Leaving Neverland

I recently read this excellent article looking at a topic many wonder about: Why are so many people reading and/or listening to Canadian professor Jordan Peterson?

Jordan Peterson is telling young white men what many of us already know: Neverland is a lie.

 I have been listening to and reading a lot of Prof. Peterson’s content since 2017, and have benefited from it greatly. (I am a woman in my early 40s with a family). I’ve also read a lot of “why do people listen to Jordan Peterson!” articles and often “why is it mostly men!” articles, many of which drip jealousy and resentment, and thus explain their own existence if nothing else. I don’t even read those kind of articles anymore, BUT this article by Ms Natthew is very different and makes many excellent points. 

I particularly appreciated the point about how current generations need to make choices about social arrangements and responsibilities  that previous generations could take for granted. This is absolutely a stressor on people and an extremely important issue. And people of my generation and younger (also thinking of myself when younger) likely never articulated to ourselves or had it clearly explained just how big a challenge it is to shoulder responsibility while isolated.

“Moreover, even as we have sought to centralize, routinize and institutionalize many of our familial relationships and friendships, we recognize that our interactions with others are nearly always conscious choices rather than ever-present unconscious realities. For this reason, our responsibilities—professional, marital and parental—are ours alone in a way that was not true for either my Italian-American grandparents or his Liberian ones. Hence no amount of self-awareness or hard work can render us truly fit for the sheer amount of personal responsibility required of anyone trying to be a decent citizen, worker or parent in today’s newly individuated world.

“Enter Jordan Peterson with his now 24 rules, making what was communal, implicit and abstract for my grandparents individual, explicit and specific for me.
“Thus, it is Peterson himself who has noticed that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. His resonance with younger people reflects the extreme demands of modern life and the new isolation in which we are expected to meet those demands. It also reflects the failure of our parents and grandparents to prepare many of us for the logistical, psychological and emotional reality that they unwittingly created.”

Matthew also makes the point that JBP resonates more with young (white) men than women because women and some racial minorities already understand his message, but young men are more likely to actually believe they can evade responsibility without consequence.  I tend not to agree with the author that there are more “lost boys” than “lost girls”. There are no shortage of women living alone, struggling with responsibility (and/or avoiding it), seeking relief through medication or retail therapy or whatever. But if our modern world doesn’t necessarily nurture young women, perhaps it caters more to us in the sense that it can repackage and sell our desires back to us.  I would say that if you really want to generalize, it’s not that JBP’s message is not relevant to women, it’s that we are lagging a bit behind in our awareness of its relevance.

Highly recommended read.

Choice, good and evil

“Choice” is something we are taught is central in our lives from an early age. Good choices, bad choices. I use this language with my children and students. How could I not? If you value freedom, you value choice. That’s how we think.

At the same time, for many years I’ve found this emphasis on choice a little bit....insufficient, I suppose. While a good many things are influenced by choice, a lot of important things aren’t, at least not by my choices. I suppose you could say that we are influenced by each other’s choices, and that would be more true.  The larger group of humanity making good choices influences my life for the better. But then what is this “good” we are striving toward, and how do we know it?  How can any of my fellow humans know their choices are impacting me? For that matter, why should we strive toward good in the first place?

For the past year or so I’ve been reading Fr. Stephen Freeman’s blog.  He writes about different issues from an orthodox theological perspective, and I enjoy it because it’s very different from any other perspective I get from anybody. He recently wrote a blog about choice and whether 

evil is necessary for the existence of good.  I really enjoyed it and the very intelligent discussion in the 100+ comments. 

Food for thought:

Before looking at the nature of good and evil, it is worth seeing the problem involved when choice is inserted into the conversation. What happens in that approach is that we are no longer speaking about the nature of good and evil, indeed, both are relativized in importance. Everything quickly revolves back to the nature of choosing, and makes the actions of our will the center of the good. Thus, there is no true good or evil, only good choices and evil choices. It is a narcissistic ontology – a system of thought in which we ourselves become the center of attention.

Indeed, it is a bit terrifying to think there is no good outside of my choices. What if I am too ignorant to make good choices? What if I don’t feel like it? What if all the choices are simply terrible, which they might be because of bad luck or because I have made so many awful choices already that I am not left with any good ones?

Fr. Freeman goes on to describe (intriguingly I think) the human condition as one of change, or kinesis. He explains thus:

...Evil is not a “thing,” nor something that has any existence or being at all. To think about evil, it is necessary to understand that all of creation (ourselves included) is in motion (kenesis). Everything moves and changes (in terms of being). The proper movement for all things is towards its end in God (its telos). This is a movement towards greater truth, beauty, and goodness. Evil, on the other hand, is a movement away from proper being, a movement away from truth, beauty, and goodness. However, it is crucial to note that this is a movement, and not a thing.

If I understand correctly, this is related to something I intuited quite a while ago: each choice I make, however freely made, changes me in some way.  The “me” that makes each good or bad choice is not static. Maybe one choice doesn’t move me a whole lot in one direction or another. But 5, 10, 20 choices down the line, the “me” doing the choosing is potentially quite a different me from the me who made the first choices. And that me is going to perceive and experience reality quite differently.

I find this aspect of choice is not really brought up in everyday discussion of choice, which tends to focus on relationships and material things: poor choices make others angry, or waste you time and resources, or lose you opportunities. All this is true enough, but I’m not sure it’s sufficiently subtle for cases where there is no immediate bad result from a choice, or it takes too much imagination to think that far into the future. Beyond the material consequences, I think we all need to have some sort of understanding of what our choices are moving us toward. Individual choices don’t make us a good or evil person on their own. But I do think it is possible to get to a place where it becomes difficult to choose not to do evil. And that is really quite terrifying.