Jordan Peterson: The Alchemical Lemon explains the Crystalline Structure of Logos
Chris and Matt finally discuss the big kahuna Jordan Peterson by taking a deep dive into his extended 2017 interview on the Transliminal YouTube Channel titled 'Ideology, Logos & Belief'.
They learn about the alchemical nature of lemons, whether a professional footballer is playing a game or living life, and Jordan Peterson's crystal clear views on the nature of Jesus & his resurrection.
Some people will say this episode is too cynical, but it's like... No. It isn't, man! And furthermore, it's not even clear we actually know on a fundamental level what cynicism is!
It is the podcast where two academics, that is me, Matt Brown, and Christopher Kavanagh, listen to content from the greatest minds the online world has to offer.
I'm a psychologist and we specialize in understanding the mysteries of the human brain.
Chris is an anthropologist and I'm not quite sure what anthropologists do, but I think they pursue primates through jungles or something.
And we are going to do what we usually do, which is get to the bottom of the interesting stuff that comes across our feed in this interconnected online world culture.
Are you ready to go, Chris?
I am.
I'm just back from my latest expedition in the world-famous rainforests of Japan, trekking after the noted...
Gorilla populations that exist here.
So I'm back from that and ready to go.
Yeah, so I think your research method is you basically interfere with them and bother them as much as possible until they react and do something interesting.
Yeah, it's anthropology because I go and live with them for several years.
I'm basically at one with the Japanese guerrilla population.
They've accepted me into their troop.
I don't want to get into it, Matt, because it's a spiritual experience for me as much as a research topic.
Okay, so we are at episode three, which I think is a pretty important milestone for us, eh, Chris?
That's right.
Death knell for many fledgling podcasts, the Bermuda Triangle of Episode 3. Yeah, well, we are flying through it with...
Sailing colours.
Very good.
The reason people listen is for that kind of, you know, nice analogy and beautiful turn of phrase, I think.
Yeah, you can tell I've studied for years in higher education.
So the first thing we have to do today is issue a correction.
Oh, yes.
I know this is going to disappoint many of our listeners, but we did get something.
Not quite right in that last episode on James Lindsay.
That's right.
And we were hoisted by our own petard because after lambasting James for his failure to research Jurassic Park canon in suitable depth, we spent a significant amount of time discussing monkey science fiction virus outbreak movies and what...
And speculating on what was being referenced.
And we managed to cover a large amount of those movies, but the one that we didn't mention was Outbreak, which is the movie featuring Dustin Hoffman.
So look at that.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
We deserve that feedback.
Yeah, yeah, we did.
Okay, take this.
This is a mea culpa.
We humbly...
I apologize and retract that.
No, I'm going to just say, Matt, that the Jurassic Park one is still worse.
Because it's a much more important movie than Outbreak.
I think the broader point still stands, Chris.
It does.
It persists unrelented.
So the other feedback that we got was we had to, in detail, kind of tweet threads breaking down the episode and giving some critical feedback by Skeptic Review which is Gretchen and Syke Lockwood which is Patrick Lockwood both people we follow on Twitter and interact with and they had various feedback but
the And it was very nice to see, I would say.
But one of the criticisms they reused, which it would be interesting to hear, was that basically our view that James Lindsay is overreacting to the critical theory and social justice threat,
that our view that it isn't causing...
Dramatic societal changes.
That really puts us in the academics with our head in the sand camp.
The kind of people who historically, when the Nazis were gaining in power, were saying, don't worry about it.
They're just a radical fringe that nobody's paying attention to.
So what do you think, Matt?
Do you think that's a fair criticism?
Like to defend your take?
Look, I think it is a fair criticism.
I'm trying to figure out whether I agree or not.
It's really hard to say because I think this is actually a bigger point, which is it's really hard to tell the relative magnitude or scale of a particular problem, isn't it?
Because the news and the Twitter feeds and everything like that delivers...
This microcosm and puts things under a microscope and it could well be symptomatic of a broader thing or it could just be a flash in the pan.
And, you know, that's true on whichever side of politics you kind of lie.
I can think of many sort of left-wing kind of scares or paranoias, I suppose, which it's kind of...
Is it just a kind of a dramatic news event or is it symptomatic of something much, much bigger?
So I honestly don't know.
I haven't figured that one out.
Have you?
Yeah, I've got to kneel down.
I similarly, you know, I think that where I fall on this is that...
I'm not in the camp that says this is only a thing like the kind of critical justice or woke stuff is only a thing that applies on specific campuses and has no impact on the real world.
I don't think that extreme is true because there are cultural impacts and there are, you know, even just the mere rhetoric is clearly relevant in modern politics.
But on the other hand, The part that I don't buy into is the kind of presentation by James and others that we are on the cusp of a woke totalitarian regime, right?
Because the examples that they use are, you know, that we have in the past have seen left-wing totalitarian regimes, which we have.
But by and large, those have been communist regimes.
Woke regimes.
And, you know, this kind of image of...
I think that genuinely people are imagining, you know, re-education camps where you and I and others will be, like, lined up and made to recite D 'Angelo until...
Or tattoo anti-racist our forehead.
And, like, that seems to me, you know, a kind of far-fetched thing which might be...
A result of having read too many young adult fiction novels about dystopian futures.
That's a cynical sarcasm for this episode growing up.
I agree with that.
I think I said last week that one thing about the more woke culture is just how nicely it synchronizes with corporate.
You know, it's too big a topic to get into, but it doesn't strike me as revolutionary.
Rather, it seems like very much a middle-class cultural kind of thing, which is very comfortable with.
Pretty much maintaining.
This is the sort of socialistic side of me coming out, but it is very comfortable with maintaining the class system, Chris.
You are the revolutionary that we should be worried about, Mark.
This is the third episode twist.
Mark, I'm talking about the societal revolutionary.
Well, I am unironically in favour of fully automated luxury gay communism.
I'm putting my flag in the sand.
Oh, gosh.
Well, we'll have to have an intervention at some point after this episode, but I'll accept that.
And as I've invoked this episode, maybe it would be interesting to mention who we're...
Dealing with this week and what our new topic is.
Yes, I'm very glad to do that.
Okay, so today we are going to be talking about the big one, the big kahuna, the man, Jordan B. Peterson.
It was just a matter of time before we got into JPP.
I think we wanted to save him until we had a little bit of practice, until we were warmed up properly.
So it's kind of exciting.
It's like a landmark moment.
It's a milestone, I think, in many ways.
Yeah, I think he's probably the least controversial person that we've dealt with to describe as a guru.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, he's set out to be a guru, let's face it.
And, you know, maybe he is.
We'll find out, won't we?
So do you want to give a very brief summary of JBP for the two or three people who listen who don't know everything about him?
Yes, yes.
I want nothing more.
Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, maybe personality psychologist as well, who until recently was based at Toronto University and basically had a career publishing away as a clinical psychologist with fairly decent,
I think in fact very decent citations and maybe sort of influential in his field.
He came to fame to the public and to myself.
More recently, when he was involved with publicly opposing the introduction of a law in Canada that he presented as involving compelled speech about respecting people's pronouns.
And this obviously mainly associated with trans rights or trans people requesting different pronouns.
And he didn't actually object.
Or he clarified at various occasions that he didn't object to using an individual's preferred pronouns interpersonally or in his classes, but he did object to the government having a law which he interpreted as mandating that you respect someone's pronouns or face legal consequences.
From that, he was recorded debating some students at the campus, and that went viral.
And prior to that event, he had been recording his lectures and putting them online.
So he had, I think, a not huge YouTube following.
But in the wake of his growth with this viral video, people became aware of his online...
And those became popular.
And then he gave some talks and eventually published a self-help book called 12 Rules for Life.
And his fame continued to grow until he became a regular fixture on social and political topics, issuing his opinion and many think pieces written about him and his potential connection to the...
Alt-right or extreme right-wing communities online and his objection to that connection being presented.
So yeah, he became a controversial figure and issued a lot of content online in the form of lectures and interview series.
It's interesting, isn't it, how so many of these figures kind of make their path towards fame through one of these controversies that build up a storm, you know, whether it's Brett Weinstein or J.B.P.
or even Donald Trump.
It's by saying controversial things sort of sparking a bit of the sort of culture war backlash that really, in many ways, propels them to
Yeah, and actually, I've heard Brett Weinstein.
Discussed in an interview that admission to the intellectual dark web, one characteristic or requirement might be to have undergone a public test of your commitment to free speech.
So in essence, an initiation ritual where your ideals are tested in public and you stand up and reveal your true character.
And as a cognitive anthropologist who...
Alongside Chasing Apes Through the Jungles specializes in ritual psychology and I've done some research on initiation rituals.
It definitely seems to fit the build to me that there is this group identification or social bonding with people perceived to have undergone a public ordeal that they...
That they then link to their commitment to free speech.
So it becomes attached to a secret value and an identity, be it the intellectual dark web or some other group.
So it's very interesting for me from that perspective of it being a kind of initiation ritual that someone needs to undergo.
Yeah, yeah, very.
So today we're going to look...
At a clip, an interview.
We've posted it on Twitter already, so if you haven't watched it by now, that's your problem.
You really should have.
Okay, so this is an interview about religion, Chris, I think.
Yeah, so content that we're looking at today is an interview he did on a YouTube channel called Transliminal, where it's actually another cognitive anthropologist from my neck of the woods, so he's probably also just back from his field trips with primates,
interviewing Jordan Peterson in an extended two and a half hour interview, mainly about...
His views relating to philosophy and religion and this kind of topics.
Not so much the culture war stuff, though that comes up at the end.
And we kind of canvassed people online to ask for content to look at.
And this was recommended by a couple of people as one of his more substantial and better pieces.
So lots of his material is, you know...
The well-known stuff is confrontational interviews or his lecture series.
But this is a kind of standalone episode.
And I think it's actually a very good one for illustrating lots of the broader themes that are in his work or the way he presents himself.
So it's a good chunk of material for us to look at in terms of...
Yeah, as a guru.
Yeah, yeah.
And very challenging too.
I mean, we'll get into this, but yeah, it is two hours long.
Although we can't criticize him for length because we've been known to create long content.
But it is challenging for me to understand precisely what he's arguing for and what he...
What he actually means.
Although, you know, and so I find it very interesting, like if you look through the YouTube comments or you look at, you know, I'm mutuals with many people who like and admire Jordan Peterson and they haven't really cited this issue of finding him difficult to understand.
They often say he's insightful and stimulating and all that stuff.
I don't know.
I do get, even from people that like him, they tend to acknowledge that he has a waffly way of talking.
They appreciate that about him.
So I definitely have heard, even from people that are fans, that they find him at times.
Impenetrable.
But that feels like a feature.
Yeah, I think that's taken as evidence of what a high level he's operating on.
So it does have that kind of guru-esque quality.
I should also have mentioned that there's two interviews on transliminal media and this is the second one from 2017.
So this is kind of at the peak of...
Peterson's rise.
And the interviewer, Jordan Levine, the cognitive anthropologist guy, it's actually quite interesting because he's very good in his questions at rephrasing things very coherently and concretely and asking quite specific questions.
But he does so in a friendly way.
So it's an interesting interview in that respect, just like from good interview technique.
Yeah, although Jordan is equally good at refusing to be pinned down.
Yeah, that's the contrast.
That's what makes it such an interesting contrast because there's these very specific questions and then the answer is never specific or if it is, it comes after like 10 minutes of tangential discussion.
So the nominal topic is ideology, logos and belief.
Yeah.
I had to Google, I should say also, I had to Google a lot of terms that were used in this.
It probably would make a lot more sense for a theologian or theology scholar, I suppose, for whom this stuff might feel more natural.
You're an anthropologist, so when you're not bothering primates, and you even study religion.
Do you think this made more sense to you than to me?
Well, that's impossible for me to answer.
Possibly so, because my personal background is that I was raised Catholic in a Catholic family in Ireland.
So the Christian components of it are not alien.
I also had an interest in mysticism in my kind of teens up to my early 20s and still do.
I find that stuff kind of interesting.
So I know a bit about Christian mysticism and the Sufism and various other traditions.
So that gave me a foundation.
But this is not to say that there weren't times where I was like, what the hell are we talking about?
It's just that I think that foundation helped.
Yeah, yeah.
Good, good.
So, yeah, let's get into the clips, shall we?
And we'll take that as a bit of a...
Like, this is a difficult ball of string to unravel just because JBP is who he is.
So I tried to make some kind of structure or plan to cover this stuff.
Kind of failed.
But I think if we work through some of the clips, then we can take those as jumping off points to make some comments.
Yeah.
And so one of the issues is that in trying to extract clips from this, it's very hard to cut out a segment because it keeps linking things in or wandering down.
Tangents to his tangents that would require splicing things together.
So some of these clips might be long, but I'm just sharing with you my frustration.
I was like, okay, I'll take a clip of this.
Wait, stop talking.
Stop going on about side tangents.
Can you say that again concisely?
But that rarely happens.
Yeah, look, I think a couple of longer clips is...
Really helpful for listeners because in terms of to illustrate how he talks and how he argues, because it's all kind of the same, like it's the same style throughout.
So I think a couple of longer clips, we can afford the time, which will be really helpful to illustrate how it actually works.
Yeah, it's good no one complains about the length of podcasts.
No, they love it.
They love it.
They fall asleep to it.
So, with all that preamble, let me play the first clip, which probably will illustrate some of these long, you know, winding connections.
So, here we go.
And I've been thinking about why that was, because many people have decried political correctness, but they did it in generic ways, you know.
And so, here's a strange sequence of thoughts.
So, there's this idea in Christianity that the word, which is the...
The capacity that's associated with consciousness, I would say, is the mechanism by which chaotic potential is transformed into habitable order, and also the mechanism by which order that has become too rigid is dissolved and reconstituted,
right?
That's the basic element of the hero myth.
And the word, the Logos, is a universally distributed eternal phenomena.
In the Christian context, it's also been given a localization.
So it's as if this universal principle, while that's the word made flesh, it's as if the universal principle was also instantiated in the local.
And there's a deep idea there, which is that the universal lacks something.
And what it lacks is specificity.
So in order to make the universal even more universal, you make it specific.
So how was that to get us started?
Yeah, that's the kind of thing I struggle with, Chris.
Okay, so...
Yeah, look, I think before even breaking down that, you know, what he's actually trying to say, I would just say that's characteristic of his way of speaking.
Presenting ideas that one thought leads to the next.
And before you know it, he's moved from why he remained popular when there's many people decrying political correctness to discussing Logos and the instantiation of Logos in an embodied Christ figure and the uniqueness of Christianity.
It does sort of follow a logical stream, but it's...
It really is connecting a lot of desperate things together into a thought stream.
Yeah, so the reason I have trouble with it is that it is, as you say, very associative.
A whole bunch of ideas linked together in this network of associations for one to get the feeling of what is meant.
That's not rigorous, but I guess there's...
I guess it's legitimate in that it's almost like poetry.
I'm not sure how to describe it.
Yeah, I think it is kind of theological reflection, a lot of it.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But it's kind of surprising that he became so popular on the basis of this.
Because I can imagine some people saying, you know, in a different era, I got a 15 cassette thing on how to pray properly by some Christian theologian.
That not being regarded as a cool edgy thing.
But listening to Jordan Peterson discuss the Bible across like a 15 series online.
Lecture is regarded as something that is not only...
Interesting and worthwhile, but it's kind of like an edgy thing to do.
Yeah, kind of new and new.
It's just surprising.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
It is because, I mean, like I recognize, I had to do a bit of research, but I recognize some of the substance behind this stuff.
For instance, this instantiation of the universal in the specific, I figured out, is an element in Christian theology.
It's one of their ways of thinking about the divinity of Christ and so on.
Both a specific human being, but also representing these universal things and God and all that.
So it's not like he's just making this stuff up, but that's a topic that wouldn't seem to be either controversial or attractive to most modern people.
Yeah, and I think it's the linking of these grand narratives and large philosophical topics to very specific...
culture war issues, right?
That might be the unique component.
So there's a clip here of him talking about his origin story where he emerged from his opposition to this Bill C-16 in Canada.
And I think this gives a good example of how he links issues into broader metanarratives.
I believe that that's an unwarranted intrusion of a certain kind of ideologue.
It's postmodern ideology, fundamentally, with its roots in a kind of a surround of Marxist identity politics.
And I think that it was completely inappropriate for that to be transformed into legislation.
So he argues that his opposition to that bill is a very incidental fact to his bigger philosophical opposition to...
Postmodernism and neo-Marxists who are destroying everything.
And he actually makes this point very clearly when he argues that he even sees the transgender people, which were in some sense seen as the target for that bill, because it was about using appropriate pronouns for people,
that his opposition to the bill is actually in defense of them from these philosophies that they are being sacrificed to.
And again,
I do not believe that legislation like Bill C-16 is in the least in the interest of these people who are marginalized.
Quite the contrary.
I believe they're sacrificial victims to the onslaught of a continuing postmodern neo-Marxist ideology.
Yes, so he does characterise that this specific issue, which obviously became a big thing and played a big role in him developing a much larger profile, he characterises it as an instantiation,
this is his theme of instantiating things in the specific, of what he sees as this sort of great battle between...
Between truth and order and the word and habitable orders versus chaotic potentials and so on.
I can hear from the tone of your voice, Matt, that you were really into this.
Yeah, yeah.
So we'll talk about this later, but what comes through is his worldview, which...
It's amazingly anti-materialist in that he really believes very strongly in that there is a more true reality, like a kind of spiritual, he calls it theological, but he uses his own special definition of theological to mean I'm not sure what.
But he sees this hidden reality underneath the material and he sees that the real stuff is happening there and stuff like politics.
Or, you know, economics or even society and so on, is just kind of the ephemera at the top.
So it is interesting.
He's a spiritualist, you know, so he's very much, it's a very different worldview from yours or mine.
Yeah, this sort of surprised me.
The way I came across Jordan Peterson was I listened to him on the Sam Harris.
I was aware of him, the protests and the controversy surrounding him.
Then I heard him interviewed by Sam Harris and they had a two-hour endless debate about truth.
Peterson was arguing for what many might consider the kind of postmodern view that truth is not about something corresponding to fact or reality.
It's more about...
It's a long episode.
You can go listen to it if you want.
No, I won't.
Yeah, but after that, I then didn't pay that much attention to his content, you know, just in clips and the interviews and whatnot with him.
And then I got the 12 Rules for Life long after it had exited the cultural moment and people weren't paying attention.
So I read it.
A year or two after that.
And I was kind of amazed at how much theological, Christian-focused content there was in it.
There was psychology, there was self-help stuff, and there was some culture war thing.
But the much more dominating theme for me was religious themes, connecting things to the Bible.
And it surprised me that people didn't focus more on this.
Aspect of him, at least that I saw.
Yeah.
So it is interesting that both his, like, that's not the feature that is emphasized by either his fans or his detractors, because his fans would sort of characterize him as a rigorous, facts don't care about your feelings kind of guy, and his detractors characterize him.
Some of his fans.
Some of his fans.
Because I just think, I think he has a wing that, like him...
Because of this, like a side that leaned towards spirituality and maybe specifically Christian spirituality.
And if they've spent a lot of time with his material, it's impossible that they've not noticed this.
So maybe the people that you're talking about, I'm not sure, but there might be, you know, different wings of his fandom.
Yeah.
Well, he is there in the IDW and so on, you know, so he's kind of got that sort of association.
But, like, I do agree with you, though, that I think one way to understand what JVP is about is part of, like, a much bigger long-term trend, which is for religiosity, I guess, in the face of, you know, science kind of.
Eating away at it and undercutting it over the last hundred years or more has progressively become more and more abstract and more philosophical and spiritual in a very vague, abstract kind of way.
So unless you're an evangelical Christian in the American Midwest, then if you are religious, you probably think about...
Much less in terms of concrete things about a bearded guy in the sky and about the sort of literal truth of things that happen in the Bible, but much more in terms of how JDP describes it, which is like psychologising it and making it more ineffable and very vague,
but also much more congruent with...
With a sort of a scientific view of the world?
Because it's now operating in a completely different domain.
Am I making any kind of sense, Chris?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I'm just thinking that my image of popular religion, though, is that what you're describing does account for a lot of modern religious sentiment, particularly amongst people who are not connected to traditional religious communities.
Or arrived at religion later in life.
But I guess my pause is that I think there's a substantial portion, especially in America, North America, of religious people for whom their beliefs are fairly literal and biblically based.
Fundamentalistically based, at least, that there is a heaven, there are angels interacting in the world, and there's a literal devil and a hell.
Like, not abstract philosophical versions of those, much more physical reality stuff.
And that's where lots of the opposition for abortion and things come from, that community or that wing.
Look, they absolutely certainly still exist and are a strong force.
I guess my point is that characters like JBP appeal to both kinds.
As we see in this interview, he has it both ways.
He gets asked directly about the literal truth of some Christian things.
He has it both ways in which it's kind of congruent with whichever flavour of religion you prefer.
Yeah, I have a clip that speaks nicely to this and also his issue with definitions.
So let's start with this one.
Well, I would say the same problems with the question formulation obtained.
What do you mean by divine?
And also, what do you mean by Christ?
These are very, very difficult questions.
So that was in response to your question, asking him, you know...
Does he literally believe in the divinity of Christ, for example?
And the interviewer actually introduced that the evangelical people might like Jordan Peterson stuff, but be curious, does he literally believe it?
And so his answer is, you know, well, first...
It depends how you define divine and how you define Christ.
And this is a common thing, is retreating to, it's all about definitions.
And the thing that strikes me about that is like, on the one hand, okay, you want to get your definitions clear for what you're talking about, especially if it's a complex topic.
But redefining well-known terms constantly and defining them in a vague, It's supposed to be something that critical theorists and postmodern people do, and it's supposed to be bad,
right?
They redefine common words in the way that suits their purpose, or they argue that there is no agreed upon meanings.
They are happy using things in metaphorical ways.
So, yeah, it feels like there's at least one group of people that shouldn't be cheering on this way to respond to direct questions.
No, no, exactly.
And it dovetails with that other theme of sort of having it both ways where, you know, Jesus Christ is both a literal figure who did do miracles and all this stuff, but also he's like a Jungian.
He's an archetype.
He's not just a hero.
He's a meta-hero.
He's a meta-hero.
Yeah, exactly.
And so you just left kind of...
Oh, there's a perfect clip that relates to this.
This is in response to the topic of hell coming up.
Right.
People who believe in hell are terrified of hell for themselves.
And in my estimation, they should be because I also believe in hell.
Although...
What that means, again, is, you know, subject to interpretation.
Lots of people live in hell.
And lots of people create it.
It's so beautiful because he starts, like, he's actually making the point I made about, you know, there are people who have literal beliefs in hell.
It's a literal place.
And then his response is to say, and I believe in hell.
But then he realizes he's perhaps endorsed, like, that sounds like he's endorsing the literal one.
So he immediately goes, well, you know.
Depends what you mean by hell.
And then he starts talking about hell is all our people, right?
Or hell is, you know.
So it's like, but then didn't you just, you don't, you believe in hell in a metaphorical sense, right?
But not as a physical location.
And I don't think he would answer that.
Or, you know, he can't answer those things directly.
Yeah, no, I don't think he can.
So, yeah, he's a psychologist and he's obviously religious as well, although it's very unclear what kind of religion he has.
Except that it's Christian.
It is definitely Christian.
Yeah, he's very clear about that.
So, yeah, no, so the interesting dynamic is him sort of transforming and melding psychological or...
It's not contemporary psychology.
It's the psychology that's associated with clinical stuff and quite old-fashioned stuff like Freud and Jung.
But yeah, sort of melding these psychological definitions of things, like people creating their own hell.
With a religious conception of hell.
And yeah, it's just so nebulous.
I'm not really quite, I can't agree nor disagree with it because I'm not sure what's being said.
Yeah, and this doesn't only apply like this tendency to muddy the water and redefine things in unclear ways.
does not just apply to the religious content.
Because maybe in that sense, you could be like, well, he's talking about concepts which are themselves
and theological, so you have to give some leeway to do that.
But let me just play a clip of him talking about dominance hierarchies and how they, even though that's a topic that he talks about a lot, they aren't dominance hierarchies.
I use dominance hierarchy because that's a shorthand.
People understand what that means.
It's not clear that hierarchies are, in fact, dominance hierarchies.
So, I mean, so he goes on to justify this because he's basically saying, you know, they don't necessarily have to involve dominance.
But I just, it just, it means that, you know, even words that he invokes fairly consistently and which have well-known definitions, that you can't trust him because he might be using it just opportunistically.
I say dominance hierarchies, but I don't actually mean dominance hierarchies.
So it's impressive.
On the one hand.
Yeah, yeah.
It is impressive and it's difficult to comment on except to look at the rhetorical manoeuvres he's undertaking.
Yeah.
So I guess the point I want to make here, and it's something which actually applies across some of the other figures that we've looked at, less so James Lindsay, more so Eric and Brett Weinstein, that this use of strategic ambiguity so that you can...
Say something, but you can always retreat from it if you're oppressed or if somebody tries to pin you down by endorsing metaphorical and literal and alternative definitions that you can make quite provocative statements,
but then you can always say, well, yeah, but I wasn't talking about it in the way that you interpret.
Whereas James Lindsay-style cultural commentators or gurus...
I'm not doing that so much.
What he thinks is relatively clear, right?
You know, he specifies out what he thinks about critical theory.
So I think this use of strategic ambiguity is something that you see across a whole range of gurus, and it's really common in new age type.
Gurus, which aren't something that we've discussed or are focusing on, but the parallels are clear.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I guess it's like the Martin Bailey technique on steroids because, as you say, it is really, really useful because it allows you to make quite striking and seemingly very forceful comments when people are implicitly reading the quite strong.
But then if there are internal consistencies that people point out or there's pushback or it becomes difficult to defend, you roll back to the very vague and nebulous definition of the thing.
And then you can switch back, obviously, to the powerful one whenever you like.
So it's this back and forth, which, you know, JVP isn't the only one who does it.
It's obviously very common, but he is very, he does do it a lot.
Yeah, and there were some striking examples in this.
There was even an instance where Jordan Levine, the interviewer, essentially, I felt like he was giving him, like, what's that?
Soft pitch, or what do you call that expression when somebody throws you an easy question?
Softball, Chris.
Softball, yeah, soft pitch.
My baseball expertise is shining through there.
So a softball question, because he...
He asked him at one point about magic and he basically said like because Jordan Peterson had talked about how when somebody comes to embody logos in its fullest form that they can Do things which are magical.
And then the interviewer is like, well, wait, when you say magic, do you mean, you know, magic that it looks to us hard to explain and feats which seem incredible psychologically?
Or do you mean pulling rabbits out of a hat?
And that felt to me like, okay, he's going to endorse the first one and say, you know, obviously I don't mean that.
But that's not what he said.
So let me just play his response.
And when you say magical, you mean magical for all intents and purposes in terms of our perception as relatively naive human consciousness?
Or magical in like, you know, rabbits out of hats?
Well, certainly the former.
And God only knows about the latter.
So...
You know, that takes us afield into strange areas, like Jung's observations of synchronous events, for example.
We don't understand the world.
Like, I do think the world is more like a musical masterpiece than it is like anything else.
And things are oddly connected.
So he does, like, he means, yes, he means psychological magic or metaphorical magic, but literal magic, let's not rule that out.
That goes to his worldview, which I got a better understanding of after listening to this, which, as I said before, is in believing sort of an underlying...
He calls it theological, but he kind of means spiritual and matters of anything to do with morality and good versus evil and so on.
He believes in that...
Spiritual world underlying reality and influencing it in important ways.
And I think that's the one thing that we can say definitively about J.B.P.'s point of view after listening to this.
Yeah, there's some segments where he starts to explain why rationalists and Sam Harrison Dawkins in particular are wrong and that their belief Or the fact that they use evolutionary theory and that evolutionary theory involves forces of selection means that they cannot be materialists and be consistent.
That's right.
And his argument there was that selection, yeah, the action of selection is not a material thing.
Did I remember that right?
Yeah, hold on.
Let's let the man say it in his own words.
The processes that make up social interactions among social animals can't be reduced to their material substrate, but they're real.
And they're so real, they select.
So they're real.
And this is the problem I have with the people who are simultaneously reductionistic materialists and evolutionary biologists.
It's like, sorry guys, you don't get to be both.
So yeah, I think it's worth spending some time on this argument that he...
Because he presents it forcefully, as you can see there.
But I find it really silly.
Fundamentally silly.
Because if I'm trying to summarize it, essentially he's saying that selection is such a fundamental process in the world.
And maybe he's even talking about evolutionary processes as they apply to...
The formation of planets or something like that, right?
No, I think he's talking about biological evolution.
He's talking about...
Well, okay.
I was going to let him give him, but he is focusing on biological evolution on the planet.
So, yes, okay.
But even thinking that you can abstract evolutionary processes out into mathematical formulas, for example, and there's no reason that you couldn't apply them in some respect to different avenues.
Dawkins has talked about this as well, right?
I'm talking about processes of selection, not the specific process of evolution amongst biological things.
So, even if you accept that...
The part which doesn't make sense is he's very upset about people acknowledging that and then trying to tie that to the material world.
But as far as I'm aware of that, the only place that we've ever seen selective processes in action is the material world.
And reality, right?
We don't have any evidence for selective processes in the spiritual, metaphysical realm.
Yeah, no, it is a very silly argument.
You don't have to be a specialist evolutionary biologist to know that evolution is entirely...
Based on the material.
And, you know, the fact that some selective processes in social animals like people may well involve things like communication and social relationships and so on.
In Jordan's mind, because those things are, in his mind, derived from theology, this spiritual realm, then you can't understand evolution without appreciating its basis in theology, which...
Yeah, I thought his objection, although this is probably illustrating the point that, you know, you can interpret some abstract painting in so many different ways, and that's a lot of what he says.
But I thought his issue was more that the interactions between animals or these, like, broader processes that they fall into, they don't relate to an individual's behavior.
Like, so they...
They can refer to species levels effects or they can refer to processes that are only evident over generations.
And that means looking at the biophysical level is reducing things to where you can't observe those patterns.
Oh, yeah.
Well, he might have been saying that.
He knows.
But obviously, your point is that emergent phenomena and selection...
Yeah, and species evolution is like an emergent phenomena of just, you know, lots of little interacting.
Yeah, but my point is it emerges in the physical world.
Yes, that's what I was going to say.
I mean, that is obviously true.
Yeah, you can, you know, even the books where we write down our ideas are on paper.
So, like, there's this part where he nods to this argument.
And it's quite interesting because he's basically saying, well, people will say, you know, everything is tied to the material world.
And he's pointing out that's a bad argument.
So let me play him verbatim us.
Now you can say, well, it's associated with material phenomena.
It's like, well, yes, I wouldn't like to point out that that is hardly a brilliant observation.
Everything is associated with the material world because here we are in this world.
Right.
So this is like a tactic.
Where you acknowledge a criticism, but you don't actually explain why it's wrong, right?
And the other part that got me about this was he almost has insight.
You know, he's talking about linking things to the material world.
But when I heard him say that, it was like, it applies to his argument, right?
You can link any two things together if you try.
But is that...
The more important question is how convincing are the links that you draw?
But yeah, he's not making that point.
He's not making a good argument.
I think we've explained it enough, but I'm pretty sure most people listening would appreciate that you can understand evolution without requiring a theological level of analysis.
Yeah, in that sense, it's close to intelligent design, right?
Arguing that there's a mysterious process in evolution that you simply cannot explain as a materialist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So a point which derives from this, which leads us on to his colorful metaphors, is that alongside seeing rationalists and theorists or Sam Harris types as being fundamentally wrong,
He also takes issue with anybody who would credit the development of reason and democracy and the modern West to the Enlightenment.
And there's this really nice quote where he explains why that's wrong.
And it invokes a metaphor that he uses elsewhere.
So let me just play that for you, Matt.
What we're talking about here is something that's indescribably deeper.
than merely what happened in the Enlightenment.
I just see that, in some sense, as a sideshow of this crystalline process that's emerging.
So what's the crystalline process, Mike?
Can you explain that?
No, I cannot explain that.
Yeah, so perhaps not surprisingly, JVP is not a fan of attributing...
Good things to the Enlightenment or that general period of empirical or rationalist type of thought because he likes attributing the good things to Christianity.
As you know, there's some limited way in which that is true.
Obviously, Christianity had a big influence on that part of the world and through the...
The kinds of things that happened through the Reformation and so on, I'm sure there are all kinds of influences one could trace back.
But I guess what he's trying to do is really cast this grand narrative, a grand Christian narrative sweep of history in which pretty much anything...
And, you know, he likes the word logos a lot because that's kind of free speech in his mind.
It's also the word, but it's also consciousness and it's also the sense of order and good generally.
So he would see that expressed in the Enlightenment, if I'm understanding him right.
No, I'm confused.
So, okay, you're saying that the Enlightenment is just like an instantiation.
Off a deeper philosophical force, right?
The logo.
That's it.
You're totally getting Jordan Peterson now, Chris.
So this crystalline structure metaphor, I think, is connected to that, right?
Where he, in response to some...
I remember it as a fairly direct, straightforward back and forth between him and the interviewer.
And then he just comes out with...
Well, while you were talking about that, I was thinking about something.
And I want to play it because it took me by surprise when I first heard it.
Well, when you asked that question, I had a vision.
And the vision was of a plane of Earth, barren Earth, with a gigantic crystalline structure underneath, forcing itself upward and breaking up the dirt.
And that's exactly how I would answer that question.
It's that there's this great idea.
Attempting to manifest itself.
Like, it manifested itself, for example, in the decimation of slavery, right?
Because there was an idea, and the idea was, well, all men are created equal.
That's the idea.
And that idea is rooted in a much deeper idea, which is that there's a spark of divinity in everyone, and that's this logos capacity.
That enables people to name things and give form to the world, and that we're not to violate that.
And that emerged, you know, you could say, well, that emerged tremendously slowly, but didn't emerge slowly at all, man.
The idea is only, in its thoroughly formulated sense, the idea is only about 2,000 years old.
It emerged with incredible rapidity.
So that is one hell of a metaphor.
I mean, the thing that struck me as I was listening to that was that when I hear Jordan Peterson giving credit to white European Christianity for destroying slavery, I can hear a million critical race theorists crying out in pain.
Yeah, they may have played a small role in that history as well, right?
Yeah, and there is a point where the interviewer brings that up and asks him, how does he defend Christian atrocities?
And you might imagine that he responds to that and gives a clear answer, but I don't think I even have where he answered because there isn't a straightforward response.
There's winding paths.
So I can't even remember what his answer to that was.
Do you have any idea?
No, I don't think he really answered it.
I think he just went off on several tangents of tangents.
Oh, sorry.
Actually, I've just realized that what we just listened to.
That was his answer to that.
That was the answer.
So that was the initial answer was that question was posed.
And when he was asked about that, he imagined a giant crystal.
I think that's quite telling, right?
And then he goes on to the Enlightenment and how, you know, that isn't actually the answer.
So, yeah.
So does that answer the question correctly about, like, why we shouldn't also, you know, attribute to Christianity, say, the divine rule of kings or the...
The civilizing mission.
No, it's just the good stuff, Chris, that we attribute to Chris Dandy.
Yeah, no, I mean, the more I think about this, the more it strikes me what a poor fit JVP is with the IDW because he, you know, all of the stereotypical things that people attribute to the IDW, he really is not on board with them.
Yeah, I think he's an outlier.
In a bunch of respects, unless you include in IDW the conservative Christian wing, like Ben Shapiro and stuff.
I think he shares more in certain respects with their worldview than people like Dawkins and Harris.
Although even the Christian ones don't really emphasize it as part of their worldview.
I think WP is a little bit unique in the way that everything is linked to Christianity.
Another aspect of the worldview that it does relate to his interest in Christianity and which struck me repeatedly through this and also through the Twelve Rules for Life is that his characterization of what is the fundamental element of existence and being is remarkably bleak.
He's got a focus on the side of humanity.
Which is, you know, life is suffering and humans are depraved and dark creatures.
And like, he does acknowledge positive aspects.
Like, even in that, we should still, you know, fight for the light or that kind of thing.
But like, he spends a lot more time in detailing the fundamental nature of pain.
And that pain is the characteristic of existence.
I sure did.
So, yeah, I think you got a clip there with Descartes and he sort of starts talking about Descartes and you think he's going to talk about consciousness being, you know, I can perceive things and I'm aware of things and therefore, you know, that's kind of a starting point.
But it's not, is it?
It's suffering.
Suffering is the starting point.
Yeah, let's play it and we'll go from there.
You know, Descartes' great investigation into doubt led him to the conclusion that I think, therefore I am.
And I don't think by think, he meant think the way we think.
He meant more like the fact that I'm consciously aware is something that I cannot deny.
That's good, that's fine.
And more power to Descartes for taking it to that extreme and then producing.
What he did produce out of that.
But I don't, for me, when I investigated the structure of doubt, the conclusion that I drew was that there is nothing more real than suffering.
Yeah, so whereas Descartes may say, I think, therefore I am, for Jordan Peterson, it's, I suffer, therefore I am.
Yeah, and later on he emphasizes that happiness is more about...
In terms of how people act and behave, it's more about avoiding suffering rather than approaching and pursuing happiness.
And he's quite explicit about that.
Yeah, as we can hear here.
Because they're not differentiating.
There's the positive emotion end of being happy, and there's the not-suffering end of being happy.
And what people mean when they say that they want to be happy is that they don't want to be suffering.
Yeah, so it's the...
It's the cessation of negative emotions, not joy.
And I will say there's validity to that point.
When you're measuring affective response in psychology, you measure positive effect and negative effect.
And you can decrease negative effect without increasing positive effect, right?
So they are separate concepts, but it's his kind of relentless focus.
When people say they want to be happy, what they really mean is they don't want pain and suffering and fatigue and negative feelings.
I'm kind of like, is that true?
Are people really not talking about they want to enjoy life and have pleasurable moments and that kind of thing?
And the amount that he fixates on this, that this says more about him than necessarily the human condition.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to escape the suspicion that this is the philosophy of someone who has had a problem with opiates.
Or would go on to.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's clear that just personally he is someone who suffers from angst.
Yeah, it sublimates that in various ways, perhaps.
But sorry, Chris, I find it hard to say something cogent about that.
No, I think you did.
I think the point that, like, somebody who would become addicted to painkillers would think that the fundamental element of existence is pain.
And this is the core motivating factor, right?
It does.
Seems relevant.
So, look, I mean, this is more just an observation, more of a criticism or anything, but I guess, yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting points that comes out of this talk is very much that he has quite a bleak outlook, as you said.
It's quite dark, and he talks about the role of evil.
In people's lives, you know, the evil that they inflict on themselves.
But he also emphasizes that, you know, coming into contact with evil people, really, and that this is the cause of many issues.
So, you know, I'm not saying he's right or wrong about that, but the general picture is a very bleak one.
Yeah, and the link at the previous point that we were making, he talks about the issue of suffering and its fundamental nature to philosophers as opposed to materialists.
And let me just play.
From the perspective of the materialist, there's nothing more real than the atom, let's say.
From the perspective of a philosopher of being, alternatively, there's nothing more real than suffering.
That puts it in quite stark.
And I think you're feeling that we're not attacking him for his personal focus on pain.
I think the element of criticism comes from the fact that he's not describing this as just his personal philosophy or view.
He is instead attributing it to philosophers worldwide and to humanity writ large.
That's the issue.
It's making subjective.
Assessments and connections and portraying them as obviously true, fundamentally correct facts.
Yeah, like a broad consensus among every philosopher who's thought about it.
And, you know, there's certainly themes in philosophy, whether it's existentialists or Stoics or whomever, who do emphasize pain and suffering.
Yeah, so, you know, like it's not out there.
It's just an important, yeah, theme and flavor to JVP's way of thinking.
Yeah, and so just before we get off the pain, there's an aspect where he is discussing, like a lot of his pain comes up when he is talking about being and what he means by being and how this is a more fundamental force in the world than the kind of materialist one.
And listen to the way he describes pain from this perspective.
People's actions indicate.
That they believe in their own pain.
And that's undeniable.
You can't argue yourself out of it.
So it transcends rationality.
And so it's real.
It's an axiomatic tenant of religious systems, generally speaking, that life is suffering, which is a restatement of exactly the same thing.
And so being is the domain in which pain announces itself as real.
And that's not the material world.
It's not the material world.
Pain is not a material phenomena.
Right.
So the part for me where the argument breaks down is again that pain outside of human subjective experiences or, you know, or at least like some physical experience for some conscious being, it doesn't make sense because...
There isn't a fundamental force floating through the universe that's like, you know, pain.
Like, maybe in the Marvel conception of the universe there is a character that does that.
But in the world as we know it, that fundamental element of existence is like a subjective experience of conscious beings.
And he seems to regard it more as like a platonic ideal, which transcends rationality, transcends the material realm.
But like, how?
Yeah, look, obviously the issue that we're talking about is dualism, where JVP is coming at it from this sort of platonic, dualistic, whatever.
We're not philosophers.
We're not going to pretend to be.
But, you know, where these mental states and consciousness is a real thing in the same way that atoms are real.
And perhaps more real because that's the stuff that we actually experience.
Whereas science-y, materialist-y type people who aren't philosophers of mind like you and I say, hey, these are just emergent phenomena that arise out there.
We don't want to deal with the issue of dualism in this podcast, but yeah, it's just worth noting that JBP is definitely of the brand that treats these philosophical and theological and spiritual things as having A real basis in reality.
Yeah.
And I think the issue that I'm going to take is, so while there are many people in this audience, including himself, who are very upset with postmodern scholars for their denial of objective reality and their tendency to engage in obscurantism and play games with definitions.
All of the things that we're talking about fall into that category.
And there was this part where he's asked a question and to answer it, again, you know, it's like the crystal structure thing.
He begins by saying, well, let's think about the spiritual essence of a lemon.
When I heard it, I was like, why?
Why do I have to go down this tortured route thinking about the essence of a lemon and how it reveals the lack of a dichotomy between spirituality and reality?
And does thinking about a lemon do that?
So again, I think hearing the clip itself might help the audience understand the persuasiveness of this point.
The concept of material reality is a post-Enlightenment concept.
I mean, if you look, for example, at how the alchemists described things prior to the emergence of the material world, they discussed the nature of the essence of the lemon.
Well, you know, lemon is solar in essence.
It partakes of the sun.
Well, it needs the sun.
It's yellow like the sun.
It has the same stuff as the sun.
The sun is golden.
The sun is mercurial.
The sun is illuminating.
Like, it has all sorts of attributes that we would consider spiritual.
There was no distinction between the spiritual and the material.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So, all right.
Okay, look, I'm going to talk JBP's corner here for a moment.
And let's say he's merely being descriptive, right?
He's describing how alchemists and so on in the pre-scientific era approached things.
Lemons, for instance.
That's nothing wrong.
You've got to get past the lemon.
So, okay.
And, you know, that's valid.
Of course, a lot of magical thinking was kind of interwoven with natural philosophy for many hundreds of years.
But, you know, is he saying they were right?
Yeah, that's the issue.
I'm fine with you describing, you know, alchemists and what they...
Previously imagined as the sympathetic magic kind of things, right?
Like a lemon is yellow and the sun looks kind of yellow, so they're connected.
And it's a plant, so we know that it does derive like all this stuff.
That's fine.
But isn't he saying they were right?
Yeah, I think so.
I think he's saying that the truths arrived at through, you know, obviously religion is a pretty scientific.
And to a life degree, a way of understanding the world, I suppose.
You know, why do events happen?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
And so on.
Why has God angry with us?
Yeah, he has a lot of respect for the pretty scientific, for want of a better phrase, view of the world.
So to me, that sounds remarkably familiar for respect for other ways of knowing.
Which is supposed to be a boogeyman that the postmodernists are trying to sneak in.
Yeah, I totally agree with that point.
I mean, critical theory has been, and social justice has been famously described as a religion, as if that's a very bad thing.
But yeah, JVP for one is all for religion, and all for a religious way of constructing meaning.
Yeah, and there's a part later where the interviewer tries to get him to characterize the difference between himself and postmodern, because this critique has been raised before of his work.
There's a bunch of rules of the game, and this is why the postmodernists, by the way, are wrong about the infinity of interpretations.
They're wrong.
There is an infinity of potential interpretations, but there isn't an infinity of viable interpretations, and that's the issue.
That's the critical issue.
So what constrains the range of interpretations?
Well, let's say there's an infinite number of ways of construing the world.
Well, there are, and that's again the postmodernist take, right?
Not only can you interpret texts in an infinite number of ways, but the world is a text, and it can be interpreted in a number of ways, and so you can't define any particular mode of interpretation as canonical.
That's the fundamental claim.
Okay, let's take that apart.
Wrong.
And he argues that the distinction between himself and the postmodernists is that his realm of possible interpretations or meanings or whatever is constrained by the fact that he recognizes the forces of biological reality and evolution and that kind of thing.
But as we've already seen...
His commitment to a hardcore empirical evolutionary framework is relatively, you know, the grasp is not firm.
So I don't know.
And I also don't think that the argument of postmodern philosophers, who, again, I claim no expertise over, but I don't think the argument is like there is absolutely no...
Interpretation that is wrong.
No, no, of course.
That's a bit of a straw man.
I mean, where it's congruent with JPP is that they perhaps would emphasise the social construction.
And saying that overlaying the material reality, that the way things are perceived and the way it's negotiated socially is of great importance.
And there's obviously some truth to that, but you can't criticise them for that and also be a fan of JBP, basically, I think.
Yeah, and be consistent, at least.
There's definitely overlap in those perspectives.
Him simply saying that his reasoning is more constrained, it feels like a relatively weak argument.
Well, it's pretty weak given that he sees that the theological reality gives rise, that evolution has to encompass that theological reality.
So it's not much of a concession to say that he takes into account the capital S science of evolutionary biology when he sees that that is itself strongly based on theological.
Yeah, and so to take it to bigger themes, I think it's reasonable to focus, like, because if you sit back and just consume the talk, I think we've both experienced this.
If you don't question the connections being drawn and you can just follow along, in some sense, it's kind of convincing and compelling.
Because you just get this narrative story almost about how the world works, how all these things are connected.
And even if individual parts give you pause, it does come together in a coherent narrative.
And I think that's part of the appeal that he offers and which many of the gurus that we look at offer.
You're being inducted into this select group of people who can see...
These hidden connecting structures which apply across culture, across religion, across time, and are so fundamental.
So yeah, you might be talking about transgender people getting into the bathrooms, but actually it's connected to the eternal battle between the forces of good and evil.
Yeah, so he really does provide these...
In his words, maps of meaning.
It's not a logical or an analytical thing that he's doing.
It's a network of associations and feelings.
So I described it as poetry early on because I think that's why people like it and I think that's the mode in which he is communicating.
So that initial clip which we played where he explained political correctness in terms of the word and consciousness and chaotic potentials.
You know, which creates habitable orders, but also dissolves habitable orders.
Like, it's just a scattergun of associations, which if you sit back and let it wash over you, is quite...
It's sort of pleasant to listen to.
I find JVP annoying when I try to understand exactly what he's saying and what his argument is.
But if I don't try to do that, if I just sit back and listen to it as if it's art of some kind, then I can certainly see the appeal because it does give...
It's very vague, but it definitely gives kind of a sense.
A sense of meaning.
It gives a grand narrative without actually...
And when you're doing that kind of thing, it's actually a negative to be specific.
I can understand why it doesn't want to be pinned down because it's not about being pinned down and being specific.
It's about providing the flavour.
Yeah, yeah.
So like you say, staying away from the specifics is a good idea.
And if you're going to do specifics, you should make it into a narrative, which is compelling.
So a really good example of this, a clear one, and one I want to bring up, is when he's discussing how compelling and mysterious Christian iconography is.
So here's him discussing Christian iconography and its complexity.
The reason for that is it's too complicated for us to articulate.
So it's bottom-up.
It's bottom-up development.
It's like the iconography of Christianity is an attempt to express something that we're not yet smart enough to understand.
So we're not yet smart enough to understand Christian iconography.
And this relates to a story he tells where he went to an art museum.
And he spent some time, like, setting this up in, I think in New York, where there was a bunch of pictures from the Renaissance era, but people were coming to see a particular picture of Mary and Jesus.
And this is the end of that story.
And there were a lot of people standing in front of the painting looking at it.
And I thought, well, let's be a cultural anthropologist about this.
All right?
That museum is on some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
There's a tremendous amount of time and effort spent on producing the museum and fortifying it and guarding it.
And then people from all over the world make pilgrimages to stand in front of it.
And what they are looking at, they do not understand.
So what the hell are they doing there?
Why are they looking at those pictures?
Well, the answer is the pictures speak to their soul.
But not in the language that they understand.
Yeah.
Okay, so Chris, Chris, I'll go first.
So that sounds compelling to me.
You know, I've got this image of, yeah, you know, people coming and marvelling at these ancient...
And clearly, why would they go to all that trouble and spend so much time and effort to put themselves in their presence and be entranced by these objects?
They're clearly speaking to them, I think, and communicating to them on some kind of ineffable spiritual level.
That seems right to me.
Yeah, doesn't it?
A counter-argument to that point and see if we can circle it.
So when I lived in London, there was an art museum which is quite well known called the Tate Modern.
In that art museum, there is modern art, as the name might suggest.
And I have a feeling that there are a lot of people...
Coming from various places around the world to look at modern art, including things like, well, Jordan Peterson might be interested in this, but like Andy Warhol's lobster phone, right?
And setting aside the deep truth that lobsters communicate to us spiritually, there's plenty of art in there that I doubt that Jordan Peterson or others would regard as speaking.
Deeply to the soul.
Those things which are like a shade of blue or abstract objects arranged in unusual shapes.
So fixating on people come to look at a Christian painting and that gives us some important insight about how deep Christian iconography is.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the thing.
Jordan's analogies and argument sounds good.
It feels right when you listen to it.
As long as you don't think about it too carefully, which is, I think that's the mistake you made there, Chris.
Yeah, I have an entire folder from this episode, which is just called Questionable Claims.
And it's full of things like this.
But people might say, well, you're fixating on a small detail in his grander narrative.
But his grander narrative is just made up of a collection of these smaller details.
And this is the evidence that is used to support the bigger connections.
So that's an issue.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, we don't have time to go through every single metaphor and every single chain of reasoning, but the ones we've looked at are pretty representative of all of them, I think.
And yeah, they're pretty weak.
I mean, yes, you can put these things together and use it as the raw material with which to create a sweeping narrative.
And as a work of art or...
Or poetry, I think that's perfectly fine.
But it shouldn't be taken as any kind of rational argument or analytical argument.
It's an associative argument of feeling.
So, yeah, I think that's a fair criticism.
Yeah.
Okay, since you're not going to let me go through all the questions, I want two of the superstars from that category to mention.
Is that the sentiment which people attach to furniture, so like you've got a favorite chair or whatever, that is a more fundamental and important thing to understand about a chair than its material reality.
And you can dissociate the object itself from the...
Let's call it the subjective overlay.
But that's not such an easy thing to do and it's not so self-evident and it's not even obvious that what you're doing when you do that is coming up with a more accurate picture of reality.
Right.
So this is again him kind of saying like there's an ineffable element of existence and the sentiments that are attached to objects may be more important than the object's physical reality.
Right?
Now, when you make that kind of argument, my brain immediately goes like, important to who?
Or on what basis do you judge that?
Because sure, in regards to like individual people who have connections with the chair, there is memories attached to that and emotions attached to it.
But it isn't true to say that that's a fundamentally deeper truth about the chair than the fact that it's made from wood, right?
It just depends on your question or what you're asking.
But take the chair out of that context and just give it to someone who doesn't have all those connections
It's a reality that's in your head.
And as a psychologist, it's kind of surprising that GPP doesn't emphasize that.
Yeah.
And that's unobjectionable to say like a person has a, you know, psychological connection to an object, which can be fundamentally more important than the object.
But that isn't what he says.
That's only, you know, the Ma and Beely argument.
And there's another illustration where he's talking about a pro footballer.
It's like the life of a pro football player.
Is that real life?
Or is that a game?
Well...
At some point, the game is life.
Right.
And so then the question is, well, what should the game be?
And Piaget's answer was, well, the game should be one that everyone agrees to play.
Okay, so that's part of a bigger conversation related to rituals and rules and the way that they are a microcosm of society.
But the point I want to make in highlighting that analogy is this thing about, is a professional footballer...
Playing a game or living life.
That relies on this kind of metaphorical trick or linguistic trick that a footballer's livelihood is derived from playing a game.
But he's using it to make a point that games and life are in some ways kind of interconnected and hard to distinguish.
But that specific example...
It just relies on the fact that somebody who plays a game professionally earns their livelihood from a game.
It feels like a cheap trick of an argument.
Because obviously a pro footballer is playing a game and they get paid to play the game.
There isn't a mystery there.
No, no.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
It's the linguistic tricks, like playing on double meanings of...
Words like game and using that to support, you know, an argument, which is a pretty, it's a pretty, it's a stretch of an argument and you can't, it's just to support it using pretty weak tools like that is not very good.
Yeah, okay.
So look, we've went down a bunch of negative roads and we've probably, Deeply offended all the Peterson fans in our audience.
So maybe we should shift back at least for a minute just to say about some of the reasonable or semi-reasonable stuff he says or any of the things that you find.
I have some ideas, but maybe you have your own.
Oh, I did.
I did have some positive things and I've kind of forgotten them after our long diatribes.
Okay, maybe I can get you started.
So one of the things that I thought he does do well is that when he's talking about psychology, he's at one point arguing about the problems with our measurement instruments for when we talk about well-being.
He kind of goes into a methodological critique of the psychological measures of well-being and how they're imprecise and how our measurement instruments...
Are basically not up the scratch when it comes to psychological science to make extreme statements.
That's a big problem for someone who wants to do scientific measurement.
It's like, okay, we're going to increase well-being.
Hey, no problem.
How are you going to measure it?
And whose well-being?
And mine?
Okay, mine now?
Mine next week?
Mine next month?
Mine in a year?
How about 10 years?
How about 50?
And who chooses how to measure it?
Well, precisely.
And my well-being in relationship to my significant other, in relationship to my family, in relationship to the community, at all those levels of temporal distinction, you're going to measure that, eh?
Good luck.
And I thought that and some of the other parts where he talks about psychology are good and accurate and, like, important points.
And similarly, when he's criticising Sam Harris for having a worldview and a set of suppositions which he doesn't acknowledge as being important to arrive at his conclusions, that all seems reasonable.
The facts themselves cannot tell you that.
And that's why you have an a priori interpretive structure, which is, of course, what Kant was insisting upon.
And Sam...
Doesn't take that into account, and that's mind-boggling to me because that a priori interpretive structure is the sum total of the effect of our evolutionary history.
So, like, what about that?
So, I mean, I just wanted to highlight that he clearly does have, you know, expertise, including in psychology, and he can make well-argued, coherent points.
Yeah, it is possible.
I think if he's talking about some specific or technical thing, then he's well able to string an argument together.
I think it's more that the subject of his attention is so big and broad and so all-encompassing with the theory of life stuff that I think he just overreaches terribly.
So I think if I was to...
Turn it around and try to defend him a little bit and almost qualify a lot of our criticisms is that in his emphasis on the subjective and subjective experience and meaning and so on, I dispute the terms like theological and casting things in terms of good and evil and so on.
But in terms of that subjectivity, as a clinical psychologist and as someone who writes self-help books, In many ways, it's very right and natural for him to have that obsessive concern with that non-material aspects of life.
So that's not controversial or particularly bad in as far as it goes.
Would you agree with that, Chris?
Yeah.
If you regard him as a theologically inclined self-help guru, It becomes a lot more tolerable.
The issue is that he's also simultaneously treated as an empirical psychologist who's very science-orientated, science and evidence-orientated.
And those two hats don't sit neatly together.
There's a torture metaphor.
You know, that's right.
And so the feedback I get from people who like JVP, I don't think that they're Reading him or listening to him and taking the stuff as literal truth or literal facts about the world.
I mean, well, I think most of them, most of the time.
I think they tend to take it as stimulating things to think about.
So I suspect that many people who like his work...
I'm not maybe taking his words at such face value or taking them as seriously as we are.
We're taking what he's saying, what he's arguing for, and saying, does that stack up?
Does that actually make sense?
Have you considered alternative explanations?
Is it actually supported by the examples and metaphors that you're giving?
And it's usually not.
But if you take it as...
As kind of inspirational poetry or self-help, that's a much lower bar.
And it's a bit like the modern art you were talking about, the lobster on the telephone or a big blue square.
You know, if it speaks to you, then, you know, all is well and good.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, like another point that I think people would probably bring up if they've watched it is that...
Towards the end of the interview, he does acknowledge quite openly his possibility to be mistaken and that he's really thinking out loud.
Most of the time I have a skeleton.
There's the argument.
There's a skeletal outline.
I see how I'm going to get from point A to B to C. And then when I'm talking, like today, it's an exploration.
It's not...
Here's what I think, it's right, and you should believe it.
It's like, no, I'm trying to rectify my errors and extend what I know when I'm speaking and when I'm listening.
And so I think that genuinely is what I'm doing.
And I genuinely don't want to give people advice.
It's something I've learned, not least by being a psychotherapist.
It's like, your destiny is not mine.
To mess with.
I don't want to be responsible for your decisions.
What if I'm wrong?
I actually think, you know, that's a very positively expressed epistemic humility and acknowledgement that he is riffing a lot of the time, just connecting things and seeing where they go.
But the issue I would take is that...
That comes at the end of the interview.
And it reminds me of when Eric and Brett Weinstein issued at the end of their 2R episode where they basically allege all this misconduct by Carol Greeter, you know, targeting Brett.
And then at the end they say, of course, we might be wrong and we don't, you know, everybody's memory is fallible and there's two sides to every story.
But they...
They don't display any of that humility throughout the episode, as we showed on the first episode we released.
And the same applies here, that there is very little of this epistemic humility throughout the preceding hours.
Exactly.
That's my problem, too, that throughout the whole thing, there's no qualification.
There's no caveats.
It's very vehement and as if you can't possibly disagree with this because it's just so logically forceful is the impression, even though, as we've talked about, it's usually not.
So I really liked what you played there.
That sounded great to me in and of itself.
I remember that from the video.
But, yeah, as you say, it's not enough just to issue that disclaimer.
At the end.
Because it is like having your cake and eating it too, isn't it?
It's like the conspiracy hypotheses.
And there's his position as a self-help guru.
And I also find in this some segments where it's really clear why people would form such a personal attachment to him.
Because he...
I don't think this is feigned or insincere.
I think he is somebody that gets emotionally invested and who is very, very personally involved in his philosophy.
He really believes it.
And there's this point where he talks about how he wants to help people.
And I thought it was quite...
I don't know the word poignant or quite telling of his approach.
I truly want the best for what wants the best in you.
Yeah.
And people love that.
They love that, man.
If you're interacting with people with that ethos in mind, they find that, well, I think that's partly why people are responding so positively to my videos, because that ethos informs the videos.
I'm saying, I'm trying to figure out what's the best for us.
Really?
Like, the best.
That's endearing.
Yeah, the final thing I'll say on that theme is that I find that aspect of him where he is clearly thinking aloud and thinking as he's talking.
And I think it's true, you know, what he said about he's figuring stuff out.
I mean, the downside of that is, of course, he's just kind of, he's just riffing.
He's like improvising all the way through.
And that's a good reason.
That's a prime reason why a lot of it doesn't make sense.
But just in terms of a subjective impression, I actually find it a little bit endearing, you know, that willingness to think on your feet and sort of talk, you know, think aloud.
Yeah.
I sometimes use the same technique at lectures, right?
So I'm not knocking.
Someone for doing that and he deserves credit for acknowledging it.
It's, yeah, I think it just sits uneasily with the level of certitude that he displays in other segments and in general throughout his material.
He basically gives the impression, look, I've thought about these things a lot and my conclusions are not reached lightly.
So treat them that way.
That might be true, but I'm not sure that he's done the requisite critical reflection on a bunch of the ideas which are now pretty...
Well, look, I mean, it's a bit like that Mott and Bailey thing we talked about before, where he has it both ways.
He means both the very forceful and concrete-specific thing, but you could also take it as the very nebulous, insubstantial thing.
So he applies that to himself and his own material.
And when he's actually presenting the ideas, it's absolute certainty.
But it's also just speculation at the same time.
So you can't really have it both ways, can you?
Yeah, yeah.
He has an emotional investment in his audience and expresses it, right?
And whenever we're talking about the techniques that people can use, it's not to infer that those techniques are used insincerely.
But just that they do have a powerful effect on the audience.
I think this is why people in part respond so defensively to him being criticized or whatever because they feel that his heart is in the right place.
It could well be.
It's hard to know, isn't it?
But I agree with you that he is passionate and feels very strongly and I'm sure...
That's part of the appeal.
Well, he breaks down in tears in multiple times in his audiobook, right?
And the thing is, when you're recording an audiobook, presumably it isn't live.
You could go back and edit that out, but he chose to leave in the edits where he's in tears in multiple times.
So I think the emotional displays...
And I haven't watched most of the content on his YouTube channel, but I gather that is something which happens.
On the one hand, it's to his credit to show emotional fragility or expressiveness publicly, given that he's seen as this quite strident conservative figure.
But on the other hand, it does feel a little bit potentially manipulative.
Yeah, there's a charitable interpretation and a slightly less charitable interpretation, isn't there?
I think we'll have to remain agnostic on that one.
Yeah, just a point to note.
So, okay, let's return to something fun.
All right, Matt.
And so for something fun, we've kind of already discussed it a bit, but I think looking at the way that...
Some of the material really comes across as almost indistinguishable from New Age, kind of crystal fair stuff.
It's hard to overstate how much that is the case.
So I'm just going to play you a clip that might illustrate that.
If you contaminate the structure of your being with...
False information with deceptive practices and you willfully blind yourself, then you're going to be led astray by your sense of meaning.
You're going to pathologize it.
So part of the issue here is that you don't want to interfere with your ability to see because you'll wander off the road into a ditch.
Okay.
Yeah, well, those are some words.
Yeah.
So how do you interpret that?
Yeah, it's almost like that New Age idea of you need to open your third eye in order to be guided along the correct path.
Yes, it is like that.
So funny you should mention.
Let's just listen to one more.
Because we're evolved for that, we can tell when it's happening.
And that's what the sense of meaning is.
The sense of meaning is it's our third eye, you could say.
Your eyes blind you because they only see what's here right in front of you now.
They blind you.
And so you have to use modes of perception that transcend mere vision in order to conceptualize being properly.
And one of those modes is the sense of meaning and engagement.
So the third eye.
You do have to open your third eye.
You do indeed, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, look, that is very Deepak Chopra-esque.
He's definitely got a real interest in the, I have to call it the ineffable.
We've talked about this earlier on, but he really has, much like a traditional New Age guru, he's very interested in these deep truths that are so profound that they...
It can't be made explicit.
So it's true mysticism, spiritualism, I suppose.
Yeah.
Okay, so I promise this is the last one I'll play.
But speaking to that, I actually have a clip which I call Deepak Peterson and explicitly discusses mystics.
So, okay, you can handle one more, right, Matt?
Yeah, bring it on.
We don't understand ourselves.
That's obvious.
We're more than we can understand.
Yes, by a tremendous margin.
And we're trying to understand ourselves.
And the artists and the mystics are at the vanguard of the development of that understanding.
And they come up with ideas that are clearer than mere feelings, but are not yet clear.
Clearer than mere feelings, but are not yet clear.
Yeah.
I mean, that's just one example out of many thousands, I think, during this talk.
To me, you know, it feels like an over-reliance on metaphorical and mystical-sounding language to imbue points that you want to make with a profundity.
Because there's charitable interpretations of what he's saying, which are like...
The human sense of meaning derives from the evolutionary history, which is deeper than any individual person and goes across generations.
So focusing just on your individual life doesn't tell you about how certain cognitive architecture evolved in humans or so on, right?
There's ways that you can interpret this in a meaningful, coherent sense.
That also applies in the case of a lot of what New Age gurus are saying as well.
There are interpretations of them which are less mystical and more metaphorical.
And he seems to jump back and forth depending on the argument as to whether he's being an empirical scientist or whether he's actually talking about an ineffable...
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, you know, for instance, he says that it's very difficult for us to understand ourselves, that we don't have the resources to truly understand ourselves.
And, you know, that's an aphorism, but it's true, right?
You know, it's true on a certain level.
It's just that it's true in that kind of New Age-y, superficial way, which is, yes, but so what, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so switching topics slightly.
Another example, a kind of clear example, which brings this out, this problem about the tension of metaphorical versus literal interpretations comes when he gets pushed on the issue of the resurrection of Jesus and whether it is a real event or a metaphorical one.
So maybe I'll start us off with a clip of him discussing this.
Did his body resurrect?
I don't know.
I don't know.
The accounts aren't clear, for one thing.
What the accounts mean isn't clear.
I don't know what happens to a person if they bring themselves completely into alignment.
I've had intimations of what that might mean.
We don't understand the world very well.
We don't understand how the world could be mastered if it was mastered completely.
We don't know how an individual might be able to manage that.
We don't know what transformations that might make possible.
So did he badly resurrect?
He is saying that we don't know the world like we think we do.
And, you know, if you master meaning...
What kind of transformations are possible?
Yeah, actually, it reminds me of the, you'd know more about this than me, Chris, but the Buddhist kind of ambiguity about sort of what happens when you truly achieve enlightenment.
I think there are some mystical interpretations which say that when a human being accomplishes that, then they...
They kind of have supernatural powers, just like Jordan Peterson is heavily implying about Christ having fully come completely into alignment and mastered meaning and therefore be able to accomplish things like coming back from the dead.
Am I right in thinking that's a bit of a Buddhist thing as well?
Yeah, a lot of religious traditions, and Buddhism is no exception, going along the path to enlightenment includes...
The development of supernatural powers in classical texts.
And there's also various traditions, like the Theravada tradition typically does acknowledge that the Buddha was a human who reached enlightenment and entered nirvana.
But the later...
Or, God, I'm getting into Buddhist sectarian disputes, but the Mahayana traditions, which are possibly later, but at least are splinter sects.
They instead saw the Buddha as a being that was putting on the display of being a human, but was actually already enlightened.
And I like, so there's many layers in these traditions, right?
It's not just Christianity which has this ambiguity.
Yeah, but that's the point, isn't it?
That at this sort of abstract level that Jordan Peterson is speaking to, it's a kind of a theme which you see in New Age stuff, in Buddhist stuff, and in this kind of transcendental Christian stuff as well.
Yeah, and in the interview, Jordan Levine...
Pushes him by saying, right, but fundamentalists or Christians want to know, this metaphorical discussion is all well and good, but do you literally believe that Christ was reborn and that he rose from the dead?
So let's hear him grapple a bit more with that question.
Is his resurrection real?
Well, his spirit lives on.
That's certainly the case.
In what sense do you mean spirit, just to qualify that?
Well, let's imagine that a spirit is a pattern of being.
And we know that patterns can be transmitted across multiple substrates, right?
Vinyl, electronic impulses, air, vibrations in your ear, neurological patterns, dance.
It's all the translation of what you might describe as a spirit, right?
It's that pattern.
It's independent of its material substrate.
Well, Christ's spirit lives on.
It's had a massive effect across time.
I'll jump in because that's returning to the kind of thing that really annoys me as someone who gets grumpy with poor argumentation because he's asked specifically about whether Christ literally resurrected and then he redefines...
Living on, in terms of the spirit living on, in terms of any kind of transcribed substrates and patterns of writing or dance or whatever, and says that's the spirit and therefore avoids the direct question and instead redefines the word lives on to be such a broad general thing that the answer is kind of meaningless.
So anyway, that triggered me.
Sorry, Chris.
No, that's all right.
And I mean, I think spending a couple, you know, 10 seconds or so to list the different patterns of vibrations that exist might be somewhat deflection from the main question.
And in that case, in essence, he's essentially endorsing the metaphorical interpretation, right?
Well, his influence exists in the world.
And by spirit, I mean the vibration of his teachings.
But there's another part.
So this section goes on for quite a while.
And this is him talking a bit more, I think, maybe arguing against that a little bit.
So let's see.
Is there something more than merely metaphorical about the idea of being?
Yes, there is, because those are associated with physiological transformations.
What's the ultimate extent of that?
That's a good question.
You know, the question is, what happens to the world around you as you increasingly embody the Logos?
And the answer to that is, we don't know.
So, I'm just going to say, that wasn't the question, right?
The question has been redefined there.
And again, it's like this slipping in and out of endorsing a kind of magical, literal, physical resurrection, or at least dancing very, very close to that.
And then like slipping immediately back to metaphorical mastery or...
And like the different meanings that that can attend to.
But at the very beginning, he acknowledges, is it something more than a metaphor?
Is it a physical thing?
Yes.
But by the end, he's back to talking about something which sounds fairly metaphorical or conceptual.
I mean, there's a pattern I've noticed that just occurred to me just now, which is that when he's being slippery and avoiding giving a direct answer.
That's when he tends to use those terms of phrase that he's well known for.
Those things like, that's a good question.
Or, you know, that's very complicated, actually.
That's much more complicated.
Or, we don't know, you know.
So, like, I see that he uses those a lot.
Yeah, I really like the, I mean, like might be a strong word, but I get enjoyment from the fact that he so often engages in Socratic dialogues with himself.
And it leads to him often saying, somebody presented a point in the end.
So it's like, no, you're wrong, man.
He has an interview there, but he still uses these little internal dialogues.
And I think to some extent that's reflective of his mind, that he's...
He's constantly kind of battling back and forth.
And in fairness, he is usually falling on one side in those arguments.
So it's kind of a rhetorical technique.
Yeah, like you say, it comes out more on certain subjects than on others.
And I'll have to say, though, I kind of, like, just objectively, I enjoy it.
You know, like, it's quite engaging and a little bit, I said before, endearing.
Those rhetorical patterns that he employs, it's like, when I actually pay attention, like I am now, I go, hang on, you're using this to actually avoid saying anything concrete.
But when I just listen to it casually, I think those mannerisms are part of the appeal.
So it's like some people will say it's a technique, but no, it's not.
No, it's more complicated than that, Chris.
It's very complicated.
Yeah, it's more complicated.
I think you can both enjoy it and appreciate the rhetorical value that it lends his arguments.
Both things are possible, Matt.
You can have both the best of both worlds.
I can hold both those ideas in a state of sort of quantum superposition, Chris.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, exactly what I was saying, Matt.
Okay, and this point about the discussion about the resurrection and stuff, and this talk is about religion, which means that it features quite a lot, but the extent to which he is interested in theology and Christianity,
It can't be overestimated.
And it leads me to this point I want to discuss where he's strongly emphasizing throughout many of the segments the unique aspect of Christianity.
And that he ties this in, like, you know, Christianity and to a large extent the West are seen as fundamentally connected.
Okay, so let me play a clip that might highlight the kind of thing I'm talking about.
The Western imagination has been at work for a very long time constructing up a meta-hero and also his adversary and clarifying the nature of those.
And that has been done in a sufficiently delineated way so that it's produced a major impact.
On the manner in which our societies are constructed, because the cornerstone of our society is respect for logos, and that's instantiated in the doctrine of respect for free speech.
It's also instantiated in the doctrine that every individual has transcendent value, which I do believe is something that the West has developed to a far greater degree than any other culture that currently exists and probably ever existed.
That's a good example of the ability to jump from one topic to the next to the next and connect them all together.
He's going from Christ as a meta-hero to him being an instantiation of the fundamental force of logos and that being the basis for free speech and also connected to the development of human rights,
which reached their epitome in Western civilization.
And he's good.
At that, at putting it all together in a narrative.
But I think that the degree to which he focuses on the Western and Christian having these exceptional qualities, to me, it's an example of availability heuristic where he knows these traditions well and he's...
He's able to, you know, draw connections and link examples to it.
And it isn't like Christianity is not connected to the development of the West.
But like we've talked about earlier, the notion that respect for individuals is a feature only or like epitomized most in the West.
I don't know.
Do you find it convincing?
Well, you know, yeah, as you said, he links together.
He's very good.
He links together about seven different.
As you said, it's partly...
The availability heuristic.
Look, I mean, so putting aside the quality of his argument, which is not great, but it's a very short argument where he's putting together so many things, this could never be that good.
You know, I think the interesting thing to note is that he is a Western exceptionalist.
He does believe that there's something very special and unique in the West, in capital letters.
And he attributes that to Christianity, which I personally don't buy.
I think there are things that are distinct.
What about the emphasis on the individual?
Because, I mean, when he's talking about respect for truth and meta-heroes, I can't help but think of all...
There's right speech in the Buddhist tradition and you can find...
Plenty of exhortations that the individual has to master themselves or that mastering the passions of the mind and so on.
I think that there are concepts in other traditions.
If you look, and it doesn't mean that they're all equally distributed, but this notion that it's Christianity that led to the development of individualism.
In the West, I know that there's mainstream scholars who make this point too, right?
Like Joe Henrik is probably the most recent, arguing that the weird psychology, the so-called weird psychology that we see in Western societies, which include a focus on individualism, he traces it to the ban of cousin marriages in the Western Catholic Church.
And this is a book that's just come out and articles that were published in Nature, which caused some controversy.
But I mention that to say that he's not the only one drawing connections and there are mainstream scholars who argued for these kind of things as well.
But I don't know.
I'm not expressing it well, but I just find that there's a kind of tautological quality.
To the arguments, because it's looking at what happened in history and what came before and saying, well, that had to cause that and be the basis for that.
But the historical dice only gets rolled once.
So if it was a Buddhist civilization who had developed gunpowder to a greater extent, it was like Buddhist civilizations that I think discovered it.
But if they had dominated for various different reasons, maybe we would have a human rights system that is less about the...
Divinity of individual people and being recreated in Christ's image and more about respect for all beings and sentient life.
Yeah, of course.
And Buddhism has got that very important tradition of focusing on internal individual enlightenment rather than as a thing to strive for, which is obviously an individual focus.
Look, I think what you're saying is obviously true, which is that...
In short, I don't know to what degree individualism is a distinctive characteristic of Western culture as compared to other cultures.
I know there's a lot of research on individualistic versus collectivist cultures and so on but there's a real danger to looking at history with the motivation.
Of finding a single dramatic sweep.
You know, history is extremely complicated and isolating the causal factors is hard.
So I'm sure there are historians who argue it both ways in terms of the degree to which Christianity inculcated a greater sense of individual rights or individual freedoms or whatever in European countries.
I'm not really sure.
Yeah, I guess my broader argument is that A whole bunch of the stuff that he presents is arguments which are already known and which fall broadly within the category of Western exceptionalism or Christian apologetics.
And there's a well-known argument for the division between science and religion called non-overlapping.
By Stephen Jay Gould, which argues that science deals with the material and the real world, and religion is more to do with the spiritual realities and metaphors, and doesn't encroach on that.
And there's a point where Jordan Peterson essentially makes the exact same argument.
And some of it's also philosophical confusion, in my estimation.
It's like, once the rationalists and the empiricists got going...
You know, we started to formulate a very powerful doctrine of the objective world, and that doctrine appeared to stand in opposition to the doctrine that was put forth by the Christian Church, the mythological doctrine,
let's say, if you assume that what the mythological doctrine was was a variant of that kind of empirical truth, which it wasn't.
Yeah, I mention that to point out that It's carving out this realm for religion where it's metaphorical and mythological and it doesn't encroach on the empirical sciences and those are different domains.
But then, as we see later, as we've seen, you know, with the resurrection discussion, there is empirical claims and there are encroachments on scientific topics and debates that impact.
Like, creationism and intelligent design are the clearest examples, but there's plenty of others, and it simply isn't the case that the majority of the world treat all their religious ideas as metaphorical,
mythological beliefs.
And furthermore, Jordan Peterson doesn't either, because earlier on he...
He talked about how that theological level had to be influencing evolution, so we have to take that into account.
You can't ignore that.
You can't be a materialist and an evolutionary biologist, was his argument.
And yeah, as you say, pretty much all of the religions did make or do make strong materialist claims about literally creating the creation of man, for instance, mankind.
Humankind, I should say.
And that was only made kind of abstracted once the evidence against that just mounted up and it became an untenable thing.
For an educated person to have.
So JVP seems to be an apologist, as you say, because he's working hard to, he'll sometimes rely on that non-overlapping magisteria idea to carve out this distinct realm for theology, but he'll sometimes rely on that levels of reality idea where he puts theology down there at the most fundamental.
Yeah, yeah.
So I guess we've banged the drum of his contradictions and his Christian-centric obsession, I might put out.
Or if you want to be nicer, you could say fascination.
Yeah, his deep fascination with Christianity.
We've banged that drum hard enough.
So maybe for the last point, so we don't end up with like a four-hour podcast, it's worth turning to some of the more grounded issues and some of the stuff that probably has made him a more controversial figure,
which only really gets touched on at the end of this interview.
And this is his connections.
Or his ideas being taken up or co-opted by the far-right or alt-right communities and the issues that he has with the left and the far left.
So let's get started by, I'll play a clip with him talking about the left and what the issue is with them.
I don't believe that what I've been discussing has been co-opted.
To any significant degree, I think that what has happened is that at this time and place, for some reason, it isn't the people on the left who are particularly open to the message, but that's because I think that they're far more gripped by the totalitarian spirit than people aligned along the rest of the spectrum.
Right.
So that's him pushing back on the suggestion, you know, that his message has been co-opted.
And he thinks that's been exaggerated by various commentators.
But you can also hear there that he's basically saying for him that in the modern era, the totalitarians that he sees around and which are concerning are the left.
And it's not so evident that it's a problem on the other ends of the spectrum.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's pretty hard to say look at a...
A left political leader like Joe Biden and have any serious concerns about totalitarianism, isn't it?
Yeah, I think this is a perennial issue that there's the concern about the far left woke vanguard and their influence, but a lot of it comes down to them being presented as the secret powers behind the moderates.
Like Clinton or Biden, that they're just the figureheads for the actual powers, in American politics at least.
In British politics, you had Corbyn, who at this time probably was the leader of the Labour Party, but he didn't get elected.
And now Labour again has a moderate leader in Keir Starmer.
So there's this notion that the totalitarian...
The ideology of the kind of woke left will lead to a new Maoist regime.
But there's a distinct lack of concern, and this is part of what has got him in trouble, with the existing far-right regimes, several of which are in actual power.
And this is instantiated in his visit to Orban in...
Hungary, who is residing over an actual regime which is rolling back freedoms and, you know, curtailing the press, closing down universities.
But he was able to go there and have, you know, a friendly chat with him about the importance of Christianity and Western civilization.
So, like, if you wanted to concede for the sake of argument that there was...
Let's say some concerning authoritarian tendencies on the extreme end of the left.
If one conceded that.
Yeah, I think that's fine.
Okay, so I think what you're saying is if one concedes that, sure, but a complete myopic obsession with just that and a complete obliviousness to the very widespread and large-scale tendency towards authoritarianism on the right.
Is not a sensible position.
Yeah, and it leads people to question, essentially, were Peterson characters himself as non-political?
It doesn't come across like that whenever you're kind of downplaying the extremism that exists on the right and elevating that which exists on the left.
That comes across as...
Partisan politics.
And this is a clip of him talking about why he sees the left as the greater issue in the modern world.
The campuses have not been infiltrated by right-wing radicals.
Not at all.
Not in the least.
The campuses.
Yeah.
Well, the problem with that is that's where the campuses, the humanities, let's lay it out again.
Theology at the bottom, philosophy after that.
Well, that's where the humanities are.
The humanities are nearest to the foundation of our culture.
And they're completely dominated by radical leftists, postmodern neo-Marxists.
And that's not my opinion.
That's well documented.
There aren't even conservatives in those domains, let alone right-wingers.
I mean, that shows, kind of following in the footstep of James Lindsay last week, that his concern is really with...
The influence of the left and the radical left on education and that he sees, you know, postmodern neo-Marxist philosophy as infecting society from academia outwards and from culture outwards.
And that is what justifies his unrelenting focus on that topic.
What do you think?
Well, I think there's a sense in which he's right and a sense in which he's wrong.
So I guess the sense in which he's right is when you look at surveys of academics, then yes, we are generally strongly on the progressive side of politics.
That's true.
So it's fair to say that left-wing ideas have a command in the academy that right-wing ideas don't.
And, okay, so again, I'm trying to make concessions.
So the other thing that's fair to say is that, yeah, that...
Political slant is evident in many ideas that come out of academia and are influential in society.
So yeah, the people who go to university and get degrees, especially fancy universities, are the people who end up running companies and being in managerial, administrative and political positions and so on.
So that's the sense, I guess, in which he's right.
I guess the sense in which he's wrong.
That's not a reason to completely ignore.
Society and politics is bigger than just the academy.
And it's true that the right-wing populists tend to have the greatest amount of popularity with people who don't go to university or don't have the highest levels of education.
That doesn't make them any less concerning.
And don't you think there's this element about this, which is people are complaining about the left-wing elitists in academia and their ironclad grip over society and how we need to counteract their harmful ideologies being spread.
But it all rests on the notion that it's these quite academic ideas and the way that they're instantiated in activist movements, The most important thing in the modern world and in politics.
And it strikes me as a thing that conservative academics or just intellectuals would inevitably find more intuitively appealing that it's about these philosophies and ideas and debating them.
And it's not just about political rhetoric and emotional appeals.
The rise of xenophobia or these kind of things.
It is more about these quite rarefied philosophical approaches.
And that's what we need to talk about, focus, understand.
And those are the big threats in the modern world.
Yeah, and I agree with you.
I think when you're an armchair opinionator and someone who reads and writes for a living...
Or like Jordan Peterson, you work in a university, then the stuff you see is the kind of more rarefied stuff.
But the stuff that's on TV and the stuff that's actually relevant to most people is not the same stuff.
So you get...
Like the apprentice.
Exactly.
It's not popular culture.
Yes, it does feed in, but even then, the degree to which it's actually causal.
There might be some sort of ready-made buzzwords that apply, but I'm not sure that the arrow of causality is completely in that one direction.
No, and I think it's important to remember that this interview is taking place in the context of the first year of Trump's presidency, and Boris Johnson is, I think at this time, the leader, or if not, it's Theresa May.
And Brexit has been, you know, the wheels are moving.
So this is not an era in which the...
The left are politically dominating the landscape.
No, that's right, because people who don't have PhDs get to vote too.
So, yeah, and, you know, the other thing where I think he's wrong is that he, we've talked about this before, but he, like a lot of these figures, they characterize academia and the social sciences as totally in the grip of cultural Marxists or whoever.
And, you know, we don't need to labour this point, but...
It's just not, you know.
Psychologists are a social scientist and psychology is not like that.
It really isn't.
Yeah, there's a very weird comment he makes right about the end where he says something like conservatives can be labelled right-wing and he basically suggests that that's invalid.
There's not even any conservatives.
I mean, maybe you can call conservatives right-wing.
I think you've got to, you know, you're pushing your luck when you do that.
I was just listening to you going, well, who is right-wing if conservatives aren't?
So, like, there seems to be at least some confusion about the relative proportions of people and the political spectrum.
Because, like, I think conservatives are right-wing.
Like, that's a fairly uncontroversial thing to say.
Yeah, yeah.
Agreed.
All right.
Well, so we're probably like on the eighth bar now.
So maybe we should bring it to a close with our concluding thoughts.
So since I enjoy putting you on the spot and forcing you to do this first, Silma, how would you summarize all of this and all of the preceding discussion in a pithy short few sentences?
I've told you before, I hate these takeaways.
My instinct is to say I'm a lot.
Okay.
So, yeah, look, we've covered all of this, so I'm not going to reiterate it, but this is largely about a mystical Christian view of the world.
He's pretty explicit about that.
He makes a lot of specific arguments and as we covered, when you actually look at the argumentation that he provides, it's extremely hand wavy and the connections he makes between ideas are very tenuous, which
is fine if you're not looking for that kind of argument.
I think we just need to be aware that he's not actually providing evidence or a logical justification for what he's saying.
He's stringing together a series of associations to paint a kind of poem.
A narrative of life and the world which he sees as meaningful.
And, you know, I think that's a large part of the appeal.
I think people seem to feel in deficit of meaning and they really appreciate the kind of things that JPP offers, which is the same things that religion and New Age gurus.
Which is that sense of wonder, that sense of being in touch with the ineffable and the sense that the mundane events in one's life, like cleaning one's room, is connected to some sense of higher purpose.
So I appreciate the...
And indeed in JPP's interest in this stuff himself.
He strikes me as someone who is very much, you know, he's genuinely consumed with these issues and is, you know, talking to himself as much as to anyone else.
So what else to say?
I don't like this kind of thing, partly because I'm an atheist, so it's not going to work for me.
Also partly because I have to read a lot of student essays and when people string together bad arguments, not to say they're wrong, just if they're not tightly argued, then my instinct is to get out the red pen and correct them.
So it doesn't work for me on...
Well, so thinking of Jordan Peterson as a guru, the impression that I get is that a large part of his appeal is the willingness to build these grand narratives that range across different disciplines and reference,
you know, classical literature and mythology and Biblical stories and a whole bunch of things and pull them together into this narrative.
And I think maybe I differ a little bit from you in that I think he does have arguments for the linkages that he's fleshed out in quite...
A lot of detail on some of it is all our content, and even to some extent here.
But I agree with you that a lot of it comes down to hand-wavy associations and things that fall apart the more that you dig into them.
But in the same way as people like Jared Diamond, you know, Guns, Germs and Steel, or even Richard Dawkins, people offering these grand, sweeping...
Messages that help you understand society and help you understand yourself have a lot of appeal.
And his characteristic as the guru who knows has a mastery of so many topics and is also emotionally available to his followers and cares deeply about them.
It's all...
It's all classical guru stuff.
And the fact that it's tied up with a Christian and psychological bowl just leads to it having an intrinsic appeal, which I don't find it that surprising that he was able to become so popular.
And listening to his 12 Rules for Life, if you let it all wash over you and you don't think too hard about it, it's kind of an enjoyable thing.
So yeah, I guess my point is just that I see him as an almost prototypical guru.
I'm one who fits neatly into this modern age by providing online lectures, getting involved with culture war commentary on Twitter.
And maybe a point to end on is that it looks like his tale will be quite a tragic one because he ended up...
Addicted to painkillers, in part because of the fame and the schedule, it seems likely.
And then in efforts to get off those, seems to have suffered brain damage as part of an induced coma and may never return to the public stage.
So whether you see that as a good or a bad thing depends on your view on the man.
But it's certainly the case that there's a tragic arc to his story where there's a meteor.
I completely agree with you about Jordan Peterson being the prototypical guru that we're interested in.
And it's surprising that he's not...
Recognized as a New Age meaning giver in the same mold as Deepak Chopra because it is so similar in terms of the nature of the appeal and the style of presentation.
It's interesting that it seems simply because he's a Christian as opposed to being into some Eastern religion of some kind, it seems that people...
Don't think that he could possibly be a New Age guru in that case.
And the other interesting thing about him is that he does combine the mysticism with a smattering of scientific evidence as well, although somewhat haphazardly.
Although even that is not...
Entirely remarkable for a New Age guru.
Of course, we've got quantum consciousness and ideas like that that came out of your more traditional New Age gurus.
They don't do it as well as Jordan Peterson, but there's certainly a long tradition of wanting to incorporate the legitimacy of science into their worldview.
So as I said at the beginning, he's the big kahuna.
He is the man.
He is just a wonderful example of what we're interested in.
And I feel pretty sanguine, I suppose, about Jordan Peterson.
I feel sympathetic because it does look like his arc has ended.
I think that the people who, or at least the vast majority of people who get something from Jordan Peterson, I think it's...
Probably almost entirely benign in that they really are just looking for a bit of help in terms of their lives and just looking for a bit of meaning.
I think they could get that stuff from other sources or they can get it from JPP.
In terms of the political stuff, I could completely understand why more progressive people would have a big problem with Jordan Peterson because I think he, like a lot of the IDW figures, have that myopic obsession.
With the excesses of the left and completely give a pass to anything right of center.
So I think that's pretty much it.
All right.
Yeah, agreed.
So we're always good at this, but the last couple of things that we should mention is we have a Twitter account, which is Guru's pod.
Yes.
Yeah, it is.
And then we have an email account, which is decodingthegrowersatgmail.com.
So you can send back any feedback there or tweet at us on Twitter, where I'm at C underscore Kavanagh.
And Matt is...
Arthur C. Dent.
Arthur C. Dent.
You can also leave us a five-star review on the iTunes store.
There's no other...
Don't try to give us a four-star review or a three-star review.
It'll actually break your browser.
So just only...
Yeah, these things...
I actually...
I didn't realize, you know, podcasts are always asking for those, but I didn't realize they're actually like gold dust to get people to write a review.
Apparently, you know, it's a very rare thing.
So yeah, do that.
And even if you want to write something mean...
That's okay.
That's all right.
We can take that.
No, Chris.
No.
Is that the wrong one?
Well, yeah.
All right.
Next week, do we know who we're dealing with?
We don't know yet, but we will announce it very soon.
