Dart Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson

A Christian Perspective
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68359-363-8
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

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.

Ron Dart teaches in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He has authored or coauthored thirty-five books that deal with the interface between literature, spirituality, and politics, including The North American High Tory Tradition (American Anglican Press, 2016) and Christianity and Pluralism (Lexham Press, 2019).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dart, Ron

Leseproben

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...