Only the first.
Just can’t get into YouTube lectures, would prefer to read. But I can talk a little about the first. To do that, I want to repeat something I said before.
These days, I get very frustrated with people who say “It’s obvious!” A lot of the criticism thrown at Peterson (including a link mentioned earlier) complains that the things he says are “obvious”.
Pfffft.
Nothing is obvious. I’ve been a teacher for a long time, have seen students, and even colleagues, make all manner of mistakes. There is no such thing as “obvious”. Doesn’t exist. I’m an economist now, and I see on some occasions professional economists make mistakes about points that are explained in 101 class. (They get the math right, but forget what the math is supposed to refer to in the first place, completely reverse the actual story of cause-and-effect that the equations imply.) We are tiny human brains in an incomprehensibly vast universe. It’s a miracle we are capable of genuine understanding of even the smallest things, let alone that we’ve attained the level of scientific and technical mastery of the modern world. It’s amazing.
Speaking the obvious in a way that makes it psychologically relevant is a skill, and it’s a damn rare one.
I used to throw that same criticism around, “Dur-dur, it’s so obvious.” So maybe I shouldn’t get frustrated at other people now who say the same thing I used to say. It’s highly non-obvious that nothing is obvious. That is also something that one must learn over time. So: what I got out of that first religion lecture was along those very same lines, something I implicitly “knew”, but didn’t appreciate on the proper level. I wish there was a transcript-- oh shit, there are transcripts! Awesome. I can just read quickly instead of wasting time watching slow videos. Sweet, gonna do that.
Okay, so thinking about that first lecture. This isn’t from Peterson, but it’s directly riffing off what he said. Here’s a point that intelligent, scientifically-educated people can have trouble remembering, or maybe trouble appreciating: we have used the word “objective” – in the sense of objective reality, which can exist independent of the observer – only from the 19th century. Less than two hundred years. That’s not to say that the concept did not exist before then – it goes back at least to Democritus – but we didn’t really have a handle on the language until well after Newtonian mechanics, and the modern idea was perhaps not stated precisely until Laplace’s demon. The very language that we use to mark the distinction between what we think of as really-real-objective-Reality, vs our potentially flawed subjective perspective of reality, is extremely new. These aren’t old words with old meanings. They are a brand new way of speaking. It’s not at all obvious that pre-literate peoples, or early civilizations just beginning to write down their myths, had the same clear mental distinction established.
Even today, it’s extremely difficult for us to separate the first subjective “reality” we experience – the world as subjectively perceived – from the really-real-objective-Reality that is uncovered by careful application of the scientific method. For a scientific mind, objects just exist out there in space and follow rigid, abstract, mathematical/physical rules. But for a pre-scientific mind, the “meaning” of an object is going to be purely subjective: the meaning of an object is its call to action. An object is meaningful, subjectively, if it causes us to change our action, to change our behavior. Peterson’s example was a chimpanzee, but I just looked at my dog.
She walks around our place. Certain objects catch her eye, and others don’t. The ones that do are somehow meaningful to her, that is, they cause her to change her action: “sniff this”. Sniffing is more subjective experience, leading to more meaning for the action: “eat this” (something my wife or I dropped on the floor in the kitchen), “chew on this” (a toy). But most objects are not noticed, and they lead to no particular changes in her behavior except to avoid as necessary. They have no meaning for her. They don’t change her action. The objects are meaningless.
It’s already obvious (heh) that the Bible, and other early religious/mythological texts, were not written from a scientific perspective. But it’s worth making clear – making “obvious” – that they were definitely not written from any semblance of an “objective” perspective, either. They are written to explain reality as subjectively experienced. Peterson:
And it is!
To put it in modern terms: Biblical stories are exploring the “reality” of direct human subjective experience – the world as we perceive it moment to moment. They are delving inside the human mind, rather than looking outward at physics or abstract mathematical rules, because even the concept of “physics” is something that was hard-won and developed over many centuries.
There is value in knowing and appreciating this, even given that it is “obvious”.
Because the problem that happens once the objective-vs-subjective split is clearly demarcated in human language, is that the subjective immediately gets relegated to “inferior”. The subjective world of experience is not the really-real-Reality, is it? It’s “only” subjective. I’m reminded of a section of Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
Pirsig is mocking the conclusion here that comes from relegating subjective experience into some inferior way of approaching the world, when in fact “subjective” experience is the most direct experience we have.
It took centuries of painfully careful thinking, of hard-won scientific insight, even to develop the modern language of the objective world. Subjective experience is immediate experience, and for that reason, it is in a very legitimate sense more important than whatever objective discoveries we’ve made. Peterson makes the emphasis: even though the subjective world is subjective, that does NOT mean that it does not follow rules. That does NOT mean we can all just “change our mind”. We can easily imagine a world that works by different laws of physics, and yet where our subjective experience is exactly the same. We can easily imagine a world that is “objectively” different but subjectively identical, where the problems of the human condition are exactly the same as they are in this world.
To wrangle this back to Peterson:
He’s talking about me there, or at least the person I used to be.
And he’s right. He’s absolutely right about this.
I’m thoroughly non-religious. I abandoned religion as an early teen with essentially no struggle whatever, and I have never looked back. I’ve read stories of other people’s non-conversion, and I just don’t relate to their struggles because I simply didn’t have those struggles. To this day, I still have problems relating to people who advocate things like “free will”. I have no idea what those two words are supposed to mean when put together. But why is that? If so many people claim to have it, why am I so confused? It’s quite possibly because I was raised after Newton, after Laplace, after Darwin, and so when I’m trying to untangle the meaning of those words, I’m using the ready language that was gifted to me – a language that literally took hundreds, if not thousands, of years to develop by people much smarter than I am. I still think it’s an incoherent concept, but I have a better appreciation now that it’s pointing at something inside, a genuine human experience that people are having.
I’m like the guy Pirsig is making fun of. Because I am personally so readily able to “change my mind” when I am unhappy, I don’t properly appreciate the struggles that other people have in reconciling the reality of their personal experiences with the reality of the “objective” world as we currently understand it. The fracture between those two things is the source of a lot of psychological dysfunction – as Peterson knows directly, because he’s a clinical psychologist. I don’t have that same experience, which is why I don’t have the same empathy for people stuck in these situations. I don’t connect with other people on that level. I’m not exactly proud of a lot of my past contributions on this board. I get very angry at people ignoring the “obvious”, and the quality of my posts suffers. Frankly, I’ve been at it so long that I doubt I’m going to improve, but at least now I understand better the source of the problem, the source of my dissatisfaction with my posting style after-the-fact. Knowing the source means I’m more likely to be able to shift my style in order to improve it. A small thing, but there it is.
Maybe this is all bullshit on my part. Maybe I’m just haphazardly connecting ideas to each other, forcing a fake “order” onto a random pattern where it doesn’t actually fit, simply because it’s a fun exercise to do so. Maybe that’s what Peterson is doing here. I’m open to that possibility. But hey, fun is fun. I enjoy thinking these things. That’s still a worthwhile end, in and of itself.
Those are the kinds of thoughts inspired in me from watching the first video.
To believe that it’s all obvious is to entirely miss the point. It’s one thing to “know” a fact, and another thing entirely to appreciate the meaning of that fact on the level that it deserves to be appreciated.
Peterson inspires these kind of thoughts, and then he goes on to say Frozen is propaganda. And it’s just like, WTF dude? Frozen is awesome.
