Advice to Jordan Peterson After Watching Him Surrounded

My brother – who is a reassuring figure as he is firmly to the Right of me on almost everything (so he stands somewhere between me and Genghis Khan) – sent me a critical analysis of Jordan Peterson’s performance last month on a thing called the Surrounded Podcast by Jubilee.

The Jubilee is a sort of aggressive round table in which one protagonist is faced by 20 or so antagonists: it is the debating equivalent of speed dating: speed rebutting, one might call it. With a bit of musical chairs thrown in. I wonder why Peterson subjected himself to it. Anyhow, as many YouTube commentators pointed out, Peterson was caught out by his antagonists. His antagonists were, you see, atheists. And atheists are a damnable crowd: difficult to persuade, as they are the self-certain denialists who can refer not only to Nietzsche, Marx and Freud but also to Common Sense, Easy Life and Politics, plus, of course, Net Zero, LGBT and CBBC – and, of course, Free Speech Union, Daily Sceptic and pretty much anything. Plus, they have a point: or many points (as there are many brands of atheism): and Peterson was trying to defend the existence of God from such panopticonic bombardment.

The entire history of thought in the last two centuries has consisted on the one side of attempts to liberate us from historic Christianity and – much harder – attempts to reconstruct Christianity over and against all the demolition machinery of Gibbon, Schopenhauer and Darwin (and Stephenson, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates Jr) and the rubble they left behind.

I have admired Jordan Peterson for speaking of Christianity, or, at least, speaking of the Bible. But I observed that the grave weakness of the Peterson position is that he falls back on Jungian philosophy. Jung was not Freud. Freud used reason to explain Christianity away. Jung used reason to explain Christianity back again. And Peterson’s stock-in-trade is a Jungian language of stories, archetypes also ‘the psychological literature’. But this means that his rationalisation is, at best, equivocal. This is because if one explains Christianity in terms that are not Christian one allows a breach in the defence. And his antagonists thus can ignore the bastions, cross the ramparts and enter the citadel.

The YouTube commentator I listened to called Peterson’s particular trick the motte-and-bailey trick. This is where you, or I, come out into the bailey and make a provocative argument, but, under attack, retreat to the motte of conventional or trivial positions. I am not so bothered by this. We all do it. Almost all of us rattle between exaggerated and absurd claims and then, under fire, versions of those claims that are safe and trivial, whether because bracketed, clarified or compromised. We all do it. Especially in speech.

Peterson is harsh and lordly in manner, but assumes, in lordly manner, that he has time on his side, and what one noticed about les jeunes is how fast they were. American youth talks quickly: sometimes forensically, sometimes in gabble. No amount of wit, especially in an old man, is going to be able to turn the blade of some coxcombed youth. In the most viral clip:

LEAR. You’re quite something, aren’t you?

OSWALD. And you’re nothing.

Perhaps Peterson hoped some Kent would come in and trip this young Oswald over.

Anyhow, I have two bits of advice for Peterson, one relatively trivial, the other more dramatic. The first is to stop talking so much. Francis Bacon said that reading makes a full man, writing makes an exact man, and speaking makes a ready man. The grave danger of being a public philosopher, that is, a philosopher who speaks, is that speech is troubled by endless equivocation. Many times I have been struck by a line someone said, and then written it down, whereupon it looked a lot less remarkable than it had sounded. If someone is throwing a spear at you, you need to adjust position. This is why I sympathise with Peterson’s retreat from bailey to motte. Everyone in the history of the world has preferred easy-catch questions, or, rather, prompts for monologue. Everyone since Socrates. But Peterson should speak less and write more: in writing one is cooler, and soon finds out whether one’s point is sharp or not. Do not confuse speech and writing. One cannot simply quote one’s own writings when one is speaking. Peterson was asked, “What is worship?” and had an almost ridiculously fast and well elaborated answer: “Attend to, prioritise and sacrifice for,” he said, a bit needlessly confrontational about it, too. This is, obviously, not a very good definition (it sounds written to me, and only passed the peer review of the wife not listening at the dining table): and so the young Oswald, who was called Danny, cracked it like a Pringle. So then Peterson tried to patch up the Pringle with a bit of chewing gum: complicating matters in academic manner. Whereupon the Oswald said, cleverdickishly, “Now you’re adding something to the definition.”

Unfortunately we live, still, in an age of audio: and though talk is charming, it is not accurate or even clear. And one can lose an argument in speech that one knows is sound on paper. I have spent a lifetime losing arguments, and so I prefer to be reactionary. Let the other person make an argument and then I’ll attack that. Why set up skittles for someone else to knock down?

The other piece of advice is more fundamental. Peterson should read some Kierkegaard, or, more likely, read it again. Christianity is a vexed matter, and hard to defend or even articulate in an unsympathetic age. There are two things to say about Christianity in such an age.

The first is substantial. One should not engage in Jungian persiflage. One should not try to secularise Christianity or allege that everyone respectful, honourable or forgiving or ‘carrying their own cross’ is somehow a Christian in disguise. One should rather say, frankly, that Jesus is ‘our saviour’, as even Shakespeare does. Or, if one wants to be objective rather than subjective (as Peterson seems to want to do) one should say, as Hobbes suggests in Leviathan that the sum and substance of Christianity is the saying ‘Jesus is the Christ’. Say not this, and one is not Christian.

The second is the rest. Christianity is, to begin with, simple: a simple affirmation. I believe. Credo in unum Deum and all that. But, after this, it is a lifetime of contemplation – or not, depending on what is willing to do. Why? Because ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is absolutely not simple. It is the not-simple as the absolute. It is, as Tertullian put it, absurd. It is, as Kierkegaard put it, a scandal, an offence, a paradox. One is being asked to believe something unbelievable.

To be asked to believe something unbelievable is simple if everyone believes something unbelievable. We do this every day. Switch on the BBC and believe – believe in all the things we are sceptical about in the Daily Sceptic. But ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is more unbelievable than climate change, trans rights and anything Ferguson, Whitty and Michie maintain. But to believe the unbelievable is vertiginously difficult if no one else does. We are asked by Christians to believe that a man was not only a speaker of words, but the Word, and that he was the Son of God – in fact, that he was God, or one of the persons of God. Divinity, Trinity etc. are necessary: but they are fragile theological constructs designed to somehow defend the proposition that Jesus not only came to say something about our condition, but that, by his works, and also by the strange and paradoxical willingness to submit to the malign work of others – in his passion or suffering at the hands of the Jews and Romans – he embodied the truth in such a way that we have to believe in him rather than believe in any of his utterances.

Anyhow, Kierkegaard is probably still the best attempt to articulate the oddity of this for the modern, sceptical mind. No wonder the trumpery Jungian piffle did not work well on the aggressively sceptical and atheistic youths on Jubilee. It is not enough to tell them that they are blind to the obvious, as Peterson tried to do. One has to say that they are blind to the unobvious. But this is even harder to do: and of course no one should expect that anyone would do this very well on Jubilee.

For any of you who are not getting a very clear sense of what I am saying, let me try this. Kierkegaard, in one his books – Concluding Unscientific Postscript (what a good paradoxical title!) – distinguished two types of religion. One is the religion of immanence, of accepting ordinary beliefs, of this-is-what-the-world-is. He took this to be a type of Christianity, a worldly Christianity, or our favoured ‘cultural Christianity’, but we may take this to be any belief system that says: “This is the world: act accordingly.” It could even be an atheist belief system. He distinguished this type of religion, one which unites many Christians, Muslims and Atheists, from the paradoxical religion in which one has to believe the unbelievable. Not the relatively unbelievable e.g. Muhammad received a message from God, but the absolutely unbelievable, i.e., Jesus was the Word made flesh. Incarnation is the root of all Christianity. No Incarnation, no Atonement. And then Jesus is not our saviour.

Kierkegaard wrote an essay called The Present Age in which he said that we live in an age of publicity and inertia, in which no one does anything but in which everything is contemplated from a sedentary position, and in which we talk about my truth and your truth and everything is a matter of opinion. How about that – written in 1846 – as an anticipation of the smartphone/internet world?

Back to Peterson. The mistake he is making, I think, is to attempt to make Christianity relevant to our world by making it into a ‘religion of immanence’. The 20 atheists noticed the problem: but not as elegantly as Kierkegaard did. Christianity simply is no such thing. Peterson is trying to make Christianity believable by saying we already believe it, whether we know it or not. And this argument simply ain’t going to work.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.