Jordan (ROUND 2)
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: Ecstasy, by Tiziana Terenzi. A spring-forest incense cousin to Laudano Nero (only with greater balance of light to dark and perhaps more uniqueness), Ecstasy’s Pin-Sol opening—a synthetic spruce and pine that, especially given its almondy amber, makes this seem like a niche version of the classic guido fragrance Pino Sylvestre—is balanced out by earthen notes (soil tincture, pebbles, patchouli) underneath whisps of cola smoke from incense sticks of olibanum-dipped sandalwood—the overall impression, meditative (like in Tiziana Terenzi’s Lillipur), being that of spring flowers (dewy violets and roses) growing from damp and stony soil in some fairy-tale evergreen forest dimmed by the density of the resinous trees.
Jordan
Your infamous evasion is nothing short of maddening. Given your extensive work (books, lecture series) on Judeo-Christian mythology, is it surprising that inquisitive souls (colloquia participants, podcast hosts, earnest students, casual interlocutors) would raise the basic questions—the ones your very silence, in fact, has turned into a kind of siren song? “Do you think a real person was immaculately conceived? Do you think that—after a few days, say, harrowing hell with his blinding light—Jesus was literally resurrected?” Your reputation for sidestepping such inquiries has only fueled their persistence—thirst for clarity, for resolution, ramped up to desert extremes by your refusal to quench it. 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 or a statement of blatant ignorance such as “I spent over thirty years in Bethlehem Pennsylvania where Jesus was born long long ago like George Washington.”
What do you do exactly? Cloaking yourself in the humility of (feigned) incomprehension—that is a common refuge. “I don’t even know how to begin grasping questions like these. I’m honestly unsure whether I’m wise enough, or man enough for that matter, even to grovel (let alone stand) before such unfathomable profundity. And I notice you keep using the word ‘real.’ But what does ‘real’ even mean here? That is not a question to be taken lightly, especially when you start considering that Hamlet—a fictional character—might be more real than either of us!”
Not yet like elderly cats (weathered and arthritic, perhaps even aware in their own way of the Schopenhauerian vanity of every chase), some questioners—like kittens leaping at the feather of the fishing-rod toy—will press the point. “Historically—did the resurrection, historically in your view, actually happen?” And the response? Redirection into symbolic territory—that is another common stratagem. “The resurrection, well it’s still happening. Every bloody day people rise from bed, wrecked by tragedy and damned well knowing tragedy awaits. If that’s not a resurrection of miraculous proportions, I don’t know what is!”
Perhaps the sotto-voce command here—the drift to catch, if you will, between the lines of such glib pirouettes—is “Now stop asking these questions.” And yet some questioners do not get the hint—even more determined now, perhaps being too on the Dungeons-and-Dragons spectrum for graceful dancing with social decorum. “I’m asking if you think—and you can say you’re unsure—that the resurrection actually happened.” “‘Actually’—well now that’s a word!” “What I’m getting at, surely you see, is—I mean, let me put it this way: do you think it's biologically possible for a human to come back from the dead?” But then we get yet another dangling carrot, one that almost makes it seem like the very asking of the question is an insensitive insult to all those who have pulled themselves out of the sinkhole of melancholia. “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, even noble ones (in no way reducible to the Derridean titillation of seeing people squirm in exasperated confusion). 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 missing-the-mark practice, the sin (according to the literal meaning of the term), of approaching the most profound narratives at the lowest levels of resolution where the psychological and existential insights get obscured. “So profound,” it is easy to imagine you tacking on (and then pausing, the anticipation of the Kundera word welling up tears), “it’s almost bloody unbearable.”
In the silence of the questioner’s incredulity, you might attempt—in what amounts only to more diversionary obfuscation—to trick yourself (if not also the questioner) into interpreting the incredulity as being not about your diversionary obfuscation but about whether these narratives really are so profound. “No really. It’s tempting to roll our eyes at a story like Cain and Abel—no more than the archaic creative writing of prescientific humans. But be careful. This narrative cuts to the heart of who we are. It captures the eternal struggle between good and evil. It shows us the two paths available to each of us: one of responsibility and self-improvement, the other of resentment and destruction. So then: what does reducing the such unbelievable profundity 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 encourages worship of a golden calf? And let me tell you, the materialist worldview—that’s one hell of a deadly calf. Look how it tempts us to chase superficial gratifications (physical pleasures, possessions, and other subhuman markers of success). Look how it tempts us to neglect the inner voice (rooted in the symbolic and mythological aspects of the human condition). And we do so at our own peril. Look what that inner voice says. ‘Stop being so bloody pathetic. Stop seeing others as no more than tools, let alone as no more than tools to help you get deeper into the hell you created for yourself.’” We can easily imagine a pregnant pause at this point as the tears well up again. “What becomes of these mind-blowing Biblical stories (stories with unending power to reveal who we are and what we should do, stories that give tried-and-true direction on how to give some damn order to the chaos)—what becomes of them when we limit ourselves to such paltry concerns? What becomes of us?”
It seems hard to say these speculations as to your motivation are uncharitable (bracketing off, of course, the bind they threaten 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 questions to be over-concretized or too reductive). These speculation show that your resistance is understandable, to some extent at least. It surely would be foolish, after all, to let preoccupation with dates and locations, on what went down in some forensic sense, overshadow the wisdom and consolation harbored in these stories. No one dismisses Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment outright, calls it 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, the biblical myths likewise are more than their flesh-and-blood components. The tell us who we are underneath all the clothing of shifting custom. The help guide us in answering the most crucial questions regarding what to aim for and what to believe in.
But here is the rub. Even if someone harbors the mistaken presumption that making squiggles is all there is to writing, you can still answer whether squiggles really are on the page—quickly, simply, before moving on to the transcendent matters you find most important. Similarly, you can answer what you see as the banal questions concerning the Bible—quickly, simply, before moving on to the transcendent matters you find most important. Neither asking nor answering a narrow question about a rich matter need amount to reducing that rich matter to the narrow—it need not, in fact, even if the questioner thinks that the narrow question is all that is important. These are obvious points. And here is the bonus rub. The points are so obvious that they tempt even the most neurotypical questioners to keep on pushing the point—the point that you do not want them to push—with mounting desperation. 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 questioners where they are and then guiding them to what you feel are the more meaningful questions (a refusal that makes it seems as if this were a courtroom where, on the stand, you kept getting chastised for following your answers with qualifying “buts” until finally you have stopped), 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 what you see as trivialities into the heart of the matter, making them focal points of frustration as opposed to 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 obvious—is time away from what you say deserves the time. Refusing to answer, in the end, 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. Each dodge, every rhetorical feint, leaves the questioner more fixated on what you refuse to say, not what you might mean.
To be sure, teachers often use the technique of dodging or 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—as in when, for example, the mathematics teacher says “since there are infinite numbers of possible lengths and heights, surely we are not entitled to say we know for sure—not having considered all of them—that the Pythagorean Theorem holds for every right triangle.” The thing is, we are not in a classroom. 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, the intellectual misstep becoming a relational one. 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 don’t share the same reductionist mindset you’ve encountered in others. I actively oppose it, in fact. Hyperfocus on literal facts can undermine the transformative power of these stories. 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 forensic 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, 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 continue to hold the line even after such clarifications and reassurances (after the questioner has made clear they are not just another materialist cliché and that they understand the symbolic aspects but are simply inquiring about a literal matter and by no means wish to trap you into some gotcha corner), 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?
It could very well be that you are 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. But even according to the best spin on all the relevant details—even if you are, that is to say, some activist for truth—the light remains unflattering. For being an activist for truth in this way, guarding the symbolic against reductionism, 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 do 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 that might arise in a pedagogical context, engage honestly instead of dissembling? And would not honesty here, fostering not only intellectual understanding but interpersonal trust, pave the way to the riches beyond the purview of the literalist horizon?
Even if we accept that your underlying motivations are noble (that you truly do seek to guard the sacred depth of these mythological narratives against the corrosive forces of profane materialism) there is an obvious and easy path forward that avoids this self-defeating dynamic of obstruction and alienation. And yet you still refuse. The tragedy is that you could guide people to more profound understandings—if only you trusted that answering the superficial basics could be a bridge to the sublime.
Word up/spot on!