“Hire a Teenager . . . While he still knows everything!”
In the play, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Trudy, the psychotic bag lady, is giving her Martian friends a tour of Planet Earth. They want to pick up a few souvenirs so Trudy takes them to Manhattan’s Broadway, an area with its share of seedy shops.
Trudy tells us, “Frankly, I was embarrassed for my species. Everything was in such bad taste.”
She is reassured, though, by the Martians. “They said,” she tells us, “Earth is a planet still in its puberty.” In fact, from their planet, Earth looks like it has pimples.”
Maybe we are in puberty. And maybe this accounts for a current trend which Jordan Peterson frequently addresses: ‘low-resolution’ conceptions of some aspect of reality, wherein complex phenomena is hyper-simplified so that single root causes are identified (with many variables shoved out of sight), thereby advancing a cause and effect model which identifies the villain and simplistic solutions; all this propagating a totalistic system/school of thought while simultaneously demonizing those who refuse to bow to the algorithm. I believe it was Caroline Casey who said “Certainty is a portable prison.”
The whole thing reminds me of Mark Twain. Twain quipped,
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Yes. That’s it! We are a planet in puberty! Hence the simplifications overtaking us! Now what’s it going to take to get us to re-engage complexity? There is so much that needs to be fixed in society. The starting point would seem to be the ability to host paradox.
Paradox Lost
Peterson tells us Nietzsche warned about the dangerous consequences when religion is abandoned. Without the anchor provided by monotheism, Nietzsche predicted: people would fall to one of two extremes, nihilism or rigid, totalitarian ideologies. Peterson describes them as, “the doubt that undermines and the certainty that crushes.”
In other words, religion helps people bridge the extremes and find a central position. Without that anchor we fail to host paradoxical aspects of reality. With that in mind, consider: in Genesis we read that man is made in the image of the Divine, “Masculine and Feminine, He created them.” Biblical commentators explain that each person has a masculine and feminine facet. Chinese medicine concurs.
Even religious symbology represents the paradox. The Star of David shows two triangles intersecting, one pointing upwards, one pointing downwards. About the cross, Gilbert Chesterton writes, it “has at its heart a collision and a contradiction . . . [and therefore it] can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing.”
Even our physiology tells the tale of paradox. The more calcium you take in, the more magnesium you excrete. And vice versa. And yet, these minerals, just like sodium and potassium, are complementary while at the same time oppositional. Think of your constitution: you have a sympathetic system and a parasympathetic system. You inhale, you exhale. Our bodies are nothing if not a walking paradox.
Despite all that, the ability to host paradox eludes us. It’s always been religion, the mystical, the irrational that has been our inroad. So says Chesterton, who tells us, the ordinary man, characterized by sanity,
“has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them (emphasis is mine). His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. . . It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man.”
Or to put it otherwise, he adds,
“the whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”
How has Peterson helped us? By introducing mythology, the unconscious, the magical realm, the humanities. By taking us on a tour of the mystical and introducing a younger generation to the importance of the world’s great religions, a departure point for personal responsibility, and an exit strategy from having to be a know-it-all about everything wrong with the world. How nice to look at one’s own backyard, see what can be fixed and start there.
For some people, Jordan Peterson has delivered the veritable kick in the head that has brought them a new way of thinking, both radical and simple. Some get new revelations, new freedoms and new strictures. For some, Peterson’s ideas are akin to entering the mall, staring at the dizzying map which, at least, provides a point of reference: “You are HERE.”
And to those who haven’t found an inroad to a new perspective, or an exit ramp out of the old one, I’m compelled to leave my own version of a koan by quoting Chuckles the Clown from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Sadly, Chuckles met his end when, dressed as a peanut at the local circus parade, he was shelled by a rogue elephant. Chuckles’ motto seems the way to close this piece:
“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”
Think about it.
Bibliography
Peterson, Jordan (2019). 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Peterson, Jordan (2021). Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
Poizner, Annette (2019) This Way Up: A Faith-Based Introduction to Jordan Peterson’s ‘Map of Meaning’
Poizner, Annette (2021). The Jordan Peterson Cheat Sheet: The coloring book that can change your life! (Jung@Heart)
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