One Rule to Live By: Be Good, Chapter 29: Jordan Peterson Is No Ordinary Psychologist

CHAPTER 29

Jordan Peterson Is No Ordinary Psychologist

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

—William Shakespeare

I never quite appreciated what the venerable Capuchin monk, who suffered the holy wounds of Jesus for fifty years before dying and to whom thousands of healing miracles have been attributed, said to me during one of my spiritual healing sessions with the gifted psychic medium who channeled him for my novel Healing with Padre Pio, perhaps because I was much too humble, or naive, but when he told me that my writing will provide “a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving, a new way of understanding,” I did not make the connection with something else that he said to me in another session: “You have transcended yourself and your community.” By community, he meant both the New Age spiritual community that I belonged to at the time but subsequently left shortly after I wrote my novel, and also the entire human community; but I’ve written more than half a dozen books since I wrote Healing with Padre Pio, and I understand what he means now.

If natural evolution can only take us so far in the consciousness of our individuating self, as ancient wisdom would have us believe and which I confirmed with my own journey of self-discovery, where does one turn when the natural process of self-individuation through karma and reincarnation can take them no further? This was the question that my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out There?” shouted from the depths of my unconscious—

Hierophants of the world,

I’ve lost all faith in religion, science,

and politics, but not in the better nature

of my fellow man, so please tell me:

what the hell is going on out there?

This was my cri de coeur. But it was also a desperate plea from the collective psyche of the world, because religion, science, and politics have failed to provide a way out of the existential dilemma of the human condition that has become so confused from the blind and treacherous moral relativism that Nietzsche proliferated with his de-stabilizing Zarathustran God-is-dead philosophy, and no one knows what to do to save the world from imploding; but the Universe heard my plea, and along came Jordan B. Peterson, a U of T professor of psychology and clinical therapist who refused to disabuse his conscience and took a stand for free speech that was compromised by our government’s amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, Bill C-16, and he was catapulted onto the world stage where he was given a global platform to answer my question “What the hell is going on out there?”

There have been plenty of articles written on Jordan Peterson since he stepped onto the world stage, some wickedly intent on destroying his career for the serious threat he poses to postmodern neo-Marxist nihilism and political correctness gone made, like Nellie Bowles’s hit piece in The New York Times (May 18, 2018: “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy”); but the more he was heard by good and decent people genuinely concerned with the conditions of our crazy modern world, the more the imperative of his message appealed to them, especially to wayward young men, and many have come to his defense; like Heather R. Higgins, an American businesswoman, political commentator, and non-profit sector executive who wrote a very insightful editorial on Jordan B. Peterson for The Hill (May 30, 2018): “How philosopher Jordan Peterson will change the world.”

Heady stuff, to be sure; but Jordan Peterson has been put through the ringer many times and is wise enough to not let praise and adulation go to his head, and Heather Higgins hits the mark with her keen and honest perspective on the intrepid hierophant who was driven from the earliest age by a fiercely obsessive daemon to understand “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world.” Higgins writes:

“The first reason that Peterson had such impact is that this is no ordinary psychologist or professor, staying in his narrow lane. Peterson not only is extraordinarily intelligent, but also widely learned. Listening to him is like wrapping your mind with a Paul Johnson history (coincidentally, I just happen to be re-reading Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals, a brilliant expose on the hypocrisy of intellectuals who left their mark on the world, like Karl Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Sartre and others), an interdisciplinary, intercultural, time-traveling tapestry of transcendent themes and truths — where evolutionary biology, history, literature, philosophy, psychology, music, art, religions, culture and myth are all interwoven…for many individuals, he reconnects them with responsibility for their lives, giving them agency and purpose — and not just for themselves, but in the effect they will then have on the world around them. Peterson is very insistent that each individual decision moves the entire world closer to either heaven or a bottomless hell. Because those aren’t just theoretical places we may go to after we die, but apt descriptions of the worlds we create around us (bold italics mine) … But those who like orthodoxies that would limit the speech, ideas, and freedoms of others in order to enforce a social construction of their own should be afraid. Like the boy who had the courage to tell the emperor he had no clothes, or like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose lone voice of truth helped topple a totalitarian empire, when this too crumbles, Jordan Peterson will be seen as the courageous catalyst that exposed the lies and made us a wiser people…”

Bravo, Heather Higgins! But just what is this “impact” that Jordan Peterson is having with the imperative of his message? What’s Peterson doing that’s so effective?

Not an easy question to answer. Ironically, not even the good professor knows why he has attracted well over 100 million viewers to his YouTube lectures and Patreon platform and thousands of people to his book tour talks (which he expanded from 60 to 100 cities) and why his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has sold over a million copies and counting, and which shot his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief  to the Amazon bestseller list); but I believe I know the answer, and it has to do with what St. Padre Pio told me about my writing being “a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving, a new way of understanding,” and it all boils down to what Emily Dickinson discerned to be our soul’s greatest need, it’s own identity, which  I explored in another one of my favorite spiritual musings:

The Satisfaction of Doing

And the Mystery of Soul-Making

Nothing pleases me more than that special feeling of goodness that comes from a satisfying piece of writing, like the spiritual musing that I was called to write on the natural process of soul-making through suffering, “The Tremor of Eternity,” which revealed much more about the human soul than I could have wished for; but why was it so satisfying? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Once I am blessed with an idea for a spiritual musing (or a poem or story), I never know where I’m going to find my entry point. It may come unannounced through associative thinking, or unexpectedly in conversation, watching TV, or reading the weekend papers or a magazine; but more often than not, it takes me by surprise with serendipitous delight, like it did this morning when I came upon something that Virginia Woolf said in Lyndall Gordon’s biography Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Life: “I have some restless searcher in me…Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay one’s hands on & say ‘This is it?’ I have a great & astonishing sense of something there.”

This “great & astonishing sense of something there” that Virginia Woolf sensed was that same “tremor of eternity” that Svetlana Alexievich sensed in her oral histories of the Soviet people, the same secret that Ernest Hemingway sensed in Cezanne’s paintings and sought to discover through his own writing, a secret that Hemingway felt only the poets had the gift of discerning, as John Keats did when he caught a glimpse of it in a letter to his brother that he titled “The Vale of Soul-Making.”

“There may be intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions,” wrote Keats, “but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure; in short, they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given unto them—so as even to possess a bliss peculiar to each one by individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like this?”

When Virginia Woolf analysed the writer’s life in a draft of her experimental novel The Waves, she remarked that there was “a certain inevitable disparity” between the public and private self, “between the outer & the inner.” “The outer facts are there,” writes her biographer Lyndall Gordon, “but only as a prop for the unfolding creative side.” Which brought to mind Emily Dickinson’s cryptic poem—

The props assist the house

Until the house is built,

And then the props withdraw—

And adequate, erect,

The house supports itself;

Ceasing to recollect

The augur and the carpenter.

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected life,

A past of plank and nail,

And slowness, —then the scaffolds drop—

Affirming it a soul.

            In her experimental novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf broke down what she knew of human nature into six ways, so as to analyse the composite and fuse her six characters into one ideal human specimen; but she failed. As Lyndall Gordon tells us in her biography: “After The Waves was published she wrote to G. L. Lowes Dickinson: ‘The six characters were supposed to be one. I’m getting old myself—I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect myself into one Virginia,” which brought to mind the Socratic principle of realizing one’s true self through a life of virtue, of which he believed goodness to be the highest, a principle that Socrates spelled out in Plato’s Dialogue the Phaedo: “And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body, as I was saying before; the habit of soul gathering and collecting herself into herself, out of all the courses of the body (by living a life of virtue); the dwelling in her own place alone, as in another life. so also, in this, as far as she can; the release of the soul from the chains of the body.” Which leads one to wonder, where was the moral factor in Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel of self-integration? Was there even room for virtue in her self-obsessed life?

Virginia Woolf failed to discover “it,” that “great & astonishing sense of something there” that Socrates couched in his philosophy and which Cezanne and Hemingway sensed in art and Svetlana Alexievich sensed in the “tremor of eternity” in the human soul that in my quest for my true self I discovered to be the natural enantiodromiac dynamic of life that individuates the dual consciousness of our being and non-being (Woolf’s “unfolding creative side” that Keats discerned to be the secret of soul-making through life experience); but Emily Dickinson ferreted out the secret way of life and shared it in her “letter to the world,” which the world failed to discern. Even the eminent literary scholar professor Harold Bloom who taught literature for more than half a century at Yale University got headaches trying to decode the secret in Dickinson’s poetry; but wise to the cruel ways of the world, Dickinson wrote—

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,

Success in circuit lies,

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth’s superb surprise;

As lightening to the children eased

With explanation kind,

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.

            That was my dilemma. And then I read Rumi. “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the secret,” declared the mystic poet, and unabashedly I told the story of my quest for wholeness and completeness in my twin soul books Death, the Final Frontier and The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, and I’ve been writing about the secret of soul-making in my spiritual musing for years, to the chagrin of my puzzled readers; so, what is this mysterious secret, and just how does it relate to that special feeling of goodness that I experienced writing my spiritual musing “The Tremor of Eternity”? 

            It’s all about soul-making. That’s what Svetlana Alexievich sensed in the “tremor of eternity” in the oppressed soul of the Soviet people. That’s the purpose and meaning of life, the alchemy of soul-making through individual life experience; and not until one learns the art of soul-making will one resolve the longing in their soul for wholeness and completeness.

Socrates couldn’t help himself and couched the secret in his philosophy, but which ultimately got him tried and condemned for sedition and heresy by the Athenian elite; and Emily Dickinson concealed the secret in her poetry; and Rumi declared the secret in every ecstatic verse that poured out of him; and I resolved the mystery that haunted Virginia Woolf and Cezanne and Hemingway and professor Bloom and every soul destined to satisfy their deepest longing in their soul to be all they are meant to be, which Emily Dickinson spelled out in her riddling poem—

Adventure most unto itself

The Soul condemned to be;

Attended by a Single Hound—

Its own Identity.

We are all condemned to become ourselves, whole and complete—the “circumference” of our life, as Emily Dickinson defined the fullness of our being; but because the natural law of enantiodromia will not allow the evolutionary process of life to complete what we are meant to be, how then do we satisfy the longing in our soul for wholeness and completeness?

This was my challenge when I set out on my quest for my true self more than half a century ago, and when I finally resolved the mystery it amused me to see that life itself was the solution to our existential dilemma that stumped great creative thinkers of the world like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, to name but a few; but I had to step so far outside the paradigm of man’s enantiodromiac conundrum that I doubt anyone will believe me when I tell them that the only way out of our paradoxical quandary is to simply be a good person.

That’s it. No messiah, guru, or Master. No religion. No philosophy. No science. No politics. Just being a good person resolves the paradox of our dual nature, because being a good person is the sum of all ways in life and makes our two selves into one. That’s why I felt such a satisfying feeling of goodness when I wrote “The Tremor of Eternity,” because when I brought my spiritual musing to resolution, I tasted the sweet fruit of my own tree, and it was good. A tad saccharine perhaps, but no less satisfying.

———

          This is professor Jordan Peterson’s appeal. His message has taken the best of religion, science, and politics and rendered the wisdom of the ages into the simple truth that there are no free rides in life. “Sort yourself out, bucko,” he admonishes the wayward young men who come to his book tour talks by the thousands, and then he lays his Rule 6 from his 12 Rules for Life on them: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”

Or, to quote from Ecclesiastes, the Preacher sums up the essential wisdom of Peterson’s core message: “…of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

In short, life is all about soul-making; and soul-making is a personal responsibility, which is all the good professor is really saying….