communism. He can perhaps be more accurately seen as a man who spies a glowing ember remaining in an otherwise extinguished fire. Unless it is put out, the ember may flare up into an inferno that once again engulfs its surroundings. While the giant machines of state Communism had spent their force by the end of the twentieth century, thus appearing to open the door to a promising “end of history” in which humankind would enjoy the broad freedoms offered by democratic republics, the essential threat has not been eliminated.6 The reason it has not been eliminated is that there are intellectuals, academicians, and activists blowing on the embers of the old Marxism. The fire is beginning once more to grow. The threat has not been rendered fully inert, Peterson observes, because it reached a point of transition. Just when Communism began to show cracks in the face of devastating real-world results, disappointed utopians sought another way forward. Marxism shed its old skin and morphed into something new, but related. Peterson refers to the new thing in a variety of ways, but the most common descriptors are postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and identity politics. The commonality Peterson sees between the evolved Marxism and its predecessor is the dangerous tendency to read the world through a single lens: that of social oppression. Where Marxism located this oppression in a world-historical economic conflict between social classes, the new Marxism focuses its analysis on race and gender, and formulates its campaign accordingly. In both cases, the problem is the same. Human beings are deluding themselves through a sometimes self-flattering scapegoating of others, and in so doing may achieve apparent victories that prove damaging to virtually the whole of society. Though the packaging is different, the analysis is largely the same, as is the program of resentment. Rather than wait to see what rotten fruit will form on the vine, Peterson counsels us to confront reality and fiercely oppose those who subvert (often at public expense) a society that deserves more credit than it receives. Neo-Marxism will topple competence in favor of ideological constructs that will disappoint tremendously in terms of actual performance. In order to better understand Peterson’s critique of this threat, it is helpful to begin with the dichotomy he sets out between the Judeo-Christian account of suffering and the Marxist account. Though Peterson does not claim to be a Christian, he sees the Bible as a source of powerful insights about the nature of human beings and the lives they lead. THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN AND MARXIST ACCOUNTS OF SUFFERING When Peterson looks at Genesis, he sees Adam and Eve as something other than human prior

to the fall. They don’t possess self-consciousness. Neither are they physically vulnerable or in need. But after they eat the forbidden fruit, they become aware of their nakedness, their fragility, and their mortality. That is when they become the only self-conscious animals in the creation. Their vulnerability exposes both good and evil. They become aware of their own vulnerability, which turns them into workers as they labor against their own weakness. Thus they must work for food, for clothing, for shelter, and for anything else they need. It is important to understand that this project of work against vulnerability reveals suffering simply to be part of life. To live is to be one who suffers. Suffering is built in to the structure of self-conscious being. In consequence, Peterson deduces that suffering is not primarily sociological in nature.7 In other words, suffering cannot be expelled like some foul spirit if only we were to implement the right ideological vision. The work we do in response to vulnerability is good in the sense that we may labor for ourselves, but also for others. Work can be a way of giving and loving. Those who work accept the reality before them and respond to it constructively. They choose to live and to help others live. But this awareness of vulnerability has a dark side as well. Once we are aware of the vulnerability of others, we can potentially prey on their weakness. Like Cain, we can let in a bitter, tormented spirit arising from our jealousy and resentment (especially due to comparing ourselves to others). The result is the murder of Abel. Peterson calls the tale of one brother murdering the other the first story of actual human beings. Adam and Eve weren’t born vulnerable. Cain and Abel were. They are human beings as we know them. By contrast, according to Peterson, the Marxist account of suffering depends primarily on the idea of suffering as a consequence of oppression.8 In classic Marxism, the workers are oppressed by the owners of capital. Utopia, in the form of happiness and freedom from oppression, will come when the oppressors are defeated. Utopia is a goal worth achieving even at a very high cost. Therefore, virtually anything is justified in order to put down the oppressors. On this account, suffering is sociological in nature. It is imposed on the poor, who are disenfranchised by the wealthy. The promise of utopia is that we will do away with suffering when we adopt and implement the correct way of thinking about politics and society. Holding the two accounts side by side, Peterson judges the Judeo-Christian version to be more true to our experience and knowledge of ourselves. He critiques the Marxist version in terms of both its motivation and its results. Without explicitly saying so, he seems to identify the Judeo-Christian account with the long development of prosperity, the rule of law, and human rights and freedoms that have taken root in much of the Western world and in some other parts of the globe. But the Marxist account, while separate from the Judeo-Christian account, is connected to it. Peterson links the Marxist way of thinking less to compassion for the poor and working class and more to hatred and resentment.9 In other words, the Marxist understanding of the cause of suffering goes right back to Cain and his envy of Abel. For Peterson, Cain’s

bitterness corresponds to the classic Marxist hostility to the bourgeoisie and their conventional lives. While Peterson tips his hat in the direction of Canadian sensibilities with regard to national health care and advocacy for workers, he appears to approve of them in prudential terms rather than as part of a strong ideological vision.10 When he looks at stronger versions of statist philosophy, particularly those steeped in Communist theory, he finds a legacy of slavery, starvation, imprisonment, and execution.11 The Marxist theory partakes of Cain’s envy and ends with a willingness to sanction murder (even on a mass scale) in order to right the wrongs it perceives. PETERSON, PRUDENCE, AND SOCIAL REALITIES Jordan Peterson roots many of his views in his interpretation of social-scientific discoveries about human beings. For example, he often states that the two primary predictors of success in life are intelligence quotient (IQ) and conscientiousness. Another finding to which he frequently refers is the economist Vilfredo Pareto’s law of income distribution.12 The initial observation Pareto made was that 80 percent of land in Italy was owned in his time by about 20 percent of the population. When he considered some other national ownership ratios, he found the same distribution roughly repeated.13 The American managerial thinker Joseph Juran later popularized Pareto’s law by writing and speaking about the 80/20 principle, which theoretically applies to many contexts.14 For example, it is suggested that 20 percent of computer bugs result in 80 percent of the crashes. More broadly, the idea is that the few (good or bad) can drive large effects (good or bad), while the rest are significantly less consequential. Peterson takes the Pareto principle to suggest that outsize rewards in wealth, money, and other areas occur in a seminatural way so as to incentivize contribution from talented, driven people.15 Marxists, then, by virtue of their assumption that economic inequality is the result of oppression, misdiagnose what is really happening. Peterson believes that intelligence, conscientiousness, and other virtuous behaviors drive achievement. Another way to look at it is in terms of competence, which is a word Peterson returns to with some frequency.16 Competence drives achievement. Achievement results in gains for the broader community. The community of concern willingly (mostly through market mechanisms) sanctions success for competent individuals because it prefers to benefit from their efforts. In the same way that music fans pay more for a ticket to a U2 concert than they would for an Eagles cover band in a local club, we are willing (though often indirectly) to pay more to the few who make the biggest difference with their work. Because of the Marxist misunderstanding of unequal economic rewards as an act of oppression rather than as a productive system of incentivization, they disrupt the Pareto distribution. Disrupting the distribution of high rewards for high competence then leads to starvation, scarcity, and excessively high levels of political repression as revolutionaries attempt to hold on to power despite essentially failing in the task of governing for the good of

the people. THE PIVOT TO POSTMODERNISM AND NEO-MARXISM The 1980s and 1990s proved to be the era of terminal decline for the largest Communist experiments. The Soviet Union collapsed. Eastern European countries regained their sovereignty. The Chinese Communist Party retained the name, but under Deng Xiaoping embarked on something much more like the state-sponsored capitalism that continues to enrich the nation and turn it into a massive economic power. Cuba has struggled without the massive aid infusions and favorable trade it once received from the Soviets. North Korea operates as something of a militaristic pariah state ruled by a single family at the expense of its people, who live a marginal existence in comparison to their thriving neighbors in South Korea. Venezuela, sitting on some of the richest oil reserves on the planet, appears to be collapsing after a couple of decades of Marxist-inspired governance. Peterson interprets left-wing intellectuals as having anticipated the failure of a Marxism based on economics for some time before the failure of the Soviet Union. In his mind, a pivot took place in which Marxism transitioned into neo-Marxism and postmodernism.17 By the time democratic capitalism appeared to have triumphed over the Marxist competition, postmodernism was well into its development and had spawned many thinkers, writings, and fields of study over a period of decades. It would be possible to write entire books deciphering the meaning of terms such as “postmodernism,” “deconstructionism,” “neo-Marxism,” and so on. I once heard a colleague recall that the historian George Marsden began a talk by saying, “Postmodernism … and I guess I can define that any way I want …” Or one might think of the headline from the satirical newspaper the Onion: “Jacques Derrida ‘Dies,’ If ‘Death’ Can be Said to Mean Anything.”18 Postmodernism is probably best understood as a reaction to modernity or the Enlightenment. If we take modernity to be the victory of scientific reasoning (including social-scientific reasoning) over the more religious and/or natural-law-based thinking of the Middle Ages, then postmodernism is the critique of modernity’s confidence in reason. To be specific, postmodernism questions the degree to which there is a single version of the truth (even if arrived at via reason) to which we are all obliged to defer. Jean-François Lyotard argued that “there is no politics of reason, neither in the sense of a totalizing reason nor in that of the concept. And so we must do with a politics of opinion.”19 Maybe the best word on which to focus in Lyotard’s statement is “totalizing.” Postmodernism would hold that there is no version of reason (in politics or anything else, such as literature) that comprehends everything. If our reason cannot comprehend everything, then it is always partial. There will always be things that are unknown, ignored, misunderstood, and misrepresented. Postmodernism is, then, a critique of the Western world’s seeming assumption (particularly in the mid-twentieth century) that modern science had made it possible to successfully manage both man and nature to their best uses. With postmodernism’s skepticism about truth claims comes its sensitivity to power

dynamics. What lies behind truth claims, the postmodernist may conclude, is a narrative set forth by the rich and powerful. They will promote the truth, which is at best a truth, and likely a self-serving truth. If there is no clear truth, but rather a contest of narratives, then the nature of reality (as far as we can understand it, anyway) is simply a struggle for power. The reader may already see a potential point of connection between Marxism and postmodernism. Peterson does not seek to be a scholar of postmodernism in the way a philosopher or literary critic might. Rather, he specifically encounters postmodernism (and neo-Marxism, tied to its hip) as threats to the flourishing of human beings and the cultural achievements of centuries. In this way, he is much like the character portrayed by the actor Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. PETERSON AND POSTMODERNISM In the late sixties and early seventies, Heston starred in an informal trilogy of end-of-theworld thrillers: Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). In The Omega Man, based on the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend,20 Heston plays a physician who has survived a plague that has killed much of humanity and left the rest in a light-avoiding, violent state. Heston’s character lives in a downtown department store that he has fortified. Each night, he dines among the relics of the old Enlightenment world as the barbarian hordes stand outside his home in what almost appears to be a mass protest. They rail against the “man of the wheel” (in other words, the man of technology) and periodically attempt to surmount his defenses. There is a real sense in which he is the last man in the world, the steward of what remains of the West’s spiritual, philosophical, and scientific achievements. It is hard to miss the resemblance of the night-dwelling plague survivors in the film to mass-protesting hippies of the time. One might see Heston’s physician character as a kind of Enlightenment Christ figure who sacrifices himself to provide a cure to a handful of uninfected youths through his scientific acumen. What Heston did as an actor in a 1970s thriller, Jordan Peterson seems to rehearse as a new millennium YouTube star. He is not a physician, but as a clinical psychologist he’s in the neighborhood. And while he doesn’t offer a serum to cure a physical illness, he is out to heal corrupted minds and vaccinate the young against diseases of the mind before they begin. He seeks to teach them to accept suffering as a part of self-conscious being and to avoid the temptation to emulate Cain’s bitterness and murderous rage. As part of the work, he endures the slings and arrows of the postmodernists and neo-Marxists who seek to end his public influence through accusations of racism, sexism, transphobia, and so on. As Heston’s character was brought into the crisis by the nature of the age, so too is Peterson. He is a creature of the academy and fully committed to methods of social-scientific inquiry. His talks are full of references to the results of various studies that seek to isolate variables, to separate spurious influences from legitimate ones, and to add to our knowledge of human behavior. He has discoursed on, of all things, the morality of rats and chimpanzees and the contests held between lobsters as evolution does its endless work of refinement.21

Although he stands for modernity’s ideal of the academy, the academy appears largely to reject him for his refusal to get with the progressive program regarding things such as sexuality and privilege. The social sciences seem, in his mind, to have moved into postmodernity and to have rejected their own dispassionate search for truth in favor of grievance studies and advocacy. He repeatedly complains that women’s studies, gender studies, and other related programs are pseudo-disciplines that lack a clear investigatory method for establishing the truth of claims.22 Of course, from the perspective of his opponents, to offer such a complaint is to buy into a Western rationalistic empiricism put into the service of structures of power that are resistant to needed change. Peterson’s chief critique of postmodernism appears to focus on its belief that with regard to any text—or, for that matter, the world in general—there are an infinite number of interpretations. First, accepting such a view would leave one unable to act in the world. How would anyone choose which interpretation on which to act? Second, while possibilities for interpretation may be infinite, there is a much smaller number of credible interpretations. Some of the constraints that make an interpretation functional for our use in understanding the world are biological and social.23 At this point, Peterson’s high-profile resistance to Canada’s Bill C-16 comes into focus. For a man to act as though he can be a woman (or vice versa) and seek to require others to give recognition to that fact under the coercive force of penalties prescribed by law potentially disregards social and biological factors that render the world coherent to those who live in it. In essence, to make such a concession mandated by law could be taken to mean that others have the ability to control one’s view of reality in ways one does not find credible. THE PARETO PRINCIPLE AND POSTMODERN NEO-MARXISM If the primary problem Jordan Peterson has with postmodernism is that it creates an interpretive crisis for anyone attempting to live in the world, then another problem arises with regard to the real-world impact of permitting postmodern neo-Marxists to apply their frame to living together in society. Remember that Peterson takes the Pareto distribution (the idea of 80 percent of wealth goes to the top 20 percent of value creators) to relate largely to the exercise of competence. In other words, much of what is involved in obtaining wealth and power is not due to arbitrary factors. Rather, he believes that success, financial and otherwise, largely accrues to those who demonstrate their ability to get things done, whether that be through innovation, management, skillful execution, unique talents, or other factors. Over the course of thousands of years, we have arrived at social models that largely operate on meritocratic criteria. More than at any previous time, it would seem that the talented individual can rise without arbitrary constraints (slavery, formal aristocracy, caste systems, lack of access to education) hindering their success. That doesn’t mean modern systems are perfect, but simply that they are more free than most alternatives and more likely to reward merit than those that preceded them.

In one of his lectures, Peterson relates a story about a young woman from the Middle East who goes to the Netherlands and is astonished to find that a bus arrives almost exactly at the time it is supposed to get there.24 His audience begins to laugh, but Peterson affirms her view. It is an amazing happening. So much has to be going right in a society for a system of transportation to operate on a schedule. We tend to take such things for granted almost as if they were part of the landscape in a region we’ve known well all over lives. We can rely on things such as complex systems of transportation that generally and reliably adhere to schedules because we put a premium on meritocratic policies that maintain competence as an important priority. Systems that fail, according to Peterson, are those that prize something other than competence. Those who hold power and authority typically do so with a fairly strong expectation (at least in the West) that they will provide important goods and render valuable service in return. Hierarchies crumble, then, when they are corrupted to the point of incompetence. It could be that they become overly hedonistic, that they become so divorced from the common experience they don’t even know what they should be doing, that they lose sight of any sense of the social good, or any of a variety of other corrupting influences. But the same threat to competence lurks within postmodern neo-Marxism. By focusing on grievance, purported racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or whatever other frame related to oppression, the promoters of the neo-Marxist view encourage us to think in terms of group representation rather than in terms of meritocratic competence. The result will be that competence will be pushed to the side just as it is in other corrupted hierarchies. An emphasis on power will lead to competence being marginalized as the primary factor in how we hire, promote, allocate resources, and so on.25 Peterson’s concern goes beyond his worries that elastic interpretations will impugn his integrity as a person experiencing and making sense of the world and that neo-Marxist modes of analysis will corrupt a social system won at great price over time so that competence suffers. Within the neo-Marxist mind, he detects the presence of the spirit he associates with Cain. Peterson notes that neo-Marxists (or critical race theorists or gender theorists, etc.) decide which categories count when analyzing inequality. Certainly, we can look at representation, income success, and other variables based on sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, family structure, and other categories we might typically observe. But why only those? Could we look at intelligence, attractiveness, health, charisma, neurotypicality, height, weight, and other important features of a person? Is there a pretty privilege, a thin privilege, a pleasant-personality privilege, a tall privilege? Why focus on the groups that are typically the subject of identity politics? And why limit our inquiry to things such as representation in professions and pay rates? Peterson notes that perhaps the most blatant discrimination practiced in our society is sexual in nature.26 In other words, we discriminate boldly and unapologetically when it comes to those with whom we have sex. Do we anticipate a world in which sexual discrimination of the most direct type (the immediate, interpersonal, and biologic type) would be the stuff of critical academic research aimed at remediating inequalities? So far we see it only in science fiction.

Peterson extends his critique by questioning the way diversity is offered as a net social or institutional advantage. As an example, one might think of the argument that a business or organization would benefit from having more employees of a particular race, gender, or ethnicity. But Peterson argues that diversity is not denominated primarily by group. Instead, we experience diversity more on the individual level. It is trait-based in nature. Arguing that races and sexes have traits would seem to run afoul of the arguments against stereotyping people by their group identity. The individual, per Peterson, is the ultimate minority.27 Peterson perceives an attempt to gain power by choosing the categories by which the society’s justice is evaluated in such a way as to organize opposition. The opposition will have the task of subverting the established system.28 Peterson’s objection to the revolutionary task is both pragmatic and principled. Pragmatically speaking, he takes a view of society and its institutions that is rooted in the thought of Edmund Burke. He is a conservative in the sense that he sees value in traditions and established ways of living. Society, as we experience it, is the result of at least thousands of years of refinement and reform, keeping the good and slowly weeding out the bad. While Peterson accepts the need for change and indeed endorses incremental improvement, he believes that the twentieth century thoroughly demonstrated the danger of revolutionary shifts driven by the power of seductive, propaganda-driven ideology. In terms of principle, Peterson objects to the work of postmodern neo-Marxists because he believes they actually use the resources of the established system against itself. Stated differently, he finds it problematic that faculty members who are tenured, paid, and given access to students through a largely public system then actively work to subvert the very institutional context in which they operate. The economist Joseph Schumpeter mentioned something similar in his prophecy regarding the failure of capitalism. He felt the wealth of capitalistic society increases access to education and the number of intellectuals. The intellectuals would then use their positions and influence to turn young people against the system.29 What Schumpeter observed with dismay Peterson wants to prevent. His program is to expose the postmodern neo-Marxism that runs beneath the notice of most people outside of the academy or left-wing politics. At one point, he discussed publicizing courses and professors teaching postmodern content in order to help parents and students to avoid giving radical programs a platform through which to exert influence.30 CONCLUSION Jordan Peterson’s description of and case against postmodern neo-Marxism is more of a provocation than a comprehensive argument. He writes and speaks as a polemicist rather than as a cold analyst, aiming to shout into a deadening fog of apathy and to awaken sleepers before they find themselves, like Rip van Winkle, in a world they don’t recognize. Peterson distrusts the people he identifies as postmodern practitioners of identity politics because he sees the Judeo-Christian account of suffering as more true to human experience than the Marxist account. As I talked about Peterson’s opposition to totalitarianism with a

colleague, he reminded me of a trenchant observation Reinhold Niebuhr offered as he wrote from the very heart of the totalitarian period Peterson keeps in mind: One school holds that men would be good if only political institutions would not corrupt them; another believes that they would be good if the prior evil of faulty economic organization could be eliminated. Or another school thinks of this evil as no more than ignorance, and therefore waits for a more perfect educational process to redeem man from his partial and particular loyalties. But no school asks how it is that an essentially good man could have produced corrupting and tyrannical political organizations, or fanatical and superstitious religious organizations.31 In other words, locating the source of evil exclusively outside oneself leads to hatred and resentment. Given this, it is probably the wiser course of action to believe that would-be revolutionaries are not angels and may be more dangerous by dint of their apparent assumption of their own righteousness and enlightenment. It is better to begin with the understanding that we contend not only against the ignorance or evil of others, but also against ourselves. The heart of the matter has to do with our hearts. Do we really understand ourselves? Or do we give in to the sin of pride in its most flattering and attractive forms? Peterson sometimes refers to “the sin against the Holy Ghost.” That appears to be a reference to Mark 3:28–29, which states that “all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (ESV). In Peterson’s hands, the unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit takes the form of a human being lying to himself about the temptations associated with power. He considers the person who contemplates the ruin of totalitarianism in Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere and yet confidently thinks, “It would have been different if I had been in charge.”32 For Peterson, this delusion leads to the sort of totalitarianism that left tens of millions dead in the previous century.

3 Language and Freedom: Peterson as Champion of Free Speech (and Freedom from Compelled Speech) ALASTAIR ROBERTS

Jordan Peterson’s initial rise to public prominence in the fall of 2016 was in large measure on account of his defense of the principle of free speech in his resistance to the passing of Bill C-16.1 The defense, exposition, and elevation of this principle has been a continuing theme in Peterson’s subsequent work. Bill C-16 was an act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and its Criminal Code, adding gender identity and expression as prohibited grounds for discrimination. Peterson’s primary concern with the bill was that, taken alongside the Ontario Human Rights Code, a failure to employ someone’s preferred pronouns could make both a person and their employer liable to prosecution. This was tantamount to compelled speech, which threatens free speech by requiring people to say something they might not actually believe. Coupled with this, Peterson maintained that, by requiring the use of preferred pronouns, the bill was also prematurely shutting down a debate on sex and gender that was far from settled. Indeed, in the relevant sciences, he contended, the social-constructionist position on gender was manifestly weak. To Peterson, by resorting to the law to secure the indefeasibility of a stance that was taking a pummeling in the arena of scientific discourse, the “postmodern neo-Marxist” supporters of Bill C-16 displayed their disregard for the spirit of free inquiry and speech Western civilization has historically protected. THE DETERRENCE OF FREE SPEECH Some legal experts challenged Peterson’s interpretation of the implications of Bill C-16.2 However, if Peterson was unclear concerning the legal ramifications of such legislation, he was not the only one: Peterson’s employer, the University of Toronto, sent him two letters warning him that his statements in criticism of the bill might be in contravention of both the law and the university’s policies.3 The lack of clarity concerning the scope of such a law, an intensification of institutional policies relating to a growing array of areas of potential discrimination, and the spread of highly litigious forms of activism combine to produce a chilling environment for public and academic discourse. Even if the law or institutional policies would not ultimately support a

complaint, growing uncertainty on the matter makes people too nervous to venture far out onto the thinning ice of the lake of discourse. A subsequent event at Wilfrid Laurier University in November 2017 illustrated this problem. Lindsay Shepherd, a teaching assistant at the university, used a clip from Peterson’s discussion of Bill C-16 to encourage conversation among her students. She was later summoned to a private meeting with three of her supervisors, who claimed that by using this clip she was creating a toxic environment; her actions supposedly violated Bill C-16 (which had been enacted into law in June of that year) and were comparable to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.”4 While the university later apologized, the incident received a great deal of public attention and seemed to justify some of Peterson’s arguments against the bill.5 The efficacy of law is not found solely in its capacity to successfully prosecute offenders, but also in its capacity as a deterrent. Irrespective of the arguments for and against the potential of Bill C-16 to lead to the prosecution of people who failed to use preferred pronouns, the potential of the act to deter any criticism of trans persons and their ideological claims was amply demonstrated by the University of Toronto’s warning letters to Peterson and the events at Wilfrid Laurier. Where the right of free speech is not firmly and unequivocally enshrined in law and society, a culture of free speech can easily fall by the wayside, even though few if any people may have been prosecuted. Few people are prepared to risk the loss of their employment and the ordeal of legal proceedings without some compelling reason. Peterson may have enjoyed the protection afforded by tenure in his dealings with the University of Toronto, but Shepherd was an economically vulnerable member of the academic precariat. Shepherd has since sued Wilfrid Laurier University, claiming that its treatment of her had “rendered her unemployable in academia.”6 Peterson has also launched a defamation lawsuit against Wilfrid Laurier in hope that this will strengthen free speech on campus, provoking predictable accusations of hypocrisy.7 OUR FAILING ECOSYSTEM OF SPEECH The range of ideas tolerated in a society’s public discourse will naturally shrink both when its journalists, academics, and other public voices are more vulnerable socially and economically, and where the bounds of legally, institutionally, and socially acceptable speech become less clear or more constrictive. The social structures upholding free speech are not confined to the legal (and, as I have already highlighted, the law’s role in upholding free speech requires not merely its nonprosecution, but also care not to deter it). A healthy culture of speech depends for its survival on a plurality of conditions, and contemporary threats to the West’s culture of speech are functioning on multiple fronts. Niall Gooch writes, “Defenders of free speech are arguing not only for free speech as an abstraction, but a wider culture of honest debate, factual argument, respectful disagreement, and civilised coexistence with people who see the world very differently from us.”8

In an American context, the concept of free speech is too often narrowly focused on the First Amendment to the Constitution, leaving considerable scope for assaults on speech through means other than government legislation. Institutional policies, the weaponization of outrage on social media and elsewhere, no-platforming or harassing of controversial speakers, doxing and attacks on people’s livelihoods, the establishment of new highly restrictive cultural orthodoxies, and various other means of closing down or freezing out unwelcome voices can all be leveraged against free speech, even in a society supposedly protected by the First Amendment. In a conversation with Camille Paglia, Peterson compared the current academic culture to the herding of zebras.9 Referencing research suggesting that zebras’ stripes exist not to camouflage them within the environment of the veldt but so that they blend in with a larger herd and are less likely to be picked off by predators, Peterson suggests that academics form herdlike groups for much the same reason. Being too identifiable in an increasingly exposed and economical insecure environment—using language or holding unpopular positions that make them stand out from the herd—would place an academic at risk of being socially ostracized and losing their livelihood. As Kevin Birmingham observed in a devastating indictment of the prevailing culture of the humanities, The privilege of tenure used to confer academic freedom through job security. By now, decades of adjunctification have made the professoriate fearful, insular, and conformist. According to the AAUP, adjunct faculty are about half as likely to undertake risky research projects, and the timidity moves up the ladder. “Professionalization” means retrofitting your research so that it accommodates the critical fads that will make you marginally more employable. It means cutting and adding chapters so that feathers remain unruffled. Junior faculty play it safe—conceptually, politically, and formally —because they write for job and tenure committees rather than for readers. Publications serve careers before they serve culture.10 As colleges increasingly function as businesses serving consumers, the institutional power of academic staff relative to students and administration will be drastically reduced, as will the security of their employment. As colleges evolve away from being formative institutions, in the direction of academic service providers to consumers who must be satisfied, administrators—who now fundamentally control the direction of their institutions— are much more likely to stifle the academic freedom of teaching staff in order to provide an experience optimized for students’ increasingly demanding preferences.11 The rise of social media has also greatly increased the social judgment to which people are exposed, as well as the possibility of public opinion being leveraged forcefully to close down unpopular or politically incorrect opinions and silence those who hold them. People’s greater exposure to social judgment and vulnerability to the threat of exclusion, negative judgment, and other social sanctions is gradually choking out a culture of free speech in many circles and encouraging a sort of performative conformity.

The breadth and variety of the threats to free speech in contemporary Western society must be considered. Many of them are not direct assaults, but are, at least in some measure, an inadvertent consequence of changing social, economic, institutional, and technological conditions. The struggle for free speech may not be as simple as a conflict between bad guys and good guys, but may be something closer to the quest for a new equilibrium in a disrupted ecosystem. FREE SPEECH REFRAMED The value of free speech is commonly understood as permitting the contestation of popular, orthodox, or established opinion. Historically, it is the totalitarian establishment, which seeks to close down the voices and agency of its critics, that most typically functions as the imaginative foil for the value of freedom of speech. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s, for instance, was a left-wing movement seeking to challenge the limitations of political speech on campus on matters such as civil rights and the Vietnam War. We are currently witnessing a shift in the social and political salience of the principle of free speech, as it becomes a right-wing rallying cry against a culturally ascendant left.12 It is by no means easy to disentangle the support for the specific causes for which the principle of free speech is leveraged from support for the principle of free speech itself. Gooch observes, “Free speech, like the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence, is a procedural virtue, which is why fanatics and revolutionaries hate it.”13 Those who might be firmly in favor of free speech when it is a matter of “speaking truth to power” may be less favorably inclined toward protecting the speech of someone who is publicizing research that challenges progressive values on issues such as race, sex, or sexuality, regarding them as strengthening the very oppressive forces that they are seeking to overthrow. Peterson has often characterized his principal opponents as “postmodern neo-Marxists.”14 “Postmodern” refers to their “claim that (1) since there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceived (and those are tightly associated) then (2) no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived.”15 A further key feature of this group—and one of the main reasons why they are termed “neo-Marxists”—is their framing of society in terms of a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. For such an ideology, claims to truth can be routinely handled with suspicion as veiled power claims, and there can be an intense focus on the identity of the party advancing them (for instance, Peterson’s support for free speech can be pathologized and dismissed as fundamentally driven by his interests and privilege as a “cishet”—cisgender, heterosexual— white male). This can sometimes lead to a cynical adherence to the Bolshevist kto kogo? principle of political expediency, although often the reality may be rather more complicated.16 Cultural values can find themselves at odds, and in such situations it is not always clear which values should take precedence. It is important to recognize the values that are commonly appealed to against free speech in the contemporary context. While one

occasionally encounters appeals to patriotism or government authority, nowadays it is far more frequent that opposition to free speech arises from support for values such as safety, diversity, inclusion, and equality. Free speech, in many of our contexts, is now perceived primarily to be a threat to more vulnerable or marginal members of society, with the establishment charged with being the patron and guardian of these groups. The value of the contestation of ideas, which free speech upholds, is much more difficult for the left to countenance when it potentially allows for the questioning and even delegitimization of ideologies and claims that seem to empower the marginalized or minorities. A LOSS OF FAITH IN FREE SPEECH Society has greatly changed since the 1960s, when the Free Speech Movement came to prominence. Our society is less homogeneous and more diverse and atomized. Women are more prominent in public life. Old religious and social orthodoxies and norms have been overthrown. Our social, political, and academic institutions are less dominated by white men from socially and economically advantaged backgrounds. Institutions such as the university now include a considerably larger proportion and cross-section of the population and are oriented to different social and economic ends. One in three US adults now has completed a college education, compared to one in twenty in 1940.17 What once was largely a white male institution preparing the academic, political, professional, and social elites now serves as a quasi-meritocratic institution to credential the middle classes. A culture of free speech holds open arenas for the potentially destabilizing and threatening contestation of ideas in society. This is not an easy thing to do. It requires considerable confidence, vigor, and security both on the part of the culture and those participating in these arenas. It typically requires some degree of faith in the efficacy of speech and the possibility of persuasion. Finally, like other procedural virtues, free speech also requires the belief that it serves a truly common good and the commitment to use it accordingly. When the sites of public speech were far more constrained by the limitations and organs of traditional print media; when participants were overwhelmingly socioeconomically secure white men; when society was much less demographically, religiously, and ideologically diverse; and when free speech chiefly served to curb the dominance of powerful social institutions and authorities, the ideological conflict that free speech once protected in society was rather less threatening. It will be difficult to understand the languishing fortunes of the value of free speech without considering such factors. Steven D. Smith has argued that public discourse has been steadily purged of religion because religion is believed to be a conversation-stopper: meaningful conversation about our deepest ends and values tends to break down or, worse, to excite social unrest or conflict.18 As the demographics of both society generally and its realms of public discourse more particularly have become more diverse in such respects as ideology, race, religion, gender, and cultural background, liberals have become increasingly nervous about free speech. They

more frequently advocate restraint and respect and discourage—or, more forcefully, restrict —conversation on a growing range of issues, lest more vulnerable parties in society suffer.19 As the identities of participants in our public discourse are more fragilized, speech that challenges those ideologies to which their groups appeal for their status in society will more readily be pathologized as hate speech. As our deepest ends and values are excluded from cultural discourse, the manifest inarticulacy on the progressive left about its driving moral values and its abandonment of dialogue for anti-speech tactics when these values are called into question becomes more explicable. In a thought-provoking piece, Scott Alexander compares a culture of free speech with a commons.20 Remarking on the way in which some of the putative defenders of free speech have sought to celebrate the value by giving a platform to the most provocative speakers they can find, he suggests that this might prove counterproductive: Every time some group invokes free speech to say something controversial, they’re drawing from the commons—which is fine, that’s what the commons is there for. Presumably the commons self-replenishes at some slow rate as people learn philosophy or get into situations where free speech protects them and their allies. But if you draw from the commons too quickly, then the commons disappears. When trolls say the most outrageous things possible, then retreat to “oh, but free speech,” they’re burning the commons for no reason, to the detriment of everybody else who needs it.21 The spread of the sort of “postmodern neo-Marxism” that Peterson decries further exacerbates this problem from the other side: no common good can be truly shared by oppressor and oppressed, creating contexts inimical to robust procedural goods. Theorists such as Herbert Marcuse have also challenged the idea of free speech and other related freedoms as things that should be afforded to all sides, insisting that oppressors should not be given such freedoms and that, when they are, there is no guarantee that good will prevail.22 Indeed, Germany’s experience with the rise of Nazism might suggest otherwise. Marcuse expressed his viewpoint starkly: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and tolerance of movements from the Left.”23 Nor is there any confidence in the existence or efficacy of truth as a transcendental toward which all parties are ordered and by which they can all be judged: everything devolves into power. AN ETHOS OF VICTIMHOOD Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have described the historical transition of the West from an honor culture to a dignity culture to a victimhood culture.24 Whereas honor and dignity cultures celebrate the strength, agency, and independence of persons, a victimhood culture fosters dependence and a competitive push for status either as a victim or defender of victims. It develops in concert with a rising concern about equality and diversity in contexts that are highly diverse and egalitarian and is underwritten by a proliferation of administrative

entities and bodies of people to which victims can make appeal. The presence of rising numbers of women, minorities, and persons with fragilized identities in our public life, coupled with the rise of radically democratic and social media through the internet, has created conditions conducive to the rise of a victimhood culture and entailed marked shifts in our institutional and societal ethos. Peterson has speculated that what we may be seeing in part is the rise of a sort of female totalitarianism, as women enjoy greater influence in public life.25 He has also conducted research which suggests that support for political correctness and its restrictions on speech are correlated not only with more common female traits but also with femaleness itself.26 Driven by the gendered dynamics of a maternal compassion and the more feminine concerns for inclusion, equality, and safety, in contrast to the agonistic male values that once dominated public life and undergirded honor and dignity cultures, society is being steadily reordered around principles such as victimhood. This theory is strengthened by the fact that political correctness is most powerful in disciplines and contexts that are dominated by women and by the fact that the characteristic forms of conflict adopted by the social justice movement closely resemble the indirect conflict tactics typical of female intrasexual competition. As Peterson observes, empathy—the defining virtue of the social justice movement—is far from an unambiguously positive thing. It can be a polarizing instinct, dividing the world into those perceived as vulnerable children to be cocooned by a maternal protectiveness and predators to be fiercely and mercilessly attacked.27 Especially when these instincts are less occupied in the raising of children, they can cause considerable problems in society. The polarizing character of such instincts also makes them unfriendly to procedural virtues that rely on some sense of goods that we share in common with our ideological adversaries. To use a Petersonian taxonomy, people who champion free speech against tyrannical paternal figures may be far less approving of its being employed against hyperprotective maternal figures. Beyond these points, there is the compounding problem that the Western tradition of public speech—like many other traditions around the world—has depended heavily on a highly agentic and agonistic masculine culture, which celebrates virtues such as strength, courage, mastery, and honor. Women’s culture of speech is less naturally accommodating of things such as the ritual combat of debate and is much more inclined to employ indirect tactics against opponents, and society in general has been uncertain of how to treat women as combatants, especially against men.28 PETERSON’S ARGUMENT FOR FREE SPEECH Arguments for free speech from classical liberals like Peterson often focus principally on what Isaiah Berlin termed negative freedom: free speech is freedom from external constraints on our personal expression. Freedom of speech is thus framed by values of individual autonomy and self-expression, yet is not clearly ordered toward any higher end. Encountered

in the context of the more general classical liberal tradition, Peterson’s argument for free speech can be nothing short of startling. What makes Peterson’s approach to free speech stand out is how deep its philosophical roots go down, in how positive a value it is. Free speech is grounded, not in the autonomy celebrated by an individualistic philosophy, but in reality and our relationship with it. Anyone familiar with Peterson’s work should be struck by the weight that he gives to the notion of truthful speech. He devotes two chapters of 12 Rules for Life to this: one on telling the truth and another on precision in speech.29 Like many other classical liberals, Peterson primarily frames his discussion of free speech in contrast with totalitarianism. However, in Peterson’s account, free speech exists not primarily to protect the rights of the individual, but to guard the transcendence of truth and our responsibility to it: It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown. But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being. What is going to save you? The totalitarian says, in essence, “You must rely on faith in what you already know.” But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. This is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be. The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being.30 Totalitarianism arises from a society’s abandonment of transcendentals such as truth, from the willingness of both the leaders of society and its members to tolerate the steady seeping of lies in their lives, until that accumulation of lies has grown into vast systems of lies beyond our control. In arguing for free speech, Peterson’s first impulse seems to be to alert people to truth and reality beyond us. For Peterson, society and habitable reality are founded on the Logos, which he understands as the speech that summons forth order from chaos, that confects Being from disorder. It is the word that gives life to society, and neglect, abandonment, or rejection of it spells destruction for society. Free speech, on Peterson’s account, is subordinated to the end of truth, not mere individual autonomy and willful self-expression. As such, free speech is a responsibility, not merely a right. Peterson further discusses free speech in terms of the process of thought in engagement with reality. He presents thought as a matter of dialectic, with opposing or contrasting viewpoints stress-testing and honing each other through challenging exchange. In an ideal world, we will have internalized various complex voices, which can be used to test our opinions in our own minds. However, it is relatively rare to see such a capacity be highly developed, and so the process of thought primarily depends on our interaction with various

conflicting spoken viewpoints. Free speech thus exists to protect thought.31 Where free speech is closed down, people are vulnerable to ideological possession. Rather than carefully speaking well-differentiated truth, they will spout entirely predictable official or group opinions and slogans, which substitute for the genuine thought that dialectical engagement encourages. As we are fallible beings, free speech protects our right to be wrong and make mistakes in a manner that is more conducive to overcoming them with corrective insight. Genuine engagement with reality is often difficult and painful, and any really serious conversation will precipitate or constitute such engagement. From our own experience, we should recognize that conversations about those things that matter most seldom get far without at least one party feeling offended to some degree. Few of us appreciate difficult experiences, and we are consequently naturally attracted to palliating lies. However, societies and persons that value truth and engagement with reality will protect and practice difficult conversations, precisely because they yield insight into and knowledge of reality. While much of Peterson’s work is devoted to the horizontal work of identifying and challenging forces opposed to and compromising of free speech in society, it is essential to also understand his vertical work of relating free speech to the transcendental of truth and the formation of the individual. Peterson seeks to revive free speech in modern society, not merely practically as a form of negative liberty for the individual, but also as something grounded in the deepest moral and metaphysical conviction. PETERSON’S PRACTICE OF FREE SPEECH In addition to advocating for the value of free speech, Peterson has, in his own practice, exemplified the disruptive power of new media and their potential to limit the power of the old gatekeepers to close down voices they find threatening. Through media such as YouTube, Twitter, and his personal blog, Peterson has access to a vast audience that greatly outnumbers any to which he would have had access previously. Faced with the threat to his livelihood and platform posed by opposition within and without the University of Toronto, he has been able to gain levels of financial support through crowdfunding websites that vastly outstrip anything he would have earned as a regular university lecturer. On the speaking tour in support of 12 Rules for Life, he also has had an immense multitude of people in his audiences, far more than he ever would have had access to in his academic post. More recently, Peterson deleted his Patreon account due to his belief that Patreon banned Carl Benjamin (a.k.a. Sargon of Akkad), a prominent right-wing polemicist, for questionable reasons.32 Peterson and Dave Rubin have been working on developing an alternative funding site, taking an active concern in addressing the complicated practicalities of securing and affording freedom of speech in a context where the means of expression are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few large online corporations.33 While these things are in large measure a result of his high level of agency and his peculiar mass appeal, they also illustrate the genuine possibility of securing far greater

autonomy for our speech than would have been possible in the past. A growing number of people are turning away from more official and established cultural institutions and to figures in new media. Peterson’s rise to prominence is hard to imagine without such changes to our social ecosystem. The so-called intellectual dark web, for all its occasionally exaggerated pretensions to academic weight, is a truly significant new phenomenon: a decentralized movement of heterodox thinkers who have attracted vast audiences online.34 The power of traditional gatekeeping institutions is rapidly being corroded by such movements, which are undermining their capacity to control narratives (even though certain corporations are becoming increasingly powerful). Faced with wild accusations against someone like Peterson, curious people can easily listen to hundreds of hours of his lectures for themselves. Like a babysitter losing control over her rowdy charges, the desperation of various figures on the left is heard in the growing shrillness of their denunciations of characters such as Peterson. The practical authority that could once be presumed upon by traditional media outlets and academic institutions has manifestly diminished. Peterson’s famous Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman is an illustration of this conflict between old and new media. An exceedingly abridged segment of the interview was initially only broadcast to a relatively small British audience. It would have been swiftly forgotten were it not also posted in its full length on YouTube, where it has received well over 10 million views from a worldwide audience. In that form, it powerfully illustrated the inability of the mainstream media to engage thoughtfully with heterodox viewpoints. It also revealed just how poor a medium classic television is for substantial and searching intellectual exchange and debate, when compared to the scope offered by a medium such as YouTube (Peterson routinely posts videos of over an hour in length). Peterson was publishing his own videos on YouTube years before he became a widely known figure through his opposition to Bill C-16. The website Quillette is another example of what the internet has made possible. A crowdfunded site, Quillette was set up by Claire Lehmann, an Australian who dropped out of her graduate studies in psychology after having a child. She established the site to provide a platform for thoughtful academic voices that were excluded by the prevailing ideological consensus. Running on a shoestring, the website has undergone a meteoric rise to prominence, gaining an audience that outstrips many traditional media outlets that are immensely costlier to run. RECOVERING FREE SPEECH In spite of the success of Peterson and others at finding audiences outside established media channels, practical problems remain. Progressive liberalism’s pragmatic qualms about robust free speech in a highly diverse and atomized society are not entirely without justification. Do we really want to tolerate, let alone encourage, unsettling conversations about our most dearly held values or our most sensitive social issues, especially as the arena of public speech

lacks the boundaries that might once have more safely contained its potential dangers? Do we want to risk inciting conflict by championing forms of discourse that may likely advantage men over women and the privileged over the marginalized? Do we want to practice a sort of tolerance that leaves the door open to the spread of extremist viewpoints when we have proved ourselves incapable of arresting them through argument in the past? These are not unreasonable concerns, and, although Peterson rightly defends the value of free speech from their attacks, it is hard to see a recovery of free speech occurring without a proactive attempt to address them positively. We might justifiably argue for a greater degree of caution or ambivalence about matters such as increased diversity, the inclusion of women in traditionally male spaces, and the opening up of the institution of the university to a greater proportion of the population— developments that the established orthodoxy insists are unalloyed goods. These things may, if not handled wisely, unsettle necessary values of free speech. Yet identifying causes of some of our problems and complex difficulties is not the same as having solutions, and there are various genies that we neither can—nor should desire to—place back in their bottles. Peterson’s firm defense of free speech is laudable and deeply necessary, yet it is not clear to me how he can allay the more reasonable core concerns of its critics and establish the practical conditions necessary for a broader cultural protection of this value. There is a time for heightening ideological antitheses, but perhaps our deeper cultural challenge is that of forging a new workable common good between various parties that currently perceive their interests to be in a zero-sum struggle for dominance and are consequently often resistant to procedural goods. Here Peterson may be better at identifying features of the problem than offering responses that will accomplish its substantial resolution. This is not to blame Peterson, but to stress that harmonizing the value of free speech with other important values in our contemporary social and technological environment is a considerably knottier problem than many might believe. What free speech might most need in our day may not be warriors who fight for its cause, but instead shrewd and irenic people who are gifted in the formation of social institutions and the reconciliation of the interests of opposing parties. Even on the terms of Peterson’s own philosophy, the rise of a movement like the intellectual dark web represents a retreat from the greater ends to which free speech should aspire. While allowing for the greater autonomy of heterodox voices, it risks diminishing the dialectical sparring that both sharpens and constitutes rigorous thought. As those voices retreat into their own enclaves, where they have limited illuminating engagement with challenging viewpoints, they increasingly risk slipping into the ruts of stale and underconsidered party lines. The university historically aspired to be a lively site of testing conversation. As it falls short in this regard, movements like the intellectual dark web risk being just one among many balkanized tribes of thinkers, rather than a genuine site of conversation that unites many parties together. We ought to bear in mind that the appeal of things such as Peterson’s Channel 4 interview are found in no small measure in their reintroduction of dialectical engagement into a cultural

setting that was patently starved of it. It was a difficult and challenging conversation, with culturally unpalatable views being expressed, but the result was so exhilarating for many viewers because they got the sense that, for a moment, we were connecting with a deeper reality than political spin and parroted ideology. A free speech that is merely the right to say what we want, no matter how provocative, does not have much to commend it above the position of its leading opponents in the West, who are at least often motivated by some sort of a concern for the well-being of their neighbor. Peterson merits our admiration for his committed and courageous defense of the value of free speech in his practice. While Peterson’s actions and statements in support of freedom of speech have received widespread recognition, his deeper philosophical engagement with the value—as a courageous living out of our responsibility to Being— deserves far more attention and consideration than it has hitherto received. As we face the formidable task of reviving a culture of free speech in a society that is justifiably wary of its attendant threats and difficulties if not actively hostile to it, a renewed apprehension of the realities that ground a true valorization of free speech may prove to be an invaluable encouragement. In the longer term, it may be this theoretical framework that proves to be Peterson’s most lasting contribution in this area.

4 Myth, Memoricide, and Jordan Peterson RON DART In the beginning was the myth.

—Herman Hesse, Peter Camenzind It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospel are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality.

—Thomas Merton, “The Pasternak Affair”

Sadly, much of the focus on Jordan Peterson never goes much deeper than a sort of silly or subtle demonization, on the one hand, or uncritical hagiography (which Peterson disavows yet is often the victim of) on the other. Is there more to Peterson, though, than the way his detractors and fans portray him? There are many portals into his wide-ranging literary tendencies, but in this essay I will deal specifically with his interest in the perennial wisdom and insights of myth and fairy tales, and what such narratives reveal (or unconceal) about our all-too-human journey. THE MYTHIC WAY OF KNOWING There has been a tendency in the West to compare and contrast two ways of knowing and being. On one hand is the way of “Logos,” in which reason as exercised in an empirical, inductive, deductive, logical, and mathematical manner delivers the hard facts of reality— this has often been seen as the path of “Scientia” (or a scientific approach). On the other there is the way of “Mythos,” in which intuition, story, narrative, imagination, literature, and fairy tales reveal much about the human soul and life journey—this has been seen as the trail of “Sapientia” (or a wisdom approach). One work that saw the former as superior was C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), which tended to pit the virtues of the scientific way against the vices of the classical humanist way. A few years earlier the respected Canadian poet Leonard Cohen had taken the other side in Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), which highlighted the role of myth, considering the scientific worldview (in its varied and layered way) a mythology of sorts.

In his first published book, Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959), George Grant was keenly alert to the chasm between these two ways of knowing and attempted to heal the breach. In chapter 2 of that book, “The Mythic and Modern Consciousness,” Grant held high the mythic way of knowing against the reductionism of a certain scientific way of knowing. However, in the following chapter, when seeking to discern an ethical center and core from which to make meaningful decisions, he turned to the probing and rational way of natural law. The turn to the mythic way of knowing (and what it reveals) has a long history. In the nineteenth century, for example, we can see such an approach in the elaborate work of comparative mythology by the fictional scholar Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Such an interest was probed in greater psychological depth by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, who dominated the lecture circuit from the 1960s to the 1980s. In addition, myth looms large in the fiction of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and many of the other Inklings. The elder of the mythopoetic men’s movement in the 1990s was Robert Bly, whose work was grounded in a mythic way of knowing. In Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), his sacred text of sorts, The Sibling Society (1997), and more recently, More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales (2018), Bly unpacked the significance and wisdom of myth, archetypes, and the perennial insights of Jung. The turn to myth (and Jung) also has a decided Canadian connection. I have already mentioned Leonard Cohen and George Grant, but other Canadian worthies such as Northrop Frye, Robertson Davies, and Margaret Atwood (and the Toronto connections among them) highlight the reality that both the interest in and commitment to myth as a way of understanding the structure and anatomy of being (so essential to Peterson’s thinking) is certainly not on the fringe of Canadian intellectual life. In many ways, Frye anticipated Peterson’s public lectures on the Bible with his own biblical lectures, including the series “The Bible and English Literature.”1 Robertson Davies (a contemporary of Frye) studied with C. S. Lewis at Oxford, so there are also affinities between the mythopoetic ways of the Inklings, Davies, and Peterson. This turn to the mythic way of knowing by Peterson and many others is not meant to undermine the scientific way of knowing. Instead, it is merely meant to correct an obvious historic imbalance in ways of seeing and being. Yet in a paradoxical way, it can be seen as more scientific in the way that it honors the deeper facts and reality of the human journey. The key point to note here is that the mythic way of understanding the structure of the human psyche runs contrary to the kind of modern liberalism that defines the human mind as a tabula rasa, or blank canvas, that we write or create our own identity on, and in the process become truly free and liberated. This assumes there is no real structure for us to attune ourselves to; but in a more classical ethos and tradition, a sense of order, the nature of things, and structure presuppose the conditions of freedom and liberty. The core issue is the understanding of human nature. The Inklings, Campbell, Bly, Cohen, Grant, Frye, Davies, Atwood, and Peterson stand on one side of the divide, and late modern and many postmodern thinkers on the opposite side.

It is therefore somewhat ironic that Peterson is often seen as a reactionary conservative, whereas Campbell, Bly, Cohen, Grant, Frye, Davies, and Atwood are not; yet each of them, in their different way, holds to a structural notion of human nature and a literary and mythic way of understanding such a structure. Both Bly and Peterson draw from the same Jungian well, yet those who heed and hear them often come from opposite ends of the cultural and political spectrum. Conservatives and liberals tend to be on the same page in recognizing the need for understanding and interpreting our all-too-human journey in a way that is rooted and grounded in myth. In short, Jordan Peterson’s turn to myth as a way of explaining the human condition and journey (while respecting and honoring the scientific way) means he stands in a long lineage. Carl Jung—whom Peterson mentions again and again in his explanation of archetypes, the shadow, and much else—is but one of many thinkers committed to what myth can reveal about the human condition. Those who ignore this deeper mythic way of knowing and being in Peterson’s thinking and presentations miss the deeper structure and wells from which he draws. But which myths should be heeded and why, and what occurs when we genuflect to myths that lead to cul-de-sacs and cliff edges? In short, what are the myths worth knowing, and what occurs in the soul, society, and civilizations when the ancient myths of wisdom and insight are neither known nor followed? And in an era dominated by memoricide—the destruction of memory—what sorts of myths are we most aware of today, and how does a teacher walk the interested from introductory myths that many might know to more substantive myths? Peterson is acutely aware that most late modern and postmodern people have little or no memory of the epic and grand narrative myths of classic civilizations, but they are exposed to certain historic myths and fairy tales through the popular media. A good teacher starts with what is known, then leads students to yet deeper truths—such is Peterson’s way. What might be some of the better-known myths and fairy tales that most know, what lessons do they teach, and how do they point to yet more substantive myths? MYTH AND PATHFINDING We live in a time in which classic metanarratives have been debunked. Identity politics is on center stage, and no guidance is offered for those seeking to find their way forward on their life journey. It is this tension between longing for meaning and purpose and the clearing away of all the landmarks that once offered such meaning and purpose that has created what Charles Taylor calls the “malaise of modernity,” or George Grant “intimations of deprival.”2 Peterson realizes, all too acutely, that there is a need to tell the ancient tales but in a way that does not retreat into pious platitudes and problematic readings of classical sacred texts. Peterson has chosen to retell ancient tales as myth in order to reclaim, in some ways, virtue ethics and the older understanding of the formation of character (both traditions that were once held near and dear by a more historic notion of education in the humanities). It should be noted that both popular mythic tales and more substantive traditional myths

are neither falsehoods nor historic, although history is often various myths in collision. We are all aware, for example, that Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, and Harry Potter are not, in a literal sense, history, but the truths wrapped within such mythic dramas are both timeless and timely. The same can apply, in different ways, to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the many stories by Hans Christian Andersen, Tolstoy’s many children’s stories, Erasmus’s Adages, or Hesse’s Fairy Tales. There are, though, some mythic tales that Peterson mines more than others. One of these is Peter Pan, which is, in many ways, an apt and poignant myth that well describes our times and ethos. What is it about this oft-told classic that makes it relevant to our fragmented age? Peterson tends to return to a few key motifs.3 First, there is Captain Hook, the angry, vindictive authoritarian and aging adult who has been attacked by the crocodile with a clock in its belly and lost a hand in this encounter. The clock, of course, is the symbol of time, which will inevitably consume one and all. The clock that ever goes ticktock reminds us of our mortality and the end of all things on our earthly journeys (some of which are shorter than others, and some, like Hook’s, including more suffering than others). Captain Hook’s role in Peter Pan echoes the Greek tale of Chronos (chronological time), in which Chronos consumes his children. The myth is played out in an updated way in Captain Hook’s relationship to the crocodile, and Hook’s anger about what time has done to him and his friends and followers. If Captain Hook represents those who lament and are bitter about the ravages of time, Peter Pan represents those who do whatever they can to avoid growing through time into a wiser notion of genuine adulthood. He and his Lost Boys remain immature infants—such is the reality, Peterson often suggests, of many men in their twenties, thirties, and forties in our ethos and culture. “Pan” means “all things” or “everything,” and such pan-boys think they can forever choose from a multiplicity of possibilities and never face the demands of time. In short, Peter Pan is the king of the Lost Boys, who refuse to face the challenges of growing into adults as time demands. This is best embodied in Peter’s attitude toward Tinker Bell and Wendy. For Peterson, Tinker Bell reflects the sort of hyperidealized woman who ever remains a plaything of multiple desires. In short, she is an almost pornographic thing that only an immature man would maintain in his imagination. Wendy, on the other hand, is a real woman who asks Peter Pan and his Lost Boys to grow into authentic relationships that do not indulge fantasy desires. But Peter is ever the “pan” who does not want to sacrifice diverse fantasies for the reality of a real relationship, which means limitations, sacrifices, and a growing into the deeper demands of time. If Peter is the one extreme in the Peter Pan myth (the Lost Boys who refuse to grow up), Captain Hook represents the opposite extreme (those who become bitter because of their experiences of life in time). Peterson also often lingers on Pinocchio.4 There are five main points that Peterson returns to in this myth. First, Geppetto is a single parent (most timely for our times) who has a child who is not quite alive (Pinocchio). How is Geppetto to raise his child? Is he alone in his

journey, or are there other places he can turn for assistance in such an ambiguous project? When Geppetto “makes a wish upon a star” in his journey, he is opening himself up to the divine assistance of the Blue Fairy. According to Peterson, this indicates a willingness to be receptive to the transcendent in the child-raising process. Pinocchio is a marionette dangled by the strings of his father—such is often the case in the initial stages of child raising. Parents, desiring the best for their children and assuming they know the best, pull the strings of their children and direct them to think, speak, and act in a way that often reflects more the parents’ agenda than the best future for the child on their journey. Parents and children must let go of such a way of relating to one another as children mature—the parent ceasing to see the child as a marionette, the child-teen-adult dissecting and cutting the strings that both parents and society dangle them by. Such is the process of maturation, and such was the initial step of Geppetto-Pinocchio. But the journey from being a controlled marionette of sorts to a living and free being is not an easy one, and there are many miscues and missteps in the process. This leads to Peterson’s second point about this classic myth. Pinocchio is naïve and is hence susceptible to all sorts of options in his journey to become a living boy. He lacks the discernment to know what to say yes to and what to say no to. He is therefore taken in by a variety of hucksters, deceivers, and shady entrepreneurs, such as Honest John the Fox, Stromboli, and the Coachman. How, then, is the process of maturation to take place when the controlled environment of family and string-pulling has lost its hold and no deeper inward compass has yet been tested and tried? The third point is at the heart of this dilemma. Pinocchio has, for much of the Disney version of this tale, an ongoing tension with Jiminy Cricket, whom the Blue Fairy has assigned to him as his conscience. Peterson sees in the Blue Fairy the highest version of the divine feminine, a form of grace that both illuminates and offers guidance via conscience. Pinocchio vacillates between heeding the small cricket of conscience and being beguiled and taken captive by Honest John, the Pleasure Island world that eventually turns people into asses (showing some overlap with Peter Pan), and the delinquent boy Lampwick. It is only when Jiminy Cricket sees where Pleasure Island actually takes people that he rescues Pinocchio from such a fate. Pinocchio’s journey homeward to find his father and family again fills out the fourth point. He realizes, after taking many a diverted trail, that home and hearth is truly what makes for the becoming of a real boy. But his father, Geppetto, has in searching for him been swallowed (with the cat Figaro and fish Cleo) by a whale. The whale episode takes the reader, from a biblical perspective, to the tale of Jonah and the fish and, from a mythic and psychological perspective, on a journey to the depths of the shadow and darker aspects of the personality and identity. Pinocchio must yet go deeper than conscience can take him, although conscience (Jiminy Cricket) does not desert him. It is in this dying to his indulgent and narcissistic ego in the search for something higher, deeper, and nobler that Pinocchio finds his family again in the belly of the whale.

This leads to the fifth and final point—Pinocchio becomes a real boy rather than merely a marionette. The whale spews forth Pinocchio, Geppetto, Figaro, Cleo, and Jiminy Cricket, but then seeks to devour them once again. Pinocchio saves his father and family but sacrifices his life to do so. He is brought home seemingly dead, but the Blue Fairy brings him to life again because in his sacrificial act he has become a real boy and genuine human being. Such is the fivefold there-and-back-again mythic journey of the Disney version of Pinocchio that Peterson often turns to as a classic tale of growing into maturity—a counternarrative, in many ways, to Peter Pan. Peterson also draws from a vast reservoir of other fairy tales as a means to illustrate many of the common and perennial mythic themes that transcend time and place: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Sleeping Beauty, Marduk (and other ancient Mesopotamian myths), and Harry Potter are but a few. He is critical, however, of the Disney film Frozen for undermining and distorting classic archetypes. I think, perhaps, Peterson is too hard and reactive in his response to the film. Such an intense and simplistic negative reaction is quite unnecessary (perhaps a flaw in Peterson at times)—there is much more at work in Frozen than Peterson seems to suggest, if but deeper digs were done, as Peterson rightly does with classical stories. I have lingered long on Peterson’s treatment of Peter Pan and Pinocchio for the simple reason that both illustrate the perennial truths about the human journey, which Peterson returns to many times. Myths offer a unique via media between the overly certain approach to ethical issues and human identity characterized by moral platitudes on the one hand and the rejection of any moral grounding or markings on the other. The obstinate and growing fact of memoricide makes it necessary to draw from some well to provide an orientation for decision making in life. Many in our culture are quite bereft of any historic and classical traditions that would help them to identify good, better, best, and bad, worse, worst choices (and the consequences of them). Peterson draws on the more popular films that incarnate many ancient and timeless truths—such as Harry Potter, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio—to point the way to yet more substantive myths and archetypes that those interested can read, internalize, reflect on, and live forth. LET US COMPARE MYTHOLOGIES Peterson and others turn to myth as a way of knowing either contra a form of rationalism or as a means to balance the unbalanced imperial rationalistic-scientistic way of knowing and being. But those committed to the mythic way of knowing inevitably find themselves in the same precarious place as everyone who holds sacred texts—or, in a more secular context, constitutions, bills, and charters of rights, declarations, and covenants—as a final court of authority. In other words, the task of interpreting myths shares in the much larger dilemma of hermeneutics (Hermes being the interpreter of Zeus from Olympus to earth). Inevitably, you have to ask whose interpretations are the best and wisest. Are all myths equally valid, and are interpretations of those myths equally valid?

Peterson’s psychological and mythic hermeneutic inevitably takes him from, broadly speaking, more secular mythic stories to explicitly religious mythic stories. Take, for example, Peterson’s approach to the myth of Siddhartha and his journey to Buddhahood. In particular, he explores both the Buddhist and Christian myths in Siddhartha’s journey to becoming the Buddha, the Eden mythic structure in Genesis, and the relationship between Siddhartha, the Buddha, and Jesus the Christ. Let us, therefore, not only compare mythologies but also compare interpretations of mythologies. Peterson has told his version of the origins of Buddhism a variety of times with much the same bent and slant.5 A prophecy was given over the young Siddhartha that he would become a great person. But did this mean he would become a powerful political leader like his father? This was certainly what his father wanted. His father expended great energy, time, and resources to protect the young Siddhartha and only expose him to positive, affluent, and worldly attractions and diversions. This, in many ways, was like the relationship between Geppetto and Pinocchio—and unlike the father of Hansel and Gretel, who sent away his innocent children to wander through the woods to the Pleasure Island-like Gingerbread House. Siddhartha, in time, felt constricted by the protective walls around him and wondered what might be on the other side of such a shielded reality. Peterson suggests that in the emergence of the journey it is right and appropriate that parents protect their young within their capacity, but there comes a time when the “songs of innocence” give way to the “songs of experience.” Siddhartha took a variety of trips from the guarded palace, and on these trips he was exposed to death, illness, poverty, and the painful and tragic aspects of life. How was he, then, to reconcile the naïve and unsullied cloistered virtues of his upbringing with the obvious suffering and inevitable mortality of each and every human being? This second phase of the journey from innocence to experience raises the question of how one should think and live given the fact that life is both “joy and woe.” It was in the answer to such experiences and the questions they gave rise to that Siddhartha turned away from political power and set out on a spiritual search that took him much deeper inwardly. This was the third phase of his journey. The inner meditative way took Siddhartha beyond comedy and tragedy, beyond indulgence and asceticism, to an inner center and source in which he became the enlightened Buddha. Many were the temptations on the way, and Peterson compares these with the Edenic temptations of Adam and Eve. But these myths are similar and yet quite different, their consequences momentous for both Occident and Orient. This brings the attentive reader to the place of diverging myths, each offering up different reads and destinations for the journey. How is the mythic journey of the Buddha similar to yet different from the Christian mythic vision? Or are myths nothing more than diverse human projections on the screen of history and life? C. S. Lewis, a fully committed apologist for the mythic and mythopoetic way of knowing, wrote that “as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”6 What

does Peterson do when myths of ultimacy collide at both the ultimate and penultimate levels? Does he see them as simply pluralistic ways of mapping the journey via archetypes that are heroic or saintly, dark or demonic? Is there more to myths than merely a psychological approach and method? In short, is there a hierarchy of myths, with lower myths leading to higher myths? Or are all myths equal? Those who are rightly drawn into Peterson’s commitment to comparative mythology need to nudge him further down the pathway on these timely and timeless questions. Let me mention another way of approaching these questions. Peterson has lingered long with various ways of reading the Adam and Eve myth of choice and consequences. I have had, over the years teaching in a course called “Religions of the West and East,” students who have come from Wiccan and Gnostic traditions. Such students tend to see the God who ordered Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree as an authoritarian tyrant and Adam and Eve using their agency to be free from such a bully. How is the myth of Eden to be read, and how do we know which reading is best? The Wiccan-Gnostic read of Eden certainly interprets the issue differently than Peterson. Peterson often quotes from Nietzsche. I have read most of Nietzsche’s writings, and spent some splendid time at Nietzsche’s home in Sils-Maria in the Engadin valley. Nietzsche’s read of the Apollonian-Dionysian myth tends to pit the one against the other in terms of freedom. Are there other ways of reading such a myth—perhaps a more subtle read of Apollo and nuanced read of Dionysius? Is Nietzsche too reactionary and dualistic in both his approach to Greek tragedy and Dionysius-Apollo? This is the question we face when we compare mythologies. Are all myths and their interpretations equal, or is there a hierarchy of myths and interpretations? If the latter, what criteria do we use for making such judgments and decisions? The three examples listed above (the Siddhartha-Jesus the Christ myth, the variant reading of the Eden myth, and Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Apollonian myth) point to the perennial hermeneutical issue in history as in sacred texts: Which texts have more authority than others, and why? And whose interpretations are more credible, and why? The turn to the mythic way of knowing and being is, in time, fraught with these challenges. Peterson has labored long and hard on exegeting the Bible. The fact that he has done this more than on most classical texts means he does prioritize it. This is unsurprising, given the fact the Bible is a foundation text of Western civilization. But the history of Christianity is rife with diverse ways of interpreting and applying the texts. Peterson has taken a decided Jungian-mythic psychological approach, and there is a certain universalist validity in such a method. Many of the biblical narratives of transformation, including lack of it or opposition to it, can be used in a cross-cultural manner. But are there elements to the biblical mythic structure that have both convergences and substantive divergences with other classical religious and philosophic texts of world literature? Is the only reason to focus on the Bible the historic fact that it is a foundation text of Western civilization and significant world literature?

There is no doubt that the tales told in the Bible, once read, heard, and inwardly digested, can, at an initial level, overcome our crises of memoricide. But recovered memory ultimately hinges on the question of whose memory and how such memory should be interpreted and applied. So, what does Peterson conclude from his work in comparative mythologies? Are there, in fact, myths that are truer than others at both the metaphysical and penultimate levels? If so, which ones, and why and how does Peterson rank such myths? And how might Peterson answer these questions, given the fact that he often dwells in egalitarian-hierarchical tensions, often favoring the latter over the former? CONCLUSION There can be no doubt that Jordan Peterson, in the last few years, has come to occupy front stage in public discourse. He has been criticized by some who have a solid training in theology, philosophy, and biblical exegesis who find Peterson’s approach in their disciplines somewhat thin. But I don’t think it has been Peterson’s vocation, at this point in his journey, to address such people. Peterson has tended to address those who are personally and culturally disoriented, realize it, and are casting about for alternate paths for living a more meaningful life. The fact that most of the markings and cairns of the past have been dismantled means orientation is difficult to come by. Memory is gone, and cultural memoricide is the reality many live with. Peterson has attempted, in his limited yet significant way, through the telling of secular and sacred myths, to offer ways of seeing paths that are worth trekking. Rather than critiquing him, I think if we can see Peterson as an agent of praeparatio evangelica we will not go too far amiss. Peterson himself is still feeling and thinking his way forward, and time will reveal the path he finally sets his feet on.

5 Archetypes, Symbols, and Allegorical Exegesis: Jordan Peterson’s Turn to the Bible in Context T. S. WILSON

We live in the most technologically advanced civilization in historical memory. The widespread adoption of the principles of liberalism has provided the material and political conditions necessary for technological progress to flourish far beyond even the wildest dreams of the founding liberal fathers, which has resulted in the empowerment of our species to an unprecedented degree. Our knowledge of the material world has never been greater, and access to that knowledge has never been more widespread. The crowning jewel of progressive knowledge has become technological mastery. Through technological mastery we have established our dominion over some of the most chaotic aspects of nature, giving us the power to compel the earth to bring forth her increase. But technological mastery has not led to psychological mastery. This a fact that is made self-evident by both the prominence of the field of psychology and the success of Big Pharma. Charles Taylor has argued that the modern human spirit is in malaise, in part, because the progress of liberalism required that we break free from the sacred orders that have traditionally given us meaning.1 It is therefore tempting to think that Jordan Peterson’s turn to the Bible is an attempt to restore meaning to a secular age that thrives technologically but suffers psychologically. But behind Peterson’s turn to the Bible resides a well-thought-out ontology (theory of being) that is deeply rooted in the Western tradition stretching back to Plato and continuing through to modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Jung. As a companion piece to Laurence Brown’s essay in this volume, I will situate Peterson within the larger philosophical conversation in order to make clear the ontology that makes him confident in his claim that investigations into the biblical stories amount to “investigations into the structure of Being itself.”2 Once Peterson’s ontology is comprehensible, it will allow me to highlight the challenge of doing the type of allegorical exegesis of the Bible that Peterson attempts to do. This difficulty is as common to Peterson as it was to the fathers and mothers of the historical church, many of whom also read the Genesis stories allegorically. SOCRATES, MENO, AND THE BIRTH OF INNATE IDEAS It was evening, and the sun was setting on the Athenian horizon as it was dawning on a new age in the mind of man. In a small and underused agora located in the outskirts of the city, a

young philosopher named Socrates was deep in discussion with a visiting aristocrat from Thessaly who went by the name of Meno. The men were discussing the nature of virtue, and whether it could be taught, in front of a crowd of onlookers. Ever since the Athenians had at last been defeated in the Peloponnesian War a few years earlier, they increasingly had begun to question all they thought they knew, making figures like Socrates ever more worthy of their ear. The crowd listened intently as Socrates resisted all of Meno’s attempts to skirt the topic of virtue, insisting that Meno define virtue before proceeding to determine if it could be learned. Incredulous, and growing impatient with Socrates’s line of questioning, Meno finally turned the tables on Socrates, asking him, “How can you inquire into something, if you don’t already know what it is? And if you don’t already know what it is, how would you know it when you found it?”3 In other words, inquiring into the nature of virtue without already knowing what it is would be like searching in a field for a specific flower without having any idea what the flower looked like. Conversely, if we already know what virtue looks like, there wouldn’t be any point of inquiring into it; we would already know it. The crowd was taken aback by Meno’s clever rejoinder, and all eagerly awaited to hear the young philosopher’s response. Finally, Socrates motioned to one of Meno’s slaves to enter into the center of the agora. After determining that the slave had never been taught any geometry, Socrates proceeded to shock the crowd by guiding the boy to complex geometrical solutions, solely by asking him the right questions. This moment (whether or not it actually occurred) would serve as one of the foundational myths for the rational age that grew out of the Socratic spirit in the millennia that followed. Socrates’s goal was to demonstrate that somewhere in the psyche of the slave the correct answers already existed; all Socrates needed to do was ask the questions that would make the slave recollect the ideas already inside him.4 Plato’s theory of ideas, and the related theory that knowledge is recollection, is the articulated response to the epistemological problem presented in the story of Socrates and the slave boy. Plato’s theory of ideas is best understood in contrast with the theory of nominalism that developed as a response to it many centuries later. When we say that language is nominal, we are saying that the words we commonly use to communicate are only signs, and they could just as easily be different if we all just made a different sound or spelled a word differently. In the same way that the names we give our children could have been different, the names we assign to objects in the world could always be different. This way of thinking about language is good for describing how we use words to describe everyday objects, but we start to run into trouble when we can no longer point to the physical object to which a word is referring. When we think of important words like “love,” “equity,” and “justice,” it isn’t so easy to point to a physical object that the sign is supposed to represent. Even if we can isolate particular instances of love, equity, or justice occurring in the world, we would need to ask ourselves whether the idea was created in response to an observed pattern of behavior or if the pattern of behavior developed in response to the idea. Plato claims that the general form of big ideas like love, justice, and equity exists in the collective psyche of all of us prior to the existence of any single one of us. Platonic knowledge has thus been called a recollection because of its emphasis on recollecting the innate ideas that make up the precognitive

structure of our being. The world-shaping power contained in the story of Socrates and the slave boy does not depend on whether Plato’s ideas are an accurate representation of the inner world of the psyche. The power is in the fact that once the force of the problem was felt in the collective mind of man, it could not be forgotten. In the millennia that have transpired since the death of Socrates, the best and brightest minds have been attracted to the problem that was made manifest in the agora on that day. This is exemplified in the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, which was concerned with accessing the clear and distinct innate ideas of the psyche that were thought to be more essential to who we are than imagination and myth. Who can fail to see the epistemological problem presented in the story of Socrates and the slave boy when reading one of the founding Enlightenment philosophers, Baruch Spinoza? And who, pray, can know that he understands some thing unless he first understands it? That is, who can know that he is certain of something unless he is first certain of it? Again, what standard of truth can there be that is clearer and more certain than a true idea? Indeed, just as light makes manifest both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard of both itself and falsity.5 Spinoza’s rational ontology (which grew out of the Platonic spirit) claimed that the clear and distinct ideas of the intellect had a greater degree of reality than the falsities of imagination because they were grounded in the infinite intellect of God.6 This was a common position for rationalist Enlightenment philosophers who viewed the light of pure reason as the essence of the human psyche.7 Although Spinoza’s Ethics was published in the seventeenth century, his concern was not so different from Peterson’s today. Spinoza was more than aware of the psychological ailments and illnesses that afflicted the human condition. In fact, he wrote the Ethics as a psychological cure for the afflictions of the psyche that he reasoned would vanish through the power of love and the light of reason. Much in the same way that darkness is nothing when the sun shines on it, Spinoza thought that psychological ailments would vanish if individuals could come to understand their emotions and cultivate the ones that would lead to a more powerful love.8 Against this embrace of the existence of innate ideas are theories that claim human beings are born as a tabula rasa, and that the psyche is largely a construction of the ideas that are etched into the blank slate of the self by the hand of society. The self conceived as a blank slate works hand in hand with the theory that ideas are nominal, in the same way that Plato’s theory of ideas works hand in hand with the theory that knowledge is recollection. If our offspring are born as empty souls waiting to be filled with ideas that are borne along in the conventions of language, it means that ideas only have a nominal existence, and they could be different if the constructs of society were different. Liberalism has embraced the self as a blank slate and the related view that ideas are nominal. If the self is a blank slate, it implies that we have the power to define who we are. In contrast, the theory of innate ideas suggests that to “know thyself” is a matter of becoming conscious of what you are preformed to be.

Peterson stands firmly on the side of innate ideas. But he is not a traditional rationalist, or he would not turn to the Bible for psychological insight. Instead, he would follow in the footsteps of Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza, who viewed reason as the cure for the superstitions of the mythic mind. REASON STOOD ON ITS HEAD IN NIETZSCHE AND JUNG Perched in the sun-drenched peaks high above the Engadin Valley, Friedrich Nietzsche looked down on the little town of St. Moritz from the eagle’s perspective. It was the summer of 1870, and from the solitude of his heightened perspective, the rebellious son of a Lutheran minister contemplated the history of philosophy, religion, and art. Nestled high in the Alps, Nietzsche would begin to pen his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. The book would not win Nietzsche high esteem from his peers, for it stood so contrary to the spirit of the times. Yet the central premise of the book would shake the West as decisively as Socrates had shaken it more than two thousand years before. Nietzsche would stand reason on its head by asserting the primacy of dreams, and the symbolproducing faculty of man, over the clear and distinct ideas of reason. Where Enlightenment philosophers like René Descartes and Spinoza would view reason as the aspect of the psyche that is most essential to who we are, Nietzsche would view the capacity to produce the symbols of illusion, fantasy, and myth as the most important feature of the human psyche, because they set the horizons in which civilizations find their meaning. In the words of Nietzsche, This joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the “shining one,” the deity of light, is also the ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolic analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the arts generally, which make life possible and worth living.9 In Nietzsche’s thought, the philosopher is enshrined as the creative artist who can mediate the artistic impulses of nature that dwell deep in the unconscious of the psyche, giving birth (as it were) to nature’s symbolic double in the form of the myths and fantasies that inevitably enclose the masses within horizons of meaning, seducing them to life. Reason is turned on its head when Nietzsche asserts that the symbol-producing faculty is closer to the primordial truth of nature than is the faculty of reason. From Nietzsche’s perspective, it becomes necessary to consider whether Western science itself might have sprouted and grown from the symbolic seed contained in myths like the story of Socrates and the slave boy. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uses the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as symbols that have multiple and layered meanings depending on their application. Nietzsche adopts the

metaphysics of Schopenhauer, making Dionysus the world as will and Apollo the world of appearances.10 The Apollonian world of appearances (of which we are ourselves composed) is but the pleasurable illusion of the most afflicted, eternally suffering, and contradictory being: the Dionysian world-in-itself. In the most redemptive act of overcoming, the primordial pain at the heart of existence creates the Apollonian world of appearances in order to turn away from the terrifying reality that is primal unity. Just as the primal will creates the world of appearances to turn away from itself, so the tragic artist who holds the Dionysian and Apollonian in a bow-like tension of opposite forces becomes “the medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance.”11 The hallmark of the Nietzschean philosopher is not the capacity to sift through the chaff of illusion and imagination in order to find the wheat of eternal truth and reason; it is to create symbols of myth that are true in the sense that they are inspired by the Dionysian world-in-itself that “in its intoxication, speaks the truth.”12 Aspects of The Birth of Tragedy would influence the thought of Carl Jung, who would carry the torch lit by Nietzsche into the twentieth century. As we will soon see, the ontology of Jordan Peterson will come to be illuminated in the light of the same torch. Jung was drawn to Nietzsche’s psychological insight into the deeply unconscious impulses and drives that inspire the dreams, fantasies, and myths on which civilization is built. Following in the footsteps of Nietzsche and Freud, Jung posited the existence of the unconscious. On the level of the individual, Jung thought that repressed and forgotten contents of the psyche remained in the personal unconscious—everything from repressed traumatic experiences to benign childhood memories.13 While this is an important level of the psyche for Jungian analysis, the most important level of the psyche as it relates to Peterson’s turn to the Bible is what Jung calls the collective unconscious. Jung writes, I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.14 Jung compares the archetypes that make up the content of the collective unconscious with “ideas in the Platonic sense.”15 Like Platonic ideas, Jung thinks of archetypes as primordial images that are universally common to all, prior to the existence of any particular being. Just as the biological form of bodily organs must exist prior to the existence of any individual person, so the primordial archetypal images of the psyche must exist prior to any individual having the capacity for psychic activity (consciousness). But Jung’s archetypes are not like Platonic ideas when the latter are taken to be universal and unchanging rational forms. As demonstrated in the thought of Spinoza, a great hope of the Western philosophical tradition was that the philosopher could grow into the consciousness of the primordial and universal ideas of the psyche (knowledge as recollection). Perhaps the decisive blow against this hope

occurred in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant demonstrates that Platonic ideas of this type are beyond all possible experience, meaning we could not have knowledge of them.16 Jung himself acknowledges that Kant’s doctrine “destroys in embryo every attempt to revive metaphysics in the old sense of the word.”17 But at the same time, Jung thought that Kant’s doctrine “paves the way for a rebirth of the Platonic spirit.”18 The rebirth of the Platonic spirit in Jung has more than a touch of Nietzsche. Jung acknowledges that we do not have direct access to archetypes as such. Which is to say, we cannot have knowledge of archetypes by investigating the archetypes as they are in themselves. Rather, archetypes should be thought of as Nietzschean “art impulses of nature” that are mediated through the symbol-producing faculty of the philosopher as artist. As such, we investigate the archetypes that Jung believes make up our “common psychic substrate” by exploring the great myths of our civilization that reflect the archetypes as a symbolic double. Echoing Nietzsche, Jung writes, “In the products of fantasy the primordial images are made visible, and it is here that the concept of the archetype finds its specific application.”19 Where Enlightenment philosophers like Spinoza shunned imagination and myth in the name of accessing the purely rational substrate of the psyche that was thought to be the essence of Being, Jung follows in the footsteps of Nietzsche by holding myth, fantasy, and imagination as higher truths that are ultimately more reflective of the primordial ground of Being. At this point, we can understand why Peterson feels justified in saying that investigations into the Genesis stories amount to an investigation into the structure of Being itself. Following Jung and Nietzsche, Peterson holds that the way to investigate the structure of Being is to investigate the myths that are taken to be reflective of the archetypal patterns at the ground of Being. Referring to the Genesis stories as myth is likely to make many Christians uncomfortable, but from the Christian perspective it can be thought that Peterson is simply holding the prophetic spirit of Christianity higher than the literal-historical. By “prophetic spirit” I mean the word of God, spoken through his prophets and distilled into the true myths that undergird Western civilization, not only in the institutions that have carried the message through time but also in language itself, grown from the seeds first spoken by the word. In Peterson’s narrative, the formation of the Genesis myths occurred phenomenologically, by which he means that the act as a behavioral pattern occurs first, and the symbolic representation adapts itself to the act. The symbolic representations of myth become a guiding light for the people by highlighting the “canonical patterns of Being” that “represent what it is that we will act out in the world” as they are “played on the crowd across time.”20 They give us the ability to represent the patterns of behavior to ourselves that we otherwise would act out unconsciously. For instance, when Peterson says of the Cain and Abel story that it is the archetypal story of humans in history, he is saying that the myth was forged in the blood of the better, shed by the hands of the worse. It is far better to be consciously aware of this fatal flaw at the archetypal level of our being than it is to unconsciously act out the eternally recurring drama. THE CHALLENGE OF ALLEGORICAL EXEGESIS

Allegorical exegesis is concerned with taking a mode of writing that is not directly applicable to a subject matter and applying it to that subject matter. For instance, when the psalmist asks, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place?” and answers, “He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully” (Psalm 24:3–4), we are to understand “the hill of the LORD” as the heavenly aspect of ourselves, which we may ascend into if we have a clean conscience and a pure heart. By reading the psalmist with an allegorical sense we can understand the poetry of the psalmist in relation to the subject matter of our spiritual salvation. Peterson approaches the Bible from an allegorical perspective in an attempt to interpret the symbolism contained within the stories that he thinks reflect the archetypal patterns that make up the structure of Being. The subject matter to which the allegorical exegesis is to be applied is the psyche. But this presents an interpretive challenge that is as common to Peterson as it was to the fathers and mothers of the historical church who also read the Genesis stories allegorically. Since the archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious cannot be known in themselves, we are dependent on the subjective interpretation of the exegete to provide their content. The symbols of myth can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and there is no way to empirically verify that any particular interpretation of the symbols is perfectly representative of the archetypal patterns. Any allegorical interpretation will inevitably be influenced by the life experience of the exegete, and the particular education he or she has had. Peterson’s interpretation is inevitably influenced by his education and his experience as a clinical psychologist. The voice of Nietzsche quite often lingers in the background. For instance, Mary becomes the symbol of the “yes-saying” mother who has the capacity to look clear-eyed at the tragedies inherent in existence and still say yes to bringing a child into the world.21 And Cain becomes the symbol of the hostile brother filled with Nietzschean ressentiment toward his more noble brother until the spirit of revenge drives him to fratricide.22 Beyond its Nietzschean elements, Peterson’s interpretation is often very practical and clearly motivated by a benevolent desire to help everyday people make better decisions in their day-to-day lives. He encourages his listeners to adopt noble goals and learn to sacrifice immediate gratification for the purpose of achieving those goals at a future time. His interpretation is often richly supplemented with psychological, neurological, and sociological knowledge. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that his interpretation of the symbols found in the Genesis stories are actually representative of the archetypal patterns that he takes to make up the structure of Being. For, since there is such a wide variety of ways that the text can be read allegorically, how can we be sure that any allegorical interpretation captures the true meaning? Since archetypes as such cannot be known in themselves, we are dependent on a subjective interpretation of the symbols, and our interpretations can be as far apart as heaven from hell. In his Confessions, Augustine directly confronts the challenge posed by the variety of

ways that allegory can be used. In a manner that is somewhat antithetical to our present age, which is so conditioned to reduce what is extraordinarily complex to a single and uniform fact, Augustine affirms that the very profundity of these biblical stories gives them the power to inspire such a wide variety of expositions: Just as a mountain spring confined to a small space generates a force that compels it to flow into multiple channels over a wide expanse of land, so the enormous force of these compact stories is that they “pour out a spate of clear truth” in a manner that is beneficial to “many expositions.”23 Like Augustine, Peterson marvels at the amount of layered meanings that can be derived from stories that are often only a few sentences in length. This is their very strength, and the mark of their profundity. They are the life-giving spring that has flowed through the minds of so many great thinkers, in a variety of ways, across the expanse of space and time. Just one example is the symbol of the serpent in the tree whispering harmful and deceitful lies to Eve in the guise of goodness, which has been reproduced in everything from children’s stories to literary masterpieces like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, where the characters of Saruman and Wormtongue embody the deceitful serpent. Peterson’s exegesis of the story of Adam and Eve combines evolutionary psychology with modern psychological analysis. The snake in the tree is supposed to symbolize a primal predator of our tree-dwelling ancestors. Drawing from a theory made prominent by Lynn Isbell, Peterson claims that human beings have adapted to see color so well because of the necessity of spotting the camouflaged predator in the tree in order to survive.24 Thus the serpent in the tree represents the most primal form of evil—the threat to the survival of our species. The tree is also called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which for Peterson symbolizes the coming into self-consciousness that occurred as our brains grew as an adaptation to the demands of vision. Reminiscent of Rousseau’s First Discourse, Peterson claims that by developing self-consciousness we developed the capacity to represent good and evil to ourselves; contained in the knowledge of what can hurt us is the knowledge of how we can hurt others.25 On another level of meaning, the serpent represents the pride of the intellect that can so easily convert wisdom to cunning. Peterson’s is a layered and nuanced interpretation of the nature of evil, which he accomplishes by applying the story allegorically to different aspects of the psyche. Peterson’s allegorical approach to reading the Genesis stories is similar to the way that early Christian thinkers approached the Genesis stories. In Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth homily on the Lord’s Prayer, he also allows the symbols in the garden of Eden to represent the psychological slavery that occurs when we allow lust (in a broad sense) to “live within us like a dictator, with no regard for law and convention.”26 Gregory believes the soulatrophying effect of lust is contained in the teaching of Moses, which he portrays to us “by means of symbols, when he present’s the serpent as Eve’s counsellor in matters of taste.”27 Gregory goes on to explain the way the symbols can be interpreted when applied to the subject matter of the soul: Now by the metaphor of the scales we must understand the manifold

occasions of lust. For, speaking generally, the passion of lust is but one animal; but the many various forms of lust which are intermingled with the human life through the senses are the scales surrounding the serpent, speckled by the various passion-provoking incidents.28 Gregory’s psychological analysis of the workings of lust is probing for anyone who has struggled with any degree of addiction (that is, all of us). As our vices begin to haunt our psyche in manifold ways, the serpent becomes more alive within us until our lives are under the psychological sway of evil. For classical Christian thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, the meaning of life was thought to be a spiritual pilgrimage to the primordial home of our being. Our journey east to the heavenly Jerusalem of our soul occurs when we establish “the consciousness of God” firmly in our hearts, uniting our soul to the divine Word.29 I would hesitate to say that Peterson’s allegorical interpretations of the symbols in Genesis are incorrect. The profundity of the Genesis stories is that they can be applied to different subjects in different contexts; they are the mythos that gives content to the Logos. However, the interpretation of Gregory of Nyssa is more profound and meaningful than Peterson’s in that it teaches the contemplation of the eternal Word, Jesus Christ—which is to say, the allegory is applied to the subject matter of our salvation. CONCLUSION Peterson’s turn to the Bible is not arbitrary; it is grounded in an ontology that can be situated within a wider philosophical conversation. If archetypes are innate qualities of the human being, and if they are represented in the symbols of myth, then Peterson’s turn to the Bible is entirely justified and his biblical series amounts to an “investigation into the structure of Being itself.” His ontology makes for a fascinating interpretation of the development and applicability of the Genesis myths for theist and atheist alike. Most often, his interpretation provides valuable and probing insights that are directly applicable to life. However, from a Christian perspective, his exegesis does not match the historic fathers and mothers of the church. These great writers and spiritual witnesses of the epic myth point more firmly, and with greater lucidity, to the Word become flesh, Jesus Christ. He is the burning fire that illuminates consciousness, the living symbol of eternity, and the very beating heart of Being.

6 Jordan Peterson’s Genesis Lectures: Interpreting the Bible between Rationalism and Nihilism LAURENCE BROWN

For well over three thousand years, the biblical stories have inspired countless generations of the faithful to gather together to find meaning. Like a golden thread weaving together a majestic tapestry, these ancient narratives have elegantly bound the ethos of Western consciousness from the time of their acceptance into Roman society until the modern era. They emerged as the glimmer of civilization necessary to stave off the forces of calamitous barbarism after the collapse of Rome, and continued to sustain Western Europe throughout the medieval period. The biblical stories have also profoundly shaped the ideational structures on which Western philosophy, art, music, and literature have been grounded in nearly every aspect imaginable. Yet now there is a twofold danger threatening to unravel the canvas of Western civilization in its entirety. On the one end, the specter of a pure scientific rationalism headed by the new atheist vanguard tugs at the golden thread, loosening its stitching and confounding the beauty of its grand narrative. On the other, the threat of cultural relativism and nihilism spreading from the postmodern spirit of critical deconstruction plucks at the thread with the intent of tearing the tapestry apart altogether. While there are many prominent figures within the Christian tradition striving to preserve the integrity of the biblical stories in contemporary culture, there is one academic from outside the church who has employed his sudden catapult to intellectual fame to staunchly defend the faith as the foundation of Western cultural values. Jordan B. Peterson, professor of psychology and clinical psychologist, has rapidly become a cultural icon across the Western world. Yet in spite of the headlines he gets for standing up to the politically correct establishment as an uncompromising defender of free speech, it is his reinvigoration of the biblical stories that may well produce his greatest and most lasting impact among millennials for years to come. In 2017, Peterson embarked on an intellectual journey to unearth the mysteries of the Bible to a generation that is largely unaware of and far removed from their direct cultural influence. Originally a twelve-part lecture series on Genesis presented at the University of Toronto between May and August of that year, The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories exploded in popularity, with over a million views on YouTube, prompting an additional three lectures to be recorded in the fall. This essay seeks to unpack the

fundamental themes presented in the original twelve lectures, with a focus on assessing their relevance for the cultural rejuvenation of Western civilization. Ultimately, I will draw inferences as to why Peterson’s psychological interpretation has appealed to so many. Approaching age-old themes such as the relationship between order and chaos, the human propensity for evil, tragedy and suffering, the treatment of strangers, and the significance of sacrifice through a modern psychological framework, Peterson testifies to the relevance of the biblical stories, not simply for the historian or religious practitioner, but for every modern person with a longing to truly comprehend the patterns of social behavior embedded within the myths and stories at the heart of Western civilization. PETERSON’S APPROACH TO THE BIBLE The lens through which Peterson approaches and analyzes the biblical texts derives primarily from his experience as a clinical psychologist; however, to say his approach to biblical hermeneutics is derived from purely rational-empirical motivations would be to misunderstand the tension between order and chaos that Peterson attempts to bridge in both his intellectual and personal odysseys. Building on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, Peterson perceives the biblical stories as the encapsulation of thousands of years of learned social behavior engrained within the collective unconscious and passed down generationally through the development of meaningful stories. The Jungian archetype, so often referred to by Peterson, attempts to extract the elements of a transcendent reality that is common to all human experience throughout the vast expanse of space and time. Much like other ancient foundational narratives, Peterson approaches the biblical stories as myths that convey fundamental truths concerning the most basic but often overlooked aspects of the human condition. By analyzing patterns throughout such narratives, Peterson extrapolates several key archetypes that help to illuminate certain moral truths that remain consistent throughout the ages. Archetypes such as the great father, the hostile brothers, and the hero are pivotal for understanding the psychological significance of the Bible. In the introduction to the series, Peterson lays the groundwork of his investigative pilgrimage by unearthing fundamental questions concerning the role of Christianity in the development of Western civilization. In an age where scientists have replaced priests as the intermediaries between the known and unknown facets of the natural world, it is difficult for many to even fathom the impact such stories had in the daily lives of their cultural forebears. “How such stories could have been believed, what it means that they are no longer believed, and what it would mean if they were still believed today,” are just a few of the questions that Peterson’s voyage into the psychological significance of Scripture is intended to answer.1 Drawing inspiration from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Peterson posits that Christianity’s rational approach to theology inherited from the Greek philosophers provided the methodological framework necessary for transcending its own dogmatic structures, opening the gates to both the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Catholicism in particular, Peterson says, encouraged a strict approach to uncovering the truth of God in Scripture, and in so doing trained the European mind in the development of self-criticism that was

necessary to throw off the shadows in Plato’s cave and reveal the light of reason to all humanity. Christianity, then, can be said to have sown the seeds of its own demise. As Peterson eloquently states, “The truth—the spirit of truth—that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity,” leading to the conclusion that the enchanted ground whence Western consciousness developed was excavated to reveal the cold utilitarian clay of scientific rationalism beneath its surface.2 ORDER AND CHAOS IN THE CREATION STORY The archetypal theme of order and chaos is one that Peterson revisits with great frequency when lecturing both to his students and to the public. From the first few passages of the creation narrative, the bedrock of Judeo-Christian metaphysics gives rise to the ideal of order across Western culture. In the second lecture, Peterson plunges headlong into some of the most profound cosmological mysteries, and the role that the evolution of human consciousness plays in the structural reality of the universe. Human consciousness, despite the greatest advancements in biochemistry and cognitive science, is one area of inquiry of which empirical methods have barely scratched the surface. For Peterson, the presence of the conscious mind is the greatest obstacle facing those in the scientific community who seek to explain reality in purely objective terms. The subjective value that humans place on material objects may be just as important as the objective physical properties these objects possess in developing a comprehensive understanding of reality as a whole. For Peterson, the creation story of Genesis speaks to our deepest psychological need to find meaning in an otherwise chaotic world of abstract and seemingly random sense impressions. The very first lines of the Old Testament depict this concept as God creates the world from formless potential, illuminating the cosmos with meaning in the command “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3 KJV). Drawing on his knowledge of evolutionary psychology, Peterson correlates the act of creating habitable order from chaos with a defense mechanism linked to the most primitive cognitive structures in the human brain. Throughout the evolutionary process, our treedwelling ancestors evolved by mapping and conquering the unknown with the capacity to assess threats through their advancing cognitive ability for pattern recognition. While the recognition of predatory threats improved through the process of natural selection, so did the capacity to face and overcome those threats systematically. The creation of the world as depicted in Genesis is not simply a story to explain the origin of the universe. To Peterson, it is a narrative that speaks to our deepest primordial instinct for creativity and survival. Unlike other creatures equipped with external defense mechanisms such as sharp teeth and claws, human survival and flourishing depended on those who possessed the heroic wherewithal to face the chaotic dangers of the natural world and thus create a hospitable environment from which threats could be closely monitored and repelled.3 Another major theme presented in the opening chapter of Genesis is the importance of speech in the process of human development. Peterson holds freedom of speech to be the cornerstone on which all Western values are grounded. The divine act of speaking being into existence from the depths of a formless void relates to the human capacity to transform

reality into its own image from the unchanneled chaos of limitless potential. A central feature of the Jewish and Christian religions is the belief that humanity is created in the image of God and therefore partakes in the creative nature of the divine. Linking the creation story to the evolutionary process, Peterson correlates the capacity for verbal communication with the spark of divinity that arose in humanity and placed the species above creation in its responsibility as stewards of the earth. Speech is not only shaped by the material world of our surroundings but also employed to categorize and transform the outside environment through reason. Upon speaking creation into existence, God declares all that he had made to be “very good” (Gen 1:31 KJV). Such an emphatic description of creation, Peterson argues, indicates that it is not simply free speech onto which Western philosophy cast its moorings, but true speech that forms the structure of any justly created order. With the advent of the postmodern critique, Peterson argues that the importance of speaking the truth, as represented in the creation story, is now more crucial than ever. As the tendency to cast fundamental ideas of societal order into the realm of opinion advances with the spread of cultural relativism, Peterson believes that the time-tested archetypes that represent the truth not only of how the world is but also of how to act in the world must be brought to the forefront of Western consciousness in order to ensure its preservation.4 In his third lecture, Peterson expands on the creation story by exploring the Christian understanding of God as an element of the archetypal image of the great father. Elsewhere, Peterson describes the great father as “a product of history,” producing both the tyranny and security of cultural rigidity simultaneously.5 According to Peterson, the concept of God is the earliest articulated image of a preexisting structure from which the phenomenon of consciousness emerges. In Peterson’s psychological analysis, the first person of the Christian Trinity, God the Father, represents the underlying a priori cognitive structure from which the basic perception of sense data becomes possible. In order for consciousness to exist and act in the world, there must first be a body from which it can operate. As Peterson suggests, this is the basis for prioritizing the divinity of the body as an essential element in classical Christianity. Shifting from individual consciousness to that of the group, the imagery of God the Father thus represents the underlying foundations of truth and virtue on which a wellordered society is built. The idea of God the Father emerged as the encapsulation of all the attributes required to drive human aspirations upward and serves as the personification of the ultimate human ideal.6 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND EVIL IN ADAM AND EVE The story of Adam and Eve and the fall from paradise in the second and third chapters of Genesis relates directly to two of the most striking flaws in the human condition: the problem of self-consciousness and the human propensity for evil. In his fourth lecture, Peterson addresses both these themes from a multiplicity of angles, drawing on biblical symbolism and metaphors for insight. The problem of self-consciousness is unique to humanity, as we are the only beings fully cognizant of our own mortality. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Peterson points out, is a powerful symbol for the evolutionary journey from

unconscious instinct to the conscious awareness of our own insecurities and vulnerabilities. The fruit of the tree represents vital information that can be used either for the good of humanity or for unfathomable evil, as the events of the twentieth century have shown. From the perspective of neuroscience, Peterson argues that since the same brain circuits we use to gather information were employed by our ancestors to gather food, information has become a type of meta-food we use not only to find sustenance but also use as a form of currency to trade for food. The curiosity for knowledge through information can thus be—just as the first couple discovered—a powerful temptation with the potential to violently shake one’s psychological foundations if not approached with reverence and wisdom.7 The emergence of self-consciousness, both in the Genesis story as well as in evolutionary psychology, may be the most transformational event not only in the history of the world but also in the universe at large. This amazing phenomenon, as Peterson states, “puts a rift into the structure of being, and that is given cosmic significance.”8 As such, Peterson rejects the nihilist claim that humanity is merely a parasite invading a speck of dust in the far reaches of the universe, and instead argues that the evolution of human consciousness may be the one pivotal moment that transforms the universe from a metaphysical abyss to a place of meaning and limitless potential. To Peterson, this is precisely what the Edenic story in Genesis conveys. The command by God not to eat of the tree, and the warning that they will die if they do, illustrates the problem of self-consciousness. Humanity, now painfully aware of its mortality, must toil by using every available faculty to fend off the clutches of death for as long as possible. The fall of Adam and Eve from blissful ignorance into the cruel selfconscious realization of death and the underlying anxiety associated with such a fear takes the shape of a great tragic play, with the remainder of the Bible dedicated to resolving this complex problem. Yet to the Christian, as Peterson indicates, the emergence of selfconsciousness was the necessary precondition for the incarnation of Christ and ultimately for the redemption of humanity in its journey upward toward reunification with God.9 The second theme in the Edenic story, the human propensity for evil, is one that Peterson has dedicated much of his life’s work attempting to understand, and is directly correlated to the problem of self-consciousness. Upon eating the fruit, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen 3:7 KJV). From a state of blindness to their own metaphysical reality, the acquisition of knowledge opened Adam and Eve’s eyes to the realization that they were exposed and therefore vulnerable. The act of covering up their nakedness, Peterson concludes, is the first step toward the development of culture. They shielded themselves from the perils of the outside world and masked their newly discovered insecurities. With the knowledge of their vulnerabilities, the human propensity for evil entered the world. Once humans recognized their own vulnerabilities, they also became aware of the vulnerabilities of others. Henceforth, such knowledge could be used either to protect the other from danger or to bend the other to one’s own will. This, Peterson declares, is the true knowledge of good and evil that has plagued the human condition.10 EVIL AND SACRIFICE IN CAIN AND ABEL

With the development of self-consciousness, humanity faced the realm of the unknown with the heightened awareness of its own mortality, but also with an insatiable curiosity for the rewards awaiting just beyond the secure confines of the encampment. Throughout ancient mythological stories, two distinct patterns of behavior emerged as a reaction to the challenge of confronting the unknown. The first pattern is represented by the mythological hero who encounters uncharted territory with courage and an outlook of benevolence by taking chances in the hopes of reaping potential rewards. The other is depicted in the eternal adversary who retreats from the unknown into a rigid authoritarian structure out of fear and often through deceit. Together, these two modes of behavior characterize the archetype of the hostile brothers.11 In this archetype, the younger brother often displays more visionary characteristics and becomes somewhat revolutionary in his approach to life. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, tilled the land while his younger brother Abel tended the flocks. While both presented sacrifices to God from the toil of their hands, God favored the sacrifice of Abel, and in his anger Cain slayed his brother. While it is suggested that Abel’s offering was of great value, having been brought from “the firstlings of his flock,” there is no mention of the quality of Cain’s sacrifice. Whether God’s decision to reject Cain’s offering was due to a lack of effort or completely arbitrary, Cain allowed the seeds of bitterness to grow, with his unchecked resentment ultimately culminating in the murder of his brother. As punishment, Cain was cursed to wander the earth as a fugitive, far from his home and the land of his inheritance (Gen 4:1–16). In his lecture on Cain and Abel, Peterson continues to mine the age-old question regarding the origin of evil, but also introduces a new theme that will continue to unfold throughout the Old Testament narratives and culminate in the redemption of humanity through Christ. Peterson describes sacrifice, often regarded as a temporary atonement for the sins of mankind, as the psychological precursor to the modern value of self-discipline. As societies developed over thousands of years, it became evident that those who delayed gratification in the present tended to become more prosperous in the future. In our quasimeritocratic society, discipline is perhaps the greatest indicator of success, as those who dedicate the most energy to their craft are generally rewarded for their efforts.12 Sacrifice is now often regarded as a primitive conception, yet Peterson holds it to be among the greatest ideas ever conjured up in the human mind. Discipline, as the ability to make sacrifices, runs contrary to our most basic survival instincts in many ways. While the human brain is hardwired to protect us from those things that are uncomfortable and risky, sacrifice requires us to override the impulse for comfort and pleasure and voluntarily embrace discomfort and hardship. The story of Cain and Abel is a metaphorical representation of two modes of operating in the world. One embraces the hardships that life inflicts with gratitude and, making the right sacrifices, is eventually rewarded for it. The other, despite being given much, sacrifices little and becomes bitter when circumstances do not follow the desired outcome. For Peterson, Abel represents the ideal mode of being, and flourishes as a result. Rather than emulating the success of his brother, Cain sinks into jealousy and hatred of what he simultaneously admires. Much more than making the wrong

sacrifice, Cain’s sin was the irreversible destruction of his own ideal in the murder of Abel. This story, according to Peterson, is the most profound story in the Bible because it speaks to the fundamental division between good and evil that runs down the center of every human heart. Peterson portrays us all with the ability to shoulder the burden of being with grace like Abel, yet we also possess the proclivity to murder the best part of ourselves like Cain. When resentment toward being itself knocks at the door, it is ultimately our own choice whether to let it in.13 SUFFERING AND NOAH’S ARK In lectures six and seven, Peterson turns his attention to the story of Noah’s ark and converges on the theme of tragedy and suffering. In the ancient world, flood narratives portrayed a general pattern of the degenerating moral condition of mankind leading to the judgment of a supernatural being who sends a flood to cleanse the world of sin. Building on the story of Cain and Abel, Peterson draws a connection between their two modes of being and the cataclysmic deluge that consumes all but the most diligent and principled. The arbitrary nature of existence may bring about tragedy and suffering, but, as illustrated through Cain, that suffering can be multiplied exponentially when approached with a negligent attitude toward Being itself. As Peterson argues, no matter how bad things get, they can always be made worse. This was certainly the case for those who lived in Noah’s generation. In contrast, the story describes Noah as “a just man and perfect in his generation,” and a man who walked with God (Gen 6:9 KJV). Following in the example of Abel, Noah found grace with God and was praised for his virtue.14 As a clinical psychologist, Peterson is no stranger to the arbitrary tragedies of life that can disrupt the human psyche and throw existence into chaos. In his lectures, Peterson merges insight from his own experience in behavioral therapy with the patterns of moral behavior demonstrated in the biblical stories. Peterson views Noah as a literary representation of the proper manner in which to live in order to both prepare for and persevere through tragedy. While the flood was devastating in its own right, the greater tragedy was the failure on the part of individuals and society to prepare for it. Noah’s generation was held responsible for the degeneration of society as a group, but as Peterson starkly warns, it was the moral depravity of every individual that contributed to the decline of civilization as a whole. One of the major lessons of Genesis, Peterson points out, is that we are not isolated individuals, but are networked together in such a way that our own moral decay can contribute to the degeneration of the entire universe in powerful ways. Corruption is like a virus that spreads throughout society from one individual to another, and if allowed to persist, is destined to engulf the whole. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, acts of omission by individuals opened up space for acts of aggression by the state and society. It is for this reason that Peterson so passionately defends the values of Western civilization by promoting the virtues of the biblical stories. Despite the imperfections and societal injustice that continue to exist, Peterson argues that the level of functionality and social trust that is prevalent in Europe and North America is historically rare, and something that should not be

taken for granted. The ark is a powerful metaphor for a cultural structure that shelters individuals from the natural forces of entropy, allowing us to persevere through unforeseen challenges. While Peterson agrees that we live in a damaged structure, every individual can find positive meaning in life by tending to those areas of disrepair that extend into their own sphere of influence, no matter how small the action.15 In his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Peterson pens an entire chapter urging broken individuals to set aside their resentment toward society and begin to change the small things around them. He urges people to stop acting deceitfully and start speaking the truth, no matter how difficult it may be. Peterson suggests that if everyone were to act in this manner, the world may stop being a place of tragedy and start becoming a place of divine hope.16 This, according to Peterson, is what Genesis means when it says that Noah walked with God. ABRAHAM’S JOURNEY From Adam before the fall, to his son Abel, and then on to Noah, the Genesis stories to this point encapsulate the prototypical man of virtue, and contrast that vision with an adversarial element. These stories create an ideal toward which humanity is urged to strive. Yet in a fallen state, these ideals bear little resemblance to the reality of the self-conscious individual who always retains an element of Cain within the depths of the subconscious mind. The following five lectures explore the journey of Abraham, who displays the all-too-common flaws to which we can all relate as humans. Yet at the same time, Abraham is portrayed as the archetypal hero who operates on faith alone in his conquest of the unknown. Throughout the Abrahamic stories, Peterson highlights this shift in focus from a Godcentered text to a sequence of narratives based on the development of distinct personalities. As Peterson points out, the direct role of God and the conception of the ideal begin to fade into the background as the Abrahamic stories progress, while the practical representations of how man is to operate in a fallen world simultaneously come to the fore.17 In discussing the Abrahamic stories, Peterson draws attention to several overarching themes that bridge the gap between the mythological world as a forum for action and the rational world as a place of objective facts based in evolutionary biology. New themes such as the treatment of strangers and the meaning of worship are introduced, while recurring themes such as the importance of true speech and the significance of sacrifice are expanded on in greater depth. In the first of the Abrahamic stories, Peterson explores the significance of the call of God to Abraham. In this narrative, God appears to Abraham and directs him to leave his country and go to a land he does not know. There, God tells Abraham that he will make him into a great nation and bless him abundantly. Even though he was seventy-five years old and his wife Sarah was barren, Abraham heeded the word of God and started on his journey. As Peterson explains, God’s first command to go forth into the unknown represents the journey toward independence that every person must face as they grow into adulthood and confront the broader world. It is a journey of personal development toward the key pillars of competence and authority that form the basis of a well-ordered and functioning society. Stories like this demonstrate the utility of virtue to a culture in which competence is often

mistaken for privilege and authority is misconstrued as oppression. In the story, Abraham is a man of action who goes out into the world against the odds; like the archetypal hero, he is promised a great reward in the form of a son. This bold act of faith speaks to the idea that if you pursue your intuition and fulfill what is required of you, nearly anything is possible. To Peterson, this is the story at the core of Western civilization. To bear one’s responsibility, to pursue one’s ideal, and to accept one’s calling leads each person to flourish in the transformation of their autonomous individuality; and through that development, the individual becomes uniquely equipped to contribute to the prosperity of the whole.18 The theme of confronting the unknown is also present in the narrative of Sodom and Gomorrah. God appears in the form of three strangers, whom Abraham welcomes into his home and treats with courtesy despite the obvious risks in doing so. Upon reassuring Abraham of God’s covenant to deliver him a child, two of the strangers go to the city of Sodom, where they are brought into the house of Abraham’s nephew, Lot. The wicked men of Sodom surround the house and demand that Lot surrender the strangers over to them to be abused. Striking the men with blindness, the strangers help Lot’s family escape, and God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah by raining down burning sulfur (Gen 18:1–19:29). As Peterson points out in Maps of Meaning, humanity’s natural tendency is to approach the unknown with aggression and fear, yet it is often the unfamiliar that offers the greatest potential for meaning and the revitalization of one’s assumptions and core beliefs.19 The story of Sodom and Gomorrah represents two opposing frameworks for dealing with “the other,” with two dramatically different consequences. Abraham, who treats the strangers with respect, is rewarded with the renewal of God’s promise to deliver him a son; the men of Sodom, who approach the strangers with contempt, are utterly destroyed.20 The theme of the stranger and how to interact with the unknown is a concept that lies at the heart of Western culture. Despite the human tendency to reject the unfamiliar, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah demonstrates that there is a transcendent value in every individual that must be respected regardless of who they are and what they may have done. The concept of natural rights arose largely from the biblical notion that every individual is endowed with the creative Logos, and therefore participates in the divine nature of God. This idea, Peterson reiterates, underpins the values that uphold Western legal systems, as even the most notorious murderers are granted a degree of human dignity. How one engages the stranger also influences the ability to navigate through the world with a corresponding degree of success. Approaching the unknown from a place of curiosity rather than fear develops the necessary resilience to adapt to life’s challenges with a greater sense of ease, and offers protection against various unforeseen circumstances and calamities. In searching beyond oneself to that which is yet to be understood, much can be learned and much suffering avoided. Abraham’s welcoming attitude toward the strangers exhibits courage, but also models the ideal mode of being toward “the other.”21 With the closing lecture in his twelve-part series, Peterson returns to the fundamental theme of sacrifice. In a hyperconsumerized society where rights have trumped responsibilities and freedoms are elevated above duties, Peterson argues that the rediscovery

of sacrifice is critical for the continued prosperity of Western culture. In Abraham’s hundredth year, God fulfills his promise: Sarah becomes pregnant and gives birth to their son Isaac. When Isaac is older, God administers the ultimate test to prove Abraham’s faith by commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son. Upon building an altar and placing Isaac on it, Abraham begins to slay his son as God has commanded, but is prevented from doing so by the angel of the Lord. The story ends with God’s renewal of the Abrahamic covenant. “Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son” (Gen 22:12), declares the angel of the Lord, “And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen 22:18). Peterson approaches the story with considerable hesitation. He points out that the command of God to sacrifice a child is often a stumbling block for any thoughtful student seeking to rediscover the biblical tradition. However, as with the story of Cain and Abel, Peterson reiterates his belief that the discovery of sacrifice was absolutely critical for the development of civilization in general, and for the West in particular; thus it needed to be illustrated in the most dramatic fashion possible. While sacrifice was common among cultures in Abraham’s time, Peterson suggests that there was a unique element to sacrifice in the Judeo-Christian tradition that contributed to the success of Western civilization. The God of the Bible did not simply require sacrifices for his appeasement, but required the sacrifice of that which was cherished most. In this instance, there is a fine line between the sacrifice of oneself and that of one’s child. This is amplified in the story of Abraham in the anticipation leading to Isaac’s birth. It is often the case that life demands we give up that which we are holding on to most in order that we may rise above our present circumstances and grow in virtue. While Abraham may have been chosen by God, Peterson points out that this did not mean that life would be easy. Living through poverty, famine, and warfare may have been difficult enough, but having to sacrifice his beloved son whom he had waited his whole life to hold would have been absolutely devastating. Therefore, it was the greatest sacrifice Abraham could give.22 The dramatic portrayal of such a sacrifice was a prerequisite for the understanding of sacrifice within the Judeo-Christian tradition, and thus can arguably be said to have contributed to the Western notion of progress that was necessary to guide humanity forward into modernity. CHRIST AS THE ARCHETYPE OF SACRIFICE While the 2017 series of lectures is primarily an exploration of the Genesis stories, Peterson’s lectures often make use of the Christian notion of the Old Testament as a precursor to the coming of Christ. Noting that the Bible is remarkably complex, Peterson invokes the modern analogy of a “thoroughly hyper-linked book” with roughly sixty-five thousand crossreferences, which leap forward and backward in time to produce a complete and coherent structural narrative.23 Following the Christian tradition, Peterson understands the aim for which the Bible was assembled to point to the fulfillment of Old Testament themes in the person of Jesus Christ. The unfolding symbolic and archetypal themes in Genesis are brought to their conclusions with the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God the Son appearing in

the flesh as the Savior of humanity. In briefly examining the psychological significance of Christ through Peterson’s interpretive methods, we may begin to draw conclusions regarding the impact and relevance that his biblical lectures offer those seeking to uncover and explore the roots of Western culture with greater contextualization and meaning. For Peterson, Christ is the bridge between the truth that is known and the truth that is unknowable. As God the Son, Christ is the image of God in whose likeness all of humanity is created. As God incarnate, Christ is also the model of the perfect individual who both accepts the tragedies of life and transcends its vicissitudes by directing humanity’s gaze upward toward the kingdom of God.24 From the fall of mankind in the garden of Eden, selfconsciousness—from which the human propensity toward evil arises—becomes the critical dilemma that is grappled with throughout the Old Testament, with the narrative building to a crescendo and culminating in Christ’s death and resurrection. As foreshadowed by the stories of Abel, Noah, and Abraham, the theme of sacrifice emerges once again as the ultimate antidote to the tragedies and malevolence of being. The passion of Christ, Peterson declares, becomes the pivotal event to which all biblical stories are directed. It is the perfect representation of an archetypal story as it approaches the limits of both human suffering and the qualities of redemptive goodness. Christ’s betrayal, suffering, and death, Peterson says, epitomize the worst possible events that can happen to the greatest possible individual. Thus the passion of Christ not only builds on the great sacrifice of Abraham but also exceeds it as the quintessential archetype of sacrifice itself.25 As God sacrifices his one and only Son while simultaneously sacrificing himself, the redemption of mankind now becomes possible as the greatest sacrifice for the greatest possible good is realized on the cross. SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE MODERN WORLD The appeal of Jordan Peterson’s biblical interpretations through the lens of clinical psychology can largely be attributed both to his unique and carefully articulated perspectives conveyed through his charismatic and relatable personality, and to the timing of his message. While Peterson presents the Bible in a format that can be easily appreciated by many outside the church through his attempts to bridge mythology and science in a manner that can be easily digested through a modern-secular paradigm, the overwhelming demand for his biblical series speaks to a deeper cultural deficit in Western countries. In a world faced with increased suffering and injustice, along with the threat of global environmental calamity, many in the West are beginning to lose faith in the utopian promise of over four centuries of Enlightenment rationalism. Yet, as Peterson argues, the postmodern reaction to this dilemma has led many to turn to identity politics to create their own meaning, and thus leaves society even more divided than before. While the West sits at the crossroads between nihilism and identitarianism, many young people have become thirsty for a deeper philosophy to renew life’s meaning, and are beginning to find it in the wisdom of traditions long since forgotten. Part of Peterson’s appeal is his willingness to sail out from the modern paradigm to explore the truth embedded within tradition without losing sight of the shoreline. For Peterson, pure scientific rationalism is simply not sufficient to explain the complexities of the

human condition and the many facets of experience that cannot be reduced to a quantitative approach. While he identifies himself primarily as a scientist, Peterson is drawn to the biblical stories, not only to understand their objective historical role in shaping Western culture and the values that set it apart from other civilizational projects, but also to draw from the deep well of ancient wisdom, insights into an area of human experience that remains largely unpenetrated by scientific inquiry. In his interpretation of the biblical stories, Peterson draws together what the world is made of and how to act in it. In Maps of Meaning, Peterson categorizes the structure of reality into two key areas: the world as a “forum for action,” and the world as a “place of things.”26 All too often, the two are set at odds, and as a result we receive only a partial glimpse into the reality of the human condition. For Peterson, the world of objective facts validated by scientific inquiry and the world of mythology that gives such objects meaning cannot be separated. Rather, they must be integrated if we are to distinguish between the world as it is and the world as it should be.27 This is precisely how Peterson approaches the Bible. By interpreting it as a set of stories that provide universal meaning to the structure that forms the basis for all social interactions, Peterson generates a refreshing synthesis between the validatable properties of the material world and the socially established values that have developed from the creative domain of religious symbolism. In so doing, Peterson begins to probe the greatest mysteries of human development embedded within such stories that both the purely scientific worldview and the exclusively mythological perspective simply could not accomplish on their own. As a Christian absorbing Jordan Peterson’s biblical lectures, it is difficult not to be conflicted between feelings of admiration for his role as a prominent defender of the faith and skepticism toward a biblical hermeneutic that is largely detached from the foundations of theology and tradition. The ambiguity with which Peterson addresses his own faith in God certainly raises many questions for the believer concerning the degree to which his approach to interpreting the Bible can be advocated. Peterson remains agnostic concerning the possibility of the literal death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—the cornerstone on which the Christian faith ultimately rests. What is important, in Peterson’s view, is the psychological transformation that occurs by acting out the role of Christ in one’s own life. For many Christians, however, such an answer remains inadequate, as it does not address the theological and metaphysical foundations on which the Christian faith was born. The apostle Paul, in preaching to the church in Corinth concerning the resurrection of the dead, responds to the challenge that the resurrection was merely a spiritual phenomenon by proclaiming that “if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). While Peterson is unwilling to rule out the possibility of universal salvation through the physical resurrection of Christ, he also appears unable—for the present time at least—to take the leap of faith Christians deem necessary to transcend the realm of material certainty into the eternal presence of the divine. Yet rather than dismissing Peterson’s psychological hermeneutic altogether, Christians may be well served by seeking to understand why his biblical series has made inroads with younger generations in areas where many churches have struggled. What is truly remarkable

about Peterson’s approach is his ability to reintroduce these foundational stories to a generation that has grown up with little to no knowledge of its cultural inheritance, and is oblivious to the narratives that have come to shape nearly every aspect of its social realities. Deprived of these stories both in the home and at school, Peterson presents them in a manner that sparks renewed interest for those longing for a greater purpose than the shallow pursuit of happiness offered up by both the modern and postmodern paradigms. What sets Peterson apart from both a secular approach and the standard Christian approach is that he sees the biblical stories, not only as antiquated tales or religious dogma, but also as living archetypes. For Peterson, such stories have the potential to direct our path through life in a manner that is congruent with the very best aspects of humanity’s learned evolutionary lessons, which, as he illustrates, are found fully preserved and intact within the collective mythological consciousness of our ancestors. Thus Peterson builds on the hope of many Christians that these vital stories could once again have relevance in the day-to-day lives of individuals, and revivify a declining and wayward culture in the West. To Peterson, the biblical stories are not incompatible with the Enlightenment; on the contrary, they can be embraced as a model for moral truth that complements the objective truth unveiled by science. For him, the biblical stories are perhaps the greatest representation of the human journey that has ever been compiled. With their beautifully articulated symbols, metaphors, and archetypes, they have the potential to reveal the innermost mysteries of the human psyche for those who seek to rediscover them. For many, Peterson’s synthesis of clinical psychology and biblical symbolism meets them where they are by satisfying the longing for a deeper spiritual meaning while remaining grounded in our modern scientific paradigm. The wondrous insights Peterson offers regarding the Bible’s psychological significance have thus appealed to many who may be open to hearing the gospel if it is explained in the language of modern psychology—a language they can both understand and identify with. Yet while Peterson’s lectures may be a doorway through which many empirically minded people can begin to understand the faith, his interpretations can only serve as a cairn at the beginning of one’s path to a deeper knowledge of God. The contemplative journey of a Christian extends beyond the material and even psychological aspects of reality, proceeding deep into the metaphysical being at the essence of the human soul—a place where the religious impulse supersedes the rational, and where the pure light of grace, forgiveness, and love can truly be experienced in its divine fullness.

7 The Image of Christ: Jordan Peterson as Humanist ESTHER O’REILLY

In the annals of science fiction, few works stand taller than Walter E. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz. Originally published as three independent novellas, it was assembled into a cohesive whole and released to wide acclaim in 1959. The three stories span thousands of years in the deep future, after a nuclear apocalypse has wiped out civilization as we know it. All are set in the same small desert monastery in the American Southwest, where the remnants of mankind’s written knowledge are painstakingly preserved. With its unflinching examination of human hubris, human sanctity, and the clash between church and state, the novel has lost none of its potency sixty years on. One of the most striking scenes occurs at the beginning of the middle novella, when civilization is on the cusp of a new scientific revolution. A young would-be Einstein, Thon Taddeo, is impatient to see the monastery’s archived fragments, which could supply the missing link in his theories. Yet he confides to a priest that he wavers between excitement and incredulity at what the documents might hold. It beggars belief that mankind in its wretched, stunted postapocalyptic state could trace its lineage back to men who harnessed gravity and flew to the moon. Taddeo invites the priest to look out his office window and see a walking demonstration: an old peasant, face and neck broken out in syphilis, shuffling home with his horse in the twilight. He shows signs of paresis, not that the drop in IQ would be that noticeable, Taddeo reckons. “Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them.… Look at him, and tell me if you see the progeny of a once mighty civilization. What do you see?” The priest feels an upsurge of anger. “The image of Christ,” he replies testily. “What did you expect me to see?”1

MAN IN PARTICULAR For good or for ill, Jordan Peterson has become a topic of obsessive fascination for many. Yet while others might consider him the most interesting man in the world, it seems Peterson would rank himself very low on such a list. Indeed, if one came away with no other impression of this intellectual superstar, one should come away with this: Jordan Peterson is a man endlessly fascinated with other people.

For some intellectuals, studying ordinary folk is a transparently patronizing exercise. To echo Dostoevsky, they enjoy surveying “humanity in general,” provided they can keep “man in particular” at arm’s length. But Jordan Peterson is a different kind of intellectual. He tells his students that if they find themselves having a dull conversation, they aren’t listening carefully enough. If they were, they would see each person as uniquely strange, and therefore uniquely wonderful.2 They would understand that they have never met a merely ordinary person. As a clinician, Peterson has had many occasions to work with people who were not merely tedious but profoundly damaged, dysfunctional, and unhinged. Sometimes they could barely communicate. Sometimes words tumbled out of them with no way to turn off the flow. He writes, In my clinical practice, I talk and I listen. I talk more to some people, and listen more to others. Many of the people I listen to have no one else to talk to. Some of them are truly alone in the world. There are far more people like that than you think. You don’t meet them, because they are alone. Others are surrounded by tyrants or narcissists or drunks or traumatized people or professional victims. Some are not good at articulating themselves. They go off on tangents. They repeat themselves. They say vague and contradictory things. They’re hard to listen to.3 Passages like these exemplify Peterson’s power to convict an audience in much the same manner as great fiction, by shining a light on that which we would rather not see. Few of us who have lived any life can fail to recognize the brokenness he exposes with such acute honesty here. In this way, he directs the reader’s gaze both inward and outward: inward, to the examination of our own souls, and outward, to the recognition of that divinity which still “dwells under seal” in even the most ruined of souls who cross our path. Today, instead of listening to people’s worst news for hours on end, Peterson hears people’s good news in thirty-second intervals as he greets them after his lectures. Yet he gives their thirty-second stories his full attention, not because he has to, but because he wants to. And when he remembers them, he remembers them not as members of an amorphous group, but as individuals. When a young man tells him that he has recovered from addiction, or repaired a broken relationship with his father, to Peterson he is not merely another recovered addict or reconciled son. He is a unique person worth rejoicing and even weeping for. He is, as Peterson puts it, “a center of creation.”4 This is in profound consonance with the Christian doctrine that each individual person is uniquely fashioned in the image of God. Even as a nonbeliever, Peterson is constantly haunted by and wrestling with this idea. In his second Genesis lecture, he interprets it to mean that the central characterization of both divine and human consciousness is Logos: that which speaks into the void of chaos and brings forth habitable order.5 Though God is allpowerful and all-knowing, He has given finite, limited man the ability to “co-create the world,” guided by the voice of conscience.6 It is in this sense that every man stands at the

heart of creation—colonizing, reasoning, choosing, striving. It is this weight that bows the shoulders of the greatest king, and this honor that lifts the head of the poorest beggar. For all of Peterson’s notorious controversies, I contend that this is his most radically countercultural idea and the one most deserving of serious engagement by Christians. Far more than a political lightning rod, Peterson is a humanist thinker of uncommon originality and power. At the same time, a closer examination of his project reveals the underlying presuppositions that lie in tension with his humanist instincts. His work thus affords a welcome opportunity to move toward a more robust philosophy of Christian humanism.

A TALE OF TWO STORIES “What a work is man!” exclaims Hamlet, and well might we exclaim it with him. Man is “the beauty of the earth.” He is the crown of creation, the culmination, the summit. His measure is incalculable. It could hardly appear less to anyone with eyes to see. But the scientist is unmoved. Shakespeare is very lovely, but his claims are neither testable nor falsifiable. So Charles Darwin takes it upon himself to bring us all back to earth: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I think truer to consider him created from animals.”7 There are few more devoted pupils of Charles Darwin than Jordan Peterson. For many of the doors into Peterson’s thought, Darwin holds the key. In the first chapter of 12 Rules, he famously invites us to consider the lobster. Why? Because if we could roll back Darwin’s reel of human evolution, ancestor by ancestor, we would eventually confront that ancestor that we share with the lobster. We are all connected in the great Tree of Life. Unless we understand the lobster, we cannot understand ourselves. Unless we understand Animal, we cannot understand Man. This Peterson regards as unassailable fact. Yet unlike Darwin, Peterson sees no hubris in Hamlet’s self-evaluation. Indeed, as we have seen, he believes that creation literally revolves around the human individual. It does not seem like an exaggeration to say that, like the poet, Peterson stands in awe of the work that is Man. How, then, can these things be reconciled in his mind? Perhaps Peterson’s clearest answer to this question can be found in his first book, Maps of Meaning. There, he writes, It is the subjective aspect of individuality—of experience—that is divine, not the objective. Man is an animal, from the objective viewpoint, worthy of no more consideration than the opinion and opportunities of the moment dictate. From the mythic viewpoint, however, every individual is unique—is a new set of experiences, a new universe; has been granted the ability to bring something new into being; is capable of participating in the act of creation itself. It is the expression of this capacity for creative action that makes the tragic conditions of life tolerable, bearable—remarkable, miraculous.8 A whole history of ideas is contained in this one paragraph. Christian theologian Francis

Schaeffer aptly described this history as a schism between the “lower story” of objective facts and the “upper story” of subjective values.9 In the Western mind, science rules the realm of facts; myth, the realm of values. Like his peers, Peterson accepts this split as a matter of course. He believes science provides the standard evolutionary framework for man’s origins, while myth is the proper classification for the Judeo-Christian tradition that man was specially created in God’s image. Yet it is only in this myth that man finds purpose. It is only here that he is dignified, raised above the animals to stand a little lower than the angels. Peterson candidly confesses his inability to synthesize these two narratives, these two stories. He fails to see how “the fact … that we’ve crawled our way up from the sludge and the mud” can “coexist” with the Genesis “myth.”10 Yet he observes that even if we say we are no more than highly advanced primates, we certainly do not act like it. At least, he argues, most people don’t act like it most of the time. Those times in history when evolutionary reasoning was taken to its fully logical conclusion on a mass scale still haunt Peterson’s dreams. The “opinions and opportunities” of these moments were the opinions and opportunities of malevolent men, and humanity’s value was judged accordingly. Yet if we are indeed “created from animals,” then from the materialist standpoint the value of the human individual is in flux, as an animal’s value is in flux. Thus, to the extent that even the most strident secularist instinctively acts as if there is something intrinsically valuable about the human person, he acts more like a Christian than an atheist. This is why Peterson concludes that scientific or material truths are not the most true things: They do not govern our lives. We may think we live in the lower story, but if we could open our eyes, we would see that we have been living in the upper story all along. David Berlinski sums up: “The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race.”11

TO BE OR NOT TO BE? “I plan on taking my own life very soon. Why shouldn’t I?” It was a question Peterson had doubtless heard many times before, though never in quite this context. The evening was late, and his energy was flagging as the question-and-answer portion of his lecture stop in Indiana wore on. But if this was a serious question, it required a serious answer.12 He begins by saying what any clinician worth his salt would say: Think about the ones you’ll leave behind. Don’t assume they would be better off without you. Tell people who care about you how you’re feeling. Check yourself into the hospital. Talk to a psychiatrist. Find out if you’re suffering from a treatable condition. Consider trying antidepressants: “I’m not claiming they’re a panacea. But they certainly beat the hell out of suicide.” Don’t assume you have nothing to offer to the world. At this point, a different element comes into Peterson’s answer. He begins to stop sounding like a typical clinician: “You have intrinsic value, and you can’t just casually bring

that to an end. You’ll leave a hole in the fabric of Being itself.” These are strong, countercultural words: Intrinsic value. Can’t. A hole in the fabric of Being. His final words are even more striking: “Don’t be so sure that your life is yours to take. You know, you don’t own yourself the way that you own an object. You have a moral obligation to yourself as a locus of divine value, let’s say. You can’t treat that casually. It’s wrong.” He repeats this point for emphasis in a summing-up of all the reasons he’s given for why the questioner should not end his life soon, or at all: “Don’t underestimate the fact that suicide is wrong.” This response could not be more contradictory to the spirit of our age, which prizes autonomy above all else in the hierarchy of values. Our first instinct may be to stop the man on the bridge, but what if he were to tell us that he had thought things through very carefully, that he had consulted with doctors, and that all things considered he would still rather not go on living? We are told that the man’s life is his to do with what he wills. If we restrict his autonomy over his own body, we are the ones who are morally culpable. And if our assistance should be required, we are obliged to render it. As Charles Krauthammer wrote in his chillingly prophetic 1997 essay “The Dutch Example,” “When you see someone on a high ledge ready to jump, you are enjoined by every norm in our society to tackle him and pull him back from the abyss. We are now being asked to become a society where, when the tormented soul on the ledge asks for our help in granting him relief, we oblige him with a push.”13 By contrast, Peterson says we do not own ourselves and our lives are not ours to take. Compare with the apostle Paul: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Cor 6:19–20 ESV). Or C. S. Lewis’s hierarchy of possession, as described in The Screwtape Letters: Screwtape would love nothing more than for humans to believe the word “mine” means the same thing when they say “my body” as when they say “my boots,” or “my dog.”14 The body is a vessel that we hold in trust, a gift we have been allowed to make use of for a limited time until we shuffle off this mortal coil and receive a new, incorruptible body. Peterson has expressed particular fascination with the reverence of the body that flows from the Christian insistence on a bodily resurrection: “The idea that the body is resurrected is a valorization of the value of the particular here and now and of the body, and an emphasis on the fact that that has divine value as well, and needs to be attended to and cared for properly.”15 But who is the benefactor? Peterson cannot say. He knows only W. H. Auden’s “singular command” to “bless what there is for being.”16 What else are we made for? After the lecture, the young questioner stood in line for his thirty seconds with Peterson. When his turn came, he said, “You answered my question.” “Which one was that?” Peterson asked, friendly and relaxed. “The serious question.” In a flash, Peterson’s face froze into stern intensity. He placed his hands on both of the young man’s shoulders and looked him in the eye, lowering his voice to a whisper: “Please take care of yourself, man.” “I’ll put it off,” the boy replied. Peterson softened and smiled. “Good. Thank you.”17

THE MANIACS Peterson’s rejection of the morality of suicide presupposes that the human individual is a locus of infinite intrinsic value. It is this implicit shared assumption that, he claims, makes functional Christians of us all. By his lights, a truly consistent atheist would dispense with this assumption and put the principle that “if God is dead, then everything is permitted” into immediate practice. He develops this thesis in the darkest chapter of 12 Rules, which explores the psychology of serial killers and mass shooters. And yet, he fails to recognize the subtler, more insidious ways in which his “enlightened” atheist peers have consistently made their peace with the culture of death. Culturally, they may be downstream from Judeo-Christian principles. But Peterson’s faith that those principles are self-evident enough to overcome man’s capacity for self-deception is misplaced. This becomes most apparent when we turn our focus to the margins of life—the beginning and the end. Charles Krauthammer already saw how a society might be taught that death is better than life. He understood that loyal denizens of the lower story are not confined to our prisons and our psych wards. They walk the halls of our philosophy departments, write articles for bioethics journals, and serve as expert witnesses in courtrooms. What comes instinctively, they train themselves to resist. What their students bring to the classroom as a default position, they take it upon themselves to undermine. These include philosophers like James Rachels, who took Darwin’s phrase “created from animals” as the title of his seminal work on animal rights. At the time, Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) was in vogue, allowing secular intellectuals to wave away the logical implications of evolution for traditional morality. But Rachels contended that fundamentalist Christians were not wrong to see evolution as a moral threat: Thus, as the debate goes on, only two positions seem possible: the fundamentalist view that Darwinism undermines traditional values, and so must be rejected; and the evolutionist reply that Darwinism poses no threat to traditional values. When the lines are drawn this way, it is difficult to take seriously the possibility that Darwinism might have moral consequences— especially the notion that Darwinism undermines traditional morality— without seeming to side with evolution’s enemies. The upshot is that, in learned circles, it is commonly taken to be a sign of enlightenment to believe that Darwinism has no implications for ethics. Lost in the fog is the possibility of a third alternative: that Darwinism is incompatible with traditional morality, and so provides reason for rejecting that morality and replacing it with something better.18 That “something better” means doing away with the old framework that grants human beings superior moral status to animals, regards only human life as sacred, and “takes the love of mankind as its first and noblest virtue.”19

In this dubious pantheon, we also find Peter Singer, who coined the term “speciesist” for people who maintain the belief that humans are exceptional. Like Rachels, he has written extensively in favor of animal rights. I have known some Christians to trivialize this work, reducing it to little more than an admonition to be kind to the animals—surely a sentiment even Christians could get behind. But such a reduction misses Singer’s central point: We are animals, and in a perfectly moral world, all policy for the treatment of man and other animals would stand or fall together. As for “the traditional view of the sanctity of human life,” Singer predicted in 2009 that “by 2040, it may be that only a rump of hard-core, knownothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct.”20 The words of Stanley Hauerwas feel more prescient than ever: “I say that in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as the people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well.”21 The decoupling of humanity from personhood cannot be contained in the ivory tower. Its logical conclusions have inexorably trickled down from the mountain of philosophy to the valley of public policy, governing the fate of the unborn, the suicidal, the sick, and the dying. Thus have the family planners taken their station at the beginning of life, while the practitioners of assisted dying take their place at its end, with other stations placed along the way in case the burden of living becomes too heavy in between. Nobody sums up this brave new world with more devastating candor than Peterson’s friend and colleague Douglas Murray: “Many people believe man is sacred in God’s eyes. But our societies are trying to work out under what circumstances, at what age and for how long they are sacred in the eyes of man.”22 The original context for Murray’s withering remark was a reflection on an interview he conducted with Peterson. Among other things, they discussed the disturbing revival of the IQ debate in alt-right circles. In a world where human life is no longer sacred, Murray wonders what is to prevent the twentieth century from repeating itself all over again. But one need not even wait for a second Hitler to witness the dark outworkings of post-Christian ethics all around us. A seasoned journalist, Murray has sounded the alarm on multiple occasions about the progress of right-to-die legislation across Europe.23 Simultaneously, he has noted the near-complete desensitizing to abortion across all Western cultures, to the point that even the trial of Kermit Gosnell elicited a collective shrug from American media. In his 2014 article “Would Human Life Be Sacred in an Atheist World?” he writes, “The more atheists think on these things, the more we may have to accept that the concept of the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive Judeo-Christian civilization.”24 Murray, it should be noted, is an atheist himself. Yet he and other atheists who balk at the cliff’s edge to which Singer and Rachels have led them accept the same presuppositions. Where, then, does Singer go wrong? Where is the flaw in Rachels’s argument? These men are nothing if not logical. We cannot but hear the familiar voice of Chesterton: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”25

HARD PROBLEMS Peterson’s NOMA of science and myth has an understandable attraction. But it founders on the grim practical realities of bioethics in a post-Christian West. If man repeats that he is “objectively” an animal for long enough, he will eventually come to believe it as Peterson himself defines “belief”—by acting it out. So I submit, contra Peterson, that the humanist who would not be divided against himself must dare to confront that which is presumed “objective.” He must dare to descend to the lower story. A proper treatment of the questions surrounding man’s alleged evolutionary origins is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, they demand careful consideration by scholars and laymen who take human exceptionalism seriously, particularly Christians with independent reason to affirm man’s divinely elevated stature in the chain of being. They are questions on which the magisteria of science, philosophy, and theology not only can, but must overlap. Too often, what should be a dialogue between the philosopher and the scientist is an enforced monologue. Without the checks and balances of the other magisteria, scientism becomes a dogma unto itself, banishing all philosophical objections to the upper story of subjective value. We should not even yield science itself to scientism. The scientific enterprise, properly understood, is the search for the best explanation of the data at hand, not the best naturalistic explanation. Honest scientists have acknowledged that a conventional Darwinian mechanism for the emergence of essential human attributes like language and abstract thought is not forthcoming.26 They have been acknowledging this since Alfred Wallace, Darwin’s own colleague, questioned the Darwinian paradigm for human origins in 1869. By contrast with Darwin himself, whose own conflicting intuitions made him fear his theory was true, Wallace’s intuitions led him to suspect the theory was false. Indeed, he wrote, even physical characteristics like the human brain, hand, and speech organs “are not explicable on the theory of variation and survival of the fittest.”27 The mark of the true scientist is that he recognizes the limitations of his discipline. Peterson displays such humility when he repeatedly says that we do not understand the first thing about consciousness, nor should we assume we ever will.28 The many glaring inadequacies in the evolutionary paradigm should give Peterson pause as he wrestles with these hard problems of human origins, not only as a psychologist but also as a scientist. Still, Christians who affirm a divine origin for man’s immaterial mind while also affirming man’s material continuity with animals face a problem: At what point in man’s evolutionary development as an incarnated creature does the switch from beast to man occur, and what does it mean for the imago Dei writ large? To answer this question, some have attempted to steer a middle course between the evolutionary narrative and the Genesis narrative. In such hybrid frameworks, recognizably human beings evolve initially without the divine image but acquire it later, in some nebulously redefined sense.29 However, this blurs the ontological status of the imago Dei for the whole human person, eroding the theology of the human body as sacred and purposefully formed. If we grant that an anatomically modern

human being could exist without the image of God, on what grounds do we argue against Singer et alii that Homo sapiens qua species is necessarily stamped with it, and all the rights that pertain, from womb to grave?30 The overwhelming publicly available evidence for human exceptionalism strongly suggests that we have arrived here at a reductio ad absurdum. Like the mathematician who realizes he has made a terrible error, we must confront the possibility that there is no direction for us to go but back. Among evolutionary scientists, the desire to reach a compromise on this issue is certainly understandable, as peer pressure in the academy is all going one way, and most lack the chutzpah or philosophical agility to resist it. Among creationists, in-house debates over whether we have enough evidence to classify other species under genus homo as sapient image-bearers are also ongoing. Wherever a Christian falls in this conversation, he should not accept just any model of human origins with no further questions asked. If the only approved models on offer render the imago Dei logically incoherent or ontologically irrelevant, perhaps it is time to try doubting something else.

HOW LIKE A GOD In his “Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope wisely observes that doubt is man’s natural state. Few things raise so many doubts in the mind of man as the contemplation of his own nature. “He hangs between; in doubt, to act or rest; / In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast.”31 Jordan Peterson is no exception. In Darwin he trusts, but Darwin cannot quiet the still, small voice that tells him there is something more to “the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.” Christians call it the image of God. Peterson calls it “the divine spark” or “spark of divinity.”32 In counseling his suicidal fan, he used the phrase “a locus of divine value.” We have seen how Peterson’s apprehension of man as in some sense a divinely stamped being moves him with love for each person as uniquely valuable. He believes all persons carry this divine spark regardless of status, capability, or worth in the eyes of society. His belief in the innate worth of the human individual and the absolute good of Being leads him to condemn suicide as inherently wrong, a philosophy which has literally saved at least one life. In this respect, he strongly recalls the Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl, of Man’s Search for Meaning fame. While Frankl didn’t explicitly affirm a Christian worldview, he argued passionately that each human being had intrinsic value, dignity, and purpose. Like Peterson, he strongly rejected suicide, as well as euthanasia. The word “humanism” has accrued negative baggage in Christian circles, but thinkers like Frankl and Peterson may be called “humanists” in the best sense of the word. It is a sense that Christians should rediscover and embrace. Still, to Judeo-Christian ears, Peterson’s language of “divinity” or “the divine” with regard to man is ambiguous enough to prompt further questioning. He recognizes that man cannot functionally “deem himself a beast” (even though he feels bound to concede that this is objectively the case when he speaks as a scientist). Might this language of “divinity” be a motion toward the other extreme? In fairness, he demurs in one interview that he is “not

trying to elevate people to the level of demi-gods”—to the contrary, he enjoins us to walk forward “with humility.”33 At the same time, he does not appear to embrace a clear understanding of God as more than an idea in the mind of man. An empty throne demands to be filled. If God is not seated on it, man will see that it is occupied. The only question is with whom or with what. Enter depth psychologist Carl Jung, one of Peterson’s most profound influences. Jung had little patience for Judaism or Christianity in the orthodox sense. The roots of his system ultimately lie in pagan traditions that predate both religions. He sought to liberate the West’s collective unconscious from its Judeo-Christian strictures and reconnect it with the “natural religion” of ancient mystery cults, such as Mithraism. He believed that through a process of “individuation,” each person could become not only “truly human” but also “partially divine,” “knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God depends on man.”34 Indeed, where Genesis clearly teaches that we are consciously formed in the image of a kind Creator, Jung taught that we are the consciousness of “a supreme being who is, in the main, unconscious.”35 Armed with this background, we can decipher Peterson’s cryptic answer in a question-and-answer session when asked, “Do you think that if all humanity ceased to exist, does God still exist?” Peterson repeatedly circles back to human consciousness and struggles to articulate what he thinks would be left if it were all extinguished.36 This makes sense once we realize that in the Jungian framework, to extinguish all human consciousness is functionally to extinguish “God.” It is ironic that Peterson is committed to the primacy of the individual, yet Jungianism ultimately renders the individual subservient to the collective unconscious. By contrast, Christianity offers every single man the opportunity to know God as he is known by God. It is God who gathers up each man’s past, present, and future self in His hand, and He who gives it back as one true whole. Herein lies the truest individualism.

HAUNTED BY CHRIST According to Scripture, the divine Logos was incarnated precisely once, in Christ the one true God-man. But in the gospel according to Jung, God incarnates Himself in all of us, “bringing about a Christification of many,” all of whom could arguably be called “Godmen.”37 In this way, the imago Dei may “realize itself” in us.38 This sheds light on Peterson’s bottom-up view of Christ: Christ was an exceptional man, but he was still a man among other “Christified” men with the same divine spark. If he could perfectly embody the Logos, what might we be able to accomplish? “We don’t know,” says Peterson suggestively in one interview.39 Yet Christ “transcended death itself.” Could we imitate him even in this? If so, what would it mean? Again, Peterson retreats into a fog. He doesn’t know “what happens to a person if they bring themselves completely into alignment,” although he says he’s had “intimations” of it.40 In keeping with his usual modus operandi on religious matters, Peterson has never clarified what this means, although similar statements he has made lend themselves to a

metaphorical reading: We have yet to discover what sort of transformation we could effect in our lives and in the world if we all lived up to our full moral potential by imitating Christ.41 But Jung wrote in explicit detail about receiving transcendent enlightenment via alleged revelatory experiences. Readers can make of these what they will, but Jung’s open fascination with the occult cannot be discounted. See, for instance, his account in The Red Book of being appeared to by the prophet Elijah and his “daughter” Salome, who worships him and declares, “You are Christ.”42 When a snake appears and coils itself around him, he metamorphoses into the lion-headed Aryan sun god Aion. Whether we read this as a fabrication, an overinterpreted dream, a hallucinogenic experience, or something darker than all of these, the implication could not be more blasphemously clear. Joel McDurmon refers to this passage in his article “Is Jordan Peterson Our New Aryan Christ?”43 Particularly salient is his point that while Jung promises the transcendent, in the end he has come full circle and closed the loop with Darwin. After all our exploring, we are still created from animals. McDurmon is careful not to brand Peterson as a Nazi or a closet Satanist, but he is concerned to make readers aware of his ideological heritage. Unfortunately, McDurmon does not seem to believe there is any good sense in which we might call Peterson a humanist. It is true that Jung’s work shows in disturbing detail how man might make an idol of himself. But the fact that humanism can be disordered should not hinder Christians from “stealing back” rightly ordered humanism. To the extent that Peterson’s humanism is Jungian, it should be rejected. To the extent that it is Christian, it should be recognized as a redeemable good. It falls on the church to tease apart these tangled strands of Peterson’s thought with discernment. It is unlikely that Peterson’s thinking will undergo a sea change in the near future. Paradigm shifts do not happen in a day. Yet God’s grace beckons always, in many places, by many means—even by dreams. In Jung’s dream, he was worshiped as the Christ. But one of Peterson’s dreams offers a very different picture.44 He recalls that he was walking in the cemetery of an old cathedral, full of the graves of great men. Then suddenly, an armed king rose up and walked out of his grave. Then another, and another, until they confronted each other and began to fight. But one singular figure towered over all, causing them to lay down their swords and bow in worship. Peterson knew the figure instantly: It was Christ. He woke, and he wondered, “What does this mean?” Who is this man? Who is this King of Glory? As one would expect, Peterson read the dream through an archetypal lens, concluding that even the most tyrannical king must have a transcendent something, or someone, to whom he bends the knee. This is true, as far as it goes. Time will tell if he comes to embrace the Deeper Magic behind it. Time will tell if he comes to see that while we may perceive the image of God in each other, it is in Christ alone that we have beheld the face of God. Until that day comes, we may sincerely wish that Christ will continue to haunt his dreams.

CONCLUSION

It should be a painting: Shy Woman with a Dog. The woman looks down, as she always does, shading her eyes as if an overpowering light were emanating from everyone she met. She is about thirty-five years old, but she looks fifty, with no beauty that anyone should desire her. Dirt clings about her clothes and hair. Her teeth are yellowed. Beside her is the dog she faithfully walks every day, her only friend and companion. Standing above her, looking down, is a young psychology postdoc. He is one of a team who has been working, with little success, to raise her social IQ. He is tall and lanky, handsome and driven. His future is bright. But in this moment, his dark brows are knit in attentive concentration, as he leans forward to catch what the barely verbal woman is saying. She’s trying to ask for his help with something. Something about the inpatients at the hospital associated with the outpatient clinic where they’re meeting. Something about her dog. Finally, understanding dawns: She hasn’t been coming to the clinic for herself. Four or five times she’s come now, but not to get help for her own numerous problems. She’s come to find someone who can help her help the inpatients who are worse off than she is, if that can be imagined. But he can imagine it, because he knows exactly the ones she means. They’re the ones who are too shattered to be deinstitutionalized. They’re the ones who huddle together in the basement during frigid Montreal winters, gibbering and wandering around the vending machines, like souls in Dante’s Inferno. Compared to them, the shy woman with a dog feels lucky. Perhaps, she suggests, she could take one of them out for a walk too. Perhaps he could play with the dog. Perhaps he could see the sunlight and hear the city. But she’d have to get permission first. Could the young doctor help her? Is he even the right one to ask? She wouldn’t know. The people who look down to look at her are all the same in her mind. He hardly knows what to say or do, but he promises to help if he can. As it happens, he cannot. She thanks him simply and goes her way, and he goes his. But wherever he goes, she follows. He writes her into his first book.45 He works her story into his university lectures. He tells it to small classrooms of students at Harvard. He tells it again to students at the University of Toronto. He tells it on podcasts. He tells it in panel discussions, when the evolutionary biologist suggests that surely in cases of very low intelligence, wisdom would “fail to emerge.”46 He tells it to an applauding crowd at the Beacon Theater in New York. He shakes his head, gray now: “I never forgot her. I’ll never forget her.”47 Even now, we might close our eyes and see the tableau in our mind: the woman, and the dog, and the doctor. If we listen closely, perhaps we might hear a voice whispering in the doctor’s ear, inviting him to look down, as Thon Taddeo invites the monsignor to look down. “Look at her,” it invites. “Look at the woman who cannot look at you. What do you see?” Perhaps, from depths no man can measure, we might hear the doctor’s soul give reply: “The image of Christ. What did you expect me to see?”

8 Professor Peterson, Professor Peterson: What Is Your View on … Science and Religion? ESGRID SIKAHALL

Once there was no Jordan Peterson … or so the legends go. In the last few years, he has captivated the minds and hearts of many; at the same time, he has been misunderstood more continuously than probably any public intellectual. The media wants soundbites from him, or perhaps even a checklist of the right views, and everyone wants to know one thing: Is he one of the good guys or one of the bad guys? Can I claim him as one of us, or is he one of them? For his views, especially about the contemporary hot topics, he is as praised as he is demonized. You are pressed to either love him or hate him, so what is it going to be? If we are to move past snapshots or low-resolution caricatures that promote nothing but tribal thinking, first we need to listen, pay attention, and be open to what is being said. If what is said is true, why not listen? If lies, why not listen even more carefully? It is the aim of this essay to converse with Peterson about one of the most pressing questions today: How should we think about science and religion? SCIENCE AND RELIGION? The science and religion field, especially in the anglophone world, which tends to dominate the discussions, has been strongly shaped by Ian G. Barbour.1 After his iconic Issues in Science and Religion (1966), the field has discussed issues Barbour raised implicitly or explicitly, and other academics in the field who were his contemporaries have also set the tone for the discussions (e.g., the physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne and the biochemisttheologian Arthur Peacocke).2 The specializing and professionalizing tendency of modernity has turned into fragmentation, and the field in some sense reflects an attempt to bring back together something that in principle emanates from a single quest for knowledge and understanding. The field is the voice of a fragment attempting to return to its proper place in a whole that continues to wonder about its existence. The study of science and religion has porous boundaries by its very nature, so many scholars participate in questions regarding science and religion from their own disciplinary fields, such as history, philosophy, theology, biology, and physics. Similarly, Jordan Peterson, as a psychologist, attempts to span virtually all domains that are relevant to his questions.

Although here I will interact mainly with historians who have worked on the question of science and religion, they are by no means the only contributors to the field.3 This chapter will interact with Peterson’s characterization of science and religion, starting with a historical account of what has been called the “conflict myth” of science versus religion. One of the guiding plotlines of this false myth is a sense of moral superiority, the triumph of good over evil (i.e., of science over religion). It is in this realm—the realm of our moral orientation—where we enter into the territory of what, according to Peterson, is our primal religious orientation: a call to action predicated on meaning. The chapter further explores a move beyond the categories of science and religion toward understanding ourselves as innately worshiping creatures. I suggest that we can begin to realize that we are worshipers by attending to our own experience, understood as participative communication. THE IDEA THAT WOULDN’T DIE: THE WARFARE BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION The “warfare” between science and religion has been called by historians the “conflict myth,” the “warfare thesis,” the “conflict thesis,” or the “warfare myth.”4 Here “myth” implies a widely held belief that is misguided, but the word is apt in another sense because the conflict thesis is a guiding master narrative for approaching reality. Very much like the secularization myth—which tells us how history moves, in August Comte’s terms, from a theological stage to a positive scientific stage—the conflict myth is a narrative that articulates how since time immemorial there has been a battle between myth and reason, between religion and science.5 One of the problems with articulations of this conflict thesis, usually epitomized by a reference to John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896),6 is that they are profoundly anachronistic and historically misinformed. The very meaning of what is real and what is conceivable is socially conditioned; therefore, historical literacy is fundamental in order to understand the reality myths map to, if they do at all.7 Here historians dealing with contemporary questions or confusions about science and religion have brought substantial light. Below I will mention specific works and particular examples that show how badly informed we are in our public understanding of these issues. By doing so, I hope we can move past humiliating one another, stop misinforming the public, and begin an informed, honest, and productive conversation. A classic in the field is John Hedley Brooke’s Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991), in which Brooke acknowledges that Barbour’s Issues is still one “of the most encyclopedic treatments.”8 In The Territories of Science and Religion (2015), Peter Harrison explores the very construction of the categories “science” and “religion.” Harrison argues that to project science and religion as we understand them now in the wake of modernity onto the past obscures the fact that these categories simply did not exist then as we imagine them now. By revealing the formation of the categories, Harrison shows why even talking about science and religion, the relationship between them, or any sort of talk that implicitly assumes them to be unchangeable entities or “natural kinds,” as he calls them,

misses the mark. Whether we talk about conflict or consonance, the fact that we use terms about any kind of relationship already presupposes their essential realities: Science and religion are not natural kinds; they are neither universal propensities of human beings nor necessary features of human societies. Rather they are ways of conceptualizing certain human activities—ways that are peculiar to modern Western culture, and which have arisen as a consequence of unique historical circumstances. So while this historical analysis may not make science-religion conflict go away, it should be clear why it has emerged at this particular time and place.9 His conclusion is telling, although it presents us with the challenge of what to do if science and religion are not natural kinds. I will speak about this in the chapter’s final section. Ronald Numbers’s edited volume Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009) includes a collection of myths ranging from the medieval Christians thinking that the earth was flat (“there is virtually no historical evidence to support the myth of a medieval flat earth”),10 to the notion that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for his promotion of Copernicanism (he was under house arrest and never tortured),11 to the idea that Darwin destroyed natural theology,12 and to the assumption that modern science has secularized the West.13 The goal of the book is to nuance, to set straight, and to enrich our understanding of history. These myths do convey some truth, but as a whole they are akin to a well-crafted lie: they tell a mistaken story and oversimplify the complexity of how history has unfolded. A similar, follow-on work, Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science (2015), which Numbers edited with Kostas Kampourakis, includes myths from medieval and early modern science all the way to the twentieth century.14 In his contribution to the volume, Peter Harrison shows how the myth that religion has typically impeded the progress of science has very little historical substance. According to this myth, Harrison argues, “these two enterprises [science and religion] are polar opposites that compete to occupy the same explanatory territory.”15 He highlights how historical events that seem crucial to the subsistence of the conflict myth—like Galileo’s condemnation in 1633, Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species in 1859, and also less well-known episodes like Pope Callixtus III’s excommunication of a comet in 1475 and the medieval belief in a flat earth—are either construed to fit the narrative or simply historically erroneous, as is the case with the flat earth and the excommunication of the comet. Galileo, of course, was condemned for teaching Copernican views, but he also was supported from within the church and challenged by the scientific establishment. As already mentioned, he was not tortured or imprisoned. Harrison argues, “While the facts of Galileo’s condemnation are not in dispute, that they were typical of a Catholic attitude toward science, or that the episode was primarily about ‘science vs. religion,’ is highly questionable.”16 In fact, at that time “the church was the major sponsor of astronomical research.”17 Darwin had a similar reception. Religious people supported him as well as resisted him, and his views were supported and challenged on scientific grounds.

The question, then, is, Why does the myth of conflict persist? After briefly mentioning the contemporary sentiments of anti-evolutionism by scientific creationism, Harrison ends his chapter with a picture of our current situation: The conflict between science and religion is thus more than an abstract description of a distant past: it has become the founding myth of a crusade to secure a threatened secular future.… Its irresistible appeal lies in the various plotlines that pit the lone genius against the faceless men or expose the apparent idiocies of inflexible institutions. Ultimately, it suggests the triumph of reason over superstition, of good over evil. This is a comforting and congenial myth that also assures us of our cultural and intellectual superiority. In spite of the evidence against it, while it continues to fulfill these functions, it is difficult to see it disappearing any time soon.18 Harrison’s diagnosis of the existence of a guiding narrative that leads us toward the triumph of good over evil articulates a profound human reality, something that is arguably more like a “natural kind”: our innate moral orientation that makes us ask how we should act, that makes us cry to the heavens, “What should I do?” This is a good point at which to interact with the way Jordan Peterson approaches the question of science and religion. JORDAN PETERSON’S SCIENCE AND RELIGION I will begin with Peterson’s observations about our intrinsic moral nature. By our intrinsic moral nature I mean our human incapacity to ignore the call to be in the world. Whatever we make of the idea of morality—even if, as someone once told me in a cemetery after burying a distant relative, “I don’t believe in morality”—our necessity to respond to the world is the beginning of our moral sense. In Maps of Meaning (1999) we see where Peterson is coming from: The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things. The former manner of interpretation—more primordial, and less clearly understood—finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature and mythology. The world as forum for action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or—at a higher level of analysis—implication for the configuration of the interpretive schema that produces or guides action. The latter manner of interpretation—the world as place of things—finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through

application of more fundamental narrative processes). No complete world-picture can be generated without use of both modes of construal. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated.19 As we enter into conversation with his perspective on what is religious and what is scientific, it is useful to recall how Peterson understands the construction of the world as a “forum for action.” According to Peterson, what is religious is “what you act out.”20 This shorthand connects meaning, one of the most, if not the most, important aspects of his thought (perhaps alongside responsibility), with that which allows us to mediate our being-in-the-world with our knowledge of the world. “Everything is something, and means something—and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn,” to use Peterson’s words.21 Our religious nature allows us to perceive meaning; hence we are all religious insofar as we are actors in the world. The idea of being actors in the world is intrinsically connected with and predicated on what is meaningful, and what is meaningful is predicated on a hierarchy of value, the possibility of valuing something in order for us to move toward it. By being in the world, living in a forum for action, we act out our religion precisely because we are acting out that which we believe to be of value. That something that we act out is what Peterson explores in depth; he wants to understand more clearly what it means to interpret the world as a forum for action, what it means for us to be religious and to be creatures that live for meaning, for “what matters.”22 In answering a question about the soul in March 2019, he articulated succinctly how it is that our individual ethic and therefore our moral intuitions are embedded in a hierarchy that should have an adequate pinnacle in the value structure: the idea of the Logos.23 For Peterson, however, our morality has been historically contained not in a set of statements, a list of propositional facts, but in the myths that have guided human civilizations in the past and that still do now, albeit inadvertently. Religious myths, and in the West the biblical stories in particular, are the means by which our moral intuitions have been cultivated and instantiated in reality, in ways that are irreducible to only propositional statements (“by their fruits ye shall know them,” Matt 7:20). Ultimately, there is no rule to tell us how to apply all rules, no formula to tell us how to apply the formula. It is always something personal, but this does not imply that we cannot have fairly firm guidelines: to take a life is generally wrong, to live is generally preferable to die, and so on. This also does not imply a relativistic conception of morality, but only that the absolute nature of what is good is of such profundity that to capture it involves paying attention to the specificity of all situations in order to figure out how it would look in the particular—us and our specific predicament. Insofar as this is a personal issue, though, it is clearly also communal, for we are sociocultural beings. This means the best way to articulate or to act out our fundamental values is then to participate in a particular living narrative.

Peterson sees religious narratives as the means by which we learn how to play our role in the world, ideally toward the good. Religious stories are, according to Peterson, the way we have codified our ethics, and therefore they are inexhaustibly important for the renovation of our culture through the action of the individual. It is also important to notice that there is an asymmetric relationship between the two modes of construal, between “a forum for action” and “a place of things.” Peterson hints at this when he says that to see the world as a forum for action is “more primordial” and “less clearly understood,” and also when he highlights that the way we use the tools that science allows us to build is determined “through application of more fundamental narrative processes.” The idea that being in the world as actors, as if in a drama, is more primordial and precedes thinking about the world as a place of things. The “natural,” pre-experimental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning—which is essentially implication for action—and not with “objective” nature. The formal object, as conceptualized by modern scientifically oriented consciousness, might appear to those still possessed by the mythic imagination—if they could “see” it at all—as an irrelevant shell, as all that was left after everything intrinsically intriguing had been stripped away. For the pre-experimentalist, the thing is most truly the significance of its sensory properties, as they are experienced in subjective experience—in affect, or emotion. And, in truth—in real life—to know what something is still means to know two things about it: its motivational relevance, and the specific nature of its sensory qualities.… Something must have emotional impact before it will attract enough attention to be explored and mapped in accordance with its sensory properties.… We need to know what things are not to know what they are but to keep track of what they mean—to understand what they signify for our behaviour.24 In other words, Peterson adds, “it might be suggested that all the myth has not yet vanished from science, devoted as it is to human progress, and that it is this nontrivial remainder that enables the scientist to retain undimmed enthusiasm while endlessly studying his fruitflies.”25 The artificial separation of what is real and what is relevant has been a profound intellectual advancement. However, coupled with the belief that what is real does not include relevance and in fact denies affect altogether, this advancement has also come with a profound loss, probably more profound than the clear intellectual gain, for it has blinded us from the obvious. It has, so to speak, given us the possibility of a dead-like existence: to live in a place where the real is utterly irrelevant. TELL ME WHO YOU WORSHIP AND I WILL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE: MEANING WITHOUT “SCIENCE” AND “RELIGION” A useful aspect of studying the history of the human exploration of nature (“science”) and what we now think of in terms of “religion” is the realization that if science and religion were

definite things, they do not in principle clash with each other. Moreover, what seems to be the problem, as was briefly pointed out above, is instead the catalyst toward a judgment between good and evil, what Peterson would call our religious motivation enacted through a particular guiding narrative. This permits us to speculate that it is not useful to characterize religion in a way that conflicts with anything (including whatever science is), because the problem seems to be that which is of ultimate value and the inescapable tendency of moving toward it. What is useful, though, is to understand that whatever is most valuable to us, even if we cannot articulate what it is, will cause in us a clash with anything that seems to undermine this value. In other words, what is actually useful is to identify and explore more in depth this sentiment that we all share, perhaps best characterized as the inevitability of worshiping something, because what we worship will determine the nature of our behavior and the nature of potential conflict with whatever runs contrary to it. This observation, allowed by the historical intricacies seen above and also motivated by Peterson’s observations about our primal orientation toward action predicated on what is meaningful, permits us to see how it is that everywhere is ripe for worship. What we think of as religion is not adequate to encompass the pervasive phenomenon that we are trying to describe here. Religion is not necessarily related only to what we think of as religious things or practices, like attending a rite in a temple, performing practices in order to attain certain goods, or following certain codes of conduct based on a particular set of beliefs or even ideas of the supernatural. It is just as easily identified with something like the unfailing love for FC Barcelona or Liverpool FC and the ineffable (absolutely religious) experience of living and dying together, through songs, food, and tears, in a match against their rivals from times immemorial (Real Madrid or Manchester United). Another glorious religious experience could be watching Roger Federer move on a Wimbledon court.26 This is why the concept of “religion” is inadequate. This tendency to worship is what is primary, and it is always present, especially in any conflict between two different structures of value enacted by another, but equally applicable to ourselves and our existential question when faced with conflicting sources of value. This tendency is manifested or has the potential to be manifested in all places and in anything that is able to call us into a change of behavior. Therefore, it would make little sense to think of science clashing with religion in this context, and in fact we could see how certain postures or beliefs about the power of science (or any source of authority) could be certainly better understood if we analyze the objects of worship within a given authority source. In this sense, we could speak of a religious science (or religious atheism, religious football, etc.) in a legitimate and even meaningful way.27 We are worshiping creatures, and this is why there are instances of conflict between what could be thought of as “religion” versus “science.” Instead of thinking in terms of science versus religion, we are better positioned to realize what is happening if we aim to understand the beings that are being worshiped. The beings we worship are what is meaningful for us, and unless there is something more real, more true, more beautiful, or qualitatively better that we can and are willing to experience, we will fight for what is valuable to us—with all our scientific and religious fervor. The error of positing any kind of relationship between science

and religion is that it ignores that whatever human activity they stand for, none is as fundamental, a natural kind, as our need to worship something that we feel transcends ourselves (even if we think that we ourselves are it). Whatever we worship determines fundamentally our morality and our encounter with the world. SOURCES OF MEANING: A REHABILITATION OF EXPERIENCE AS PARTICIPATIVE COMMUNICATION What are we to make of the categories “science” and “religion,” then, in light of Jordan Peterson’s depiction of the world as primarily a forum for action, and considering that using these categories would already seem to load the conflict myth into our consciousness? There is no space here to venture into a robust alternative, but I will highlight what appears to me to be a clue toward a meaningful path, concentrating on the ideas of meaning and experience. Given our worshiping nature, one way to shift the conversation regarding science and religion toward speaking about what motivates any categorization of our activities (including the activities we associate with science and religion) is to recover the importance of our ordinary experience. As Peterson has pointed out, we have removed the affective wrapping of reality almost entirely in order to analyze what is left in an empirical manner. In doing so, however, we have forgotten that there was a wrapping, and that the wrapping is more important than what has been unwrapped. It is our experience that holds together what has never been apart—that is, what things mean for us, the essential relevance of life. Experience is also what allows us to be open to seeing ourselves as worshiping beings. Without taking our experience seriously, we have limited chances of realizing that we are worshipers by nature. By “taking our experience seriously,” I do not imply a radical subjectivism or pure feeling and extreme individualism. Taking experience seriously means seeing it as the integration of our participation in and with the world—including our thoughts, our feelings, our body, our relationships with one another, our physical dwelling space, our temporality, our finitude, and our fragility. Rehabilitating the importance, or one might even call the sacredness, of our experience could be seen as understanding ourselves as participating continuously in communication with another: with nature in its wider possible sense. Communication is always participative at some level, but here I emphasize participation because now communication has become so detached from our profoundly personal essence that there is a need to underscore the fact that we are active players in our reality and that we are being addressed meaningfully by our reality at all times. It is tempting in our contemporary culture to assume that we make ourselves, and that we are whatever we sense we are. But this cannot ignore the fact that as worshiping creatures we are, so to speak, at the mercy of whatever addresses us as a potential being of worship. To think of our personal experience as participative communication is, I think, a minor rotation toward something that seems far away. But although we might rotate only a few degrees, the slight rotation is profoundly meaningful the more distance we traverse. A minor

correction at the origin can have a tremendous significance in shifting our goal, just like a minor movement of the archer can mean hitting the target or missing it completely. Let us hope that we are open to see how it is that we all are being addressed by another, and in so doing we open ourselves to the possibility of finding that which truly transforms us into our truth, that which if worshiped transforms us into its Truth.

9 A Kierkegaardian Reading of Jordan Peterson STEPHEN M. DUNNING

On October 28, 2017, The Province published an opinion piece entitled “David Millard Haskell: Fight against Modern Cultural Marxists Evokes Martin Luther’s ‘95 theses.’ ” In it, Haskell likens today’s struggle with cultural Marxists, who now dominate much of the academy, to that of Luther’s protest against—and ultimate break with—the religious establishment some five hundred years earlier. And although he mentions a number of fairly prominent Canadian YouTubers leading the struggle, he singles out Jordan Peterson: “While my comparison of Canada today to Europe on the eve of the Reformation has some prima facie merit, for my allusion to truly resonate, it requires a Canadian public figure fulfilling the role of Luther. To my mind, professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto most closely fits the bill.”1 He then proceeds to note similarities between Peterson’s and Luther’s rises to prominence, and points out that just as the then-recent invention of the printing press allowed Luther to disseminate his heterodox ideas, YouTube, along with other social media, has likewise permitted Peterson and others to circumvent the mainstream media and to reach a massive audience. When I first read Haskell’s piece, I had known of Peterson for only a few months. In those months I had watched dozens of his videos, beginning with those concerning Bill C-16, but expanding to include a broader sampling of his lectures and public speeches. Even this limited exposure to his ideas, however, allowed me to recognize the essential credibility of Haskell’s claim that Peterson was engaged in a struggle with a deeply held (though perhaps not deeply thought out) ideology; one that, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues throughout The Righteous Mind, commands something approaching religious devotion.2 But while Haskell’s religious analogy resonated with me, I also thought that he had failed to identify the religious reformer whom Peterson most closely resembles: Søren Kierkegaard. At this point, I was unaware that Peterson had apparently read a good deal of Kierkegaard, lectured on him, and cited him approvingly, most recently in his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Others, too, have noted the connection between Peterson and Kierkegaard, and at least one has attempted to use Kierkegaard’s radical fideism to correct what he misapprehends as Peterson’s overly rational approach to theology.3 I propose to do something different: employ Kierkegaard to describe Peterson’s predominantly psychotherapeutic—not political—concerns, and then attempt to articulate Peterson’s

religious convictions by placing these within the framework of Kierkegaard’s existential stages. POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS TO A KIERKEGAARDIAN READING OF PETERSON Some may harbor initial objections here, pointing out perhaps that one cannot compare Kierkegaard, who takes the metaphysical and dogmatic claims of Lutheranism as given, with someone like Peterson, who in many interviews appears constitutionally incapable of giving a straight answer to the simple question of whether he believes in God. Others may object because of their relative valuation of the thinkers’ intellectual statures, regarding the setting of the two men together as an instance of lèse-majesté against Kierkegaard. Perhaps this would be the response of David Bentley Hart, who in one interview dismissed Peterson as an intellectual hack, arguing that in the academic world he is “treated as a joke,” and claiming that Peterson’s work is a mishmash of bad scholarship and self-help psychology.4 I would address the first of these objections by pointing out that while there are undoubtedly significant differences between the thinkers, some of which I will discuss later, we should recognize that both writers respond to and critique the governing assumptions of their cultures. Kierkegaard was responding to Danish Lutheranism, whereas Peterson is primarily responding to the contemporary academy, and by extension to the liberal elite in the West. Kierkegaard, of course, lived at a time when everyone automatically assumed he or she was Christian, simply by virtue of having been born in nineteenth-century Denmark. Because he believed this assumption posed a grave spiritual danger, he vowed to make everything as difficult as possible, insisting at every turn that becoming a Christian in Christendom was harder than converting to Christianity from paganism. He was convinced, too, that the leading theologians of his day had confused reflecting on faith with living the faith, something encouraged by what he saw as the unholy alliance between Lutheran theology and Hegelianism—“the System,” as he called it. Similarly, Peterson has challenged the governing liberal orthodoxy of our day, calling into question the vilification of the West’s intellectual, political, social, theological, moral, and material legacy. Naturally, his heterodoxy has drawn the collective ire of our cultural Sanhedrin. He represents, quite literally, a mortal threat to their raison d’être. Aside from the broad similarity between the two thinkers’ engagement with their cultures, Peterson’s explanation for his habitual reluctance to state that he believes in God reveals that he shares at least some of Kierkegaard’s religious convictions. When asked about his reticence, Peterson pointed out that he “acted as if God existed.” He went on to say that belief must be “manifested in the burden of action,” that “belief is what you stake your life on.”5 He then argued that in Christianity, particularly within Protestantism, belief in God has been reduced to (or equated with) stating that one believes certain propositions. This, he claimed, ignores a competing tradition within Christianity that emphasizes the necessity of imitating Christ. Most notably, and in a Kierkegaardian vein, he argued that this reduction cheapens what belief means. To illustrate his point, he cited the Grand Inquisitor section from The Brothers Karamazov,6 praising Dostoevsky’s insight into the ways in which the

institutional church mediated Christ’s seemingly impossible demands to the people, effectively making Christianity palatable and ordinary life possible. Elsewhere, Peterson also notes the parallels between Kierkegaard’s critique of Christianity and Dostoevsky’s own.7 Thus, and fully in keeping with Kierkegaard, Peterson puts the emphasis squarely on the how and not the what of faith. Moreover, as he makes clear in the same lengthy discussion with Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro cited above, he recognizes that his treatment of religious themes in his lectures and books is reductive in that he attempts as a psychologist to account for patterns within religious mythologies by assuming the principles of evolutionary biology, anthropology, and neuropsychology. Working within these assumptions, he makes the case that many key theological concepts—for example, God, Christ, and sacrifice—could have arisen naturally. But for him, this does not exclude the possibility that these naturally derived ideas point to metaphysical truths that remain completely independent of whatever process brought them to our consciousness. Speaking of the idea of God, he says, “It’s as if there’s a spirit at the bottom of things that gives rise to everything.” He later expands on this, claiming that there is likely “a metaphysical layer beneath all consciousness that is the structure of reality itself.” Kierkegaard also claims that at the first motions of consciousness, God is both immediately present to subjectivity and exists only for subjectivity in “inwardness.”8 Both thus make the vital link between God, consciousness, and the structure of reality itself. The last thing I will say to the first objection is this: I have belonged for a while to an informal group of (mostly) Christian academics who discuss Peterson’s theological ideas through email. In one thread, I argued that while Peterson may not belong in the sanctuary proper, he certainly has found a place in the narthex. From this intermediary position, he is able to engage many people who would otherwise remain beyond the reach of the church.9 Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox friend of Peterson’s, responded by saying that he and Peterson had hit upon precisely the same ecclesial metaphor.10 He then continued: Jordan is no different in private than he is in public. He wants the word “God” to mean something to him before he says something like, “I believe in God the Father.” … But he is not only trying to convince others, he is trying to convince himself. Two weeks ago Jordan called me.… We talked for 2 hours, going once again through the story of Genesis, and the relationship between the structure of the Garden, the tabernacle and the traditional church building.… Then he said: “It is terrifying to think that those stories might actually be true.” I swear there was actual terror in his voice.11 This puts paid to the notion that Peterson has rejected the metaphysical (and moral) claims of Christianity. As far as the objection based on Peterson’s intellectual stature goes, the comparison to Kierkegaard does not require one to believe, along with economist Tyler Cowen, that Peterson is “the most influential public intellectual in the West.”12 My point is not that

Peterson can match Kierkegaard’s scintillating genius, but rather that he shares many of Kierkegaard’s concerns and insights (shifted into a contemporary, secular register), and that bringing Kierkegaard into the discussion helps us understand both the nature of Peterson’s project and its limitations. In the end, I hope also that detractors like Hart will recognize, however grudgingly, that Peterson is anything but an intellectual joke.13 THE ESSENTIALLY THERAPEUTIC NATURE OF KIERKEGAARD’S AND PETERSON’S WORK In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous narrator of this most comprehensive and systematic of Kierkegaard’s philosophical works, tells the story of overhearing a conversation between a grandfather and his grandson at the graveside of the boy’s father. The old man laments the loss of his son’s faith to Hegelian speculation, a loss that the old man believes will eternally separate him from his son. Climacus vows that he in turn will work vigorously to separate people from the damnable illusion that theological reflection is all that God requires of us. It is precisely in this spiritual sense that Kierkegaard’s work may be described as therapeutic. He is engaged fundamentally in the cure of souls, though cure of spirits perhaps comes closer to the mark.14 Peterson similarly emphasizes that his primary interest is not political but psychological, by which, and in keeping with his practice as a clinical psychologist, he means therapeutic. This is not to say that his objection to Canada’s Bill C-16 or his frequent diatribes against cultural Marxists, identity politics, and what he describes generally as the madness of the ideologically possessed do not have political implications, which they obviously do. His fundamental objection to all these things, however, is that they interfere with proper human flourishing. When asked, for example, about the most important of his twelve rules for life, he responds without hesitation that it is rule 8: “Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie.”15 Telling the truth lies at the heart of an individual’s proper engagement with Reality, or Being, in Peterson’s words. Thus, he objects to the radical Left’s stranglehold over discourse in much of academe precisely because it prevents people from speaking and thinking clearly, which in turn cuts them off from engaging authentically with Being and thus being transformed. And as the subtitle of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos suggests, he wants to help individuals combat the suffering and chaos of life by finding meaning that will not only immediately benefit the individual but also inevitably help all those imbricated in the individual’s life. Those who doubt Peterson’s essentially therapeutic intent need simply watch a few of his videos in which he relates with tears how thousands of people have told him either by email or in person how he has helped them put their lives together. When asked by Rubin in the interview cited above what makes enduring all the hatred and vitriol he experiences worthwhile, he again speaks of hearing directly from people whom he has helped. Many of his mainstream interviewers apparently cannot conceive of evaluating political positions on the basis of how they affect individual human flourishing, no doubt because they have bought into the corrosive lie that the personal is the political, and the

political is all that counts. To help determine more precisely what truly counts for Peterson, we turn now to a brief —and admittedly simplified—overview of Kierkegaard’s existential stages. Such an overview proves useful in approaching Peterson’s work both because it reveals broad areas of agreement between the two writers’ understanding of the self, and, more significantly, because it also allows us to identify precisely where they appear to part company. KIERKEGAARD’S STAGES Kierkegaard develops his theory of existential stages—the aesthetic, ethical, and religious— primarily within his pseudonymous writings. The most useful of these is Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a work that many critics regard as the definitive statement of Kierkegaard’s philosophy.16 The first thing to note is that these stages are not absolutely discrete phases in existential development through which individuals progress systematically and irreversibly. No one fits perfectly into any one stage at any given time (though it is often the case that one stage will dominate). Furthermore, even when individuals move decisively from one stage to the next, this does not involve the complete loss of the previous stage. The more advanced stage takes the previous one up into itself and transforms it.17 There are a number of ways of describing the aesthetic stage (or any stage for that matter), depending on which aspects of the “self-system” are perceived to be most important. Mark Taylor insists that the key to the aesthetic stage lies in the absence of decision.18 His notion of the immediate and reflective poles of the aesthetic stage proves useful in illustrating this. The immediate pole is characterized by “immersion in sensuous inclination,” and has pleasure and pain as its categories.19 At the reflective pole of this continuum, the self is aware of its complete separation from the environment. The interesting and the boring become the significant categories, and imagination is given free play in order to provide sufficient entertainment. The significance of time for the self provides another important means of distinguishing between the stages. Stephen Crites, unlike Taylor, considers “the interesting” to be the determining category at both poles of the aesthetic. He argues that, at both extremes, consciousness is effectively lifted out of time: at the immediate pole, by the intensity of a momentary experience that blots out awareness of past and future, and at the reflective pole, by the abstraction of the self from temporal process that allows for the contemplation of reality under the aspect of eternity. Furthermore, he claims that “only what is atemporal is interesting.”20 Taylor also agrees that the self is not “temporalized” at the aesthetic stage.21 Kierkegaard identifies the boundary between the aesthetic and ethical stages as irony. It “arises from the constant placing of the particularities of the finite together with the infinite ethical requirement, thus permitting the contradiction to come into being.”22 The movement from the reflective pole of the aesthetic to irony thus requires only a shift in emphasis or perspective. Where reflective aesthetes focus on their own ideality while ignoring the particularities of finite existence (or perhaps use reality merely as an occasion for abstraction

and speculation), ironists attend to the disparity between the two. In other words, someone in this boundary condition is aware of the ethical ideal but focuses on the failure of others (or the world) to measure up. Ironists thus lack true awareness of themselves. They imagine that all things are possible for them, with the result that the “world becomes dream-like, and [the] self becomes a bundle of conflicting possibilities.”23 To move beyond irony, the self must be consolidated in time by “choosing” itself and thereby entering the ethical stage. This expression steers a middle course between merely gaining knowledge of the self and independently creating the self.24 Before this choice, the self is immediately “given.” Louis Mackey notes that the self that comes into existence by this choice is “the previously existing self lifted from nature to self-consciousness by means of freedom.”25 He explains how this initiates a life committed to temporality, a concept that, as we will see, is central to Peterson’s therapeutic: Self-choice is thus not only the entrance to the ethical life; it is also the constitutive principle by which that life is structured. As such it is compounded of two essential moments, the moments … of repentance and duty. In the present resolution of self-choice a man takes all of his past into his freedom (repentance) and freely programs his entire future (duty).26 Movement into the ethical stage also involves the displacement of aesthetic categories by the ethical either/or: good/evil. Peterson likewise advocates for the replacement of aesthetic by ethical criteria in rule 7 of his twelve rules—“Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).” Judge William, the paradigmatic ethicist in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, argues that the initial ethical choice consists in choosing or not choosing. With this choice, “the choice between good and evil makes its appearance.”27 The judge also claims that to choose absolutely is to choose the ethical, which is yet another way of describing the choice of the self. Kierkegaard, unlike Peterson, believes that the ethical stage merely permits a transition from aesthetic to religious existence. The ethical stage’s inevitable collapse can be traced to two related factors: an overestimation of the self’s potential for meeting ethical demands and an underestimation of the nature of those demands. According to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Judge William fails to realize that even entry into the ethical life—the initial choice of the self—lies beyond finite human resources. He mistakenly assumes that the self will be able to come back to itself after despairing absolutely, for in order to do this the individual requires the assistance of a God who lies beyond the parameters of the ethical self.28 A similar tendency to regard God (and religion in general) as merely a dimension of the ethical self is evident in the judge’s confidence in his capacity to fulfill the requirements of duty. The fundamental principle of duty, expressed in the abstract, is that everyone must become himself. At this theoretical level, the ethicist’s primary aim of self-realization amounts to little more than self-assertion.29 God is simply invoked as a “supersensible guarantor of the validity of his moral position.”30 The illusion of ethical success thus can be

maintained only at the cost of translating the infinite ethical demand into a type of finite social ethic. The ideality at the heart of ethics thus brings about its collapse. There inevitably comes a point where a man “must either choose to acknowledge himself absolutely in the wrong or lose himself in a maze of casuistries. If he does not reach this point, he deceives himself and shortchanges his principles.”31 This critique will prove crucial in the analysis of Peterson’s position. Kierkegaard identifies the boundary between the ethical and religious stages as humor. It resembles irony in that it involves the recognition of a contradiction, but here the contradiction is between the infinite ethical requirement and the individual’s own concrete moral reality, “and this misrelation is deepened further when he [the humorist] sees the difficulty of fulfilling the ethical requirement.”32 Thus humor has an inherently pathetic quality, for humorists are conscious of being alienated from their immortality, “the most passionate interest of subjectivity.”33 Religion A, the initial and “lowest” type of religious existence, presupposes guiltconsciousness, and thus an individual can enter it only by choosing guilt as an absolute qualification of the self. Unlike ethicists, who edify themselves with the thought of being essentially in the right, in Religion A people repose in the thought that before God (the Absolute) they are always in the wrong.34 The consolation proceeds from the fact that they have reestablished a relationship to the Absolute, even though it can be expressed only as guilt-consciousness and occasions suffering. That Religion A is predicated on divine immanence holds the key to understanding its consolation. There are two basic ways that critics have understood the use of divine immanence in this context: phenomenologically and metaphysically. The phenomenological reading is that the individual assumes that the eternal is accessible to the self, even though this is experienced negatively through guilt-consciousness. The metaphysical (or essentialist) reading is that a person’s immortal soul participates in the eternal, a fact that temporal experience cannot alter, though it may obscure it. Kierkegaard also ties this to the Socratic belief in the preexistence of the soul.35 The common element in both positions would be the assumption that God is accessible to the self within the self. Religion B (or Christianity) holds no such guarantee, for it involves a decisive break with immanence. Just as Religion A presupposes guilt-consciousness, Christianity presupposes sin-consciousness. In Kierkegaard’s estimation, the alienation implied by sin is so radical that individuals could never discover it by themselves. It requires the paradox of the God-in-time, or the incarnation, to reveal it. And, ironically, for Kierkegaard the incarnation does not signal God’s presence in creation, but rather its opposite: “In the religiousness A the eternal is ubique et nusquam [everywhere and nowhere], but concealed by the actuality of existence; in the paradoxical religiousness the eternal is at a definite place, and precisely this is the breach with immanence.”36 To enter Religion B, one must have faith, a faith that believes against the understanding. Reason’s primary function in the transition to Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, is to recognize this absolute paradox. The only two responses to

this are offense or faith, and if one believes, it is by virtue of the absurd. But we need not concern ourselves overly here with Kierkegaard’s ideas about Christian faith (or Religion B), since Peterson’s therapeutic program does not arrive even at Religion A, though it may share some of its features.37 THE THERAPEUTIC DIALECTIC BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND REALITY As will be obvious to anyone with even a passing knowledge of Kierkegaard and Peterson, they both insist on the primacy of the individual. Famously for Kierkegaard, the crowd is “untruth,” a claim he makes in his dedication to “that single individual.”38 Likewise, Peterson speaks frequently of the sovereignty of the individual, arguing that this is Christianity’s greatest contribution to Western culture. Peterson, in a move that appears to have held little interest for Kierkegaard, goes further, arguing that the renewal of the sovereign individual is the key to the regeneration of the larger culture. This separation of individuals from the common herd isolates them before God (in Kierkegaard’s parlance), or before Reality and Being (in Peterson’s),39 thereby allowing them to achieve a degree of moral clarity about themselves—away from the distractions of collective life and the possibility of dissolving their particular individuality in comforting, though ultimately caustic, abstractions such as the “crowd,” the “public,” or any form of “identity politics.” As Peterson puts it in 12 Rules, it is understandable that we would “want to be shielded … from the stark existential aloneness of individual Being and its attendant responsibility.”40 As noted earlier, Peterson insists that of his twelve rules, rule 8 (“Tell the truth, or, at least, don’t lie”) is fundamental. His explanation of why he places such stress on this reveals some deep affinities with Kierkegaard, particularly his comment that telling truth allows for Reality to “kick back,” thereby initiating an ongoing dialectical relationship that both shapes and improves the person. Peterson speaks about this in another place as the dialectic between Being and Becoming, which corresponds closely to Kierkegaard’s dialectic between necessity and possibility.41 At times, Peterson describes this process as driven by order and chaos, where order represents the past in all its reassuring stable givenness, and chaos, the future in all its terrifying fluid potential. As Peterson puts it elsewhere, without engaging honestly in such a process, we will never discover how wrestling with necessity, with the constraints of Reality, can force our true potential to come forward.42 Peterson explicitly links this desire for existential truth with Kierkegaard’s notion of authenticity.43 And when one exists in truth, by both speaking and acting truthfully, one eliminates some of the bolt-holes that Kierkegaard argues aesthetes often provide for themselves. In the ethical sphere, there can be nothing hypothetical about one’s engagement with Reality, since the choice of self is absolute, unconditional. One cannot redirect any pushback Reality provides toward some arbitrary, temporary, project of the self, but rather must accept this as judgment and correction. And it is thus that one progressively approaches a truer understanding of the self, though, as we will see, Peterson and Kierkegaard diverge significantly in their notion of what this understanding entails. It seems, for example, that

Peterson values this dialectical process principally because it allows a person progressively to learn more about the self, in all its potential. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, proves exclusively focused on what it reveals about what is for Peterson one interest among many— one’s ethical status, and by implication, one’s prospects for eternal happiness. Both men, however, recognize that there are two fundamental ways in which we can frustrate or sabotage our engagement with Being. Here, in particular, Kierkegaard helps us understand what Peterson refers to generally as sins of omission and commission. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard (through the pseudonym Anti-Climacus) traces in great detail the dialectical progress of despair as it moves more and more fully into consciousness. Despite the myriad forms despair assumes, it appears in two fundamental guises: weakness and strength—that is, fear of, and flight from, one’s essential freedom before God, or defiant assertion of one’s freedom in the face of God. In the latter case, which Kierkegaard identifies as informing the advanced demoniac, it is as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and that this clerical error became conscious of being such—perhaps it was not an error but in a far higher sense was an essential constituent in the whole experience—it is then as if this error would revolt against the author, out of hatred for him were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”44 Kierkegaard refers also to the hatred for existence with which such a being wills to be itself, not even wishing to tear itself free from the “Power which posited it,” but rather “to obtrude upon this Power [its Source] in spite, to hold on to it out of malice,” thereby offering proof “against its goodness.”45 One can see that Peterson is working with a similar analysis in chapter 8 of 12 Rules, though he does not develop it as thoroughly or systematically as Kierkegaard, who remains unsurpassed as a dialectician.46 Early in his discussion of telling the truth, Peterson describes people who “hide,” refusing to discover, or choose, themselves. Later, however, his discussion of Milton’s Satan shows that he understands well the distinction between despair in weakness and despair in defiance, for Satan has a mind that is “not to be changed by Place or Time.”47 Indeed, such minds—like those of the Columbine High School killers, whom Peterson has studied carefully and spoken of frequently—despise Being itself, and prove expert at making a hell of earth.48 Though Peterson emphasizes that everyone has the potential for extraordinary evil, he argues that such evil arises precisely when people refuse to engage truthfully with Reality and thus know themselves. This claim provides a useful point of entry into a broader discussion of where Peterson and Kierkegaard diverge significantly. Indeed, where Kierkegaard is optimistic about reality and pessimistic about the self, Peterson is pessimistic about reality and optimistic about the self. And this provides a key to the limitations of Peterson’s position, at least from a Kierkegaardian perspective.

THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN KIERKEGAARD AND PETERSON As the overview of Kierkegaard’s stages above indicates, the movement from the ethical stage to religious existence involves the recognition that before God, the individual is always in the wrong. But Kierkegaard would also insist that God loves us and provides a means of righting this wrong, in Christ. Individuals in themselves simply do not have the resources to eliminate either guilt or sin-consciousness, but must receive this in faith from their transcendent Source. And while it is true that this process occasions great suffering, the sort of suffering Kierkegaard refers to is not that of quotidian pain, misery, and general disappointment, but rather is occasioned by a person’s distance from, and longing for, God.49 Peterson, however, starts from very different assumptions. Life, he argues in many places, is essentially suffering, arising from the chaos that surrounds and often overtakes us. We are beset by sickness, disappointment, misfortune, and inescapably by death itself. In the face of such a grim assessment of the true state of things, he advises people to get their lives together and to shoulder the greatest burden they can bear, for the sake of both themselves and others. Here perhaps there are faint echoes of both Nietzsche’s pessimism and his defiance—and if not Nietzsche’s in particular, then certainly a Stoic’s of some sort. At the same time, this Stoic pessimism is mitigated to a large degree by a loosely Christian conviction that the individual through speaking truth participates in the divine Logos, the power that carves habitable order out of chaos. Indeed, in places Peterson waxes positively rhapsodic in his anticipation of the eschaton that his project hopes to bring about. Consider this passage toward the end of chapter 7 of 12 Rules: Meaning is when everything there is comes together in an ecstatic dance of single purpose—the glorification of a reality, so that no matter how good it has suddenly become, it can get better and better and better, more and more deeply forever into the future. Meaning happens when that dance has become so intense that all the horrors of the past, all the terrible struggle engaged in by all of life and all of humanity to that moment becomes a necessary and worthwhile part of the increasingly successful attempt to build something truly Mighty and Good.50 This sort of triumphalism is totally absent in Kierkegaard, though it is present in incipient form in Judge William in Either/Or, who remains quite convinced of the innate human capacity to meet the absolute ethical requirements Reality places on us. Kierkegaard himself, of course, remains convinced that the Judge is simply deluded about our capacity to bear this burden. If Kierkegaard could somehow comment on Jordan Peterson’s project, I suspect that while he would salute the undoubted courage of Peterson’s engagement with life, he might also point out that in passages like the one above, Peterson has lost sight of what for Kierkegaard must always be the primary concern of the individual—his own eternal happiness. There is in that passage more than a mere whiff of ineluctable Hegelian progress,

in which the individual becomes lost in a collective rhapsody. I imagine that Kierkegaard’s hope and prayer for Peterson would be that he resolve for himself the struggles that drove him to contact his friend Jonathan Pageau. For as stimulating as it is to dialogue with Peterson in the narthex, it would be far better to worship with him in the sanctuary.

10 Being and Meaning: Jordan Peterson’s Antidote to Evil MATTHEW STEEM AND JOY STEEM What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve. .

—Jacques Maritain

Over the last few years, Jordan Peterson has come to mean different things to different people. For some, he is a proponent of an antiquated patriarchy and rigid hierarchy; for others, he is a charlatan who isn’t saying anything original. But for others still, he is a father figure: commenters frequently call him “papa Peterson” on YouTube and other social media outlets. Whatever people’s opinion of him, Peterson has something to say, and many are paying attention. But what is he saying that so many find so appealing? Most influential intellectuals have strongly rooted schema from which they theorize, and Peterson is no different. Possibly one of the most fundamental aspects of Peterson’s schema is the location of evil and how best to navigate it. For Peterson, if we are to live meaningfully, we must understand what evil is and where it comes from. Indeed, identifying and addressing evil is an integral element to being able to answer the perennial question “Is life worth living?” with a yes. And it is for his way of getting to yes, perhaps, that Peterson has gained so much traction. EVIL AND RESPONSIBILITY Peterson believes that life is suffering, and many of his ideas are in some way related to this assertion. However, while life is suffering, it can also be—must be, if we are to live with purpose—filled with meaning. This means that the only way to live meaningfully is to properly deal with suffering, and one does this by taking responsibility. But how is one to take responsibility in the best possible way? Peterson’s advice is to “set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”1 Setting one’s house in order is more complicated than it might sound at first; it includes an entire life philosophy based on the desire to ameliorate suffering by being loving. But the only way to effectively love is to recognize the location of evil. For Peterson, evil is not primarily something that comes from our environment. Evil comes from within us, and there is no permanent or utopian cure for it. There is no technological fix that progress will eventually implement if given enough time or resources.

Peterson is fond of quoting the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s words in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart— and through all human hearts.”2 Evil is permanently part of the human condition. Peterson suggests that recognizing the location of evil, and being ever aware of it, is of absolute importance, especially if we are to make meaningful changes within ourselves. This requires true self-awareness, which is not easily undertaken. He asks, “We build endless memorials to the Holocaust, for example, and swear never to forget. But what is it that we are remembering? What is the lesson we are supposed to have learned?”3 He then makes the poignant assertion that “we cannot say ‘never again’ as a consequence of the memory of the Holocaust, because we do not understand the Holocaust—and it is impossible to remember what has not been understood. We do not understand the Holocaust, because we do not comprehend ourselves.”4 From this example, he points to the necessity of recognizing that it was people with similar vulnerabilities and temperaments to ourselves that were indeed capable of producing the moral horrors of war: “ ‘Never forget’ means ‘know thyself’— means recognize and understand that evil twin, that mortal enemy, who is part and parcel of every individual.”5 Peterson believes that we can learn from history if we read it accurately. To do this, we should read it as if we were the perpetrator of the evils being committed—because in all statistical likelihood we would not have been of the select few who opposed it. Reading ourselves into history as people who are capable of committing the evil acts we find there is part of acting responsibly.6 If this sounds similar to the Christian doctrine of original sin, that’s because Peterson finds great value in the concept. He states, Acceptance of the harsh Christian dogma of Original Sin, for example (despite its pessimism and apparent inequity) at least meant recognition of evil; meant some comprehension of the tendency towards evil as an intrinsic, heritable aspect of human nature. From the perspective informed by belief in Original Sin, individual actions and motivations must always be carefully scrutinized and considered—even when apparently benevolent—lest the ever-present adversarial tendencies “accidentally” gain the upper hand. The dogma of Original Sin forces every individual to regard himself as the (potential) immediate source of evil.… It is no wonder that this idea has become unpopular: nonetheless, evil exists somewhere. It remains difficult not to see hypocrisy in the souls of those who wish to localize it somewhere else.7 This is not to imply that the environment has no role in how an individual will comport himself in the world. Peterson asserts that the environment will certainly contribute; indeed, he affirms that theories that take environmental conditions into account concerning behaviors are “extraordinary useful.”8 This is probably why he emphasizes the importance of acting responsibly toward each other. He states that “the voluntary evil we do one another can be

profoundly and permanently damaging, even to the strong.”9 Acting in a loving manner toward the other is part of acting in a responsible manner. Acts of malevolence contribute to the suffering of all. Ultimately though, responsibility for an action, of good or evil, lies within the individual and not society. He says that “man [is not] a victim of society, [an] innocent lamb perverted by social forces beyond individual control.” This is because Peterson believes that “man created society in his own image; it enables him as much as it corrupts him.”10 This is a hard pill for many people to swallow, since it disallows laying the totality of blame elsewhere. Peterson recognizes this unpopularity. He attributes this unwillingness to take responsibility for evil partly on the decline of religious belief and partly on the idea that progress and our environment (if only made ideal) can finally rid us of our capacity for destruction: “Acts once defined as evil are now merely considered the consequence of unjust familial, social or economic structures.… Alternatively, the commission of incomprehensible acts of cruelty and destruction are viewed as symptomatic of some physiological weakness or disease. Seldom are acts of evil considered voluntary or purposeful.”11 Each one of us, Peterson asserts, despite the environment we are in, can “exult in agony, delight in pain, worship … destruction and pathology.” People choose to “lay waste, to undermine, to destroy, to torment, to abuse and devour.”12 If the underlying cause for evil is grounded in the individual, it is no surprise that negative environments don’t create evil; they bring out what was already there. Peterson again quotes with approval Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago: “If a person went swiftly bad in camp, what it might mean was that he had not just gone bad, but that that inner foulness which had not previously been needed had disclosed itself.”13 In both his written and spoken material, Peterson belabors the point that responsibility rests in each individual. For Peterson, taking responsibility begins with knowing ourselves, and especially the ability we have to contribute to evil: “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.”14 Before we can act in a meaningful way, which will create positive change, we must own up to the evil that we all are capable of choosing. But why would a person choose evil? SUFFERING AND CHOICE People’s actions toward others and themselves are motivated by how they interpret the world and the rules by which it operates. Thus, to understand why people act the way they do, it is vital to know the true nature of the world. For Peterson, foundationally, Being “is an interplay between the finite and the infinite.”15 Humans inhabit a world that has limits. This is not a bad thing, for “in the absence of serious constraint there can be no choice, no freedom, no existence.”16 Vulnerabilities, then, are a precondition for the wonderful and remarkable possibility of being human. Without limitations there is literally no story. The trouble is that the nature of finitude and limits also includes the possibility of tragedy. In other words, the

price we pay for existence is a life that includes tragedy. But for Peterson, the primary cause for suffering is not tragedy, which he defines as “the arbitrary harshness of society and nature, set against the vulnerability of the individual.”17 Rather, the greatest amount of suffering results from the voluntary choices individuals make to act in ways that cause harm to others. Certainly, things like natural disasters and debilitating diseases contribute to the suffering in our world; however, in Peterson’s view, the greater cause of suffering is voluntary acts of evil perpetrated by individuals against one another. For Peterson, evil is characterized by “voluntary willingness to do what is known to be wrong, despite the capacity to understand and avoid such action.”18 Humans, as separate from other animals, know what evil is because of our unique capacity to understand our own vulnerability. We recognize our own vulnerability in the world in terms of physical and emotional harm. In short, we understand the finitude of life. We know that we are bounded by the limitations of Being. And since we are cognizant of our own weakness, we recognize that others are susceptible too. Peterson argues that this is why humans, unlike animals, can inflict evil.19 Peterson argues that there are two ways of dealing with the fact that life is suffering. The first is to live in a meaningful way by believing—and making a choice—that Being is more good than bad, better than worse, despite the suffering that accompanies it. The second is to live and act as if the price for living, which includes suffering, is not worth the effort. This latter choice is the main reason for acts of evil. ARROGANCE AND RESENTMENT In many of his written and oral presentations, Peterson comments on people who choose to do evil things: whether they be recent historical figures (the Columbine killers or Carl Panzram, for example), individuals from various ancient stories (the biblical Cain, Esau, and various antiheroes from different mythologies), or figures of evil from literature (Milton’s Satan or Goethe’s Mephistopheles). All these characters, he says, share an anger at the created world, at Being itself. Such individuals see the world and Being as less than good. As a result, they see creation itself as less than valuable. They regard consciousness, which includes the possibility of tragedy, as something to reject. Because of this view of the world, they voluntarily act in destructive ways. But these are seriously evil antiheroes; is the average person really capable of such evil? Peterson would say that there are degrees to which a person can act on the assumption that Being is not fundamentally good. We do not, all of us, have the same intense hatred for the nature of Being as Mephistopheles or Shakespeare’s Richard III. But the crux of the matter is still the assumption—in whatever degree—that the intrinsic vulnerability (which allows for tragedy) that characterizes a person’s life is an unacceptable load to bear. The view that existence does not have value leads any individual motived by selfish desires and immediate gratification to choose that which is expedient, or advantageous for the moment, rather than

that which is meaningful and has value in the long term. Peterson asserts that in addition to a negative view of Being, arrogance and resentment also serve as stimuli to evil.20 Arrogance, as Peterson understands it, is an unshakable belief that one’s own view of the world is the correct one. That is bad enough, since it rejects any alternative or corrective view. However, when an arrogant person has presupposed that the nature of Being does not justify the tragedy that finitude imposes, evil is the result. The pernicious nature of arrogance that makes it particularly hostile to reconsidering a negative view of Being is its lack of either wanting or being willing to consider that its understanding might be wrong. What’s more, arrogance employs reason. Of reason and its relationship with arrogance, Peterson says, It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown. But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being.21 For Peterson, humility—admitting that we can’t know everything because of our own finitude—is integral to a proper approach to Being. The devil is, of course, the ultimate personification of pride, and this is what makes him irredeemable. Similarly, the individual who trusts only in his or her own finite reason cannot adapt to the possibility that life might be worthwhile.22 Peterson says, “What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. That is faith in the sacrifice of the current self for the self that could be.”23 One of the reactions of the individual who believes not only that the world is tragic but also that the injustice and tragedy is aimed at them, is resentment. Such people feel they have unfairly been dealt the poorer cards in life more than everyone else in some way.24 This perception, according to Peterson, breeds contempt, deceit, jealousy, cruelty, and hatred. And this hatred, which is aimed at existence itself because it is assumed to be unfair in nature and therefore not really good, is then acted out in reactions of volitional malevolence.25 Peterson puts forward that a person who truly believes that the nature of Being is unfair cannot at the same time believe that life is worth living in a virtuous manner. Ultimately, Peterson says that the resentful individual exists in a state of stuntedness. They “will experience life as a burden —as a responsibility too heavy to bear—and turn to resentment and hatred, as a ‘justifiable’ alternative.”26 Resentment allows people to rationalize their violence against others or the world. Like arrogance, it is bad enough on its own, but resentment and arrogance in tandem allow for a particularly destructive force. Moreover, because arrogance is unwilling to accept any other view, it also means the rejection of hope, which might include a more remedial view of the world. LIVING MEANINGFULLY IN THE WORLD

Despite all the potential troubles that might beset the individual living in the world, Peterson is confident that life can still be meaningfully lived. He is, in fact, deeply hopeful and optimistic. Part of the reason for this hope comes from his expectant belief in the nature of Being. Essentially, Being is good, and if a person aligns himself properly with the requirements of Being—believing that existence might be justified by its goodness and acting accordingly—he will be able to live not only a purposeful life but also one that is satisfying. So how does one live meaningfully in the world? First, Peterson believes that we must choose to believe that Being is fundamentally good. As previously noted, because being human necessitates that we live within limits, we will face tragedy and suffering. However, with a proper approach to life we can not only mitigate the suffering we experience in our own lives; we can mitigate suffering in the lives of others. Peterson has stated that “the antidote for suffering, or what helps us cope with it, is meaning.”27 When asked if this was a philosophical assertion, he clarified that it was actually theological. For anyone who knows his work, this will come as no surprise. He has stated more than once that a philosophy based solely on a materialistic worldview is bound to be lacking since human beings live in a world that is more than materialistic: The philosophical study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such study can render us more sophisticated in our choices. Even older and deeper than ethics, however, is religion. Religion concerns itself not with (mere) right and wrong but with good and evil themselves—with the archetypes of right and wrong. Religion concerns itself with domain of value, ultimate value. That is not the scientific domain.28 Some statements and assertions are metaphysical, not materialistic; they are wholly undiscoverable by science. There is a framework from which science cannot judge certain claims. One such claim would be the assertion that it is better to exist than not to exist—that Being, existence, despite unavoidable suffering, is still good. He does in fact claim this— ardently. How does one arrive at meaning? It might even sound as if an act of faith is needed. In a way, it is. Peterson puts it this way: Decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness—if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and arrogance. It is that declaration of faith that keeps hatred of Being, with all its attendant evils, at bay. And, as for such faith: it is not at all the will to believe things that you know perfectly well to be false. Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.29 Interestingly enough, Peterson follows this with another claim about the limits of reason. He

says that when considering existence being justified by its goodness, “You might start by not thinking—or, more accurately but less trenchantly, by refusing to subjugate your faith to your current rationality, and its narrowness of view. This doesn’t mean ‘make yourself stupid.’ It means the opposite.”30 Peterson is talking about being fundamentally open to Being. Some philosophers have called this capacity of openness “wonder.” The Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper puts it this way: “The one who experiences wonder is one who realizes in an unmixed form that ancient attitude toward being, which has been called theoria since the time of Plato: the purely receptive stance toward reality.… Theoria can only exist to the extent that man has not become blind to the wondrous[,] the wonderful fact that something exists.”31 In addition to this act of becoming open to Being, Peterson prescribes taking responsibility as a necessity for living a meaningful life. The first task truly responsible people will undertake is recognizing the potential for evil in themselves. Knowing our own capacity for evil is integral if we are to take responsibility. To quote Peterson on evil again, The individual is a terrible force for evil. Recognition of that force—real recognition, the kind that comes as a staggering blow—is a precondition for any profound improvement in character. By such improvement, I mean—the capacity to bear the tragedy of existence, to transcend that tragedy—and not to degenerate instead into something “unconsciously” desirous of disseminating pain and misery.32 After recognizing the location of evil, responsible people will act in a loving manner. This will then work outwardly and to the benefit of all. In other words, acting responsibly will serve to bring more meaning not only to the individual but also to the totality of the society in which she or he dwells. This is because Peterson believes that the actions of all individuals, good or bad, will have an effect on those around them: “It is the little choices we make, every day, between good and evil, that turn the world to waste and hope to despair.… Who can argue with a Solzhenitsyn when he states: ‘One man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny’?”33 We are very much connected with all those around us, and everything we do matters. Perhaps this is why Peterson has argued that “you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of.”34 This is truly the only way a person can find lasting meaning, because meaning can be found in assuming—and acting in a way that assumes—that all individuals have worth and dignity.35 Assuming the dignity of others gives us a willingness to set aside our own ego for the purpose of reducing the suffering of others. This means we must sacrifice “what is unworthy and unnecessary and resentful and deadly in our characters despite the pain of such sacrifice.”36 Peterson goes further than this, however; he also clearly instantiates the importance of love into the equation of responsibility. This is where being Christlike comes in. Foundationally, acting in a Christlike way, for Peterson, is being willing to confront evil for

the sake of oneself and others. Christ … signified transition of morality from reliance on tradition to reliance on individual conscience—from rule of law to rule of spirit—from prohibition to exhortation.… Love thy neighbour, as thyself. This means, not merely to be pleasant, polite and friendly, but to attribute to the other a value equivalent to the value of the self—which, despite outward appearances, is a representative of God—and to act in consequence of this valuation.37 Speaking specifically to what this looks like in terms of responsibility, he says, Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity.… Christ is eternally He who is willing to confront and deeply consider and risk the temptations posed by the most malevolent elements of human nature.… Christ is always he who is willing to confront evil—consciously, fully and voluntarily.38 Peterson believes not only that each individual can act in a Christlike way as described above but also that if we do, the suffering in the world can be mitigated. He sums love up as “the desire in you to see the good in others flourish.”39 This is to live in a truly meaningful way. In the final analysis, Peterson offers the possible outcome of believing in the ultimate goodness of Being, and acting responsibly: Perhaps your uncorrupted soul will then see its existence as a genuine good, as something to celebrate, even in the face of your own vulnerability. Perhaps you will become an ever-more-powerful force for peace and whatever is good. Perhaps you will then see that if all people did this, in their own lives, the world might stop being an evil place. After that, with continued effort, perhaps it could even stop being a tragic place. Who knows what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best? Who knows what eternal heavens might be established by our spirits, purified by truth, aiming skyward, right here on the fallen Earth?40 CONCLUSION Jordan Peterson is one of the most recognizable public intellectuals of the Western world. Such popularity calls for a careful analysis of his view of life. According to Peterson, depending on how people view the nature of Being, they can live meaningful lives or perpetrate evil. This is by no means a simplistic approach; instead, it calls us to face head-on the very nature of existence: that tragedy abounds, and that, ultimately, life is suffering. Why has this message made Peterson so popular? First, people are desperately seeking to live meaningfully, and they sense that doing so requires some responsibility on their part. Second, people resonate with Peterson’s claim that existence includes suffering, but are hopeful that this does not preclude an individual from living in such a way as to experience the goodness of Being. And Peterson certainly believes that existence is—despite our

finitude—fundamentally good. The requirement for experiencing meaning is to choose to believe in the goodness of Being, and accordingly to act in a responsible manner.41 Responsibility, for Peterson, means acknowledging the location of evil inside every individual. G. K. Chesterton once cheekily asserted, “The answer to the question, ‘What is Wrong [with the world]?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”42 If we realize that, we are ultimately able to choose the right and virtuous path in spite of the difficulties of our environment. And this living responsibly does not merely end with the single individual but works outwardly. This is perhaps what Peterson means when he offers, “Treat your fellow man as if he were yourself—not with the pity that undermines his self-respect, and not with the justice that elevates yourself above him—but as a divinity.”43 With that said, while Peterson has a lot to offer in his grammar of responsibility regarding both the location of evil and how to address it, he does not spend as much time touching on the importance of community. Though Peterson addresses the importance of acting in loving ways toward self and others, this is not the same as cultivating community. Since he is a self-proclaimed classical liberal, it is to be expected that his main focus is on the individual. However, there is a weakness in any theory that focuses excessively on the mere individual. It is highly unlikely that any person will be able to see the full scope of evil in themselves without the vantage point that communal life brings. Moreover, virtue, a topic Peterson approaches from a rather Stoic angle, is difficult to fully know, let alone develop, purely as an individual. Awareness of both evil and virtue can only develop fully within a community. It may be true that for people to grow in their ability to take on responsibility they need to clean their room; however, even a room is not purely of one’s own making and for one’s own keeping. Instead, every person’s room includes things that were not only created by others, but also, hopefully, things that allow for each of us to work toward better living within community. A proper emphasis on community is also needed for a proper conception of the nature of Being—that is, that Being is ultimately good. In the Judeo-Christian view of the world—a stream Peterson swims in—the idea of a body, which is an interrelationship of many members, is of paramount importance. In fact, according to the scriptural metaphor of a body, the lone individual—like a lone body part—will never be able to function on his or her own. The Message paraphrase of the apostle Paul puts it this way: “The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together … every part dependent on every other part” (1 Corinthians 12:25). Thus, when it comes to knowing the nature of Being, might it not be better (even required!) to incorporate a communal mindset instead of merely the singular? By focusing with near exclusion on the individual, Peterson might be like those pietistic Christians who take an individualistic approach to pursuing holiness (Peterson might instead say perfection). This is not to say that he is calling for an exclusivism that rejects the world. Yet, even if we take responsibility and clean our room, face the suffering nature of the world

and our own inherent vulnerabilities, or even resist pride and resentment, there are limits to what we as mere individuals can achieve even when it comes to our own development. Perhaps in Peterson’s future work he will deal more fully with the role of corporate living. Time will tell.

List of Contributors Bruce Riley Ashford (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is provost at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He is the author of seven books, has written regularly for Fox News Opinion, and has been featured on CSPAN, NPR, and other national outlets. Hunter Baker (JD, PhD) is the dean of arts and sciences at Union University and a member of the department of political science. He is the author of three books on politics and religion and serves as an affiliate scholar with the Acton Institute. Baker is also a fellow of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and associate editor of the Journal of Markets and Morality. Laurence Brown graduated with his BA in political science from the University of the Fraser Valley, earning the Dean’s Medal of Excellence in the Faculty of Social Science. Throughout his studies, Laurence has developed a deep interest regarding the impact of faith on political systems, and plans to continue researching this vast subject at the global level as he pursues an MA in international affairs. Ron Dart teaches in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He has authored or coauthored thirty-five books that deal with the interface between literature, spirituality, and politics, including The North American High Tory Tradition (American Anglican Press, 2016) and Christianity and Pluralism (Lexham Press, 2019). Stephen Dunning is co-founder and co-director of the Inklings Institute of Canada, housed at Trinity Western University. He received his DPhil from Cambridge University, which he attended as a Commonwealth scholar. He is the author of an award-winning book on Charles Williams and of numerous articles and conference papers on a wide range of subjects, most notably on Canadian literature and the various Inklings. Esther O’Reilly is a freelance writer and doctoral student in mathematics. She currently blogs at Patheos, and her work has appeared in various Christian and mainstream outlets, including The Federalist, Quillette, Premier Christianity, and Permanent Things. She has also been a guest on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? discussing Jordan Peterson, the Intellectual Dark Web, and the meaning crisis. Alastair Roberts (PhD, Durham University) works for the Theopolis and Davenant Institutes. He is an author of Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption Through Scripture (Crossway, 2018) and the forthcoming Heirs Together: A Theology of the Sexes. He

participates in the Mere Fidelity and Theopolis podcasts, along with his own Adversaria Podcast. Esgrid Sikahall is a doctoral candidate in Science and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, specifically on the question of how Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can reconfigure the contemporary reflection and public understanding of the sciences, philosophy and theology. Matthew Steem and Joy Steem are passionate about exploring the intellectual, imaginative and emotional vibrancy at the heart of the Christian tradition. Their essays, both academic and popular, can be found in Mythlore, The Chesterton Review, Christianity Today Women, Fathom Magazine, Clarion Journal, Relief Journal, and elsewhere. T. S. Wilson lives in a communal setting on a hobby farm with his two daughters and a variety of farm animals. He studied political philosophy at the University of the Fraser Valley, and over the next few years intends on continuing his education at the postgraduate level.

Subject and Author Index A Abraham, 116–17 Academic freedom, 52–53 Action, 158–59, 170 Adam and Eve, 33, 82, 99–100, 109, 111 Alexander, Scott, 58 Ancient narrative, 102 Andersen, Hans Christian, 75 Archetype, 93–95, 112, 120 Art, 13 Atheism, 12 Atwood, Margaret, 72 Auden, W. H., 135 Augustine, 98 Autonomy, 134 B Barbour, Ian G., 150 Barron, Robert, 1 Being, 63, 73, 86, 95, 180, 198 Berlin, Isaiah, 61 Berlinski, David, 132 Bible exegesis, 2–3, 82–83, 96–100, 103–5, 124 significance, 122 Bill C-16, 1, 7, 41–42, 50, 167, 173 Birmingham, Kevin, 52 Bly, Robert, 72 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 8 Brooke, John Hedley, 153

Buddhism, 80–81 Burke, Edmund, 45 C Cain and Abel, 34, 111–113 Campbell, Joseph, 72 Canticle for Leibowitz, 126 Character, 75 Chesterton, G. K., 139, 202 Christian humanism, 130, 146 Class oppression, 34 Climacus, Johannes, 172 Cohen, Leonard, 71 Compelled speech, 1, 49 Competence in social organization, 43 Comte, August, 152 Consciousness, 33, 107–11, 170 Conservatism, 2 Courage, 118 Cowen, Tyler, 171 Creativity, 91 Crites, Stephen, 175 Cultural deficit, 122 D Darwin, Charles, 130 Darwinism, 130, 136, 140–41, 154–55 Davies, Robert, 72 Del Noce, Augusto, 13 Derrida, Jacques, 12 Descartes, René, 91 Dickson, Andrew, 152 Dionysus and Apollo, 91–92 Discourse, 50, 57 Divine immanence, 179 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 127, 170

Draper, William, 152 Drucker, Peter, 32 E Eliot, George, 72 Emancipation, 14 Enlightenment, 89–90 Erasmus, Desiderius, 75 Eroticism, 14 Evil, 46–47, 110–11, 188–89, 191, 193, 199 F Frankl, Viktor, 143 Free speech, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 63–64, 67–68, 107 Freud, Sigmund, 93 Frozen, 79 Frye, Northrop, 72 G Galileo, 154–55 Gender, 49 God, 108, 142–43, 171 Goethe, Johann, 193 Gooch, Niall, 51, 54 Grant, George, 71, 74 Gregory of Nyssa, 99 H Haidt, Jonathan, 167 Harrison, Peter, 153, 155 Hart, David Bentley, 168 Haskell, David, 166 Hauerwas, Stanley, 137 Hermeneutics, 80, 124 Hesse, Hermann, 75 Human sanctity, 118, 128–29, 133–34, 138, 142 Humility, 194

I Identity, 36, 44 Individualism, 180, 203 Isbell, Lynn, 99 J Jesus Christ, 110, 120–21, 144, 146 Jung, Carl, 72, 93–94, 143, 144, 145 Juran, Joseph, 36 K Kampourakis, Kostas, 154 Kant, Immanuel, 94 Kierkegaard, Søren aesthetic stage, 175 ethical stage, 176 existential stages, 174 humor, 178 irony, 176 religious stage, 178 Koontz, Dean, 30 Krauthammer, Charles, 134, 136 L Lewis, C. S., 72, 81, 134 Liberalism, 2, 73, 85–86, 90 M Marcuse, Herbert, 59 Marxism, 31–32, 34–37, 39, 43 cultural, 166, 173 McDurmon, Joel, 145 Media, 65, 66 Memoricide, 74, 79, 83–84 Miller, Walter, 126 Modernity, 16, 38 Murray, Douglas, 138–39

Myth, 20, 71–73, 79, 80–82, 130–32, 136, 154–55, 159, 163–64, 196 N National socialism, 31 Neo-Marxism, 32, 38, 43, 45, 55–56, 58 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 46 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 82, 86, 91, 94, 97, 105 Nihilism, 122, 130, 140 Noah, 113 Nominalism, 88 Numbers, Ronald, 154 O Order and chaos, 10, 17, 18, 22, 73, 106, 129 Original sin, 190 P Pageau, Jonathan, 171 Pareto principle, 36–37, 42 Pareto, Vilfredo, 36 Pathfinding, 74 Peacocke, Arthur, 150 Peter Pan, 75, 76 Pieper, Josef, 198 Pinocchio, 76–78 Plato, 86–88, 90 Polkinghorne, John, 150 Pope, Alexander, 142 Postmodernity, 38–39, 41, 45, 55–56, 58 Power, 39 Provocative speech, 58, 68 Psychology, 9, 85, 125, 128 Purpose, 131 R Rachels, James, 137 Redemption, 195

Relativism, 103 Religion and science, 150–56, 161 conflict myth, 152, 156 Repression, 37 Resentment, 115, 118, 193–95 Responsibility, 199–200 Rieff, Philip, 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99 S Sacred order, 9–12 Sacrifice, 112–13, 119, 120 Schaeffer, Francis, 131 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 92 Schumpeter, Joseph, 45 Scientific rationalism, 13–14, 103, 125, 136, 140, 159, 160 Secularization, 8, 13, 16–17, 152 Sex, 14, 44 Shakespeare, 194 Shapiro, Ben, 170 Singer, Peter, 137 Smith, Steven, 57 Snow, C. P., 71 Social decay, 11, 14, 33, 43, 115 Social justice, 36, 42 Social oppression, 32 Social order, 10, 23, 28 Sodom and Gomorrah, 117 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 20, 188, 191 Speciesism, 137–38 Spinoza, Baruch, 89 Steiner, George, 11 Suffering, 33–35, 113, 121, 185, 188, 192, 196–97 T Taylor, Charles, 15, 74, 86

Taylor, Mark, 175 Theology, 12, 15 Therapy, 172–74, 180 Tolkien, J. R. R., 72, 98 Tolstoy, Leo, 75 Totalitarianism, 14, 20–21, 30, 47, 60, 62–63 Tragedy, 114 Transcendence, 15–18 Truth, 16, 20–21, 61–63, 75, 82, 115, 173, 181–83 V Victimhood, 59–60 Vulnerability, 34 W Wallace, Alfred, 140 Worship, 163

Notes Introduction 1 Robert Barron, “The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon,” Word on Fire, February 27, 2018, https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/the-jordan-peterson-phenomenon/5717. Peterson and Barron have since talked on Peterson’s podcast; see https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/s2-e14-bishop-barron-catholicism-and-themodern-age/. 2 Jordan B Peterson, “Political Correctness: A Force for Good? A Munk Debate,” YouTube video, 2:04:25, May 20, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ST6kj9OEYf0. 3 Bernard Schiff, “I Was Once Jordan Peterson’s Strongest Supporter. Now I Think He’s Dangerous,” Toronto Star, May 25, 2018, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongestsupporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html. 4 CBC News, “Is Jordan Peterson Dangerous?,” YouTube video, 7:19, June 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf303jRvJ9o.

1. Jordan Peterson and the Chaos of Our Secular Age (Bruce Riley Ashford) 1 Tim Lott, “Jordan Peterson and the transgender wars,” The Spectator, September 20, 2017, https://life.spectator.co.uk/articles/jordan-peterson-and-the-transgender-wars. 2 Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018); Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (London: Routledge, 1999). 3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. De Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al., Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 450. 4 Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, ed. Kenneth S. Piver, Sacred Order/Social Order 1 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); Rieff, The Crisis of the Officer Class: The Decline of the Tragic Sensibility, ed. Alan Woolfolk, Sacred Order/Social Order 2; Rieff, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity, ed. Arnold M. Eisen and Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Sacred Order/Social Order 3 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). 5 Rieff, Deathworks, 7. 6 Rieff, Deathworks, 45.

7 Rieff, Crisis, 17–18. 8 Rieff, Deathworks, 58. 9 Rieff, Crisis, 6. 10 Rieff, Jew of Culture, 80–81. 11 George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 132. 12 Steiner, Real Presences, 120. 13 Steiner, Real Presences, 214, 229. 14 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 278. 15 Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 338. 16 For a concise summary of Del Noce’s framework of thought, see Bjørn Thomassen and Rosario Forlenza, “Christianity and Political Thought: Augusto Del Noce and the Ideology of Christian Democracy in Post-war Italy,” Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 2 (2016): 181–99. Also, see Carlo Lancellotti, “Augusto Del Noce on the New Totalitarianism,” Communio 44, no. 2 (2017): 323–33. 17 Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, ed. and trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 151–56. 18 Del Noce, Crisis of Modernity, 157–86. 19 Del Noce, Crisis of Modernity, 87–91, 189–246. 20 Augusto Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, ed. and trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 43–44. 21 Del Noce, Age of Secularization, 19–34. 22 Del Noce, Age of Secularization, 232; Del Noce, Crisis of Modernity, 245. Del Noce’s insight here is reminiscent of Neil Postman’s argument that it was not George Orwell’s vision of overt totalitarianism in 1984 that should frighten us most. Instead, Aldous Huxley’s covert totalitarianism in Brave New World is most pernicious, since it makes people so love their chains that they are unlikely to try to cast them off. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), vii. 23 Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, 233–35. 24 Charles Taylor, Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991); Taylor, A

Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 25 Taylor, A Secular Age, 83. 26 Bruce Riley Ashford, “Tayloring Christian Politics in Our Secular Age,” Themelios 42, no. 3 (2017): 447. 27 Taylor, A Secular Age, 595. 28 Steiner, Real Presences, 214, 229. 29 Even in 2011, before his rise to widespread popularity, Peterson was urging the public to bring order to chaos. Consider, for example, the TEDx Talk he delivered at the University of Toronto that year. In it, he argued that the good of humanity is order wrought from chaos. The very reason societies have norms is because they need order. Human freedom is not an absolute good, and it is not the highest good. It must be exercised within, and constrained by, a normative framework of rights and wrongs. TedX Talks, “TedXToronto—Dr. Jordan B. Peterson—Redefining Reality,” YouTube video, 10:47, November 14, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOgSqHtTtHY. 30 Peterson, 12 Rules, 63–64. 31 Peterson, 12 Rules, 163. For readers interested in a long-form lecture by Peterson on this topic, the following video is exemplary: How To Academy, “Jordan B. Peterson on 12 Rules for Life,” YouTube video, 1:30:32, January 16, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5RCmu-HuTg. 32 Peterson, 12 Rules, 215. 33 Peterson, 12 Rules, 215. 34 Peterson, 12 Rules, 218. 35 Peterson, 12 Rules, 310–11. 36 Peterson, 12 Rules, xxxiii. 37 Peterson, 12 Rules, 27. 38 Peterson, 12 Rules, 99. 39 Peterson, 12 Rules, 278. 40 Peterson, 12 Rules, 157–59. 41 Peterson, 12 Rules, 104. 42 Peterson, 12 Rules, 106.

43 Consider this brief clip of Peterson speaking about how the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom: Bite-Sized Philosophy, “Jordan Peterson—The Fear of God Is the Beginning of Wisdom,” YouTube video, 4:39, October 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_gG8_z9wVo. 44 Peterson, 12 Rules, 45–64. 45 Peterson, 12 Rules, 184. 46 Peterson, 12 Rules, 27. 47 Peterson, 12 Rules, 102. 48 Consider this clip from an interview in the Netherlands in which Peterson becomes emotionally moved as he talks about audience testimonies. It is not at all uncommon for Peterson to be emotional during question-and-answer sessions with persons who are suffering or when he is describing the suffering of other people: Irishfiddle101, “The Individual,” YouTube video, 5:09, November 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=6VBeGixIFy8&. 49 Consider the following examples: Alastair Roberts, interview with John Piper, “What Can We Learn from the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon?,” Ask Pastor John (podcast), Desiring God, August 13, 2018, https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/what-can-welearn-from-the-jordan-peterson-phenomenon; Amanda Gleaves, “Is Dr. Jordan Peterson a Post-modern Messiah?,” Medium, October 14, 2018, https://medium.com/@amandalouisegleaves/is-dr-jordan-peterson-a-post-modernmessiah-1f703631af0b; Matthew Schmitz, “Jordan Peterson, Unlikely Guru,” First Things, April 2018, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/04/jordanpetersonunlikely-guru; https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/01/30/jordanpeterson-is-aprophet-and-a-problem-for-progressives/; Anne Hendershott, “Jordan Peterson Is a Prophet—and a Problem for Progressives,” Catholic World Report, January 30, 2018, Tara Isabella Burton, “The Religious Hunger That Drives Jordan Peterson’s Fandom,” Vox, June 1, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/1/17396182/jordan-peterson-alt-rightreligion-catholicism. 50 James Park, “Jordan Peterson Liberty University Incident,” YouTube video, 1:27, Mar 31, 2019, https://youtu.be/oCVck7bIbBI. 51 Esther O’Reilly, “Jordan Peterson, and the New Chivalry,” Quillette, April 12, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/04/12/jordan-peterson-and-the-new-chivalry/.

2. Jordan Peterson the Counter-Revolutionary: Marxism, Postmodern NeoMarxism, and Suffering (Hunter Baker) 1 Dean Koontz, The Silent Corner (New York: Bantam, 2017), 221.

2 Philosophyinsights, “Jordan Peterson: Why Is Marxism So Attractive?,” YouTube video, 4:20, November 1, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h_mMVwQnAk. 3 Jordan B Peterson, “Postmodern NeoMarxism: Diagnosis and Cure,” YouTube video, 33:19, July 9, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4c-jOdPTN8&t=3s. 4 Peterson, “Postmodern NeoMarxism.” 5 Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995). 6 The now semi-infamous phrase came into common currency in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 7 Jordan B Peterson, “Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege,” YouTube video, 2:31:42, November 13, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=PfH8IG7Awk0. 8 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 9 Davie Addison, “Jordan Peterson Addresses Socialist Intellectuals,” YouTube video, 11:44, April 13, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXgZAdaMtS8&t=2s. 10 Addison, “Socialist Intellectuals.” 11 Ruminate, “Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism | Jordan B Peterson,” YouTube video, 43:46, July 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoG9zBvvLQ&t=3s. 12 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 13 Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1906). 14 J. M. Juran, Managerial Breakthrough (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 15 Philosophyinsights, “Why Is Marxism So Attractive?” 16 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 17 Peterson, “Postmodern NeoMarxism.” 18 Regrettably, this Onion classic from 2004 appears to have disappeared from the internet. 19 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 82. 20 Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (New York: Gold Medal Books, 1954). 21 Commentary on morality in rats and chimps comes from Peterson, “Identity Politics.” His discussion of lobsters is found in Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote

to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), 1–2. 22 Peterson, “Postmodern NeoMarxism.” 23 Peterson, “Postmodern NeoMarxism.” 24 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 25 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 26 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 27 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 28 Peterson, “Identity Politics.” 29 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 143–55. 30 Peterson, “Postmodern NeoMarxism.” 31 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 17. 32 Peterson, “Identity Politics.”

3. Language and Freedom: Peterson as Champion of Free Speech (and Freedom from Compelled Speech) (Alastair Roberts) 1 Jordan B Peterson, “2017/05/17: Senate hearing on Bill C16,” YouTube video, 1:00:08, May 18, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo. 2 Tamara Khandaker, “No, the Trans Rights Bill Doesn’t Criminalize Free Speech,” Vice, October 24, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/qbnamx/no-the-trans-rights-billdoesnt-criminalize-free-speech. 3 Tom Yun, “U of T letter Asks Jordan Peterson to Respect Pronouns, Stop Making Statements,” The Varsity, October 25, 2016, https://thevarsity.ca/2016/10/24/u-of-tletter-asks-jordan-peterson-to-respect-pronouns-stop-making-statements/; Wesley Yang, “The Passion of Jordan Peterson,” Esquire, May 1, 2018, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a19834137/jordan-peterson-interview/. 4 Yang, “The Passion of Jordan Peterson.” 5 Mack Lamoureux, “Wilfrid Laurier Exonerates Lindsay Shepherd, We Can All Move On Now,” Vice, December 19, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/yw5dbg/wilfrid-laurier-exonerates-lindsayshepherd-we-can-all-move-on-now.

6 Sarah Berman, “Lindsay Shepherd Is Suing Laurier for $3.6 Million Over Jordan Peterson Video Controversy,” Vice, June 13, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/zm88yw/jordan-peterson-video-controversy-landslaurier-dollar36-million-lawsuit. 7 Mack Lamoureux, “Free Speech Hero Jordan Peterson Launches Another Defamation Lawsuit,” Vice, September 12, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/pa8dyy/freespeech-hero-jordan-peterson-launches-another-defamation-lawsuit. 8 Niall Gooch, “Dying For the Right to Say It: What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Free Speech?,” Niall’s Writing Blog, May 28, 2017, https://niallthinksandwrites.blogspot.com/2017/05/dying-for-right-to-say-it-what-dowe.html. 9 Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia, “A Conversation between Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Dr. Camille Paglia,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/docs/Transcripts/Peterson-Paglia.pdf. 10 Kevin Birmingham, “The Great Shame of Our Profession,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-ofOur/239148. 11 Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin, 2018), 197–99. 12 While it has been less successful in the political arena, the Left now dominates academia, the arts, the media, and entertainment, and their respective institutions. 13 Gooch, “Dying for the Right to Say It.” 14 For more on this, see Hunter Baker’s chapter in this volume. 15 Jordan Peterson, “Postmodernism: Definition and Critique (with a Few Comments on Its Relationship with Marxism),” jordanbpeterson.com, May 25, 2018, https://jordanbpeterson.com/philosophy/postmodernism-definition-and-critique-with-afew-comments-on-its-relationship-with-marxism/. 16 Kto kogo? can be translated as “who, whom?” In other words, which of two or more competing parties will gain an advantage through a particular measure? 17 Camille L. Ryan and Kurt Bauman, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015 —Population Characteristics: Current Population Report,” census.gov, March 2016, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20578.pdf.

18 Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 211ff. 19 Smith, Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, 224. 20 Scott Alexander, “Sacred Principles as Exhaustible Resources,” Slate Star Codex, April 11, 2017, http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/11/sacred-principles-as-exhaustibleresources/. 21 Alexander, “Sacred Principles.” 22 Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1969). 23 Wolff, Moore, and Marcuse, Critique of Pure Tolerance, 109. 24 Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” Comparative Sociology 13, no. 6 (2014): 692–726; Campbell and Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggression, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 25 Bite-Sized Philosophy, “Jordan Peterson—The Rise of a Female Totalitarianism?,” YouTube video, 4:18, March 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Xw1lthwHn9U. 26 Scott Barry Kaufman, “The Personality of Political Correctness,” Beautiful Minds (blog), Scientific American, November 20, 2016, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-personality-of-politicalcorrectness/. 27 See also Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). 28 In some of his most controversial statements to date, Peterson has discussed the limited tactics that men can resort to when in conflict with women (Peterson and Paglia, “A Conversation”). See the work of figures such as Deborah Tannen for discussion of typical differences between male and female cultures of discourse. 29 Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (London: Allen Lane, 2018). 30 Peterson, 12 Rules, 218 (emphasis original). 31 Jordan B Peterson, “On the Vital Necessity of Free Speech (Are You Listening, Saudis?),” YouTube video, 30:51, August 20, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=EuNeqawPuuY.

32 Jordan B Peterson, “Patreon Account Deletion,” YouTube video, January 15, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrZDcEix7uk. 33 Jordan B Peterson, “Patreon Account Deletion,” YouTube video, 4:16, January 1, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp9ZJiFFBnU. 34 Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” New York Times, May 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html.

4. Myth, Memoricide, and Jordan Peterson (Ron Dart) 1 University of Toronto, “The Bible and English Literature by Northrop Frye—Full Lectures,” https://heritage.utoronto.ca/frye/full-lectures. When he was alive, I was fortunate to correspond with Frye on some of these themes. 2 Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998); George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991), 135–43. 3 See, for example, Bite-Sized Philosophy, “Jordan Peterson—The Tragic Story of the Man-Child,” YouTube video, 7:46, July 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JjfClL6nogo. 4 See, for example, Jordan B Peterson, “2017 Maps of Meaning 02: Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1),” YouTube video, 2:23:33, January 25, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN2lyN7rM4E; Peterson, “2017 Maps of Meaning 03: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2),” YouTube video, 2:26:55, January 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us979jCjHu8; Peterson, “2017 Maps of Meaning 04: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 3),” YouTube video, 2:12:26, February 8, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV16NEWld8Q. 5 See, for example, Jordan B Peterson, “2017 Maps of Meaning 10: Genesis and the Buddha,” YouTube video, 2:18:44, April 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=7XtEZvLo-Sc. 6 C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 58.

5. Archetypes, Symbols, and Allegorical Exegesis: Jordan Peterson’s Turn to the Bible in Context (T. S. Wilson) 1 Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991), 3. 2 Jordan Peterson, The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories, May 16– December 5, 2017, https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/bible-series/.

3 Plato, Meno and Protagoras, trans. Adam Beresford, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin, 2006), 110–12. 4 Plato, Meno 80d. 5 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 92. 6 Spinoza, Ethics, 92. 7 “As it regards the difference between a true and false idea, it is clear from pr. 35, II that the former is to the latter as being is to non-being” (Spinoza, Ethics, 92). 8 Spinoza, Ethics, 222. 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 2000), 35. 10 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 45. 11 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 49. 12 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 46. 13 C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3. 14 Jung, Four Archetypes, 4. 15 Jung, Four Archetypes, 13. 16 Immanuel Kant, Critique Of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 188. 17 Jung, Four Archetypes, 10. 18 Jung, Four Archetypes, 10. 19 Jung, Four Archetypes, 12. 20 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-i. 21 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblicalseries-v. 22 Peterson, “Biblical Series V.” 23 Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (London: William

and Heinemann, 1912), 266. 24 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-iv. 25 Peterson, “Biblical Series IV.” 26 Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9.575a. 27 Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer, in The Lord’s Prayer, The Beatitudes, trans. Hilda Graff, Ancient Christian Writers 18 (New York: Paulist Press, 1954), 65. 28 Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer, 65. 29 Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer, 23.

6. Jordan Peterson’s Genesis Lectures: Interpreting the Bible between Rationalism and Nihilism (Laurence Brown) 1 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the idea of God Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-i/. 2 Peterson, “Biblical Series I.” 3 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-ii. 4 Peterson, “Biblical Series II.” 5 Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (London: Routledge, 1999; PDF version with figures, 2002), 168. 6 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblicalseries-iii. 7 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-iv. 8 Peterson, “Biblical Series IV.” 9 Peterson, “Biblical Series IV.” 10 Peterson, “Biblical Series IV.”

11 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 244–46. 12 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblicalseries-v. 13 Peterson, “Biblical Series V.” 14 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series VI: The Psychology of the Flood Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-vi. 15 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series VII: Walking with God: Noah and the Flood Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblicalseries-vii. 16 Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), 156–59. 17 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series VIII: The Phenomenology of the Divine Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblicalseries-viii/. 18 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series IX: The Call to Abraham Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-ix. 19 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 197. 20 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series XI: Sodom and Gomorrah Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-xi. 21 Peterson, “Biblical Series XI.” 22 Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series XII: The Great Sacrifice: Abraham and Isaac Transcript,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblicalseries-xii. 23 Peterson, “Biblical Series I.” 24 Jordan B. Peterson, “On the Ark of the Covenant, the Cathedral, and the Cross: Easter Message 1,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/philosophy/on-the-arkof-the-covenant-the-cathedral-and-the-cross-easter-message-i. 25 Peterson, “Biblical Series XI.” 26 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 13. 27 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 15.

7. The Image of Christ: Jordan Peterson as Humanist (Esther O’Reilly) 1 Walter E. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (New York: Bantam, 1997), 129. 2 See, for example, this clip from a classroom lecture: “If you listen to people, they will tell you the weirdest bloody things, so fast you just cannot believe it. So if you’re having a conversation with someone, and it’s dull, it’s because you’re stupid. That’s why.” Bite-Sized Philosophy, “Jordan Peterson, How to REALLY Listen to Someone,” YouTube video, 10:00, January 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=J24TGZDk960. 3 Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), 284–85. 4 Room for Discussion, “Jordan Peterson at Room for Discussion,” YouTube video, 1:27:12, November 7, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-PQbFfQKVs&, 1:02:45–1:06:00. 5 Jordan Peterson, “Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order,” jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-ii/. 6 Jordan B Peterson, “Responsibility, Conscience and Meaning,” YouTube video, 1:38:16, January 7, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10QsBmawqxg&, 54:00–55:45. 7 Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 300. 8 Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999; repr., London: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 481. 9 See, e.g., Francis Schaeffer, Escape From Reason (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1968), chap. 4. 10 Jordan B Peterson, “Swedes Want to Know: Take 2: Ivar Arpi Interviews Me Again,” YouTube video, 1:19:53, March 9, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=B74WowudoFg&, 1:03:30–1:05:00. 11 David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 179. 12 Toothandsticks, “Jordan Peterson 12 Rules Live in Indianapolis (06-15-2018),” YouTube video, 2:35:02, June 16, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=5hNfvbpNXEA, 1:21:31–1:27:14. 13 Charles Krauthammer, “The Dutch Example,” Washington Post, January 10, 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1997/01/10/the-dutchexample/71fb58d5-58d4-4a76-855b-3f46ed922b45.

14 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 97–98. 15 From Jordan B Peterson, “Responsibility, Conscience and Meaning,” YouTube video, 1:38:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10QsBmawqxg&, 1:24:20–1:24:40. 16 W. H. Auden, “Precious Five,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991). 17 This exchange was obtained in an interview with the boy and preserved in screenshots by the conservative outlet Chicks On the Right, in a report titled “An Extraordinary Thing Happened at Jordan Peterson’s Indianapolis Performance.” The young man had one more exchange with Peterson on Twitter, where he said he was considering checking himself into a hospital per Peterson’s advice. Peterson responded to say he was thrilled. In the following months, I reached out to him myself. Sadly, he would change his mind and attempt suicide that fall. The attempt was unsuccessful, and he finally sought the diagnosis and medication that he needed. As I write, he is diagnosed bipolar, but still with us and looking forward to a new year. 18 James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3. 19 Rachels, Created from Animals, 1. 20 Peter Singer, “The Sanctity of Life,” Foreign Policy, October 20, 2009, https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-sanctity-of-life. 21 Stanley Hauerwas, with Peter Mommsen, “Why Community Is Dangerous: An Interview,” Plough Quarterly: All Things in Common?, Summer 2016, https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/church-community/why-community-isdangerous. 22 Douglas Murray, “The Alarming Return of the IQ Debate,” UnHerd, July 30, 2018, https://unherd.com/2018/07/the-alarming-return-of-the-iq-debate/. 23 See Douglas Murray, “Grim Reaper, M.D.,” National Review, April 25, 2016, https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/04/euthanasia-belgium-netherlands-slipperyslope/; Murray, “A Licence to Kill—The Slippery Slope of ‘Assisted Dying,’ ” The Spectator, August 29, 2015, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/08/the-atheist-caseagainst-assisted-dying/; and Murray, “Where the Euthanasia Argument Leads,” National Review, August 16, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/aurelia-brouwerseuthanasia-argument-leads/. 24 Douglas Murray, “Would Human Life Be Sacred in an Atheist World?” The Spectator, April 9, 2014, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/04/ethics-for-atheists/. 25 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945), 32.

26 See, e.g., Chris Knight’s “Puzzles and Mysteries in the Origin of Language” Language and Communication 50 (September 2016): 12–21, where he concludes from the work of Chomsky, Zahavi, and Sperber that “no currently accepted theoretical paradigm” can explain language. 27 Alfred Wallace, “Sir Charles Lyell on Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,” Quarterly Review 126 (April 1869): 359–94. 28 See, e.g., Pangburn, “Jordan Peterson vs Matt Dillahunty (CC: Arabic & Spanish),” YouTube video, 1:43:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmH7JUeVQb8&, 27:30– 29:40. 29 See, e.g., Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005). 30 Indeed, self-proclaimed Christian ethicist Robert V. Rakestraw argued in his 1992 article “The Persistent Vegetative State and the Withdrawal of Nutrition and Hydration” that persons in a “persistent vegetative state” have lost the imago Dei, therefore their food and water can be morally removed (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 35, no. 3 [1992]: 388–405). He justifies himself by saying (in a footnote) that “many” people in ethics, philosophy, and theology would agree with him. Similarly, Christian ethicist Robert Wennberg argued in his book Terminal Choices (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) that the “human biological organism” loses its “significance” when it can no longer “sustain personal consciousness” (159–60). By similar reasoning, he argues that a developing fetus only gains significance once it gains consciousness. 31 Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man,” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2428/2428-h/2428h.htm. 32 See, e.g., his second Genesis lecture, “Genesis 1: Chaos & Order.” 33 Peterson, “Swedes Want to Know,” 1:00:50–1:01:20. 34 Carl Jung, letter to Elined Kotschnig, in C. G. Jung Letters, ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 2:316. 35 Jung, Letters, letter to Morton T. Kelsey, 2:435–36. 36 Pangburn, “Jordan Peterson vs Matt Dillahunty,” 1:05:00–1:08:00. 37 Carl Jung, Answer to Job, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 11:470. 38 Jung, Answer to Job, 417. 39 Jordan Peterson and Transliminal Media, “Ideology, Logos & Belief,”

jordanbpeterson.com, https://jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/transliminal. 40 Peterson and Transliminal Media, “Ideology, Logos & Belief.” 41 See, e.g., his second interview with Ivar Arpi, “Swedes Want to Know,” 1:05:00– 1:06:40. 42 Carl Jung, The Red Book, ed. Shonu Shamdasani, trans. Mark Kyburz (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 252. 43 Joel McDurmon, “Is Jordan Peterson Our New Aryan Christ?” American Vision, February 8, 2018, https://americanvision.org/15591/jordan-peterson-new-aryan-christ. 44 One account can be heard in his dialogue with William Lane Craig and Rebecca Goldstein, Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto, “Is There Meaning to Life?,” YouTube video, 2:07:30, January 26, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pDDQOCXBrAw&, 1:33:32–1:37:50. 45 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 461–62. 46 Jonathan Pageau, “Q & A with Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein & Jonathan Pageau | SFL Regional Conference, Vancouver,” YouTube video, 1:23:05, November 9, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cLLFSdKZLI&, 41:16–45:57. 47 School of Peterson, “Jordan Peterson | In-Depth Talk on ‘12 Rules for Life’ (FULL) ~ Beacon Theatre (2018),” YouTube video, 2:00:58, April 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs4ZWhfxQuw, 53:30–59:00.

8. Professor Peterson, Professor Peterson: What Is Your View on … Science and Religion? (Esgrid Sikahall) 1 See Robert John Russell, ed., Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and His Legacy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 2 This is not to say that discussions about science and religion as we think of them now did not exist prior to them (e.g., the works of Sir Arthur Eddington, C. A. Coulson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Duhem, Mary B. Hesse). 3 Of course, I cannot list even the most important contributors, but the following come to mind: Willem B. Drees (former editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science and professor of philosophy of the humanities, Tilburg University), Elaine Howard Ecklund (Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and professor of sociology at Rice University), Alister McGrath (Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford), Robert John Russell (Ian G. Barbour Professor of Theology and Science at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley), Paul Davies (Regents’ Professor,

Arizona State University), Philip Hefner (emeritus professor of systematic theology, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago), Keith Ward (Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus, University of Oxford), Michael Ruse (professor and director of the History of Philosophy of Science Program, Florida State University), and Nancey Murphy (senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary). Among the historians, I could name Peter Harrison (director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland), John Hedley Brooke (former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford), Ronald L. Numbers (Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Jon H. Roberts (Tomorrow Foundation Professor of American Intellectual History, Boston University), and David C. Lindberg (Hilldale Professor of the History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison). This is but a glimpse of the caliber of scholars that have contributed significantly to the science and religion field. 4 The title to this section echoes Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley, eds., The Warfare Between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). 5 Even in the development of Greek thought, the “from myth to reason” narrative is not unchallenged: see Richard Buxton, ed., From Myth To Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6 See Jon H. Roberts, “ ‘The Idea That Wouldn’t Die’: The Warfare between Science and Christianity,” Historically Speaking 4, no. 3 (2003): 21–24. 7 See Elain Howard Ecklund’s Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 9, and her volume coauthored with Christopher P. Schietle, Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chap. 8. The volume edited by Jeff Hardin et al., The Warfare Between Science & Religion mentioned in note 4 includes chapters on what the conflict thesis meant to different religious communities (e.g., Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews) and what it means for scientists today. 8 John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 476. 9 Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 194–95. 10 Lesley B. Cormack, “That Medieval Christians Taught That the Earth Was Flat,” in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 34. 11 Maurice A. Finocchiaro, “That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating

Copernicanism,” in Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 78. 12 See Jon H. Roberts, “That Darwin Destroyed Natural Theology,” in Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 161–69. “Darwin’s theory was clearly instrumental in convincing natural theologians that they would be well advised to alter the kind of arguments that they employed in drawing inferences from nature to nature’s God. It seems to have played a negligible role, however, in accounting for the shifting status of natural theology itself” (168–69). 13 John Hedley Brooke, “That Modern Science Has Secularized Western Culture” in Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 224–32. 14 Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, eds., Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 15 Peter Harrison, “That Religion Has Typically Impeded the Progress of Science,” in Numbers and Kampourakis, Newton’s Apple, 195. 16 Harrison, “That Religion Has Typically Impeded,” 197. 17 Harrison, “That Religion Has Typically Impeded,” 197. 18 Harrison, “That Religion Has Typically Impeded,” 201. 19 Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (London: Routledge, 1999), 1. 20 The Mill Series, “Jordan Peterson @ Lafayette, A Conversation and Q&A, Full Event,” YouTube video, 2:47:35, April 10, 2018, https://youtu.be/qT_YSPxxFJk, 1:50:15– 1:54:33. 21 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 2. 22 Jordan B Peterson, “What Matters,” YouTube video, 12:59, March 30, 2013, https://youtu.be/A5216ZJVbVs, 0.00–0.33. Peterson says, “I’m not an atheist anymore, because I don’t look at the world that way anymore. I’m not a materialist anymore. I don’t think the world is made out of matter; I think it is made out of what matters. It is made out of meaning.… What we orient towards unconsciously, which means what captures our attention, is meaning, and it captures our attention before we know what it is. The brain acts as if the world is made out of information or made out of meaning.” 23 Jordan B Peterson, “March 2019 Q and A,” YouTube video, 1:41:08, March 18, 2019, https://youtu.be/CfQZcpaBqo4, 55:34–1:07:01. 24 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 3. 25 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 3.

26 As David Foster Wallace eloquently argued in “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” New York Times, August 20, 2006, https://nyti.ms/2k1lxH6. 27 This is why the debates between creationists, intelligent design proponents (different from the creationists), and fully committed neo-Darwinians can be conceptualized as religious debates about science. It is not that their content is religious but that the motivations are about ultimate objects of worship.

9. A Kierkegaardian Reading of Jordan Peterson (Stephen M. Dunning) 1 David Millard Haskell, “David Millard Haskell: Fight against Modern Cultural Marxists Evokes Martin Luther’s ‘95 Theses,’ ” The Province, October 28, 2017, https://theprovince.com/opinion/op-ed/david-millard-haskell-fight-against-moderncultural-marxists-evokes-martin-luthers-95-theses. 2 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012). 3 Deep Talks: Exploring Theology and Meaning-Making, “The Theology of Jordan Peterson (Part 3-Kierkegaard vs Peterson),” YouTube video, 23:23, July 23, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLgWmavO9QU. 4 David Gornoski, “David Bentley Hart, David Gornoski on the Politics of Jesus, Socialism, Property Ethics,” YouTube video, 1:35:40, July 26, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6kXKgddZYM. 5 The Rubin Report, “Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro: Religion, Trans Activism, and Censorship,” YouTube video, 2:01:05, November 30, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1opHWsHr798. 6 Peterson also cites the Grand Inquisitor scene in chapter 7 of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018), and in Jordan B Peterson, “2017 Personality 11: Existentialism: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky & Kierkegaard,” YouTube video, 1:34:31, February 21, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qZ3EsrKPsc. 7 Peterson, “2017 Personality 11.” 8 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 178. 9 For a compelling account of how Peterson was responsible for the recovery of a young man’s Christian faith, see The Rational Rise, “Jordan Peterson Is a Gateway Drug to Christianity,” YouTube video, 1:13:45, October 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oll2hmdLNnY. 10 Indeed, I may have come by this metaphor after hearing it in one of Pageau’s and

Peterson’s videos. I simply cannot remember. 11 Jonathan Pageau, “JP in the Narthex,” email to the author, July 20, 2018. 12 David Brooks, “The Jordan Peterson Moment,” New York Times, January 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html. 13 I take it as hopeful that Hart, in the same interview in which he dismissed Peterson’s significance, also admitted that he “may have missed something.” 14 See Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 35, where the narrator identifies himself as a physician. Given that souls are identified with, and, in some traditions, inform the body, and given that, as W. H. Auden once said, “A planetary visitor could read through the whole of [Kierkegaard’s] voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood,” it is perhaps more accurate to describe Kierkegaard as a physician of the spirit or consciousness. 15 Alexander Pärleros, “Jordan Peterson on the Differences between Men and Women— Full Interview in Framgångspodden,” YouTube video, 35:55, November 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-of0LhNNijA. 16 Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of the Stages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 181. See also Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 281; and Josiah Thompson, “The Master of Irony,” in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Josiah Thompson (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 155. Concluding Unscientific Postscript invites this perspective both because of its comprehensive and systematic nature, and because Kierkegaard assumed responsibility for its publication. 17 Reidar Thomte, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 102. 18 Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 128. 19 Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 130. See also Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 51. 20 Stephen Crites, “Pseudonymous Authorship as Art and Act,” in Thompson, Critical Essays, 212–13. 21 Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 182. 22 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 448.

23 Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 177. 24 Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 188. 25 Mackey, Kierkegaard, 52. 26 Mackey, Kierkegaard, 52–53. See also Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 122–26, for a more sophisticated treatment of the relationship between the self’s temporality and choice. 27 Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 2:182. 28 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 230–31. 29 Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 232. 30 Mackey, Kierkegaard, 61. 31 Mackey, Kierkegaard, 88. 32 Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. Edward V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 202. 33 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 155. 34 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Walter Lowrie, revised Howard A. Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 2:339–56. 35 See Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic, 202; and Taylor, Pseudonymous Authorship, 253–54. 36 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 506. 37 To be fair to Peterson, that he identifies Milton’s Satan as “the spirit of reason” in 12 Rules—reason that loves itself and takes offense when it runs into the “Highest and Incomprehensible” and thus brings about hell—indicates that he shares some of Kierkegaard’s insights into the limits of reason when approaching absolute things. See Peterson, 12 Rules, 218. 38 Søren Kierkegaard, “On the Dedication to ‘That Single Individual,’ ” trans. Charles K. Belanger, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/kierkegaard/untruth/files/untruth.html#Kierkegaard. 39 See Peterson, 12 Rules, chap. 8, “Tell the Truth,” where he uses the terms “God,” “Being,” and “Reality” interchangeably. 40 Peterson, 12 Rules, 225. 41 See Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 54.

42 Peterson, 12 Rules, 269–82. 43 Peterson, 12 Rules, 276. 44 Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 118–19. 45 Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 118. 46 Though it is clear that some kind of dialectical process is driving Peterson’s analysis, he does not appear to recognize what Kierkegaard describes as the paradoxical nature of despair: the fact that despair must increase to be resolved, so that the advanced demoniac is both closer to, and farther from, God than is someone caught in unconscious despair. Thus, as the possibility of faith increases, so too does the possibility of offense. In Peterson, by contrast, one gets the sense that in approaching Being/God (or one’s true self), one moves simply from glory unto glory. 47 Peterson, 12 Rules, 268. 48 See, for example, Jordan B Peterson, “Message to the School Shooters: Past, Present and Future,” YouTube video, 36:39, March 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=GYua-3JmnT4&vl=en. 49 This is a constant theme in almost all of Kierkegaard’s writings. Indeed, Kierkegaard treats mere physical suffering as relatively trivial. 50 Peterson, 12 Rules, 198.

10. Being and Meaning: Jordan Peterson’s Antidote to Evil (Matthew Steem and Joy Steem) 1 Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 158. 2 Quoted in Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York: Routledge, 1999), 375. 3 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 315. 4 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 315. 5 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 315. 6 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 355. 7 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 318–19. 8 Jordan B Peterson, “Tragedy vs Evil,” YouTube video, 42:31, March 30, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLp7vWB0TeY.

9 Peterson, 12 Rules, 184. 10 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 353. 11 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 314. Taking the idea a little further in his lecture “Tragedy vs Evil,” Peterson asserts, “There are all sorts of human cultures that were characterized by virtually complete absence of material luxury [and] well-being, whose cultures were highly functional and highly moral.… To describe the propensity towards misbehavior as a consequence of economic inequality is … [to miss the point]. Evil is more pernicious than that which is generated, for example, by social inequality.” 12 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 353. 13 Quoted in Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 359–60. 14 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 375. 15 Peterson, “Tragedy vs Evil.” 16 Peterson, “Tragedy vs Evil.” 17 Peterson, 12 Rules, 181. 18 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 324. 19 Peterson, 12 Rules, 76–77. 20 Peterson, “Tragedy vs Evil.” 21 Peterson, 12 Rules, 219. 22 Peterson states, “Reason can only serve health—can only serve life—when it plays a secondary role” (Maps of Meaning, 321). 23 Peterson, 12 Rules, 220. 24 Jordan B Peterson, “A History of Violence: CBC Ideas,” YouTube video, 53:58, March 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIDqaCjpjD8. 25 TVO, “Jordan Peterson on The Necessity of Virtue,” YouTube video, 52:03, January 4, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwUJHNPMUyU. 26 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 284. 27 Gadi Taub, “Jordan Peterson on Masculinity, Meaning, God and Fatherhood (with Gadi Taub),” YouTube video, 25:01, February 16, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=OwFdvVBPn5Q. 28 Peterson, 12 Rules, 118. His popular debates with Sam Harris in Vancouver and in

Ireland deal especially with this issue. 29 Peterson, 12 Rules, 123. 30 Peterson, 12 Rules, 123. 31 Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 118–19. 32 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 444. 33 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 468. 34 Jordan B Peterson, “Higher Ed & Our Cultural Inflection Point: JB Peterson/Stephen Blackwood.” YouTube video, 1:33:33, February 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlgG8C1GydA. 35 Jordan B Peterson, “Australia’s John Anderson & Dr. Jordan B Peterson: In Conversation,” YouTube video, 1:23:57, April 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4NijLf3M-A. 36 Jordan B Peterson, “Foreword to The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary.” YouTube video, 47:30, October 31, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJwEBizQgYI. 37 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 404. 38 Peterson, 12 Rules, 186. 39 Jordan B Peterson, “2017/04/24: Banned lecture at Linfield College: Ethics and Free Speech,” YouTube video, 2:06:23, May 2, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=AKHuxVvA7T8. 40 Peterson, 12 Rules, 167–68. 41 Peterson claims that “meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that” (12 Rules, 204). 42 From a letter to the Daily News (August 16, 1905). Quoted in Julia Stapleton, Chesterton at the Daily News: Literature, Liberalism and Revolution, 1901–1913, Volume 3, January 1905 to June 1906 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 167–68. 43 Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 468.