This is the General Prophetic Method

Thursday, March 29th, 2018

Jordan Peterson is actually good, Scott Alexander admits:

The best analogy I can think of is C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a believer in the Old Religion, which at this point has been reduced to cliche. What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work. Jesus’ love becomes a palpable force. Sin becomes so revolting you want to take a shower just for having ever engaged in it. When Lewis writes about Heaven you can hear harp music; when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone. He didn’t make me convert to Christianity, but he made me understand why some people would.

Jordan Peterson is a believer in the New Religion, the one where God is the force for good inside each of us, and all religions are paths to wisdom, and the Bible stories are just guides on how to live our lives. This is the only thing even more cliched than the Old Religion. But for some reason, when Peterson writes about it, it works. When he says that God is the force for good inside each of us, you can feel that force pulsing through your veins. When he says the Bible stories are guides to how to live, you feel tempted to change your life goal to fighting Philistines.

The politics in this book lean a bit right, but if you think of Peterson as a political commentator you’re missing the point. The science in this book leans a bit Malcolm Gladwell, but if you think of him as a scientist you’re missing the point. Philosopher, missing the point. Public intellectual, missing the point. Mythographer, missing the point. So what’s the point?

About once per news cycle, we get a thinkpiece about how Modern Life Lacks Meaning. These all go through the same series of tropes. The decline of Religion. The rise of Science. The limitless material abundance of modern society. The fact that in the end all these material goods do not make us happy. If written from the left, something about people trying to use consumer capitalism to fill the gap; if written from the right, something about people trying to use drugs and casual sex. The vague plea that we get something better than this.

Twelve Rules isn’t another such thinkpiece. The thinkpieces are people pointing out a gap. Twelve Rules is an attempt to fill it. This isn’t unprecedented — there are always a handful of cult leaders and ideologues making vague promises. But if you join the cult leaders you become a cultist, and if you join the ideologues you become the kind of person Eric Hoffer warned you about. Twelve Rules is something that could, in theory, work for intact human beings. It’s really impressive.

The non-point-missing description of Jordan Peterson is that he’s a prophet.

Cult leaders tell you something new, like “there’s a UFO hidden inside that comet”. Self-help gurus do the same: “All you need to do is get the right amount of medium-chain-triglycerides in your diet”. Ideologues tell you something controversial, like “we should rearrange society”. But prophets are neither new nor controversial. To a first approximation, they only ever say three things:

First, good and evil are definitely real. You know they’re real. You can talk in philosophy class about how subtle and complicated they are, but this is bullshit and you know it. Good and evil are the realest and most obvious things you will ever see, and you recognize them on sight.

Second, you are kind of crap. You know what good is, but you don’t do it. You know what evil is, but you do it anyway. You avoid the straight and narrow path in favor of the easy and comfortable one. You make excuses for yourself and you blame your problems on other people. You can say otherwise, and maybe other people will believe you, but you and I both know you’re lying.

Third, it’s not too late to change. You say you’re too far gone, but that’s another lie you tell yourself. If you repented, you would be forgiven. If you take one step towards God, He will take twenty toward you. Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.

This is the General Prophetic Method. It’s easy, it’s old as dirt, and it works.

So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way.

“He, uh, told us that we should do good, and not do evil, and now he’s looking at us like we should fall to our knees.”

“Weird. Must be a prophet. Better kneel.”

Maybe it’s just that everyone else is such crap at it. Maybe it’s just that the alternatives are mostly either god-hates-fags fundamentalists or more-inclusive-than-thou milquetoasts. Maybe if anyone else was any good at this, it would be easy to recognize Jordan Peterson as what he is — a mildly competent purveyor of pseudo-religious platitudes. But I actually acted as a slightly better person during the week or so I read Jordan Peterson’s book. I feel properly ashamed about this. If you ask me whether I was using dragon-related metaphors, I will vociferously deny it. But I tried a little harder at work. I was a little bit nicer to people I interacted with at home. It was very subtle. It certainly wasn’t because of anything new or non-cliched in his writing. But God help me, for some reason the cliches worked.

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    I don’t know whether this makes me think better of Peterson or worse, particularly in the context of your last post on him.

    On one hand, a secularized version of Christian ideas is almost the only way forward for the west. Other civilizations have to one degree or another had moderate success in tying their spiritual traditions to secular behaviour modes that make the religious content somewhat optional. Japan, for one. China, albeit by a complicated arrangement of force, denial, and adaptation to a failed new religion. Indian Hindus, though with the religious part not quite as optional. All very approximately.

    On the other hand, problems-

    1. We’ve tried a secular version of Christianity many times already and the dregs of all of them are still around. Some are driving catastrophically negative trends.

    2. There are other alternative New Religions already out there. One might argue that they too are splinters of or made possible by Christianity, but less tied to it than Peterson. I rather assume that by the 22nd century we will be led by a female priesthood in worshipping Gaia, whose manifestations will range from the water cycle of nature to the female genitalia. The work of Australian philosopher Astrida Neimanis, which I stumbled on by the most appalling sequence of coincidences last year, is emblematic here.

    3. I recognize what a commenter on the earlier Peterson post noted, that in effect there is no West without Christianity and the classical world had many truly shocking moral and philosophical omissions. The synthesis of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, in the formulation so beloved of 1980s-90s conservative American intellectuals, was the West.

    I don’t think I want Christianity any more. The art and music were nice, and I’ve no idea how they would have developed had some alternative West arisen, if at all, but I have had about enough of what seems to be the old religion’s death wish.

    And I would be a little afraid of a resurgence of the pre-Christian moral sets of the West, more so than if I had grown up with them, lived in them, and made my peace with their consequences. The values of classical Greece would be hard to embrace in or after middle age, grown up in a softer world.

    4. Vast numbers of the younger than me don’t recognize anything at all of value in Peterson, or the West, let alone Christianity, and would reject anything connected with them however obvious, secularized or neutral it might otherwise seem. The unity of civilization, the meaninglessness of ‘religion’, the failure to recognize their own beliefs as effectively forms of religion, the appeal of post/transhumanism through technology, biology and semantics, are what they are about.

    Consider recent movies- many about the emergence of man/machine synthesis, increasing numbers about ideas in the category of separating the spirit from the body [there was just one about a girl falling for a spirit that changes bodies everyday] as though no one had heard of mind/body dualism or the Christian or Gnostic ideas of the soul before, and sporadic interest in the alternative reality of VR. Whether as a moral quandary- is it better to live in the Matrix? Or as salvation and vehicle for Tarantino-esque pop culture mining- Ready Player One.

    At this point I think the next political/social/moral philosophy to viably take the name “Humanism” will have to be a reactionary philosophy. Certainly it will widely be considered such.

  2. Faze says:

    I don’t know whether this makes me think better of Peterson or worse

    It certainly made me feel better about Scott Alexander, of whom I already had a pretty good opinion. He gives Peterson, and C.S. Lewis, a fair shake.

  3. gaikokumaniakku says:

    Quote:
    “So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe.”

    End quote.

    How silly the Greeks were to invent the term prophetes. How silly the translators were to use “prophet” as a rough translation of the Hebrew term “nabi” (related to “to bubble forth, as from a fountain,” and if that doesn’t make you think of striking a rock in the desert to bring forth water, nothing will…). But silliest of all is the writer who carelessly imposes modernity on these ideas. If I were to write a bloated, pompous, Greek-laden discourse on why Scott Alexander’s ideas of religion are silly, I would probably convince the reader that I was sillier than Scott Alexander.

    I am relieved when a person is silly. Even when that person is staring back at me from the mirror.

  4. Bruce says:

    Not prophetic, homilectic. Homilectic sermons like Peterson’s are about cleaning your room. Prophetic sermons go big. When Sidney Smith preached against pouring your pay down your throat in whiskey while your children went without clothes, it was homilectic. When Jeremiah preached woe unto you, Israel, he was a prophet. When Elijah sent bears to devour children who laughed at him, he wasn’t making them clean up their rooms.

    Prophets are cooler, but homilectic preachers make people be nicer. Scott’s a nice guy and he’s smart, and homilectic is a technical term in theology, and he used a flashier word.

  5. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    “When Elijah sent bears to devour children who laughed at him, he wasn’t making them clean up their rooms.”

    Well, Jordan Peterson is from rural Canada, so I’m pretty sure he has bears who obey his commands. Jordan could command those bears to eat people, eh?

  6. Bruce says:

    Yes, if thirty antifa are mocking Peterson and stop to feed the bears, that’s a sign he’s a prophet.

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