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Wrestling With Jordan Peterson
Introduction to an attempt to make “We Who Wrestle with God” more reachable.
I seem to be driven to tilt at the windmill of making works about Western civilization and Christianity more accessible to the “common man, meaning the High School/Community College graduate and those of any educational level captured by our shallow post-modern “culture” of greed, pride, selfishness, consumerism, hedonism, decadence and especially nihilism. (Which at too great a level is “all of us.”)
I’m reading Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle with God” and have read and thought about many similar works that point to the decline and fall of Western civilization and those of us fiddling with various explanations, solutions and mostly laments while we watch the conflagration.
I could pull out a lot of quotes, however I’m on a path of extracting the basic points in the sort of order and vocabulary suited for “everyman.”
A foundational point he makes is that humans always have an “aim” toward some target. Today that target for most is some shallow target, like sexual pleasure, wealth, “identity” or mere obliviousness via drugs or other forms of distraction to be absent from ourselves and reality. Those goals are aiming very low, and as Jordan would say, they call out the “dragons” that will and are devouring ourselves and our civilization.
Western civilization clearly worked in the material sense in that we have more resources to apply to any sort of goal that we may choose. Or we can accept the choice of a timeless spirit beyond the material at any point in history. To paraphrase Luke 17:33 and Matthew 16:25, a culture that prioritizes the temporal over the eternal will lose all that is meaningful.
For most of our history, the template (form, model, blueprint) behind our civilization was Christianity. Transcendent concepts like loving your enemy, the universal value of ALL human life, the morality of the Ten Commandments and Christ’s teachings were the foundational “rock” on which the “house” of Western civilization was built.
Mark 8:36 asks us, what does it profit a culture if it occupies Mars, extends material “life” to eternity, but loses the “why?”
Matthew 12 and Lincoln tell us that a house divided cannot stand. Western civilization is more than “divided,” it is atomized. Intellectuals tell us truth does not exist, men and women are not discernable, institutions like marriage and family are no longer useful, and “morality” is essentially hate speech unless it happens to be YOUR “morality.”
I imagine the book will be widely criticized as being a product of whiteness, patriarchy, etc., which nearly all of Jordan’s works are.
Figures like Jordan and Elon Musk are introducing new ways to understand culture, technology, freedom of speech, intelligence (human and artificial), reality, meaning, and a nearly infinite set of other similar ideas.
Since my tendency is to “go to ground” and just keep working the challenge of a book like this, I’m going to attempt to intersperse this journey with posts like this.
I enjoy reading more than writing, so we shall see how successful that is!
Published in Religion and Philosophy
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Just bought the book as a gift for someone. I’m looking forward to reading it afterwards.
I haven’t read his books, but he makes this point in his videos over and over. If you don’t know what your objective, or target, is, you won’t accomplish much. Great Stuff!
Perhaps the most popular and well-known Jordan Peterson “thing.”
I’m not an expert, but I think Jews are pretty explicit about this concept and widely accept it.
It’s not clear to me that the Christian Scripture teaches the “universal value of ALL human life.”
Where do you get this from Scripture? I agree that many who claim to be Christian teach this, but most Christians don’t seem to know much about what Scripture actually says.
Christianity teaches that few are saved. Matthew 7:13-14:“You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way. But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.”
Christianity teaches that God casts the sinners into hell. Matthew 10:28: “Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
You can quote John 3:16 about how “God so loved the world,” but if you interpret this to mean the God has great love for every single person, then you need to understand that this type of love is consistent with condemning the loved one to eternity in hell. It’s not what most people consider to be “love,” in my experience.
Finally, there is the doctrine of election or predestination, from Romans 9:
What is the “universal value” of the lives of those who are “destined for destruction”? It is so that God’s mercy will be evident to those that He chooses to save.
It seems, to me, that this idea about the “universal value of ALL human life” is not a Christian idea, but is an idea of the so-called Enlightenment, which has undermined Christian teaching and led to the abandonment of most of those Ten Commandments.
The message of Jesus Christ throughout the New Testament is that he pursues all people to believe in him. Without researching Scripture I quickly thought of a recent text preached by our pastor this summer/fall. From 2 Peter Chapter 3 verse 9: “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
The focus is not wanting anyone to perish, all people have value, we are all equal as children of God.