Maps of Meaning: The Why and Who of Jordan B. Peterson

I finally got my copy of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief and I've finished the Preface. So now I am completely qualified to start writing about it!

Actually, the Preface is disarmingly frank and appealing. Simply, Peterson tells us why he has written the book.

First, after being brought up by a church-going mom, he broke with Christianity during his confirmation process. Then he became a lefty and an activist and became a student representative on the board of his local community college.

Then he has a crisis of faith, because while he disagreed with all the local notables on the board, he "could not but help admire them, even though [he] did not share their political stance." However, he could not say the same of the low-level lefty activists he interacted with in leftist politics.

They seemed to live to complain. They had no career, frequently, no family, no completed education -- nothing but ideology. They were peevish, irritable, and little, in every sense of the word.

How to deal with the contradiction: disagreeing with the worthy notables on the college board while agreeing with the moral midgets in lefty politics?

Then something curious happened. He discovered a critical voice in his head that would say "you don't believe that" when he was spouting off on something. This was confusing and embarrassing and would cause him to stop in the middle of a sentence. He realized that he could not go on repeating other peoples' ideas from books, not unless he could actually believe them to be true.

Peterson found that Jung's idea of the persona explained this, that we each put on a mask to present to society as a compromise between the real "me" and what society expects.

Then Peterson started having terrible dreams, two or three times a week. He read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and then remembered that Jung had done a lot of work at the intersection of dreams and myth, and he read this from Jung:

It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.

It is telling that Jung himself went through a long period of terrible dreams after his break with Freud.

Peterson's study of "comparative mythological material" made his terrible dreams disappear. But it also transformed what he believed about the world. He used to believe in the modern disenchanted world, but now believed that "beliefs make the world," that "beliefs are the world."

So let us set forth his manifesto at the end of the Preface, which, I think, brilliantly captures our current human dilemma -- and opportunity.

The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place of things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however -- myth, literature and drama -- portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily set at odds, because we have not yet formed  a picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former [i.e., science] is the objective world -- what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the latter [i.e., myth] is the world of value -- what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action.

Now the point is that, until the rise of science in the last millennium we humans had only the perspective of the world as a "forum for action" and the myths and narratives and dramas that try to make sense of it all. Many modern people now think that the world as a place of things, of reason and science, completely negates the old world of myth and meaning. But the flagrant failure of communism and fascism in the last century, not  to mention the unsatisfactory experience of the market system as a mechanical process, put the lie to this.

We cannot do without narrative and meaning. Science and the knowledge of objects may be very useful, but they do not tell us what life means and what we ought to do about it. The meaning of life, the universe and everything is what we should do about ourselves and the rest of the world, and what it all means, not what we know about things.

Peterson argues that we need to balance our old knowledge of narrative and meaning with our new knowledge of places and things, and that is the way to understand and to live in the world. He dramatizes this balance with the notion of a baby girl reaching up to touch "a fragile and expensive glass sculpture... Suddenly her mother interferes... tells to not to ever touch that object."

But why? What is so special about that object to mother? What does it mean? That is exactly the point, according to Peterson. "Everything is something, and means something --  and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn."

Indeed even today the distinction between thingness and meaning is very often not drawn; it is just stated and woe betide the fool that dares to challenge the generally accepted narrative about meaning. And this is not necessarily a fault. Life must go on, using what knowledge we have, and we cannot often afford the luxury of working out all angles of a particular issue before acting, any more than a mother can spend half an hour explaining what makes a sculpture is so special and meaningful that little Suzy may not touch it, ever.

One point. I don't think I agree that communism and fascism are merely applications of thingness to the human condition. I think they are attempts, after the demolition of meaning, to rebuild the cathedral of meaning in too much of a hurry. The world that Peterson proposes, working out the boundaries of thingness and meaning, is a gigantic project, a reformulation of everything we humans have been and hope to be.

Figuring it all out ain't gonna be easy. It is going to take a while to figure out. But, what a wonderful moment to be alive!