At the end of We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation. The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order – the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism. The remedy is fearless self-examination, an agonising struggle against despair that points to a realm beyond the self. But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age?
Thirteen years in the making, this compendious volume –the first of two, Peterson tells us – consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture. Reflections on the Genesis story of the Fall, Cain, Abel and the meaning of sacrifice lead to a two-chapter meditation on Moses, over 100 pages long, and a final chapter on the story of Jonah who, instructed to convert Nineveh, ends up being swallowed by a whale.
In the section on Moses, Peterson refers to the Israelites who “regressed to the paganism of possession by instinct”, worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountaintop communing with God: “The narrative here… indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order.”
An “a priori cosmic order”, however, is not the biblical deity, the creator of the world and humankind. Such an order could be the timeless realm of Plato’s “forms”, or – as Peterson acknowledges when he cites the Taoist tradition – the impersonal “way” of Chinese thought. Why identify this “intrinsically structured reality” with the God of Abrahamic religion? In the introduction, or “Foreshadowing”, Peterson tells us:
“The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated – the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”
Reduced to a collection of inspiring legends, however, Christianity cannot exorcise the spectre of nihilism. Thinking of the Christian religion as a bulwark to shore up a particular civilisation leaves it less than a universal truth and risks the cultural relativism that Peterson condemns in woke thinkers.
When you consider Peterson’s troubled life, his search for meaning makes perfect sense. Born in Edmonton, Canada, in 1962, he spent the first half of his career as an academic, passing though the universities of Alberta, McGill and Harvard to the University of Toronto, where he became a professor of psychology in 1998 and had a small clinical practice. His life changed in 2016, when he refused to comply with Canadian legislation requiring that he use the chosen pronouns of transgender people and became a cause célèbre on YouTube. Conflicts with university and state authorities followed, and he left academic life to become a freelance lecturer and writer. From that point, his fame has only grown. A two-hour conversation with Elon Musk shown in July of this year on X (formerly Twitter) garnered not far from 40 million views within two days.
Yet it is wrong to portray Peterson as a publicity-seeker, as do his many enemies and detractors. His celebrity has been a curse on him, driving him to psychological breakdown and almost ending his life. From 2016 onwards he used prescription drugs and radical diet regimes – for several years consuming only beef, salt and water – to combat depression, anxiety and suicidal impulses. (He has said that his mental health problems were aggravated by the near-death of his wife, Tammy, from a rare form of renal cancer.)
When he tried to wean himself off the medication, he suffered acute withdrawal symptoms. Failing to find doctors able to treat him in North America, he was flown by his daughter Mikhaila to a clinic in Russia, where he was put in an induced coma. Emerging from the treatment semi-catatonic, he was moved back to the US, then to a Serbian hospital, which dosed him with opiates to calm his uncontrollable restlessness. Covid intervened, infecting him and his family. After a period of retreat, he resumed his work as a travelling lecturer, podcaster and author (his self-help book 12 Rules for Life was a bestseller on its publication in 2018), denouncing the woke assault on Western traditions and imparting his views on gender, identity politics and climate science. (It is hard to know whether we should take literally Peterson’s apparent denial of the existence of climate change – he is not, in fact, a scientist, after all. As is shown by his assertion of the biological reality of dragons in a recent conversation with Richard Dawkins, he does have a tendency to argue himself into some curious positions.) He has been regularly cancelled, deplatformed and disinvited, with Cambridge University joining the campaign against him by rescinding an offer of a visiting fellowship in 2019.
The obvious question is why Peterson returned to a life that almost destroyed him. The answer is that he believes he has a mission: “the scientist or thinker is impelled to evangelise the results of their quest. He does so by speaking and by writing, attempting to spread the doctrine of the newly revealed truth.” His message is that Western civilisation is in mortal danger because people have turned to false gods. The West’s crisis comes from severing its roots in Jewish and Christian religion and reverting to paganism.
Peterson resists being labelled as a conservative, describing himself as a classical liberal who believes in individual liberty and personal responsibility. But like many on the right today, he believes there can be no recovery of liberal freedoms without a revival of Christian faith. It is true that modern liberties originated in the practice of tolerance developed after the European wars of religion. Whether what is now unfolding is a reversion to paganism is more doubtful.
One problem is that a link between Christianity and liberalism exists only in branches of the religion. Eastern Orthodoxy has never promoted freedom of conscience in the manner of post-Reformation Christendom. Even in Western Christianity the connection is not universal. Toleration emerged in countries that rejected the authority of the Catholic Church over the inner life. Tellingly, it is in these countries – particularly in the Anglosphere – that woke movements have become most powerful. Woke – or, as it is more accurately described, hyper-liberalism – is a radical secular avatar of Christianity, in which the Protestant affirmation of personal autonomy in matters of belief has morphed into the assertion that truth is subjective.
Beginning as a peculiarly American ideology, it is recognisably a throwback to the frenzy of witch-hunting Puritans in colonial-era New England. But there are closer affinities with late-mediaeval millenarian movements, which believed the true believer was emancipated from all the restraints imposed by the Church, society and history. The cult of the self-defining individual, creating themselves as they wish, is a Christian heresy, desacralised and emptied of transcendence.
In many ways, pagan religion was the opposite of woke. Human beings were playthings of the fates – a vision that survives in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. If it meant shaping life according to human will, autonomy was an illusion. The noblest and bravest strivings were regularly defeated. History was the eternal recurrence of the crimes and follies of the past; there was no redemption. Nothing is more alien to contemporary sensibility.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote that every philosophy is an exercise in unconscious and involuntary autobiography. When Peterson writes of wrestling with God, what he describes sounds very like wrestling with himself. Disobeying the authorities on the correct use of pronouns, he was plunged into a collective madness that, for a while, undid his own grip on sanity. His life since then has been a struggle to regain control. At the end of the book, Peterson asks if God is real, and replies:
“This is a matter of definition, in the final analysis – and therefore, of faith. [The divine] is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay; and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order”
Rather than surrendering to a higher power, Peterson seems to be engaged in fashioning a higher self. The deity is not a reality beyond words, but a metaphor invented by human beings to enable them to escape meaninglessness. Peterson’s self-made God is a symptom of the modern Western malady, rather than a cure for it.
If he has not given us a compelling response to the challenge of nihilism, neither did Nietzsche. The atheist prophet – the son of a Lutheran pastor, let us not forget – could not endure the pagan vision he uncovered in his early writings. Unable to live without redemptive hope, he installed an imaginary Übermensch in place of an absent God. The same absurd project is pursued by liberal rationalists who believe human life can be managed and improved under their enlightened guidance.
Jordan Peterson has confronted Nietzsche’s challenge, at some personal cost. Against all odds, he persists in asking the deepest questions. For this he deserves respect and admiration, even if – like Nietzsche– he does not in the end avoid the subjectivism that is the fatal sickness of the age.
We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine
Jordan B Peterson
Allen Lane, 576pp, £30
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[See also: Kevin Roberts’s fire-breathing American right]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone