I’ve taken more time to do this series than I intended. One reason has been the chaos of life (one small consolation: that has included getting my manuscript closer to publication).
Another reason is that I didn’t realize how much I hate reading and note-taking at the same time. It seems similar to a parent who misses “being there” with his children because he is too busy taking pictures. Alternatively, reading the book is more pleasant than figuring out how to best write about it. So I haven’t, up to now, gotten past the introduction and one chapter, even though I’ve read into Rule 6.
Another reason is related to my decision to cover Rule 3 first: I didn’t like the first two chapters as much as I expected. This flummoxed me because I didn’t want to sound like “that Christian guy.” That left me wondering how I should proceed, because there are more than enough Peterson critics and I didn’t see any need for me to join in.
But here we are.
In Peterson’s self-introduction to the book (called an “Overture” in part to distinguish it from Dr. Doidge’s introduction) didn’t strike me as that important at first. I wanted to get to the first rule. He basically relates that the 12 rules were part of a longer list he posted on the Quora website in answer to the question “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?” Unlike his answers to other questions, his “list of rules and maxims, some dead serious, some tongue-in-cheek” scored in the 99.9 percentile among Quora answers…
The list of 42 rules has since been deleted, but YouTube has an audio version:
This origin story exposes a fascinating aspect of Peterson’s book and many other intellectual and cultural endeavors. It took awhile for me to understand its significance. I had to read further before I got it.
Peterson tells us, or we can deduce, several things in this “overture”:
- He wrote many things on Quora that didn’t resonate with many visitors to the website despite the fact that he “put a bit of care into” those answers.
- There’s no indication that the “rules and maxims” were similarly thought through.
- He considered the popularity of his answer to be a question itself that he needed to answer: Why did so many people like his “rules and maxims”?
- We can be quite certain that it wasn’t because all the upvoters have been reading Jung or other subjects that Peterson knows so well.
- Peterson then, for the book, wrote essays to go along and (perhaps) explain twelve of the rules.
But there’s no reason to believe that Peterson had thought of the material in these essays as reasons for the rules at the time he first created the list! Like the mystery of the readers who upvoted his rules, how Peterson himself came up with the rules is also a mystery.
Now, for the 12 rules published in the book we have (what I have so far found to be) impressive essays. But the value of the essays, whether high or low, doesn’t prove anything about the origin of of the questions. After all, if the questions could be appreciated by people without Peterson’s academic or philosophical background then why should they require such knowledge to be created–especially if the author was surprised at their popularity?
So do Peterson’s essays explain the value of the rules? Note that the essays could be a possible explanation, and the rules could be valuable, but that still isn’t sufficient argument to prove that the essays are the correct explanations.
This ends up being a task familiar to any Christian. Even when believers and unbelievers agree (as they sometimes do) that something is true or good or beautiful, they often disagree about why it is true or good or beautiful.
Keep that in mind going forward.
Another important point raised on the overture is, despite the subtitle, “chaos” is not always a bad thing.
Another important issue is that Peterson attempts to explain what he means by “Being,” a term he uses frequently. In a lengthy footnote he writes that he takes the term from Martin Heidegger. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I understand his meaning. Here’s the full quotation:
I use the term Being (with a capital ‘B’) in part because of my exposure to the ideas of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger tried to distinguish between reality, as conceived objectively, and the totality of human experience (which is his ‘Being’). Being (with a capital ‘B’) is what each of us experiences, subjectively, personally and individually, as well as what we each experience jointly with others. As such, it includes emotions, drives, dreams, visions and revelations, as well as our private thoughts and perceptions. Being is also, finally, something that is brought into existence by action, so its nature is to an indeterminate degree a consequence of our decisions and choices – something shaped by our hypothetically free will.
I’ll probably leave that to others to analyze.