Jordan Peterson: Lost in a World He Never Made

 

I find Jordan Peterson’s thinking hard to follow. Should I make the effort to figure out what he is trying to say? Is it liable to be anything of substance, or will I be wasting a great deal of time?

The odds are I will be wasting my time. Being able to think clearly and being able to express yourself clearly are almost the same thing.

But I took the time to try to untangle his thinking in this brief interview with Andrew Klavan. Klavan is trying to pin Peterson down on whether he believes in God.

In the talk, I do not think Peterson is trying to be deliberately obscure. Many academics are; enough double-talk and people do not realize you are talking nonsense. Peterson is not like this. Utter sincerity seems to be his dominant trait. It is what is so attractive about him. It is why, I think, he has become so popular and famous; nobody is used to hearing an academic speak so honestly. 

His problem is that, as a social scientist, he does not have the mental tools to handle metaphysical questions, like the existence and nature of God. He almost seems to understand this himself.

“Does God exist? How would I know? I can’t know, and neither can anyone else.”

In fact, the existence of God is knowable in a dozen ways. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says 

“Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of ‘converging and convincing arguments,’ which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.”

That is, there are various philosophical proofs for the existence of God. Peterson’s problem is that there are no, and can be no, scientific proofs for the existence of God—and the only thing he understands is science. There can be no scientific proofs of the existence of God, because science deals only with physical objects, and God is not a physical object.

As though to explain the impossibility, almost as if he understand the problem, Peterson goes on to speak of the objective and the subjective. 

“I don’t understand the relationship between the objective and the subjective. I don’t understand consciousness. From the objective perspective, it’s nothing.”

Because he speaks from a scientific perspective, Peterson is confusing “objective,” “physical,” and “real”; he is assuming they all mean the same thing. Science cannot tell them apart.

The objective is that which exists independently of our experience of it. It abides when we are not witnessing it. For example, the physical world does not cease to exist when we close our eyes.

The physical is what we perceive with our senses: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing.

The real is not “what exists,” although it seems to mean that. Everything conceivable necessarily exists--as a concept, as a perception. We say something is “real” when it exists in the same category of existence we think it does. If we think it exists as a physical object, but it exists only as a concept, it is “unreal.” But on the other hand, we do not call happiness “unreal” because it does not exist as a physical object.

Peterson: 

“Religious experience is subjective, but it is a human universal. It is transpersonal, but it is subjective. We don’t have a category for the transpersonal subjective.”

It is science that does not have a category for the “transpersonal subjective.” But Peterson is wrong on his terminology. God is not subjective—he is objective. He exists when we are not thinking of him. “Transpersonal” means “objective.” By “subjective,” Peterson really means “non-physical.” 

God exists in the non-physical, i.e., spiritual, objective realm. As does heaven, hell, and the angels and saints. As does love, sin, morality, other consciousnesses, and most of what is important in life.

And Peterson, as a social scientist, cannot account for any of it. He is trapped in the world of inanimate things.

So, by extension, is psychology, and social sciences, in general.

The Freudian Slouch on the Couch

I put a thought experiment to my Freudian friend: suppose someone came to an analyst or psychiatrist, of any school, and said they had been speaking with an angel. As Mohammed did, or Joseph Smith, or Mary, or St. Francis, or Abraham, or Moses, or Joan of Arc. Would they accept that, or declare them mad? For if they could not accept that, they are working antithetically to religion. The two cannot both be true within the same universe.

He replied, “No competent lay therapist would pronounce someone who was visited by an angel as insane. Together they would find meaning in it.”

I am not satisfied. I find meaning in this phrasing, “find meaning in it.” Isn’t the meaning of the incident obvious? It’s an angel. It’s a message from God. Surely this “find meaning” means the analyst rejects this possibility and tries to replace it with a materialist explanation?

And then, if the patient does not buy the materialist explanation, he or she is declared mad.

There are, granted, procedures a religious person should follow as well to, as Paul said, “test the spirits.” But the phrase “find meaning in it” would not be the right one.

The first question would be, “is it an angel or a demon?”

And then there is a place for a certain sort of “analysis,” granted. God speaks in parables. He is oracular, the Greeks would say. The meaning is often not the literal meaning. So you might say “unravel the meaning of it.” Why is God speaking to you now? What is he telling you? What does he want you do to?

My friend ranks Freud with Copernicus and Darwin, as scientific paradigm shifters. I would rank him instead with Marx, as two thinkers who tried to apply the “scientific method,” or rather, a scientistic world view, to areas where it cannot work and does not belong.

Science relies on experiment and observation. You cannot directly observe the human soul: that is the key insight of Buddhism. You certainly cannot directly observe the soul of another.

As Heraclitus said almost three thousand years ago, you can never plumb the depths of soul, so deep is its logos.

Nor is a human soul an object, like an apple falling from a tree. This creates an insurmountable observer paradox: there is no way the observer can claim greater knowledge than the “object” of his study. Both are, unlike a geologist and a rock, in principle equally sentient beings. Worse: the object has knowledge of itself the observer cannot have. To overcome this, it is necessary to declare the observer mad, and so incompetent. Thank you, DSM. This objectifies him.

Ah, you say, but that is just the biomedical boys. They know nothing of the subconscious!

I think Freud created the subconscious to work around this same problem: positing an area of the soul of which the analysand is supposedly unaware. Still does not work, though: it is actually an area the analysand can see and experience, and the analyst cannot. This struck me when I realized that, to accept the theory as presented by Jung, you had to accept that a person is “unconscious” when, for example, reading a novel or watching a movie. So too in your dreams: you are conscious of the dream; only the analyst is not. If you are going to be scientific about it, the analysand is the expert, and is teaching the analyst.

But then, there is no such area of the soul. What Freud called the “subconscious” is simply the spiritual realm: Coleridge’s primary imagination, the spirit world, the kingdom of heaven, the source of Plato’s ideal forms. The place where mathematics comes from, and ethics, and archetypes, and innate knowledge of all sorts.

This is hardly a new discovery. Freud only tried, with his “subconscious,” to give a materialist explanation for it. Beyond the canard that it is all down to synapses in the brain, it was a repository of our repressed desires—for material things. For physical survival and for survival of the species: for food and sex.

Materialism. If the spiritual existed at all, it existed only secondarily; like the heat from a fire.

Yes, the spiritual world is beyond our direct conscious control. Just as is the physical world: we cannot decide what will happen in our dreams, and we cannot simply will it to rain. It is, in other words, something that exists and operates independently of us and our will. It is wrong, therefore, to think it is somehow nevertheless part of ourselves, “our” subconscious, any more than the physical world is. We do not speak of “our” physical universe. Yet this is what Freud asserts—in order to deny the independent existence of spiritual entities.

We are willing things we are not willing, then. A contradiction in terms.

Declaring ownership over the spirit world is a pretty blasphemous thing; and a pretty dangerous thing.

Freud came up with this construction because he had to. He understood that there is no modus vivendi between psychiatry and religion. Psychiatry was intended by Freud as the “scientific” replacement for religion. There is no common ground.

The rough beast is now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. The pagan jinn, the demons, are back. Science has led to progress in the material sphere, where it can operate. It has led only to regress when misapplied to the human world: witness the 20th century. Fascism, in its day, was “scientific.” Communism was and is “scientific.” Eugenics was “scientific.” Hallucinogenics, opioids, and so on, were “better living through chemistry.” And now the tide of madness rises.

Prince Condla

Once upon a time in Ireland there was a handsome prince. His name was Condla, if you need to know. He was a good prince and a good son, and his father King Conn felt that all was well regarding the succession.

Then one day, Prince Condla and King Conn were walking in the hills. At once, a woman of supernatural beauty appeared, but only to Condla. She handed him an apple from the Land of Youth, and told him she was waiting for him there. In the Land of Youth, she said, there was no fighting, no death, and no evil.

King Conn could not see the woman; but he did hear the voice, and the apple was a verifiable fact. Condla put it by his bedside, and, over the months, it never showed any signs of decay.

Over the same months, Prince Condla grew more and more melancholy. He could not forget the beautiful woman. He could find no peace until he joined her in the Land of Youth.

And this, children, is the true story of what we call “depression,” or at least one strain of it.

There is much wisdom in fairy tales. They are the real psychology, and far more reliable than the modern "scientific" discipline.

Thomas Szasz

... died a few days ago, Just heard. My fellow Syracusan, and perhaps the only person, other than RD Lang, who ever talked sense to psychiatry. RIP.

A bit about Szasz here.

The Madness of Psychology

Play that funky music, shepherd boy!

Psychology's claim to authority is that it is a “science.” Very well—that means it must stand or fall on the best empirical evidence. And the evidence is this: if psychology works, even if its use is not becoming any more widespread, we should see an overall decline of mental illness year-by-year as it increases in its knowledge.


What we have seen, instead, is a rapid growth in mental illness, and at exactly the time that we are relying more and more on psychology, in exactly the places where this is happening. It would be hard to imagine a more perfect example of a scientific theory being disproven. In fact, the evidence makes it clear that psychology is causing “mental illness.”


According to psychology, all major forms of mental illness are incurable. The “symptoms” can perhaps be “controlled” with “medicine,” but the prognosis is always “no cure.” Just the opposite, in fact: if you have any of the major “illnesses,” or even chronic depression, the prognosis is for it to simply get worse until you die.


What could be a clearer admission of failure? To make it worse, and to make the point clearer, these “mental illnesses” were commonly understood to be only temporary in most cases before psychology, and still are thought to be temporary in places where psychology is not used.

“Cross cultural and historical studies indicate that chronic mental illness is a recent phenomenon of Westernized countries. Recent studies by the World Health Organization show that the rate of recovery from severe mental illness is much better in third world countries than in Western industrialized countries. Historical evidence points out that the rates of recovery were much higher during the 1830-40's in this country when there was a much more optimistic view of recovery."

http://www.power2u.org/articles/recovery/people_can.html


So the plain scientific evidence is that psychology is causing and sustaining mental “illness.” The worst possible thing you can do, if you show any relevant symptoms, is to go anywhere near a psychiatrist, psychologist, or clinical facility.

Proposed template for dart board.

One further proof that it is all bogus is that psychologists themselves readily say so. Ask them about anything psychology held to be true as recently as twenty years ago, and they will openly scorn it. All nonsense, it turns out. Twenty years ago, of course, they had the same attitude towards everything they believed forty years ago. Real sciences change in details, but build on a foundation that remains. Psychology works instead as a series of fads; each in turn wholly disproven in time. It takes a supreme leap of faith in opposition to reason to suppose that, having always been wrong before, nevertheless, this time they are right.


For psychology to be actually making “mental illness” worse, it must be actively blocking the real cure. What might that be? The answer is perfectly obvious: real “psychology,” that is, literally, “systematic knowledge of the soul.” Religion. Psychology sets itself up more or less in direct opposition to religion, generally positively avoiding any religious references. Not scientific. You'd have a better chance of hearing about religious truth by chatting with any man on the street than by going to a therapy session.


Spiritual troubles occur in the spirit. This would be obvious, indeed self-evident, if psychology had not gotten things so screwed up.


Even if depression or schizophrenia are caused by something your parents did to you in childhood—and this is likely to be largely so—simply talking about your childhood is unlikely to do much for you. The problem with the past is that you cannot change it. The future is much more useful. In the end, your family is just a random bunch of people you happened to grow up with. Contrary to much, even Christian, popular belief, there is nothing sacred about the family.


If you want to read a nice, family-friendly text, stay as far as possible away from the New Testament. Here's what Jesus has to say about families: “He who does not despise his father and mother is not worthy of me.” “Let the dead bury their own dead.” “What have I to do with you, woman?” (To his mother. The Virgin Mary.)


“Codependency”? That concept is malicious jive. It is a way for the unrighteous to persecute the blessed for their righteousness. If the concept is legitimate, then Mother Theresa of Calcutta, St. Francis of Assisi, Kwannon, Jesus Christ, all the angels and saints are simply “codependent” and “mentally ill.” No good Christian can endorse the concept of “codependency.” Indeed, no good person can endorse the concept of “codependency.” Here the psychiatrist speaks directly in the devil's voice.


The whole “chemical imbalance” thesis is perfectly tautological. We know that how we think changes our brain chemistry; so there is no way to distinguish cause and effect. Wrong tree, dawg.

Riding the tiger of emotions: Korean shamanic drawing.

Nor is there any value in discussing fuzzy inner feelings. Let's look at the scientific evidence for the thesis that mental illness comes from not talking about our feelings. As we can easily see, some cultures are much more open to expressing feelings than others: the Koreans are far more openly emotional than the Japanese, the Irish are far more open than the English, the French are more open than the Germans—these being, otherwise, rather comparable nations on other factors. If Freud and the “fuzzy feelings” folks are right, this should be manifested by a significantly lower incidence of mental illness in the open than in the closed partner in each pair.


I gather nobody has done a really systematic study—oddly. But when the same diagnostic survey was tried in both Germany and France, the rate of mental illness in France turned out to be double that in Germany.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5111202


I have also read that the rate of schizophrenia in the Irish is unusually high.


Again, you would expect women, who are generally more inclined to talk about their feelings, to have significantly lower rates of mental illness than men. But no, it turns out their rates are somewhat higher:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_disorder


So the theory is plainly and simply wrong. It is surely just as likely that talking a lot abut your emotions, by focusing your attention on them, makes them stronger. If your emotions are unpleasant ones like sadness, anxiety, shame, or anger, this would then be distinctly a Bad Thing To Do.


It may also be a bad thing because it is unhealthily egocentric, trapping you in the narrow view that is causing you depression, as opposed to learning to be more “philosophical” about things. Consider the “Prayer of St. Francis”:

O Divine Master, 

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; 

to be understood, as to understand;

Isn't this the opposite of the psychotherapeutic enterprise? And might this not actually be better advice?

You know Buddhism; you know the Four Noble Truths? The last thing the Buddha would have advised was to get in touch with your feelings. Feelings are cravings; that's exactly what they are. They are exactly where dukkha—“ill being,” very much including what is called “mental illness”--comes from.

Jesus, too, tells us to get our emotions under wraps, not to dwell on them. If we lust after a woman—that is adultery. If we in anger call our brother “fool”--that is as bad as murdering him. If we worry--”take no thought for the morrow; sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Hmm—pop pseudo-science that has already been disproven, or the wisdom of the ages? Tough choice.


I do believe in “art therapy,” though. Except there is no such thing—all art is “art therapy.” It takes the bad feelings, and transforms them into something different, and something meaningful. As Wordsworth put it: “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Painting, sketching, sculpting, poetry, singing, playing an instrument, telling a story, acting, all the traditional arts. All soul-restoring, and time-tested, ways to sublimate troublesome feelings. Failing that, “art appreciation” works too, though not so well. “Whenever the evil spirit from God overpowered Saul, David would play on the lyre and Saul would feel better for the evil spirit would leave him.”


But if Saul had simply made his peace with God—he would have been cured.

Repressed Memory Syndrome Remembered

It is truly incredible to me that nobody seems to remember or take into account the old horrors of "repressed memory syndrome" in the context of current accusations of child sexual abuse against Catholic priests--and in demanding goverments lift the statute of limitations on prosecution of this crime in particular, when it is precisely the sort of situation the statute of limitations is intended to address. I remember those old absolutes from the eighties, obviously false even then, but seemingly held as articles of faith by every social worker and judge in North America: "Children never lie about these things." "If you think it happened, it happened." "Any truly upsetting memory is repressed." Any speaker who dared to question this orthodoxy was literally shouted down.

http://www.salon.com/books/memoirs/index.html?story=/books/int/2010/09/20/meredith_maran_my_lie_interview

The whole thing back in the 80's turned out, of course, at terrible human cost, to be a witchhunt.




"Can you remember the name of the Papist priest who did this to you?"


The current pogrom against priests traces exactly the same familiar parabola. For that matter, the elements are all the same as in Salem, Massachusetts, back in 1692. You'd think we'd remember, you'd think we'd learn, but there is always some new extraordinary popular delusion to stir the madness of the crowd.

Sanity and Insanity

Not long ago, the National Post covered an "Anti-psychiatry" convention in Toronto. The coverage was not sympathetic; no doubt the Posties saw this as yet another left-wing victim group. The reporter wrote caustically of "self-absorbed crackpots like the 'shaman' M. Anne Phillips," "who holds that mentally ill people are in fact spirit guides to alternative realities," and that a psychotic episode "'is an indication of a traditional medicine or shamanic calling.'" Is that nuts, or what?

Unfortunately, I too am a crackpot. I have lived in Korea, China, and in the Middle East; my wife is Filipina. It is only too obvious to me, from personal experience, that

1. beliefs that are labelled insane in North America are accepted as simply true in other places; and

2. people who would be declared insane, unemployable, and put on mind-numbing medicines for life in North America are fairly normal members of society, with families and decent jobs, elsewhere.

How then can madness be an "illness" on the analogy of physical illness? To me, this whole notion of "mental health" and "mental illness" is a metaphor misunderstood literally, at the level of puzzling over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

My wife, along with most Filipinos, believes as a matter of course in curses, ghosts, witches, and various magical spirit beings similar to dwarfs and fairies. After all, she has seen some of them herself. She is quite open about these "hallucinations": a few months ago, she phoned me at work, agitated, because she had just seen me waving at her from the end of the street, although I could not have been there. At home, a neighbour who was a witch died, and her house was filled with bees. But the bees all left when her surviving daughter ordered them to do so.

I suspect we Europeans and North Americans all have such "hallucinations" as well; we just ignore them, like our dreams, or at least keep our mouths shut about them. Thirty-five percent of Americans, after all, claim direct contact with aliens. My two kids from a previous marriage once saw Dracula at the head of the staircase, and reported this quite matter-of-factly at the time. Now grown, they still remember it vividly, but know enough to no longer talk about it. My sister says she saw an angel at her window once. Me, I'm not saying. As Samuel Johnson once said, "most of us learn to conceal our tails."

I'm not saying reality is up for grabs; I'm saying that a purely physical, five-senses view of reality is seriously incomplete. Insane, even. But that is the view that the psychiatrists defend to the death--albeit not their own--as the only valid one.

It tends to throw Westerners to discover that all Muslims believe as a matter of course in the reality of "jinn," or genies, creatures one would not dare to mention around a Western psychiatrist. They are in the Qur'an. But then again, any sincere Christian ought to know as much: the Bible is clear that the middle air is thronged with angels and demons, not to mention the saints in heaven, who continue their involvement in this world.

There is, after all, a spiritual reality. This is not a question of "faith." It is, in logical and philosophical terms, not in doubt. The spirit world is the only one we know directly. What is in doubt, as Berkeley proved, is whether there is any physical reality apart from it.

In Korea, people who start "hallucinating," who become directly aware of these spirit presences, commonly become "mudangs," professional shamans, just as Phillips suggests. After an apprenticeship, they can make a decent living telling fortunes, healing the sick, selling talismans. Instead of an illness, they have a career. You may scoff that their imagined reality is not real; but that is actually beside the point. So long as they are allowed to continue believing in it, they are happy and well. Their "sickness" is the psychiatrist's refusal to accept this.

The situation is the same in China or in the Philippines--the "psychotic" commonly become herbalists and healers, "witch doctors," "shamans." Perhaps, in the end, not all those diagnosed in the West with "mental illness" are shamans; but it seems necessarily true that at least some shamans are, in North America, instead drugged numb and declared permanently disabled.

Yet the minute you accept that there is a spiritual reality, it becomes almost necessarily true that some people will have greater insight into it than others. Those who have greater insight into it will almost certainly not be the social "scientists," nor the psychiatrists, the "physicians," who are materialist by ideology.

It is not just that the blind are leading the blind; the blind are leading the seers.