Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules of Life & Other Non-Christian Books

JORDAN PETERSON: 12 RULES OF LIFE

DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING

YUVAL HARARI: HOMO DEUS

MARY BEARD: HOW DO WE LOOK

TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE

JOHN GRAY: SEVEN TYPES OF ATHEISM

REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY

JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF COMMON SENSE

NEIL MACGREGOR: LIVING WITH THE GODS

Around my town, on every exposed patch of concrete, in underpasses, on walls, in the arches of railway viaducts, a lone tagger has left garish images of human heads accompanied by slogans such as: ‘life sucks’; ‘meaning is dead, stop kidding yourself’; ‘kill thought, love yourself’. Like most people, I suspect, my first reaction is: ‘He was probably high’. At the same time, this graffiti has a certain power to communicate. Haven’t most of us had thoughts like this at some stage? Maybe, it’s what some people go around thinking all day. And the rest of us, when we repress such thoughts – are we just ‘pretending’? I can’t help thinking of a character in a book I recently read (actually an alter ego of the author, Eric Reinhardt), who spends his time daubing nihilistic slogans over every surface, and, at the close of the novel sets off, loaded with explosives and firearms, on his way to perpetrate some Brevik-style massacre. Individuals like my tagger (not, let us hope, like Reinhardt’s fictional hero!) seem to have entered Jordan Peterson’s consulting room from time to time; they certainly haunt the pages of his recent book,  12 Rules for Life.

Authenticity is the number one rule for difficult lives

The ‘rules’ in question are not particularly to do with right and wrong behaviours: e.g. stay clear of drugs; don’t break your marriage. Nor does Peterson have much to say about the conventional areas of ethical debate, like euthanasia or abortion. He is much more interested in personal attitudes. This we might expect from the psychologist that he is. Altogether more unexpected, given this background, is the morally engaged character of Peterson’s approach – something indicated, of course, by his title. Yes, our ‘fight or flight’ response goes back to the evolutionarily acquired instincts of our remote human and pre-human forebears; but no, this emphatically doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as good or bad. And the criterion for Peterson’s ethical judgment is generally authenticity. Put negatively, our responses are bad, when we are deceiving ourselves, playing gratifying games in our heads that place us in the role of undisputed heroes of our destiny, struggling against the iniquities of malevolent God or hostile fate: the state of mind represented by what he terms the sinister ‘trinity’ of ‘arrogance, self-deceit and resentment’. Of these the worst is indisputably that kind of metaphysical resentment (‘God doesn’t exist, the bastard!’) which characterizes the nihilistic response of our lonesome tagger.

But it’s not that Peterson fails to take account of just how difficult life can be. In fact, by comparison with other contemporary pundits, I suspect, he would probably come out among the more ‘pessimistic’; our hierarchical instincts, he argues, are hard-wired, our relentless competitivity is at least as ingrained as that of the lobsters that inhabited the sea-bottoms aeons before primates had entered upon the terrestrial scene. So Peterson’s issue with our tagger (assuming that individual is not one of those unfortunates – and we all know they exist – whose depressed or psychotic mental condition has reduced them to the point of moral non-accountability) is not that life really isn’t that bad – as though we could measure ‘how bad’ life is against some supposedly objective standard. Things are more complicated than that. Each of us, as Peterson sees it, stands in our personal life projects, as it were, poised between a known past, and an unknowable future, in which who knows what change may occur. It follows we simply can’t say, at any given moment, ‘life sucks; so I’m going to finish it all’, without wilfully blocking out, if nothing else, the possibilities which the future may bring. In practice, we are also likely to be blocking out certain hard-to-evaluate factors of personal responsibility in our past and present. In short, the decision to make an end which follows on from the conclusion that ‘meaning is dead’, is simply not one that the nature of conscious life itself (let alone the compromising circumstances of our individual lives) allows us to take with any semblance of good faith or authenticity. So, to the extent that we want to remain authentic – something that Peterson identifies with the good – the position of metaphysical resentment is simply not available to us. It’s a pose, in other words. However, this metaphysical resentment (‘cursing God’) is, from Peterson’s point of view, only the endpoint of a descending sequence of self-deceptive psychological strategies to which we all tend to resort when life gets tough. The alternative task of ‘taking responsibility for ourselves’ is never an easy path for anyone – even if it is ultimately fruitful one. And the notion of shouldering this existential burden is broadly the common thread that links together all Peterson’s rules: such as ‘make friends with people who want the best for you’, or ‘tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie’, or ‘pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

An existentialist psychology?

This whole approach happens to belong to a clearly identifiable philosophical position: existentialism. Not only the general concepts, but even the terminology – ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘being’ – point in this direction. Actually, even the most abstractly philosophical existentialist writing seems often to contain a concretely psychological and descriptive element, rather like Peterson’s; those who have read Sartre will think of the justly famous case of the waiter that Sartre uses to illustrate the meaning of bad faith or inauthenticity. A great strength of Peterson’s position, by contrast, is that a lot of his concrete examples seem not to have been thought up for the purposes of illustrating a philosophical point, but to be based on his own personal and professional experience. There is, I believe, a specifically existentialist school of psychology (which I personally know nothing about). But Peterson makes no reference to it, or even to mainstream existentialist writing, beyond a single brief nod in the direction of Heidegger (footnote, p. xxxi). I say ‘mainstream’, because what we do find everywhere we look in Peterson’s text is an open and acknowledged debt to the nineteenth-century continental tradition of religiously engaged literary and philosophical/theological writing that is generally supposed to underlie the later, twentieth-century development of philosophical existentialism: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Basically, it is this Christian/or anti-Christian pre-existentialism, and a reading of bible texts explored through this frame, that Peterson uses to shape his interpretation of empirical psychological material derived from personal/professional reminiscence.

The Christian existential alignment of this position makes it easy enough to predict his principal targets. No surprise, they turn out to be the latter-day exponents of secular-leaning Enlightenment optimism – what the French social theorist René Girard calls ‘the romantic lie’. The foremost representative of this philosophy is universally acknowledged to be Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his banishment of the Christian concept of original sin in favour of a notion of an original innocence of Nature, clearly evidenced in little children, and the uncivilized condition of the noble savage (today’s ‘hunter-gather’), and degraded only by the corruptions of society and culture. To the influence of this way of thinking Peterson attributes the rise of much in contemporary secular culture that he clearly sees as exacerbating rather than alleviating the difficulty of our individual moral efforts to bear our everyday existential burdens. He also places it (fairly uncontroversially, I think) at the source of the political totalitarianism – Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism – that he regards as the political embodiment of the consequences of nihilistic thinking, and the ultimate exemplification of what it means to live inauthentically. For Peterson, the ‘social justice warriors’ (SJWs) fall into the same category, I’m afraid – which explains much of our author’s notoriety amongst representatives of the ‘liberal left’.

Mythology and institutions

So far so good. But, from my own perspective, Peterson’s approach does have its limitations – and it is to these I now come. The most important of these concerns the relationship of the value systems embodied in mythologies to institutional and collective entities like the religions, states or tribes which have transmitted them. Here Peterson has little to say. This may be inherent in the practice of psychology that sees human problems from a personal rather than a sociological perspective; but it is also characteristic of Existentialism which – like the secular Enlightenment, incidentally – grounds its worldview in the experience generally of the individual consciousness, as Sartre himself complains in Being and Nothingness. Broadly, Peterson seems to envisage ethical ‘values’ as emerging, more or less spontaneously and without any requirement of collective social and religious affiliation, out of the accumulation of our human experiences of life. In other words, experience, insofar as it interests Peterson, is seen as non-culturally specific, and as tending to produce in us, when responded to authentically, certain value systems that all religious traditions will share. Thus Peterson can claim to be garnering the fruits of mythological wisdom in the interests of personal well-being.

The problem with this is that the various mythical narratives, from both Judaeo-Christian and other traditions, which Peterson sees as the accumulated wisdom of the ages, are, in fact, intimately bound up with culturally specific rituals and institutions – to the extent, indeed, that they could be seen as offering a kind of mythical charter for them. Thus, the narratives collected in the Old Testament would most properly be seen as the story that Israel, the ‘people of God’ (whether understood as the Jewish kinship state, or Christian Church) has told about the origins of its own identity. To my mind, Peterson’s failure to take into account this ritual-institutional dimension poses at least two problems. The first concerns interpretation. Take, for instance, the Egyptian myth of the victorious struggle of the falcon god Horus with his evil uncle Set over the inheritance of his father Osiris on p. 181. This Peterson interprets in his own manner. But it may not be irrelevant to a balanced interpretation, or even an accurate representation of the myth (and with myths interpretation and representation go together) that, in the ritual-institutional context of its use, the story idealizes the hierarchical and patriarchal principle of Egyptian royal succession, according to which each successive Pharaoh, regardless of his genetic relationship to his predecessor, sees himself as impersonating the god Horus vindicating the inheritance of his father Osiris. Peterson’s interpretation is not necessarily invalidated; but it could appear arbitrary. Peterson’s treatment of myths rather reminds me of the way in which artefacts from indigenous cultures – West African statues, Aboriginal tchuringas (phallic-looking stones), etc. – are sometimes wrested from their socio-religious context, and presented to the frequenters of our own Western cultural temples, as examples of ‘Art’ – as though the circumstances of their production were entirely irrelevant to their meaning, and as though ‘art’ in this sense was not a largely culturally-specific Western romantic creation. There may, I suggest, be a similar problem about interpreting biblical narratives without reference to the various ‘peoples of God’ (latterly the Christian Church) who have developed and interpreted them in relation to their own rituals and institutions.

But there is a second related and more practical problem. Our own cultural world – and, along with it, much of Peterson’s prospective audience – is probably moving into a phase in which the old religious and cultural references are being swept away. It was enough in the 1950s for the late Billy Graham (Christian evangelist) to hold up a leather-bound volume and pronounce: ‘the bible says ….’ to arouse in his listeners an interest in how that respected legacy of our centuries-old culture could, in their own case, have been incompletely understood. Such was the cultural standing of the book. Where Peterson invokes Christian narratives to a contemporary secular audience, his predilection for Christian mythical narratives could just seem arbitrary. Why these cultural references rather than those? Why the Bible not the Qur’an? It’s not enough just to say: ‘but for us in the West’ (i.e. ‘for us inheritors and beneficiaries of a Christian culture’) – because many in his prospective audience will not identify with the identity imputed to them by ‘us’. It is as though Peterson wishes to gain the sanction of myth without crediting the existence of those institutional structures that are the only basis of its continued authority. In fact, in these postmodern times, and to an audience of SJWs, it may be that even the time-honoured literary-philosophical canon of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky no longer offers the same copper-bottomed cultural credentials that it once did. I hear from the back of the lecture hall: “Dostoevsky …. who’s that?” This de-mythologized world is clearly not one that Peterson wants to inhabit. But if he is serious about stemming the secular postmodern tide that looks set to sweep away his religious references like so many sand-castles (if only in the interests of the existential psychology he claims they support), then he cannot, I think, consistently hope to set about this without at least acknowledging the role of the socio-religious institutions that guarantee those myths their continued authority. Cultural Christianity (the idea one can life by Christian principles without belonging to some ‘sect-life’ organization) presupposes the taken-for-granted nature, the entrenched cultural dominance of Christian religion. Where, as now, that dominance passes away, such Christianity becomes a fast-vanishing middle ground between, on the one hand, a postmodern world that Peterson knows he doesn’t like, and a minority that see themselves as belonging in one form or other (and there are many) of Christian institutional framework – or Church.

Where is Peterson on institutional Christianity?

This brings us to the question of where Peterson does stand in relation, not to Judaeo-Christian myth and narrative, but to contemporary religious phenomenon of Christianity to which the myth belongs. Here few clues are given. Of course, the ‘non-religious’ use of Judaeo-Christian narrative could be the ploy of a convinced Christian apologist – just a tactic adopted in order to arouse interest and sympathy for Christianity amongst those otherwise little inclined to give it air-time. I guess something like this is what Peterson’s atheist critics might suspect. Alternatively – as I rather believe – he has simply discovered that an interpretation of Judaeo-Christian narratives framed by the pre-existential literary/philosophical tradition can make excellent sense of his personal and professional experience – rather as the secular-leaning René Girard of the 1970s suddenly found that a reading of the Western literary canon and the Bible gave him a fresh and revelatory angle on human mimetic behaviour. In both cases the convergence of observed human experience with biblical ‘truth’ would seem to have been unforeseen. Which, of course, makes the work of these writers all the more powerful as testimony. But I suspect Peterson may end up shifting towards a more ecclesiastically committed position for the reasons I have already outlined – as indeed Girard ended up doing with his return to the fold of Catholicism.

If Peterson is fighting shy of this step, my supposition is that his reasons for this may lie in objections formulated against institutional Christianity by its most virulent, and by the same token best, critic. According to Nietzsche (and it is far from clear that Peterson dissents from his view):

Dogmatic belief in the central axioms of Christianity (that Christ’s crucifixion redeemed the world; that salvation was reserved for the hereafter; that salvation could not be achieved through works) had three mutually reinforcing consequences: First, devaluation of the significance of earthly life, as only the hereafter mattered. … Second, passive acceptance of the status quo, because salvation could not be earned in any case through effort in this life …. And, finally, third, the right of the believer to reject any real moral burden (outside the stated belief in salvation through Christ), because the Son of God had already done all the important work. (p. 189)

Let me say outright (for the benefit of any Evangelical preachers out who happen to be reading this) that I myself have heard these axioms preached from the pulpit, and my sympathies are entirely with Nietzsche and Peterson. The problem with such Christianity is precisely that it is indeed inauthentic, in Peterson’s sense; though to appreciate just how opposed to the spirit of all that Peterson is advocating will require you to read the above passage in the context of the entire book. Essentially, bearing one’s own existential burden is just part and parcel of the good as Peterson sees it.

Having said this I am perfectly confident that my own Christian faith does not lead to inauthenticity. Why not? First, because it is simply not true that in Christianity ‘salvation is reserved for the hereafter’ (though I have certainly heard Evangelical preachers whose words could – and probably are – interpreted in this sense). Second, the idea that ‘salvation cannot be achieved by works’ is based on a scripturally false dichotomization of ‘faith’ and ‘works’ that has distorted the reading of the New Testament, and sullied strands of Protestant Christianity, since the Reformation. Third, the salvation event should not be considered ‘complete’ in the sense indicated here, since the whole purpose of Christ’s death is to initiate a sacrifice that is ours as well as his – which begins with Christ’s sacrificial life and death and ends in the ritual and ethical implementation of the Eucharistic paradigm in our day to day lives (though, once again, the waters seem to have been muddied, to say the least, by extreme versions of Protestant Evangelism, overanxious to emphasis the clear blue water they suppose to separate them from Roman Catholicism). A powerful and much needed corrective to views of this kind is administered by the Evangelical Protestant T.N. Wright in an excellent book that should be required reading for every Evangelical: Surprised by Hope.

Who would benefit from this book?

Would I give 12 Rules of Life to Christian friends? Absolutely. Especially any that happened to be Evangelical preachers. They, of all people, need to learn to distinguish authenticity from inauthenticity (if they’re not already doing so).

Would I give it to non-Christian friends? Yes, this is brilliant for ‘atheists’. Partly, yes, because it smuggles in some intelligent exegesis of scripture – a way of impressing the reader with the existential depth of texts they would otherwise have dismissed as ‘religious’, and might now be more inclined to take seriously. Far more importantly, though, because the existential nature of Peterson’s position, quite convincingly developed in this book on the basis of empirical observation, entirely jolts the reader’s thinking out of the well-worn rut of scientistic objectivism. The kind of ‘truth’ that Peterson associates with authenticity is a personal truth to self that concerns the world as we experience it, not some supposedly objective ground to this experience, apprehended through scientific experiment. In the face of the claims that such ‘truth’ makes upon us, scepticism is simply not an option: the requirement of authenticity itself grades our life-projects on a scale of value and of relation to ‘the good’ that is synonymous with religious belief. You think you’re an atheist? ‘No, you’re not’, says Peterson. ‘You’re simply not an atheist in your actions, and it is your actions that most accurately reflect your deepest beliefs – those that are implicit, embedded in your being, underneath your conscious apprehensions and articulable attitudes and surface-level self-knowledge.’