Jordan Peterson Sees the Awesome Power of Stories
What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been is the title Jordan Peterson (or his organization) gave to his 500th podcast, released last week. Apt for Peterson, who has chalked up a few psychedelic journeys and has talked about them with seriousness and insight (though not so much lately), to use as his title the most famous lyric phrase in the entire Grateful Dead songbook.
Peterson is challenging us to make our lives a part of the great story right now so that we no longer will flirt so closely with disaster.
Apt as well because Peterson is emphasizing adventure as central to life lived at its deepest. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead guessed that that was at the core of his band’s appeal: “Maybe that’s it, maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.”
In recording #500, Peterson sees the call to adventure as biblical, in God’s imperative to Abraham to get up and leave everything familiar behind and go to the place He would show him. He sees it in the willingness of Jacob to wrestle with God, and has titled his newest book, We Who Wrestle With God, in reverence to the story of Jacob receiving the name Israel after he literally wrestles with a divine being.
Putting adventure at the core of the relationship with God requires two things. First, it requires dedication to truth. For Peterson this means a commitment to that which is beyond the limits of our ability to control or manipulate, something which requires the surrender of our pretensions.
Truth measures us. We can respond to that measure and commit ourselves to the adventure that ensues, or we can reject that open-endedness and the fear of the unknown for an endless sorry rehash of our own cycle of behaviors. We can dare to put out our thoughts so that, as Alfred North Whitehead wrote, our bad ideas can die instead of us. Whitehead, too, wrote of religion as adventure:
The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.
In the second place, adventure implies a story. An adventure is not experienced or remembered as a list of facts or a series of abstractions. Rather we experience it as a tale, a narrative.
Peterson reminds us that there is nothing older or more central to human culture than stories. They treat truth as something that grips our lives and shapes us and the world. They recreate us as we hear them and tell them, awakening the inner feeling of adventure as we put ourselves in the place of the heroes of our stories and see the world through their eyes. In the best narratives, the mind and heart are an organic unity. They help us be whole. No wonder, says Peterson, that story is central to the Bible and spiritual traditions that have stood the test of time.
Peterson has been influenced by Carl Jung’s deep dive into the narratives that are the stuff of our culture and of our inner lives. Peterson believes that Western culture made a catastrophic blunder in turning away from Jung’s exploration of deep narrative as the key to our psyche. Instead, the West turned to the Deconstructionists’ rejection of any coherent narrative except their own nihilism.
To the deconstructionists, we differ so completely in how we read that in the end, no story can unite us. To them, all meanings are entirely in the separate and unrelated minds of the author and reader. When this literary nihilism merged with the political and moral nihilism of Marxism, Wokeism exploded onto the scene, attempting to level every monument and every meaning, to clear the cultural field of everything except their own unaccountable power.
Like most readers of American Spectator, Peterson sees in the stunning events of this year’s election evidence of the resurgence of values the wokeists had thought dead and gone. The great narrative of the Bible and of the civilization that built on its foundation is turning out to be stronger than Derrida or Foucault understood. We see ourselves as part of a great story that will not be denied.
The Bible begins with stories and doesn’t seriously turn to law until well into its second book. It engages us first. It takes pains through the story to invite us into a law that is godly and inviting.
The model of law of the Roman emperors was top-down. Justinian’s code inspired those who wanted all power in their hands and who would use the Biblical narrative only to put a divine enforcer behind to terrorize those who might dare to defy the tyrant’s strong arm. Modern tyrants continue in that mode.
But the Biblical narrative was seamlessly integrated with a law that reflected the power of the story. It is a law that lives, that inspires love as well as respect, and that is studied lovingly by every citizen:
You shall love the Lord your Lawgiver (the Hebrew word used here is also used in Scripture to mean a human judge) with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your hearts … and you shall teach them to your children.
The Bible doesn’t teach a mindless obedience to a larger power. It tells first a long, long story which puts its law in the necessary context: the absolute benevolence of a Supreme Being who shares his very self with a universe upon whom He bestows a freedom like His own. A being so dedicated to love that He gives humans the power to disobey and pain Him radically, just so long as in the end, they could choose to love.
About 1900 years ago, a great teacher, Rabbi Akiva, proposed that the overarching principle that integrates God’s revelation — the Torah — is the command in Leviticus to love your neighbor as yourself.
As is typical in the Godly freedom of study of the Word, Rabbi Akiva’s student, Ben Azzai, differed with him. He cited another Biblical verse, Genesis 5:1-2: “This is the storybook of Adam’s kind — when G-d created Adam, He made him in the likeness of God, male and female … ”
The Bible’s story, Ben Azzai was saying, gives us the grounding that we need to love. Failing to know who we are at core, created out of love by a loving God in His own image, we can easily despair of being able to love even our own lives, let alone someone else. The core gift of the Bible’s story is that of our innate worth, which is not a product of our own effort or choice but is God’s irrevocable gift. We then are challenged by God to use that gift in a way that furthers His story and ours.
This is the basis of the kind of law that the Bible generates in societies which are imbued with its message, a law that respects worship and learns from the greatest Lawgiver of all that our freedom is key. With that model of love and respect animating the law, the country so governed can inspire the love and respect of its citizens to strive together, governing themselves for the common weal.
We nearly threw this concept of law out in the garbage. It is quite the tale now to add to the great narrative: how a nihilistic and cynical human tyranny could not quench the great story of the Bible or loose its hold on our hearts. Peterson is challenging us to make our lives a part of the great story right now so that we no longer will flirt so closely with disaster, in our private lives or in our life as a nation and as a world.
May Peterson go forward from strength to strength as he makes his next 500 recordings. His story and example beckon us to join the great adventure and become fearless acolytes of truth ourselves.
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