Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective

By Lexham Press

Popular philosopher Jordan Peterson has captured the imagination of Western world.

For some, Peterson represents all that is wrong with patriarchal culture; for others, he is the Canadian academic prophet who has come to save civilization from dizzying confusion. Regardless of how one feels about him, his influence in North America--and beyond--is difficult to deny.

While the "Peterson phenomenon" has motivated numerous articles and responses, much of what has been written is either excessively fawning or overly critical. Little has been produced that explores Peterson's thought--especially his immensely popular 12 Rules for Life--within the context of his overall context and scholarly output. How is one to understand the ascendency of Jordan Peterson and why he's become so popular? Does his earlier Maps of Meaning shed light on how one might understand his worldwide bestseller, 12 Rules for Life?

In Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson, scholars across various disciplines explore various aspects of Jordan Peterson's thought from a Christian perspective. Both critical and charitable, sober-minded and generous, this collection of ten essays is a key resource for those looking to faithfully engage with Jordan Peterson's thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781683593638

Book preview

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MYTH AND MEANING IN

JORDAN PETERSON

A Christian Perspective

RON DART

Editor

Copyright

LEXHAM PRESS

Copyright

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 [e-mail].

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 aspirin-agnosticism … 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 life-transforming 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