Part Two: The People We Meet – Jordan Peterson
Recently, I attended Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle With God Tour” in Florida. I went to the Estero, Orlando, and Jacksonville events. Each event was unique and offered a distinct experience with varying topics.
Here’s a little of what unfolded at each location and some of the invaluable insights gained:
The Power of Archetypical Stories
Peterson discussed several biblical stories, such as those of Cain and Abel and Moses, Moses and the staff, and Elijah and Moses, drawing parallels to everyday life and emphasizing their timeless relevance. He explained how these narratives serve as archetypes that explore universal human experiences and truths, such as morality, justice, and personal growth. For instance, he linked the story of Moses and the snakes to the medical concept of hormesis, which posits that exposure to a small amount of harm can strengthen the body’s resilience.
An archetypical story, often called an archetype or archetypal narrative, contains elements and themes universally recognizable across different cultures and periods. These stories tap into fundamental human experiences, emotions, and conflicts, making them resonate with audiences on a deep and primal level. Archetypical stories often feature characters, motifs, and plot structures that recur throughout literature, mythology, folklore, and religious texts. They serve as timeless templates that explore universal truths about the human condition. Archetypical stories have endured for centuries because they tap into fundamental aspects of the human experience, offering insights into identity, morality, destiny, and the nature of existence. They provide a framework for understanding and interpreting the world around us, reflecting timeless truths about what it means to be human.
The Story of Elijah
We don’t understand because we don’t look low enough – Carl Jung said this. Elijah looks low enough. Elijah’s story highlights this concept of God as existing outside the natural order.
Elijah is there that’s more mysterious because his account is subtler, it’s harder to understand, and his place with Moses and Jesus isn’t so self-evident. I walked through that story because, although it’s a subtle story, it’s worth knowing. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung was a student of Freud, and he significantly influenced Peterson’s thinking. He said once that modern men do not see God because they do not look low enough. It’s paradoxical and brilliant and implies that part of what stops us from finding our relationship to what’s most foundational or the highest is something akin to our pride. And there’s genuine wisdom in that as there isn’t so much of what you wrote and said not to look low enough. In the Old Testament, Elijah is the man who looks low enough. Elijah’s story unfolds when the Israelites have wandered far from their covenant, contractual relationship, and agreement with Yahweh, the unitary God of the ancient Hebrews.
King Ahab of Samaria is very corrupt, and he’s described as a man who’s done everything imaginable to displease God, which is a very damning account. He marries a woman named Jezebel, who’s a pernicious foreign influence. In the biblical accounts, foreigners play roles, and as they do in life, sometimes, they’re far wiser and better than the Israelites, as in the case of Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro. Sometimes, they’re wiser than the Jews of Christ’s time, as in the case of the Good Samaritan, and sometimes, they’re a strong and pernicious and distorting force, deceiving force, corrupting force, as the Egyptians are, or the Canaanites. In the early biblical accounts, Jezebel is the young woman who’s a corrupting influence, and she has the profits of your well put to death, and she turns the worship of the Israelites toward a God known as Bahl; he’s a god whose nature is very relevant today because Bahl is a God of nature, although it isn’t often conceptualized this way because the radical environmentalists of the modern world are worshippers of nature, and to worship something means to put it in the highest place.
The definition of worship is to put something at the highest place with every glance we take in, every move we make, because to attend, to look to perceive, to act, you have to focus on something and make it the most important element of your consciousness at that moment and devalue everything else. Even when you’re merely attending to something, you’re privileged and celebrating what you’re attending to at the cost of all the other things you could interact with. So, celebration and worship in the biblical sense are unavoidable parts of merely perceiving the world. If you act towards a goal, you set that goal as the highest element of your aim because that’s what it means to the goal. It means configuring your actions so that you’re acting according to that goal and not all the other goals. You could conceivably be pursuing what that means: as you attend, perceive, and act, you inhabit a structure that orients you towards some elevated value, and there’s no escaping from that. You can be confused, and you can pursue a multitude of aims, which essentially makes you polytheistic, or you can be united in your aim, in which case you’re monotheistic. Implicitly and if not in consequence of stated beliefs, and if you’re integrated in that manner, then everything you attend to and everything you do serves the same master. Part of the aim of the biblical corpus is to specify what that high esteem should be and to characterize it and the many stories that make up the library of stories at the base of our culture. Elijah remains faithful to Yahweh. It’s already understood by this time that the God of the Hebrews is not to be found in the natural world. This is a remarkable notion, and it means that once highest is transcendent, so ultimate but transcendent in a manner that transcends even what’s most profound.
What’s most evident, and we’ll return to that so that the nature of that becomes clear, is the hypothesis that being and becoming itself depend on something outside of being and becoming outside of time and space that’s a remarkable dairy philosophical and theological proclamation. It’s one of the things that makes the God of the Old Testament unique. One question that emerges from that realization is where such a deity is to be found, if not in nature, and if not in the form of the pharaoh, and the story of Moses and Elijah are attempts to answer their question. And it’s not answered in a manner that requires those who understand that story to adopt blind and superstitious faith in something unprovable. First, that’s not what faith means; faith means to stake your soul in something. It doesn’t mean to state facts as if they’re believed to be true. It requires faith and commitment that goes beyond the commitment of your life, and you might say, well, what could be beyond the commitment to your life?
That’s a straightforward thing to answer and that’s the commitment you have that expresses itself as the love of your children because if you’re a parent who has the least amount of sense, you would give your life for your children, which means you hold something in higher regard than your existence and the love you have for your children points to that transcendent reality. That’s why there is an insistence in the Old Testament and the New Testament that love is one of the purest manifestations of the spirit of God. Focus on something and put it in the highest place.
Best advice for a long-lasting marriage?
How to become more articulate while keeping emotions under control.
Peterson came right out and said that this is not the way to think about it. You don’t want to have to keep your emotions under control. Rather you want to control that chaos in a way that the result is inherently good. If your aim is correct, the words will come out naturally.
I’m often surprised when I bring up the topic of Jordan Peterson; many people have never heard of him. A little background on Dr. Jordan Peterson: He’s a best-selling author, psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, and co-founder of Peterson Academy. He taught some of the most highly regarded courses at Harvard and the University of Toronto for twenty years while publishing more than a hundred scientific papers with his students and co-authors. His podcast frequently tops the charts in the Education category. He’s written three books: Maps of Meaning, an academic work presenting a new scientifically grounded theory of religious and political belief, and the bestselling 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order. Peterson provides insight into the structure of mythology and narrative to hundreds of thousands of people. If you are new to Jordan Peterson and want to learn more, the links above or his interviews on the Joe Rogan podcast are a great place to start. This interview is the most popular.