C.S. Lewis holds the dubious honor of having seen a lot of the current postmodern, diffusely totalitarian rot coming in advance. He didn’t have a time machine and never got to write his time travel story with Tolkien, but he did have a salient insight into humanity and its worst impulses which could be mistaken for soothsaying.
A favorite quote of mine to whip out in the COVID era has been this one from God in the Dock:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Many probably recognize at least that first sentence as a functional thesis statement for a “Rights-oriented Lockdown Skeptic.” But another slightly lesser known passage from Lewis comes from his essay “Men Without Chests,” itself collected in the book Abolition of Man.
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
I find the phrase “castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” applicable to a host of phenomena in the present day because we see so much counter-productivity. We lock indoors and bid the shut-ins be healthy. We spark tribalism and bid our nations be united. We assault access to energy and bid the gasoline be affordable. Or to update and literalize the original illustration: we castrate and bid women’s swimming be competitive.
My point in this observation is not to itemize things that really grind my gears.
My point is that we’re seeing plenty of symptoms of men without chests in every corner of life.
So what does this have to do with Jordan Peterson?
If Dr. Peterson could be said to have a central driving theme to his work, both in writing and in dialogue, it would be something like “the pursuit of meaning.” He rightly seeks to address a frightful dearth of meaning, particularly (but not exclusively) among men. This scarcity of meaning flows naturally, I think, from a scarcity of chests as Lewis might describe it.
There is plenty to be said about the root causes of this in various societal turns, all the -isms in the past century. Many disagree about the exact diagnosis. Most disagree, vehemently, about the cure. But few seem to deny there’s a problem with the heart.
So why do so many look to a “brain doctor” for help with that?
My argument here is that, whether he’s conscious of it or not, Jordan Peterson has the kind of counter-cynical, ordered-affections “chest” Lewis wrote about, and it’s compelling by virtue of contrast.
I think this has an awful lot to do with Peterson’s respect for the Western tradition as opposed to thinly veiled (or simply unveiled) contempt for it. More often we expect psychologists to take the pure materialistic route — “it’s the brain chemistry, stupid” (although most recently that take seems to have aged like milk). This might only be stereotype but Peterson defies it all the same. Instead he consistently points us back to the archetypes. He speaks of character(s) and concepts which many assumed we’d collectively outgrown.
What we know to be true
Lately, popular acknowledgment of the Biblical stories or works descended from them (if it happens at all) carries a snobbish tone, a “look what we’ve enlightened ourselves out of” attitude. It’s all been debunked, seen straight through just as described in “Men Without Chests.”
But Dr. Peterson would have you “see through” things less. Vision (and by extention, attention and perception) is another huge theme with Peterson. Stick around his podcast long enough and you’ll almost certainly hear an illustration about it, either very old in the form of Egyptian mythology, or very new in the form of AI development. Generally when these examples come up, it’s to drive home an exhortation to really pay attention to what it is you try to pay attention to — ultimately, to discern the truth. “Discernment” and “truth” being prized in a Biblical worldview, I think this is why, in spite of the continuing sword dance Peterson is doing around Christianity, and in spite of some odd takes on the Biblical narrative, many believing Christians have found his work compelling and useful: he really insists on the importance of seeking, speaking, and living by truth.
The curse postmodernism has saddled us with is the imbalance of assuming that whatever is extremely difficult to discern may as well be impossible, and that anyone claiming otherwise is almost certainly (heh!) a power-hungry grifter — and you can just forget about “truth” in any useful sense of the word. To me this is essentially synonymous with (or at least the descendant of) the “debunking” of which Lewis warns in his essay. Peterson wants the aforementioned curse lifted, rightly recognizing just how many men’s chests it has hollowed out.
Ironically, I’ve heard “grifter” leveled as an accusation against Peterson before and it actually seemed hilarious to me simply because of how often he cautions against unbridled cynicism. Maybe the accusation is just iron law of woke projection? Or maybe it comes of having been hurt enough that Peterson’s key admonishment that “not everything is a grift” sets off an alarm bell. The latter is more sympathetic but still pathological.
In either case the main symptom of this pathology is a strong aversion to the concept of abiding truth. But it’s less like a true allergy and more like the kind of “intolerance” trendy dieters swear they have to gluten. The problem is that gluten gives bread its hold-together, and anything else that tries to simulate this probably behaves really strangely in the mixture, doesn’t perform as well for structure, and may still be tough to digest anyway. And now I’ve stretched the metaphor like, uh, dough. But I trust I’ve proved my point?
Real ideals
This pathology, the radical skepticism of abolished, hollowed-out men that seeks to unravel truth, will necessarily set its sights on truth at all levels — which includes the loftier ones. Lewis uses the example of sacrifice (incidentally, an extremely prominent concept in Peterson’s work); when men go to die in war for love of nation, what they feel is the result of “merely propaganda.” Manipulation just as easily leveraged toward some other utilitarian end, if the right people wanted it.
But what Lewis notes, and Peterson maintains, is that just like truth, the transcendent is not quite as artificial as that. Merely because our ideas of transcendence are cultivated and trained up does not make them lies.
Lewis appeals back to Augustine and Aristotle as he commends to his reader the definition of education as having “ordinate affections.” The idea is that human emotions and passions are a force for good, if properly directed. This is another common imbalance: that we see the solution to “uncontrolled passion” as “no passion at all.” It seems like the safest way to proceed but it really just leads from the ditch of the BLM rioters and communist revolutionaries (but I repeat myself) to the ditch on the other side of the road. You want to be neither a Klingon nor a Vulcan, so to speak.
According to what standard should the affections be ordered to stay on the path? Lewis employs the word “Tao” (the “Way”) and Peterson usually prefers something like “the highest ideal.” Upon sufficient drilldown, both of these seem to me to lean a bit too heavily on collective human experience as its arbiter, but both men nonetheless would contend for it as a “real thing” and not merely a construct. Both would further contend that we fail to learn and teach it at our own extreme peril.
Lewis expressed this peril as the titular abolition of man and he is charitable enough to assume that its engineers may well be unwitting. For Peterson, seeing the results of totalitarian regimes through the rest of the 20th century, “hell on earth” becomes the preferred nomenclature (though Lewis uses a similar phrase too). He’s understandably less forgiving of the demonic architects after we've seen just how low they could stoop for building blocks.
Nonetheless I see the same stronghold surveyed from two different vantage points. Lewis is scouting ahead, with quite a sharp eye, while Peterson has the dubious benefit of having seen more of the whole structure. Their shared admonishment is that just because we've come to regard the transcendent as “fake,” it doesn’t grant immunity to the consequences — any more than a man deciding humans may fly unaided renders him immune to gravity as he steps off the cliff.
Passion project
But the title of this post is not “Jordan Peterson, man who gets other men to have chests.” It’s not just the content of the message, but the speaker himself who brings to mind, by contrast with the zeitgeist, what C.S. Lewis wrote. His speech and writing are personal rather than detached, and I would argue this is ultimately a significant reason for Peterson’s big splash and the abundance of ripples in the pond.
What is obvious to me in Peterson’s work is the directed passion with which he conducts himself (again, that idea of ordinate affections). As with the mythological illustrations, spend just a little time on his YouTube channel and you’ll see real, stirred emotion and energy around the subject matter — whether moved to tears by a poignant turn in a podcast conversation, or stern in his condemnation of burgeoning totalitarianism in Western politics. The more emotional moments garner ridicule by detractors, but by and large such moments do not come at the expense of meaningful discussion. Granted, the Tweets occasionally may, but I would argue this is still an issue of degree and not of category in terms of expenditure of emotional energy; the statements may be overplayed, but are still aimed in the right direction.
Part of his relatively wide range of expression seems to me to stem from Dr. Peterson’s respect for suffering as a human reality, both observed in clinical practice and research, and experienced through truly horrific personal life events. Media scrutiny, family illness (mulitple times), severe complications of medication withdrawal. But there is an exit from the tunnel and now he’s writing, touring, and recording again with some of his best conversations and material.
It’s very interesting to me that going through the wringer to such a degree could impart an even greater dignity and spirit than might otherwise exist, and it runs directly counter to the modern narrative of inescapable and indelible scarring by past evils (a narrative upon which intersectionality leans heavily, which is also interesting to note).
At some point along the way we tilted from “do no harm” as a guiding principle to “suffer no harm” as some sort of goal. The former is down to individual agency and responsibility; the latter is framed as an outcome almost always dependent on circumstances (whether imutable as with race or sex, or hypothetical as with disease transmission). I wonder if this correlates with greater collectivist leanings in the population?
Trouble is, it’s not only that there’s more to life than dodging unpleasant experiences; it’s that such an endeavor is literally impossible on a long enough (but likely to be relatively short) timeline. There are those who dismiss Peterson as a hypocrite because of his personal struggles, seeing them as a betrayal of the principles for which he advocates in his books and lectures — “If you’re so big on responsibility, why did all this happen to you?” But this misses the point; it was never about being untouched by suffering and chaos, but rather the ability to voluntarily face them, endure them, and make it all mean something.
We knew this once, perhaps, as “resilience” — before “safety” became the virtue beyond all tradeoffs. And I think this last point touches on yet another differentiator for Jordan Peterson: he’d rather see you strengthened and prepared to face what’s coming than withering away in the futility of avoidance. And such strength comes from the chest.
- Jordan Peterson
This was a really interesting and enjoyable stack piece. Happy to have clicked on your stack link after reading a series of comments (on BadCattitude) that made me actually laugh out loud.
Jordan Peterson post his wife becoming a Christian has been very interesting to me. His own struggles with how a believing Christian life might look for him has had me examining my own fruitfulness.
There is a very long and great interview with him by Lex Fridman. His wife and daughter are both Christians.