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Aug. 14, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
50:25
Master Relationships, Improve Your Dating Life, and Make Marriage Work | Answer the Call | EP 571
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Time Text
You don't win an argument with your wife.
You never win that.
Part of your defensive mechanism and your pride is going to be, well, this time for sure.
Sometimes though.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it's convenient when that's the case.
What's some advice that you could give a man my age on how best to integrate or maybe conquer the ghosts of past relationships?
The core of the question was, what can I do to ensure that I'm not dragging the past into the future?
Understand the past.
Understand the past.
There will be times when you or your partner were betrayed in the past by yourself, by someone else.
Doesn't matter.
There's a betrayal.
And then when I suggest that it's you, you're going to get defensive.
Partly because you don't want it to be you and partly because there's a part of you that knows that there's something underneath that that's going to be very unpleasant to uncover.
You also have to allow your partner to do a good thing badly.
When they first start to listen, when they first start to help and untangle, you got to let them flail them out a fair bit.
People will often do something difficult twice, go on a date, for example, when they haven't been with each other for a long time.
It won't go well and they'll think, well, we're certainly not doing that again.
That happens to people.
Then they don't have any romance for decades.
That is not wise.
That's not wise.
Thank you.
Thank you.
In this episode, we're talking about marriage and relationships.
So that should be interesting.
Fortunately, my husband doesn't watch anything I do.
So first on the line, John in Chicago.
Hi, John.
Hi, Dr. Peterson.
Thank you for having me on the show.
Yeah, thanks for offering.
I'm 53 years old.
I've been divorced for about nine years.
During those nine years, I've purposely devoted a very substantial portion of my time, effort, and attention to my son and his predisposition for acting.
Recently, at the urging of my highly extroverted 17-year-old son, and after quite a bit of thought and feelings of terror on my part, I took his advice and started dating.
Thankfully, after taking that step, I've started dating a rather fantastic woman.
During the adventure of our five-month relationship, I've seriously discovered the importance of having an intimate partner in my life, and we've even discussed the possibility of spending the rest of our lives together.
So my question is, based on the abbreviated description of my situation, what's some advice that you could give a man my age on how best to integrate or maybe conquer the ghosts of past relationships and life choices to properly set the foundation for a new relationship to last the rest of our lives?
I have a program that you might want to try online called Past Authoring that helps people write an autobiography.
I would say that it would be useful for you, since you're concerned with conquering the ghosts of the past, which is a very wise thing to do at your age with your wisdom and when you're wanting to embark on a new path forward with clarity and with the demons of the past understood and relatively conquered.
Now, we organize ourselves neurologically at the highest level through language and story.
And your life to date, properly understood, would make a coherent narrative.
Now, that's hard because you have five decades to contend with and there will be elements of your past that aren't well mapped.
And those are the pitfalls.
Everything you don't understand about your past is a pitfall waiting for you to fall into in the future.
Now, one of the ways that you can understand where those pitfalls exist is that you'll have memories of the past that are still hot and active.
They still have emotional significance.
Now, if a memory that's more than a year and a half old still has emotional significance, that's an indication from the anxiety alarm systems that you did not mine that experience for its full significance.
And that means that you still have something to learn to avoid falling into that pitfall again in the future, which is what you indicated that you want to do.
So I would say that you could profitably spend some time writing down your life.
Now, the way the program works, and you don't have to do the program, you can do this on your own, is that it asks you to break your life down into seven or eight epochs.
So sometimes people do that by their relationship.
Sometimes people do it by their educational progression or their career transformations.
Whatever way seems reasonable to you or, you know, different chunks of age, whatever way seems reasonable to you to break down your life is fine.
And then to think through what the most significant positive and negative events were, to lay them out, to lay them out in a way that helps you understand why the positive events were positive, what you did right and what the circumstances were so that that positive outcome was most likely, where you went astray, how you contributed to that, how you might deal with that in the future.
You want to do that in a manner that brings you up to date.
And so that'll help exercise.
And I don't mean physical exercise.
I mean demon exercise.
That'll help exercise the ghosts of the past.
Now, the rule here to understand is the principle to understand here is the actual principle of memory.
You do not remember the past so you have an accurate, objective record of the past.
That's actually impossible because you can't have a comprehensive record of the past.
You remember the past so that you can duplicate what was good about it in the future and avoid what was bad about it in the future.
And that means you have to have derived the appropriate moral, which is the point, from the outcome.
And so it's very useful to bring your narrative up to date.
Then you know where you are.
Once you know where you are, you can plot your future and you can plot your future together with your new partner.
And so the reason I recommended this in particular, in consequence of this question, was because the core of the question was, what can I do to ensure that I'm not dragging the past into the future?
It's like understand the past.
Understand the past, right?
Delve into it.
That's good.
This is interesting because you get deep into it.
And I've got some like practical tips because I just not just actually, because it's been a number of years that I've been remarried, but I went through something similar.
What I noticed, I noticed try and figure out what your concerns are and for lack of a better word, your triggers are.
So I noticed that when I was in certain situations that were bad in the past, that had a similar pattern, I'd have an emotional reaction that was way off the charts.
And I had to recognize, oh, I'm recognizing a pattern from the past, but this isn't the same thing.
It just has certain similarities.
So that's a me problem.
But then I'd talk about it with my husband and he started to pick up on it once we noticed this happen a couple of times.
And I'd say, okay, this is freaking me out because of what happened in the past.
And then we'd communicate through it, which was really useful.
So one of the things that you're pointing out is that, and this is extremely useful, is that you can watch yourself or your partner for emotional responses that are disproportionate to the trigger that recur.
Okay, now to investigate those, you have to take a trip to Dante's Inferno.
Okay, so the book, The Inferno, is a story of a voyage to the underworld, a voyage to hell.
Now, here's the idea is that under, so imagine there's a trivial trigger for a relatively profound emotional upset.
Okay, that means there's something underneath it.
Okay, how far underneath?
Well, that's what you have to dig into to find out.
Dante put the betrayers right next to Satan in the depths of hell, so to speak.
So often what you'll find with yourself or with your partner, and this is almost inevitable in any relationship, is that there will be times when you or your Partner were betrayed in the past by yourself, by someone else, doesn't matter.
There's a betrayal, and that has meant left you unable to trust and hypersensitive about any situation that's reminiscent of that.
Some people, some people are just who, some people who've been betrayed continually, who've never had a good relationship.
Let's say with if they're a woman with a man, yeah, they're they're just like that, they just have like a hundred triggers like that.
Yeah, and no wonder, and no wonder, but it means unfortunately that you have to go to the bottom, and that's very difficult because one of the things you'll find too is that, so let's say I identify that in you.
Well, first of all, you're gonna see me as the cause.
Oh, yeah, so that's gonna that's hard.
And then when I suggest that it's you, you're gonna get defensive, partly because you don't want it to be you, and partly because there's a part of you that knows that there's something underneath that that's going to be very pleasant, unpleasant to uncover.
And then you're going to be irritable and get angry as a defensive mechanism.
And then, if I keep pushing, you'll cry and make me feel like I'm a bully.
But if so, this has to be done very carefully.
It might also be an emotional release, though, crying.
It is an emotional release.
From my experience, and this didn't take me very long because I had already done a lot of work and was aware that this was going to be a problem.
Yeah.
So, when I saw myself, okay, my like heartbeat is going up, something happens that reminds me of a past situation.
My heartbeat goes up and I get flappy, like really flappy.
Yeah, like I'm not doing this, absolutely no, huge boundary.
And it's like, whoa, where did this outburst of emotion come from?
And then I could go, okay, I'm scared.
Like, that's the main thing.
I'm scared, and that's not an appropriate response.
Um, I feel like what worked for me was like taking a minute and breathing and calming down and being like, This isn't the same, trying to retrain your nervous system and something this isn't the same.
Even this might not be the same, right?
That's a good initial step.
That, yes, that's my initial step.
It's going to be the same, right?
And then there's other attitudes that you can adopt that are helpful.
Like, if you're running into a recurrent problem with your partner, there's there's a couple of possibilities.
It's you, that's one possibility, it's the other person, that's another possibility.
It's some situational variable that you haven't all considered.
Now, the attitude you have to take, then this is this is hard to do.
This is the attitude of humility rather than pride, is even if it's only 5% me, it would be in my best interest and my partner's best interest and the best interest of our marriage to fix it.
So, I'm going to listen to what this other person says.
You know, part of your defensive mechanism and your pride is going to be, well, this time for sure, it's my partner.
The probability that's 100% them is very low.
Sometimes, though, yeah, yeah, well, it's convenient when that's the case.
The reason that humility is a religious practice is because it's extremely useful to adopt the attitude that you might have something to learn, right?
Because then you can keep learning.
And the goal, the mutual goal, should be, and this is why the marriage vow has to be sacred, it has to be deep.
The aim should be, let's live in peace and harmony.
Yeah, let's solve this.
Not let's win.
Yeah, that's for you.
Or I want to win more than let's win.
Or something terrible in me wants to win.
You don't win an argument with your wife.
You never win that.
It's not, and if you win repeatedly, she just loses repeatedly.
That's a very bad strategy.
The goal should be: we'll talk about this badly, foolishly, but as the best we can until we've sort it out.
And that's the more the person you're with or you has been hurt, the harder that is.
It's hard.
And it often takes, especially someone who is not practiced at this, you know, they'll be upset about something.
It can take them a week to figure out what's actually bothering them.
It's very hard to get to the bottom of things.
Yeah, you need to practice.
But practice does work.
Practice definitely works.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And getting your aim straight works.
It's like, I don't want to, I don't want to have this fight with you for the rest of time.
Well, remembering you like the person.
If you like the person, that really helps.
It's like, wait, no, I do like that.
Well, that is.
It's a very good thing to remember because that also helps you fight against the proclivity to win.
It's like you've got to remember that you love the person.
This is something, this is something you can really practice in your marriage.
Like as a practice, look at your wife and remember when that you love her.
Remember that.
Bring it to mind.
Bring that feeling that you had when that was self-evident.
People, you know, often romanticize the early stages of a relationship when that intense romantic love first manifests itself.
You know, and everyone says, well, that declines with time.
Well, it declines with time if you don't practice it.
Just like everything else, it doesn't decline with time if you practice it.
And you can, our culture is very clueless about such things.
We know virtually nothing of spiritual practice.
We don't practice humility, right?
You have to practice that.
We don't practice gratitude.
To practice gratitude means you remember what you're grateful about and search for it genuinely every day or every moment.
And you do the same thing with love.
You have to remember.
And that can really help you when you're trying to sort through something complex.
And then you also have to have the trust that's courage rather than the trust that's naivety, right?
It's like, I'm going to put you in my in, I'm going to put me in your hands when I'm most vulnerable, right?
So you don't want to violate that trust.
Yeah.
And if you do violate it, then you want to sort that out, apologize, and try not to do it again.
The other thing I would say, just to close this off, is you also have to allow your partner to do a good thing badly.
Like when they first start to listen, when they first start to help and untangle, you got to let them flail about a fair bit.
And you have to remember, since you're married, that it might take them 50 times to get it right, just like it might take 50 dates or 50 meetings before you're even vaguely good at it.
50 negotiation sessions.
50 isn't very many if you're going to have to do something 10,000 times in your life.
People will often do something difficult twice, go on a date, for example, when they haven't been with each other for a long time.
It won't go well and they'll think, well, we're certainly not doing that again.
It's like, oh, really?
You're not going to do that again ever.
And then you, that happens to people.
Then they don't have any romance for decades.
That is not wise.
That's not wise.
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Up next, we have Tahani in Tennessee.
Hello, Tahani.
How are you doing?
Doing well, Dr. Peterson.
Nice to see you.
Away you go.
Nice to see you.
Okay.
My name Is Tahani, as you know, and I'm a stay-at-home mom to our seven-month-old son.
And my husband, Michael, is the sole provider for our family.
My husband's very hardworking and also eager to be involved in the home, but sometimes neither one of us knows what that involvement should look like from him.
So, first of all, how many hours a day are ideal for him to be home with the family since he makes his own hours?
And is it essential to take consistent days off each week, or should he just work and earn as much as possible?
More importantly, when he is home, should it be diaper changes, bottles, and bathtime, like being a Mr. Mom, or should he focus on playtime only?
Basically, how can someone who works a lot make the greatest impact as a father?
And what can I do as a wife to encourage him and support that involvement from my husband?
So, for the first nine months, in my estimation, the primary role of the father is to support the mother in her intense care of the infant and to spell her off.
And so, he should be focusing on the two of you.
And how much he should do that is dependent to some degree on how much you need.
And because his goal should be to make sure that you aren't overtired and pushed beyond your capacity.
Now, whether or not how much he should work and make money, that's something you guys have to negotiate.
And you will have to negotiate that with your own level of exhaustion and need.
Now, having said that, I would also say that those first nine months when the baby is really a dependent infant are also a time where the father can begin to establish a relationship with the child.
And any of that care that you described that's practical, feeding, changing, etc., is a way of doing that.
But holding the baby and starting to play, like even with a very young baby, say six months, five months, a father can start to play games.
So, one game you can play with a very young infant is to hold the infant up and to make eye contact, which infants quite enjoy, and to you can make a little sequence of noises, you know, like a little melody or count.
One, two, three, tap heads, one, two, three, tap heads, one, two, three, tap heads, one, two, three, then don't.
That's a little surprise because a game is often, especially with an infant, a game is the establishment of a predictable routine with a surprise variant.
And you'll see babies will laugh about that.
Now, if the surprise is too great, they'll cry.
So, you got to kind of calibrate that.
But that's a very simple game.
And men are particularly good at playing with young children.
And when men are playing, what they tend to do is to push the baby outside of his or her zone of simple comfort into the zone of intense play, into being thrilled often.
And they do that by like pushing the baby in various ways beyond his or her ordinary physical limits, stretching, lifting up, lifting down, flipping.
And all of that is a way to help the baby explore the limits of his or her own physical being, the distinction between pain and pleasure, and to develop trust.
Like the most important thing that your husband can do, apart from supporting you and making sure you're not burned out and unable to enjoy and be fully engaged in what you're doing, is to play with the infant.
Now, that play involves the sorts of things I describe, but also the physical contact and physical touch is extremely important to infants.
And so the goal of your husband is to push the baby continually to his or her physical limits in a manner that both find enjoyable and what?
It's enjoyable because there's an element of fun and surprise to it, but there's also an enjoyment in the mutual understanding that develops and the bond that exists because of the trust.
Another way of analogizing it, I would say, is your husband is going to dance with the baby.
One of the things you see with kids that aren't attended to enough physically, especially as they get to be around three, is that they're vague in their attention and they're uncoordinated and ungraceful in their movements.
The Taoists would regard that as the state of being an uncarved block.
And what you see in children like that is they haven't been attended to enough.
They haven't been sharpened up, you know, and men who are attending to their children intensely sharpen them up.
They keep them on their toes.
They play little tricks on them and they ensure they're awake and they push them to their limit.
And they do that in a manner that's confident and playful.
And that makes the child understand his or her embodiment much more deeply and also establishes an immense love of play and a solid basis for trust and adventure.
And that's a man's role.
So now women can...
What about...
So I had this conversation with mom actually a bit ago because I work from home and I have for seven or eight years.
And my husband works from home.
And so it's complicated to know who does what.
What I've figured out was helpful just more practically.
So you can tell me what you think about this was diaper changes.
I feel like you weren't a fan of diaper changes.
No, I didn't mind once I learned how to do it.
That was really helpful, especially if you're breastfeeding because then you're already kind of on call all the time and attach the baby.
Hyper changes were really helpful.
Doesn't take very long, but those were really helpful.
And then she asked about how much per day, which is hard to say too, but you mentioned enough so that you're not resentful basically and that you're still enjoying the baby.
Yes.
And we figured that was at least a little bit in the morning, a little bit in the evening.
That's minimum.
And then I think it's tricky when people work from home because it's kind of like, oh, you're in the other room.
What are you doing?
I'm starting to get tired.
You know, maybe I'm a bit annoyed.
And taking like five minute breaks to come say hi is really beneficial too.
So I think this is just for the mom.
Explain that too.
Well, like you get, especially with little babies, you get overwhelmed, especially if you're sleep deprived just the first three months, particularly with your first.
But after it says, say the baby's fussy, you haven't slept, the baby's not sleeping well, you're trying to breastfeed, you're not sure if they're hungry, you're just not sure really what's going on.
You're like, I can't hold a crying baby.
Anymore.
Anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't do it.
That's the point when you're like, can you take the baby for five minutes?
I need to breathe.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
You have to watch.
The role of the husband in the first seven, nine to nine months is really to keep a really sharp eye on the mother and make sure that...
Food helps too.
Food helps too.
Yes.
And make sure that she isn't pushed beyond her limits.
Yeah.
And that's problematic because she's constantly on call and her sleep is disrupted.
So you have to keep an eye on that.
And if she gets teary or upset or irritable, and those things will all happen, she has to be spelled off.
Yeah.
Oh, that's what you meant by spelled off.
Yeah.
I have no idea what that means.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's also the role of the wife or the mother to communicate with the husband so that when they're at their limit, they go, I need help right now.
Yeah.
Instead of sitting there and like freaking out.
Yeah.
And you're not being needy because the first period of time is really crazy, especially if you're by yourself and you don't have help, kind of.
So it's okay to be like, I'm at my limit right now.
right now i need a breather and a five minute breather is actually pretty decent it's when there's no yeah well that's that's uh for on the mother's side like she has to guard herself against the guilt that says i should be a hundred percent thrilled to be with my baby all the time.
And it's like, no, 90% of the time will do, or 80%, or 75%, right?
That's still a lot.
It's still a lot.
Yeah.
And she, you know, when you're taking care of someone, and this goes for the elderly or for people who are ill too, while you're taking care of them, especially if it's a long-term arrangement, you have to ensure that you're taking care of yourself because you won't be able to do it effectively in the long run if you're pushed beyond your actual capacity.
And that's, well, that's where you start to do things like consider your resentment as well.
If you notice that you're irritable and resentful, you want to determine and talk to your partner about whether or not you're just being irresponsible and immature because there's a lot of maturation that has to happen when you're a new parent, or whether you're demanding too much of yourself, right?
That's also a kind of delusion.
You know, Eric Neumann, who is Carl Jung's most accomplished student by a lot, said that you shouldn't try to be better than you are.
And what he meant by that was not don't improve, because you should improve, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're a better person than you actually are.
Not least because some of that irritation you might feel at being on call constantly is actually a manifestation of a necessary self-protective mechanism.
Yeah.
Right.
Agreed.
Yeah.
Yep.
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Next caller?
Next caller.
Let's do it.
We have a caller from Iowa.
Hello, Dr. Peterson.
The question I have for you is: my wife and I have three kids between one and seven.
And their question is, what is the right age or maturity to discuss LGBT ideologies?
Both of my siblings identify as LGBT, which has really sped up our timeline.
And is there any way to discuss this without ruining their childhood in a sense?
We want this information to come from us as their parents and not from anybody else.
We're trying to prepare them for the world and want to be a trusted source of information for them.
So how and when do we discuss this?
Well, I would say as a rule of thumb that you take your cues from your children in a situation like that, it isn't necessary for you, all things considered, to provide information you're not being asked about.
Now, if you observe your children carefully, an example might be that when children are ready to be toilet trained, they'll show an interest in such things that's somewhat subtle and will disappear if you ignore it.
But that's a good time.
That's a time to strike when the iron is hot.
Your children will bring, if you set up a regular habit of communicating with them, and the dinner table is a very good time to do that because that's a regular meeting time, or perhaps before bed, that's sometimes a time when one parent or the other or both can spend some intense communicative time with your kids.
If you make a habit of that being the time to bring up issues or concerns or ask Questions, then that gives your children an opportunity to bring their concerns to you.
And so I would say you want to establish that communicative pattern as a habit, and then you want to take your cues from your children.
Now, let's see if I can be more specific about that on the LGBT front.
I'll tell you, I'll give you an overarching strategy for this.
We worked this out at ARC, which is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
This is a group that I helped found that is trying to develop a vision for a modern classic liberalism and conservatism.
And one of the most tense negotiations we had with the interested parties of about 40 people, a number of whom were gay and quite what would you say?
They're well-known people.
This was the hardest discussion that we had.
It took us about a year to really sort it out.
And here's how we did it.
And I think it's right.
We presented the proposition that every concept has an ideal at the center and concentric rings of deviation from that ideal around it.
And by deviation, I also don't mean, I don't mean deviation in the necessarily pathological way.
I also mean experimentation.
The core of sexual identity that's socially harmonious and productive in the medium to long run has to be long-term, monogamous, committed, child-centered, heterosexual couples.
It has to be.
Well, why?
Well, because that's the only arrangement, the minimal arrangement that ensures average contentment, satisfaction, stability for children, propagation into the future, and the foundation for culture.
Okay, now, so now you have the ideal in the center.
That's the flag you plant in the center.
Now you face another conundrum.
It's like, okay, well, fine, but who approximates that ideal perfectly?
And the answer is really nobody.
You know, no marriage is always happy.
40 to 50% of people are likely to get divorced.
There's no shortage of single parents.
And there's the LGB, I'm not going to include the T because that's just going too far in my estimation.
Community, there's all sorts of ways we deviate from the ideal.
And some of that's a matter of experimentation.
There are other forms of family that can work.
Although I would say the farther you get from that core ideal, the more difficult it is to make it work and to integrate it.
And so that's the sort of meta-strategy.
So then knowing that, you can say to your children, look, if you deviate from that path, it's going to be extremely complicated for you at minimum.
It's also complicated for everyone else.
Now, if you're willing to take on that responsibility and you feel compelled by necessity to wander away from the ideal, then understand that that's going to be difficult and also inevitable over the course of your life.
And what does that mean?
It means have some patience and tolerance because you're going to deviate from the ideal just like people who occupy different forms of relationship.
I don't know a better way to conceptualize that for kids.
Now, you know, your kids have to be somewhat sophisticated to understand that.
But I think if you let Them ask the questions, then you'll know when they're ready for the information.
I wouldn't act precipitously, even to inoculate them, so to speak, against the ideology.
If they're disturbed and you've set up the situation so that open communication is possible in the household and they encounter something at school or among their friends or online that's confusing to them, then they'll bring that to you and you can answer enough so that they're satisfied.
And then you can wait for the next questions to arise.
I don't really know a better way of dealing with it than that.
I like that answer.
We managed a consensus among the ARC group, which is composed of people with very diverse viewpoints.
We managed a consensus around there.
The notion of a center with rings of experimentation around it, that also gives you some play in the system, right?
It's because people can be quite different from one another, and you still need a standard.
It's like, on average, this will work best.
It's like, but I'm not average.
It's like, maybe you're not.
Like, probably you're more average than you think.
And you should pray that that's true.
Because if you really are different, like different, one definition of different is special.
Another definition of different is miserable and doomed.
Yeah.
Right.
And those can go together.
And maybe you are special and you have to walk your own path.
But boy, you walk off the straight, narrow path at your own peril.
That doesn't mean it isn't necessary.
It might be necessary.
I also, I don't think kids care.
I remember when I was young, and I feel like you used to pull us out on days.
We'd have these random homeschool days.
I don't know why we were pulled out on certain days, but I feel like it was to avoid certain indoctrination things that were already happening in our school.
But we had Julian had a really good friend whose parents were lesbians.
I don't think anyone cared, really.
They're like, that's different.
Like, we didn't really think about it.
We were just like, that's not a mom and a dad.
It's a mom and a mom.
That was about it.
That's also the kind of tolerance that I'm talking about.
And I think that that's quite typical.
That was very typical in Canada in the 1990s.
Like the basic, we had already established the social milieu that the progressives now claim to be aiming at.
Oh, I know.
Nobody cared about it.
And then destroyed.
No, actually, they just destroyed it because now we don't have that anymore.
Now we're less tolerant.
Where we lived, where we lived in particular, no one cared.
No one cared if you were black.
No one cared if you were Asian.
No one even really noticed, especially the kids.
No one cared if you were gay.
The rule was: don't be too annoying and assume goodwill and everyone will get along.
And that worked.
And then, well, then all hell broke loose around 2010.
And that all, much of that fell apart.
And I could see some of that starting to happen when you guys were kids, but mostly you.
You were also raised in quite a progressive milieu.
I mean, you went to alternative schools.
The neighborhood we lived in was champagne socialist, like, and none of that was, none of that was a problem for me until 2016 even.
And then, whew, it went sideways.
Yeah.
That's for sure.
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We have a pre-recorded call from a viewer in Beijing, China.
So that's cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm looking forward to that.
My name is Mikhia.
I'm from Romania, and my wife is from India.
We live in Beijing, China.
We have two boys who were born in Beijing.
Their ages are two and four.
The children have Romanian passports.
We have three home languages: English, which is dominant, Romanian, my language, and Chinese, spoken by the live-in babysitter.
The children go to a British school where I also work as a teacher.
We celebrate holidays and festivals of all three cultures: Indian, Romanian, and Chinese.
My question is as follows: Given that my children are growing up in a multicultural environment with influences from Indian, British, Chinese, and Romanian cultures, how can we, as parents, best navigate the balance between preserving the unique values of each culture and ensuring they develop a strong sense of personal identity?
That's cool.
Three languages, good job.
I guess I would ask to begin with how you and your wife negotiate that.
No, it would that's a very that's a very hard question because multiculturalism brings the advantage of diversity, let's say, and that's multiplicity and difference of opinion and the disadvantage of confusion and conflict on the conceptual and ethical side.
And so, one definition of multiculturalism is balkanization, and that's the precursor to continual war.
And so, those who think that diversity brings integration are by necessity are absolute fools.
Obviously, that isn't the case.
How do you negotiate that in a household?
You're teaching, your children have the opportunity to learn these different languages, and they're exposed to a variety of different cultural influences.
If they're thriving, then I would leave that question alone until they're in their teen years.
And then I would say, if that becomes an issue for them, if the fact that they're pulled in multiple directions by their different cultures becomes an issue, then they'll have to educate themselves in relationship to how an integrated vision of culture might be formulated.
And the best sources I know for that endeavor are the thinkers in the school that aggregated around Carl Jung and Mircea Eliada, who was a Romanian historian of religions.
And what that school of psychological, sociological, and historical investigators attempted to do was to map out the commonalities of pattern across different religious and sacred systems.
Now, you see, there's a pre-cursor to this, precedent for this that's very, very deep.
Western civilization arose because the philosophical tradition of Greece mapped strangely onto the prophetic and legal tradition of Judaism.
And the synthesis of those two really laid the groundwork for the Western tradition.
And what you saw in Greece was the emergence of a conceptualization of logos.
And you saw a parallel emergence of a conceptualization, conceptualization of logos, particularly in Christianity.
And it turned out that there was a parallelism between those two that allowed them to be amalgamated.
Now, the Jungian school, the school that Eliada was a part of and a leader of, were looking at a synthesis of that sort that was deep across an even broader range of cultural traditions.
And I don't know of any thinkers that did a better job of pulling together across that diversity than that school.
I would like to think that the work that I've done, particularly in my book, Maps of Meaning, in We Who Wrestle with God.
I'm working on that as well in a new book called The Foundation of the World, which is an analysis of the gospel stories, is a continuation of that integration tradition.
See, you're asking a very difficult question, which is how do you bring harmony out of radically different cultural traditions?
And what you look for is profound commonalities, but you have to go way down into the structure of the beliefs to find those commonalities.
And you won't only find commonalities.
So this is a massive, you're asking the same question as how do you bring a monotheism out of a polytheistic state?
These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
And so it's very difficult to do something like that in the span of your own life.
If you feel obligated or required to do that, I don't know of a better source of information than the writings of the school that I just described.
Carl Jung's works, Mircha Eliada's works, the work of the Bollingen school.
They're the people who did this properly, as opposed to the postmodernists who just accepted radical fractionation and diversity as the desired end goal, which is clearly not the case for you.
You want something to emerge for your children that's integrated and foundational.
So that's a complicated answer, but there's no simple way of addressing that question.
Do you think, just to wrap this up, do you think it's, I mean, absolutely necessary?
Or can you just wait until the kid's old enough?
Because what I've seen from people, especially who have very strong backgrounds, is putting that on their kid, which is like, do you need to make them, I'm Canadian, so I almost feel like I don't have a culture.
I feel like that's kind of like, it just doesn't really feel like that to me.
And I was interested in my background, I guess, like where we originated, but there wasn't a strong pull in any direction.
Do you need a strong pull in any direction or can you just figure it out yourself?
Well, you don't need to solve a problem you don't have.
Yeah.
Right.
And so, as I said to the questioner, if his children are thriving, just leave it be.
Like, you're doing whatever needs to be done right for the moment.
If it becomes an issue as they mature and that's something that becomes an area of concern for them, well, then you cross that bridge when you come to it.
What I tried to lay out was the sources that would be particularly useful in that endeavor.
In more popular culture, people have found their path to this kind of integration primarily through the work of Joseph Campbell, right, and his work on the hero myth, because one of the things that seems to unite cultures at a very deep level is that the traditions,
the traditional narratives of diverse human cultures have a structure that approximates the journey of the hero that Campbell was so good at popularizing.
Now, the postmodern types deny that, but they're a pack of corrupt and self-serving nihilists.
And that is one way, by the way, that is one way of solving the problem, is that if you're faced with the conundrum of multiple competing moral narratives, you can just fractionate and pick whichever one's convenient for you at the moment.
That is not a good solution.
But that's certainly the solution that the academics of the world in the last 50 years have decided that they were going to adopt.
That's why we have a culture war, one of the reasons we have a culture war.
Well, the defining characteristic of postmodernism, this is from Léotard, who was a Jean-François Léotard, who was a founder of postmodernism, is He said postmodernism is skepticism towards metanarratives.
And what he meant, this is a reflection of the Nietzschean death of God.
What he meant was, well, there is no paramount uniting narrative.
There's just a bunch of fractionated narratives that people can, micronarratives that people can inhabit.
It's like, okay, fair enough, but what do you do if the micronarratives compete?
Which they do, which they clearly do.
It's like, well, you get confused and you get anxious and you get aimless and then you get power mad and then you go to war.
You get rioters in California.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thanks for joining us.
We hope you enjoyed and we'll be back to answer many more questions in the future.
Thanks a lot, Mick.
Thank you, Dad.
And to our questioners, much appreciated.
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