Putting the World Together
My project of continuing to try to digest Jordan Peterson has continued. Let’s assume the modern psychological premise that we are not fully conscious of ourselves, in fact we are only marginally conscious of ourselves which can help explain why we do things, are fascinated by things, or obsess over things that the rational, conscious parts of ourselves don’t fully comprehend. I feel this way a bit with some of this Jordan Peterson stuff. I think this is part of the reason why he’s skyrocketing in terms of attention and demand. He’s scratching where we’ve got a cultural itch and we know it for reasons we don’t know. We’ll see where it leads. If you’re a Christian you might attribute this to the Holy Spirit. If you’re an atheist, you might blame the subconscious. Read it like you want, something is happening.
This particular video I think nicely helps Peterson get into a lot of the stuff that is making him tick. It’s more a gold mine than a pile of gold because you’ve got to go dark underground and work through some hard rock to get the gold, and even after that you might have to smash the rock and use cyanide to leach is out. Or maybe we’re going to get it out of pile of old green circuit boards. In any case there is some dangerous work to do here.
Dealing with Post-Christian Skeptics
Let’s use some Peterson to mine Peterson. What is going on? Why are there now groups of young men that consider themselves “Christian Atheists” as a result of his videos? Why is he the most requested conversation partner for Sam Harris by far? We can guess what kinds of people follow Sam Harris.
It’s clear that the atheists have a monster they fear, and that monster is some strange combination of Christian belief, a way to read the Bible, a way to interpret common human experience and the history of Christianity in the West. Harris famously sees Christianity, and other religions as a sort of a failed science. Back in the day such superstition might have offered some Darwinian survival advantage but since the twilight of modern science we now should know better and it should therefore be dismissed. It’s something like leachcraft or bloodletting. We know what causes plague and as Harari noted greatly diminished humanity’s three great adversaries of plague, hunger and war. It’s time to keep moving forward, not look back at obsolete stories. We need to school religious people to keep the leaches in the swamp and join the bright daylight of our enlightenment.
The monster of obsolete belief is accompanied by a variety of beliefs and identifiable by a variety of shibboleths. A public profession of faith in Darwinian evolution is perhaps the most important starting point for many in this tribe. This makes the nearly half of the American population that likes to believe that “God created the heavens and earth” pre-Darwinists waiting for conversion. Safe people tend to be academics, scientists and the kinds of educated respectable people who get the elite jobs. There are always some characters in the gray areas that embrace some sort of evolutionary narrative but still cling to the vestiges of archaic religious belief.
Now there is a lot of low-resolution belief about the history of human origins. I’ve been reading The Metaphysical Club about the rise of American pragmatism and there are some interesting passages about the strange ways this story arose.
The purpose of On the Origin of Species was not to introduce the concept of evolution; it was to debunk the concept of supernatural intelligence—the idea that the universe is the result of an idea.
For a belief that species evolve is not incompatible with a belief in divine creation, or with a belief in intelligent design. Progressive adaptation might simply be the mechanism God has selected to realize his intentions. What was radical about On the Origin of Species was not its evolutionism, but its materialism. Darwin wanted to establish something even his most loyal disciples were reluctant to admit, which is that the species—including human beings—were created by, and evolve according to, processes that are entirely natural, chance-generated, and blind. In order to do this, he had to do more than come up with a new set of scientific arguments. He had to develop what amounted to a new way of thinking.
Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (p. 121). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
