What is “Revelation” for Jordan Peterson?

A few quick comments on Anna Marchese’s interview with Jordan Peterson for the Jesuit review America. The interview, published in April, garnered attention because Peterson discussed one of his own experiences of God, sparked in the presence of a sculpture he’d completed. Here I want to address more general issues. And so: the interview as a touchstone for giving my own (tentative) Christian take on Peterson.

In this interview, I think Peterson’s off the mark in a few formulations, but in general he gets it: he gets the deep structure that makes the West what it is; he gets that this is not merely a cultural detail of our Western past, but a fundamental element of the West that is non-negotiable, as the presence of water is non-negotiable if one wants to call something a “lake”.

Also, as Peterson sees, the West’s understanding of the Logos is a realization vis-a-vis Being that means the West is onto something: which is to say that losing the trail will also mean losing whatever else works about Western civilization, which is now (in my view and I think Peterson’s too) running on fumes left over from previous centuries.

I think Peterson is off, however, on various things. In this interview, he’s off when he speculates about what preachers believe or don’t believe. Sure, there are pastors and priests that fit his description, but these are certainly not all pastors and priests. When it happens, it’s mainly a matter of three things: a weak formation; a lack of drive; a lack of intellectual acumen. Which is to say that there are plenty of pastors who haven’t grasped truths Peterson himself has grasped. Is that any surprise?

He’s also off when he speculates on why so many churches are nearly empty. It’s not that the churches aren’t “modernized”, but rather that Western societies are still too much under the spell of Enlightenment scientism. I suspect that spell may be starting to wear off, though I may be wrong. Post-Enlightenment science has made the West strong; simultaneously, post-Enlightenment scientism has weakened it. We need to jettison the scientism while continuing to practice the science.

Typical for a North American, Peterson also puts too much stress on preaching as the essential thing that happens in churches, while ignoring the centrality of ritual and sacrament. That’s an unfortunate result of dominant Protestantism.

In more general terms, I believe Peterson’s biggest problem is that he takes Jung’s archetype theory too seriously and doesn’t take the possibility of revelation seriously enough. Yes, he uses the term revelation, but I suspect he doesn’t mean by it what orthodox Christians do: namely, that it is the Triune God who reveals, not a process of archetypal instantiation. Peterson, if I’m correct, still seems uncertain how this revealing God would be distinct from something in the Self. Oddly, for me, he keeps repeating that “the West is right”, but seems to think this is a matter of a certain learning process the West successfully went through, or a certain serendipitous instantiation of archetypes in the West’s stories that led to an intellectual leap. Of course, in my mind, if “the West is right”, it is because of more than just a lucky instantiation.

At least one of my learned friends thinks I’m misinterpreting Peterson, and insists his thinking is closer to mine that I realize. That may be so. In any case, I do think we’re very lucky to have Peterson. Has there been a secular public intellectual in living memory who can speak so compellingly on certain elements of Christian? Yes, it’s only certain elements, but Peterson’s ability to hit these points home so clearly is a gift to us. I pray for a gift of grace that may convert him to the fuller Christian vision, and faith. Perhaps, if my friend is right, Peterson has a fuller Christian vision than I realize. I have great respect for his project, and admiration for his tenacity and political insights, but have my doubts on this latter point. I will keep following his work and encouraging others to do so.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Steven Pinker Steps in it Again

Steven the PowerPoint Messiah
Look at a handful of the online photos of Harvard’s Steven Pinker, watch any of his lectures, and you will be struck by the feeling that this is a man suffering from mania. A gleam of self-confidence, a twinkle of avid flippancy emanates from this face.

In fact sometimes one can judge a book by its cover.

Pinker has done important work in cognitive linguistics. Yes, he’s clearly a very smart man. Unfortunately, like not a few others who’ve done serious work in science (think Richard Dawkins) Pinker imagines this automatically makes him a sage in political matters too.

The results, as with Dawkins, are embarrassing. Though cases like Pinker’s and Dawkins’ do make for interesting lessons on the vanity of the scientific mind (or at least some scientific minds) they mostly serve to make one depressed. It would be better, one feels, if intelligent people didn’t make fools of themselves in the public arena.

A handful of years back, Pinker published his tome The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argued, in a nutshell, that modernity had made humanity less violent, and suggested that we needed just continue on the modern, secular path and we’d eventually eradicate human evil. He managed to make this argument with a straight face (he’s a man of great straightness of face) just a few years after the end of the most horrific and systematically murderous century in human history. Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism--these were, as serious political philosophers recognize, all deeply modern projects, possible only after the triumph of our secular "Enlightenment". It’s a conundrum many modern thinkers wrestle with, one that puts in question all our claims to civilizational progress.

Not Professor Pinker. No, he has read a few things and has all kinds of (suspect) data to buttress his case. Thus Better Angels.

Now Pinker is at the podium once more, again outside his field of expertise, again showing the world that one can be a major tenured researcher at Harvard and at the same time lack even an inch of philosophical depth.

I spent a few hours with Pinker’s book, but couldn’t finish it. It is typing rather than writing; typing rather than thinking; typing rather than history. Ultimately it represents a monomaniacal hubris, a mere keyboard mania, curls and graphs flying in all directions.

All to prove a rather banal and circular thesis. Something along the lines of: Reason as I, Steven Pinker, understand and define it, will save the world.

As Peter Harrison wrote in his well deserved review of the book:

For the sceptical reader the whole strategy of the book looks like this. Take a highly selective, historically contentious and anachronistic view of the Enlightenment. Don't be too scrupulous in surveying the range of positions held by Enlightenment thinkers--just attribute your own views to them all. Find a great many things that happened after the Enlightenment that you really like. Illustrate these with graphs. Repeat. Attribute all these good things your version of the Enlightenment. Conclude that we should emulate this Enlightenment if we want the trend lines to keep heading in the right direction. If challenged at any point, do not mount a counter-argument that appeals to actual history, but choose one of the following labels for your critic: religious reactionary, delusional romantic, relativist, postmodernist, paid up member of the Foucault fan club.

What's obvious is that Pinker doesn’t take his go-to Enlightenment philosophers seriously enough to actually read them. His summary of the ethical thought of the figures he cites is so shoddy as to make one suspect he didn’t even bother to check, say, the relevant articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. That encyclopedia is online, Steven.

The trend among prominent scientists not to take philosophy seriously (Pinker, Dawkins again, the late Stephen Hawking) is ultimately dangerous. Science discovers much about the universe, of course, but philosophy is needed to think the relevance of those discoveries for human being. Scientists like Pinker don’t care to think that relevance at any depth, any philosophical depth, because in fact they aren’t interested in human being. They’re not interested because, in a gesture of amazing naiveté, they assume they already know what human being is. They assume that the meaning of the human is somehow evident, or obvious.

Philosophy is prior to whatever science does. Philosophers of science understand this. Glib practitioners of scientism do not.

I’m not going to bother further with Pinker’s silliness. It’s true I used to be more interested in following intellectual zombies, if only to keep tabs on them. But recently, well, there are so many actual thinkers at work, and we have too much to benefit from them to give over precious reading time to books like Enlightenment Now.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

New Atheist Truthiness and How to Fight It: Three Words

The New Atheists have been with us for some time. Shrill positivists who've made public careers out of fashioning the same straw man over and over, their impact on our culture is getting harder to ignore. Their few talking points have been absorbed widely and are regularly regurgitated any time one tries to discuss Christianity or either of the other two Abrahamic faiths. The results for serious discussion of religion have been reprehensible: a substitution of soundbites for thought.

One need only raise religious concepts in almost any mixed company and immediately there pops up one or two bright-eyed keeners with: "So I suppose you believe in the Tooth Fairy too!" Or: "There is zero concrete proof that God exists! Period!"

I especially like the line, traceable to Richard Dawkins: "You can believe that nonsense if you like, but I don't think you should have the right to teach it to children."

But try to take such debaters seriously, begin to engage actual argument with them, and they typically come back with things like: "Look, I'm not really interested enough in this topic to continue. It's not my concern."

Just like Dawkins himself. Not interested enough to actually study what he claims to refute.

In my mind the saddest part of the rise of Dawkins, Harris and Co. is that a New Atheist theology has actually taken root. And it is a theology, if only because their arguments only hold water to the degree their portrayal of Christian and other monotheistic theologies is accurate. Thus even as they forge their neat bullet points they're compelled to project a theological target at which their bullets can be fired. And since they haven't studied actual theology, they draw the target on their own. It is thus just what I say: a New Atheist theology. Since no serious theologians subscribe to the kind of thinking they project, it is purely an in-house project: the most egregious use of straw-man argumentation the West has seen in the past few decades.

Trite, shallow, grade-schoolish--of course the monotheism they revile is easy to take down. They made it for that purpose. Voilà the whole New Atheist project in a nutshell.

Him: "So I suppose you think you think Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs, right?" Me: "Actually I think evolutionary theory is correct about the rise of species." Him: "Well then you're not a real Christian, are you?" Me: "Uh. Sorry if I suggest that you're not the one to tell me what a real Christian is."

The tedious arrogance of these people! It's lucky most "real Christians" are reluctant to resort to violence. There'd be plenty of broken noses out there by now.

But I'm not writing here today to point to the shallowness of New Atheist debate tactics or theology. These points have been repeatedly raised by religious writers and even by many non-religious writers. In any case Harris and Dawkins have a rock star following to woo: they're not going to start actually talking substance with so many screaming teens in the audience. They've inculcated just the aggressive rudeness they hoped for. I'm here today to coin a new term or two to meet them halfway.

The fact is that it's damn cumbersome, it's inelegant, to write "New Atheism", "new-atheistic", etc. The word doesn't have a good adjective form. Besides, it's confusing to refer to a Dawkins groupie with the term "New Atheist", since this term is generally reserved for the big guns, that quadriga which, since the demise of Hitchens, we can indicate by the well-deserved acronym ADHD: yes, I mean AC Grayling, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett. So today I'd like to suggest three new words we may use when writing of this gang and their rude followers. Instead of the cumbersome "New Atheist" or "New-Atheistic" or "showing a shallowness similar to that of the New Atheists" I will use:

newther
newthy
newthiness

I think these words might add some punch to our writing. One can save time typing and write far more elegant sentences. And (if I may say so myself) the terms are just what Dawkins, Harris and their now millions of smart alec followers deserve. Because in fact they are not promoting science so much as scientism. And their political liberalism is not so much true liberalism (in the classical sense intended by our Founders) as scare-mongering paranoia: it is atheist dogmatism seeking to overthrow liberalism.

Newther nicely echoes truther, which is about right.

And newthiness echoes Stephen Colbert's immortal truthiness, which again hits the nail right on the reductive newther head. A Catholic himself, I think Colbert would approve.

Religious writers slogging about the Anglosphere these days will find plenty of chances to use these terms.

Newthiness: Just as all economic discourse on Fox News and like media refers back to the now disproved bromide "A totally free market is best for everyone" (and thus is mere truthiness) so all New Atheist discussion refers back to the highly debatable dogma that "Empirical science is the only way human beings can access truth"--and thus is mere newthiness.

Newther: This term is good in response to people who immediately feel it their duty to insult you when they learn you're a believer. As in: "So you think that the earth is ten-thousand years old, huh? I bet you think God hates fags too."

I once had a tubby, squinting Minnesotan throw just these lines in my face.

"Why do you people always assume all believers are rabid fundamentalists?" I asked him. "I mean, you're German-American. How'd you like it if half the people you met, upon learning your ancestry, suddenly shouted Sieg Heil! and tried to get you to defend the Holocaust. Duh."

The Minnesotan just smirked and took another swig of his beer. And I walked away.

With my new term newther I can save my breath next time. I can just say "Fucking newther soundbites" and walk away. Which is more or less meeting the newther on the level of debate he (and it always is a he) prefers. (Indeed--why are New Atheist converts so overwhelmingly fat, white and male? Is it straight from Dungeons and Dragons to Dawkins and Dennett or what?)

And so: newther, newthy, newthiness. We need these terms. There's an insufferably arrogant, definable strain of argument that's grown out of the New Atheist books and TED talks and pep rallies. It's a repetitive, redundant, willfully rude type of debate style. I feel we've been too polite when faced with it. It's time to coin some sharper terms to pin on these slobbering monomaniacs. I for one have grown tired of people with a third of my education thinking they can talk to me like I'm a moron. It's insulting to me, but more importantly, it's insulting to my faith.

Eric Mader

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I've recently been introduced to the Freedom From Atheism Foundation (FFAF). I've some reservations about them (they seem in terms of the US to have a soft spot for the GOP which I hardly share) but it's certainly true that someone needs to start doing this kind of work. Check out their Facebook page.

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Hail the Four Horsemen of the ASSPOCALYPSE:
Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens