Solutions for chaos have millions clamoring for Jordan Peterson.
So, I read his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
Here’s the gist of his survival plan for your calamities.
“Stand up straight with your shoulders back” JP p.1
Peterson, a Darwinian naturalist, urges us to focus on lobsters as inspiration.
“It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies. Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom.” JP p. 8, 28
Standing up straight with your shoulders back is to sweat out the future on your own like any other animal.
If we are no more than descendants of lobsters and apes like Peterson, Nietzsche and Freud say, then we would behave more like animals because…
“Animals only kill for food or safety, not for pleasure. They kill for prey, one or two at a time, not a million of their own species for no reason at all.” Philip Yancey
But, we are not just animals, because fortunately and unfortunately we humans have a unique and higher form of consciousness for choosing good or evil.
Animals can’t do that.
Why not Christian Faith?
Peterson blames Christian faith as “wishful thinking” because he thinks the doctrine of grace removed the angst to do good.
“Nietzsche believed that Paul, and later the Protestants following Luther, had removed moral responsibility from Christ’s followers. They had watered down the imitation of Christ. Nietzsche writes, ‘The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them…and the impudent garrulous talk about ‘justification by faith’…is only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works that Jesus demanded.’” JP p.189
In other words, if Christian faith is authentic, why do so many Christian leaders fail?
And yet Peterson calls the Sermon on the Mount a model for human excellence.
“The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day,so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you–but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth…, do that only after you have determined to sacrifice whatever it is that must be sacrificed so that you can pursue the highest good.” JP pp. 109-110
Faith, for Peterson, is for every human to use the ethics of the Bible without God.
Enough Supermen will Save the World
Like Nietzsche, Peterson is willing us forward to…
- take responsibility
- conquer gray spaces
- sacrifice willingly
- dare the unachieveable
- align with the “Highest Good”
But, the source for all this ambition must come from within the lobster.
“Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death.” JP p. 198
Why the Lobster is not Enough
Peterson is conflicted by the restrictions of Darwinian evolution because he says man “has a spark of the divine.”
Do lobsters?
The former Harvard professor betrays his naturalistic philosophy by constantly appealing to biblical themes of Original Sin and the doctrine of God to motivate his followers.
“So, here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness–reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding–to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil.” JP p. 57
Here’s a proposition for Jordan Peterson: why should we give more authority for truth to one accident’s (evolution’s view of man) explanation of another? Why not recognize our limitations as human beings and the limitations of science and open your mind to revelation that is outside the realm of natural elements?
What do you think?
“Millions clamoring” for his drivel, but that contrasts starkly with the reality that his book had to be discounted 40% to sell.
That’s funny Bruce!