He clearly has a deep respect for Christianity, but it seems mostly to be because he is in love with the West and Christianity formed the West. He realizes you can’t just remove it without the whole edifice crashing down, and he thinks it would be a very bad thing for the edifice to crash down. He sees a deep transcendent significance in the Bible and the way it’s shaped the culture. But when he says “transcendent” what he really is referring to is a kind of ancient, shared wisdom that embodies tens of thousands or millions of years of our trying to understand who and what we are. He has a real awe for the deep complexity and mystery and hiddenness of consciousness and for the tenuous grasp that we have on ourselves, for the way we stumble around in the dark just trying to understand who we are, never mind anything outside ourselves.
He knows that man has a nature (a point first brought to my attention by Dallas Willard), that we aren’t infinitely malleable, that there is an enduring wisdom about who we are and how we ought to live that stands like a rock above the tide of individual self-determination. He has a great respect for the wisdom of the past and rejects the chronological snobbery that thinks it can discard all that came before and build something new and better (his critique of Marxism is central here). He has some good critiques of the popular atheist dismissals of religion on this point.
He is not an ivory-tower academic. He’s been a practicing psychologist, he’s worked with people in their messiness rather than just imposed theories on them from above. And if you’ve ever seen one of his lectures he clearly cares about his students. He speaks with a passion and an urgency, because he knows that how you live your life matters and you could very easily get it wrong and if you do the consequences could be catastrophic.
His ideas about how we form maps of the world to understand it, and the descent into chaos when we find some of our fundamental assumptions violated, sounds to me mainly correct. One thing that continues to strike me about people is that when describing their dark times they will often say they didn’t think something like this could ever happen to them - “I didn’t think I’d ever get divorced”, “I didn’t think that relationship could disintegrate”. There is a part of us that gets stuck in disbelief that such things could have possibly happened. And that seems to fit with his ideas about what happens when our maps fail us.
But for all that, the solutions that he offers fall short. The advice he gives is often based on Niezschean power dynamics or evolutionary psychology rather than anything resembling traditional western/Christian morality. His appreciation of the Bible centers on its status as an ancient repository of human attempts to figure out who and what we are, there is nothing transcendent (as I use the word) about it. His attempts to psychologize basic Christian doctrines more often than not left me groaning in frustration; for example this on the trinity: “The idea of the trinity is something like the spirit of tradition, the human being as the living incarnation of that tradition, and the spirit in people that makes relationship with those two possible”. Now, I certainly think there are deep spiritual truths in the stories of the Bible. But Jordan Peterson as often as not just sounds like he’s eisegeting his own Jungian psychology back into the text.
All in all, he’s an eclectic mix of right-on and totally off-base. But he’s one of the more eloquent voices pushing back against the progressive turn that society is taking, and his unconventional approach is thought-provoking and fascinating even when it takes him to obviously wrong places. For that, he’s worth listening to.
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