Jordan Peterson Meets Bp Barron, Again

Jordan Peterson has recentlly begun to reenter the public forum following lengthy recovery from a life-threatening health crisis. As part of the reentry, he's done a second YouTube encounter with Bp Barron, which is linked above.

The thing that strikes me most in the encounter is how little Jordan Peterson has changed. The guy has had as difficult a struggle against addiction and other health issues as I can imagine, but he's exactly the same Jordan Peterson who engaged Bp Barron in their first encounter in 2019.

This is to say that he continues to be a product of the mid-20th century academic culture -- and I might go a little farther to say that since he was formed in part as a Harvard professor, it's mid-20th century Ivy League academic culture, precisely what I was exposed to in the 1960s. And this puzzles the heck out of me, the guy has simply not changed.

Peterson's outlook is a largely inchoate melange of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Orwell, and whatever else strikes him -- and it leans conservative, in the sense of National Review as of about 1968. In fact, it's what you found in the oligopoly stentorian media pre-Viet Nam, Time, Newsweek, Cronkite, the papers. This was on the intellectual supermarket shelves when I was in college, although even at the time it was regarded with deep suspicion by most faculty and students. As of now, it's simply a period piece. It's a cross-section of the conservative wing of main line Protestant academic culture and Protestant morality, which in the 1960s was collapsing.

Even at the time, I had a nagging feeling that there was no there there, but main line Protestant culture, liberal or conservative, offered no systematic challenge, because, inchoate, there was no good way to parse it on its own terms. I suspect the same doubts bother Peterson, but again, formed in the same mid-20th century confusion, he has no clear path forward. And today, all that Jung-Freud-Nietzsche-Darwin-Orwell may as well have sunk with the Titanic.

What strikes me especially as I come back to Peterson after his absence of several years is his determined agnosticism. I recognize it now particularly from my recent reading of Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit, which, nothing like a reverie, makes a careful case for Protestantism as a form of agnosticism. And I can find no better example of Kinsman's view than Jordan Peterson, who is hardly Protestant but definitely agnostic.

He sees lots of good in the Bible, because it's full of Jungian archetypes. The archetypes have lots of good things to tell us, and it's hard to disagree that insofar as they teach prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, they're very good things indeed. The problem seems to be that Peterson is stuck roughly there. He doesn't seem to be able to proceed to a more unifying explanation, which is probably what makes him agnostic.

Peterson in a tentative way keeps advancing the position to Bp Barron that they agree in some basic way -- the Bible is a good thing, and the virtues are good things, but he just doesn't quite know what to make of everything else.

Bp Barron keeps responding yes, they agree, and we as humans have been endowed with reason, a tool that Aristotle and Aquinas can help us use, but then there are the Church Fathers, who take Biblical interpretation even a little farther down the road than you have, Prof Peterson. And in fact, faith can be seen as a step beyond reason. (I'm not sure if we even need to go that far, but it's a different issue.)

So far, poor Jordan Peterson is left stroking his chin and furrowing his brow. I think he's still puzzling over the collapse of mid-20th century main line Protestant consensus and what's so far replaced it, but an agnostic to the core, he's not going to make a whole lot of progress beyond that.