JACOBIN
12.18.2024
In his latest book, right-wing provocateur Jordan Peterson looks to extract existential and political lessons from the Old Testament. Far from probing deep truths, it’s a shallow, self-serving exercise in culture war.
Jordan Peterson addresses students at te Cambridge Union on November 2, 2018, in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK. (Chris Williamson / Getty Images)
Review of We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine by Jordan Peterson (Portfolio, 2024)
Jordan Peterson is back with a five-hundred-plus-page book about, nominally, the Old Testament. It is the Canadian psychologist and culture warrior’s first volume of biblical exegesis, and he has promised to follow it up with at least one more on the “many other stories of the Old and New Testament.” Depending on who you are, Peterson waxing poetic on Genesis may sound either like a must-read or like a novel form of torture that would test the fortitude of Job.
I’ve read a lot of Peterson over the years and even contributed to a short volume critiquing him in depth. Part of that project was motivated by genuine admiration for some of the commonsense self-help advice he offered in books like 12 Rules for Life. A lot of my friends back home, conservative and not, found him helpful and even somewhat inspiring. Another motivation was my sense that Peterson could be on track to become a formidable conservative intellectual à la Roger Scruton or Patrick Deneen: someone who offered probing critiques of the Left alongside a rich, positive conservative philosophy that required sustained intellectual response.
Unfortunately, going through We Who Wrestle With God, it’s hard to imagine anyone but his most devout fans finding much in the way of inspiration. It’s by now clear that Peterson’s evolutionary trajectory has been toward becoming another hacky right-wing pundit in the mold of Ben Shapiro and James Lindsay.
Once More Against “Postmodern Meta-Neo-Marxism”
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), Peterson’s first book, suggested he might become a more sophisticated thinker — albeit very much an idealist who asserted that “beliefs are the world in a more than metaphysical sense.” Compared to his recent writing, back then he exhibited a more nuanced approach to politics and culture. Peterson typically (if inaccurately) tended to identify the yearning for order with the political right, but also often pointed out how an excess of order could be as dangerous as an excess of chaos, typically associated with the fruits of progressive agitation. Peterson claimed that the “conservative tendency of any culture, striving to maintain itself, can easily transform into the deadening weight of absolute authority. The Great Father as tyrant destroys what he once was and undermines what he still depends upon.”Peterson fails to engage seriously with leftist ideas but doesn’t let that get in the way of denouncing the Left as resentful, genocidal, idiotic, and so on.
At points, Peterson even identified the radicalization of this tendency with the far right and fascism, describing the fascist as a person who “builds stronger and stronger walls around himself and those who are ‘like him’ in an ever more futile attempt to keep the threatening unknown at bay” and who “cannot visualize the beneficial aspect of chaos.” One wonders where this critique of right-wing wall-builders and ethnocentrists has gone.
Peterson has not threatened to become such a comparatively interesting thinker since then. We’re well past any such nuance in We Who Wrestle With God. Instead, we get an even more reductive bifurcation of the world into Cain and Abel, the “hostile brothers” who perennially confront one another. The spirit of Cain is embodied in all those who “resentfully dwell” upon differences, especially “those of sex, race, class, ethnicity, ‘gender,’ attractiveness. . . .”
More concretely, these villains include a variety of “Marxists”:
The resentful, then murderous, then genocidal Jacobins who first planned the French Revolution and then took it over completely were the spiritual descendants of Cain. Karl Marx is Cain to the core, construing society as nothing but a battleground of power. . . . He failed completely (and purposefully) to separate wheat from chaff in the totalizing condemnation of the “bourgeoisie,” regarding them in consequence of their success as only parasites, predators and thieves, and gave no credit whatsoever for the wealth and stable societal structure they produced as a result of their conscientious, diligent, honest, and productive labor. The modern meta-Marxists, the postmodern power players, have, as it were, metastasized Marx — but, more deeply, the spirit of Cain. . . .
Here it is tempting to accuse Peterson of not only hypocrisy, but projection. He describes the intellectual left as offering “totalizing condemnations” of people they characterize as murderous parasites. Meanwhile, he fails to engage seriously with leftist ideas but doesn’t let that get in the way of denouncing the Left as resentful, genocidal, idiotic, and so on. If Peterson had read Marx closely, he would have noticed that The Communist Manifesto proclaimed the bourgeoisie had produced wonders the world had never seen and praised the class for its historically revolutionary role. Moreover, as Ben Burgis notes, Peterson once expressed awareness that Marx had multifaceted thoughts on the progressive and regressive dimensions of capitalism. Since then, it seems Peterson either has forgotten this point or has decided it overcomplicates the screed he wants to tell about Marx and Marxism.
Peterson’s vicious denunciation of Marx here is all the more ironic given that a major theme of We Who Wrestle With God, and much of Peterson’s other work, is that our bourgeois world precisely can’t be commended for a “stable societal structure,” characterized by deep religious and traditional roots. Had he read the Manifesto more carefully, Marx and Friedrich Engels might have given him a clue as to why — when they talked about everything solid melting into air and everything holy being profaned by the creatively destructive processes of capitalism that Peterson heaps praise upon.
Are We Material Beings in a Material World?
As mentioned above, in his heart of hearts, Peterson is very much an idealist. One who owes a deep debt to the thinking of the German conservative revolution and adjacent schools of thought. He is deeply influenced by thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Martin Heidegger, and an under-defined but very William Jamesesque kind of pragmatism. In terms of guiding our actions and thoughts, various kinds of beliefs about the world typically take priority over material facts. These beliefs are symbolically encoded, and the more encompassing their meaning, the greater the “more than metaphysical” reality we are to grant them.
Such a strange position would require careful, patient, and rigorous defense. That is never provided: when discussing hard questions about epistemology, ontology, free will vs. determinism, or metaethics, Peterson tends to retreat into gish-galloping question begging and non sequiturs:
Even if the story that we tell ourselves in this increasingly atheist, materialist, and fact-based world exists in skeptical contradistinction to that belief, we still believe, insofar as we act out such offense, whether given or taken. No man who avows disbelief in free will or even consciousness itself dares to treat his wife as if she lacks free will or consciousness. Why not? Because all hell breaks loose if he does. And why is that? Because the presumption of intrinsic value reflects a reality that is deep enough — “real” enough — so that we deny it at our practical peril. And, if that presumption is so absolutely necessary, how is it not true?
The limitations of this approach are reflected in his reading of Scripture. Peterson is not a theologian or biblical scholar, a point that even friendly critics of the book have stressed. He is not very concerned with historical questions about the Bible’s accuracy, and is characteristically evasive on questions of onto-theology. What matters for Peterson is not the historical or ontological truth of the Old Testament, but the supposed practical efficacy of its lessons.
There is nothing inherently wrong with such an interpretation of Scripture. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, G. W. F. Hegel, perhaps the greatest of “idealist” thinkers, also presents the Bible as a largely symbolic iteration of philosophical and moral truths made accessible to ordinary people through images and stories. The socialist theologian Paul Tillich tended to perceive God as less a real, existing figure and more as an existential call to consider what is of “ultimate concern.”
The problem is that, for a book that’s supposed to be about wrestling with God, Peterson doesn’t actually want to fight that hard. It turns out that, upon reflection, the Almighty’s views are pretty straightforwardly those of the average North American conservative. God doesn’t much like “Marxists,” trans people, environmentalists, atheists, materialists, ChatGPT wokeness, or “Tinker Bell, the porn fairy.” On the other hand, God is quite content with the existence of billionaires, provided they don’t love or worship money (and why would any billionaire when they have so much of it?). The effect of Peterson continuously finding in the Old Testament affirmation of the views that he already held is to suggest, to paraphrase Terry Eagleton, that he wants to purchase revelation on the cheap. This is, after all, much easier than contending with the more interesting and potentially disturbing problems that deeper readers of Scripture end up wrestling with.
If I Only Could, I’d Make a Deal With God and Get Him to Swap Places
Leo Tolstoy would be an example of that more serious kind of reader, one whom Peterson cites positively throughout We Who Wrestle With God. In middle age, Tolstoy famously underwent a conversion, traced with great beauty in his Confession. Immensely successful, rich, and long if not quite happily married, Tolstoy nonetheless felt the weight of his mortality and wondered whether the transience of all life meant that nothing mattered. He instead found meaning in the Bible, developing a distinctive brand of Christianity that would go on to influence Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
What is most notable about Tolstoy’s Christianity, as defended in classics like The Kingdom of God Is Within You, is how fiercely utopian and egalitarian it was. From Tolstoy’s perspective, Biblical injunctions to turn the other cheek or give up all your wealth to the poor weren’t meant to be taken as suggestions for personalized moralism, to be balanced alongside worldly (and conservative) common sense. Instead, they required us to make immense social changes, ranging from the abolition of private property and standing armies to eliminating most hierarchical social apparatuses.When discussing hard philosophical questions, Peterson tends to retreat into gish-galloping question begging and non sequiturs.
Lest anyone think I am just being needlessly critical because I disagree with Peterson politically, we can compare the work of Yoram Hazony, a sophisticated proponent of national conservatism and defender of traditionalism and Zionism. In his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Hazony notes some important challenges Jewish religious texts pose for the political right. Hazony defends the need for a hierarchical social order based in tradition and respect for long-standing authorities. But he observes that the God of the Jewish scriptures often seems to have a different set of values than his conservative followers.
On Hazony’s reading, God is typically underwhelmed by the ethics of the conservative “farmer.” This is a person who lives a “life of pious submission, obeying in gratitude the custom that has been handed down, which alone provides bread so that man may live.” Instead, God admires the ethics of the shepherd; shepherds are characterized by “ingenuity and daring, risking the anger of man and God to secure improvement for himself and his Children” and by “dissent and initiative, whose aim is to find the good life for man, which is presumed to be God’s true will.”
This poses serious problems for the conservative proponent of the Old Testament, who must continuously balance his human desire for gratitude for custom and stability with an awareness that it is the often-rebellious prophets and innovators who are most loved by God for improving his creation by tearing down what is calcified and unjust. But it is a problem, according to Hazony, that conservatives must wrestle with honestly. While we should reject his political views, Hazony at least has the honesty to wrestle with the conflict here — rather than shying away from it by construing Scripture as a series of apologias for the political philosophy of the Daily Wire.
To the Mat
There are some parts of We Who Wrestle With God that are engaging the same way 12 Rules for Life and its sequel could be. Peterson isn’t wrong that a toxic sense of resentment can be corrosive of an individual’s life and that it is an inherently dangerous basis for any kind of politics. It would be nice if he acknowledged as he did in Maps of Meaning, that the Right is also fueled by such affects (and much of the contemporary right is transparently fueled by resentment over having to share the country with those they consider unworthy or dangerous, or having to pay for the well-being of the undeserving poor).
The point stands, however, that a person is more likely to lead a flourishing life by asking what they can do, rather than being resentful over what they can’t. Understood holistically, this would of course include a commitment to social justice. But insofar as the Old Testament chronicles prophetic figures who rose above their all-too-human limitations to accomplish something for themselves and their society, Peterson’s reintroductions of Abraham and Jonah may be personally edifying for some readers.For a book that’s supposed to be about wrestling with God, Peterson doesn’t actually want to fight that hard.
But the book mostly demonstrates the real but self-imposed limitations of Peterson the polemicist, pundit, and slayer of woke dragons. He seems diminishingly interested in genuinely challenging the views of his opponents and doggedly invested in reading everything in a way that confirms his priors.
Ironically, the same could not be said of Marx, who Peterson chastises for dogmatically dismissing religion as nothing more than an illusion. Characteristically, Marx, who could undoubtedly be a venomous critic, learned a great deal through a deep and careful engagement with conservative streams of Hegelianism and other elements of the German idealist tradition. Marx’s actual view of religion was that it was an illusion — but not merely an illusion, or one that could be simply dismissed. Religion, the “heart of a heartless world,” would never disappear so long as inhumane social conditions persisted. As many Marxist theorists have argued, if the social world remains alienating, we will continue to project new and often damaging ideologies onto it.
Peterson’s own partisan polemicism increasingly looks like another example of such ideology. To the extent it offers a take on religion intended to reconcile ordinary people to a world of illegitimate hierarchy and extreme inequality, We Who Wrestle With God is, more than religion itself, an opiate for the masses.
Contributor
Matt McManus is a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of, among other books, The Political Right and Equality, A How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism, and the forthcoming The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.
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