Fencing Bear at Prayer

The convener of one of the Jordan Peterson Facebook groups that I participate in has been pushing me for some time now to be more compassionate towards our professorial “father.” Or, as my friend puts it: “to take off your fencing gear and model the Nourishing Feminine.” Okay, then, but I have to warn you. It is going to hurt. What do I see when I look at Jordan Peterson with a mother’s eyes? I should preface my reflections with the caveat that I speak here not just as the mother of a son, but also as an historian. Reading the textual accounts left by people about their thoughts and emotions is what I do in my scholarship. Just as Jordan has spent the past thirty years as a clinical psychologist, I have spent them as a reader of texts,* my goal as an author being to help the texts speak to audiences for whom they no longer mean anything. I have practiced listening to my texts just as Jordan has practiced listening to his patients, and I hope that I have been able to hear. More ...

I have been struggling for some time with whether and how to write this post, but not writing it is making me feel weak, so, following Our Father Jordan’s advice, I’m going to say it. Jordan Peterson is a heretic . His Orthodox friend Jonathan Pageau would say all of us Latin Christians are heretics, of course . The question is whether it matters. It does. My burden is to help you see why. I know from the Facebook groups I belong to that many of his followers take Jordan as a kind of spiritual advisor, some would say guru . They spend thread after thread discussing how to live out his sayings. Which would be fine. If not for the fact that some of his sayings go directly contrary to the tradition in which he purports to be speaking. I know, I fell for it, too . In Jordan’s powerful words : Don’t underestimate the power of your speech! Now, Western culture is phallogocentric. Let’s say it... It is predicated on the idea of the Logos. The Logos is the sacred element ...

I never set out to teach like a woman, but somehow it happened anyway. Back when I was a beginning teacher, my great hero was Erich Auerbach, more particularly, Erich Auerbach as the author of  Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature   (1953). His whole method seemed to me to be genius. He would start each chapter with a lengthy block of text, which he would then use as a key to unlock the underlying patterns of Western culture, wondrously made visible through his close reading of the text. You can see how I use this technique in my blog posts, but it comes from my teaching . In effect, I encourage my students, “Submit yourself to the word, and let it teach you. If you read carefully, thinking about what the text tells you about why the author was writing and paying attention to what it can tell you about the circumstances in which the author found it important to write, that is when it becomes a proper historical source, something in which you ar...

Feminism is cancer because it is built on a lie. Actually, it is built on a whole pyramid of lies, but there is one gigantic one at its base. Here it is in its most diabolical form. The author is Ludwig Feuerbach, his translator the novelist George Eliot, the work his  Essence of Christianity , published in English in 1854: But here it is also essential to observe, and this phenomenon is an extremely remarkable one, characterising the very core of religion, that in proportion as the divine subject is in reality human, the greater is the apparent difference between God and man; that is, the more, by reflection on religion, by theology, is the identity of the divine and human denied, and the human, considered as such, is depreciated.... To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.... The monks made a vow of chastity to God; they mortified the sexual passion in themselves, but therefore they had in heaven, in the Virgin Mary, the image of woman—...

Cathy Newman is angry, we all know that now . But what, exactly, is she angry about? I think it’s here, the moment when she switches—albeit hypothetically and just for a moment— to the first person : Newman : So you don’t believe in equal pay.  Peterson : No, I’m not saying that at all.   Newman : Because a lot of people listening to you will say, are we going back to the dark ages?  Peterson : That’s because you’re not listening, you’re just projecting.   Newman : I’m listening very carefully, and I’m hearing you basically saying that women need to just accept that they’re never going to make it on equal terms—equal outcomes is how you defined it.  Peterson : No, I didn’t say that.   Newman : If I was a young woman watching that, I would go, well, I might as well go play with my Sindy dolls and give up trying to go school, because I’m not going to get the top job I want, because there’s someone sitting there saying, it’s not possible, it’s g...

Call them the Hostile Brothers. Capitalism and Communism have been at each other’s throats since the birth of the Industrial Revolution, the Creation ex nihilo —certainly, it has the economists flummoxed how to explain it—of the modern developed world. Capitalism—let’s call him Abel—makes something beautiful and useful that makes his life and the life of his family more pleasant and comfortable, and Communism—let’s call him Cain—burns with resentment at the thought that Abel has something he doesn’t because he doesn’t understand how Abel was able to make it. So Cain kills Abel, blaming his brother for the resentment he (Cain) felt at seeing Abel so productive and blessed. And then Cain blames God—let’s call him the patriarchy—for rejecting his offering in the first place. It is the founding myth of modernity, so engrained in our thinking that even Jordan and Milo believe it. In Milo’s words : “The patriarchy, to put it simply, is Western Civilization.” Jordan puts it archetyp...