Reading Peterson 9 – Archie & the Types

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12,…

I’m an analytical sort of guy. I like numbers and logic and working out systems and schemes and pulling things apart to see how they work. It means I have biases in what I value and I’ve been guilty of STEM snobbery at times (apologies – I regret that). But I also do like the idea of mixing things up – I like aesthetics in my mathematics, I like nonsense in my logic, I like planning algorithms that make whimsy, I love ambiguity – it tickles me. Arts and sciences can’t be separate domains any more than we each can separate personalities into component parts.

Even so, I think you can mix these different aspects of your mental life together in the wrong way. That you can confuse what is fictional and what is empirical, confuse what is aesthetical with what is universal. I look at somebody like John C Wright’s anger at what he sees as the left abandoning truth and reason and I can see he really believes it despite these being his own apparent vices.

Maybe, some people just have the way they deploy their intellectual tools set wrongly? Maybe that’s why some see what is permanent as mutable and what is mutable as permanent?

Consider Jordan B Peterson.

I’ve already discussed the influence of Freud and Jung on the pattern of belief I’ve taken to calling ‘the thing’. Both Freud and Jung are undoubtedly important thinkers in modern culture and I believe we are richer from their influence but, their insights were not science in any meaningful sense – even if Freud, in particular, helped set psychology on a course that would become increasingly scientific.

Dreams, motives, desires, drives, myths, recurring motifs in cultures, archetypes – these are legitimate subjects of intellectual inquiry but they are not subjects that are very tractable to scientific or empirical inquiry*. They are not a good source of truth, they are not a good place to deploy reason with confidence, not all rules of logic may apply.

Peterson on the other hand…Consider his Chapter 1 of 12 Rules for Life entitled ‘Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back’ (aka The One With The Lobsters…). It has a whole section called ‘The Nature of Nature’ in which he sets out to describe what is fundamental about our biological selves. It starts like this:

“The Nature of Nature
It is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative. When something evolves, it must build upon what nature has already produced. New features may be added, and old features may undergo some alteration, but most things remain the same. It is for this reason that the wings of bats, the hands of human beings, and the fins of whales look astonishingly alike in their skeletal form. They even have the same number of bones. Evolution laid down the cornerstones for basic physiology long ago.” -Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (p. 11). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

That’s OK, seems reasonable for a bit of pop-science. We get a second paragraph that is a bit waffly and then:

“First, it is easy to assume that “nature” is something with a nature— something static. But it’s not: at least not in any simple sense. It’s static and dynamic, at the same time. The environment— the nature that selects— itself transforms. The famous yin and yang symbols of the Taoists capture this beautifully. Being, for the Taoists— reality itself— is composed of two opposing principles, often translated as feminine and masculine, or even more narrowly as female and male. However, yin and yang are more accurately understood as chaos and order. The Taoist symbol is a circle enclosing twin serpents, head to tail. The black serpent, chaos, has a white dot in its head. The white serpent, order, has a black dot in its head. This is because chaos and order are interchangeable, as well as eternally juxtaposed. There is nothing so certain that it cannot vary. Even the sun itself has its cycles of instability. Likewise, there is nothing so mutable that it cannot be fixed. Every revolution produces a new order. Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis.” – Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (p. 12). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The passage continues in that pattern – a mix of Peterson recounting what he thinks evolution is interspersed with what appear to be extended metaphors.

Now here’s the trick to reading Peterson. They aren’t metaphors. At least they aren’t metaphors for Peterson.

Peterson’s primary modes of inquiry are introspection and archetypes. The diversion into evolution, the stuff about lobsters, the hand waving at serotonin, THOSE are the decorative bits, his actual reasoning, the process by which he proceeds from one idea to the next and structures his arguments is via those elements that appear to be artistic or literary or aspects of writers craft.

Any good science writing will mix empiricism with artistry because we need rhetoric and literary devices to help shape our understanding but it is a mistake to read Peterson that way. Consider Chapter 2 – here he more directly explains his approach:

“Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundred years ago, with the work of Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens (any more than they could view the moon and the stars through the glass lenses of the equally recent telescope). Because we are so scientific now— and so determinedly materialistic— it is very difficult for us even to understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth. Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person. It was something similar to the stories we tell each other about our lives and their personal significance; something similar to the happenings that novelists describe when they capture existence in the pages of their books. Subjective experience— that includes familiar objects such as trees and clouds, primarily objective in their existence, but also (and more importantly) such things as emotions and dreams as well as hunger, thirst and pain. It is such things, experienced personally, that are the most fundamental elements of human life, from the archaic, dramatic perspective, and they are not easily reducible to the detached and objective— even by the modern reductionist, materialist mind. Take pain, for example— subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real— ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.” -Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (pp. 34-35). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Apologies for the length of the quote. Peterson’s point isn’t wholly unreasonable until you see where he gets to. Peterson’s axiom, the point he later compares to his own Cartesian insight equivalent to “I think therefore I am”, his own ladder out of scepticism is that suffering is the indisputable truth of the universe. Suffering, in turn, needs to be understood differently than the material world and HENCE the fundamental truth lies not with the material world or the methods for understanding the material world.

The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters
“The scientific world of matter can be reduced, in some sense, to its fundamental constituent elements: molecules, atoms, even quarks. However, the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness. It is our eternal subjugation to the first two that makes us doubt the validity of existence— that makes us throw up our hands in despair, and fail to care for ourselves properly. It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out.” – Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (p. 35). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Peterson keeps hammering home this point about order and chaos – these aren’t just themes or ways of helping us think about the universe. Peterson sees them as THE fundamental principle of truth:

Chaos and Order: Personality, Female and Male
“Chaos and order are two of the most fundamental elements of lived experience— two of the most basic subdivisions of Being itself. But they’re not things, or objects, and they’re not experienced as such. Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities— and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice. Order and chaos are not understood first, objectively (as things or objects), and then personified. That would only be the case if we perceived objective reality first, and then inferred intent and purpose. But that isn’t how perception operates, despite our preconceptions. Perception of things as tools, for example, occurs before or in concert with perception of things as objects. We see what things mean just as fast or faster than we see what they are. Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others, living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent. This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us. 35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.” – Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (pp. 38-39). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

…and he keeps going on in this vain. He mixes in appeals to evolution and the length of time life has evolved but keeps returning to this duality: (another long quote – sorry but its hard to snip these)

“Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals, including the chimpanzees who are our closest genetic and, arguably, behavioural match. It is because men are and throughout history have been the builders of towns and cities, the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks, the operators of heavy machinery. 38 Order is God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper and dispenser of rewards and punishments. Order is the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. It’s the political culture, the corporate environment, and the system. It’s the “they” in “you know what they say.” It’s credit cards, classrooms, supermarket checkout lineups, turn-taking, traffic lights, and the familiar routes of daily commuters. Order, when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly. It does so as the forced migration, the concentration camp, and the soul-devouring uniformity of the goose-step. Chaos— the unknown— is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made. It is also what matters, or what is the matter— the very subject matter of thought and communication. In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road. It’s the mother grizzly, all compassion to her cubs, who marks you as potential predator and tears you to pieces.” – Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (pp. 40-41). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

It’s not wholly nonsense – some may well see the feminine as chaotic and the masculine as order. Yet is easy to flip them – masculinity as violence and hence chaos, femininity as nature and hence order. Peterson though wants them to be one thing, chaos is feminine he takes as a principle, not as a metaphor. All dualities look vaguely similar because they all split things into two chunks, so you can always build a metaphor between two dualities – rough versus smooth, strong versus weak, opaque versus transparent, Laurel versus Hardy, French versus Saunders. But there is literally nothing stopping anybody swapping any of them around even in mid-sentence. The sea is like a woman, the land is like a man – a sky god is a man and the god of the land is a woman – or some such allusion. So is the land of a man or a woman? It can be both! To be open to a metaphor is not an inherent property of a thing and the core logical law of non-contradiction does not apply. The land can be both and neither, the land can be asexual or the land can be many genders. They are metaphors – that’s how feckin metaphors work! {and, oh yes, I’m saving up a longer essay on Peterson’s views on women in his book – the above quote is far from the worst).

But if you build your way of reasoning about the world by mistaking poetic, figurative devices for fundamental truths and attempt to use those as syllogistic properties? You are going to not just end up drawing bad conclusions you are also going to become very defensive about how people approach to culture.

Chaos and order – for Peterson these are key organising principles and their relationship to male and female is a core insight for him i.e. more than a metaphor but as essential to what is real and true as protons and neutrons.

Changing gender roles, therefore, are to Peterson like somebody physically changing how atoms are made. Transgender people? Intersex people? People simply not fitting into one of his forced dualities? He can’t reason in a world where the dualities don’t behave – he treats such things as an attack because they are literally undermining how he sees the world.

Later Peterson says:

“Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect. And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being— it also tells you how to act. The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14: 6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7: 14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” – Peterson, Jordan B.. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (p. 43). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

For Peterson things “fall into place” be seeing the world this way. Oops! We’ve gone and changed the world by NOT following the proscriptive pattern! Every orderly woman and chaotic man, every person who doesn’t want to be either, every guy who’s just not that into sex and every woman who enjoys having lots of sexual partners, every feminine police officer and every masculine florist is actively fucking up Peterson’s universe. There’s no metaphor that quite works for this because actual fundamental truths about the world can’t be altered by cultural change and individual desire in this way.

He thinks it isn’t women he is objecting to (like I said – a whole other essay) because he knows he needs both chaos and order. But – he needs us all to behave and stay in our categories because otherwise, we mess up the metaphors.

Is it any wonder that Peterson fears a culture war? There’s nobody quite as vulnerable to cultural change than Peterson. A world with changed gender norms would be like a world in which the fundamental forces of nature and been shuffled.

Next time: Women: Agents of chaos trying to destroy Jordan B Peterson or not? I take a fair and balanced look…

*[I don’t think they are impossible to be treated scientifically though but that’s a different story for another time]