Maps of Meaning - Table of Contents

An Analysis of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning

1. Maps of Meaning: The Why and Who of Jordan B. Peterson
He had a voice inside that couldn't go with the lefty rubbish

2. Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Means
It means becoming a lefty victim

3. In Media Res: Peterson and Stark
Chaos, morality, social control

4. Ancient Myth and My Three Peoples Theory
Can Three Peoples be meshed with Great Mother, Great Father, and the Son?

5. But First, Humans are Tribal
The capitalist/libertarian world view is not enough, because humans are tribal 

6. The Alt-Right Takes Out After Jordan Peterson
Peterson isn't defending the Christian culture and the nation state

7. Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning:" It's a Start
Can we emerge from our need for safety to the challenge of the Sacrificial Hero?

8. The Two Paths: Rich Kids After the Death of God
Either the nostalgia of "activism" or the real path of self-discovery

9. Why I Think Jordan Peterson is Important
He is saying what I am saying, only better.

Why I Think Jordan Peterson is Important

In response to my review of Vox Day's Jordanetics, Vox Day kindly averred as how Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad."

But here is a Rex Murphy piece in the Canadian National Post on Jordan B. Peterson, about how the left too has a problem with Jordanetics, about how the whole Peterson phenomenon started with a bunch of U of Toronto students that tried to get the prof fired for crimes against leftism.

[They were outraged by] Peterson’s “gross misconduct,” his “efforts at agitation … inflammatory denunciations … evident connections to white supremacists … disruptive behaviour.”

In response, Peterson

more or less told the pack of puerile leftlings chasing him with pitchforks and torches that their grandmothers wore severely unstylish army boots.

OK, so why do both left and right disapprove of Jordan B. Peterson?

The answer, as you would expect, is completely comprehended by my reductive Three Peoples theory. That's the one with the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, the People of the Responsible Self, the ordinary middle class, and the People of the Creative Self, everyone from artists and writers to start-up businessmen and political activists and revolutionaries.

See, the point is that lefties see the world as creative revolutionary activists like them making the world safe for their "little darlings," the People of the Subordinate Self -- the workers, peasants, and historically marginalized people like blacks, women, gays -- from the depredations of the evil bourgeois middle class and the worst thing in the world, Christianity. But Peterson defends the right of the ordinary middle class to pursue its destiny of responsibility and even regards religion as a Good Thing.

Now, chaps like Vox Day believe that the middle class of the nation state, the People of the Responsible Self, and reason and logic are the good guys. The lefties of the People of the Creative Self are the bad guys, and the workers and peasants of the People of the Subordinate Self, are the foolish dupes of the lefties.

My Three Peoples theory takes the reductive position that all three of the Three Peoples are perfectly natural and physical. There are tons of people in the world that just want to be safe and leave all the heavy lifting to their lord or their political patron. So be it. There are lots of people that want to get a job, get married, have children, and retire in good time with a nice little nest egg. More power to them. Then there are creative geniuses on the border between the known and the unknown that bring new inventions and economic revolutions. They are amazing.

So you can see that my theory of the world is a sophisticated and balanced view of the world that understands that there are all kinds of people in the world and they have a perfect right to be who they are. In any case, we can't be sure about who has the inside track on Truth, Justice, and the American Way. That really is the point that Kant is making with his notion that we can't know things in themselves, but only start guessing from what we pick up with our senses. My Three Peoples theory also tracks with Jung, because Jung proposes that all religions are attempts by historical peoples to make sense of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and that the same themes keep coming up in every religion. With the left, we are saying that all religions are superstition and bigotry. But with Jung we are saying that all religions are an honest attempt to get to the heart of things.

So of course Vox Day would be anti-Kant and anti-Jung.

Now, I'm not sure what Jordan Peterson has to say about the People of the Subordinate Self, but he clearly in his 12 Rules says that the first thing to do is get out of the basement, stand up straight with shoulders back and discipline yourself to become a responsible person. In Maps of Meaning, his first book, he proposes that the highest and best thing is to be a sacrificial hero trying to make sense of the border between order and chaos. That is a celebration of the creative self.

So of course I think that Jordan Peterson is a good guy. He is saying what I am saying, only better.

See, my world view is that for most of history, and certainly since the dawn of the state-based agricultural age nearly everyone was a subordinate peasant or a slave. It was the genius of Christianity and the other Axial Age religions to develop the idea that humans were responsible to God for their lives, not subordinate to their lords, and ought to do something about it. But now, in my view, we have entered into a creative age, where people think that the highest and best thing is to be creative. The last 200 years of the capitalist explosion is nothing if it is not a creative explosion.

This means that the old religion of responsibility, Christianity, no longer can win the hearts and minds of people that yearn to be creative. They all want to be artists and writers, and activists and start-up entrepreneurs, not mere deplorable responsibles. Now modern leftism, in my view, is the idea that only political creativity is meaningful, and that responsibility is for the birds. So their religion excludes responsibility as a good.

But I think that the religion of the future must combine a faith in responsibility with a faith in creativity, rather than choose one or the other, and I think that Jordan Peterson's ideas are a sensible step in that direction.

 On my view you can easily see that it makes perfect sense that Vox Day, with his faith in responsibility, and lefties, with their faith in political creativity, would think that Peterson is a dangerous crank that ought to be vilified and suppressed.

My only complaint is that the woods are not full of Jordan Petersons celebrating a combination of responsibility and creativity.

But we can't have everything. Not right away.

The Two Paths: for Rich Kids After the Death of God

Today the formerly-Facebook-censored Dennis Prager issued part 3 of his "Explaining the Left" series. Quoting Victor Frankl, he writes:

[T]he greatest drive of man is meaning.

Frankl's book is titled "Man's Search for Meaning." And golly, whaddya know, Jordan B. Peterson's book is titled "Maps of Meaning."

That is what God and religion down the ages is all about. As Douglas Adams jokes in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: it's "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

But now God is Dead, at least to the educated people of the West. So what do we do? The Left is one answer to that question. Prager:

The answer to the great dearth of meaning left by the death of biblical religion in the West is secular religion. The first two great secular substitutes were communism and Nazism. The first provided hundreds of millions of people with meaning; the latter provided most Germans and Austrians with meaning.

In particular, both ideologies provided the intellectual class with meaning. No groups believed in communism and Nazism more than intellectuals. Like everyone else, secular intellectuals need meaning, and when this need was combined with intellectuals' love of ideas (especially new ideas -- "new" is almost erotic in the power of its appeal to secular intellectuals), communism and Nazism became potent ideologies.

And, after Communism and Nazism failed the God is Dead crowd, inspired by the Frankfurt School, adapted a new secular religion. You will notice that it curiously combines the class warfare of Communism with the race warfare of Nazism.

What is notable about both Communism and Nazism and the modern derivative we call postmodernism, or political correctness, or "woke" -ness, is that it is a doctrine of political power: we will redeem the world with a political movement to eliminate the sins of the world.

It is telling that the old religions all conceded that we were not going to be able to create a heaven on Earth. Eternal Bliss was only available in the afterlife, and only to the folks that got with God in this life. But with the growth of science, maybe we could do better!

Now it is my belief that the left's faith in politics is a Great Reaction, a nostalgic move back to the old days when political or military power was all in all, because it was needed to defend your tribe's patch of land and its life-giving food. In that world you had to be perpetually armed against all others, because only one tribe could eat the food from a patch of land.

So I understand the left's secular religion as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the Death of God. The left is reacting rather as the Germans reacted after the disaster of World War I. This most advanced country in the world -- that had invented modern philosophy, modern cars, modern physics -- returned to the pre-modern faith in race and land. People normally do this when the world turns against them, according to new-age philosopher Ken Wilber. They instinctively seek a return to "what worked."

But here's the thing. There is an alternative to the left's nostalgia, and it has been here all along and, in many ways, it reflects the left's return to the past, with a difference. We are talking about the cultural movement represented by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jung, Frankl, and people like Joseph Campbell, and this year's sensation, Jordan B. Peterson. All of these people are looking back to the old religions to figure out what religion and myth were all about, and then used their new understanding of the role of religion and myth in human life in order to inform the present.

If you read Campbell, and I just checked through my late mother's copy of Creative Mythology, you find copious references to Nietzsche and Jung. Ditto Peterson. So what is going on?

I will tell you what I think.

The rise of science in the last millennium has changed the way we think about the world. In the old days we used to think that God created the world and all we could hope to do was to live in it according to his plan. But science has taught us that we can learn a lot about how the world works, and successfully do something about it. In other words, we are now able to go about the world creating things. So Creation is no longer a monopoly of God. Mankind has figured how to get in on  the creative action.

That is why the top dogs of my reductive Three Peoples theory are the People of the Creative Self. We are people that realize that we are not born into this world to be subordinate peasants or merely responsible individuals. We are called into the world to create.

The lefties have chosen to create according to a Gospel of Force. They will use force, through politics and government, to wash away the sins of the world, inequality, oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia and create a new world.

But the gospel of Nietzsche is different. He tells us not to change the world but to change ourselves, to "become who you are," to go on an individual journey of self-discovery like his Zarathustra, to rise above the herd and become exceptional.

The gospel of Campbell is to live The Hero's Journey of myth and descend into the underworld (i.e., the unconscious) and only after you have learned your lessons well to return to the world to give your life and knowledge to your fellow humans. The gospel of Peterson is to live on the edge of order and chaos and become the Sacrificial Hero that dies to redeem the world.

Notice the difference between the two gospels? One is a gospel of force, conducted by people who already know what the world needs. The other is a gospel of self-discovery, conducted by people who know they have have a lot to learn, and that one day, by the grace of God, they may find a way to benefit their fellow humans.

Notice that even at the level of economics the differences are stark. The lefties already know what needs to be done: the only thing necessary is to encode their doctrine in beneficial legislation, even to the extent of molding the entire economy into a government administrative bureaucracy.  But the market economy requires each of us to go out into the world to discover how each of us might find something with which to contribute our labor and our skills and our ideas to the world. Only after self-discovery do we find out what our contribution might be.

It is telling that Peter Thiel's book about the market economy is called From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build  the Future. Yeah. How do you get from Zero to One?

It needs to be said that the life of creative discovery is much more challenging than the life of a subordinate peasant or modern "victim," and also more challenging than the life of a responsible citizen and worker. It is not for everyone, nor yet for everyman.

But let it be said that, for the well-born, folks that have had all the advantages of being born to intelligent and resourceful parents, there are Two Paths. One path is the nostalgia of political "activism," that has bewitched young rich kids ever since Marx and Engels. The other path is the existential challenge of self-discovery in the hope of one day getting from Zero to One.

One of the Two Paths fails in blood and misery every time it is tried. The other has brought us from $3 per person per day to the present $150 per day, and a world of astonishing peace and trust.

And we, each one of us, get to choose which path to take. What a world.

Jordan B. Peterson's "Maps of Meaning:" It's a Start

I finished reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning a couple of weeks ago and have been wondering since how to write about it.

Let me tell you what I think Peterson is trying to do, consciously or unconsciously. He is trying to find a way out of our current western dilemma, the apparent stand-off between the stolid bourgeoisie, who I call the People of the Responsible Self, and the artists, writers, and activists of the educated elite, who I call the People of the Creative Self.

And the people that are going to have to change are the People of the Creative Self. Their current line is that they are called to save society from its racism, sexism, and homophobia through transgressive humiliation of the stolid bourgeoisie and government grants to do activism to help the marginalized and the oppressed.

Peterson's Maps of Meaning says that this sort of thing, this salvation of the poor and weak, is not done by regime-approved activism and grants. It is done in the old way, in the constant theme of myth and religion, through the tragic witness of the sacrificial Son and Hero, who redeems a society out of joint with his selflessness, his witness, and his courageous suffering on the border between Order and Chaos.

By the way, there is a YouTube video series of Maps of Meaning.

The constant theme of Maps of Meaning is the play of opposites (hello Hegel?): Order vs. Chaos; What Is vs. What Should Be; Security vs. Tyranny; Creation vs. Destruction; Base Matter vs. Gold; Known World vs. Unknown World.

For Peterson the humans that inhabit this world of opposites are not the rational actors of our modern understanding. In saying this he is merely continuing the narrative that began with the Romantic reaction against the Age of Reason. Instead of rational actors we are creatures of habit that live almost unconsciously until we experience something that shatters our Known World. Peterson illustrates this point with the story of a young executive that thinks his career is going great guns until one day HR calls him in and tells him he is fired because everyone else finds him impossible to deal with. Bam! The whole world of the young man is destroyed: all his assumptions, all his plans, his whole world view is shattered. Until he can figure out what went wrong and develop a better understanding of the world.

On Peterson's view this encounter with the Unknown must be the way of the world. It's the way that the whole of creation except for mankind must live, because our rational-actor model is predicated on the reality of our conscious mind which, we believe, is not available to the rest of creation. This is the meaning of the great instincts like Rage and Fear; they arise at the moment that the world surprises an animal, humans included, and these emotions, these "affects," force us to confront reality and do something about it.

The normal thing for an animal to do, after being surprised, is to freeze, and then to begin to explore the world around it to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it. That is what the young man mentioned above did. And that is what we all do.

But what we humans can also do is strategize about our situation, and develop a rational plan in addition to our hastily acquired knowledge about the world that just surprised us. This human ability is obviously a very big thing.

But whatever the rational plan may be, it must sit atop the more primitive and immediate reality of instinct and affect and, above all, Meaning. Peterson argues that the way to understand this is by studying the great hero narratives of myth and religion and their reality of great opposites: Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, Creation and Destruction. The world of opposites is a world of Meaning.

But Peterson does not present us with a 12 step method to save the world, as he does in his later book. For there are no slick answers on the border between Order and Chaos. There is no telling what may happen after the hero descends into the Underworld there to confront the Dragon of Chaos within his own breast. Nietzsche echoes this in his Beyond Good and Evil where he writes that suffering -- not good and evil or pleasure and pain -- is the real coin of the realm:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?

 So, in Peterson's story, it all comes down to two Hostile Brothers:

One of these "hostile brothers"  or "eternal sons of God" is the mythological hero. He faces the unknown with the presumption of benevolence -- with the (unprovable) attitude that confrontation with the unknown will bring renewal and redemption...

The other "son of God" is the eternal adversary. This "spirit of unbridled rationality," horrified by his limited apprehension of the conditions of existence, shrinks from contact with everything he does not understand... His weakness, in combination with his neurotic suffering, engenders resentment and hatred for existence itself.

But who of us knows whether inside of us dwells the hero or the adversary? The answer that Peterson proposes is that the hero is willing to sacrifice himself. I think that Peterson's famous refusal to obey Canada's C-16 law on non-binary sexual pronouns is his way of living out this heroic path. You have to be ready to sacrifice your job, your reputation, your life, in witnessing to the truth in the face of the mob and the rulers. In this event, his refusal made him into a cultural hero, and now he is traveling the world giving lectures and signing books.

Still, Maps of Meaning was a mild disappointment to me. It does not end in a rousing coda, but subsides almost in confusion. But it ends like this:

The human purpose, if such a thing can be considered, is to pursue meaning -- to extend the domain of light, of consciousness -- despite limitation. A meaningful event exists on the boundary between order and chaos. The pursuit of meaning exposes the individual to the unknown in gradual fashion, allowing him to develop strength and adaptive ability in proportion to the seriousness of his pursuit. Meaning is the subjective experience associated with that contact, in sufficient proportion. The great religious myths state that continued pursuit of meaning, adopted voluntarily and without self-deception, will lead the individual to discover his identity with God. This "revealed identity" will make him capable of withstanding the tragedy of life. Abandonment of meaning, by contrast, reduces man to his mortal weaknesses.

It hardly needs saying, I think, that this "meaning" cannot be found in the vile snake-pit of microaggressions, safe spaces, and accusations of hate speech from the left. Nor can be be found in the retreat to mere nationalism on the right.

Really, the current culture war is about warring notions of safety, either in the identity politics of race and gender or in the identity politics of nation. Of course, humans have always been tribal. The question is whether we can find a way emerge from our various safe spaces to transcend our current tribalisms and reinvent them at a higher, more heroic, level.

The Alt-right Takes Out After Jordan Peterson

I got a bit of a shock the other day when Vox Day took out after Jordan B. Peterson for something he'd written about Jewish IQ. One of Day's memes is that Jews are not as smart as they/we think.

I can understand why the alt-right doesn't like Peterson. That's because Peterson's work is not about defending Christian culture and the nation state. I see that in Peterson's interest in Nietzsche and Jung.

What Day and the alt-right are doing is fighting back against the left's war on the bourgeois culture of responsibility and the Christian world-view. Nothing wrong with that. But Nietzsche's most famous books are Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. And Jung at one point was trying to get Christian divines to recast their theology in the light of his study of myth and the unconscious.

Do you see what is going on? Here is what I think. First of all, my reductive Three Peoples theory, that we humans come in three flavors. First there are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants that are moved by the neo-feudalism of the welfare state; their god is the local lord. Then there are the People of the Responsible Self, responsible citizens and middle-class who believe in the formal social control of law and right and wrong; their God is the Axial Age god of divine justice and mercy. Finally there are the People of the Creative Self, artists and writers; their god is the creative spirit in each of us.

On my view the story of the last two hundred years is this. The newly emergent People of the Creative Self decided that all the sins of the world were caused by the People of the Responsible Self -- the bourgeoisie -- ragging on the People of the Subordinate Self and exploiting and oppressing them. So the newly emergent People of the Creative Self would beat up the People of the Responsible Self and save the poor helpless People of the Subordinate Self from the cruel oppression of the Responsible bourgeoisie. This all started, if you like, in the 1840s with Marx and Engels, and got tried out in the Bolshevik and Maoist Revolutions with about 100 million deaths. So there was a problem. But the revolution continues with today's left warring on the People of the Responsible Self for their racism, sexism, and homophobia against helpless women, minorities and LGBTs and the left's promotion of global migration and apology for Islamism.

Now I think that the War on the People of the Responsible Self has been a tragic and evil mistake. But the critique by Marx and Engels had a point. The middle class of the mid-19th century, the People of the Responsible Self, were busily remaking the world in their own image, of cities, trade, manufacture, prices, law, trust, etc., exactly what seemed natural and physical to them and their world view. But for the People of the Subordinate Self, streaming into the cities from serfdom and starvation in the countryside, the agenda of the People of the Responsible Self was alien and horrible. And it seemed to require them to slough off the sleep of ages in ten minutes and join the join the responsibility revolution right now. But since the bourgeoisie extended the vote to the workers the problem eventually got softened by the welfare state that allowed the workers to continue as their Subordinate selves and put off their assimilation into middle-class respectability and responsibility.

But here is the problem. The bourgeoisie might have been a bit hard on the workers and peasants, but their culture of responsibility was just the thing to midwife the Great Enrichment from $3 per day to $150 a day in 200 years. Talk about a poverty program! Yet the People of the Creative Self have been ragging on the People of the Responsible Self and attempting to destroy their responsibility culture. Really? Turning back the clock on the Miracle of the last 200 years? I don't think so.

So, the People of the Creative Self have been doing exactly what they were accusing the People of the Responsible Self: bullying people less enlightened than themselves, and trying to force feed them with a cultural narrative which didn't make any sense to them. This is sick and wrong.

In the stead of this folly and failure here is my noble and perfect agenda. The People of the Creative Self and the People of the Responsible Self should unite on a thoughtful and compassionate agenda to bring along the People of the Subordinate Self, the workers and peasants, into the middle-class culture of responsibility. This must mean a dilution of the welfare state and a program to lead the Subordinates out of their victimhood and envy and their desire to sit in unionized good jobs at good wages forever without regard to the inevitable changes in the labor market. If you don't teach the workers to be responsible they end up dying of despair like the white working class of which we've heard tell, and we don't want that, do we.

Next, the hard part. The People of the Creative Self need to be just and tolerant of the People of the Responsible Self as they demand that the People of the Responsible Self be tolerant of the People of the Subordinate Self. That means they must stop beating up on Christianity, marriage, motherhood, family, manliness, and capitalism. All these things are markers of the responsibility culture and are just what the doctor ordered for People of the Responsible Self and also the People of the Subordinate Self if they want to master life in the city.

Therefore the world's Big Problem is to teach the People of the Creative Self how to abandon their current religious Crusade on the People of the Responsible Self and find a new religion, one that is tolerant of the People of the Responsible Self and does not cruelly draft the People of the Subordinate Self as foot-soldiers in a War Against the People of the Responsible Self.

This is not an easy task, but this is what, I think, people like Jung and Peterson are trying to do. I have just finished Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning: the Architecture of Belief and I can say that he helps us on the road, but he doesn't get us to the Promised Land.

Suppose we accept that, with the current world we are Beyond Good and Evil. But then what? What Jung is saying is that, for better or worse we are the creatures of our unconscious, both the personal unconscious and the precipitate of the ages in the collective unconscious; therefore we need to incorporate that in the Religion of the Future. What Peterson is saying is that "change" does not come from left-wing activism, but from sacrificial heroes, living dangerously (and creatively) on the border between the known and the unknown, and bringing the unknown into the known by their courageous and humble willingness to explore the unknown, begin to understand it, and bring back its meaning to us. On this view, what the left does today is a travesty of the hero's journey. It assumes that anyone can do activism -- even good little girls that need safe spaces when traumatized by microaggression; it assumes that we already have the answer to the modern question, and that is a fight against oppression and exploitation; it demands that the hero get a grant from the government to carry out his plan.

Very nice. But how do we get there from here? Well I think we need both the work of the Petersons and the counter-offensive of the alt-right. We need to paint a new picture of Heaven in the sky and a develop a religion of creativity that tells its novices that the way ahead is hard and traumatic: no safe spaces and don't forget that many are called but few are chosen. And we need to give the left a stunning blow in the solar-plexus to demoralize it and send it into the mythical underworld from which it can, after a long sojourn in the wilderness, return sadder and wiser with a plan for humanity that can avoid the disasters of the Soviet Union, China, and Venezuela.

But First, Humans are Tribal

Jonah Goldberg's new book, The Suicide of the West, is out this week, and I haven't ordered my copy. I'm not exactly sure of his argument, but it seems to include at least Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment, because I hear him talking about $3 per day, which is the daily income of Brits, Indians, Chinese, USians in 1800. Jonah calls it the "Miracle" of getting from $3 per day to $100 per day.

From the blurb on Amazon:

As Americans we are doubly blessed that those radical ideas were written into the Constitution, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society:

• Our rights come from God not from the government.
• The government belongs to us; we do not belong to the government.
• The individual is sovereign. We are all captains of our own souls.
• The fruits of our labors belong to us.

In the last few decades, these political virtues have been turned into vices. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation and “white privilege,” the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right.

Time was, I would have agreed completely with Jonah. But now I don't. That's because, since July 2016 with the accession of Trump to head the Republican Party, I have had to face the fact that the capitalist/libertarian world view that I held is not good enough.

The reason, I have come to believe, is that the notion of the material world understood by science and the notion of the rational actor that is understood by post Enlightenment theory misunderstands the nature of man the animal.

Yes, reason and science are the amazing developments that have enabled the "Miracle" but we are still 90 percent the social animals that survive because we live in groups and we conform to the world-view of the group. And we act not on a rational analysis of the situation but from emotion, or "affect."

I have been able to come to a reasonable understanding of all this by reading Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. In that book Peterson runs us through myth, religion, alchemy, Jung and Nietzsche to try and make sense of it all.

And the most important thing he says is that we do not go through life as rational actors, deciding every moment what to do based on a scientific analysis of alternatives. Not at all.

What we do is go unthinkingly, unconsciously, from moment to moment in our "known world," which is known to us partly from our own experience and mostly from the socialization we get from the group, through its myths, religion, and its menu of "things we believe." Anyone that disagrees with the norm is typically labeled as a madman, if relatively harmless, or a dangerous heretic, if not relatively harmless. Thus our life in the "known world" is partly just unconscious life on auto, and partly an unconscious subordination to the culture of the group we belong to.

Thus it makes complete sense that lefty mobs combine to anathematize anyone that dares to diverge from the liberal line. That is what humans do. It is the way we preserve our human groups and keep everyone safe in the "known world" and its best practices, and keep klueless klots from bashing into the guardrails and killing themselves. The punishment of dissenters and heretics is how we preserve our group way of life, the way of life that has brought us successfully to the present moment.

But what happens if suddenly our unconscious life lived moment to moment in the "known world" bumps into something unexpected? What happens right away is Fear. Here is what rats do when they encounter something unexpected. They stop, freeze in Fear for a while, and then tentatively start exploring around them, in an attempt to understand what has happened, and how they should adapt to the unexpected, whether it is dangerous or useful or what.

We humans do the same thing. When we come upon something unexpected, we freeze in Fear. Then, after a while, we start to figure out what went wrong, and what to do about it. But this sort of thing happens not just to individuals but to groups as well. The bulk of Peterson's book is about the social process of adapting to the new and unexpected at the group level, the irruption of the "unknown world" into the known world of the group and the way in which the group responds to the chaotic challenge of the unknown.

In Peterson's view, the agent of adaption is the creative, sacrificial, revolutionary hero, the Christ figure, that explores the frightening unknown and proposes, and suffers, for his solution to society's problem. He suffers, of course, because society never wants to change. Even as the world is collapsing in ruins, people still want to go on in the old way, and they still want to punish heretics that propose a new world view.

Now in my view the Axial Age religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- are astonishing ways of adapting the received "way of life" from a small tribal group to a larger agricultural-plus-city group. It proposes the brilliant notion of divine justice to deal with the problem that, in a society larger than the village, we do not know what everyone is doing, and who has done what to whom, and therefore cannot mete out justice to all the malefactors.

In my view the nation state is an astonishing way of replacing the actual tribe of the kindred, people actually related to me by blood, with the totally fake and artificial and much larger tribe of the nation, united by a centrally imposed language and a totally fake and artificial glorious history.

But we are now in a place where the old Axial Age religions are no longer meaningful to educated people in the West. And we are now in a place where the nation state is no longer meaningful to educated people in the West.

In my view the Axial Age religions were responsibility religions, with a God that spelled out a vision of divine justice that people were expected to follow on their own -- with a bit of help from priests and churches and Inquisitions. But our new educated class is in the process of replacing the old responsibility religion with a religion of creativity. In their view what is best in life is to be creative; everything else is deplorable. Nietzsche is the guy that is really starting to face up to this, with his "Beyond Good and Evil" and his "we free spirits." What does a culture of creativity look like? That is what Nietzsche is trying to do.

Very nice: I am all in favor of the culture of creativity. But I doubt if the overwhelming majority of humans are ready for this. So a culture of creativity has to account for the fact that most people are not ready for it.

In my view the nation state is an astonishing human and cultural and political achievement, even though its birth has everywhere been the work of some dominatory and conquering elite. But our educated elite has determined that the nation state is the cause of all wars, and that the nation state must be replaced by supra-national institutions like the EU and the UN. Ordinary people cannot be trusted because they are all proto-fascists, so educated experts must rule. However, the educated elite still needs to use politics in order to gain the support of ordinary people for their elite agenda. In the nation state era they would appeal to the national idea, through notions like "British is best," the "American way of life." The Germans, of course, developed the idea of the national "Volk." But what were the elite to to do if nationalism was a bad word and Volk is nothing more than genocide? Well, what the educated class has done is revive the tribalisms of old. Instead of the nation they are using what we now call "identity politics" to rally people. First it was the identity of class, in the Communist Manifesto. The workers belonged to no nation, but would join in a Communist International across national borders. Then the educated class started to appeal to people on the basis of gender and race within nation states -- all this to achieve equality of gender and race.

This is all very well, but I doubt if turning the clock back to the smaller identities of class and race and gender is really a better fake tribalism than the fake tribe of the nation.

So here we are in a chaos of warring cultures and tribalisms. What is the solution?

The solution is marked out in Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning. We need a new sacrifical creative hero to lead us to a Promised Land with a new understanding of the confusing world situation that will, in time, harden into a new religious and group orthodoxy. And this new orthodoxy will convert the rational ideas of modern science and the economic "Miracle" into a new system of religious and cultural "affect" that ordinary people will pick up with the air they breathe.

In my view the new religion must combine several features that serve the "Miracle" and are notably absent from the thinking of the global educated elite.

• First, we must all serve the market as we once served our feudal lords. This is a very difficult concept for most people to accept, and a lot needs to be done to assist people when the market leaves them by the side of the road. We need to make a cult out of serving the market, and make it ordinary and natural for people to pick themselves up and find a new way to serve when their old job no longer serves. Right now we have a chaos between "free trade" and "jobs for life" and everyone feels betrayed.
• Second, we must revive the nation state or some other artificial tribal notion which almost all people can support. Now the point of a tribe is protection from the neighboring tribe, because the land the tribe occupies is its source of food, and must be defended if the tribe is to continue. This old point has lost its salience because food can be bought and transported from anywhere to anywhere in the world. So the nation state is no longer in the business of protecting the food supply. And yet humans still need protection and the group is what provides protection. So the nation state must provide protection. But from what? Obviously, the terrors of the market, not to mention robbers and mass murderers, and natural disasters. But here is the thing. We should not protect people from the market with gigantic entitlement programs that completely insulate them from the world. Government is here to protect us from existential perils, not to hide us away from day-to-day annoyances.

But the key is that these two things must be done not as rational, sensible programs, but as religion, as the dividing line between good and bad. They must partake of the fundamental nature of human life, which is not reason but emotion.

Our problem, the problem of the non-left, is that we profess the futile notion that we are rational whereas the left is all about feelings. Sorry chum, but the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is all about feelings. The trick is to use feelings in the service of rationally acquired knowledge, to realize that religion is upstream of culture is upstream from politics, but that behind the scenes is knowledge and reason.

It is my belief that the whole arc of the left, from Marx to Marcuse to McKinnon, is a religion upstream from culture upstream from politics that is a Great Reaction against the findings of modern knowledge and reason. I mean, what idiots would set themselves against the ideas that have released billions of humans from hunger and bondage?

Really, this is not that hard!

Ancient Myth and My Three Peoples Theory

My reductive Three Peoples theory, as I am sure you know, proposes three kinds of humans: There are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants that experience life as if they were feudal peasants. There are the People of the Responsible Self, responsible individuals that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. You need to be a Person of the Responsible Self in order to function competently in the modern market economy of the city. Then there are People of the Creative Self, artists and writers.

I think this theory brilliantly illuminates the modern world and its political and cultural wars. But now I am reading Jordan B. Peterson, with his distillation of scholarship on myth and post-Jungian psychology. And I have a problem.

The problem is that, in the mythological framework, you have the Great Mother, the Great Father, and the Son as Hero.

The Great Mother represents the axis of creation / destruction. She is mystery, with unknown and unfathomable things happening within her mysterious body. She is the source of life, and yet also the author of destruction. Frankly this is shocking to me, carefully taught to think of women as lovers and helpless carers and helpless victims of the patriarchy, and not to think about Mean Girls, and goddesses like the furious Kali, not at all. But we deplorables can understand the affinity between creation and destruction in the famous concept of Joseph Schumpeter, that capitalism is "creative destruction."

The Great Father represents the axis of order / <->tyranny. This is easy to swallow, because it isn't that different from our patriarchal states that protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. But there is always the danger that too much protection and government can slide from the beneficial establishment of order into the cruel and unjust imposition of tyranny. We know all about that, we sons of the 20th century.

The Son is the Hero that stands at the border between order and chaos. It is his job to explore the chaos of the time, to understand and tame it, and lead the people into the Promised Land where the dangerous and unknown chaos can be brought into the light and understood and mastered. Yes: Marduk, Horus, Jesus Christ: those chaps. And actually, I think that the liberal idea of the "activist" partakes of this notion.

I tell you what bothers me. It is the notion that creation/destruction is a feminine trait of the Great Mother. Because I think that the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries, when real per capita income has grown by 30 times, is mostly a male thing of creative destruction. So where does that connect with the Great Mother theme of creation and destruction? It's a problem!

Now here is one way to think about it. We can say that in the modern world the roles of Great Mother, Great Father, and Hero Son have become blurred and blended. If men are no longer needed to guarantee order by standing on the border and keeping the barbarians out then that reduces the role of Great Father protectors. So maybe the solution is for men to get into the creation business, not by gestating babies, but by gestating start-up businesses. Needless to say, the business startup game also partakes of the Hero myth, for every businessman that starts a new business is going down into hell, confronting the great unknown, and trying to explore a new technology or business idea and make it habitable and productive for his fellow humans. He clearly sacrifices himself for the potential good of all.

So also for women. If women are not longer needed to devote their entire lives to the creation of babies, maybe they can partake of the Father role of maintaining order and become politicians. I think we can say that Margaret Thatcher did that successfully, and Hillary Clinton did not. Hey, maybe women can even harden themselves and become Heroes, going down into hell and bringing back a great boon to mankind.

But you know what? I think that the road for women to partake of Great Father and Hero roles is much harder than the road for men to partake of feminine creativeness. Anyone that has looked at the life of Margaret Thatcher understands that. It took her ten years to find a constituency and get into Parliament; yet she never whined about the Tory patriarchy that would not have her for a candidate. And I think that we are seeing this difficulty right now with the whole cultural froo-fra from women in STEM to "hate speech" in social media and the feminization of education with the drugging of boys and the attack of the open-outcry culture of debate with the concerns about microaggressions and safe spaces.

The point is that if you want to be the guarantor of order, then you can't be demanding that someone else protects you from the brickbats of the public square. If you want to go down into the underworld where there be dragons you can't be worrying about the pinpricks of microaggressions. Ain't no safe spaces down in the underworld, old girl.

So that's why I think that, when the votes are finally counted, women will choose to return to the domestic sphere, the family and the neighborhood, which indeed badly needs their care and attention. Men may be able to soften themselves from warrior-warriors into road-warriors, but they ain't gonna be no good raising babies and interacting with the ladies of the neighborhood, not nohow.

In Media Res: Peterson and Stark

I'm in the middle of Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning, but also reading Rodney Stark's Why God. Oh, and my book right now to read at the gym is a compendium of Nietzsche's writings.

It's all very exciting because they are all talking about the same thing, only with different sound systems. Strictly speaking, I should not write about them while in the middle of reading them, in media res, just like the great classic myths, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, that all start "in the middle." But hey, if the great story-tellers can start in the middle, why not me?

For instance, this morning in "The Gay Science" Nietzsche was talking about both "heroes" and "chaos." That, of course, is exactly what Jordan Peterson is talking about.

Peterson's premise is that to understand myth and humans you have to understand that non-scientific people have to live in a world of the known and the unknown. At any moment, you may have to deal with an irruption of the unknown into your life, otherwise known as chaos.

Now in our world we think the known world extends all the way out to space, to the solar system, to the galaxy, to other galaxies. We have theories that explain the whole thing. We have a bit of a problem with the Big Bang and dark matter and dark energy and multiverses, but hey, the priests, er, scientists at the temples of knowledge will soon figure out the whole procedure.

Actually, I maintain that, despite all our modern knowledge we still don't have a clue what it is all about, the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as Douglas Adams repeats again and again in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

In fact, even though we don't like to admit it, the whole stuff about the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy and so forth play pretty close to a creation myth. "In the beginning" there was the big bang, then inflation, then atoms started to form, then stars then galaxies. But here's  a funny thing. They say that galaxies do about one revolution in a billion years. So that means that, given the current scientifically determined age of the universe, the galaxies have only made about 13 revolutions since the Dawn of Time.

Know what? I don't think so. I think that in time there will be another theory that replaces the Big Bang. The Big Bang will be consigned to the lumber room as an ancient myth of those superstitious 21st century loonies, and we will find out that the galaxies have made a lot more than 13 revolutions in their lifetimes.

But back to Peterson. His line is that our basic human problem is dealing with the unexpected, the irruption of the terrifying Unknown, potential chaos, into our ordered world. And it is the job of the hero to venture into the unknown, explore it, understand it, and bring it into the predictable known world. You can see that this narrative does not end with the birth of science. Science is always butting into unexpected results that disturb our current understanding. Indeed, good scientists are aching for such a situation, because that creates the possibility to become an Einstein, a Heisenberg, or a Richard Feynman: a hero.

And yes, that hero, that Son, in venturing to solve mankind's problems, is also sacrificing himself so that others may live. Mother, the creator of life, Father, the guarantee of order, and the Son the sacrificial hero. It's right there in all myth and religion. It's even in left-wing activism. What do you think the brave young activist going against the evil status quo and bending the arc of history towards justice is all about?

But I am also getting some clarity about modern monotheism from Rodney Stark. He makes me adjust my ideas about the Axial Age when cities and monotheism got started.

(By the way, Stark points out that all the monotheisms got there by demoting the auxiliary gods, making them into angels and Satans saints and whatnot).

Stark's line about the Axial Age, which he puts definitively at the 6th Century BC, rather than the 800 BC to 300 BC at La Wik, is the social crisis of the transition from village to city.

Quoting Karl Jaspers, who coined Achsenzeit, Stark states that the Axial Age marks the beginning of ethical religion, religion concerned with morality. The old gods, you see, were not moral.

[F]rom infancy, humans are raised to believe that the norms of their group are the "right" way to behave and are trained to conform. In addition, all groups exert informal methods of social control -- pressures to conform imposed by those in our immediate  environment... But as societies become larger, and many people are unknown to one another, informal social control breaks down.

That's when you need "formal social control," i.e., the state, to execute on "deterring and punishing moral violations, usually involving specialists in detection and punishment." But, as Nicholas Wade points out in his The Faith Instinct, there is a problem. People don't like the enforcers from another family enforcing on their family. There is a danger of social strife between people in the community. Plus, no human enforcement specialist is going to bring every malcontent to justice. Enter the monotheistic God. Stark: "Being all-knowing and all-seeing, God is the ideal enforcer of morality." Wade:

A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless task of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.

Now, as a racist sexist homophobe, I am drawn to the idea that the informal social control of the village was (and is) performed by women. That is what the women's culture of complaint is all about: "I can't believe she said/did that." But it is clear that formal social control is a guy thing. That's why the monotheistic gods are male. When the cracking of skulls is needed, you need a man for the job.

Oh, and by the way, I'd say that the modern godless administrative state, especially in its extreme instantiations of Communist and Fascist regimes, relies way too much on actual mortal, human formal social control without the help of the immortal gods. I'd say that a little bit of faith in a God who knows all and sees all can fill in for a whole bunch of policemen, who are, after all, nothing but time servers counting the day till they get their pensions.

Oh and by the way, how about the market economy that rewards trust and fair dealing and pretty soon cuts out the untrustworthy and cheater, and given its head, can increase human income by 30 times in 200 years? You could call it a rebirth of informal social control. It ain't perfect, of course, but everybody benefits from reciprocal trust. And you know why? Because it is cheaper: it reduces transaction costs and that goes straight to the bottom line.

Maps of Meaning: What Failure to Respond to Chaos Looks Like

I'm only part way through the first part of Maps of Meaning, where Jordan B. Peterson is setting up his view of reality, so I really don't know what I am talking about yet.

But Peterson's basic line is that we are not rational actors living in a world of scientifically understood objects. We are really just rats.

You put a rat into a new cage, or introduce a cat into its life and it freezes up in terror. For a while. But then it starts to explore and figure out what the new situation means and where the dangers are, and it starts to relax.

In other words, any living thing goes along as unconcerned as a seagull until something unexpected happens. Then the living thing has to figure out what that unexpected experience means. Is it nothing? Is it a potential mate? Is it a threat? And what should the living thing do about it?

It is just like Anne Elliott at the climax of Persuasion. when she gets the all-important and utterly unexpected letter from Captain Wentworth.

On the content of that letter depended all which this world could to for her. Anything was possible, anything might be defied rather than suspense.

So then Anne reads the letter, in which Captain Wentworth renews his offer of marriage. She finds herself overwhelmed with emotion.

Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. Half an hour's solitude and reflection might have tranquilized her; 

But it was not to be. She has to pull herself together so that she could go out and meet Captain Wentworth and communicate her acceptance of his offer. And of course, she did.

Now, in Jordan B. Peterson's world view, we have a sudden unexpected event that pitches Anne Elliott into emotional turmoil. How will she act? Well, we already know that Anne Elliott is a dab hand at dealing competently with an unexpected event. Thank goodness, for it would not do for our heroine to collapse onto a fainting couch.

Now, just today I ran across a piece in the New York Post by a woman diagnosed as "borderline personality disorder" of BPD. Her problem is that she gets overwhelmed by everything, and has difficulty managing her emotions.

Borderline Personality Disorder is described by SANE, a government-run mental health advocacy group in Australia, as a mental illness where the “people affected have difficulty managing their emotions and impulses, relating to people and maintaining a stable self-image.”

In essence, it’s the inability to regulate emotions appropriately.

Now this ties in completely with Peterson's model of human response and action. The whole point of emotional response is that you realize that something has happened and life ain't gonna go on like it did.  The flood of emotion stops you in your tracks. But obviously, if you are going to make a sensible decision that will make things better for you then you need to manage your emotions and your fight/flight instincts.

However, there is a problem. We rich westerners,

the civilized, amiable, and admirable part of mankind, well brought up and not constantly in a state of fear... [live in] an environment in which the stimuli to excessive emotional response are at a minimum.

That is nice; we humans like to live in "safety." However, the safe and predictable social environment "will make small deviations from custom appear increasingly strange and thus... increasingly intolerable." In other words our safe and predictable environment ill-prepares us for the inevitable vicissitudes and setbacks of life. I find in my own life that I absolutely hate to be pitched out of my routine, but once pitched out am able to reconcile to a period of actual action and decisions and stay out of my normal-life rut.

Our NYPost BPD sufferer explains the things she struggles with.

• Skewed sense of self
• Maintaining personal relationships
• Splitting
• Engulfment and abandonment
• Self-destructive behaviors
• Intense emotions and anger

All of these things, it seems to me, align with the failure to do the basic thing we living things are designed to do, which is to react when something changes, and then make a successful adaptation.

You can see that the culture of the modern helicopter parent is not going to do a very good job of rearing a child that can adapt to shocks and setbacks, because Mom is raising her children in a cocoon of safety and predictability that extends into college and its dormitories. It cannot be surprising that these children are then unable to deal with "microaggressions" and demand "safe spaces."

The problem is, in addition, that the left encourages helplessness and rage and the victim culture. Because people with BPD syndrome are useful political fodder for the left to use in its power project.

So it is not surprising that Peterson, in talking to a nice center-lefty is telling young people to forget activism and changing the world and change themselves first.

Because the first thing you need if you want to act in the world is to train yourself to deal with the unexpected and respond successfully rather than collapsing into a heap of self-destructive behaviors, intense emotions and anger.

It is notable, I should think, that modern armies have found it necessary to train up recruits to the frightening experience of combat soldiering with "boot camp" and "basic training." It is, you might say, a sensible way of preparing the raw recruit for the terrors of uncertainty and the necessity for instant adaptation in the world of armed conflict.

Maybe the same is needed for young women: basic training for the endless Battle of the Sexes in the post-sexual revolution world.

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!