TEN Things I Learned from Jordan Peterson

Personality is real, the psychology of evil, the interest of allegory, and so much more

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I've learned many things from Jordan Peterson since he came on the public scene in 2016. I've learned things about psychology, morality, philosophy and even about Scripture and the Christian faith, things that have bolstered my understanding as a Christian philosopher and theologian.

So without further ado, ten things I learned from Jordan Peterson.

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1. The Reality and Importance of Personality

Jordan Peterson is a personality psychologist. Following Carl Jung, he believes in the divisions between different personality traits that can be discovered through empirical study. He’s an advocate, in particular, of the recent Big Five model of personality. In the Big Five, there are five traits along which human beings can vary, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, assertiveness and neuroticism.

Now, I used to be a bit of a skeptic about psychology in general, but personality in particular. Anytime someone tried to put me in a psychological box, I would resist it. I would hear about the Myers Briggs scale and be put into a category, whatever it was, INTJ, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It never made any sense to me. It never felt accurate to me.

The interesting thing is, the Big Five is not about putting people in personality types. It's about traits that vary independently.

And so since I've learned about this, you start to see it everywhere. Some people are more extroverted, some less so and more introverted. Some people are more assertive than others. Some people more open to intellectual experience and ideas and so on.

And I think a lot of us resist this out of a sense that it puts us, of course, in a box or that it limits what we can change, what we can become. But there's also a deep reality to this. Not everything about human personality is malleable, and more importantly, some things in human personality are given.

What was even cooler to understand about personality was that so many other aspects of human differences can reduce down to personality differences, differences of ideology, whether that’s in theology or politics.

Try to tell me with a straight face that the difference between a Pentecostal and a Presbyterian isn't a difference of personality!

The same goes for liberals and conservatives. These are very much personality types. People who are extremely high in the trait of compassion, are strongly inclined to be liberal. It doesn't mean they're automatically more moral or righteous for doing so that compassion can lead them astray. It can lead them to be compassionate when it's time for judgment or boundaries.

But it really helps to understand that people don't get their ideas out of nowhere. We can also lower the temperature of ideological disagreements when we realize that we're all mostly just expressing our existing personalities.

2. The Psychology of Evil

Now this is one I'm still processing, but Jordan Peterson, following other psychologists, identifies the dark triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as the psychological causes of evil behavior.

And I used to think that it was just liberals, in the fundamentalist Christian sense, that believed that there were psychological causes of evil. Isn't evil just caused by sin, just by doing the wrong thing. “BAH — I want to do evil!” Isn't that how evil is explained?

But when you think about it, people vary greatly in their capacities and tendencies to do evil. Not everyone is evil in the same degree, and that creates a kind of catch-22, which is that if some people are more violent by nature, aren't they to that extent, off the hook? Isn't there a sense in which, by explaining their behavioral tendencies, we no longer view them in an explicitly moral sense.

Now you might just say this is the problem of free will, and to some extent it is, but I think it's a problem we all have to wrestle with.

No one does evil without a cause.

No one does evil without some kind of explanation or backstory.

It's not all Freudian backstories about how we were brought up.

Many of them are naturally existing differences in personality traits and tendencies, including the dark triad.

3. The Interest of Allegorical, Moral and Psychological Readings of Scripture

Now, throughout my theological education in a Christian seminary, I was taught to be wary of moral and even allegorical interpretations of Scripture.

Scripture has a literal sense. It says this is what happened, and that's what it means.

If it has a moral application, we risk the idea of moralism, of trying to justify ourselves before God or save ourselves through our own moral action, rather than by accepting the grace of God. All the Old Testament stories, which we might interpret as morality tales, actually foreshadow Jesus Christ and everything that he did for us. So we shouldn't try to be like David fighting our giants, we should accept that Jesus was the David who fought Goliath for us.

But now I've seen that this is very narrow, and it gives up an extremely appealing and compelling dimension of the scriptures.

Jordan Peterson, contrary to all those Protestant Christian theologians, packed auditoriums by talking about the allegorical and moral and psychological dimensions of Scripture, the things that these could mean and the ways they could apply to our lives even caveat if they weren't true.

And now I see more and more the poverty of trying to do with just the story of what Jesus did for us. One recent author calls it “The Abridged Gospel.” (Check out Jordan Raynor’s The Sacredness of Secular Work.)

And Jordan Peterson, while we don't actually know if he believes that specific part of the gospel, believes in the further dimensions of the scriptures, both those that precede Christ's coming, the moral teaching, the Old Testament, law and those that come after it, the third use of the law, the application of the Christian scriptures, the Christian message to our life, the life of self, sacrifice and denial that Christ called us to.

That I think should transform Christians view of what our preaching and our message and our evangelism ought to look like.

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4. The Existentialist Argument for the Limits of Materialism

Now I wouldn't be surprised if you had no idea what I was talking about here, but this is actually something from the very earliest lectures that I heard of Jordan Peterson, and from the opening pages of his book, Maps of Meaning.

Jordan Peterson, philosophically, is a Heideggerian, and Heidegger was an opponent of anyone who reduced human life and metaphysics down to the material, to pure science. And he did so not on the basis of a kind of Cartesian or spiritual dualism or an argument that mind was more than matter.

He did so on the basis of the idea that human beings fundamental orientation to the world, our fundamental way of knowing the world, is not scientific or theoretical. Our fundamental mode of being in the world is practical. It is to see things as ripe for action, to see the value in things, the valence, to see affordances for our action.

And Jordan Peterson put it this way:

It’s not only matter that exists; what matters also exists.

— Jordan Peterson (somewhere)

Other Heideggerian philosophers have echoed this, like John Haugeland and Hubert Dreyfus. John Haugeland’s festschrift is called Giving a Damn, because if you give a damn about things, then you're not a materialist. You believe that there is value and disvalue.

And so by that alone, Jordan Peterson disproved materialism.

5. Wisdom and Morality Don’t Have to Come from the Bible (especially wisdom)

Now, as a Christian by background, there's a tendency for Christians to think that all moral truth comes from the Bible. There's no other source for it. You can't get it from just human reflection or philosophy or reading books of ethics by secular philosophers. Now, instead, you've got to go straight to the Bible and find out what God directly commanded us.

But this is a very narrow view of morality. As CS Lewis said in the opening pages of Mere Christianity, everyone's making moral claims all the time. You took a bit of my orange. Now, give me a piece of yours. The smallest little moral attitudes we have that we give expression to show that we actually all believe in morality. We can't get rid of it.

Now Jordan Peterson doesn't get his morality, ultimately, from the Bible, or even what he does get from the Bible, he confirms, through psychology, science and biology. And this is important because it's very narrow to try to get all your morality from the Bible. We also have the book of nature. We have the world itself and human nature laid out before us. Why can't we use our eyes and observe it and gain good things from it?

Otherwise, we try to force Bible verses to give us the details of how we should live every part of our lives. We assume things like I've assumed that our problems in marriage are going to be solved by really understanding Ephesians 5 or some Greek word like kephalé — that's not going to solve our marriage problems.

Meanwhile, Jordan Peterson, looking at the sciences and psychology and the personality bell curves for men and women, can give you much better advice and wisdom about life. He can recognize, on the one hand, the complementarity of the sexes, that they really do vary in their distribution of personality traits. At the same time, he can tell you that the best relationship between a man and a woman, as between any two mammals, is one that is controlled by the spirit of play, by a kind of give and take, not by a command and subservience.

And that is this great wisdom about how man and woman can complement each other in marriage that does more than Bible verses do.

6. The Superiority of Empirical Knowledge of Human Nature and Morality to Biblical Knowledge of the Same

Now this follows from the previous one.

So Christians would tend to think that, Oh, maybe you can kind of pick up the pieces from just observing human nature, kind of figure out how humans ought to behave, but it would be better to just be told in the Bible and then just go do it.

But through understanding Jordan Peterson's ideas and his psychology, I've come to disagree with my fellow Christians on this one": I think it is better to understand how the world works on the basis of how the world works.

It's when we can look at the world and see, “These are its workings. This is the way God made things. Now I'm going to act in accord with that” — that is the best way to know and understand the world and to then live in accordance with it.

The Bible can give us clues and indicators. It can tell us things, but if we don't actually see those in the world, then it's like artificially pretending that the Bible is true instead of knowing that it is true.

And for example, the book of Proverbs is actually full of this. It's all about human wisdom, accumulated experience over time. It takes time to really understand ourselves and to live in accord with the warp and woof of the world, and that's something you can't acquire by three years studying in seminary, studying the Bible. It's something that takes decades and decades of experience and then learning from others, even more decades of experience.

That's the kind of Christian maturity and wisdom that Christians and human beings alike all ought to pursue.

7. The Pharisaism of the Evangelical Demand for Confession of Faith

Now this one is also very novel to me as an Evangelical, but I heard it directly from Jordan Peterson's lips.

I attended one of his lectures on the “We Who Wrestle with God” tour, and he opened with a salvo against evangelicals and Catholics who wish for him to confess the Christian faith, to explicitly say, “I believe in God, no if’s, and’s, or but’s.”

And Peterson said, “You don't realize this, but what you're asking for is actually what is actually what Jesus condemns the Pharisees for” — of praying on the street corner, of doing their good deeds before men in order to be seen by them.

For Jordan Peterson to come out as a Christian, specifically saying it, that would be this public thing. He would be lauded by Christians. We would praise Him for it, but he would also say it would be a claim to almost be worthy of saying that he believes in God.

I mean, if you say that you believe in God, but you scroll the internet mindlessly, or look at pornography, or ignore other people when you ought to be concerned for them, isn't that to be a practical atheist, as our Christian forefathers spoke of?

Well, Jordan Peterson is concerned about that. Wouldn't it be better that I act as though God exists, and you can tell what I believe by my action?

Sounds like something Jesus said in his Parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21:28-32). One son says he will do what his father asks him to do and doesn't do it. The other brother says that he will not do it, but then he does.

Who does Jesus praise?

The one who professed obedience or the one who actually obeyed?

8. The Prudential Argument for Morality Is Superior to the Moral One

Now, morality is the idea that some things are right and wrong: You can't do them…because they're wrong.

Prudence is this other dimension of human action, where we think about what's good for us, where we think about how to get the things we desire.

Now, if you tell people to do the right thing just because it's right, you'll get Immanuel Kant's praise, a lot of Christians will applaud, but not very many people will actually do what you said.

Now, there's another argument for doing what is moral that goes back to Socrates, the great founder of philosophy, and it is that the just life is actually the best life in terms of prudence as well.

And Jordan Peterson is actually a modern day Socrates, in this respect. He features, not the argument that you should just do what's right because it's right, but that you should do what's right because it is good for you…

…and it is good for your family

…and it is good for your community

…and it is good for the world.

And so he's compelling to people because he speaks about the way in which living a just life is actually in our self-interest, yes, but also honorable and desirable and praiseworthy, and something that we can sleep well at night as a result of.

And while you could critique that as not acting from a pure will in a Kantian sense, it is what human beings actually care about. It's actually much more compelling and inspiring to be told that this is the best life for a human being.

Christians often fail to communicate to people because our arguments are just moralistic. We need to cop Jordan Peterson and start making the same argument.

9. The Problem of Evil Assumes Moral Nihilism

Now this one's a deep cut towards the end of Jordan Peterson's groundbreaking Maps of Meaning. He deals with the problem of evil, which is one of the main reasons that our contemporaries do not believe in God. And in that section of his book, he talks about a premise that often goes unnoticed for the problem of evil.

The problem of evil says that given human suffering, God cannot exist.

What is assumed in it, though, is that the human suffering of life outweighs the good of existence.

And to actually believe that, to believe that it would be better if this world had never existed, is to adopt a nihilistic view of life. And this is a premise that has led many people to actually destroy the world. It is a premise that is held by school shooters, tyrants and psychopaths.

Let me read just a little bit from that book.

Should the world exist? Are the preconditions of experience so terrible that the whole game should be called off?

There is never any shortage of people working diligently toward this end.

It seems to me that we answer this question implicitly but profoundly. When we lose someone we loved and grieve, we cry not because they existed, but because they are lost.

This presupposes a judgment rendered at a very fundamental level, grief presupposes having loved presupposes the judgment that this person's specific, bounded existence was valuable, was something that should have been even in its inevitably imperfect and vulnerable form.

— Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning, p. 453 (“Conclusion: The Divinity of Interest”)

And I think what Jordan Peterson says here and in the rest of this section says more than what a generation of analytic Christian philosophers have said in response to the problem of evil.

It is not human—it is not it is not the right psychological frame to be in to think that it would have been better if this world had not existed.

It is a sign of psychological health to see the good in the world as outweighing the evil, that life is worth continuing on, overcoming suffering through valor, honor, sacrifice, and love.

10. The Need to Act as though God Exists

Christians are often suspicious of Jordan Peterson for saying that he acts as though God exists, but not saying that he just believes that God exists.

But which is more important: To believe that God exists or to act as though he does?

Peterson himself rejects the dichotomy. In his own terms, to act as though God exists is to prove that one does believe that God exists. Merely to believe that God exists, or to profess that one believes, is not worth anything at all.

Now I myself, I don't reject the question. As the Bible says, even the demons believe and shudder, and yet their belief does not amount to saving faith. It doesn't amount to acting in a righteous and upright way. It is intellectual, but they view God as an enemy, as something of which they are afraid.

Instead, I answer the question directly.

It is more important to act as though God exists, than to profess to believe that he does.

I take this from Jesus own words: “Many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord.’ And I will say to them, ‘I never knew you” (Matt 7:21-24).

It is those who act as though God exists, whose faith is shown by their works, who truly have faith.

It is the brother in the parable who did what his father asked who is justified, not the brother who said he would do it but did nothing.

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And so from Jordan Peterson, I’ve learned lessons that go to the heart of ethics, politics, philosophy, psychology, theology and so much more.

While some people view Jordan Peterson merely as a guru, another fad, an influencer, I view him as a philosopher, and possibly even more, a prophet.

What I definitely view him as is as one who prepares the way. Like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.”

And I think by following what Jordan Peterson teaches, we are brought to the threshold of the Christian faith.

The only question is whether we will step through the door.

I'm Joel Carini, The Natural Theologian. Until next time.

Jordan Peterson Bearing Witness, from Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness, Annibale Carracce, ca. 1600, modified with MidJourney

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