Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith: Spencer Klavan (Transcript)

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, 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.

Perception and Reality

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s not possible. You know, and I’ve been looking into that a lot, and 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: You have to funnel. You have to have some sort of organized.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to know 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? But the sensations themselves, the perceptions, 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.

Understanding Vision and Perception

DR. JORDAN B. 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 whole.

And when 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 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. I could look, you know, 30 feet 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.

The Role of Stories and Perception

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. 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.

But power rules everything. They slipped into a kind of Marxism, right? So it’s contradictory.

Spencer’s New Book

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.”

SPENCER KLAVAN: October 15th.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So it’s coming out October 15th.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. Within a couple of weeks. Yeah. 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 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So there’s there’s an implicit description of the nature of reality there.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that’s what the rationalists objected to when they were objecting to the presumptions of the empiricists. 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 didn’t.

Understanding Perception and Interpretation

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 narrative.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. 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 numbers have nothing to do with the human mind.

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Mathematical Reality and Human Perception

DR. JORDAN B. 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, but merely presuming that, as you pointed out, that numbers are self-evident and have nothing to do with the psyche, right, the way we structure things.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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. In other words, 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 so.

The Visual System and Perception

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Everything could be reduced to that. Yeah, well, it’s funny, because those so-called primary qualities are something like what everything has in common. And so there is something foundational about them. But 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 can 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, the grip I would use to grip that glass is activated by the perception. So part of what I perceive as the glass is a 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.

The Complexity of Visual Processing

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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, 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. 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.

The Synesthetic Nature of Perception

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Wow. Yeah. It’s so cool. It’s a synesthetic.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, exactly. That’s right. Once you’ve established that circuitry, you can’t look at a word without hearing the word, right? 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.

The Problem with Primary and Secondary Perception

DR. JORDAN B. 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-down constraint, even on the primary perceptions, that it’s almost impossible to disentangle the subjective from the objective in perception.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And Francis Bacon worried about this, actually, because his whole effort was to get back to what the Greeks would have called imperia, 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 can’t clear something all the way until you’ve written in something new. In other words, there’s always that length.

The Challenge of Learning and Perception

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, that’s a major problem, because it also implies that you almost never learn any thing without subjecting something previous to a death, right, which this is partly what makes a revelatory conversation or realization painful. And so, here’s another neurophysiological and sociological problem with the idea of primary perception.

You’re constituted so that in your embodiment, the fact of skepticism about direct sense data is built in. Here’s why. Well, you can see something and assume it was real. 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? 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.

The Scientific Method and Reality

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s sufficiently flawed, so that if you relied on only that, you would 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, but we refer to tradition. And then not only do we ask other people and refer to tradition, we also… This is something the scientific revolution really did produce, and Francis Bacon in particular. 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.

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The Genesis Connection

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

It’s a 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?

Understanding Consciousness and Learning

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So really, what your consciousness does as it operates, this is neurological reality, it’s an exploratory process that involves, generally, the activation of large areas of the brain. 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?

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, 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.

The Nature of Consciousness

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. So it vanishes from your sight. Everything that you can predict, this is so important, everything you can predict vanishes from your sight. Right?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Profound, yeah.

The Biblical Connection

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right? So consciousness actually does seem to be the thing that lives on the edge of the transforming horizon of the future, and so the reality, this is what seems to be portrayed in the book of Genesis with the idea of tohu vabohu 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.

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, and that’s actually not what either of us is saying at all, but rather quite the reverse.

Language and Divine Creation

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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, vayihi or, right, let there be light and there was light, and in 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 vayihi or, it’s the same thing.

The Mind’s Role in Creation

SPENCER KLAVAN: So, to me, and light existed, and light emerged, and God said be light and light be, or something like that, 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Categories and Forms

SPENCER KLAVAN: Well, that’s partly why 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? And 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 particulate entity so much as entities as members of the classes that we use to categorize our perceptions and to draw them into that form.

The Nature of Sound and Perception

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

Unity and Meta-narratives

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: This is another one of the weaknesses of the post-modern claim that there’s no transcendent unity, no meta-narrative, which is a restatement of the idea of the collapse of the highest, the unifying principle, the collapse of God, the death of God. You see, one of the real problems with that hypothesis is that it’s boundless. So there’s no inevitable higher-order unity, okay?

Perception and Unity

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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, 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.

Now, I think it’s Manet, but it might be Monet, I don’t remember, a French Impressionist who went out and painted haystacks, a whole series of them under different conditions of illumination. And the haystack is the same, but of course it’s not, because the colors that constitute the haystack shift dramatically, and that’s what he was investigating.

The Problem of Unity

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And 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. They’re separate in time, they’re separate in place, the constituent elements are completely different, but there’s an 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 metanarrative. It’s like, if there’s no overarching metanarrative, 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.

The Challenge of Reality

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And it’s worse than that, because let’s assume that they’re right, that there is no uniting metanarrative, 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 doesn’t point towards a unity that’s actually apprehensible and in some way implicit in the world? This is a huge, huge problem.

Understanding Postmodernism

SPENCER KLAVAN: This is why I was so struck by what you were saying about Foucault 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 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 Greece, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right. The river.

The Problem of Inference

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes, but also runs through people like David Hume and even Bishop Barclay, who are reacting to this objectivist idea.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, Hume’s problem is, you cannot compute a pathway forward merely by understanding the terrain. You can’t get an ought from an is. 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, in 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.

The Problem of Induction

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s his scandal of induction, right? That’s the problem the chicken has with the farmer. The farmer is the chicken’s best friend. Every day the farmer brings food until it’s Thanksgiving, in which case the faith that chicken has in the structure of the world as a consequence of induction turns out to be painfully wrong.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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, like, well, until it emits a solar flare that takes out our entire electrical system, which is a high probability event, right? 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.

Consciousness and Predictability

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

Biblical Symbolism and Reality

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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 Vavohu, or the Taom, the spirit of God that rests on the water, that field that that spirit interacts with seems to be something like the pool of infinite possibility. Like, it’s represented, for example, in the Mesopotamian stories…

SPENCER KLAVAN: Absolutely, in T-Maps.

DR. JORDAN B. 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?

Quantum Mechanics and Philosophy

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

Bohr, sort of a Kantian philosopher, says we’re banging up here against the inherently unknowable to the human mind, that these waves 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, it’s a possibility.

SPENCER KLAVAN: It is, it is a possibility, and Heisenberg, at one point, wonderfully compares it to Aristotelian potentia.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, really? Oh, really?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Oh, yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Potential. Yes. Oh, that’s so important.

The Copenhagen Interpretation

SPENCER KLAVAN: And so he brings back this old Aristotelian idea that the world is made of potential and energia, 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 mind. 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…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s deterministic.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. And it also means that mathematics describes directly a reality that is independent of us entirely, and that the 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. 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.

The Pattern in Genesis

SPENCER KLAVAN: Now, that doesn’t mean that the author of Genesis was told by God about the Schrodinger equations. 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 Hebrew Bible, of God’s mind as the resolver of a fundamentally unresolved possibility.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. The caster into order.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. That’s good, or very good. Yes. And the idea of us as essentially… the image of God in us is essentially…

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The Nature of Possibility

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Let me extend that supposition for a minute. There’s a field of possibility that lays in front of you, and 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Okay, right, right. So there’s a non-zero possibility that one of the less probable manifestations of this object will occur.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. 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.

Ethics and Perception

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. That’s a set of our aims that define the manner in which we’re going to leave the possibilities of that object as they predictably and non-terrifyingly are.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: But that’s entirely dependent on our, it’s so interesting, because it’s dependent 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. 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.

The Role of Perception and Aim

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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 manifested.

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 injunction that we should walk with God is that if we oriented ourselves 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.

The Fall and Human Pride

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So, I’ve been thinking about this with regards to work, 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.

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?

The Story of Cain and Abel

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. He can’t get the right sacrifice.

Finding Meaning in Work

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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, or 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, the whole world transforms.

The Neurophysiology of Perception

DR. JORDAN B. 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 a name, and then the world appears to you as a pathway toward that aim.

And it’s so subtle. So, for example, if I want to walk, if I decide that I want to walk across a room, 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 emotion.

Pain and Higher Purpose

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s even more subtle than that, I would say, well, take this situation of a football player who’s injured, well, in the important final game, okay, 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.

That produces positive emotion, that’s incentive reward, the same physiological response that cocaine produces, okay? Cocaine is powerfully analgesic, so at one level of analysis, you’ve still got the pain, but at another level, the fact that the activity that’s causing pain is linked to a distal valuable goal produces a pharmacological counterposition to the pain.

The Story of Job

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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 that helps you maintain your faith, your optimism in the essential goodness of yourself as a human being. 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.

Satan and Pride

SPENCER KLAVAN: I mean, 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 Terence Foster.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, and under that another hell opens up, right, and in fact…

SPENCER KLAVAN: That’s his pride, eh? Pride and desire to usurp produces that, right? Unwillingness to change in the face of, that’s to bring a mind unchanged by time and place.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right, and that is one of the things that Milton shares actually with Marlow, Dr. Faust, the Mephistopheles says, do you think, thinks 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…

The Story of Cain

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Pain, that’s what happens to Cain, I think. Cain, in killing Abel, in consequence of resentment, which is not the only way to respond to the failure of Cain’s life, right, he chooses that, God accuses him of choosing that, but he invites sin in to have its way with him.

And he also is destined to become a wanderer, right, so interesting, he’s destined to become a wanderer, a 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, he has to move from place to place.

Okay, and then 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, and so 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 you see that in Dante too, that the image of the Inferno, there’s a hell.

Dante’s Vision of Hell

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Very reminiscent of the figure of Satan in the Miltonic story.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. You see that in Dante too, that the image of the Inferno. There’s a hell.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: It’s betrayal, which I think is quite brilliant.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. That’s what Dante identified as the cardinal malevolence of Satan. It’s brilliant because betrayal inverts trust.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. And civilization depends on trust.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Love depends on trust. Family depends on trust. Your relationship with yourself depends on trust. Right. And so people often become traumatized by a profound betrayal of trust.

The Descent into Darkness

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So Dante got that right. But the idea that there are these descending levels of suffering with something ultimately malevolent at the bottom.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That is a vision of hell. And 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Like an infinite landscape of faithless pain.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Terrible. Wow. Terrible. Terrible thing to see. I mean, unimaginable. You see this in relationships.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

Relationship Dynamics

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right? And that produces a certain amount of emotional tension.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And then maybe you start to talk about it, you find that under that there’s a slightly more profound disagreement.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. 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.

Generational Trauma

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: I believe that.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. Yeah. 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.

Emotional Resolution

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know how when you hash something out with someone you’re close to?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Sometime during that process it’s very likely, if the conversation is sincere and deep, that someone will break into tears. Right?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. Right? Yes. Yeah, exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a dissolution of their perceptions, right? And a potential restructuring. I think that’s what tears signify. Anyways, that is a descent into the abyss.

Dante’s Journey Through Hell

SPENCER KLAVAN: And Dante has so much to say here, too, with what he does with what we would call gravity and the direction of gravity. What happens when you get down to the bottom of the inferno past Judas and the mouth of Satan is that the world flips upside down, and we move from the inferno to Purgatoria. So they go past the pit of hell and begin to climb upward 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 sort of then your journey can begin, right? Then you start to climb your way out.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Rebuild.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

The Path to Paradise

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, well, that’s a symbolic death in reverse, too, right? And then beautifully, magnificently, once you reach the pinnacle of purgatory, then move into the third of this sort of triptych that Dante is giving us, next to 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 planet. 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 towards 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: There’s one motive force in the universe.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. So that’s a monotheistic claim united with the notion that the fundamental unity is something positive and benevolent.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, right.

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The Metaphysics of Science

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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 metaphysics that made science itself possible has been demolished. So then I was thinking, 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?

Jung’s Theory of Alchemy

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Jung tried to figure this out, right? That’s why Jung was so interested in alchemy. So Jung’s idea was that there was an unconscious fantasy emerged in counterposition 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. So there’s a potential in the material world that has that as its promise. That’s the treasure.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Prime matter, right?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Prima materia. Yeah, which is exactly the thing with no qualities. It’s the thing with the strict fear of everything. 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.

Scientific Motivation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And once?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. Right. What were the preconditions?

The Foundation of Science

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay, so let’s lay this out. Tell me what you think. The cosmos has the logos. So it has an order.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You’re not going to uncover man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Exactly. That’s right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Or you build a technological enterprise like Prometheus that dooms you.

SPENCER KLAVAN: That can happen.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Okay? 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 dedicated submission to that logos, you can explore in a manner that reveals it.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

The Judeo-Christian Foundation

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That it’s fundamentally good.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That you can approach it in the proper spirit. And if you do, that’ll be redemptive.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

Dawkins and Christianity

DR. JORDAN B. 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Because that implies that the Christians got something right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What?

SPENCER KLAVAN: We got nowhere with that. Well, I’ve nowhere with that.

The Three Body Problem

SPENCER KLAVAN: So I don’t know if you’re familiar with the three body problem. 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 gives you this misty, secular pseudoscience where it’s the midi-chlorians 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 and 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 out of space, to navigate through whatever situation you find yourself in.

And the reason that Xi Xinliu 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 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.

Newton’s Laws

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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 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 there’s just a difference.

The Unified Order

SPENCER KLAVAN: So Christians would say fallen order down here. And there is a pristine region of the spheres.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Operating even perhaps the angels are pushing them around or whatever.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And what as opposed to forces as opposed to.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. Yeah. This is a big in my book. I call them ghosts in exile.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Right. Right.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And this idea is what when when Newton comes out with the Principia for the first time, we now think, oh, we 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 super lunary. Right. Spears, because now underlying unity. Right.

Newton’s Contribution

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And that is something like that is something like a transposed monotheistic faith.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Exactly.

DR. JORDAN B. 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. Yes.

Modern Scientific Challenges

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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 quantum gravity and so forth are hammering away at that barrier. Right. Under the presumption that they’re going to break through. Yes, exactly.

Scientific Truth and Unity

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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. That there’s a fabric, 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 in both of these convictions. And I think that anybody that does science is still operating on these convictions, even if outwardly they would they would deny it.

Experience in Research

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, if the hypothesis of Jung is true in the broad sense and that you 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. Right. 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, 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.

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. There’s all the possible combinations of the numbers in the in the matrix. Right. OK.

So then out of that, you can draw a discovery, let’s say, that’s revealed in the patterns. But you cannot do that 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.

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Science and Faith

SPENCER KLAVAN: Wonderful. 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.

Modern Examples

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, what is the greatest example of the phenomenon you’re describing that’s recently been in the public eye?

SPENCER KLAVAN: I would argue it’s Katanji 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 and hiring and so forth. Now, I doubt I rather doubt that Katanji 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Infinite number of hidden variables.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Exactly. But 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because more of the specialists are white. Yes. Right. That’s why.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Well, that’s so much of medical science and social science is corrupted by the fact of specious correlation.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right.

The Challenge of Scientific Integrity

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Then you’ve got to serve something, right? You’ve got to have this enterprise to some sort of purpose. 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Fatally.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You’re going to have to accept that. If the study indicates that the hypothesis upon whose promotion you state 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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 can say, well, I don’t care. Like Raskolnikov says in Crime and Punishment, I’m not going to get caught. Yeah. 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?

The Value of Truth

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. It’s raw joy.

SPENCER KLAVAN: I mean, that’s the treasure in the field of man.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right.

SPENCER KLAVAN: That’s the pearl of great price.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly right.

Personal Growth and Truth

SPENCER KLAVAN: And one of the most striking things you said to me in Athens was when 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 honesty of lies. Yes. 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s I think that’s really the conclusion that Job draws. It’s that. 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And leave everything behind.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s right.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Well, why?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, OK, 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.

The Promise of Faith

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Construed over a very long period of time.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. Right. 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. Yeah.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And you teach your children that. Well, you establish that ethos of divine patriarchy. That’s a good way of thinking about it.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, why wouldn’t your descendants be numerous and and take over the world, so to speak? That’s the promise of the covenant in the in the Old Testament.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Oh, yeah. I mean, this is all the all these things shall be added unto you. Right.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. 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 you’re chasing after.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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’s stripping that you’re describing in sacrifice.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, if Christ extends that, because he says that also that extends beyond your commitments to career, let’s say, or even to 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. And what I mean by that is that every single thing that’s good. Yes.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Has to be sacrificeable to the highest possible.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. And then out of that source will arise all the other good. That’s why Abraham gets Isaac back.

SPENCER KLAVAN: As far as I’m concerned.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Because he’s willing to offer his son to the same process that impelled him out of his immature satiation. Yeah. He offers his son fully. And the consequence of that is he gets him back.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah. 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.

The Paradox of Parental Love

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That paradoxically increases the probability that you’ll establish a relationship with them that will be sustainable through the entire course of your existence.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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 Koran, 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? Ask the angels to worship you and sing your praises at all times. And God in the Koran just says, I know what you do not know. He basically responds that it’s that it’s a mystery.

Divine Love and Free Will

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And that this is the sort of primordial fatherly act that you’re describing in your own. It’s the essence of what we mean when we say father.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Father, the word father implies a commonality of spirit across all instantiations of fatherhood. Right. And then you might say, well, father as a category implies an essence of an essential element of the patriarchy. Could be power. That’s not a great way of establishing a relationship with your children. It could instead be something like encouragement of courage.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. 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.

The Nature of Power and Fatherhood

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, I think the confusion of this with power, and of course, it can be abused and turned into a force.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes, of course.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, well, that’s where the postmodernists went way off the rail. Foucault in particular. It’s all power.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like, that’s pretty goddamn convenient for you, buddy. You know, and 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.

The Natural Order

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, that’s no principle on which to found the world. That doesn’t even work for chimpanzees, by the way. 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s like something out of Machiavelli.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, definitely. 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 yourself. Even the worst elements of your own soul.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Certainly. And so you live in a world now that increasingly, to the extent that you have power over it, includes only you. You are inherently the best. The most narrow part of you.

The Path to Hell

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So that’s a very good description of hell, but 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 gods. Now you need to use power, because other people won’t go along with that. Just like kids in a playground won’t go along with the bossy kid who only wants to play his game.

So we found that the 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.

The Corruption of Power

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And not least because their acquiescence to your idiot, hedonistic tyranny makes you suffer terribly. 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? While Berlin was burning and Europe was in ruins.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right? There’s hell. That’s a good image of hell.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely.

Modern Parallels

SPENCER KLAVAN: The thing that you said about Cain and Abel, that in order to escape his sense of inferiority, Abel destroys his ideal.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: You bet. I mean, I’ve often thought about what we call wokeness, a kind of global war on archetypes. Right? It’s like this. Your beauty standards make me feel bad.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, absolutely. So 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, well, and the ethos underneath that is something like any axis of comparison where I’m lesser has to be demolished.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. Yeah. Okay, that’s a trouble. And the attractive, the beauty standard, he is an ideal and a judge.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And a harsh one.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. Well, I think that’s why you get in the communist societies a degeneration into, well, everyone’s equal.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes.

SPENCER KLAVAN: With nothing.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right. That’s where you make people equal is when everyone has nothing.

The Nature of Hell

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

The Screwtape Letters

SPENCER KLAVAN: It’s a 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 you cannot understand.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s by definition.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. By definition.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

SPENCER KLAVAN: And 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.

The Problem with Foucault

DR. JORDAN B. 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. 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: That’s your world. You’re definitely, 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And 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 at whatever cost.

The Psychology of Power

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, well, that’s that legion of devils that constitutes hell. And the idea 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 base 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.

The Biblical Alternative

DR. JORDAN B. 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-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?

The Nature of Sacrifice

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. God himself sacrifices himself as voluntarily to hoist the future and the community onto his shoulders.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes, that’s a complete inversion of the notion of power.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely. 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.

Love and Sacrifice

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s sacrificial. That’s what you do with your children. That’s what you do with your friends. That is the antithesis of power. I think the post-modernist realization, unconscious though it may be, that Christianity is directly opposed to the post-modernist claim that power rules is the ultimate driving force of the culture war. That’s what it looks like to me.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right. Definitely. Well, I actually don’t think there’s any difference between that and cortical maturation.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Okay.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, because you start out in the world as a plethora of competing impulses, right?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah.

The Integration of Development

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: And those are integrated across time by your development of the ability to share, to engage in reciprocal action, and by your ability to forego immediate gratification so that you can stabilize the future. And it takes its cortical maturation that allows that to occur on the physiological plane. And it isn’t the Freudian repression of the motivations and the emotions. It’s the integration of the motivations and emotions.

SPENCER KLAVAN: That’s their sub-doing, right, that Adam’s called upon to do.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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. Does that include that cortical maturation, the establishment of these sort of perceptual categories that we’ve been talking about, the building of the pathways that would enable us to do things like look at this glass?

The Process of Socialization

DR. JORDAN B. 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 they become part of not only your character but your physiology are categories that you build as you pursue that aim, right? 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? So in a sense, the whole conversation kind of comes full circle. If you think about it, we’ve talked about so many things and yet we’re really talking, I think, about one thing.

The Universal Pattern

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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?

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s what you’d expect if there’s an underlying unity. The most ancient 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?

SPENCER KLAVAN: Right, this is all just… I mean, the counter hypothesis is the postmodern.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, right, or even the Enlightenment idea that that’s all superstition that is now being supplanted by this rationalist orientation. All right, well, that’s good. That’s a good place to stop.

Closing Remarks

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: 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 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: I’d love that. So let’s do that.

Final Reflections

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, so thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And thank you. It was very nice to see you again, by the way.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Oh, just a joy.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah, always a pleasure. That was fun.

The Future Ahead

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: There’s something new being born, you know. 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 re-evaluate 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.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes. But I see the light breaking, too, actually. I think, you know, I know you’ve been 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…

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes, yes, definitely.

SPENCER KLAVAN: It’s the eternal Babylon.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Eternal Babylon, right.

Signs of Hope

SPENCER KLAVAN: And I also feel, despite the apparent darkness around us, I look at, for example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. I think about, you know… Neil Ferguson.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes, who are sort of unexcavating these… Russell Brand, for that matter.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Russell Brand, I know. You should say it’s in many different locations. That’s for sure. It’s a kind of revival.

SPENCER KLAVAN: 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.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: No, that’s Moses’ sin.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yeah, yeah.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Too heavy use of the rod.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Yes.

Farewell

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: All right, sir. Well, thank you very much.

SPENCER KLAVAN: Thank you.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: It was lovely talking to you today. Much appreciated. And to all of you watching and listening, we appreciate your time and your attention. Bye-bye.

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