The Incoherence of Jordan Peterson

Even Dean Wormer had it right:

Indeed, I say this as an alumnus of the institution that served as a model for Faber College, and who as an undergraduate received similar advice from the model for Dean Wormer. In fact, such was my undergraduate experience that for a year or two, I would have actively disagreed with the dean and insisted that fat, drunk, and stupid was the best plan of life.

And if you're rich, you can get away with it. That was the actual lesson we were taught, and even Dean Wormer was swimming against the tide. Nelson Rockefeller was that institution's chief benefactor, after all.

Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life don't differ essentially from Dean Wormer's advice. The first ones are representative:

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you

Let me say from the start that this is good advice, as indeed Dean Wormer's exhortation is just as good. The problem is where it comes from. Peterson's philosophy is hard to distinguish from natural law, which is traditionally "the use of reason to analyze human nature to deduce binding rules of moral behavior from nature's or God's creation of reality and mankind". But there's conventional wisdom, even the stuff Aunt Margaret or Dean Wormer can get right, and the authentic workings of reason.

The question is where Peterson finds "nature" or "human nature". Although Peterson is now treated as something of a pariah in the academic establishment, he is nevertheless a tenured full professor of psychology at the University of Toronto after teaching and also gaining tenure at Harvard. There is nothing radical about this guy.

Peterson's view of "nature" is pretty plainly scientific materialism. While a debate, or informal exchange of some sort, with Bp Barron would be fun and entertaining, the one I'd like to see would be with Prof Feser. That one's much less likely. From Peterson's point of view, "human nature" is a vaguely Jungian entity derived from evolution. Mythic archetypes have emerged in human nature as a response to natural selection. The myth of the hero evolved because heroes were a useful behavioral pattern that protected humans from predators or other less-evolved humanoids -- indeed, even psychopathic homo sapiens.

I think if I were going to take a path to debating Peterson from a Thomistic perspective, I'd ask what the mythic archetypes actually are. The best answers we can give would be that evidence for them is contained in ancient manuscripts -- but they're only secondary sources. You can point to Gilgamesh or the Ramayana or Homer, but the best academic opinion is that they come from pre-literate oral tradition, which leaves uncertainty about their origin. And their actual interpretation is highly subjective. The 20th-century scholarship on myth from Frazer or Eliade or Campbell is fraught with academic fraud.

But we can go a bit farther and say, with Prof Feser, that the thought processes that somehow result from mythic archetypes are immaterial. Whatever else you try to do, you aren't going to get immaterial processes of mind from a material process of natural selection. Material circumstances can create habits, which without reason and will to supervise them can have bad results, but the reason and will that supervise them are immaterial. But the reason and will can also develop habits of virtue.

So if I were debating Peterson, I would probably start by asserting that mythic archetypes are immaterial and at best unprovable, but as a pragmatic approach, we can be safe in assuming they don't exist. They aren't a basis for natural law. So where does natural law actually come from? Not from Dean Wormer, to be sure. I'd probably send Peterson back to Aquinas.