Jordan Peterson exploded on the scene six or seven years ago because he refused to bend the knee to woke orthodoxy. At the time he was a typical Canadian liberal, but the left drove him to the right. YouTube helped get his ideas into the mainstream, and his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, released in 2018 made him a sensation. It was especially meaningful for young men who have had their masculinity emasculated by the woke leftist secular culture. In case you’re not familiar with him, Peterson is a clinical psychologist and ex-professor. A 2019 documentary about him is a good introduction to the man, what drives him, and the reaction to him.
The Covid tyranny, which was especially bad in Canada, was what drove Peterson to finally fully embrace conservativism. Like many of us, he’s been red-pilled. And like many ex-liberals (liberal in the classical sense, not the progressive perversion of it) he has been stunned by the leftist takeover of what used to be a politics that believed in liberty. He’s realized a cultural version of Marxism is now what drives the left side of the political/cultural spectrum. The video below is a discussion specifically about the trans insanity that dominates Western culture and education. I’m not writing about that specifically, only to give you a good example of how the man thinks, and why it’s appealing to me, and so many others.
Although not an orthodox Christian yet, as far as I can tell, he’s an extremely effective apologist for Christianity. He comes at everything from a deeply psychological and nuanced perspective, and more than most he realizes Christianity is the foundation of Western civilization. More than that, he argues it uniquely gives meaning to human existence in the deepest sense (which is a favorite phrase of his, as is technically). If you watch/listen to the video, you’ll see how he challenges his interlocutor’s agnosticism/atheism. She fails to realize the only reason she’s repulsed by the trans insanity is Christianity!
What makes him especially appealing to me is that he gets the complexity of human existence and the human psyche. In fact, he says that in the video, that it’s complicated. Christians, as well as human beings in general, are given to simplistic thinking in dichotomous terms, either/or, one way or the other, black or white. We are perfectly free to view people this way but it’s not an accurate assessment of the human beings we encounter throughout our lives. This dichotomous thinking also applies to what we think we know or the knowledge we have.
If we’re to love people as we’re commanded, it helps to realize and accept that life is terribly complicated and messy. As they’ve grown up, I’ve taught my kids that every person they encounter has a history, and they are who they are as they stand in front of them because of that history. They’re not being, and you pick the annoying trait, obstinate or frustrating or petty or domineering, just to annoy us. It’s who they are! God brings them to us to teach us how to love them, not to insist they love us. It’s amazing how easy that is to get that backwards.
Related to this, I’ve learned from Peterson how little I know about how human beings, how the human psyche works. It reminds me of what has become one of my favorite verses as I’ve grown older and realize the more I know, the more I know I don’t know. In I Corinthians 8:2, Paul tells us:
The one who thinks he knows something does not know yet know as he ought to know.
As I always make sure people understand when I quote it, this is not a call for skepticism or cynicism, that’s we can’t know, or have confidence in what we think we know. Rather because of what Paul says in verse 1, that we all have knowledge, it’s a call for epistemological humility, which most people tend to lack. We always think we know more than we actually know.
It took me decades to begin to understand how little I really know, and in light of the infinitude of knowledge (because it all comes from our infinite Creator God), that is vanishingly small. When I was a young know-it-all, I saw my knowledge as earth size, not infinite for sure, but pretty impressive. As time went on that shrank to the size of a basketball, then in due course a golf ball (to bring up bad memories), and finally a pebble. Now I realize it’s the size of an atom! Invisible to the naked eye; that’s how little I know.
Again, it’s very important to understand what I am not saying. I know a lot, more than the average bear, but what’s more important is what I don’t know. That allows me to hold on to the knowledge I do have lightly, if tenaciously. My convictions about what I think I know are as strong as they’ve ever been, but I realize I’m looking at one grain of sand from all the seashores and deserts of the world, and then that doesn’t really capture it. My conclusion? We know confidently in humility. Our knowledge is to be used in love to the glory of God, for our good, and the good of others.
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