Jordan
Let’s workshop this piece about the counterproductive nature of the rhetorical evasions we commonly see from Jordan Peterson when it comes to literalist questions about the bible.
scent of the day: Nero Oudh, by Tiziana Terenzi. A tad tarnished by a cheap-smelling designer oud accord (whose harshness, however, screeches less loudly on skin), Nero Oud dries down to a long-lasting and heavy-hitting saffron leather with fruity and floral qualities that—coupled with everything else—lends an off-putting but alluring industrial smell (burn rubber, varnish) and an insanity reminiscent if only in feel to Unutamam.
Jordan
Given your extensive work (multiple books, lecture series) on Judeo-Christian mythology, it is unsurprising that people—colloquia participants, podcast hosts, student, casual interlocutors—would get the ball of conversation rolling with the basic questions. “Do you think a real person was immaculately conceived and, after a few days in hell, later resurrected?” Your reputation for sidestepping such inquiries has only fueled their persistence, denial of access to what dangles before our noses proving throughout animal history to ignite curiosity and desire. But how you carry out the evasion—that really drives us up the need-to-know wall, baiting us (intentionally or not) as thoroughly as a book that opens with a puppy in peril (I need resolution now on the puppy’s fate) or a statement of blatant falsity such as “I spent over thirty years in Bethlehem Pennsylvania where Jesus was born long long ago like George Washington” (I need resolution now on what explains the narrator’s ignorance”).
What do you do exactly? Only a few examples suffice to reveal the basic idea. “I don’t understand how to begin even to grasp such an unfathomably deep question”—that is a common refuge. Sometimes you suggest that you might not even be wise enough or man enough to approach questions like those. “What does ‘real’ even mean here?” you might ask. Not yet weathered and arthritic by the vanity of the chase (still like a kitten leaping at the feather of the fishing-rod toy), some questioners will press the point. “Historically, biologically—did the resurrection, in your view, actually happen?” And the response? “Actually—well now that’s a word. It’s still happening. We are wrecked by tragedy and yet most manage to rise out of bed. It’s a miracle when you really attend to it.” Perhaps the sotto-voce command here is “Now stop asking these questions,” but some questioners—even more determined now, perhaps being on the spectrum—do not get the hint. “What I’m getting at, surely you see, is—I mean, do you think it's biologically possible to come back from the dead?” But then we get yet another dangling carrot. “Damn right it is. You know how many times in my clinical practice I’ve seen clients, we’re talking isolated men on the miserable road to suicide—you know how many times I’ve seen them come back from death?”
You might very well have reasons for the torment, noble ones. Beyond the fact that (as you say yourself) the same questions over and over get wearisome, perhaps you find they miss the point—or worse, “much worse.” Entertaining them—so it is easy to imagine you clarifying, and so it would be at least a little more helpful if you actually did (whatever “actually” means here)—serves to embolden the inappropriate practice, “sinful” (according to the literal meaning of the term), of approaching the most profound narratives at the lowest possible levels of resolution—“so profound,” you pause (the anticipation of the Kundera word brings genuine tears to your eyes), “it is almost unbearable. And, no really, think about it. What does that, what does reducing unbelievably transcendent riches to quibbles about when and where—what does that accomplish?” Like a kid alone before dusk with his ball and his bat, this of course is a lob to yourself. “Nothing good, as far as I can tell. It heartens the Dawkins types to keep letting their skepticism about the spatiotemporal minutiae bleed into the metaphorical (the realer than real) oomph these stories have. Let’s see, what else? How about it entrenches people further into misplaced worship of a golden calf? And let me tell you, it’s one hell of a deadly calf”: the materialist worldview, which tempts us to chase the superficial gratifications (physical pleasures, possessions, and other subhuman markers of success) instead of that inner voice (rooted in the symbolic and mythological aspects of the human condition)—a spiritual calling to “stop being so bloody pathetic” or at least to see others as more than just tools to help us get “deeper into hell than we already are.” We can easily imagine a pregnant pause at this point as the tears well up. “What becomes of these mind-blowing Biblical stories, stories with unending power to reveal who we are and what we should do, when we limit ourselves to such paltry concerns. What becomes of us?” Bracketing off the bind it threatens to place you in (namely, that your common refuge of not understanding what is being asked seems barred if the reason for your evasion is because you find the question to be over-concretized or too reductive), is this not a charitable speculation as to your motivation?
The resistance is understandable to some extent. No one dismisses Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment as irrelevant simply because Raskolnikov was not real in the way that Napolean was. Just as writing is more than the act of making squiggly shapes with a pencil, these myths are more than their literal components. But here is the rub. Even if someone harbors in their very core the mistaken presumption that making squiggles is all there is to writing, you can still answer whether squiggles really are on the page—before then moving on to the symbolic richness you find important. Similarly, you can answer what you see as the banal questions concerning the Bible—before then moving on to what you find important. Neither asking nor answering a banal question about a rich matter need not amount to reducing that rich matter to the banal—it need not, in fact, even if the questioner thinks that the banal question is all that is important. These are obvious points, obvious enough to have questioners keep on pushing the point with the increasing desperation of incredulity. And yet you continue to refuse.
If things could not get any stranger, look what happens when we assess through the lens of pragmatics. Your continued refusal to meet the questioner where they are and then guiding them to what you feel are the more meaningful questions (as if this were a courtroom where, on the stand, you keep getting chastised for following your answers with qualifying “buts”), surely that is self-defeating. Does it not (again, Psychology 101) add more emphasis to the very questions you aim to transcend, turning them into red buttons to be pressed or niqabs to be torn off in heat? And even if it does not serve to fetishize the banal part of the issue (turning them into focal points of frustration rather than stepping stones toward deeper understanding), all the time spent—the questioner trying to clarify what they are asking and you sidestepping and the questioner trying further to clarify what should be the obvious point—is time away from what you say deserves the time. Refusing to answer literal questions does not so much elevate the discussion as stall it out. It is strange when you think about it: wasting time (evading, pretending you do not understand the question) instead of getting to the meat and potatoes because you think people have been wasting time (limiting their focus on trivialities largely beside the point) instead of getting to the meat and potatoes.
To be sure, teachers often use the technique of dodging and feigning ignorance to provoke frustration toward some pedagogical end, often to stimulate the class to think harder and dig deeper on some matter instead of just mouthing the textbook response in autopilot. The thing is, we are not in a classroom. And how do you know, anyway, that the questioner is stricken by the dangerous assumptions you feel it deleterious to entertain? Unless told otherwise, why assume that the questioner must be fulfilling what you see as the all-too-worrisome stereotype? And even were you the teacher and were this a classroom, surely there comes a point where it is pedagogically pragmatic to cave (so as not to alienate genuine inquirers and to tie up loose ends) if not also out of a duty to truth, to intellectual conscience.
And it gets worse. As various YouTube videos make clear, we do not need to tax our minds much to imagine the questioner clarifying matters as follows. “I understand that the immaculate conception story has mythological import that doesn’t stand and fall with the historical reality. I feel, as you seem to, that focusing on the historical truth of these stories distracts from their deeper symbolic and psychological significance. I do not share the same reductionist mindset you’ve encountered in others. I actively oppose it, in fact. Hyperfocus on literal facts of the matter can undermine the transformative power of these stories—yes, even for devout believers. So please understand where I’m coming from. I agree that what is most important is what these stories reveal about the perennial elements of human nature. I’m simply approaching this step by step and starting with the literal questions, over-concretized and banal as they are compared to their mythological and psychological significance. Just to be perfectly clear, I understand that in a metaphorical sense human history—a history of extreme depravity—shows that hell, for example, is real in a metaphorical sense. But please understand I’m operating, for now at least, at the literal level. I know, yes, that ‘literal’ itself can be a loaded term. But I hope that my clarifications show what I am after here, what I’m asking: in this case, the historical-biological question of whether you think, materially speaking, a baby was immaculately conceived (immaculately in the robust Christian sense, not in any metaphorical sense) and that when he grew up he was killed (heart stopped, decay already beginning perhaps), only to later rise—bodily—from the dead.” Let us even assume that the questioner, sensitive perhaps to what he senses as increasing defensiveness as you stew in though before answering, adds the following as a good-faith bridge across what might only (or also) be a divide caused by psychological temperament. “I am not trying to set you up for attack or corner you. I ask that you see this as a safe space to be vulnerable about the matter.” When you do not give in even after such clarifications and reassurances (after the questioner has made clear they understand the symbolic aspect but are inquiring about literal matter and do not wish to trap you), to describe your behavior merely with the word “evasive”—well, talk about being overly reductive! Such a word comes at the risk of vastly underappreciating how messed up you are being. In light of what seems dismissal without genuine engagement, words like “arrogant” and “asshole” should come to mind as well, no?
Even on the best spin where you are not just being a difficult person whose obstinacy and defensiveness reaches, on the presumption that this is no mere intellectual handicap, into the territory of antisocial personality disorder; even if you are, rather, some activist for truth, the light remains unflattering. For being an activist for truth in this way involves you doing what any true activist for truth would rebuke: obscuring truth in service of a broader ideological narrative (one that you push even when the questioner makes clear you di not need to); lying, in effect, for the sake of truth—lying, more precisely, for what you perceive as truth and with the counterproductive effect of alienating genuine inquirers from learning. Would not a true advocate of truth, barring perhaps temporary exceptions for a pedagogical end, engage honestly? And would not honesty here, fostering not only understanding but interpersonal trust, pave the way to the riches beyond the purview of the literalist horizon?
