Six years ago, a commentator↱ described Jordan Peterson as a competitor to Richard Dawkins "in the race to be the first of the two to hit the 'screaming, topless and drunk, at geese in the park' phase of public life". It's the kind of thing that comes to mind along the way when, well, it's Jordan Peterson. It takes an effort to fare worse than Dawkins, but Peterson is the guy who famously had his staff repeatedly change his password to keep him off social media, yet somehow found himself risking his license to practice psychology because he couldn't help harassing transgender people and fat women online.
He's also the guy who wants enforced monogamy and is really mad that women would object. In the end, it wasn't cancel culture that got him, but addiction, and when he returned from an induced coma to dress up in an ill-fitting tuxedo and out himself as a climate denier on a major podcast, at least his fans didn't seem to notice the difference.
Apparently, the professor needed easier quarry than women, so he wrote a book about God. Critic James Marriott↱ did the job nobody else wants to:
The last time I reviewed a book by Jordan Peterson, a cleverly edited excerpt of my negative opinion (I described it as "bonkers") appeared on the cover of the paperback edition, giving readers the misleading impression that I had endorsed it. So this time I shall have to be clear. The new book is unreadable. Repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad, We Who Wrestle with God repels the reader's attention at the level of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word.
It's kind of like the difference between atheism itself, and atheists. Okay, probably not "the" difference, but it's a difference that is hard to not notice, like trying to find actual rational discourse among modern Rationalists. Marriott risks jacket copy by acknowledging Peterson's polemic skill and role in polpularizing evolutionary psychology, "But in recent years his thought has taken on an unignorably zany complexion, like challenging Dawkins on the dragons.
Now comes this sprawling allegorical study of the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus. Surely even Peterson's most devoted fans are struggling to keep up at this point. I can't imagine many of them will manage to follow their prophet — who cuts a more raddled and wild-eyed figure with every passing chapter — through this arid and bewildering desert of prose.
We Who Wrestle with God is not a conventional work of biblical exegesis. Its author is almost entirely uninterested in historical or theological interpretation. It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument. Peterson's thesis, familiar from previous books, is that the biblical narratives contain certain significant motifs or characters that encode eternal truths about the structure and meaning of existence. These "archetypes" recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton's Satan and Goethe's Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, "Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame", Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and "Syndrome in The Incredibles".
The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children's film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia ....
.... This is biblical scholarship as conspiracy theory. Everything is connected. Nothing happens by chance. The snitch in the Harry Potter game Quidditch is "a manifestation of the spirit Mercurius … an emissary of the dreamworld of the unconscious — a psychopomp who flits on the border between the human and the divine". What if it's just a made up magic ball game, you want to ask. But the Bible means whatever Peterson decides he wants it to mean. And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology ....
.... Much of this, I suppose, is inoffensively spurious. A more civilised variant of the hippy-dippy nonsense that is so popular in our increasingly superstitious culture, with its tarot readers and astrology addicts. But the really nuts idea, which Peterson pushes more forcefully in this book than ever before, is that archetypes can be said in some way to exist. They may even be "more real than the facts", he suggests. "Ideas are living spirits … extant both in the collective and in the individual psyche." This is the explanation of the stuff about the "biological reality" of the dragon.
We Who Wrestle with God is not a conventional work of biblical exegesis. Its author is almost entirely uninterested in historical or theological interpretation. It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument. Peterson's thesis, familiar from previous books, is that the biblical narratives contain certain significant motifs or characters that encode eternal truths about the structure and meaning of existence. These "archetypes" recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton's Satan and Goethe's Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, "Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame", Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin and "Syndrome in The Incredibles".
The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children's film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia ....
.... This is biblical scholarship as conspiracy theory. Everything is connected. Nothing happens by chance. The snitch in the Harry Potter game Quidditch is "a manifestation of the spirit Mercurius … an emissary of the dreamworld of the unconscious — a psychopomp who flits on the border between the human and the divine". What if it's just a made up magic ball game, you want to ask. But the Bible means whatever Peterson decides he wants it to mean. And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology ....
.... Much of this, I suppose, is inoffensively spurious. A more civilised variant of the hippy-dippy nonsense that is so popular in our increasingly superstitious culture, with its tarot readers and astrology addicts. But the really nuts idea, which Peterson pushes more forcefully in this book than ever before, is that archetypes can be said in some way to exist. They may even be "more real than the facts", he suggests. "Ideas are living spirits … extant both in the collective and in the individual psyche." This is the explanation of the stuff about the "biological reality" of the dragon.
The thing about skepticism is that, without a rational foundation, it's just an affectation. If, in the middle of a discussion, an atheist up and crows that his god is stronger than your god, what challenge will be, will be, but it might occur to wonder what the word "atheist" is doing in the middle of all that. It's something that comes up when the skeptic fails to understand what the skeptcism criticizes. Skepticism reduced to fancy is, comparatively, mere fancy. "It is unclear whether he believes in God," Marriott observes of Peterson's book: "He certainly does not believe in rational argument."
Because Peterson's ideas about the biological reality of dragons have no basis in reality, he attempts to dignify them with the superficial impression of rigour by employing a pseudo-philosophical jargon that is wearyingly heavy on abstract nouns. "Adam has just been confirmed in his role as describer and delineator of the world; he is the locus of the differentiated consciousness upon which being and becoming themselves somehow mysteriously depend," runs a characteristically rebarbative sentence. "The entity residing in or characterising the ultimate up can detect the quality of a sacrifice in the upward rising smoke," runs another.
If these seem entertaining taken out of context, imagine getting to the end of one sentence like that and having to read another just as bad. And then another. And another. And so on for more than five hundred pages. The reader's patience is further tested by Peterson's habit of lurching from the spurious to the pedantic.
If these seem entertaining taken out of context, imagine getting to the end of one sentence like that and having to read another just as bad. And then another. And another. And so on for more than five hundred pages. The reader's patience is further tested by Peterson's habit of lurching from the spurious to the pedantic.
Perhaps we could have stopped at "unreadable", or, "Repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad". At some point, Marriott's review is an exercise in irony verging on cruelty, but it's also softened for the Peterson fandom. If, for instance, simply pointing to the irony of Peterson's hypocrisy was sufficient, Marriott wouldn't bother with the political correctness: "The reader's patience is further tested by Peterson's habit of lurching from the spurious to the pedantic," might not be a the most complimentary assessment, but it's gentler than saying the reader is assailed throughout by the blazing hypocrisy of it all.
Indeed, the political correctness, the sanitized and gentle language of Marriott's criticism, is its own manner of irony. The overformulated sentences just start to stack up in a way Peterson might, were it not criticizing his book, otherwise envy. "If We Who Wrestle with God offers the reader any relief at all," the review explains, "it derives from the inadvertent comedy of Peterson's attempts to combine humourless biblical analysis, pop culture fandom and conservative polemic in the space of a single misbegotten sentence." And while, for instance, the professor's focus on porn stars "is a diverting subtheme of the book", Marriott also observes, "The hours do not exactly fly by in Peterson's company."
And, honestly, compared to actual religious scholars, "the WWE of biblical hermeneutics" is not a description to be taken lightly. And maybe, if the "importance of the pole" doesn't tell us enough about where Peterson's head is at, it's because nobody knows, not even Peterson: Moses, Numbakulla, the Jack who climbed a beanstalk; you never know when you're going to need "the stabilising effect of the spirit of the ancients".
At some point, it feels like piling on. But, as Marriott explains, "there is something dispiriting about spending multiple paragraphs agonising conscientiously over different translations only to be breezily informed a few pages later that Jiminy Cricket is the archetype of Jesus Christ."
Was a time, this guy I know tried this dumb pitch about how he'd never heard of Peterson until the professor showed up on TV and said some good things about free speech. Thing is, anybody can. Just like pretty much anyone can tell you Jiminy is Jesus, pretty much anybody can say what you want to hear.
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Notes:
@FoldableHuman. "Despite Dawkins' healthy head start, Peterson is closing the gap in the race to be the first of the two to hit the "screaming, topless and drunk, at geese in the park" phase of public life." Twitter. 13 August 2018. X.com. 21 November 2024. status/1029093081579024384
Marriott, James. "We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson review — rambling, hectoring and mad". The Times. 20 November 2024. TheTimes.com. 21 November 2024. https://www.thetimes.com/culture/bo...tions-divine-jordan-peterson-review-cn3hk3bdz