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?

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.

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.

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.

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.