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.
2. The Truth of Myth
Peterson’s title is taken from his hypothesis that a story is “a map of meaning.” if it is what Frye calls “polysemous” – a layered story with multiple meanings, one in which you discover something new every time you read it. The action in such stories presupposes belief grounded in faith – the “architecture of belief” mentioned in the subtitle is what Peterson constantly tries to expound. Systems of belief and moral theory can be critically assessed by cross-cultural analysis of the sort used to interpret the essentially literary texts, both secular and sacred, found in the humanities. The literary critic Northrop Frye followed this path in his The Great Code (1982) and Words of Power (1990), studies cited and quoted abundantly in this book. The means by which culture, ethics and morality are transmitted through the ages are explored in Peterson’s second chapter, “Maps of Meaning,” especially in its final section “Mythological Representation: The Constituent Elements of Experience (pp.89-108) in which he elaborates on his theories of the unknown, the knower and the known. Cultural transmission involves little explicit teaching. Just as children learn to speak by imitating adults in their environment, they learn moral and ethical beliefs, the behavioural wisdom of their culture, because it is embodied in adults and illustrated by archetypal narratives and rituals, even in entertainment such as cartoons and movies featuring heroes who save the world, defeat evil, bring order out of chaos and guide comic plots to their inevitable and timeless conclusions – removal of threats to true love, joyful uniting of society around the married couple with feasting, dancing and birth of new life.
One such polysemous story we might call the myth of deliverance from oppression. Its archetype is the tale of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery into the Promised Land, a prototype of Jesus delivering his followers from the bondage of sin into his eternal kingdom. The mythical pattern recurs in the story of African-American Blacks being delivered from slavery into a new America of freedom and equality (the Negro spiritual song “Go Down Moses”), or more generally in any story where the “wretched of the earth” rise up to smite a tyrant, or a doomed world is saved from destroying fire or flood by a hero. All its variants are aspects of the dominant archetypal narrative in the book: Creation of Paradise, the Fall into sin and death, Atonement by a hero, Redemption, the destruction of evil and death, and entrance into a new Paradise. Perhaps the most profound of the stories that have come down to us over hundreds of thousands of years is the fertility myth of the regeneration of the wasteland, as exemplified in Wagner’s Parsifal or T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and associated with the Fisher King in Frazier’s The Golden Bough, a book also frequently cited by Peterson. The kingdom devastated by drought and infertility is metaphorically identified with the sick old king who rules over it. He often suffers from a wound that will not heal, suggesting impotence or castration. His once-flourishing and fruitful kingdom has become static, a decadent tyranny violating the implicit principles upon which society itself is founded. A young hero, a variant of the knower, sometimes the king’s son, rescues the kingdom by curing the king’s disability and restoring fertility. This usually happens in the spring, the period dreaded most in the wasteland – Eliot’s poem opens thus:
April is the cruellest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
Mixing memory with desire
Stirring dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm
Covering Earth in forgetful snow.”
Sometimes a blood sacrifice is necessary to restore fertility, as in the stories of dying and reviving gods and kings. Sometimes a great evil must be atoned for by the redeeming hero. The relevance of all this to Christ’s Passion is obvious. The fundamental emphasis on death-and-rebirth dramatizes the need to overthrow a stasis dominated by the authority of outdated tradition, of decadent patriarchal power, often symbolized in some versions of the story by a virgin princess imprisoned by the king and released by the hero. Peterson remarks that this is why static political utopias always fail or do not convince. Naive, ideologically-motivated utopian thought is open to several fallacies: (1) the perfectibility of man, a progressive teleological concept that leads to the end of history and unchanging moral values in a failsafe society; (2) the simplistic theory that attributes the existence of human suffering and evil purely to the State because human beings are all born good; (3) the pastoral fantasy of a walled-in innocent Eden or Arcadia where change never comes; (4) the presumption that the State is all that is good, and that the individual should exist merely as subordinate or slave. Peterson notes that ideologies such as these utopian ones may be regarded as incomplete myths.
“The Great Father is the old Emperor, dangerously out of date – a powerful warrior in his youth, now under the spell of a hostile force. He is the eternal impediment to the virgin bride, the tyrannical father who wishes to keep his fruitful daughter firmly under his control. He is the authoritarian who rules the land ravaged by drought; keeper of the castle in which everything has been brought to a standstill.” (p. 215)
3. The Way
Chapters 3 and 4 turn to an exploration of the myth of “The Way,” the path of the exploring, adapting hero and his followers – it may be the Eastern Tao, Buddha’s journey or Christ’s claim to be “The Way, the Truth and the Life.” The hero must first experience the ritual death of his childhood self and rebirth as an “apprentice” into a group that fosters and protects his identity from threatening anomalies he will soon experience as an adult. However, total subservience to any “groupthink,” even that of traditional cultural authority, is perilous, a passive surrender to the dead hand of the past. The mature individual will inevitably encounter anomaly in its many guises:
“The exploratory hero is at home in unexplored territory – is friend of the stranger, welcoming ear for the new idea, and cautious, disciplined social revolutionary.” (p. 232)
The nature of human experience can be altered, redirected for the better by voluntary action and thought enabling us to progress from the tragic circumstances of the unbearable present – the fallen world – by choosing to behave responsibly and properly, moving towards the goal of regaining paradise, a benevolent but necessary fiction until the fallen world is transcended.
Peterson laments how easy it was to discredit the Way. After myth and religion have been reduced to philosophy and then to rationalist materialism and finally to politics, naive empiricists and nihilistic ideologues can casually criticize a stable, culturally transmitted moral tradition, discarding it as primitive superstition or crude projection of psychic realities that today’s advanced thinkers understand scientifically. Because they have been made statable and explicit by abstract rational analysis, these implicit and fundamental religious myths, not understood at all by their critics – decadent authoritarian cynics who think they know everything – are attacked using “Critical Theory,” a blunt instrument devised by the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism. When Antonio Gramsci and his colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer realized that Marxist World Revolution was doomed to failure by the power of Western Christian civilization, they set about destroying that civilization by infiltrating educational and religious institutions by using their factitious scholarship of Critical Theory and deconstructionism (a contribution by Jacques Derrida) to tear down philosophy, education, religion and morality by calling it all oppression. The only reality for them is power, usurped by a ruling patriarchy which must be destroyed. This power (now usurped by them) is then wielded to “liberate” its manifold victims from superstition, conditioning and censorious Puritanism. The Fall of Man, Original Sin, Good and Evil, the Resurrection, Salvation, are all exposed as false historical phenomena, things that did not happen and mean nothing. Complex cultural systems of action and belief that have helped people to achieve discipline and protection, enabling them to face tragedy, evil and the terrors of mortality, are smashed by pseudo-scholarship. Everything you know, say these cultural relativists, is wrong. So, we whistle in the dark, lying to ourselves about evil and death, until we sink into inert despair, our fake secular religions fallen in ruins around us. Even as we arrogantly dismiss our mythic cultures as something we “don’t believe in,” we have nothing else. Critical Theory offers nothing to replace what it destroys. Our laws, customs, institutions, belief systems, codes of conduct are all obviously derived, although often in a distorted form, from Judaeo-Christian civilization, even the tiresome platitudes of postmodernist groupthink and identity politics.
The key cultural belief supporting the myth of the Way is the sanctity of every human individual. This belief is the most important target of the postmodernist destroyers, who want to replace the individual of faith with the conformist groupthinker. Central to this project is spreading the fake news that God is dead (of which more shortly) combined with the nihilist absurdity that nothing means anything except “power.” The “liberation” offered is decadence, unlimited self-assertion and self-indulgence according to a gross perversion of Freud’s concept of “polymorphous perversity” formulated by Frankfurters Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, both renegades from the Viennese school of psychoanalysis who simply ripped the lid off Pandora’s Box and released the worst demons from Freud’s id. Freud’s polymorphous perversity pertains to the infant’s omnisexual desires which are soon curtailed by the discovery that he and his mother are separate beings. At no time does he say it isa virtue, nor does he ever advocate surrender to the often horrific desires of the id. But Reich and Marcuse seek to destroy all moral restraints so they glamorize every form of sexual licence and perversion in the name of liberation from oppression. And of course in the name of “human rights.” Peterson reflects on the consequences of a successful challenge to the belief that every individual is sacred:
“[It] would invalidate the actions and goals of the Western individual, would destroy the Western dominance hierarchy, the social context for individual action. In the absence of this central assumption, the body of Western law – formalized myth, codified morality – erodes and falls. There are no individual rights, no individual value – and the foundation of the Western social (and psychological) structure dissolves. The Second World War and Cold War were fought largely to eliminate such a challenge.” (p. 261)
4. The Death of God
“God is dead,” chorused Swinburne, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Confessions) and Nietzsche. The latter predicted the triumph of corrosive and tyrannical nihilism in the twentieth century. The loss of faith in the meaning of life, he argued, could not be attributed to Max Nordau’s theory of creeping degeneration or Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West: it would occur because of the destruction of Christian faith by militant scientific rationalism like that espoused by the naive empiricists James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in their theory of Utilitarianism. It became increasingly difficult to embrace faith in the traditional mythic narratives because religion was being forced to “prove” its validity as actual historical events, as things that happened rather than as meaningful action that is more metaphorical than documentary. Nietzsche heaped scorn on the spurious tactic of appropriating Christian morality by dressing it up as philosophy or common sense or innate virtue. Denying that we can select from its ruins whatever fragments of the Christian belief system we fancy, he insists that once we have killed God we have also killed the religion derived from him. In his Confessions, Tolstoy was horrified to reach this conclusion after he accepted the death of God:
“As presented by the learned and the wise, rational knowledge denies the meaning of life but the huge masses of people acknowledge meaning through an irrational knowledge. And this irrational knowledge is faith, the one thing I could not accept…. My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing in the way of rational knowledge except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing except a denial of reason, and this was even more impossible than a denial of life. According to rational knowledge, it followed that life is evil, and people know it …. According to faith, it followed that in order to understand the meaning of life I would have to turn away from reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary.” (pp. 269-70)
The attempt to devalue religious and mythical thinking and deny the validity of imaginative literature arguably begins with Plato’s act of expelling the poets from his Republic. Frye counterattacks, directing his wrath at I.A. Richards’ influential Science and Poetry for maintaining that mythical thinking has been superseded by scientific thinking. Throughout all his work Frye has tried to demonstrate that imaginative, creative literature is a separate verbal universe and that mythological or metaphorical thinking cannot be superseded by scientific materialism because it forms the framework and context for all thinking:
“The poetic imagination constructs a cosmos of its own, a cosmos to be studied not simply as a map but as a world of powerful conflicting forces. This imaginative cosmos is neither the objective environment studied by natural science nor a subjective inner space to be studied by psychology. It is an intermediate world in which the images of higher and lower, the categories of beauty and ugliness, the feelings of love and hatred, the associations of sense experience, can be expressed only by metaphor and yet cannot be dismissed or reduced to projections of something else. Ordinary consciousness is so possessed by the either-or contrast of subject and object that it finds difficulty in taking in the notion of an order of words that is neither subjective nor objective, though it interpenetrates with both. But its presence gives a very different appearance to many elements of human life, including religion, which depend on metaphor but do not become less ‘real’ or ‘true’ by doing so.” (p. 491 n. 537)
He is impatient with the “infantilism” of literary specialists concentrating on some narrow aspect of criticism such as one writer or period because they “are both ignorant and contemptuous of the mental processes that produce literature.” (p. 270) Nietzsche is even more scornful of the “boundlessly clumsy naivety” of the modern scholar’s treatment of “the religious man as an inferior and lower type that he has outgrown.” (p. 270)
Some maintain that Hamlet is the first modern man, and that Shakespeare’s play reveals that he already knew what Freud “discovered” much later in his psychoanalytic research. Harold Bloom has made the more extreme claim that Shakespeare invented human nature. Hamlet, “sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought,” his faith shaken by the horror, evil and absurdity of existence, learns that knowledge can kill moral action through paralysis of the will. He proceeds (like the empirical researcher Freud) with his carefully verified observations and intellectual manipulations, doubting that there is any validity in his visions or intuitions. But he loses his way.
Peterson postulates a parallel between the paths followed by both Buddha and Christ as examples of “the Way.” Even though the Buddhist tenet that all is illusory or false may seem to contradict essential Christian faith and scripture, at a deep level the two exploring heroes agree. Buddha grew up protected by his father in a walled-in earthly paradise unaware of human suffering, tragedy, evil and death. Even after he insisted out of curiosity upon leaving his garden of delights, he was shielded from any perception of the real world. Finally, however, he discovered aging, disease and death, and that they would all befall him. Struggling to overcome the shock of his tragic self-consciousness, he moved through various philosophical disciplines, completing the process with extreme asceticism that led to his mystical awakening into Nirvana. But even though he had achieved a sort of perfection finally transcending human desire, he declined to remain in this state. Returning to his mortal condition (that meant once again personally accepting decay and death), he becomes a revolutionary hero by disseminating among his fellow-humans the knowledge he acquired – “I show you sorrow. And I show you the ending of sorrow.”
Like Jesus, Buddha chose to dwell for a time in the tragic human world, confronting and defeating death, ascending to Heaven but not abandoning his followers, leading them to also achieve salvation, enlightenment and Nirvana or eternal life… These two myths of the Fall from and Way back to Paradise describe the development of self-consciousness as voluntary, a matter of individual choice, in no way predetermined by divine will or authoritarian group:
“Individual intrapsychic representation of cumulative historically predicated human experience makes the one into the many, so to speak; makes the individual into the embodiment of group experience, to date. Development of moral sense, and moral choice, constitutes an emergent property of such incorporation of knowledge. Knowledge of morality, of good and evil, presupposes the presence of alternative possibilities for action in a given situation – means capacity for conceptualization of alternative ideals, toward which behaviour can be devoted.” (pp. 304-5)
Without the choices and actions of the individual Buddhist or Christian, these religions would mean nothing.
5. Theodicy
As the epigraph quote indicates, Peterson is preoccupied with evil, its nature and origins, especially regarding the unbearable horror of nuclear war. As Frye used to speculate in his lectures, how can people living in the age of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocide believe that evil does not exist? He opined that such students were suffering from serious moral and intellectual neglect. There can be no doubt that Peterson agrees with him if this criticism is applied to students today, who talk of making the world a better place through “social justice” but have no basis for distinguishing good from evil or dealing with their own inner chaos. In some ways, this book seems like a new kind of theodicy, but as far as I know Peterson never uses this word anywhere. As a clinical psychologist he declines to poach on the territory of the theologian, choosing words very carefully when asked questions involving religious belief. But he does not dodge the concept of theodicy, the questions of why did a good God make a bad world? Why does God permit so many children to suffer terrible evil? Why is Satan allowed his many victories over good? How does one counter the atheist and nihilist who points out the meaningless absurdity of existence? And finally, just exactly what is evil?
The postmodernist dictum that everything you know is wrong certainly refers to the knowledge that evil is real. The term is uncool and old-fashioned, much like the divine soul of the human individual, part of the discredited apparatus of religion. Behaviours and characteristics once defined as evil are now to be considered symptoms of mental or physiological illness (an old Stalinist gambit) or the consequences of unjust familial, social or economic structures. Evil actions as such are never voluntary, purposeful or the results of deliberate choice. Least of all can evil be the product of an aesthetic that renders terror and pain artistic. However, this kind of failure to understand the reality of evil leads to its eventual triumph. Peterson observes that what the Devil craves most is invisibility. (p. 309)
In the Introduction to his Chapter 5, “The Hostile Brothers: Archetypes of the Unknown,” Peterson develops a contrast between the hero and his adversary, usually his alter ego or evil twin. Though he refers to several such pairs, including Cain and Abel and Seth and Osiris, he emphasizes Satan and Christ, offering an extensive analysis of Satan’s character especially as created by Milton in Paradise Lost, as the perfect archetype of evil. He observes that the Bible is of little use here as it contains almost nothing about Satan as an individual personality or his response to his environment of Hell. Thus the Satan that Peterson puts forward as the incarnation of evil is mostly a product of Milton’s creative imagination (with some help from Dante’s poem The Divine Comedy). Readers have been troubled by the fact that Satan is a tremendous, heroic, glamorous figure, regarded by some Romantic poets as the real hero of the poem. Blake said that Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it, and other Romantic rebels have admired Satan’s fearless defiance of God’s omnipotence and his proud boast, “Better to reign in Hell/ Than serve in Heaven.” But it must be remembered that Paradise Lost is an epic, in which the adversary must be a worthy opponent of the hero. Satan declares himself superior to Jesus, and capable of defeating God and his angels in the battle that is a necessary part of every epic poem. Milton, closely following Homer and Virgil, has contrasted the pious, Aeneas-like Jesus with a Satan modelled on Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax and other amoral pagan heroes who revel in proud fury, murderous and vengeful rage, and who never display repentance or compassion (with the single exception of Achilles returning Hector’s body to Priam). Refuting the romantic infatuation with Satan in his Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis brilliantly analyses Satan’s evil in passages that must have influenced Peterson.
The essential ambivalence of the individual means that he has a dark side, capable of thoughts and actions that are entirely evil. Satan, the eldest son of God and the evil twin of his younger brother Jesus, is extrapolated from a single mythic personality. The first step in understanding evil is that it exists in each one of us in all of its worst forms. The Bible does dramatize this fact in showing the potent, though unsuccessful, temptations of Christ by Satan. Evil deeds are not predetermined by God, Fate, Chance, Necessity or Nature but always flow from deliberate individual choices where there are possible alternatives – to do, or not to do.
Peterson defines evil as follows:
“Evil is rejection of and sworn opposition to the process of creative exploration. Evil is proud repudiation of the unknown, and wilful failure to understand, transcend and transform the social world. Evil is – in addition – and in consequence – hatred of the virtuous and courageous, precisely on account of their virtue and courage. Evil is the desire to disseminate darkness, for the love of darkness, where there could be light. The spirit of evil underlies all actions that speed along the decrepitude of the world.” (p. 310)
He concludes that when evil has reached a certain level intolerable to God, he will destroy the world with fire or flood.
Part of Satan’s attractiveness is his rhetoric: he is a brilliant demagogue when appealing to his followers both before and after his failed rebellion – his fearlessness, while facing the terrors of Chaos and Hell, his ambition and willpower in refusing to submit, surrender or admit error. In his soliloquy he even admits some of the truth about himself and his circumstances, although it leads only to self-pity and remorse, not to repentance. Or reform. In Heaven he was Lucifer, the brightest of all the angels, the first-born son of God and thus the supreme angel in the divine hierarchy. But when God declared Jesus to be the Messiah and sat him at his right hand, Satan felt he had been passed over. Overcome by pride and wrath, he decided to defy God and declare himself “the Most High,’ leading a rebellion of angels loyal to him. Here we see the arrogance and self-delusion of the typical tyrant. He knows he cannot become superior to God and has no authority to challenge his decisions. He is also a skilful and habitual liar, as shown by his spurious claims to be higher than God and his groundless confidence that he can overcome God’s will by force. After he is defeated and cast into Hell with his followers, he leads them in a war of cosmic terrorism against God and his works, including his creation of a new world peopled by a race who may in time replace the fallen angels, now become demons. Ruling over them, he presents himself as omniscient and infallible, never accepting any advice from other angels. But Milton’s reader can see the bluff and bluster behind the rhetoric. His scheme to defeat God by destroying Paradise and the human beings there is a failure. Adam and Eve do fall into sin and death, but they and their descendants are redeemed by Christ – the second Adam – and admitted to a new Paradise. So Satan is defeated again, reduced through all eternity to playing his futile role of cosmic vandal.
Satan’s soliloquy in Book IV is a masterpiece of unconscious self-revelation. It is our only opportunity, as is often the case with Shakespeare’s characters, to discover what is behind the Satanic facade. He is intoxicated with pride, based on his imagined power, status, strategic brilliance and the terror he imagines he inspires in God. But his empire is a house of cards. At bottom, as Frye observes, Hell is nothing more than a travesty of Heaven with Satan posing as God:
“A demonic fall, as Milton presents it, involves defiance of and rivalry with God rather than simple disobedience, and hence the demonic society is a sustained and systematic parody of the divine one, associated with devils or fallen angels because it seems far beyond normal human capacities in its powers…there seem to be demonic reinforcements in heathen life that account for the almost superhuman grandeur of the heathen empires, just before they fall.” (p. 315)
Satan experiences a moment of self-discovery when he admits to himself that he always knew he was inferior in both kind and degree to God and the Messiah, and that he lied to the other angels about this and about their chances of winning the war in Heaven. But the perception leads only to further self-delusion. Even if he did repent, he supposes, God could never forgive him because of the magnitude of his transgressions. This fallacy, that there are sins so great that God himself cannot forgive them, is trademark arrogance in the proud, evil tyrant. Finally, as he is flying through Chaos on his way to sabotage God’s creation of humanity, he even realizes that his evil is his own doing, and thus forever inescapable:
“Which way I fly is Hell
Myself am Hell.”
However much of fear and weakness he may perceive in himself in introspective moments, Satan always clings to his proud delusion that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. As Peterson remarks:
“It is the act of denying that stupidity exists, once it has manifested itself, that is evil, because stupidity cannot then be overcome.” (p. 317)
It is arguable that the existence of evil is a precondition for human freedom, Peterson suggests that this is the case as he recounts the story of the Good Spirit and the Destroying Spirit in Persian mythology (pp, 318-19). The position is also forcibly stated by Milton’s God, commenting on the degeneration of Satan and mankind:
“So will fall
Hee and his faithless progeny: whose fault?
Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of mee
All he could have; I made him just and right
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” (p. 319)
Foreknowledge by God is not predestination. Foreknown or not, Satan’s fall, or Eve’s, would have occurred because of their own freely-chosen actions. God goes on to assert that obedience to his laws, faith in him or love for him would be meaningless if compulsory. If will and reason are not involved in choosing between good and evil, but only some passive necessity, fate or chance, it is not a choice at all. God’s perfect goodness, omnipotence and omniscience are not inconsistent with the existence of evil. Neither does the existence of evil mean that God does not exist or that he is to blame for all the horrors that befall the world. Peterson warns against confusing the tragic circumstances of the human condition with deliberately-undertaken evil actions such as the mass murder of schoolchildren. As a literary genre tragedy can be ennobling through catharsis. Evil never is. Encountering tragedy as part of the mortal conditions of human existence may develop character. Participating in evil actions intended to cause pain and suffering destroys character.
In conclusion, Peterson suggests that we might reserve an answer to the questions of God’s nature, intentions and responsibility for the presence of evil in creation until we have solved the problems of our own nature and intentions. If we lived responsibly and behaved properly, taking full advantage of every gift we have been granted, there might be a lot less evil in the world:
“We have been granted the capacity to voluntarily bear the terrible weight of our mortality. We turn from that capacity and degrade ourselves because we are afraid of responsibility. In this manner, the necessarily tragic preconditions of existence are made intolerable….We seem capable of withstanding natural disaster, even of responding to that disaster in an honorable and decent manner. It is rather the pointless suffering that we inflict upon each other – our evil – that makes life appear corrupt beyond acceptability; that undermines our ability to manifest faith in our central natures. So why should the capacity for evil exist?” (p. 454)
His answer follows: what is believed determines the value of things; therefore, the distance between good and evil gives life its meaning. For those who don’t believe in the difference, nothing means anything. Everything you know is wrong;
“Value is a continuum, a line stretching from necessary point ‘a’ to necessary point ‘b.’ ‘A’ and ‘b’ are defined in relation to one another, as two points define a line. The polarity between the two determines the valence of the goal. The more polarity (that is, the more tension) between the two points, the more worthwhile the enterprise. Good cannot be defined – cannot exist – in the absence of evil. Value cannot exist in the absence of polarity. So, for the world to be worthwhile (that is, for the choice between two things to constitute a real choice) both good and evil have to exist.
But then it would be possible to only choose good, at least in the ideal – and then evil would not exist, except in potential. So it appears that the world could be valuable (could justify the burden it requires to maintain) if evil were only to exist in potential – if everyone chose to act properly, that is. This seems to me to be the most optimistic thought I have ever encountered.” (p. 455).
Peterson then begins to really sound like a Biblical prophet. Love God. Know thyself. Seek the truth. Imitate the perfection of Christ. Love your neighbour as yourself. Stop trying to repair and save the world, stop polluting it with good works that don’t work. It will not be vainglorious posturing but small, everyday choices that will do the most good. He quotes
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago as he so often has throughout this book:
“One man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny.” (p.456)
He leaves the reader with this challenge:
“Christ said, the kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it. What if it was nothing but our self-deceit, our cowardice, hatred and fear, that pollutes our experience and turns the world into hell? This is a hypothesis at least – as good as any other, admirable and capable of generating hope. Why can’t we make the experiment, and find out if it is true?” (p. 456)
6. Epilogue
This review-article is not a Summary and Guide to Maps of Meaning. Such a document may be found at https://www.scribd.com and at https://www.reddit.com/Jordan-Peterson/
Professor Peterson has provided his own precis at the website “Psycoloquy 10 (077).”
My article emphasizes the significance of this book for the humanities, more particularly for the study of the history of ideas as it has been carried on at the University of Toronto by such scholars of intellectual history as Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. I do not address the chapters on Phenomenology and Neuropsychology, nor do I comment on the extensive sections on Alchemy and C.G. Jung’s contributions in that area. This book is so dense that it is sometimes opaque. In style, Peterson is much more like McLuhan than Frye. All three write scholarly prose very much as they lecture: whereas Frye wrote lectures and read them with precise control, rarely deviating from his text or leaving his lectern, McLuhan and Peterson are (were) more improvisatory and perambulatory. This oracular style can generate much excitement in the audience but can also be quite repetitive.