Synthesis
I come from a LDS religious background yet my faith became much more nuanced around six years ago. I never stopped believing in God's existence, yet I no longer view him as an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being, and therefore became theistically non-religious. Being faced with the idea that God is no longer a reliable source of truth, I needed to find new grounding for my beliefs. I have appreciated many of the perspectives of modern atheists because of how committed they are to grounding themselves on a rational and reliable truth. Yet, something about their ideology seems lacking. [As of 2021, I am now an atheist, but I wasn't at the time of writing this on Facebook, 8/19/2020. I was more of an agnostic at this time.]
In facing my adversity with disabling chronic pain and fatigue due to scoliosis, I have had to reevaluate my principles and rediscover what I believe to be true about the meaning of life. Jordan Peterson has played a large role in inspiring me to find new ways to rediscover meaning. In order to give myself the psychological strength to face such serious health issues I was forced to dive into the belly of the whale of my religious tradition and resurrect some religious principles that I might have left behind had I decided on following the path of a pure non-theistic rationalist.
Jordan Peterson's style of rational religiosity gave me hope that there might be a way to bridge the gap between atheists and theists if we can give up the dogmas of religion and focus on the project of rationally rebuilding religion by reevaluating which religious principles are beneficial and which are deleterious.
I have found certain religious principles to be very empowering because they redefine my circumstance in terms that are more motivating and endurable. Do any of you think that it might be possible to unite the religious with the atheists under a new type of rational religion? Is a modern synthesis possible, and if so, desirable?
https://youtu.be/wTM0lcUaWX0
Rational Religion Here is my summary of this analysis of Jordan Peterson's religious project:
To the question "Do you believe in God?" Jordan Peterson often replies, "I don't like that question". Jordan Peterson rejects the reductive analysis of religion that both the religious and secular are guilty of, meaning he doesn't want to limit religion to a pure literal interpretation of their texts. Jordan Peterson speaks of God within psychological metrics. He focuses on the psychological function of the idea of God, rather than the phenomenology of God.
He talks of God as an abstracted representation of the principles that should guide our behavior, an abstracted ideal for the proper mode of being in personified form. His philosophy is linked to the philosopher Hegel who believed that a rational principle ("the spirit") would guide humanity through the process of a dialectic discussion where truth evolved out of conflicting ideas. Trying to map a system of morality would be imperfect at first, but as ideas get refined through the process of argument and counterargument, thesis and antithesis, eventually a pure rational principle would be revealed in some future time, to which there would be no counterargument. This pure rational principle is equated to discovering God. Therefore, under this philosophical framework, God is not the God revealed in past iterations of religious logic but rather the conclusion of the entire theological project. Dogmatic literalism is the enemy of this religious philosophy. Accordingly, humanity needs to recognize this feature of God as an evolutionary meme and transcend the historical definitions of God in order to come closer to that pure rational principle.
Similarly, Jordan Peterson argues for an evolutionary principle of God based on religious syncretism where an ever-evolving principle of God is developed in the continuous iteration of dialectic conflict over generations of tribal interactions. For example, when tribe A has a God with a principle X, and tribe B has a god with a principle Y, when the two tribes are merged through diplomacy, the concept of God will evolve into an XY based God. Gods who contain faulty or deleterious principles will inadvertently guide their believers into an early Darwinian demise, and therefore only the most successful (truthful) aggregations of principles will be passed on to the next generation.
Sociologically speaking, Jordan Peterson’s ideology is similar to Ludwig Feuerbach. God is the absolutification (infinitization) of the strengths of man and solution to man’s weaknesses by abstraction. Power, knowledge, and love are all strengths of the ideal man, and when taken to the theological conclusion, God is infinite in power, knowledge, and love, in other words, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
Ludwig Feuerbach believes that God is the anthropomorphized essence of nature (personified nature). Jordan Peterson splits with Ludwig on this point, viewing God as the abstracted antithesis to nature, or a set of principles that address the problem of nature. But in both conceptualizations, the psychological function of the concept of God is to solve the fundamental problem of human existence such as - "What is the meaning of life?" and "What is the ultimate reality upon which we can ground our values?"
Rudolf Bultmann's approach to myth – myths are not meant to give an objective picture of reality but rather display how we understand ourselves in the world. It is an anthropological phenomenon to solve our existential problems. It is not a cosmological phenomenon. But the fact that myths are incorrectly interpreted as objective facts about the cosmos does not reduce their importance regarding their psychological function at the evolutionary level. Myths are a narrative of action (values), rather than a narrative of perceiving (science). Myths solve the problem of values by showing what the ideal mode of being might be.
Williams James was a philosopher and psychologist who is also similar in his attitudes towards religion. According to him, religion is the feelings, acts, and experiences of men in their solitude, in their relation to the divine. Peterson goes beyond this in redefining religion to encompass anything that addresses the problem of values, anything that answers the question of "What should we do?" and "How should we be?", questions that science can never answer in the philosophic sense.
Anytime an atheist purports to have an ideology that values something, Jordan Peterson is known to say that he believes they are subconsciously religious because of his definition of religion. Jordan Peterson is also known to say that atheists are more likely to become murderers, but this would need to be interpreted within his religious framework as well. Only someone who has zero values would be considered a true atheist according to Jordan Peterson. This type of person would not even value human life, and therefore be a likely candidate for becoming a murderer.
Jordan Peterson’s religious framework sees the mythological world as trying to guide us towards a promised land, a utopia in this world. The myths guide our behaviors and push us towards this utopia. Accordingly, we can rationally measure the successfulness of different religious principles based on how effective they are at producing behaviors that point us in the utopian direction. He finds that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, yet not scientifically explicable. Consequently, rather than jumping to conclusions and becoming dogmatically literal about interpretations of supporting texts, he would rather leave it as a mystery and try to analyze the religious phenomenon rationally.
Peterson treats religious texts as human texts rather than divine miracles (Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis). Jordan Peterson is neither a closet atheist nor a closet Christian, but he definitely believes in the belief in religion.
Jordan Peterson's God
"I was once asked how I would define God. My God is the spirit that is trying to elevate Being. My God is the spirit that makes everything come together. My God is the spirit that makes order out of chaos and then recasts order when it becomes too limiting. My God is the spirit of truth incarnate. None of that is supernatural. It is instead what is most real."
"So there's a line in the New Testament where Christ says that no one comes to the Father except through him. Which is a hell of a thing for anyone to say. I am the way and the truth and the life. That's another one. Here's the idea. Its as if there's a spirit at the bottom of things that is involved in bringing to being of everything. People talk about evolution as a random process, but that's not true. The mutations are random, but the selection mechanisms are not random. What are the selection mechanisms? Human females are very sexually selective. That's why you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. So the male failure rate for reproduction is twice that of the female. How is it that males succeed differentially? Females reject. They reject on the basis of what? Well its something like competence. How is competence defined? Well men put themselves in hierarchies and they vote on each other's competence. Let's say you follow the best leader into battle. Then you don't die. Like, he might get all the women, but you don't die. So at least your still in the game. And it might be the same if you're following the greatest hunter. And the greatest hunter wouldn't be the person who was the best at bringing down game, it would be the person who was best at bringing down game, and sharing it, and organizing the next hunt, and all of that. What that means to some degree is that there's a spirit of masculinity shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history. That's what that means. Its the spirit of positive masculinity that manifests itself across epochal ages - millions of years perhaps. And it actually has shaped our consciousness - actually! Its like the essential spirit of all the great men who defined what greatness constituted - that's a spirit. Well that's a purely biological explanation. That's God. God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values. That's God. God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time. That's God. God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men. That's God. God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth. But there's another possibility too which is that that's actually reflective of a deeper metaphysical reality that has to do with the nature of consciousness itself. I think that's true. I believe the biological case and I believe the biologically reductive case. But I don't think that exhausts it. There's a metaphysical layer underneath that that the biology is a genuine reflection of. And that's the macrocosm above and the microcosm below. We are really reflective, including in our consciousness, of something about the structure of reality itself. And that might involve whatever it is that God is. Well that's God. God is the future to which we make sacrifices. That's God. God is the voice of conscience. That's God. God is the source of judgement and mercy and guilt. That's God. God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure. That's God. "
GOD -
God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values.
God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time.
God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men.
God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.
God is the future to which we make sacrifices.
God is the voice of conscience.
God is the source of judgement and mercy and guilt.
God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure.
God is the spirit that is trying to elevate Being.
God is the spirit that makes everything come together.
God is the spirit that makes order out of chaos and then recasts order when it becomes too limiting.
God is the spirit of truth incarnate.
Meaning Crisis
In a lot of ways, modern culture is suffering from a diverse set of problems, seemingly stemming from the meaning crisis. The meaning crisis seems to revolve around the idea of the Nietzschean idea of the "death of God" and the absence of a direction, purpose, and guidance, once religious doctrines are debunked by science. While this is a problem, I don't view this as the core problem in our modern age.
Unity of Meaning Crisis
I think the more fundamental problem that is plaguing our culture is the lack of unity around what we should value, what we should find meaningful, and what our collective purpose should be. If we use spiral dynamics to measure our culture, we could find a significant percent of people dealing with beige-ethos survival issues, a certain percent retreating into purple-ethos magic oriented spiritualities and superstitiousness that can inspire conspiracy theories. Then with the arrival of Donald Trump, red-ethos tribalism and loyalty orientations are being revived. A significant portion of both leftwingers and rightwingers are still very religious in a judeo-christian sense - maintaining a blue-ethos of order and rule orientations. Scientific enlightenment idealists that value orange-ethos freedom and individualism also maintain a strong percentage of the population. Green-ethos equality and equity orientations are also growing. Yellow-ethos orientations towards cultural synthesis are growing among leaders of the intellectual dark web. Turquoise-ethos sustainability orientations are also strong percentage of the culture, often surfacing in the face of global issues like Covid-19 and global warming. So what seems to be the problem is not necessarily the lack of meaning, but the drastic gap between each segment of the population's perspective on what has meaning. We are at a point where ideologies are diverging faster than they are merging.
Solution To Disunity
I believe that the only viable solution is to increase the rate at which ideologies are merging to the point where it is faster than the rate of divergence. This means that we need to be educating everyone in philosophy and emphasizing dialectical reasoning. Only by a collective dialectic can we derive the synthesis we need to get everyone back on the same page as to what is meaningful. Perhaps this can best be accomplished by a rational religion of philosophy.
Integral Theory
In my efforts to search for solutions to the growing polarization and disunity in our country, Ken Wilber's "Integral Theory" has shown the most promise. Integral Theory is based on Spiral Dynamics, the two basically agreeing on most points, they just use different color schemes to map the evolutions in philosophy. The most impressive thing about Integral Theory is that it maintains that the next zeitgeist of thought that is due to take over the culture is "integral" philosophy - a worldview that recognizes the value of every perspective and has a goal of assessing and aggregating the good from each level of society, while also minimizing the negative aspects of each worldview. This empathetic mindset seems poised to do exactly what is needed to unify the world - help people look for the good in others, rather than only seeing the bad. This approach would result in the cultural dialectic needed to help us merge our perspectives faster than they diverge.
Jordan Peterson's Attack on Atheists
Multiple times, across at least interviews with at least three different atheists (Matthew Dillahunty, Susan Blackmore, and Sam Harris), Jordan Peterson has maintained that "true atheists would be murderers". I have ambivalent feelings towards Jordan Peterson with respect to this point. On the one hand, I think it is unfair of him to throw atheists under the metaphorical bus by labeling them as murderous by definition. I think that if Sam Harris had said the same thing about Christians, he would not have appreciated the slanderous broad strokes being made. Half of Jordan Peterson's critique of the political left is how they weaponize speech in a tribal way, yet this seems to be exactly what he is doing to atheists.
On the other hand, I think there is a genius point being made here, and perhaps the shocking nature of the criticism draws one towards a deeper understanding of how value systems operate. Jordan Peterson further elaborates how if you define God as "the highest value in a hierarchy of values" then you have a religion based on your value system. Someone who was truly atheistic, with respect to Jordan Peterson's definition of God, would have no value system. Without a value system, they wouldn't even value human life, hence potentially murderous.
Many people get upset with Jordan Peterson for the appearance of a type of sophistry that plays tricks and sleights of hand to manipulate definitions to his advantage. But in general, I see Jordan Peterson as a good faithed actor - he is trying to make the world a better place. I believe that he uses these definitions of God and religion, not for personal gain and manipulation, but because he believes that these definitions are more useful and pragmatic for us in accessing the way the world works.
So, to give Jordan Peterson the benefit of the doubt, by labeling atheists as murderers, he is trying to highlight the religion within the hearts of those who claim to be atheists. For example, Sam Harris displays no evidence of murderous intent while being an atheist. Jordan Peterson thinks that Sam Harris's "good nature" comes from being born in a culture saturated with Christian symbols and ethical assumptions. Basically, Sam Harris is subconsciously a Christian in his value system, despite consciously rejecting the metaphysics. Jordan makes this point more salient when he claims that Sam Harris's moral system, as mapped out in his book "The Moral Landscape", essentially is a narrative of how to navigate between heaven and hell, with respect to maximizing wellbeing and minimizing suffering.
In my transition from "100% confidence in God's existence" theism to agnosticism to atheism, I have noticed a series of transitions in my perspectives. I think that western atheists' moral natures are less rooted in Christianity than Jordan Peterson thinks. I think that Judeo-Christian value systems are largely deontological in nature. "Thou shalt not" Biblical morality is essentially a "you have a duty to obey rules" moral system. There is an authority structure giving rules, and a populous that is obligated to follow rules. Since God is given absolute authority, Christian morality falls into the trap of "divine command theory", essentially giving the burden of defining goodness to God, and anything that contradicts God is the opposite of goodness. The problem with this is that goodness becomes as arbitrary as God's opinion in the moment. So, when God commands genocides, all Christians can do is throw up their hands and assume that God has his reasons.
Deontology, by its nature, lacks nuance. It is the contraposition to consequentialism - the idea that goodness is defined based on the consequences of actions. For example, deontology would say - killing is always bad, therefore we should never kill, including fetuses, animals, and criminals. Its an absolute perspective with regards to the reliability of the goodness of the rule. Christians usually don't apply the rule "thou shalt not kill" to animals, since God explicitly said that animals are under mankind's dominion, and routinely demands their sacrifice. They also don't apply the rule "thou shalt not kill" to criminals since the Bible makes it very clear that God wants the death of the wicked and guilty.
In a sense, God demands a deontological morality from his people in commanding them "thou shalt not kill", yet functionally, in its implementation, God becomes a consequentialist, measuring the value of different populations and determining whether or not they deserve to be destroyed. Christianity is willing to be as consequential as their God is in the Bible, but in areas of ambiguity, they default to a hard deontological position of blatant disregard for consequences. It doesn't matter if the consequence of abortion kills the mother, it doesn't matter if she has to bear the burden of raising a rapist's child, it doesn't matter if it harms the mother spiritually, emotionally, physically, or economically. It doesn't matter if it harms society to create a generation of unfathered children. It doesn't matter if it increases criminality in the next generation. Christians have a duty to not kill.
Atheists, on the other hand, despite growing up with Christian morals embedded in the ether of cultural assumptions, are not obligated to stay stuck within this moral deontology. Atheists have the freedom to reassess what morality looks like outside the burdens of God's arbitrary rules.
Spiral Dynamic Values by Color
As consciousness evolves, mankind more and more learns to value higher-order principles. Family is a higher order value than oneself. The nation is a higher order value than the family. The religion is a higher order value than the state. In some sense, whenever people take a single-minded focus on one value, they become deontological in their moral perspective. If a purple-ethos individual were to monomaniacally insist that their duty was to their family, even if it meant the destruction of millions of people, then they would be evidencing a deontological morality, since it is obvious that they value their duty to their family more than any consequence imaginable. I think that before the yellow layer, it can be easy for each color to get sucked into deontological perspectives based on what they currently value. For example, a green-ethos individual might think that women must have rights to their bodies in order to truly have equality. Their duty to women's rights is so profound, that they don't care what the consequences are. It doesn't matter how much pain the fetus in the womb suffers - women's rights are women's rights. Once we get to the yellow-ethos, the dialectic approach starts to take hold. Suddenly, instead of being stubborn about our values, we are trying to aggregate values from each ideology, organize them into a hierarchy, and synthesis a method for combining their use into a sort of Swiss Army Knife moral system.
Consequentialist Pathologies
I think Jordan Peterson sees the danger in a orange-ethos, green-ethos, and even red-ethos abandonment of rules that he thinks are valuable. He is afraid that if society adopts a green-ethos Marxist ethic, they will completely forget the value of life and become murderous in their approach to equality and equity. Perhaps he is right in this fear. Over the past few years, I have attempted to join a variety of Facebook groups that cover the vast swaths of the ideological landscape. In my attempt to monitor the pulse of the narrative in these different groups, I have found, to my dismay, that Marxist/Communist oriented groups are by far the most violent in their blatant declarations that the rich should be murdered. There seems to be a clear pathology developing around this ideology that Jordan Peterson has probably accurately pin pointed. When the rich are defined as villains by an ideology that has abandoned deontology for consequentialism, it only becomes natural to sacrifice the lives of the villains to obtain the desired consequences.
Synthesis
I think that yellow-ethos philosophy solves the problem of the green-ethos pathologization of consequentialism. By acknowledging that each layer of the evolution of Spiral Dynamic morality has value, yellow-ethos is free to reinvite blue-ethos deontological rules back to the table. Yellow-ethos then has the opportunity to look for a synthesis between deontology and consequentialism. In general, I think a lot of Jordan Peterson's work helps orient people towards a yellow-ethos. Yet, on atheism, Jordan Peterson may have some valid fears, but I think his approach in referring to atheists as murderers does significant harm to social progress towards a yellow-ethos. I think there are probably better ways to express this fear that don't further intrench a largely blue-ethos populous in their anti-atheistic sentiments.
Comments