An open thread for reader tips and comments.
An open thread for reader tips and comments.
*drunk pic.twitter.com/cLsPWy7LEq
— Kelly 🐀 (@kelly_t_mac) May 15, 2018
A review of Jordan B. Peterson’s MAPS OF MEANING: The Architecture of Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 1999)
“The reasons for war, many believe, are rooted in politics….It is just as true, however, that it is a good thing to look for something you don’t want to find in a place where you know it won’t be―and the modern concern with global politics, and the necessity to be involved in a ‘good cause,’ rather than to live responsibly, seems to me to be evidence that the desire not to find overpowers the real search for truth…It is true that people don’t want the truth, because the truth destroys what lack of faith erects, and the false comfort it contains….I looked for what I wanted to find where it was obvious to everyone it would be―in politics, in political science, in the study of group behaviour….I came to realize, slowly, that a problem of global proportions existed as a problem because everyone on the globe thought and acted to maintain that problem. Now what that means is that if the problem has a solution, then what everyone thinks is wrong. Now the problem with this line of reasoning is simple. It leads inexorably to the following conclusion: the more fundamental the problem, the more fundamental the error…I came to believe that survival itself, and more, depended upon a solution to the problem of war. This made me consider that perhaps everything I believed was wrong.”
From Peterson’s letter to his father pp. 457-58
1. Chaos vs. Order
Jordan Peterson is a prophet. Not a fortune-teller who reads palms or tea-leaves, but an interpreter of our history and culture, where it is, has been and is going. A Professor of Psychology, he has revived an intellectual tradition at the University of Toronto best represented by Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, A.S.P. Woodhouse, F.E.L. Priestly, Malcolm Ross and Harold Innes, originally deriving from Harvard where Peterson has also studied and taught, there associated with Professors G.L. Kittredge, Douglas Bush and Peter Gordon and known as the study of intellectual history, sometimes as the history of ideas. The central idea examined in this book is the conflict of human order against chaos, the pre-cosmic state preceding the creation of social order. Chaos (also called the unknown) envelops and constantly threatens to overwhelm the fragile order culture struggles to maintain. As Othello cries despairingly as his world disintegrates, “Chaos is come again!”
For Peterson our world is not primarily an object for empirical analysis but a forum for dramatic action. This action comprises three elements of human experience: the unknown, the knower and the known, all having emerged from chaos, their stories metaphorically recounted in creation myths, archetypal narratives and religious revelations. These myths are not only true but, as Hemingway observed about the best fiction, “truer than true” because they are the essence of eternal human action. Jung called these omnipresent myths that recur in similar forms in most cultures, the collective unconscious, not because they are genetically inherited but because we never forget them. Some pedantic reviewers of this book complain that all myths are far from identical in content or reference, pointing out differences between Confucianism, Samoan rituals and Western archetypal structures. It is true that Peterson emphasizes Judaeo-Christian archetypal patterns but that is because he is analysing Western, not global, mythology since our culture is based on it – our laws, morals. ethics, literature, religion and philosophy.
The unknown is Freud’s id, Nietzsche’s Dionysus and all mysterious dark forces of Nature best symbolized by the metaphor “womb and tomb” – therefore, archetypally feminine. The knower is Freud’s ego, the wise fool who has become enlightened, the hero, the sun (son of God) who opposes darkness and disorder. The known is Freud’s superego, Nietzsche’s Apollonian world of ordered rational culture, the power of moral authority, the patriarchal hierarchy and thus archetypally masculine. There are struggles in creation myths (for example, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian) between the Terrible Mother and the Great Father usually mediated by the knower – their son. However, each of these aspects of experience is ambivalent. The womb and tomb of the unknown can bring regeneration and advancement or destruction and death. The knower, often a heroic explorer and warrior who can even subdue his parents to create moral order, must sometimes face his alter ego, an adversary who may be his brother but is a demonic rebel who rejects and destroys everything he tries to accomplish, as in the rivalry between Christ and Satan depicted by the poet John Milton. The known, the domain of cultural and moral order, if it does not remain flexible and adaptable to changes and challenges from the unknown, will decay, become rigid and despotic, finally a wasteland ruled by tyranny that reverts to chaos.
RCMP say more than 76,000 have crossed the U.S.-Cda border this year. About 96% have crossed into Quebec, the rest through Manitoba and B.C. Quebec officials expect about 400 crossings per day this summer. #ottnews pic.twitter.com/Au3aPDXuWE
— carolan w. lesaux (@cwadsworthCTV) May 15, 2018
After Federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, and NPD MP Kennedy Stewart (who is now running for mayor of Vancouver), were arrested at the Kinder Morgan pipeline protest in Burnaby back in March, the BC Prosecution Service (BCPS) announced today that charges of criminal contempt against the pair have been approved.
Another potential Liberal voter:
There’s a guy walking about freely in Toronto bragging to the media about going abroad to join the Islamic State. He’s told The New York Times he killed people (executed them in the head, to be precise). Although he’s walked that part back