Why I love Jordan Peterson (Part 1)
Religious fundamentalists believe the Bible is literally true. A secular rationalist shows it is not, and therefore concludes the Biblical stories are false. But here’s where they agree: the stories in the Bible are making claims about reality that should be understood in the same way scientific claims are understood.
That is wrong. The Bible was written long before human beings began to think scientifically, and therefore was not written to communicate things we should assess only through a scientific lens. While it is obviously valid to conclude that the Bible says things that are not accurate if understood scientifically, that does not answer the question whether there may be something worth reading there.
This is old news. The idea that the Bible should be “read as literature” that contains “metaphorical truth” has been around since at least the time people began to realize that a literal reading could not be reconciled with science. Still, what does “reading the Bible as literature” and “metaphorical truth” really mean? Is it just a cop out to keep the Bible relevant after science has disproven its claims? That would be the conclusion if truth exists only in objective facts that science can prove. But there are ample reasons to question that. Like: Can the purely objective facts established by science tell us how we ought to act in the world? Is there something about the subjective experience of being a self-conscious animal that cannot be understood purely through the objective-empirical methods of science? What is going on when we feel deeply moved by great literature or great music? Why, after all, do we love telling stories to ourselves, and why have we always done so?
If these seem like important questions to you, then you may enjoy listening to Jordan Peterson, especially his lecture series called “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories.” Peterson is a clinical psychologist and psychology professor. But his approach to the Bible is interdisciplinary, described as: “Evolutionary; Psychoanalytic; Literary; Moral; Practical; Rational (But no more reductionist than necessary)” and “Phenomenological,” which I would loosely describe as the study of consciousness and how we subjectively experience reality. It takes him an hour and fifty minutes before he gets to the first line of the Book of Genesis. You may find him the spine-tingling professor you wished you had in college, or impossibly circuitous and hard to follow. But for those who dismiss Peterson as a self-help cult figure or quack, or as nothing more than an angry critic of political correctness, I suggest you give him a chance by listening to these lectures.
I had a philosophy professor in college who on the first day of class drew two concentric circles on the blackboard. He pointed to the inner circle, which was much smaller than the outer one, as representing what we could understand about ourselves based on literal, brute facts. The outer circle, he said, represented everything about us that we either do not understand at all, or can only barely understand through some artistic expression. The class was called “Philosophy In Literature,” and the basic idea was that by reading a series of novels — what you might call canonical stories — we were also going to be engaging in philosophy, which is loving, or searching for, truth.
Peterson says something similar, also with concentric circles. He has three. He labels the outer one “Acted” to represent everything we do in the world. Since we do not come close to fully understanding ourselves or the world, the outer part of this circle is the greatest unknown. The middle circle he labels “Dreamed,” which reflects our attempt to make sense of reality through things like dreams, art, and religion. And the inner circle he labels “Spoken,” which reflects what we understand about ourselves in ways that can be articulated in rational discourse — or you might say what we can verify through objective-empirical methods. The basic idea is that reality and human experience are infinitely complex, and to make some sense of this infinite complexity, we need dreams and art. We need stories.
Can a fictional story be true? I have always thought so because it feels like there is something true in a great work of literature. When I read a great novel, I feel the same thing I feel when I am deeply moved by music. The experience is the same as a religious experience — either the aesthetic experience is really religious, or the religious experience is really just aesthetic, or the two are the same. See John Keats from 1820: “Beauty is Truth, and Truth Beauty…” What’s going on here? Peterson offers an insight I found helpful: a fictional story can be true because it reflects an abstraction of millions of actual instances of human actions and feelings — an abstraction in dramatic form, showing things being acted out in a way that captures some essence of what we are always acting out without understanding it. A story can therefore be, in some sense, more real than the innumerable individual instances that gave rise to it.
In one of our older stories, Genesis Chapter 3, Adam and Eve fall from paradise by eating from the Tree of Knowledge between Good and Evil. Isn’t that strange? Why would knowing that be a bad thing? Why would God punish us for being intellectually curious? One would have thought that it is a good thing to know the difference between Good and Evil. Of course, to ask that question one already must know there is a difference between Good and Evil. It is impossible to put ourselves back into the world of “paradise” where such a question, indeed any questions, would not be asked. In our world, we cannot help asking why one of our oldest stories should contain such a bewildering metaphor for original sin and a fall from paradise. But then consider this: human beings, seemingly alone among all living creatures, are self-conscious. We know we are vulnerable and can suffer terribly; we therefore know we can inflict suffering on others, but we also know we can feel empathy for the suffering of others; we know we are going to live into the future and then die; we know we can make that future better or worse depending upon how we act. So, once we became self-conscious, we knew the difference between Good and Evil. And that was a cataclysm. We lost our innocence as animals; we became something else entirely; we “fell into history,” as Peterson says — that is, we began the journey of existing as self-conscious beings who have to negotiate with the future.
And what did we do when we discovered we could negotiate with the future? We made sacrifices. And guess what, the next story in Genesis is a story about sacrifice: two brothers make different sacrifices to God, one of which pleased Him more than the other. And then the one whose sacrifice did not go so well murdered his brother, the one with the successful sacrifice. If you replace “God” with “Nature,” it might make it easier to see what’s going on here: one person succeeds and another fails; we don’t know for sure if the success is really due to a “better sacrifice” (harder work, etc.), or whether it is just the random vicissitudes of Nature; the story is, importantly, ambiguous on that point; what we do know is the less successful person becomes understandably unhappy, resentful, and angry at the world because things did not work out well for him and everything seems unfair; eventually, he becomes so unhappy with the world that he acts out his anger by killing his successful brother, his ideal. This is a tragedy. And here’s the kicker: Abel had no children; the Bible is saying we are all the children of the murderous Cain.
And isn’t it true that most of us are like Cain most of the time? Life seems unfair. We don’t get our way. Things don’t work out. We feel like the deck is stacked against us. And if we aren’t careful, it is easy to get resentful, jealous, and angry.
Peterson sees endless, transcendent meaning in this story of Cain and Abel. I can’t do justice to his insights here. But he has helped me see layers of meaning I did not see before. Here, I dwell just a bit more on the curious question of sacrifice.
A sacrifice is, by definition, foregoing something desirable in the present in the hope that it will produce a better future. It is more than just an evolved survival instinct whereby an animal may instinctively horde food for the winter. It is a self-conscious choice to deprive ourselves of something we really want now because we believe that will somehow lead to a better future. For us, a sacrifice makes sense (at least potentially) when there is a rational connection between the current deprivation and the future benefit: giving up sugar to lose weight; giving up buying certain things to save for a college fund; even giving up one’s kidney to save someone’s life. But how does that kind of rational sacrifice relate to the primitive sacrificial rites of killing a calf or burning vegetation, let alone the barbaric practice of human sacrifice? Is there a link between the primitive, superstitious sacrifice and the civilized need for productive sacrifice?
One view of superstitious sacrifice is that one day someone accidentally killed a calf and afterwards there was better weather or a good harvest, and thereby a superstition was born. But isn’t a deeper explanation possible? There is the conceptual and linguistic link between superstitious and rational sacrifice: in both instances, the sacrifice is an act of bargaining with the future, giving up something of value in the present in exchange for a better future. We would think that Cain and Abel would have made sacrifices like learning to work instead of resting, so as to provide for more food and shelter in the future. And obviously our ancestors did learn to do such things. But as they were learning to do such things, they were struggling to survive as self-conscious beings in a dangerous and chaotic world — a world full of predators and subject to the whimsical power of Nature. And they were not only struggling to survive in that dangerous and chaotic world; they were struggling to understand it. And as we emerged as conscious but pre-literate beings, struggling to survive and to understand, our initial way of understanding reality was solely through action — that is, before we told stories or wrote treatises, we acted out what we understood about reality. So, as we learned that to survive we needed to give up things of value in the present, maybe we started to act out that understanding in rituals to show how seriously we took the need for sacrifice. Why did we act this out as a ritual sacrifice to a “God”? Maybe because we were acting out an understanding that there was some transcendent Order underlying the mad and dangerous Chaos of the world.
One of the things I think Peterson is saying is that to understand ourselves, and to understand “how we ought to act,” we need to understand our stories, especially our oldest stories that formed the “substrata” of our civilization for a very long time. Given the enormous complexity of the subjective human experience, we cannot understand it without stories — without archetypes and myths. All the scientific knowledge in the world does not tell us how we ought to act. If all you had was knowledge of objective facts, without any subjective understanding of what was important to you and why, you could not go forward in the world and act. You would either have a total breakdown or become a psychopath. So where do we get our subjective understanding of what is important to us and why? From things like family, culture, and religion (writ broadly, because all people, including atheists, have a religion in the sense of a subjectively believed value system). And the only way to understand those things is through stories. They are too complicated to understand any other way. We cannot know and remember every objective fact about reality, let alone sort them all out from one another in a way that distills any sense or creates any meaning to gives us moral direction. And a huge amount of reality is not an objective fact at all, but a subjective experience. So we have to reduce the complexity to a story, to a narrative that makes sense to us, and gives us some shared sense of “how we ought to act.”
Trial lawyers know this. As do political campaigners. They both try to distill massive complexity into simple stories that compete with other stories in a zero-sum game to win over juries and voters. Such simplified stories inevitably have flaws — internal contradictions, omissions, refusal to confront the facts that do not fit the story, and sometimes outright falsehoods. Life is too complex for the stories to be perfect, especially when you are trying to win a lawsuit or an election.
But outside the zero-sum games of lawsuits and elections, we need deeper stories to make sense of the world, to live with purpose, and to flourish — to know how we ought to act. We need stories to keep the cultures in which we live alive, which allows them to grow. But what if even our deepest stories also contain flaws, or even falsehoods? How do we deal with that? And in the modern, secular world, dominated by the objective-empirical methods of science, how can any story long survive?
These are the questions Peterson is asking, and the way he talks about them resonates with millions of people. For the past 500 years or so, the objective-empirical methods of science have created staggering progress in human well-being. Yet they have also left us rootless and alienated, no longer able to believe in our ancient stories. This has serious consequences, and there are no easy answers. But there are wrong answers that lead to dangerous, dark, and destructive places, both for individuals and for societies. Peterson grapples with those wrong answers — nihilism, ideologies, post-modernism — and tries to show why they are wrong. Doing that does not make him a cult leader who pretends to have all the right answers. You might say it makes him a storyteller, which is true in one sense — he tells stories about stories, with as much scientific insight as he can, but not more.
I don’t quite know how it all ends, but I believe there is much more to it than this.
