← The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
489. Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith | Spencer Klavan
01:41:02
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, lecturer, and podcaster Spencer Klavan. They discuss the fruits and follies of the postmodern worldview, how our conscious and subconscious rank order data and form perceptions, where disparate creation myths and biblical depictions overlap, why God does not rule by force, and how just about everything we uncover through science reaffirms the notion of an underlying unity Spencer A. Klavan is host of the Young Heretics podcast and associate editor of The Claremont Review of Books. A graduate of Yale, he earned his doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. He is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed book Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith, as well as the editor of Gateway to the Stoics and Gateway to the Epicureans. He has written for many outlets, including The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, City Journal, Newsweek, The Federalist, The American Mind, and The Daily Wire. ...
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- [00:15]
Jordan Peterson
So I had the opportunity today to speak with Spencer Clavin. I met Spencer partly through my connections with the Daily Wire, but also more specifically, we filmed a documentary together for the Foundations of the west series that's now available on the Daily Wire. You could take a look at it there. There's a series of dinner meetings that go along with that as well, that expand out the ideas that we analyze. The more proximal reason for speaking with Spencer today was that he has a new book coming out called Light of the Mind, Light of the World, which is available in mid October, 2024, just a couple of weeks after this episode in particular was taped. And we walked through his book, which is an analysis of the. What would you say of the development of the ideas of the scientific revolution and an examination of their relationship to the religious ideas that still surround them and that constitute their metaphysical basis, but also an analysis of the dynamic relationship between those systems of ideas, religion versus science, let's say, as those ideas progressed through time, since the dawn of the scientific revolution. For me, during the conversation, time flew by very rapidly, and Spencer said he had the same experience. So we're hoping that that spirit of timelessness that encompasses you when you are investigating honestly things that you believe to be true will also surround you as you watch this discussion. So welcome to that. So, Spencer, the last time we had any real opportunity to speak together was in Athens, right in front of the.
- [01:57]
Spencer Clavin
Acropolis, which now got the Arizona mountains in the background. But it's a bit of a change.
- [02:02]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, it was a good deal to meet in Athens. And that was part for everybody watching and listening. That was part of the Foundations of the west documentary series, which has been recently released on the Daily Wire plus platform. And so I did a series of documentaries, two in Jerusalem, one with Ben Shapiro, and one with Jonathan Pageau, one in Rome with Bishop Barron, and one in Athens with Spencer Clavin. And so that was fun. So what's been the consequence for you or for the Daily Wire, as far as you know, of release of the Foundations of the West?
- [02:38]
Spencer Clavin
Well, it's really fascinating. And first of all, just looking back at that series, when I got to rewatch it as it came out, to think what a honor and a privilege we had to be there together. I mean, just a gift. And it was a while back that we filmed that show, and I was really struck by the fact that the logic of our conversation at dinner took us to this discussion of antisemitism, as you called it, the Spirit of Cain and we sort of arrived at before the October 7 massacre, before all of the horrors that have unfolded since we had that talk. We kind of of arrived at the spirit of the age that's moving. And so on one level, it's very sorrowful to look back and see how true that was what we were talking about. On the other hand, it's sort of a confirmation that these ideas, these issues are so vital now, these things that are supposedly so antiquated. Oh, it's ancient history, and we're chasing it out of the academy because it's white and it's evil or supremacist or whatever. In fact, the ideas of the west and the principles of the west are so deeply under threat that they become ever more vital by the day. So it's been wonderful to hear from people that this has given them a kind of grounding in where they come from. Because we feel so alone in time these days. We feel so cut off from our ancestry. And we've been told that everything basically before sometime in the middle of the 19th century is just backwards nonsense, if that. And now this leaves people without kind of any mooring in these extremely turbulent times. So I think, you know, besides just the joy of doing it ourselves and the wonderful conversation we had, it's great to know that we're giving people something. And that is grounding in history and a connection to the past.
- [04:37]
Jordan Peterson
It was really good of the editors. The editors did a very good job in linking together the conversations within each documentary section in a manner that produced a coherent conversation, because it was a very spontaneous enterprise. And then also across all four. And then part of that, of course, was the dinners that we had afterwards in remarkably beautiful locations, crazily beautiful locations, I mean. And those turned out to be very coherent as well. And I think one of the things that made the documentary different from others of its type, let's say, is that we concentrated more on the meaning of the ideas than on the facts of the historical progression, the significance of the historical ideas, rather than the nature of the ideas themselves or the historical events. And so that's also, I think, emblematic of this different conceptualization of the world that's starting to emerge, in a way, on the ashes of the Enlightenment. So one of the things that I've been writing about and thinking about, and I believe this strikes right to the heart of the issue, is that the postmodern types were correct in one way. Not uniquely correct, but still correct. Even a stopped clock, they're, well, right. But to give the devil his due it's very interesting and worthy of consideration that a small group of essentially literary critics have upended the world. Foucault, for example, Derrida.
- [06:16]
Spencer Clavin
Nice.
- [06:17]
Jordan Peterson
And that, that's at the bottom. That act of upending is at the bottom of the culture wars. Something like that doesn't happen by accident. And what the postmodernists got right in their suspicions was that we cannot see the world merely in consequence of apprehending the dead facts.
- [06:39]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [06:40]
Jordan Peterson
It's not possible. You know, and I've been looking into that a lot. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons it's not possible. I mean, the first reason is there's way too many facts. There's a fact per phenomenon or a fact per combination of phenomena. Right. So there's an infinite number of facts. And so you drown in facts alone. You have to prioritize them, you have.
- [07:01]
Spencer Clavin
To funnel, you have to have some sort of organized principle.
- [07:03]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. You have to just to look, you have to have some organizing principle because. And this is where the science starts to reflect it as well. The strict empiricist types act as if what presents itself to you are unquestionable sensations. Right. That the sensations themselves, the perceptions, have, the have truth as part and parcel of their nature, self evident truth. It's not true. And the reason it's not true is because you cannot separate perception physiologically from action.
- [07:41]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [07:42]
Jordan Peterson
So it's particularly interesting if you think about how your eyes work, because when you're looking at something, so you say, well, there it is right in front of me, it's like, no, to actually understand how vision works, it's better to think about it the way you might think about touch for a blind person. So you do. When you're using your fingers, if you're blind, you have to move them and then you map out the contours of the thing that you're perceiving and you aggregate those individual perceptions, let's say micro perceptions, into a hole. And even if you're blind, the whole w H O L e manifests itself as a unity in your imagination. So the idea that blind people don't see is wrong. They don't see light, but they perceive shape, otherwise they couldn't orient themselves in the world. You do the same with your eyes. You're feeling, you're feeling your way out with your eyes by moving your eyes like you're exploring, and you piece the world together that way. And you cannot do that without intent, without aim. So even to focus your eyes, you know Because I could look at you and focus there, or I could look, you know, 30ft away and focus there. Just the choice of focus is goal directed and value predicated. So perception itself is saturated by value. And the postmodernists figured this out. They figured out and they were right, that either there's two ways of looking at it. Either we see the world through a story, that's one way of thinking about it, or a description of the value structure through which we see the world is a story. It is a story. Okay, so they were right. Now, robotics engineers figured this out and cognitive scientists figured it out, and neuropsychologists figured it out. There's multiple disciplines converged on this. Where the postmodernists went wrong, and this is a serious error, was they said, well, we see the world through a story. There's no uniting story. So that's skepticism of meta narratives. Yes, but power rules everything. They slipped into a kind of Marxism. Right. So it's contradictory.
- [09:56]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [09:57]
Jordan Peterson
Okay.
- [09:58]
Spencer Clavin
So extremely remarkable. Your thoughts on this subject are really dovetailing with something that I've been tangling with as well recently. You know, I've got this book that's coming out called Light of the Mind, Light of the World.
- [10:11]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Light of the Mind, Light of the world that's coming out in. This is October 15th.
- [10:15]
Spencer Clavin
October 15th.
- [10:16]
Jordan Peterson
So yeah, so it's coming out October 15th?
- [10:18]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, so within a couple weeks, essentially. And it's the subtitle is Illuminating Science Through Faith. So the book is effectively a new history of the scientific enterprise told as if the question of spiritual matters is not yet resolved. Because we have, we've sort of begun with this idea, or I at least grew up with this idea that if you wanted to believe in anything religious, you basically had to throw your reason out the door.
- [10:52]
Jordan Peterson
Right, so. Right. So there's, there's an implicit description of the nature of reality there, which you alluded to earlier, which is that we were in the dark ages until the scientific method emerged and then we stepped into the light. And the scientific method is antithetical to the religious and vice versa.
- [11:14]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, it has to do with exactly this separation that you're talking about between what I think we would now call the subjective and the objective world, and this kind of myth that there exists these bare facts out in the world with no interpreting mode available. You can just look at the world without any kind of human interpretation.
- [11:37]
Jordan Peterson
And that's what the rationalists objected to when they were objecting to the presumptions of the empiricist. Right. They didn't like the idea of self evident sense data. They knew that we imposed something like an a priori structure on the world, but they, they didn't. They didn't. What would you say? They didn't take the step. They thought about that interpretive framework and maybe this is mostly the Greek influence as something that was rational, but it doesn't seem to be rational, it seems to be narrat.
- [12:09]
Spencer Clavin
Yes. So it's during the scientific revolution. In fact, it's Galileo who for the first time draws this division between what will come to be called primary and secondary qualities. And the primary qualities you may know are things like quantity, mass, position, these quantifiable things. So primary qualities are actually quantities and they're therefore supposed to be completely mind independent. Which if you think about it for a second, is a remarkable claim that no numbers have nothing to do with the human mind.
- [12:42]
Jordan Peterson
Right. Well, mathematicians themselves differ on that interpretation because some of them do believe that the mathematical realm is an independent reality that human beings discover. And others think, well, it's a subjective construction that bears some correspondence to the world. There's much to be said on both sides of those arguments, no question, but merely presuming that as you pointed out, that numbers are self evident and have nothing to do with the psyche and the way we structure things.
- [13:15]
Spencer Clavin
And so there was this hope, this very exciting hope at the time that you could draw a picture of the world from no human standpoint, that the world effectively could be reduced to this machine that operates entirely independently of our participation in it. And the secondary qualities, things like color and sound and all of those tactile sensations that you're describing, and the way that we build our momentary impressions up into a picture of the world, all of that was secondary.
- [13:46]
Jordan Peterson
In other words, more subjective.
- [13:48]
Spencer Clavin
More subjective, right. And gradually over time, as the scientific method demonstrated such enormous power, it began to seem as if that picture of the world, the primary qualities, picture of the world was all that was really real because everything else seemed.
- [14:05]
Jordan Peterson
So everything could be reduced to that.
- [14:07]
Spencer Clavin
Exactly.
- [14:07]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Well, it's funny because those so called primary qualities are something like what everything has in common. And so there is, there is something foundational about them. But you know, how the brain handles that to some degree is quite interesting. So if you look at the visual system, so your primary cortex extracts out from the visual field some things that you might regard as primary edges, for example, and you could think of those edges, edge detection, as one of the primary constituent elements of visual perception. And then that information so moves from the retina, say, to the first level of visual processing, and then it moves up a hierarchy of visual processing toward perception. Now, at the highest level, perception itself involves motor movement. So, for example, when I look at this glass, although I don't know it, when I look at the glass, my. The grip I would use to grip that glass is activated by the perception. So part of what I perceive as the glass is grippable object of a certain mass with these dimensions that I could lift in this manner. And that's activated by the perception without me thinking about it. It's part of the perception. Now, there's one other thing that's relevant. Okay. So you could imagine that when people first started to talk about the visual system, they thought, well, there are basic perceptions and they feed upward to the realm of emotion, motivation, thought, action, one way upward. But the way the system is actually constructed is that all the different levels of the visual system feed back to one another. So even at the level of primary perception.
- [15:56]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [15:56]
Jordan Peterson
Most of what you see when you see something familiar isn't the object, it's your memory of the object. Right. So you start to substitute. That's part of what gives you that feeling of familiarity. I've seen this before. It's also, weirdly enough, one of the things that obscures the wonder of the world. Because as your perception automates as a consequence of repeated familiarity with something, instead of seeing the thing in itself, whatever that is, you start to see the memory of your perception of the thing. Now that's super efficient. Here's a good way of thinking about it. You know, once you're literate, you can't look at a word without hearing it in your imagination. Okay. You hear it because your eyes, the part of the brain that's devoted to visual perception and the part that's devoted to auditory perception in the cortex, overlap so your eyes are actually working as ears.
- [16:51]
Spencer Clavin
Wow.
- [16:51]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, it's so cool.
- [16:52]
Spencer Clavin
It's a synesthetic.
- [16:55]
Jordan Peterson
That's right. But. Yeah, but.
- [16:57]
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- [18:25]
Jordan Peterson
Once you're. Once you've established that circuitry, you can't look at a word without seeing the. Without hearing the word. Right?
- [18:33]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [18:33]
Jordan Peterson
It's part of the perception. Well, you know, is the word on a page there as an objective entity? Well, yes. The answer is yes and no.
- [18:42]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [18:43]
Jordan Peterson
So anyways, the problem with the primary and secondary model, neurophysiologically speaking, is that because there's feedback loops from every level to every other level, it isn't the idea of a one way, of a step process towards higher level of perceptions just isn't right. There's so much top constraint even on the primary perceptions that it's almost impossible to disentangle the subjective from the objective in perception.
- [19:09]
Spencer Clavin
And Francis Bacon worried about this actually when he. Because his whole effort was to get back to what the Greeks would have called emperia. Right. Direct experience. And this was going to be the touchstone of truth. And you were supposed to clear away every preconceived theory that you had before you arrived at the hard data. Then you could apply your theories. But there's a passage where Bacon says the mind is like a pair of glasses, or rather like a notepad upon which you're writing. You, you can't clear something old away until you've written in something new. In other words, there's always that lens.
- [19:43]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a major problem because it also, it also implies that you almost never learn anything without subjecting something previous to a death. Right. Which this is partly what, conversation or realization? Painful.
- [20:01]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [20:01]
Jordan Peterson
Is that. Yeah. And so here's another neurophysiological and sociological problem with the Idea of primary perception, you. You're constituted so that in, in your embodiment, the fact of skepticism, skepticism about direct sense data is built in. Here's why. Well, you could see something and assume it was real.
- [20:28]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [20:28]
Jordan Peterson
Well, then why don't we just have one sense? And you might say, well, because things happen behind you, let's say, which you can't see. Well, then why don't you have eyes all the way around your head? Okay. And why, more profoundly is like, why vision plus hearing plus touch plus taste plus smell, and then proprioception as well. And the answer is because the data coming in from any given single sensory source is not determinative. It's sufficiently flawed so that if you relied on only that, you die. But it's worse than that. It's worse than that because we have five dimensions that we use to triangulate, so to speak, on reality. But even that's not reliable enough. Even five qualitatively distinct sources of input, the senses, which are very different from one another. Right. If they all report the same thing, we think it's there, but no, we don't. We think maybe it's there. And then we ask other people, Right? And then not only do we ask other people, yeah, but we refer to tradition. And then not only do we ask other people and refer to tradition, we also, this, this is something these, the scientific revolution really did produce.
- [21:49]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [21:50]
Jordan Peterson
And Francis Bacon, in particular, of course Bacon and Descartes together determined that there were ways that we could approach the problem of what was real that would be more rigorous. And so the scientific method came up, and the idea there would be, if we're trying to account for something and there's a multiplicity of potential causal pathways, will reduce the causal pathway that's under question to one and then systematically vary it. It's a brilliant thing to do.
- [22:19]
Spencer Clavin
It's brilliant. And what's so, to me, tragic about the story in the true sense, in that there's really no villain in this story. It's just there's. There's a shadow that follows in the light of this discovery.
- [22:31]
Jordan Peterson
I think maybe there's the villains of the French Revolution.
- [22:34]
Spencer Clavin
Well, the French always. We can always learn the French. And in fact, Pierre Simon Laplace, who was Newton's greatest interpreter in, in France, who took Newtonian mechanics and applied it marvelously to astrophysics, is if there is a villain of my book, for instance, it's Pierre Simon Laplace in that he's the guy who takes this method and these mathematical laws for organizing Our observations, that is Newtonian mechanics. And he draws out of that this claim that the world itself is exhaustively described in what we would now call purely objective terms. That is all a bunch of particulate matter moving in these totally mind independent ways. And he writes this essay.
- [23:19]
Jordan Peterson
That's Laplace demon. He's Laplace of Laplace's demon on probabilities.
- [23:23]
Spencer Clavin
That if you had a mind that knew the position and momentum of every particle in the world, past, present and future, would lay open like a book. So he's describing the mind of God, but attributing the mankind, attributing to mankind the possibility of finding this sort of knowledge. A zero standpoint.
- [23:42]
Jordan Peterson
That's such an. It's such an interesting claim there too, because it shows that even in a claim that simple, yes. There's an if, which is a proclamation, an a priori proclamation of a certain kind of faith.
- [23:53]
Spencer Clavin
Precisely if.
- [23:54]
Jordan Peterson
Precisely this exists. And the problem with Laplace's demon, which is supposed to, let's say, be able to track the position and momentum of every micro particle, is it can't. It can't. Right.
- [24:05]
Spencer Clavin
So.
- [24:06]
Jordan Peterson
So the whole if is wrong. Right? Right. So the fundamental axiom of faith upon which the deterministic model of objective reality is predicated, is false.
- [24:15]
Spencer Clavin
And this is Ludwig Boltzmann, Right. You know, when you start to talk about the second law of thermodynamics and why it is that things tend toward entropy, and suddenly you've hit upon a rule of the material world that is nevertheless not strictly speaking, a law in the sense of being something that must happen by necessity. And it's that discovery, actually, that's a precursor to the quantum revolution. It's not exactly the same, but the same mode of thought is operative in Boltzmann and in Max Planck, after whom we name the constant that describes the quantum, and that explosion of the atomistic, deterministic idea of the world that reduces everything outside of us, and ultimately us as well, to mere bodies in motion that can somehow be known from a zero standpoint, a God's eye view that totally upends this way of thinking about the world and starts, I think, to point us back toward what you're describing. And I think that what you're describing is at a very deep and primordial level, also what the Book of Genesis is describing.
- [25:25]
Jordan Peterson
Well, let's delve into that for a bit. I mean, the problem with this sort of discussion is that when any pseudo intellectuals get together to put forward a pseudo intellectual enterprise, they always pull in some Strange element of quantum mechanics and rip off that often very badly understood. And I'm very aware that we could wander into the same territory. But there is the fundamental proclamation of the book of Genesis, which is echoed in many mythological traditions. Like there's a shared pattern, for example, in the Mesopotamian creation myths. And it's very widespread idea that what gives rise to reality eternally, so at the beginning of time, now and forever in the future, is something like an active force of apprehension or conception that interacts not with a deterministic world, but with a realm of possibility, a realm of structured possibility and casts that into being. Now, to me, that's very reminiscent of what consciousness itself does. Consciousness, you're not conscious of what's predictable. So this is so cool. Right. Because if you think about that Laplacian world, it's deterministic. One thing follows another. It's rule like it can be turned into an algorithm. Okay. Anything that you do that can be turned into an algorithm vanishes from consciousness. Right. So what your consciousness does as it operates, this is neurological reality, is it? It's an exploratory process that involves generally the activation of large areas of the brain.
- [27:11]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [27:11]
Jordan Peterson
If you're learning a new word, for example, when you learn the new word, a fairly widespread pattern of neurological activation will accompany your initial perceptions. If it's a really new word, it's even hard to hear the first couple of times. You might have to have it repeated to you multiple times, and then you might have to say it multiple times. Right, right. Okay. So what you're doing. Well, you hear it repeatedly and you say it repeatedly as you reduce the number of neurological operations that are necessary in order to specify that phenomena. And you build this little machine.
- [27:51]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [27:52]
Jordan Peterson
Left side of your brain, farther back in the brain, this little machine that's specialized for that now. And then from then on in, when you encounter that phenomena, you use that little specialized machine.
- [28:04]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [28:05]
Jordan Peterson
So, but the. But what consciousness itself is doing is concentrating on what isn't deterministic yet, what isn't predictable, what hasn't been established. And then if it can, it algorithmizes it and makes it automatic. But then you're not conscious of it. So, for example, once you can read a word, you're not conscious, you don't have to sound it out.
- [28:29]
Spencer Clavin
So it vanishes from your sight.
- [28:31]
Jordan Peterson
Everything that you can predict. This is so important.
- [28:34]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, yes.
- [28:35]
Jordan Peterson
Everything you can predict vanishes from your sight. Right.
- [28:38]
Spencer Clavin
Profound. Yeah.
- [28:39]
Jordan Peterson
Right. So consciousness actually does seem to be the thing that lives on the edge of the transforming horizon of the future. And that. So the reality, this is what seems to be portrayed in the book of Genesis with the idea of tohu, vbohu or teom, is that what your consciousness apprehends is not the deterministic world that can be turned into an algorithm, but those elements of the world that are not yet revealed but could be. That's what you're contending with.
- [29:07]
Spencer Clavin
And I want to return to something you said about sort of pseudo intellectuals bandying about these scientific ideas, because I think that's absolutely right. There's a very dangerous direction of travel here where you end up saying something like, science has proved the book of Genesis or anything like that. And that's actually not what either of us is saying at all, but rather quite the reverse that the book of Genesis is describing here a pattern and indeed an allegorical template that ramifies out into every possible sphere of life. So this notion that you have that the world is invested in some sense from the beginning with language. Vayomer, Elohim and God said yehi or vayhi or right, let there be light, and there was light. And in the Hebrew, let there be light, and there was light are almost the exact same word. It's impossible to capture this in the structures of English, but in Hebrew because time is factored so differently into the verbal system. When God says let there be light, he says yehi or. And then when the text says and there was light, it says vayhi or it's the same thing. So to me, what was and light existed and lightened, God said be light and light be, or something like that. So, you know, if you could say it that way, what this implies, I think, is that the text is describing a situation in which mind invests matter with these implicit structures that you are illuminating from a cognitive and psychological perspective. And that when man is invited into the garden to name the animals, he's not simply inventing the Hebrew language or coming up with the particular sounds he's going to say. It's much, much deeper than that. His mind is formed in such a way as to draw out these implicit.
- [31:02]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, that's partly why there's that there's an echo in Genesis where the word is what brings being into reality. And then human beings are said to be made in that image. And then that's reflected further in the text by God's granting to Adam the power to name. And God himself in the text brings the animals to Adam to see what he'll name them. Right.
- [31:29]
Spencer Clavin
Not only that, but you know what he does, he brings them to him, each after its form and kind. So he's not bringing a cat, he's bringing cat as a category, which is a very different sort of thing. You know, the text is quite explicit that what's being presented to Adam is not any particular entity so much as entities as members of the classes that we use to categorize our perceptions and to draw them into that form. I mean, you were talking earlier about touching the edge of the cup as a blind person, you think? Also, one of my favorite examples is hearing, which just at a basic kind of high school physics kind of level, we know that hearing is a wave, right? That is to say, it's a pattern of change over time. And so even before you get to the quality of what you hear, that is, this is a song or this is speech or what have you, if you take a snapshot of every particle in your body, if you could, in that Laplacian way, at a moment in this conversation where we are discussing and the sound waves are vibrating between us, nowhere in that snapshot is anything resembling a sound wave, because the sound wave involves the pattern of change over time. And so in order to create even sound, you need this box into which you can gather and group individual moments of perception that form them together.
- [32:56]
Jordan Peterson
So everything that's that top down process that brings things together in a unity. This is another one of the weaknesses of the postmodern claim that there's no transcendent unity, no metanarrative, which is a restatement of the idea of the collapse of the highest, the collapse of the unifying principle, the collapse of God, the death of God. See, one of the real problems with that hypothesis is that it's boundless. So there's no, there's no inevitable higher order unity. Okay, at what level of analysis are you speaking? Because if I'm going to perceive this as a glass, then all of the multitude of things that that glass is that the different molecular positions that the liquid inside it might take, all the different ways that a glass could make itself manifest, all that has to be subsumed into a unity, that is the glass.
- [33:58]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [33:58]
Jordan Peterson
Now there's a. I think it's Manet, but it might be Monet, I don't remember French impressionist who went out and painted haystacks, a whole series of them, under different series, different conditions of illumination.
- [34:11]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [34:12]
Jordan Peterson
And the haystack is the same. But of course it's not, because the, the colors that constitute the haystack Shift dramatically. And that's what he was investigating.
- [34:20]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [34:21]
Jordan Peterson
It's so interesting because two paintings of the same haystack, really, at the micro level, bear nothing in common. Right. There's nothing in common.
- [34:31]
Spencer Clavin
Right, Right.
- [34:31]
Jordan Peterson
They're separate in time, they're separate in place. The constituent elements are completely different. But there's an emergency emergent reality, which is the haystack, that unifies all those variants in form and makes the perception possible. Now, the postmodern claim is that there's no overarching meta narrative. It's like if there's no overarching meta narrative, you can't even. You can never perceive a unity. And they might say, well, there's a limit to the manifestation of that unity. Right. There's no ultimate unity. It's like, oh, yeah, fine, draw the line. Tell me exactly where the unity stops. And it's worse than that, because let's assume that they're right, that there is no uniting metanarrative, so no single proper way of looking at the world. You can understand that something might be said about that. Well, then does that mean that the ultimate reality is disunified, that there are various forms of fundamental truth? And if reality itself can't be unified because it's not unified in its essence, then are we destined to conflict between our own motivations, even? And how do you and I agree on anything if it. If it doesn't point towards a unity that's actually apprehensible and in some way implicit in the world?
- [35:49]
Spencer Clavin
This is why.
- [35:50]
Jordan Peterson
This is a huge, huge problem.
- [35:52]
Spencer Clavin
This is why I was so struck by what you were saying about For. And Derrida. I think we can kind of put Lacan in here, too, because it mirrors something that happened to me at the end of writing this book. You always come to a few surprises if you're onto something in a good book. And to me, the biggest surprise was that I understood the postmodernists in a completely new way. And I understood them actually as part of a tradition that probably goes back to Heraclitus speaking of Greek Greeks. Right?
- [36:22]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right.
- [36:23]
Spencer Clavin
The river, yes, but also runs through people like David Hume and even Bishop Barkley who are reacting to this objectivist idea.
- [36:34]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Hume's problem is you cannot compute a pathway forward merely by understanding the terrain. Right. You can't get an ought from an it.
- [36:45]
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- [37:54]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah, and the whole thing is inference, essentially. And he's saying that the only thing that we have in front of us is the fact that the sun has always risen in our experience and all recorded human experience. And it's only on that that we're able to base the idea that the sun's going to rise tomorrow, which shatters this idea of something that remains consistent from day to day.
- [38:16]
Jordan Peterson
That's his scandal of induction.
- [38:18]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, right.
- [38:19]
Jordan Peterson
That's the problem the chicken has with the farmer.
- [38:22]
Spencer Clavin
Right, exactly.
- [38:23]
Jordan Peterson
The farmer is the chicken's best friend. Every day the farmer brings food until it's Thanksgiving, in which case the faith the chicken has in the structure of the world as a consequence of induction turns out to be painfully wrong. Yeah. And the problem is we never know. And Hume was pointing this to some degree. We never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from underneath us or at what level. You could even take the sun itself, I've thought. Because you think, well, there's nothing more consistent than the sun. It's like, well, until it emits a solar flare that takes out our entire electrical system, which is a high probability event. In fact, there was a solar flare, I think two days ago that's on its way to Earth. And no one knows what the consequence of that storm will be.
- [39:11]
Spencer Clavin
This is.
- [39:12]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. Well, so it seems to me that in reality itself there are something like levels of predictability that have something to do with statistical regularity. You know, the sun is a fairly predictable entity because of its immense mass and because of its immense mass and size, the transformations that it undergoes can be predicted to some degree at a statistical level. Reliably, but not entirely. I guess that's also partly. That turns us back to the reason that we evolved consciousness at all. If we could rely on induction, there'd be no reason for consciousness. Consciousness seems to be the mechanism that corrects for the fact that the world is not fundamentally predictable. Like, seriously, not fundamentally predictable. Irrevocably. Now, how do you understand, if at all. And this is where we start to wander onto the dangerous quantum territory. One of the things that's really struck me, and it's maybe only an analogy, is that the field, the Tohu Wabohu or the Teom, that the spirit of God that rests on the water.
- [40:24]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [40:25]
Jordan Peterson
That field that spirit interacts with seems to be something like the pool of infinite possibility. Like it's represented, for example, in the Mesopotamian stories.
- [40:36]
Spencer Clavin
Absolute.
- [40:37]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, exactly. As a dragon. Right. And a dragon is an interesting representation because a dragon is something fearsome and predatory, but also something that contains the possibility of treasure. And so the underlying metaphor there is that what our consciousness confronts is something infinite in danger and possibility. Right, right. Which seems perfectly reasonable. And that the proper stance to adopt to that is one of something like a heroic endeavor towards fundamental truth, and that. That's the best way of contending with that. And you see echoes of that in Genesis, because God is also periodically characterized as the victor of the battle over Leviathan, for example, which looks like an analog of Tiamat. And so that's part of that heroic interaction with reality that characterizes, well, the logos. The spirit of the logos itself.
- [41:32]
Spencer Clavin
Right. The seething ocean of.
- [41:34]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah. Okay, so at the quantum level, so what. What's being discovered?
- [41:38]
Spencer Clavin
Right. Well, so this. I like to approach this through the debates that Niels Bohr used to have with Albert Einstein. So when quantum mechanics was first making itself known, first and foremost to these very men, among others, Bohr and Einstein were two of the great architects of quantum, along with Louis de Broglie and any number of. I mean, Max Planck we've already mentioned. But it's between Einstein and Bohr that this fundamental irreducible tension emerges, in which Bohr, sort of a Kantian philosopher, says, we're banging up here against the inherently unknowable to the human mind.
- [42:18]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right. Yeah.
- [42:19]
Spencer Clavin
These waves in that describe probabilities. This is Schrodinger's sort of. And Heisenberg also kind of managed to mathematically describe probability waves which tell you where a particle is likely to be, but never where it actually is not because we don't know, but because in some fundamental sense, it isn't in any of those positions. And this is Bohr's idea, right?
- [42:43]
Jordan Peterson
It's possibility.
- [42:44]
Spencer Clavin
It is possibility. And Heisenberg at one point wonderfully compares it to Aristotelian potentia this ancient times.
- [42:51]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, really?
- [42:52]
Spencer Clavin
Oh, yes.
- [42:52]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, really?
- [42:53]
Spencer Clavin
Oh, yes. Yes.
- [42:54]
Jordan Peterson
To potential.
- [42:54]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, to potential.
- [42:55]
Jordan Peterson
Oh, that's so important.
- [42:56]
Spencer Clavin
To pure. And so it brings back this old Aristotelian idea that the world is made of potential. Energea and the realization of potential. And so this is the Copenhagen interpretation, which basically says there are no holding places in your mind for that which is fundamentally unperceived. So Bohr is saying, of course, all of our measurements and observations are always going to be expressed in terms of classical mechanics, because they're going to be making contact with our minds, which are shaped like classical mechanics in some way. These categories like space and time, location and position, these are baked into our minds. This is where you get the Kant of it all. And Einstein wonderfully says, if this is true, then it's the end of physics, because to him, physics means it's deterministic. Yes, well, and it also means that mathematics describes directly a reality that is independent of us entirely, and that world can be blanketed over completely with these objective mathematical terms that describe whatever is most fundamentally real. And this dispute and its various tributaries are still going on today, which is one reason why this is such treacherous territory to venture into, because there's always going to be an alternative possible interpretation. But if you accept something like Bohr's interpretation, which I believe remains the most philosophically coherent way of dealing with these discoveries, then what you have is a situation very much like what you're describing in Genesis. Now, that doesn't mean that the author of Genesis was told by God about the Schrodinger equations. That's sort of right. That would be the sort of pseudoscience version of it. But it does mean that the pattern you're observing shot through Genesis, and as you indicate through the whole, whole Hebrew Bible, of God's mind as the resolver of a fundamentally unresolved possibility, the caster into order.
- [45:01]
Jordan Peterson
That's good. Or very good. Yes.
- [45:02]
Spencer Clavin
And the idea of us as essentially the image of God in us is essentially.
- [45:07]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, okay, well, so let me extend that supposition for a minute. So there's a field of possibility that lays in front of you, and it, in a way, it surrounds and constitutes all the objects. So, for example, this is a candle but not if I throw it at you. Okay. Right. Right. So there's a non zero possibility that one of the less probable manifestations of this object will occur.
- [45:36]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [45:36]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So then you might say, well, under what conditions does this remain a candle? Okay, well, that's very complicated because if I smash it, let's say, on the edge here now, it's a knife. Right. And it's just as much a potential knife as it is a continuing candle. Just as much. Not quite. Not quite just as much. Partly because we have established an ethical framework between us.
- [46:04]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [46:06]
Jordan Peterson
That's a set of our aims.
- [46:08]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [46:08]
Jordan Peterson
That define the manner in which we're going to leave the possibilities of that object as they predictably and non terrifyingly are. But that's entirely dependent on our. It's so interesting because it's dependent.
- [46:23]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [46:24]
Jordan Peterson
On our ethical aim. You can imagine a situation where you're in a bar where a beer bottle now becomes a spear or a club.
- [46:32]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [46:33]
Jordan Peterson
And so that's within that realm of possibility. Now, the reason that possibility doesn't or does manifest itself is very much dependent, well, partly on the intrinsic possibility of the object, but it also depends on the aim of the perceivers. If our conversation starts to deteriorate into the depths and we hit a fundamental place of disagreement and we regard each other as enemies in consequence, then we're likely to make some of the unpleasant possibilities that surround us much more likely to be manifest. And one of the things that indicates is that the manner in which the factual itself reveals itself is inextricably dependent on aim. Now, what the biblical texts insist upon in their. What their injunction that we should walk with God, is that if we oriented ourself towards the highest possible aim, and we did that consistently and without pride, then the manner in which the world would unfold would be the manner that is good or very good. And that only when we deviate from that heavenly orientation is it the case that the possibilities of the world that tilt it towards a more fallen or hellish state manifest themselves. So I've been thinking about this with regards to work. So, you know, when Adam and Eve succumb to the sin of pride, they want to usurp the highest place. Right under the temptation of the serpent, they fall. And God says, well, you're destined to toil and the world is going to bring forth obstacles, pricks, thorns, thistles to you.
- [48:23]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [48:24]
Jordan Peterson
Well, so I've been thinking about that a lot. It's like if your effort is toilsome and if the world you inhabit is Fallen. How much of that is a consequence of your pride and your misaligned aim and your refusal to walk with God? See, when God calls to Adam in the garden after Adam and Eve fall, yes, Adam hides from God, so he's alienated from the divine unity at that point. And he refuses to habitually walk with God as he had. So his aim is now seriously off, right? Tempted as he was by even the serpent, that's when burdensome toil enters the world. And so one of the things I've really been thinking about is this is something Job wrestles with too, is that the degree to which the possibilities of the world make themselves manifest as unjust suffering are in precise proportion to the misalignment of your aim. And you see that elaborated in the story of Cain and Abel, for example. Cain's aim is misaligned. Nothing works for him, right?
- [49:33]
Spencer Clavin
It makes him get the right sacrifice.
- [49:35]
Jordan Peterson
He can't get.
- [49:36]
Spencer Clavin
Here's something that I've been going through that initially will sound like a real crash down from the lofty heights of our conversation, but actually I think it embodies it almost exactly. It suddenly occurred to me that if instead of coming to my work with aspirations to some external reward, such as fame or money or any of these other things, which are good things, that we would want, I think, for our friends and all that. But if you leave all of that at the door and you just try to love things for the right reasons, that is, you try to love the good and invest yourself and your joy in the good of the task before you, everything transforms. The whole world transforms. Yes.
- [50:26]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, you know, that's actually. We can refer back to the neurophysiology. That's actually literally true. So the way your perceptions work is that you establish an aim and then the world appears to you as a pathway toward that aim, okay? And it's so. It's so subtle. So, for example, if I want to walk, If I decide that I want to walk across a room, yes. The fact that you're in the way now makes you tagged by my emotional systems as negative. The fact that I've established the aim of walking behind you makes you an obstacle. And the response to that is negative emotions. So it's so interesting. So you establish a name, a pathway opens up, okay? Now, that pathway is demarcated by obstacles and things that facilitate your movement forward. All the things that facilitate your movement forward are now positive to you. They invite, they fill you with enthusiasm, and everything that's an obstacle is tagged with negative Emotion. So you can see obstacle, facilitator, foe and friend. Right. Okay. So what it means is that not only do the phenomena of the world make themselves manifest to you as perceptions in relation to your aim, so do your emotions. Yeah, yeah. So then you think, so that starts to beg a question. If you're suffering, how much of that suffering is a consequence of misaligned aim? It's a seriously open question. Now, you talked about work.
- [52:02]
Spencer Clavin
Yes. Well, how much of your experience of the suffering, because I think that you will still experience what we would categorize as negative emotions, or at least that's been my own experience, is that in this state of attention toward the good for its own sake. It's not that all of the experiences we describe as toil, anxiety, disappointment, appointment. Not that those don't come. It's that precisely as you are suggesting, your interpretative framework for them has radically altered the way that they land with you.
- [52:33]
Jordan Peterson
Well, it's even more subtle than that. I say, well, take this situation of a football player who's injured. Well, in the important final game, when we have documentation of this occurs all the time. People will play with broken ankles or they'll play with broken thumbs. And do they feel the pain? It's like, it's very complicated because the emotions are being experienced at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. So at one level, because the digit or the ankle is damaged, there's interference, there's obstacle with regards to its local movement, and that's going to manifest itself as pain. But the overarching pattern of activity which is to continue with the game is directed towards a higher order and important goal that produces positive emotion. That's incentive reward, the same physiological response that cocaine produces. Cocaine is powerfully analgesic. So at one level of analysis, you've still got the pain.
- [53:44]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [53:44]
Jordan Peterson
But at another level, the fact that the activity that's causing pain is linked to a distal valuable goal produces a pharmacological counter position to the pain. And so. So what you have then, I think that's what we experience when we say something like that was difficult.
- [54:01]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [54:02]
Jordan Peterson
Painful, let's say anxiety provoking.
- [54:04]
Spencer Clavin
Sure.
- [54:04]
Jordan Peterson
But it was certainly worth it. So it's like proximally, yes. Pain distally, no. It was a pre. See, and this is kind of what Job decides. In the book of Job, Job makes the case that he will not allow his proximal suffering to demolish his essential faith in himself or his essential faith in the goodness of the spirit that underlies reality. And it's a call to courage. What the story of Job indicates, I believe, at least in part, is that no matter what happens to you in your life, no matter how deep the suffering is, your best stance is one of one that helps you maintain your faith. Your optimism in the essential goodness of yourself as a human being. And Job is portrayed as a good man in the text. Your essential faith in humanity itself and your distal faith in the ultimate benevolence of reality. Now it seems to me also that without that we wouldn't be able to move forward in difficult times, right? They would just stop us. And it's also the case that if you lose that faith, so let's say you're suffering and even unjustly, as occurred with Job, so you're being tortured and you don't know why, and it's hurting your faith. Let's say you do lose faith in yourself and you lose faith in God. You do what Job's wife tells him to do, which is to curse God and die, right? Right. It seems to me indisputable that all that does is open up a new hell under the one that you're already suffering. And it would be because you're already in pain and things are going badly for you and now you demolish your faith in that distal goal. Well then all of that pharmacological remediation that would go along with your sense that this is hard but worth it, that vanishes and there's nothing left but the theater of how did you choose.
- [56:01]
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- [57:31]
Jordan Peterson
Pain, I mean.
- [57:32]
Spencer Clavin
That condition that you described, that underneath you is a new hell deeper than the one you're in. That's exactly the condition of Satan in Milton's.
- [57:40]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, exactly.
- [57:42]
Spencer Clavin
Which way is hell? Myself am Hell. And under that another hell opens up. Right. And in fact, that's his pride, eh?
- [57:49]
Jordan Peterson
His pride and desire to usurp produces that.
- [57:52]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, right, yes.
- [57:53]
Jordan Peterson
And it's unwillingness to change in the face of. That's to bring a mind unchanged by time and place. Right, right, right.
- [58:00]
Spencer Clavin
And that is one of the things that Milton shares actually with Marlowe, Dr. Faust, Mephistopheles says, do you think, think thou, that I who saw the face of God can go anywhere now without pain, that having turned away from that distal goal you're describing, everything, even things that we would account pleasures, becomes sort of more pain.
- [58:22]
Jordan Peterson
That's what happens to Cain. Yes, I think is that Cain, in killing Abel in consequence of resentment, which is not the only way to respond to the failure of Cain's life. He chooses that. And God accuses him of choosing that, that he invites sin in to have its way with him. Cain decides to kill his ideal, right? Because Cain is bitter because he's not able. And so then he kills Abel. And then he says to God, my suffering is more than I can bear. It's like, well, obviously it's more than you can bear, because now you've demolished the very thing upon which your redemption, your salvation, your enthusiasm, your shielding from pain, depends. And he also is destined to become a wanderer. Right? So interesting. He's destined to become a wanderer of vagabond and in the land of Nod. It's so cool. So he's a wanderer for the Same reason that psychopaths are itinerant is that once you violate the implicit moral order, you have to seek out new victims because your reputation precedes you and no one will play with you. So you have to be a wanderer. That's the classic literary trope of the itinerant bad guy, right? He has to move from place to place because he. Okay. And then it's. He's a wanderer in the land of nod, which Robert Louis Stevenson associated with sleep and unconsciousness. It's like. Well, of course, because the way that people react to the evidence of their own criminality is to degenerate into unconsciousness. They allow themselves to become willfully blind.
- [59:55]
Spencer Clavin
So he's.
- [59:55]
Jordan Peterson
He's an un. He's a psychopathic wanderer in the land of unconsciousness with nothing but pain as his companion. That's very reminiscent of the figure of Satan in the Miltonic story. And, yes, you see that in Dante, too, that the image of the Inferno, there's a hell, yes. But underneath that there's another hell. And then underneath that there's another hell. And then in Dante, you do get to the bottom of things. It's betrayal, which I think is quite brilliant. That's what Dante identified as the cardinal malevolence of Satan. It's brilliant because betrayal inverts trust, right? And civilization depends on trust. Like love depends on trust, family depends on trust, your relationship with yourself depends on trust. And so people often become traumatized by a profound betrayal of trust. And so Dante got that right. But the idea that there are these descending levels of suffering with something ultimately malevolent at the bottom, that is a vision of hell. And it's. I think it's right. You know, in my clinical practice now and then, I would encounter people who had the deepest of existential problems. Like there were murderous impulses afoot in their household for multiple generations. Brutal situations. And in those situations, completely contaminated by thousands of lies, thousands of lies. We'd get to the bottom of something, terrible as that was, and then something new would open up that showed that where we had got was nowhere near the bottom yet, like an infinite landscape of faithless pain. Terrible.
- [61:39]
Spencer Clavin
Wow.
- [61:39]
Jordan Peterson
Terrible. Terrible thing to see.
- [61:41]
Spencer Clavin
And the. I mean, unimaginable. It's.
- [61:45]
Jordan Peterson
But you see this when in relationships, like, yeah, People often won't communicate with their wife or husband because they don't want to start an argument. And what happens is there's a surface disagreement, right? And that produces a certain amount of emotional tension, right? And then maybe you start to talk about it. And you find that under that there's a slightly more profound disagreement.
- [62:04]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [62:05]
Jordan Peterson
And you investigate that, and underneath that there's a slightly more profound disagreement. And people stop the inquiry when they hit the point of depth that they can no longer tolerate. Right. So here's a way of thinking about it. So imagine that your wife has had a history of a certain amount of abuse at the hands of men. That's a very common situation. And even more common, becoming even more common all the time. I don't believe that you don't know how much of whatever proximal disagreement you have is a consequence of some fundamental betrayal in her history, or even, I would say, the history of her mother, her aunts. Because people talk, you know, and these spirits of betrayal lurk and haunt across generations. And it's terrible to go down into the substructure of a specific disagreement because to solve it, you have to take a journey down to the depths. And you often discover a profound betrayal. You know how when you hash something out with someone you're close to.
- [63:12]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [63:13]
Jordan Peterson
Sometime during that process, it's very likely, if the conversation is sincere indeed, that someone will break into tears. Right, right.
- [63:20]
Spencer Clavin
Because.
- [63:21]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, exactly. That's a dissolution of their perceptions. Right. And a potential restructuring. I think that's what tears signify. And anyways, that is a descent into the abyss.
- [63:30]
Spencer Clavin
And Dante has so much to say here, too, with what he does, with what we would call gravity and the direction of gravity. So what happens when you get down to the bottom of the Inferno, past Judas, in the mouth of Satan, is that the world flips upside down and we move from Inferno to purgatorio. So they go past the pit of hell and begin to climb upwards toward paradise. But there's two stages to that, right? There's the stage where the weight, the gravity of the situation you're describing, that betrayal that has basically ripped the ground out from underneath you, that's still pulling you downward. And so everything is toil and exertion. It's kind of our condition that you work your way. You know, there's a reason, I think, that you call what you do doing the work, or work, you know, when you sit with people and kind of hash these things out, that by the time you get down to the bottom of it, you're sort of. Then your journey can begin. Right. Then you start to climb your way out. Yes. And once.
- [64:30]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, that's a symbolic death and rebirth, too.
- [64:33]
Spencer Clavin
Right. And then beautifully, magnificently, once you reach the pinnacle of purgatory, Then we move into the third of this sort of triptych that Dante is giving us, and that's paradise, where Beatrice descends to lift Dante up, and they start to move of their own accord at light speed, up toward the heavens, toward the planets. And she says to him, wonderfully, this is what it looks like to your human perception, but really, this is an allegory of what's going on with us, with us spiritually. She says, this is the force, the same force that carries fire up toward the stars is now carrying us up toward God. Because there's one love, the last line of the poem, the love that moves the sun and other stars. There's one motive force in the universe.
- [65:22]
Jordan Peterson
Right? So that's the monotheistic claim united with the notion that the fundamental unity is something positive and benevolent.
- [65:30]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, right. Which is.
- [65:31]
Jordan Peterson
See, I also think, and I talked to Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, about this recently. So tell me what you think about this, because one of the things I hashed out with Dawkins to some degree was the fact that in my estimation, and I think in his, the metaphysic that made science itself possible has been demolished. So, okay, so then I was thinking, now, he tends to lose in. He knows that, but he tends to lose interest in what that metaphysical demolition constitutes. So one of the things I've been trying to lay out is what is the metaphysics? What's the narrative frame of science itself? Now, Jung tried to figure this out, right? That's why Jung was so interested in alchemy. So, okay, so Jung's idea was that there was an unconscious fantasy emerged in counter position to the spiritualization of Christianity that highlighted a lurking possibility that still existed in the material world that hadn't been explored. And so that would be something like the call of the transmutation, that there's a substance, a material substance that could give us, make us healthy, that could grant us immortality, and that would transmute everything base into what was highest, lead into gold. Okay, so there's a potential in the material world that has that as its promise.
- [67:01]
Spencer Clavin
That's the treasure prime matter. Right.
- [67:03]
Jordan Peterson
Which is prima materia. Yes.
- [67:05]
Spencer Clavin
Which is exactly the thing with no qualities. It's the thing with the stripped bare of everything.
- [67:09]
Jordan Peterson
Okay, so Jung's proposition was that there had to be a fantasy very widely distributed, that there was something of immense value still lurking in the material world. Before the scientific enterprise could get started, you need a motivation for spending your whole life analyzing the mating habits of fruit flies, because it isn't something that has Obvious immediate motivational or emotional significance. It has to be linked to something else. Okay, so what's it linked to? Well, here, tell me what you think about this. And this is also why I think that science, which is another problem Jung was trying to solve. Why did science emerge in Europe and once. Right. What were the preconditions? Okay, so let's lay this out. Tell me what you think. The cosmos has a logos, so it has an order. Okay, fair enough. The order is intelligible to the mind of man. Okay. The order is good, such that understanding it better makes things better, not worse. Contrary, let's say, to the story of Frankenstein. Right, right.
- [68:13]
Spencer Clavin
You're not going to uncover man made horrors beyond your comprehension.
- [68:16]
Jordan Peterson
Exactly. That's right. Or you build a technological, technological enterprise like Prometheus that dooms you. That can happen. The idea would be that wouldn't happen if your aim was true. Okay. And then the final piece of the puzzle is that through the dedic, through dedicated submission to that logos, you can explore in a manner that reveals it. And that will be redemptive to you as a scientist, but also broadly beneficial. Okay. Those look to me like the metaphysical, necessary metaphysical foundations of science. Because. And none of them, those are starting points, they're game rules. Like you can't get to those within the scientific enterprise. They have to be laid down. Now I think they were laid down fundamentally in the Judeo Christian system. Right. Is that there is a logos to the world, that logos is apprehensible to man, that it's fundamentally good, that you can approach it in the proper spirit. And if you do, that'll be redemptive.
- [69:11]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [69:12]
Jordan Peterson
This is why, although I don't think Dawkins knows and I tried to push him on this, I think this is why he found himself compelled to state relatively recently that he was a cultural Christian.
- [69:21]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [69:22]
Jordan Peterson
And I pushed him on that. I said, okay, well that implies that the Christians got something right. What? He's like, we got nowhere with that. We got nowhere with that.
- [69:33]
Spencer Clavin
So I don't know if you're familiar with the three body problem that the. Not the Chinese science fiction novel made a big splash as a Netflix series recently, but it's the novels that really grapple with what you are talking about. And what's so remarkable about this series to me is that unlike a lot of American science fiction, you get Star Trek, Star wars, which kind of give you this misty secular pseudoscience where it's the midichlorians that hold things together, or it's Our humanist values in Star Trek. In this trilogy of novels, remembrance of Earth's Past, the first book is named after, famously, an unresolvable problem in astrophysics. In Newtonian mechanics, if you have three bodies mutually attracting each other, it's impossible to lay out a logos exactly what you're describing. That is a consistent system that can be reduced to abstract principles comprehended by the human mind, and then used to fly to outer space to navigate through whatever situation you find yourself in. And the reason that Shi Xin Liu named began with this is because he is genuinely peering into the abyss of what science looks like. Once you pull the rug of those five principles out from underneath us, that there you might hit a point at which actually the whole structure of reality simply scrambles your monkey brain. It just doesn't compute inside of us because we no longer have this conviction that the imprint on our brain is effectively the hand of God. And so that's the same imprint that writ large is pressed across the whole universe. When Newton came up with his laws, there was a widespread belief, derived from Aristotle, that there were two sets of rules for the physical world. It was called the superlunary and the sublunary spheres. And that it was named that because the barrier was supposed to be at the moon, where the moon's orbit is there starts to obtain a whole new set of laws. And the reason people thought this was quite reasonable is that you look at the stars and they're following these very regular patterns that we can chart and know more and more through observations. You look at things around here, they don't move like that kind of clockwork, surely. You get stones falling to the earth, you get fire moving up into the air. And so people thought they're just a different. Christians would say fallen order down here. And there is a pristine reason. Logos, music of the spheres. Yes. Operating, even perhaps the angels are pushing them around, whatever. And what.
- [72:13]
Jordan Peterson
As opposed to forces as opposed to exactly. Right, yes.
- [72:16]
Spencer Clavin
This is a big. In my. In my book, I call them ghosts in exile because they write. And this idea is what. When Newton comes out with the Principia for the first time, we now think, oh, he discovered gravity. Yes, of course, he outlines the way of calculating the force of gravity between two masses. But at a much, much deeper level, what he does is he shatters the barrier between the sublunar and the superlunar.
- [72:42]
Jordan Peterson
Spheres, because now, showing an underlying unity.
- [72:44]
Spencer Clavin
Right, here's the three rules that will govern not only the arc of a comet across the sky, but the descent of an apple from a tree. Why did Newton have any right to expect that he could do that? Why were people working on that problem at that time? It's because of the assumptions that you're describing that the world is not only organized according to a logos, which is sort of the pagan claim that we talked about in Greece, but also that that logos is answerable to the patterns that are in our minds. However they came about. You talk about evolution, you talk about whatever, but we now have, and this is what we experience them as. It's dishonest, I think, to describe our experience of these principles as anything else. When we see math, we think we're looking at something universally valid and that. Something that not only hangs together in our brains, but will also send a rocket ship to Mars one day. And that's because of this faith.
- [73:43]
Jordan Peterson
And that is something like. That is something like a transposed monotheistic faith.
- [73:47]
Spencer Clavin
Exactly.
- [73:47]
Jordan Peterson
It's the notion that at the foundation or at the pinnacle, there is an ultimate unity in which resides all things in the absence of contradiction.
- [73:58]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, Right. So now we're up against. We wouldn't recognize it this way, but we're up against another superlunary sublunary barrier, and that is the puzzle of how to reconcile relativity with. With quantum mechanics. And I know that you've talked to scientists about this on your podcast, and I would. I would say, of course, that, like, I am not going to be the person that resolves this puzzle, but from the outside, as a scholar of the history of science and also a classicist, I can see that this is the exact same issue. This is two realms that answer to two different and contradictory set of. Apparently contradictory set of laws. And scientists are currently hammering away, some of them working in string theory, others and other versions of, you know, quantum gravity and so forth, are hammering away at that barrier.
- [74:41]
Jordan Peterson
Right under the presumption that they're through. Yes, exactly. That the fact that they can't detect the unity is actually a consequence of their ignorance, not of the fact that reality itself is disjointed.
- [74:54]
Spencer Clavin
That there's a fab. There's a seam in the fabric that we will never bring back together. Or alternatively, that there's a seam in our minds that we can never reconcile that there's something. I mean, you need both of these convictions. And I think that anybody that does science is still operating on these convictions, even if outwardly they would deny it.
- [75:11]
Jordan Peterson
Well, if the hypothesis of Jung is true in the broad sense, and that, see, it implies something very interesting that I also Saw as a practicing scientist. So I was involved and still am, in a lot of research enterprises.
- [75:27]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [75:27]
Jordan Peterson
The production of approximately the equivalent of 30 PhDs, it's something like that. And I watched scientists who were genuine scientists and scientists who were careerists and hucksters and I watched how they operate. And it's so interesting because the scientists that actually discover something of value, and I would say the ones that have the deepest careers and the best relations with their students, the ones that are on the right path, yeah, they're suffused by religious ethos and it's very deep. So I spent a lot of time, I wouldn't say mastering statistics because I'm no statistical genius, but understanding how to conduct a statistical analysis well enough so that I could do it and actually do it and actually understand it.
- [76:20]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [76:21]
Jordan Peterson
And one of the things that I realized was like if you have a spreadsheet that's full of data, a hundred thousand data points, let's say there is an indefinite number of ways that you can apprehend that matrix that you can see it. Right. There's all the possible combinations of the numbers in the matrix.
- [76:39]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [76:40]
Jordan Peterson
Okay. So then out of that you can draw a discovery, let's say, that's revealed in the patterns. But you cannot do that as a homeowner.
- [76:50]
C
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- [78:06]
Jordan Peterson
If your orientation to the spreadsheet is the progression of your career, the pathways that make themselves manifest in the numbers will be those that further your career. So this is part of the problem of replicability.
- [78:19]
Spencer Clavin
So hacking. Right. This is a factor.
- [78:21]
Jordan Peterson
Exactly. You can do an infinite number of correlational analysis and if you do 100 of them, five of them will be statistically significant. Well, you can just ignore the fact that 95% of them weren't and report on those 5%. And the thing is, there's a profound pull to do that because in any given experiment you might have to. Any given experiment you might have devoted two years of your life for a graduate student, the success of the analysis might determine whether or not they get their PhD. Like, there's a lot at stake. And so then you might say, well, why not just discover within the matrix of numbers the pathway that furthers your career?
- [79:01]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [79:01]
Jordan Peterson
And the answer to that is, well, that's a complicated problem. It's like, is there anything other than self promotion? Well, I told my students, if you allow your careerist interests to determine the decisions you make when you're conducting your statistics, which will be well hidden from everyone else, but also from yourself, one of the negative consequences is that, well, you betray the spirit of science and so you pull the rug out from underneath yourself, but you also convince yourself of the existence of a delusion that you might then chase for the rest of your life. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's so interesting, and this is something that scientists don't really concentrate on. It's like, how do you inculcate in the scientific investigator the ethos that produces the desire to search for truth and not career success, let's say, at every micro level of the scientific endeavor. And I think that once the scientific endeavor becomes sufficiently dissociated from its underlying Judeo Christian narrative, there is no protection against that. And I also think that's why the scientific enterprise is corrupting so rapidly.
- [80:17]
Spencer Clavin
Well, what is the greatest example of the phenomenon you're describing that's recently been in the public eye? I would argue it's Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court saying, citing a study that black babies have better health outcomes when they're in danger if they go to black doctors. And she cites this in defense of all sorts of things like affirmative action and race conscious preferences in hiring and so forth. Now I doubt, I rather doubt that Ketanji Brown Jackson realizes this, but that's a Junk study. And it's a junk study for exactly the reason that you're describing, which is that there's a hidden variable, and the hidden variable is birth weight.
- [80:58]
Jordan Peterson
Infinite number of hidden variables.
- [81:00]
Spencer Clavin
Exactly. But the, the one that really counts here is birth weight. So when babies have a lower or dangerous birth weight, they are more likely to be taken to white doctors, whatever the reason for that is. And so in that case, they'll have worse health outcomes because you're dealing with.
- [81:18]
Jordan Peterson
More of the specialists are white.
- [81:20]
Spencer Clavin
Yes, right. The author.
- [81:22]
Jordan Peterson
That's why. Well, that's. So much of medical science and social science is corrupted by the fact of specious correlations.
- [81:31]
Spencer Clavin
Yes. And this, the authors of the study were aware of this variable and as were the reviewers, and discounted it purposefully. So it's an instance of exactly the sort of thing that you are describing, of filtering out that data. And yes, in that context, of course, science, real science, the handmaiden of knowledge, one of the most ancient and beautiful human practices, is going to become the science. Capital T, capital S, and endorse Kamala Harris in Scientific Americans. Because then you've got to serve something right? You've got to attach this enterprise to some sort of, sort of purpose.
- [82:08]
Jordan Peterson
So then you might ask, as a mentor to scientists, well, I'm telling you to do something difficult. I'm saying that if the data reveals, for example, that your study is flawed fatally, you're going to have to accept that. If the study indicates that the hypothesis upon whose promotion you've staked your reputation is wrong, you're going to have to admit that and you're going to have to suffer the consequences of both of those. Maybe you won't get your PhD. Maybe you'll have to do another series of studies. Maybe your career won't advance properly. Maybe you'll be humiliated as a consequence of your previous claims. Okay, so then you might say, well, if that's the cost, then, well, why not just falsify? This is the temptation of the lie, constantly. Why not just falsify? And I would say on the positive side, the negative side is, well, that's wrong, and maybe you'll get caught and that'll be a catastrophe and the abyss is there and all of that. But you could say, well, I don't care, like Raskolnikov says in Crime and Punishment, I'm not going to get caught, so we're not worried about that. And if I can lie to further my career, then so be it. Okay, so then you might say, well, why not do that. Because I think the question isn't ever why lie? The question always is, why not lie? And in the scientific realm, what you sacrifice, if you deceive yourself and others in the service of your career, is the discovery of the concordance between your soul and the logos of the world. Because there isn't anything more enthusiasm provoking than actually discovering something new. And it's because you get a sense of the eternal harmony between things. You think, oh, that realization, which is a new form of truth, is of so much value that the price I paid for that sacrifice, my old presumptions that my career has taken a strange path as I pursue the truth. That's irrelevant in comparison to the profundity of. I think it's the establishment of that harmony between soul and cosmos. It's something like that.
- [84:21]
Spencer Clavin
It's raw joy. I mean, that's the treasure in the field of man self.
- [84:24]
Jordan Peterson
That's right. That's the pearl of great price. That's exactly right.
- [84:27]
Spencer Clavin
One of the most striking things you said to me in Athens was you told the story of realizing that most of what you said early on in your career you didn't believe or you didn't have the reason to believe, or there was there was some element of dishonesty, of lies.
- [84:43]
Jordan Peterson
Yes.
- [84:44]
Spencer Clavin
And you said, I decided to tell the truth and see where it would take me. And that whatever happens to you because of the truth is going to be better than anything else, even if you don't know it.
- [84:58]
Jordan Peterson
I think that's really the conclusion that Job draws. And it's also the act of faith that Abraham performs when he makes his multitude of sacrifices. Because God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure. Right. God comes to say to Abraham, you're content and satiated, but that's not enough. Leave everything behind.
- [85:22]
Spencer Clavin
That's right.
- [85:23]
Jordan Peterson
Well, why? Well, okay, so now Abraham agrees he's going to do this. So he follows the divine path of adventure. Now he has to make sequential sacrifices as he moves up because he has to dispense with what's no longer appropriate. As his capacity expands, he transforms so radically that he gets a new name. Right. And he kind of encounters every adventure in the world as he grows. And that's also what makes him the father of nations. So he starts. It's so cool. It's such a great idea. The idea is that the forthright adherence to the clarion call of divine adventure is the same pathway that radically increases what the evolutionary biologists would describe as reproductive success, construed over a very long period. Of time. But it makes sense, right? Imagine that you have that your deepest instinct pulls you out into the world beyond your zone of comfort and impels you to develop. Well, obviously that's going to make you more attractive to people of the opposite sex. But then also, obviously, if you're a contender in that manner, you can wrestle with serpents, you can handle serpents without being bitten, and you teach your children that. Well, you established that ethos of divine patriarchy. That's a good way of thinking about it. Well, why wouldn't your descendants be numerous and take over the world, so to speak? That's the promise of the covenant in the Old Testament.
- [86:58]
Spencer Clavin
Oh, yeah. I mean, this is. All these things shall be added unto you.
- [87:01]
Jordan Peterson
Right.
- [87:02]
Spencer Clavin
All the stuff that you just talked about that you give up, all your career advancement, all your readiness to throw yourself at the feet of the first person that's going to give you a Nobel Prize or whatever shiny thing you're chasing after, you've got to get rid of all of that in order to seek the kingdom of heaven first, in order to love the good for its own sake. That stripping that you're describing in sacrifice is kind of.
- [87:24]
Jordan Peterson
Well, and Christ extends that because he says that also that extends beyond your commitments to career, let's say, or even to the benefits of life, more abundant and material prosperity. Said you also have to do that even in relationship to your own family. Right. Is that every single thing that's good has to be sacrificeable to the highest possible good.
- [87:48]
Spencer Clavin
Exactly. And then out of that source will arise all the other goods.
- [87:52]
Jordan Peterson
That's why Abraham gets Isaac back, as far as I'm concerned. Right. Because he's willing to offer his son to the same process that impelled him out of his immature satiation. He offers his son fully and the consequence of that is he gets them back.
- [88:08]
Spencer Clavin
Right? Yeah.
- [88:09]
Jordan Peterson
And I think that's exactly right, is that I do believe that, and I see that all the time, is that the more you try to conserve your children and pull them to you and shelter them from the adventure of their life, the more they're going to struggle to get away with you, from you and to have nothing to do with you. And if instead you throw them out into the world, then that paradoxically increases the probability that you'll establish a relationship with them that will be sustainable through the entire course of your existence.
- [88:39]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah. Well, I suspect that there's a reason why it's Christ who does this, because this is, I think, also what God does in endowing Adam and Eve with the ability to choose to rebel. If you think of God as knowing in advance that he's bringing these creatures into the world, you know, in the Quran, the choice on God's part to create man is greeted with utter bewilderment by the angels. They say, why would you bring into the world this creature that is going to spread bloodshed in the land when you already have perfect spiritual beings, us, the angels, to worship you and sing your praises at all times? And God in the Quran just says, I know what you do not know. He basically responds that it's a mystery. But I suspect that the answer to this in the Christian tradition is God desires you around so much that he is willing to let you go, that he's willing to put you in the garden, as Milton says, sufficient to have stood, but free to fall. Right, right. And that this is the sort of primordial fatherly act that you're describing in your own.
- [89:45]
Jordan Peterson
It's the essence of. Of what we mean when we say father. Yes, right, Father. The word father implies a commonality of spirit across all instantiations of fatherhood.
- [89:56]
Spencer Clavin
Right.
- [89:57]
Jordan Peterson
So then you might say, well, father as a category imp implies an essence of. An essential element of the patriarchy could be power. That's not a great way of establishing relationship with your children. It could instead be something like encouragement of courage and faith in the ability of your children to contend with whatever comes their way and not to shield them from it, knowing that they will expand in the most optimal manner if they face their challenges forthrightly.
- [90:34]
Spencer Clavin
Yes. I think the confusion of this with power and of course can be abused and turned into a power.
- [90:39]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, of course.
- [90:40]
Spencer Clavin
No question. But to say that because of that, it simply is fatherhood or patriarchy is oppression, that is the exertion of force over another is.
- [90:50]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, that's where the postmodernists went way off the rails. Well, it's Foucault in particular.
- [90:54]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [90:54]
Jordan Peterson
It's all power. It's like, that's pretty goddamn convenient for you, buddy. You know, when I see that terrible alliance with hedonism. Right. If your orientation is just to get what the narrowest part of you wants. Now think about sexual hedonism in that regard. And that's particularly relevant to Foucault, as far as I'm concerned. It's like, well, why do you want power? Well, so that people will do what you compel them to do. Okay, well, what do you want to compel them to do? Well, obviously, if you have to compel them to do Something it's going to be radically to your benefit and not at all to theirs, because that's the only situation under which force would be required. Like if I make you a good deal, I don't have to use power. So power is the handmaiden of hedonism, fundamentally. And hedonism is the sacrifice of others to your short term whims. Yeah, that's no principle on which to found the world. And that doesn't even work for chimpanzees, by the way.
- [91:51]
Spencer Clavin
Really.
- [91:51]
Jordan Peterson
Franz de Waal showed this quite clearly. If you track the stability of chimp patriarchies across time, the rulers who exert force die a bitter and premature end because their underlings rebel and in a moment of weakness tear the tyrant to shreds.
- [92:10]
Spencer Clavin
It's like something out of ma.
- [92:12]
Jordan Peterson
Definitely.
- [92:13]
Spencer Clavin
I think we discussed this in Athens. This is what Plato describes as the tyrant. Because what have you done? The minute you've forced somebody into doing your will, you've effectively made that person into an appendage of your own soul. You've turned them into some part of.
- [92:28]
Jordan Peterson
The world, even the worst elements of your own soul.
- [92:30]
Spencer Clavin
Certainly, certainly. So you live in a world now that increasingly, to the extent that you have power over, it includes only you.
- [92:38]
Jordan Peterson
You are inherently the most narrow part of you. So that's a very good description of hell is that what you're doing first is you're allowing yourself to be possessed by your most immature and self centered momentary whims. Those are your God now. You need to use power because other people won't go along with that. Just like kids at a playground won't go along with the bossy kid who only wants to play his game. Right. So this is also. So we found that the dark, so called dark triad traits, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, they clump together. That conceptualization had to be expanded to include sadism, which is the positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. And I think the reason for that is that if you start to instrumentalize other people and they go along with it or are unable to withstand your tyrannical force, you end up absolutely contemptuous of them. And not least because their acquiescence to your idiot hedonistic tyranny makes you suffer terribly. Like they're not standing up to you and setting you right. And so you start to. Just like this is what happened to Hitler, who ended his life with full contempt for the German people for not being the sort of people who deserved his stellar leadership. Right, right. Well, Berlin was Burning and Europe was in runes, right?
- [94:04]
Spencer Clavin
I mean, that thing there's hell.
- [94:06]
Jordan Peterson
That's a good image of hell.
- [94:08]
C
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- [95:01]
Spencer Clavin
Absolutely. Now, the thing that you said about Cain and Abel, that in order to escape his sense of inferiority, Abel destroys his ideal. Ideal?
- [95:11]
Jordan Peterson
You bet.
- [95:11]
Spencer Clavin
I mean, I've often thought about what we call wokeness as a kind of global war on archetypes. Right. It's like this. Your beauty standards make me feel bad.
- [95:20]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, absolutely.
- [95:21]
Spencer Clavin
So in, instead of addressing that through my own personal change, I'm going to try to basically tear the whole fabric of spiritual reality or absolute truth or something down out of the sky.
- [95:35]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, well, and the ethos underneath that is something like any axis of comparison where I'm lesser has to be demolished. Now part of the reason that's so self devouring is, well, let's say you're a young person who's not particularly attractive. Okay. That's, that's a trouble. And the attractive, the beauty standard is an ideal and a judge.
- [95:55]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [95:56]
Jordan Peterson
And a harsh one. But then you think, well, you're young, like there's an undeserved advantage and there's a multitude of dimensions on which you're unfairly healthy compared to many people in the world. You're going to subvert the terrible standards of the judge until none of those differences remain. Well, I think that's why you get in the communist societies a degeneration into. Well, everyone's equal.
- [96:24]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [96:24]
Jordan Peterson
With nothing.
- [96:25]
Spencer Clavin
Well, right.
- [96:26]
Jordan Peterson
That's where you make people equal is when everyone has nothing.
- [96:29]
Spencer Clavin
You know where this is really beautifully depicted is in the screwtape letters, C.S. lewis's sort of letters from demons to one another. He basically makes of them a Totalitarian society describes hell as a totalitarian society. There's this wonderful moment where, you know, Screwtape is writing to Wormwood, his. I believe it's his nephew, so the younger demon, and he's coaching him. And at one point he says, the thing that most confounds us about the enemy that is God is that he really does love the little vermin, that is. This is the thing we cannot understand.
- [97:01]
Jordan Peterson
That's. By definition, yes, by definition, right.
- [97:04]
Spencer Clavin
And in his. In his fatherly nature and in his definition as God. In the next letter, he says, I hope you haven't shown my letters to anybody, because, of course, if I were taken to mean that there really is such a thing as love, that would be heresy and I would be very much condemned in Hell. Love is impossible. We in hell know that love is impossible because everything expands by eating up what is around it.
- [97:31]
Jordan Peterson
Right, right, right. That's the rapacious hordes of devastating mankind motivated by nothing other than power, which was really, as far as I'm concerned, a complete confession on the part of Foucault. It's like, really, there's nothing but power, eh? Really? That's what you think. That's what you think about everyone. And there's no actual dialogue between people. There's just the competition between plays for power. That's your world. You're definitely, yeah, you might be successful, Mr. Foucault, but that just made you the biggest devil in hell. And that's a pretty weird definition of success. And it's. There's something even more pathological about that, because if there is no game but power, so there's no love, let's say, if there is no game but power, I'm a fool to do anything but play a power game with you. And I'm also a fool not to win. Right. At whatever cost. Right, right. And so that's, I think, the unconscious motivation that underlies the claim that the ruler of the earthly realm is the spirit of power. It's like, okay, if that's the case, then clearly, if I can, I should. Now, I know as a clinician, if you're the kind of person who thinks I can, and therefore I should, I should get the hell away from you as rapidly as possible, because that is the core proclamation of the possessed psychopath. It's like, you are nothing but a field of opportunities, not only for me, but for my deepest, darkest, and most fragmented desires. Yeah, well, that's that legion of devils that constitutes hell.
- [99:05]
Spencer Clavin
And the idea that this is that this force or Satan is the prince of the world basically sets us up to understand ourselves as either slipstreaming into that logic, operating according to our most based desires, dissolving ourselves effectively into raw material power, or positing the existence of a separate principle from the raw mechanical workings of the material world.
- [99:36]
Jordan Peterson
Well, I think the Old and New Testaments are investigations into what that alternative to power is. And I think you can sum it up. Actually, it took a long time to figure out how to sum it up. Well, it's something like the spirit of voluntary self. Sacramento sacrifice. Right. Because the biblical stories are an investigation into what sacrifices best please God. Right. It's a millennia long investigation. What is the right work, which is the same thing as the right sacrificial pattern. And there isn't anything more diametrically opposed to the claim of power than the proclamation that the proper community is founded on the highest possible spirit of voluntary self sacrifice. And that is what's emblematic about the crucifixion. So God himself sacrifices himself as voluntarily to hoist the future and the community onto his shoulders.
- [100:32]
Spencer Clavin
It's like.
- [100:32]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, that's a complete inversion of the notion of power.
- [100:35]
Spencer Clavin
Absolutely.
- [100:36]
Jordan Peterson
And I think I can't see how you can possibly claim that the healthy community can in fact be founded on anything other than sacrifice. I mean, to the degree that you love your wife, you give up everything that's only local to you for the relationship that's sacrificial, that's what you do with your children, it's what you do with your friends that is the antithesis of power. Yes. I think the postmodernist realization, unconscious though it may be, that Christianity is directly opposed to the postmodernist claim that power rules is the ultimate driving force of the culture war. That's what it looks like to me.
- [101:18]
Spencer Clavin
Absolutely. And what you're describing, in one sense, of course, it's the most functional thing in the world because it's the only way to found a healthy community. In the other sense that we've been talking about more, it's extremely inexpedient to propose that you should leave, you should shelve all of these immediate desires that you have and trust. Right. Believe that you're going on the other side of that to receive blessing.
- [101:44]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right, definite. Well, I don't. I actually don't think there's any difference between that and cortical maturation.
- [101:50]
Spencer Clavin
Okay.
- [101:51]
Jordan Peterson
Well, because, you know, you start out in the world as a plethora of competing impulses. Right. And those are integrated across time by Your development of the ability to share. Right. To engage in reciprocal action. And by your ability to forego immediate gratification so that you can stabilize the future. And it takes. It's cortical maturation that allows that to occur on the physiological plane. It's like these. And it isn't the Freudian repression of the motivations and the emotions. It's the integration of the motivations and emotions that's their subduing. Right. That Adam's called upon to do. It's their integration that makes them a higher order unity. That is, in fact, the best way of even providing for those motivational systems what they want in the broadest range of places and across the longest span of time.
- [102:44]
Spencer Clavin
Does that include that cortical maturation, the establishment of these sort of perceptual categories that we've been talking about. That is the building of the pathways that would enable us to do things like. Look at this glass.
- [102:59]
Jordan Peterson
Well, it is. So imagine that as you mature as a child, if you're properly socialized, so you become an increasingly desirable play partner, which is like the definition of proper socialization. All the categories that you automatize so that become part of your. Not only your character, but your physiology are categories that you build as you pursue that aim. Right. It become what you. This is true neurophysiologically, you bloody well become what you practice. Right. And you practice in accordance with your aim. Right? So the aim, that's the Jacob's ladder story. The aim should be to the ineffable that reigns above everything supreme. Right? Right.
- [103:44]
Spencer Clavin
So in a sense, the whole conversation kind of comes full circle. If you think about. We've talked about so many things, and yet we're really talking. I think about one thing, and this is what I mean when I say that the Book of Genesis at this very profound level provides you with this template that you can use to understand and interpret any number of things you talk about. Like, you know, is it about quantum physics? No, it's not about quantum physics. But is quantum physics uncovering in the material sphere the pattern that we also uncover in the psychological sphere that we also uncover?
- [104:18]
Jordan Peterson
Well, that's what you'd expect if there's an underlying unity. Is that the most ancient story, stories of mankind, the orienting stories from a multitude of different cultures. Would dovetail with what we're actually discovering about reality. I mean, what's the counter hypothesis?
- [104:34]
Spencer Clavin
Right. That this is all just. I mean, the counter hypothesis is the postmodern.
- [104:37]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, right. Or even the Enlightenment idea that that's all superstition that is now being supplanted by this rationalist orientation.
- [104:43]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah.
- [104:44]
Jordan Peterson
All right, well, that's good. That's a good place to stop. I think what we'll do on the Daily Wire side, for those of you who are watching and listening, I think what I'll do is I'll interrogate Spencer further about his new book, let's Walk Through It. And I would also like to find out as we walk through the book why those topics interested in you, you know, why they gripped you and compelled you. And so let's, we can do an analysis of the book, but also a psychological analysis of the motivations underneath it. So let's do that. All right, so thank you everyone for watching and listening and thank you. It's very nice to see you again. That was, that was fun. There's something new being born. You know, it's, it's, it's really something powerful to see. I can see it making itself manifest everywhere. And it is. Whatever's going to. We're either going to devolve into a world that is in fact ruled by the spirit of power, like the Chinese society, for example, with the all seeing eye of Sauron everywhere, or we're going to reevaluate our wisdom and pull out of it what we need to move forward properly. And you know, you can see that those two proclivities battling at the moment. But I see more and more reason to be optimistic. So we can all pray for that if we have any sense because the alternative is pretty damn dreadful or even unimaginably dreadful. Yes.
- [106:04]
Spencer Clavin
But I see the light breaking too, actually. I think, I know you've been thinking, thinking a lot about the Tower of Babel story lately and the Chinese system that you're describing sounds a lot like the kinds of Near Eastern societies that I think. The Tower of Babel story.
- [106:17]
Jordan Peterson
Yes, yes, definitely. It's the Eternal Babylon.
- [106:19]
Spencer Clavin
Eternal Babylon. And I also feel, despite the apparent darkness around us, I look at, for example, Ayon, Hirsi Ali. I think about, you know, Neil Ferguson. Yes. Who are sort of excavating.
- [106:33]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [106:34]
Spencer Clavin
These.
- [106:34]
Jordan Peterson
Russell Brand, for that matter.
- [106:36]
Spencer Clavin
It's every. As you say, it's in many different.
- [106:38]
Jordan Peterson
That's for sure.
- [106:39]
Spencer Clavin
It's a kind of revival.
- [106:40]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah.
- [106:40]
Spencer Clavin
And it's something that a lot of people have been praying for actually for a long time. Something that has to happen organically from the ground up. I think something we don't necessarily understand or we wish weren't true is that you can't hammer this down into people's minds.
- [106:55]
Jordan Peterson
That's Moses Sin.
- [106:56]
Spencer Clavin
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Right.
- [106:58]
Jordan Peterson
Too heavy use of the rod.
- [106:59]
Spencer Clavin
Yes.
- [107:00]
Jordan Peterson
Yeah, yeah. All right, sir. Well, thank you very much.
- [107:02]
Spencer Clavin
Thank you.
- [107:02]
Jordan Peterson
It was lovely talking to you today. Much appreciated. And and to all of you watching and listening, we appreciate your time and your attention. Bye.