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Nov. 30, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
35:18
2016/11/29: Tradition and Things That Don't Fit with Jonathan Pageau
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Today I'm talking to Jonathan Pajot, who I think is touched with more than a little bit of genius, and he's a Quebecois artist and a carver, a sculptor.
I'd like to start by letting Jonathan tell us who he is and what he does.
Okay, so yeah, I'm an icon carver.
Which means that I make carvings for churches and for people of traditional images.
So I get commissions and I work within a traditional language of Christian art.
I've been doing that for about five years now, full time.
And before that, I actually lived in Africa for seven years, working with artisans there, trying to help them in their business practices and their design skills.
So I have a very Kind of strange and varied background.
I studied fine art at Concordia University here in Montreal in the late 90s.
So how many full-time icon carvers do you suppose there are in Canada?
In Canada, I'm the only one.
Actually, in the entire world, we're very few.
I actually know most of them.
Yeah, well, it doesn't sound like a very easy thing to monetize.
So, how in the world did you go from being an art student trained at Concordia to being a carver of icons?
I studied painting and drawing at Concordia.
On the surface, I was doing really well.
I actually finished first in my class.
But there was a malaise the whole time I was working there because I'm a Christian.
I grew up a Christian.
And I was trying to figure out how that would connect to my art practice.
And so I was looking, trying to figure out symbolic languages in painting and trying to find ways to talk about bigger questions, metaphysical ideas in my paintings.
But I didn't have the language.
I was really just groping around almost blind.
And at the end of my time at Concordia, the professor who was supervising me, she basically said on the very last day, She said, what are you doing here?
This is not the place for you.
After that, it kind of left me dangling, you know, and questioning a lot of things.
What sort of education did you get at Concordia?
All the fine arts programs now in, I think, pretty much almost 100% are based on contemporary art practices.
And so very few universities, very few programs teach technical skills or teach you, you know, how to draw in a classical way.
So they're actually not really teaching anything.
It's hard to know exactly what they're doing.
I guess it was ever since the 1960s there has been this idea in the art world that technical skills and ability just aren't that important and that the important thing is to find your I would say your political voice, but it's very strange to me that this has occurred because it seems to me that before your voice is anything but an off-color croak,
you have to become a disciple of a discipline and an apprenticeship and learn the tools and trades of your craft and learn how to be an artist because there's a technical end to that.
I mean this is really almost an image of the world as it stands now.
The purpose or the stated purpose of modern, especially postmodern art, was to free the artist, right?
To break away all the things that were holding the artist back in terms of rules and in terms of the way that things were presented.
But what ended up happening is that there were no more legitimizing objective or strong legitimizing structures around the art.
The only thing left was politics and relationships and status, basically.
Well, you know, there's a big literature on creativity, which I know very well.
My lab designed the creative achievement questionnaire, which has been used in hundreds of studies now to assess lifetime creativity.
And so I've spent a lot of time looking at the measurement of creativity and also trying to understand creativity.
And the literature strongly suggests that When you impose restrictions on people, it actually makes them more creative rather than less.
Because part of what creativity is, is the overcoming of obstacles.
You know, imagine someone who writes poetry in the haiku format.
Well, it's very, very restrictive and obviously arbitrarily so.
But the fact of the restriction is partly what makes the poetic form possible.
The same thing is true if you think about playing a game.
There's far more things that you can't do When you play chess, then there are things that you can do.
But there's still an infinite number of variations of chess games.
So this idea that there's a dichotomy between structure and rules and creativity is perniciously false and contradicted by the evidence.
And when you start to explore the art world and the way it works, there's an irony there that it purports to not have boundaries on creativity and structures on creativity, but they're actually extremely strict.
And they're hidden.
They're kind of this pernicious thing underneath where actually you have to present things in a very, very precise way for it to be able to enter into the legitimizing structure of the gallery.
It's like the message that I was trying to work on and the structure of contemporary art just didn't fit together.
And so at some point I gave up on art.
I had a studio and I closed it down.
I just destroyed all my Paintings it was it was actually a moment of kind of spiritual crisis for me And it's in that in that moment that I discovered medieval art I discovered traditional Christian art and when I discovered traditional Christian art it was exactly what you were saying before the forms of Christian art were kind of developed as a community would say as a the Christian community developed these forms that are We're actually extremely powerful and created like a cosmic map, basically.
And so you could use these images as a type of algebra to create a sacred language.
And so discovering that I just felt like, yeah, it gave me so much possibility.
Yeah, well you're going back like 800 years, 900 years into the history, maybe even farther than that, back into the history of traditional art.
So you say you discovered Christian iconography, and I also know that you're an Orthodox Christian, which is a strange thing for a Quebecois, so I don't know, you're a pretty rare bird.
So maybe you could say a few words about the discovery of the iconography, how that came about, and also how it is that you converted to Orthodox Christianity.
Well, I mean, those two things are very intricately related.
I think during university, just like a lot of people, I kind of I was reading Derrida and Boudriard and all the postmodern theorists trying to wrap my head around this.
Like, what does this mean for me?
And what is going on?
And it's in that kind of Crazy time that I started reading The Church Fathers and reading more traditional authors, people who talk about traditions in different cultures, and realizing that this was really the solution, for me at least, it was the solution to kind of get out of the chaos that the modern world had kind of fallen into.
But it came with the art.
So looking at the art and seeing the patterns And seeing that those patterns in the art were the same as you find in Scripture, and the same that you find in liturgy, and the same that you find in the stories that are around us, even stories that aren't actually Christian.
To see those patterns emerge is what really caught my attention.
And so I was looking.
At first, I wasn't necessarily going to be Orthodox.
I could see the patterns coming through, and I was trying to figure out, and I couldn't find them in my own milieu, which I grew up evangelical.
And so I was looking for it.
I couldn't find it.
I looked at Catholicism.
But finally, I felt that in looking at Orthodoxy, I felt like Orthodoxy was the type of Christianity that had preserved the most of that ancient worldview and was still living it today.
So it's a living tradition.
You know, when you say you went back 800 years, in a way, That's true, but it's not true for the Orthodox because they continue to perpetuate those forms until today.
I mean, not that they didn't go through rocky times.
Obviously, it's been crazy for Orthodoxy as well.
But for some reason, they've been able to constantly revive their forms.
It's a thriving part of Christianity.
Well, you know, this idea of this return and the continual revivification of traditional forms reminds me of two things.
It reminds me of the old Egyptian stories about Horus and Osiris.
And Horus is the Egyptian god of vision and attention.
So he's the Egyptian eye and the falcon.
After Horus defeats Seth, who's the sort of Egyptian precursor to Satan, and reclaims his throne, he goes down into the underworld to rescue his father, Osiris, who Seth had chopped up into pieces.
And when he's down in the underworld, he gives Osiris one of his eyes, which Seth has torn out.
He gives him one of his eyes and then brings him back up to the surface.
They rule Egypt together and the union of Osiris and Horus was like the Pharaoh's soul.
So there's this ancient idea.
It's expressed in more places than in Egyptian mythology that it's the duty, it's the sacred obligation of someone who's awake to journey to the underworld and revivify the corpse of his father.
And that unites the individual with a living culture and also makes the culture alive because of course culture in some sense because it's the product of the dead.
Is a dead entity.
It has to be continually revivified by the living.
And then you see that echoed in more modern form, oddly enough, in a Disney animated movie in Pinocchio.
And Pinocchio is the story of the struggle of a puppet, a marionette, whose strings are being pulled by forces that he does not understand.
It's the story of his struggle towards individuality and rebirth.
And a number of things happen to Pinocchio.
He has to learn not to lie.
He has to learn not to be a neurotic victim because that's actually one of the temptations.
It's his agreement that he's a neurotic victim that places him on Pleasure Island, where he's in danger of becoming a jackass and a slave to totalitarians, interestingly enough.
After he leaves Pleasure Island, He goes to find his father but he can't find him and a note from the Holy Ghost essentially tells him that his father is at the bottom of the ocean in the belly of a giant whale and the whale is also a dragon and so then Pinocchio has to go down to the bottom of the ocean in his half-jackass form and rescue his father from the belly of the whale and he does that by mastering fire and interestingly enough in the Pinocchio video he's assimilated
to the Christian symbol of the fish in the belly of the whale.
Geppetto catches a bunch of fish He thinks to eat them and then he catches Pinocchio and confuses him with a fish.
Doesn't realize that having caught Pinocchio, he's caught his own salvation.
Then they work together to get out of the whale's belly.
But there's this very old idea that, especially in chaotic times, when everyone's turned into a jackass and a tool of totalitarians, that the way forward is to journey to the deepest possible recesses of reality and revivify the Father.
Something everyone needs to know.
And there's something, I mean, we'll see as our conversation continues, you'll see how for me at least this goes, is that for me going back into the Christian tradition and reconnecting with the Christian tradition has actually opened my eyes also to the world around me.
So those patterns that I find in my own tradition, the patterns that are kind of feeding my life, Once they're integrated, now when you look around you, you see them, they appear everywhere.
The world is actually made of those patterns and you can recognize those patterns in contemporary culture and you watch a movie and you can see that these are the same patterns.
The best way is, like, the danger is to do it simply in an intellectual way.
I mean, that's kind of our danger.
So connecting to a tradition, you know, becoming Orthodox and living it through liturgy.
Like, liturgy, when you go to church and you participate in the liturgy, you're physically engaging.
In these sacred patterns, and so it's a way to make it almost a bodily experience.
Well, it's interesting, you know, the Christian emphasis on the resurrection of the body, which is of course something that modern people have a very difficult time with.
I mean, people can perhaps swallow the notion that the soul is immortal, but the idea of the resurrection of the body is something that just seems Beyond the pale, but there's a logic to that insistence, and the insistence is that there's something sacred and necessary about the body, and that it can't be forgotten when discussing both spiritual, say, and sacred matters.
And it's definitely the loss of the body that's part of what constitutes part of the rootless nihilism that characterizes the modern age.
And I learned that partly by reading Carl Rogers, because one of the things that Rogers talked about was the necessity, Jung talked about this a lot as well, the necessity of bringing the body into alignment with, for Rogers it was more with the voice.
And he claimed, for example, that you could Feel with your body, essentially, whether or not your words were aligned properly with your being.
I've certainly learned that that's true and that you can learn to determine when your voice is making you stronger physically and when it's making you weaker physically.
A very, very useful thing to pay attention to.
One of the iconic figures that you've carved and that you're interested in is St.
George.
I've been very interested in the figure of St.
George.
I think the story that's encapsulated in St.
George is certainly one of the oldest stories known to mankind.
It might be at the core of the oldest story because basically what it does is present human being, the individual, in a battle where the individual society and the individual are being threatened by the re-emergence or emergence of a carnivorous reptilian carnivorous predator and I think the roots of the St.
George story go all the way back to the time when the distant ancestors of human beings were living in trees and being preyed upon by predatory snakes and that's about 60 million years ago back when there were still dinosaurs by the way An anthropologist named Lynn Isbell at UCLA has done a series of studies showing that the reason that human beings have such amazing vision because we can see better than any other animal except for birds of prey is because our vision evolved to help
us detect predatory snakes in particular as they crept up on us through the underbrush and she established that by noting that there was a powerful correlation between the prevalence of predatory snake predation in primate populations across the world and the acuity of primate vision and it's also the case that our vision evolved just as the story in Genesis suggests because of fruit because we see colors because we can detect
to detect ripe fruit and so Genesis insists that human beings got their vision because of snakes and fruit and that seems exactly right from an evolutionary perspective, but you can imagine The idea in St.
George, there's a dragon that re-emerges from its lair underground, and it's an eternal dragon, immortal dragon, and it threatens the community.
And St.
George goes out to fight the dragon in single combat, and as a consequence, he frees a virgin from the snake's grasp, just like Harry Potter does in the second Harry Potter volume.
When he goes down underneath Hogwarts to free Ginny, who's the virgin, Virginia, from the grips of the basilisk.
And the basilisk is the thing that turns you to stone with a single glance.
And Harry Potter is revivified, by the way, by the phoenix's tears.
And the phoenix produces a rebirth, right?
Because the phoenix is a symbol of death and rebirth.
And so the St.
George story is embedded right in the depths of the Harry Potter story.
But I think it's predicated on the idea that human beings, men in particular forever, have been fighting off the predations of the natural and the social world.
And the idea that you free the virgin from the grasp of the serpent is that women have preferentially chosen to ally themselves with and mate with men who are capable of facing the reptilian predator and so it's the basic evolutionary story of mankind that Human beings learn to fight back against predators,
maybe to even find them in their lair instead of waiting for them to attack.
And that women in their gratitude for that, in their gratitude for the protection of infants, like there's often images of Mary raising Christ up out of the way from a predatory reptile, right?
And that's in reference to the Genesis comment that Mary will bruise the head of the serpent with her heel.
It's an extraordinarily, extraordinarily deep story.
It goes deeper than just the idea of the serpent too because the ultimate serpent in some sense isn't the one that lives in the external world.
The ultimate serpent might be the one that's in the heart of your enemies or if you make a metaphysical transformation in your thinking even beyond that, the ultimate serpent isn't even the one that lives in the heart of your enemies.
So it's not the natural snake or the crocodile or a predator like that.
It's not The vicious barbarian that's come to the gates of your castle to steal your belongings and make off with your women.
It's the snake that lives in your heart.
And that's why Christianity insists on the association between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan.
I think that if you think of the world in terms of macrocosm and microcosm, The idea that certain structures repeat themselves at different levels of reality.
Yeah, that's like music.
Right.
Then you can think of this idea of a world as having in the middle a tree or a cross or something like an axis in the center.
And as you move away from that access, you know, from the access which defines the space, basically, like a flag or something like a post, as you move away from that center, you're moving further and further from what it defines, and you're approaching chaos, basically.
You're approaching chaos, which is, in the negative sense, it's chaos, right?
In the positive sense, it's also potential.
It's the potential from which that world will grow.
On one side, it threatens the inside, if you will, and on the other side, it is the potential by which that thing will grow.
In St.
George's story, there are actually several versions of the dragon.
In some versions, in the most known versions, St.
George will kill the dragon.
But there are lesser known versions of the story where he actually tames the dragon and turns the dragon into his pet.
And there's versions where he tames it, then kills it.
There's different versions of the story.
But it's to show this idea of as you move out, sometimes there's something on the edge that appears on the edge and you can't define it.
It's a chaotic thing.
The dragon, in traditional way of representing it, isn't just a reptile.
It's actually a hybrid creature.
It usually has a mix of lizard, and it has hairy feet and wings, and so it's this...
Yeah, it's a monster.
It's an amalgamation of things to be frightened by, but also treasure, because the dragon doesn't only guard virgins, it guards treasure.
It's in the it's in contact with what you fear and despise that the treasure is to be found Yeah, you know your your notion about the center point say with the flag or the cross reminded me reminded me of the way that children react with their mother and their home and So what a child will do when when he or she is exploring the world is make contact with the mother and that And that's in the center of the household so you can think about it as the mother embedded in society the child will will Comfort himself with
contact with the mother and then go out into the world to the point where his fear overcomes his exploratory tendency and then on that edge he'll play and further his psychological development and his mastery of the world and then when he wears out and maybe goes beyond his limit he runs back to the center point for comfort and then the next time he goes out he can go out a little bit farther Yeah, and so that structure is basically the structure of everything.
I mean, it's the structure of a society, it's the structure of a family, and like you said, it's also the structure of an individual, where on the edges of our person, we have these desires that exist on the edge of our person, and those desires are Very dangerous because they can lead us into a lot of a mess.
But they're also the tool by which we further ourselves.
That's very similar again to Jung's idea of the incorporation of the shadow.
And also Nietzsche's idea of beyond good and evil.
Nietzsche meant by that, at least in part, beyond the conceptions of good and evil that are basically thrown up by nothing but cowardice.
So you try to make yourself into this little restricted thing that's basically the Jungian persona, and you define yourself as good if you never go outside that little box.
But to be truly good, you have to go way outside that box.
So if you take this as a worldview, I mean basically that has become my own worldview.
It helps you to identify what's happening around you.
So on the periphery of the world, there are these marginal things that exist kind of in the buffer between You know, order and absolute chaos.
And those things, they rear their heads up.
And so we transact with them in different ways.
Tame them.
Sometimes you have to, like a dragon, you have to kill it.
Sometimes you have to just ignore it too.
Some monsters just have to be left alone basically.
They're too big to deal with yet.
You just leave them alone.
And to me this is really related to what you're going through right now.
It seems like this is where we are right now in our society.
Our obsession with liminal things right now in the world seems to be Sign of something, you know the word monster actually comes from the Latin word which means to show right as a portent we in French We actually still have the the verb montree which means to show is it's from demonstrate in English.
Yeah, there you go demonstrate exactly so the word monster is is a portent of something it is it's it's like a harbinger of a Of change or a harbinger that's something you need to pay attention because something is happening and so right now like so to demonstrate to demonstrate is to de-monstrate yes right it's to it's to take the monster apart and make it into something that's you can deal with yes that you can master yeah that's like Marduk in the old Mesopotamian
myth because Marduk who's the Mesopotamian hero God confronts Tiamat who's a monster And cuts her into pieces and makes the world.
And actually, one of the names of Marduk that the Mesopotamians had was, he who makes interesting and useful things from the combat with Tiamat.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, so right now, if you look around, if you think of the social manifestations that are going on, like just take zombies, for example, like that's the greatest example, because a zombie is an in-between figure.
It's something that is neither dead nor alive.
It stands in between two categories.
And so, in the case of the zombie, the zombie, because it is in between the categories, it acts as a parasite, it starts to eat the interior...
The brain, actually.
Exactly.
Yes, it's looking for meaning, and so it wants to eat the thing that's inside.
It's trying to devour it.
Right.
That's the corpse of the culture.
The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx is the perfect kind of image of this.
So the Sphinx appears as this undefined monster.
It's a mix of a woman and a lion and a bird or whatever.
It's this thing that appears.
And what it is, it's a question.
It's saying, like, what am I? The monster is a question or it's an enigma.
The person coming for it is faced with this enigma and the danger.
So one possibility is that you name the monster and you're able to integrate it.
The other possibility is that you're eaten by the monster.
Those two things are a real reality on the edge of things.
So when you come to the edge of something, you have this image in traditional stories of the bridge.
You come to the end of something and there's a bridge.
And on the bridge, there's a monster.
And so you have to face this monster because when you're on the bridge, you're in a dangerous place.
You're in between categories, right?
You're in no man's land.
You're in no man's land.
And so the monster comes and wants to devour you.
So it can be either this idea of the monster asking a question, asking an enigma for you to be able to cross the bridge.
This is what's happening right now.
There are some elements that come from the margins of society which are The ones that I've been dealing with have been the people who don't fit into the gender categories.
Yes, and so we're in a situation where that manifestation of hybridity, right?
Because if you look at the categories that are used, they are trying to be the category of multiplicity itself.
That's why the categories are multiplying beyond name.
They started with just non-binary and now it's up to 70 online.
Yeah, what it is, it's a decomposition, like it's a decomposition of a category.
You come to the end of something and it starts to decompose.
I know in your talks you talk about the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail.
Well, this is my vision of it, is that when you first see that serpent, it actually looks like it's the tail that's eating the head.
And then after a certain transition, then it becomes the head eating the tail.
So imagine a fruit falls on the ground.
The ground starts to eat it.
It starts to decompose.
And once it's fully decomposed, then something happens.
There's a flip.
And now the seed starts to use the earth and eat the earth to become a tree.
And so there's that moment at the end of something where there's a flip that happens, like an inversion and then an inversion of an inversion that happens.
It's a very chaotic time.
And that's the moment where we are in right now.
And what you're going through, like the finger that you've put your finger on something very, very critical, And that's why there's so much noise about it, is because you're standing right in that spot and you're telling everybody, pay attention to this monster.
Like, it's right there in front of us.
You know, you talked before with me about two biblical stories that shed some light on this, and you were talking about Abraham and the stranger.
And so, maybe you could walk through that, because I thought that was an extremely interesting analysis.
Okay, so, I mean...
The way that in the Bible and in most traditional societies, the way that we deal with the strange, okay?
The thing that comes from the margins, you know, it's the stranger in a global way.
It's the strange thing.
The way we deal with that is through hospitality, right?
The first way we deal with it.
The first way we deal with something coming from the outside and that doesn't fit into our world is through hospitality.
Hospitality means that you receive this thing as a stranger and there's these implicit rules of how you interact with them so that there isn't a mutual destruction basically.
And so in the Bible we see a version of good hospitality and bad hospitality Play themselves out.
So, in the story of Abraham, Abraham receives three strangers, and he receives them into his tent, and he feeds them, and he receives them properly.
And the strangers are also acting properly in his tent.
They're eating his food, but they're being respectful of the house.
They're not stealing things.
They're not trying to seduce his wife or doing the things that you're not supposed to do implicitly when you're in someone else's house.
And because of that, the three strangers announced to Abraham that he's going to have a child.
So Abraham is in his 90s, you know, he never thought...
Right, they're angels, right?
They're angels in disguise.
But they're secretly angels.
That's what's important, is that in the strange, the strange, because the strange is an ambiguous...
Category, it can contain both extremes.
It can contain both the angel and the devil.
These three angels come to him and they announce that he's going to have a child.
And so what they do is that the strange now acts as this potential that we talked about.
Right, so it's a fruit-defying agent in that story.
And it's always the case that an orderly structure has to allow an element of chaos, an element of the strange into it in order to become something new and even to maintain its own survival because things have to become something new as they move forward through time.
Right, and so in that case the stranger becomes the means by which Abraham's marriage is fructive.
So his family grows through this right interaction with the stranger.
So now these same three strangers then they go to visit Abraham's brother Lot who's in Sodom and Gomorrah.
And then although Lot receives the strangers appropriately, The inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, they want to rape these strangers.
They want to sexually assault the strangers and rape them.
And angels blind the people around them and they're able to escape.
And because of the wrong interaction and the sexual, the wrong sexual interaction between the stranger and the people of the city, the city is destroyed by fire.
And then it leads even further.
It leads to Lot having an incestuous It's like the whole world collapses because there isn't a proper approach to hospitality.
In that story you see So there's an intimation in there too, is that if the interaction with the stranger is handled properly, then everything becomes more fruitful.
And if the interaction with the stranger upsets things, say, as basic as sexual interactions between people, then the entire society can become destroyed.
Exactly.
And I'm using those two stories, but those two stories repeat themselves.
There's so many stories where you see that.
Often it's not just sex.
It's often food.
There's sex and food.
Those are the two major ways in which we integrate the world.
For example, the story of Hansel and Gretel, for example, is a perfect example of where the desire to eat the people, to eat your guests, That's the evil mother too, eh?
In the Hansel and Gretel story because she's too good to be true.
And then she's all compassion, the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.
And you can tell that because she has a gingerbread house.
It's made of candy.
And like a house made of candy is too good to be true.
That's the social justice warrior overemphasis on compassion.
And inside, she's just fattening the kids up constantly, taking care of them.
But her fundamental wish is to devour them.
Yeah.
So like an example...
Sorry, one more thing.
They've been abandoned.
Those kids have been abandoned.
To the predations of the evil mother because the family broke down.
It's the stepmother who tells the father, if I remember correctly, to abandon the children in the forest.
So it's the breakdown of the family that leads to the children being threatened by the Oedipal mother who's too good to be true.
She's compassion that's gone completely beyond its tolerable limit.
It's a cautionary tale, that's for sure.
There's so many stories of how the relationship between a host and a stranger goes wrong.
And sometimes the push comes from the host and sometimes the push can come from the guests.
There's an Ethiopian tradition where it's almost an inversion of Abraham's story where A man receives three guests into his home, and the three guests serve him food, which ends up being a human being.
So they kind of trick the host into becoming a cannibal, and then the host becomes like an out-of-control cannibal, and, you know, he's eating people all over the place.
So you can see how the story can go both ways.
Like, the relationship with the strange, there can be a push from the inside, from the right hand, let's say, the order hand.
There can be a push that causes the chaos, but it can also come from the guest.
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