Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

By John Tierney

Jordan Peterson, a modern phenomenon with legions of fans and an equally substantial number of detractors, has appeared as if from nowhere and achieved such polarizing prominence that he is clearly riding the cultural wave.
It is vital to understand the cultural circumstances underlying the rise to fame of such people. This book is neither for nor against Peterson, although it advances a degree of critical appraisal. His precise views are not the central subject of this book. Nor are his biographical details. Instead, this book concerns the historical forces that are now at play, which, for the conservative wing of the political spectrum, Peterson crystallizes perhaps better than anyone else, with the single exception of Donald Trump. Where Trump is an active executive agent of the spirit of the times – actually taking critical decisions and directly shaping events – Peterson may be viewed in more passive terms as providing an intellectual justification for Trump and his base.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244469122

John Tierney

John Tierney is interested in the work of Oswald Spengler and how it relates to the modern West. Is the West in terminal decline?

Book preview

The Failure of the Tenth Man

In the zombie apocalypse movie World War Z, a senior Mossad agent explained to Brad Pitt’s character why Israel was prepared for the zombie outbreak, unlike the rest of the world. The agent cited the 10th Man Rule. Israel’s security council had ten advisors that investigated all possible threats. If the first nine dismissed a potential danger to the country, it was the duty of the 10th to overrule them on principle, in order to avoid the complacency and blindness of groupthink. Nine advisors dismissed the threat of zombies, and so the tenth, the Mossad agent himself, ordered Jerusalem to be surrounded by an enormous anti-zombie wall.

This 10th man scene had to be one of the biggest misfires in movie history because literally minutes later the city was overrun by zombies! So much for the 10th man.

Just when you think you have everything sussed, as they say in Britain, is when catastrophe strikes.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman said, Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters overconfidence. Even the 10th man wasn’t pessimistic enough, wasn’t prepared enough, wasn’t prescient enough, didn’t plan well enough. When you call on the Devil’s Advocate, you really need the Devil himself. Can the 10th man ever work? After all, Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke said, No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.

Who foresaw the stellar rise of Professor Jordan Peterson? Where is the tenth man for such a task? In fact, a century ago, a man foresaw that it was inevitable that someone like Peterson would come to prominence. In his great metahistorical study, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler asserted that the West was heading towards an unavoidable crisis. He predicted a time of chaos, accompanied by the rise of what he called the Second Religiousness.

This book is an exploration of why the West has now finally reached its crisis point, and why Jordan Peterson is none other than the central prophet of the Second Religiousness.

There are those that talk about a great intellectual awakening being underway, and they point to the so-called intellectual dark web as a medium supporting a global spiritual paradigm shift. They refer to a renewed interest in Christianity and Gnosticism, and the rebirth of the religious and sacred. All of these are in fact precise symptoms of a culture about to perish.

The beginnings of the second religiousness often involve a degree of let’s pretend. People play act at being spiritual. They find it relaxing, entertaining. It’s not a serious part of their life, although they like to fake it that it is.

Charlatans, gurus, life coaches and fake prophets abound. Snake oil is everywhere. The world is drowning in it. It gets served up in super-concentrated amounts on YouTube and social media, where all gatekeepers have vanished, all standards have collapsed, and any populist rhetoric can go viral in a trice. When the world is looking for Moses, it always finds him. There is always a Burning Bush waiting around the corner. It always knows what to say to the sort of people that believe in talking bushes.

Spengler wrote a century ago, [Frauds] toured the towns and sought with their pretentious rites to persuade the half-educated into a renewed interest in religion. Correspondingly, we have in the European-American world of today the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science, the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-and-crafts business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment. Everywhere it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-religion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly, but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

So, although the second religiousness has playful origins, when it is fully engaged it is in deadly earnest.

Spengler wrote, This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything. … The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti’s time in China. In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness – the piety that impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans in China, India, and Islam – and that of Caesarism consists in its unchained might of colossal facts.

The three signs that the end times of a particular civilization are coming are: 1) The growth of giant world-cities, full of different cultures, that are cut off from the nations in which they are located, 2) The growth of militarization and regional conflict, and 3) The rebirth of the religious fervor of the early culture, but now heavily modified and reinterpreted.

Spengler wrote, But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself – it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness – only otherwise experienced and expressed.

You cannot recreate the conditions of the past, no matter how much conservatives would like to dream you can. No one can restore Christianity. As Nietzsche understood, the task is to assassinate Christianity, not to put it back on its dusty old throne, as some drooling zombie or decomposing corpse. Nietzsche declared the need to revalue all values. That’s exactly what is needed. Instead, the current age is trying to return to failed values and give them a makeover, a reinterpretation that makes them credible again. Jordan Peterson, using Jungian psychology, operates in exactly this territory.

Spengler wrote, [The Second Religiousness] starts with Rationalism’s fading out in helplessness…

You know the end is coming when conspiracy theories flourish, when science, philosophy and mathematics are held in contempt, when experts are mocked, when the Dunning-Kruger effect is rife, when subjectivism and relativism are everywhere, when everyone proclaims that they have their own truth and own path and no one is allowed to contradict them.

If, very loosely and inaccurately, we associate rationalism with the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett – then it reached its high point and apparent all-conquering success just a few years ago. Let’s call the high watermark of atheism the publication in 2007 of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Oh how times have changed. The smugness of atheism has collapsed. The likes of Sam Harris are on the run, suffering defeat after defeat. No one is buying their nostrums anymore. That’s no bad thing. These people were not the last defenders of rationalism, but the first symptom of the Second Religiousness.

Atheism and science are not vehicles of rationalism. They are the agents of the opposite school of philosophy: empiricism. Anyone with a passing interest in philosophy knows that the war of rationalism versus empiricism reached its climax in the clash of ideas between Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (the rationalists) and Locke, Hume and Berkeley (the empiricists). The first three were highly logical and mathematical. The second three were not. They were extremely skeptical and only believed what their senses showed them. Bishop Berkeley went as far as to say that things only existed while they were being perceived; a non-perceived thing is a non-existent thing. Objective reality – things that exist regardless of humans and their perceptions – disappears. Subjective perception becomes the sole reality.

Berkeley was in fact able to resurrect objective reality by positing an all-powerful God, a God who never slept or turned away, who perceived everything all the time, hence kept everything in existence. Quantum mechanics does not posit any God. It says that when humans aren’t perceiving things, those things – such as they are (because what are they?) – vanish into abstract, unreal probability wavefunctions. According to Nobel laureates, reality is what is extracted from the process of humans performing observations on unreality! Rationalism begs to differ. Reality exists objectively, regardless of any humans and any human perceptions. Nothing ever disappears into unreality. That would constitute a category error. Reality and unreality cannot coexist and interact any more than Cartesian mind and matter can coexist and interact.

Immanuel Kant, with his transcendental idealism, claimed to have reconciled rationalism and empiricism as far as was possible. But Fichte, Schelling and Hegel immediately attacked Kant’s philosophy because he referred to an unknowable domain of things in themselves – the noumenal world of things as they are when stripped of all human perceptions. Hegel advocated absolute idealism, understood rationally. His central dictum was that the rational alone is real. He said, What is rational is real and what is real is rational.

Hegel was attacked by the likes of the irrationalist Kierkegaard (father of existentialism), while the whole philosophical tradition was attacked by the irrationalist Nietzsche (father of postmodernism).

Empiricism has never been a friend of reason and logic. Look at science. It rejects the Principle of Sufficient and Occam’s razor. No rational and logical principles are featured in science. All a priori, analytic thinking is rejected. Mathematics – the quintessence of rationalism – is regarded as unreal, abstract and manmade, yet if mathematics were removed from science, science would be useless and worthless. How can unreality be essential to the success of science, which is supposedly about reality? Nietzsche was surely right to say, Success has always been the greatest liar. The first step of the scientific method is not to deploy reason and logic (which rationalism demands) but to observe the world using the limited, fallible, unreliable, frequently delusional human senses (which is what empiricism demands). This is a radically different worldview.

Science is pseudo-rationalism. It is overwhelmingly ruled by empiricist thinking, which directly contradicts true rationalism (you need to urgently study philosophy if you imagine rationalism and empiricism are compatible). If scientific materialism and empiricism based on physics were replaced by scientific idealism and rationalism based on mathematics (the proper language of metaphysics), a paradigm shift could be inaugurated which made mind rather than matter the primary reality, but in a wholly rational, mathematical way, not in some mystical mumbo jumbo way.

However, humanity prefers to return to religion, spirituality and mysticism. Reason and logic nauseate it. Humanity craves emotion and intuition. It wants psychology, not mathematics. Rationalism is incomprehensible to the average person. Leibnizian immaterial monadic minds that exist outside space and time as metaphysical singularities are inconceivable to the masses. Humanity has only the most tangential relationship with rationalist thinking. Only a fraction of humanity has ever had the capacity to think rationally. Humanity is a Mythos species, not a Logos species. Humans understand reality narratively, which is to say in terms of emotional structure. Humans do not understand reality analytically, which is to say in terms of mathematical structure. Humans use story logic to make sense of their existence, not actual logic, which, ontologically, is mathematical logic.

The Second Religiousness presages the total collapse of not only rationalism, but also empiricism. What remains is emotionalism and intuitionism (mysticism). The particular form that the Second Religiousness is taking is that of a fundamental transition from the literal to the metaphorical. Instead of the claim that such and such religious event actually happened – such as the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or the resurrection of Jesus Christ – the same event is repainted in terms of its psychological power, its archetypal resonance. It is declared metaphorically true rather than literally true, but then the metaphorical truth is presented as having some higher truth content than either science or mathematics offers. This higher truth is cast in terms of meaning.

Science rejects meaning and purpose, so science can never address the human craving to live a meaningful, purposeful existence. If science is not in the game, and literal religious truths are literally ridiculous – entirely contrary to science – then all that remains is to sanctify metaphorical truths. These psychologized truths are truths for living. They are the human truths we live by. This is the terrain where Jordan Peterson has come into his own.

Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris have had several largely futile debates in which Harris argues on behalf of the empirical truths of science while Peterson argues on behalf of the metaphorical – archetypal – truths of psychology. Their positions are inherently incommensurate. They are arguing from the perspectives of different paradigms, so it’s impossible for them to agree. Peterson calls himself a scientist, so is more willing to try to see Harris’s point-of-view, but it is impossible for him, as a psychologist, to adopt the full scientific position, which denies mind, free will, the unconscious and consciousness, and is left with nothing but biological robots, made of nothing but atoms and inescapably governed by the laws that dictate atomic behavior. There is no scope for psychology. In strict terms, psychology is not and never can be a science since it deals with entities that are contraindicated by the tropes of physical science. Behaviorism was the only type of psychology that ever approached hard science … because behaviorism abolished the mind! All it did was investigate inputs (stimuli) and outputs (observed behavior, consequent upon the inputs).

Jordan Peterson had a simple choice: to try to create a new religious and spiritual outlook, based on archetypes, or to give old religion a makeover and explore the archetypes that made it so successful in the first place. Peterson chose the latter path and he focuses on Judeo-Christianity, the religious tradition of the West, which he regards as the high point of human civilization. This choice is exactly what would be expected of