A professor friend who endures the inanity now routine at universities - touchy, twenty-something totalitarians, or identity politics which makes ethnicity, skin colour and culture relevant instead of character, academic ability and aptitude - told me of how he first heard about Jordan Peterson: His University of Calgary colleagues were near-unanimous that Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, was racist, sexist and beyond the pale.
Peterson became famous in late 2016 for opposing federal legislation to include artificial gender categories in the human rights code. Add to that Peterson's refusal to bend to his own university's diktats that he use made-up gender pronouns such as "zhe" in place of evolutionary-derived and fixed gender categories.
My friend checked out Peterson's work and discovered what most open-minded people find: His assertions are empirical and his beliefs liberal in the classic sense. Thus, Peterson found that males and females are biological realities (this, apparently, is news to some). Moreover, attempts to demand people say otherwise reeks of anti-science, mini-totalitarian impulses.
Peterson, originally from Fairview, Alberta, gained fame for that dispute. Our understanding of the celebrity professor can now be enlarged, thanks to his new book,
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos. At its core, it is about an Easter theme: suffering.
In his book, Peterson mostly ignores the controversy that made him famous. Instead, Peterson zeroes in on what he learned in three decades from clinical practice, friends, family and marriage: Akin to a summer thunderstorm, misfortune can appear without warning. Our reaction to the deluge can mean the difference between redemption and a possible good life, as the Greeks defined it (not the same as modern happiness), or a plunge into the abyss of lost hope.
Sometimes, anguish results from our own or others' capacity for meanness and evil; sometimes, suffering is accidental and for which one may, Job-like, accuse God of great neglect.
Peterson's own daughter, Mikhaila, a sunny child, struggled for years with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. It crippled her ability to walk or do anything without pain, including even being carried by her dad.
Things improved dramatically later, but only after years of suffering with frequency and intensity that would cause any parent to cry along with Christ at Golgotha: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
To grasp agony and wring out meaning is not a trite exercise. Most self-help books offer a one-two-three step process. Peterson's title may lead one to think his book is of the same ilk. Instead, his book draws on Dostoevsky, Freud, the Talmud, the New Testament and Taoism, as well as patients and students whom Peterson helped manoeuvre through life's unfair odds, their own choices, or both.
Peterson aims to help readers through misfortune's arrows in part by grounding us in the world's great faiths and sages. The author then asks us to be honest in the process - with our own hearts and heads, but also friends, children and spouses. Peterson observes that honesty produces genuine conflict that is "neither pleasant nor easy." It is, however, the only way to grow and not surrender to fakery or despair.
Elsewhere, Peterson poignantly observes that our human frailties, perhaps especially those we struggle to overcome, are where the love of others is called forth in our direction.
"What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations," writes Peterson, in a moving recounting of early childhood difficulties with his own son, Julian.
Such calls to clarity and actual compassion are why Peterson's words and work touch a nerve: Because Peterson starts with men, women and children as they are and the world as it is; he then adds honesty and demands non-safe spaces to critique ourselves and others, the only way we might improve either.
The truth may not immediately set you free; it will light up the proper path.
Comment: From Peterson's
website:
On the ark of the covenant, the cathedral, and the cross: Easter Message IThere has to be a bridge between the finite and the infinite.
There has to be a place where the ephemeral meets the eternal.
There has to be a bridge between the knowable and the unknowable.
There has to be bedrock at the foundation.
The ark, which is the portal to God, is to be carried on the shoulders of those who are Holy. It is not to be touched. To touch the ark is to risk death. There are holy things that cannot be touched except at mortal risk. These things that cannot be touched are the very foundation of the community.
The ark must be placed at the center of the temple. The temple must be placed at the center of the community. The community must be arranged around what is untouchable and unshakeable. The untouchable and unshakeable is what is axiomatic. The people following the ark have determined to journey toward the eternal Promised Land.
The city arranged properly around the ark of the covenant is eternal Jerusalem.
Something must be axiomatic, or everything shakes and falls. The axiomatic cannot be expressed fully in words. The axiomatic, untouchable and unshakeable, is instead what makes communication possible. The axiomatic is a spirit, a process, a living force. Its manifestations, however, are concrete. That is the transformation of the spirit into matter. That is the generation of the Tablets of Stone.
The ark of the covenant contains the Rules that are derived in the first order from the axiomatic principle. That principle is the Spirit that made the Rules manifest. The Spirit is the ultimate inhabitant of the ark, and the rules the result of its action. That Spirit is the creative Logos.
The ark of the covenant and the temple is replaced by the cathedral at the center of the community. The cathedral is the cross in architectural form. The cross is where the transformation takes place. The transformation is the incorporation of the body of Christ. That incorporation is a dramatic pretense; is the embodiment of the decision not to believe in Christ but to act Him out, which is to believe in a much deeper manner than to merely believe.
Christ is He who transcends death by voluntarily accepting death. Christ is He who rejects the kingdoms of this world for the Kingdom of God. Christ is He who speaks the truth that creates the habitable order that is good from the chaos of potential that exists prior to the materialization of reality. Christ is He who wields potential as the sword that cleaves death. Christ is He whose radical acceptance of the conditions of life defeats the hatred, bitterness and vengefulness that the tragedy and malevolence that taints Being otherwise produces. Without the acceptance of death, bitterness rules, and Hell triumphs.
Christ is the potential of man and woman.
It is said that man and woman alike are made in the image of God, and that God is He who uses the eternal Logos to generate habitable order from the chaos of potential. This is the axiom. This is the diamond at the center of the world. This is the Spirit in the ark that is untouchable. This is the bedrock of the culture that brings peace and prosperity and that respects the dignity of man. This is the Great Truth. This is the responsibility whose acceptance allows each of us to live despite the catastrophic fragility of our limited being. Our likeness to God gives each of us a value that transcends the finite. Individual and society alike are charged with the ethical demand to respect that value. This is not only the presumption that grounds the idea of the Rights of Man. It is the presumption that lays upon each of us the Ultimate Responsibility that is the inevitable corollary of those Rights.
Face the chaos of the future.
Employ the Logos of which you are a part to transform that chaos into the habitable order that is Good. Speak the truth. Embody the truth.
Accept, impossibly, the limitations that make Being possible. Dispense in that manner with resentment, hatred, and the desire for infinite and unbounded vengeance and all the cruelty and evil that accompanies it. Pick up the cross of your tragedy and betrayal. Accept its terrible weight. Hoist it onto your shoulders and struggle impossibly upward toward the Kingdom of God on the hill.
The alternative is Death and Hell.
Comment: From Peterson's website:
On the ark of the covenant, the cathedral, and the cross: Easter Message I
There has to be a bridge between the finite and the infinite.
There has to be a place where the ephemeral meets the eternal.
There has to be a bridge between the knowable and the unknowable.
There has to be bedrock at the foundation.
The ark, which is the portal to God, is to be carried on the shoulders of those who are Holy. It is not to be touched. To touch the ark is to risk death. There are holy things that cannot be touched except at mortal risk. These things that cannot be touched are the very foundation of the community.
The ark must be placed at the center of the temple. The temple must be placed at the center of the community. The community must be arranged around what is untouchable and unshakeable. The untouchable and unshakeable is what is axiomatic. The people following the ark have determined to journey toward the eternal Promised Land.
The city arranged properly around the ark of the covenant is eternal Jerusalem.
Something must be axiomatic, or everything shakes and falls. The axiomatic cannot be expressed fully in words. The axiomatic, untouchable and unshakeable, is instead what makes communication possible. The axiomatic is a spirit, a process, a living force. Its manifestations, however, are concrete. That is the transformation of the spirit into matter. That is the generation of the Tablets of Stone.
The ark of the covenant contains the Rules that are derived in the first order from the axiomatic principle. That principle is the Spirit that made the Rules manifest. The Spirit is the ultimate inhabitant of the ark, and the rules the result of its action. That Spirit is the creative Logos.
The ark of the covenant and the temple is replaced by the cathedral at the center of the community. The cathedral is the cross in architectural form. The cross is where the transformation takes place. The transformation is the incorporation of the body of Christ. That incorporation is a dramatic pretense; is the embodiment of the decision not to believe in Christ but to act Him out, which is to believe in a much deeper manner than to merely believe.
Christ is He who transcends death by voluntarily accepting death. Christ is He who rejects the kingdoms of this world for the Kingdom of God. Christ is He who speaks the truth that creates the habitable order that is good from the chaos of potential that exists prior to the materialization of reality. Christ is He who wields potential as the sword that cleaves death. Christ is He whose radical acceptance of the conditions of life defeats the hatred, bitterness and vengefulness that the tragedy and malevolence that taints Being otherwise produces. Without the acceptance of death, bitterness rules, and Hell triumphs.
Christ is the potential of man and woman.
It is said that man and woman alike are made in the image of God, and that God is He who uses the eternal Logos to generate habitable order from the chaos of potential. This is the axiom. This is the diamond at the center of the world. This is the Spirit in the ark that is untouchable. This is the bedrock of the culture that brings peace and prosperity and that respects the dignity of man. This is the Great Truth. This is the responsibility whose acceptance allows each of us to live despite the catastrophic fragility of our limited being. Our likeness to God gives each of us a value that transcends the finite. Individual and society alike are charged with the ethical demand to respect that value. This is not only the presumption that grounds the idea of the Rights of Man. It is the presumption that lays upon each of us the Ultimate Responsibility that is the inevitable corollary of those Rights.
Face the chaos of the future.
Employ the Logos of which you are a part to transform that chaos into the habitable order that is Good. Speak the truth. Embody the truth.
Accept, impossibly, the limitations that make Being possible. Dispense in that manner with resentment, hatred, and the desire for infinite and unbounded vengeance and all the cruelty and evil that accompanies it. Pick up the cross of your tragedy and betrayal. Accept its terrible weight. Hoist it onto your shoulders and struggle impossibly upward toward the Kingdom of God on the hill.
The alternative is Death and Hell.