Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

WE WHO WRESTLE WITH GOD  by JORDAN B. PETERSON (Published by Penguin-Random House. Price in New Zealand $35) 

 

Even to mention the name of Jordan Peterson is to raise some people’s hackles. To tell you what you probably already know, he has a wide readership, often lectures, is frequently interviewed on television and other platforms, and has written about the way people should be able to grow up, take responsibility and mature. A Canadian, he was for years a professor of psychology and taught in many universities. So why did he become a person wrapped in controversy? It began when he ran up against the transgender movement. Peterson loudly protested against “compelled speech”  - that is, people had to accept and use the new transgender movement’s jargon or be sanctioned. Later, under pressure, the society of Canadian psychologists ordered him to be sanctioned… but they had to admit that it had nothing to do with what he had taught or what he had done as a therapist. They were basically saying that he was lowering the standard of psychology by writing and giving talks in theatres in a popular way. One can’t help thinking that there was much envy about his success and (as is also true) that he earned a great amount by his writing and appearances. After going through his “punishment” he decamped from Canada and he now lives in the U. S. A .

Peterson has not yet declared that he is a Christian, but he appears to be well on his way to becoming one. He believes that many ancient texts are still relevant to us and worthwhile when it comes to matters of ethics and morality. It is foolish to assume  - as too many modernists do -  that only texts of the modern age are worth considering. To regard only what is currently fashionable is to miss out what is essential in the making of human beings. He begins quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Carrion Comfort” which suggests how difficult it is to deal with God, but how ultimately the struggle is rewarding. Hence the title We Who Wrestle With God, with the added words Perceptions of the Divine. His preface called “Foreshadowing: The Still, Small Voice” tells in detail the story of Elijah wherein the still small voice [of God] leads to consciousness and an awareness of a moral order. It is “what is the appropriate hierarchy of value through which the world most productively, generously and sustainably reveals itself”. He also asserts in his preface that “The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated – the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”

To make his case, what follows is presented to us over about 500 pages. We Who Wrestle With God is what is best called a commentary on the first five books of the Bible (the Torah – the Law), but also referring to some later Hebrew texts; and every so often Peterson quotes from the New Testament. He is exploring the importance of a universal ethical code. Tiresome though it is, to explain this long and detailed text the best thing I can do is to summarise each chapter. Thus…

1 In the Beginning

God passes to us consciousness and being aware of the goodness of nature around us. God gives us nurture and guides us. Man needs woman as woman needs man [Adam and Eve]. They complement each other. And “The world cannot survive if it is ruled by sex and power. Those forces degenerate into tyranny and chaos intertwined, intermingled and married when they are raised to the highest place. The world of the proper sovereign order is and must be ruled instead by the pattern of encounter with chaos, upward striving, truth, and voluntary sacrifice precisely in the manner that is most deeply and comprehensively encoded in the biblical corpus.” (p. 20) Further “Eve corresponds to Adam precisely as the Taoist yin does to yang. It is her job to bring to her partner’s attention all the concerns that Adam may have overlooked, involved as he is in his enterprise of responsible stewardship. He is called upon in that work to extend, expand, and update his naming and subduing in keeping with the new and even novel needs of the time, without too radically, pridefully, or presumptuously restructuring the entire tradition. Eve’s role is on keeping with the well-known personality differences between men and women, evident cross-culturally, and more pronounced in more egalitarian societies….” (pp. 23-24) Hear we have the idea that there is a core of behaviour, from primeval times, that is still relevant. Peterson makes a good case for God and the necessity of individuals needing society.

2 Adam, Eve, Pride, Self-Consciousness and the Fall

Here Peterson asks how much we can be ‘made in the image of God’. The Garden of Eden is the testing ground for humanity. Eve’s sin [the forbidden tree etc.] is hubris in thinking she embraces all peoples [as she carries all in her womb]. Adam’s hubris is to think that he is lord and master of all things as he surveys his world. As for the serpent, this is the temptation that leads to evil. Relating this to the present day, Peterson the psychologist says “The fact of the emergence of sophisticated self-realization with maturity implies that some of the fall is a mere consequence of growth. People abandon their childish naivete – not without pain – as they come to confront the bedrock realities of life: the harshness of the natural world; the tyranny of the social world; the sinful impulsive and hedonistic proclivities of the tempted individual. It is by no means obvious, in addition, that our descent into the cynicism that is so often the replacement for childhood trust and wonder is not an improvement, in some dark and necessary manner… the fall from childhood naivety is a prerequisite to maturity… To become self-conscious is to know nakedness, limitation, and mortality…” p.68

3 Cain, Abel and Sacrifice

From the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are therefore expelled and, hitting harsh reality, they have to toil. While Adam and Eve were made directly by God, their offspring are  made in part by human beings. The essence of rivalry and warfare is the desire to destroy what others have achieved, and this is the meaning of the story of Cain and Abel. Abel gives a real sacrifice to God, giving up something that was valuable to him. Cain does not give a real sacrifice, giving up something that was not valuable to him. Cain gives a mere token. This, says Peterson, betrays not only God but himself. As I see it, Peterson is now explaining how flawed human beings are and how there is a deep tendency in us to be tempted to harm others. Cain kills his brother… and thenceforth there are always those who are violent and destructive. This is often a struggle within us. Thus “humility and faith versus pride, despair and vengeful anger”. When referring to the legacy of Cain in us, Peterson often mentions Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the murderer in Crime and Punishment  who thinks that he is superior than other people and above the law. [ Dostoyevsky is clearly one of Peterson’s favourite writers – he often mentions him.]

4 Noah: God as the Call to Prepare

Cain’s spirit has come to rule the world. Resentment at higher groups leads to murder on a massive scale. There is “a pattern of degeneration” i.e. human behaviour gradually degenerates. Hence the Deluge and the saving of only the righteous few [in the Ark]. In case you read this as a ridiculous fable, Peterson reminds us that “ cultures who concentrate too much on what passes for present wisdom (“we can dispense with the superstitious foolishness of the past”) will lose the vertical traditional orientation that protects them against mere fads of consensus.” (Pg. 161) In other words, there is much wisdom in this passage.

5 The Tower of Babel: God Versus Tyranny

As Peterson says, before Babylon and prior to the Tower of Babel, there were many tales in the Middle East of gods punishing those who attempted to take over the role of heaven. The story of the Tower of Babel was not new, but it emphasises the human attempt to usurp God. What was more important was the Bible’s critique of the moral decline of Babylon. There is in scripture reference to a “brutish form”. Peterson relates it to the present day thus: “The ‘brutish form’ referred to is the true identity lurking behind the mask of shallow sexual attractiveness monetized in the present world as often, and in so many diverse forms – all produced, distributed, and purchased by the technological sons of Cain… This is certainly the technologically-mediated subjugation of the feminine to the hedonistic and narrowly economic and, more deeply, the alliance of the prostitute (or her virtual equivalents) with the terrible spirit of arrogant irresponsibility characterizing the builders of the eternal Babylon.” (pp 200 -201) On his way, considering the denigration of morals, he quotes Milton and Revelation, depicting Hell as the loss of morality on a larger scale with the dominance of elites scorning moral sense. When he discusses the tyrants in the Bible, he sees them made in the pattern of Cain. In the modern world, he sees in Cain narcissists who want to always be the centre of attention lacking all empathy, and authoritarian regimes (Fascist, Communist etc.) who revel in controlling whole nations.

6 Abraham: God as Spirited Call to Adventure

Abraham [formerly Abram] has many flaws [as we all have]. He is given a covenant with God and in effect he is being told to dare to go beyond the comforts he is used to. In this case, he dares to go on a long journey, with all its perils [including the challenging degeneration of Sodom and Gomorrah]. Peterson interprets this as an existential problem that is still with us – the big price you have to pay if you follow the necessary call and the problems you will meet. Thus “If the cost of reality is death, how might reality manifest itself, to justify that price? That is the ultimate question, with the paradisal dream providing the impossible answer. God provides an intimation, with the initial call. If the requirement to strive forward in the world is accepted, the reward is limitless: a life well-lived, the establishment of a genuine and stellar reputation, the founding of a nation, and a blessing on the entire world. Is that sufficient to pay for death? There is no a priori answer. That is the curse of the true existential dilemma. Is it worth it? You are fated to find out along the way.” (pp. 249 – 250)  And in this existential context, God tests us, which is where we struggle with God. God tests Abraham’s wife Sarah [previously Sarai] by making her barren when she wants a child. She prays and prays. Only when she is very old, she gives birth to Isaac. God has tested her faith. God tests Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham prepares to do so. God stays his hand. Abraham’s faith was tested. [This story is often quoted by atheists as proof that God must be some sort of sadist toying with human beings. In fact this story says quite the opposite. God says that real sacrifice is a very hard thing.]

7 Moses 1: God as Dreadful Spirit of Freedom

 

Moses is the archetype of the child who was cast away [the baby in the bullrushes etc.] but who became a leader and liberator, both leading the Hebrews who were fleeing from Egypt and presenting them with a God-given ethical code. The burning bush was his moment of being confronted by God, the “dreadful spirit of freedom”. Peterson has in this section a heading called “The Commandments as Explicit Revelation of Custom” explaining how a good society has to be coherent. 

 

8 Moses 2: Hedonism and Infantile Temptation

 

As well as having coherence a society must have laws… but who makes the laws? Says Peterson, referring to our present age: “It is not at all that the Israelites are insisting, with the fervour of authoritarian believers that the God they worship must be the One True God; it is that the true followers of Yahweh – those who wrestle with God – are always those seeking to discover what constitutes the genuine highest and uniting principle and then you live in accordance with that revelation. This is very different than the power-mad insistence that a given ideology or principle of power must rule; it is instead submission to the divine order, accompanied by willingness to make the painful, genuine, and personally costly sacrifices that are the eternally valid markers of true belief.”….    “The legitimate followers of the God of Abraham do not create their own values, as the philosopher Nietzsche insisted so wrongly that we must do, in the aftermath of the hypothetical demise of the divine.” [pp.351 -352]…. And finally…

 

9: Jonah and the Eternal Abyss

 

Jonah was called by God to go to the people of Nineveh and preach against their wickedness. Jonah tried to avoid God’s summon and ran away. Through many events (the story of the big fish etc.) Jonah submitted to fulfil God’s call. Wrestling with God often means you know the call is right even if you are loath to do what you should do [to put it horribly simplified].

 

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

In certain passages, while dealing with the concept of human beings “made in the image of God”, Peterson challenges the notion that human beings are made for no purpose but are merely the result of random procreation – the “selfish gene” idea popularised by Richard Dawkins.  “Even the biologists who should know better, are mainly onboard with this: the famous “selfish gene” cares for nothing, for example, but replication at any cost – or so goes the story. Could it not be possible, however and instead, that the interest of the individual, truly pursuing his or her great adventure, do and must align perfectly with the demands of procreation, all things considered and wisely understood? This would mean a harmony from instinct to heaven, so to speak, instead of any inevitable and necessary opposition between biological impulse, motivation or drive (all inadequate conceptualizations) and the social order – no Hobbesian war of all against all or Rousseauian antithesis of society and noble savage.” [p.270]

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *

 

 

Peterson’s Conclusion is eleven pages reiterating his main ideas, the greatest being first that the Bible is not a fairy tale but it holds much wisdom relevant to the present day; second, that life has a purpose – and that purpose will require us to face challenges in our life, hence the wrestling with either God or some other force or barrier; third, human behaviour is constant – we homo sapiens are essentially the same creatures now as our distant ancestors were in primeval times. Yes, we might have advanced with science, but there is still virtue, goodness, compassion AND as much anger, contempt, violence, jealousy, war, dishonesty etc.; fourth, societies crash when they are without real laws, and tyrants and determined idealogues [Fascists, Communists, Extreme Nationalists etc.] are always with us; five, there has to be a force [God] to remind us of what is essentially ethical and moral – the small voice; and six men and women are made what they are for a reason, so men cannot be women and women cannot be men. Men and women complement each other - not only theory but biology says so.

How do I assess We Who Wrestle With God ? In his prose, Peterson can be verbose. He often over-explains quotations from the Bible. On pp. 258-262 he tells us God knows that being human you have the capacity to take risks and therefore you can be an adventurer. He illustrates this by telling us the story of his sister. Some of his prose involves long and contorted sentences.

In spite of all this, whether you are agnostic, atheist, Christian, Jewish or any other religion, you will find much intelligence in this book, especially if you appreciate the value of wisdom coming from an ancient source. And if you don’t go along with everything Peterson writes, you can amuse yourself by picking holes in his reasoning… as I did when I read my way through Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

     “THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS” by George Douglas (First published in 1901)

 

            Imagine you are a young Scotsman who is very intelligent and has won a scholarship to the university of Oxford. He reads a lot, including current fiction set in Scotland. Imagine you have become sick of all the sweet little Scottish novels that are being churned out – about charming, picturesque small Scottish towns where people get on very well with one another, look after one another, occasionally have a harmless dram and make cheerful, harmless jokes about the dominie and the deacon as they watch the beautiful sun go down over the brae. They always have happy endings of course.  Imagine if the young man wants to hit back at this romanticised rubbish. He rebels. He decides to write a novel about what small Scottish towns are really like – the back-biting and nasty parochialism where poisonous gossip is the main currency and people are always scheming to take successful people down a peg.

So the young author writes his novel. It is called The House With the Green Shutters. When it is first published, it immediately becomes what we would now call a best-seller. George Douglas  [full name George Douglas Brown, born 1869 – died 1902] intended to write more novels. But he died relatively young (aged 33) in 1902, the year after his only novel came out. Douglas certainly depicted small Scottish towns as they often were over a century ago, and for some years The House With the Green Shutters was regarded as a minor classic. But few now see it that way. The hard fact is that, despite Douglas’s attempted reality, the novel goes over-the-top. In The House With the Green Shutters nearly every character is venal, underhanded, bullying or cowardly. Is this plausible, even in one small town? Worse, gradually what started out as a sort of reality turns into raw improbable melodrama.

 

                                George Douglas apparently with a very severe Scottish gaze

Synopsis as brief as I can make it: The setting is a small town in Ayrshire called Barbie. The time is the late 19^th century. John Gourlay is the most wealthy man in town. He is a big, bullying man. He intimidates his wife and daughter and he regards his one-and-only son John [sometimes called Jock] as a weakling and perhaps a simpleton – certainly not a worthy heir for aggressive John Gourlay, especially when the boy is so easily beaten up by other boys at the local school. Gourlay owns a large, dominating house, grander than other houses in the town and commonly referred to as “the house with the green shutters”. Much of his wealth comes from being a carter, with a string of underpaid employees who, in Gourlay’s many carts, deliver coal and various goods to the town and environs. Many people envy Gourlay’s wealth as well as hating his bullying ways. A group of men known as the “bodies” [only one of the hundreds of Scottish words when there is dialogue in this novel] gather around in the evening and gossip, always negatively and denigrating anybody who seems to be succeeding in any way. Provost and Deacon – who are supposed to be pillars of the council and the church – are part of the “bodies”. And of course they hate Gourlay. So they are delighted when a new entrepreneur comes to town, Wilson, who not only has acquired  a modern “emporium” [fancy old-fashion name for a store selling all sorts of goods] but who is also savvy enough to know that railways are now taking over carts for carrying goods. Gourlay begins to lose his customers. He makes less and less money until he begins -  without telling his wife -  that he bit by bit has mortgaged his house. His nemesis Wilson has a bright son and Wilson has the wealth to send his son to the University of Edinburgh. Foolishly, to keep up with what he thinks is his prestige, Gourlay also pays for his son to go to the University of Edinburgh. So more of his money drains away. He is humiliated when he discovers that, without knowing it, he has taken up some work by a company that is really run by Wilson. He is now openly ridiculed for all his bluster. There is only one moment in the novel when he says something positive to his son. Young Jock wins, at the university, a prize for an essay he has written. Gourlay congratulates him, but only because Wilson’s son hasn’t yet won any prize. What Gourlay doesn’t know is that Jock is hardly doing any study at Edinburgh. He has fallen in with a group of more wealthy students who can waste a lot of time carousing and drinking. Jock joins them, gradually takes to drinking whisky and bit by bit becomes an incurable alcoholic. He thinks he is being witty when he insults a professor… and he is expelled from the university. He comes home in disgrace… to the glee of all the town’s gossipers and to the wrath of Gourlay. Dear reader, let me simplify how it all wraps up. Gourlay shouts, intimidates and almost beats up his feeble son to the tears of his timid wife. His son runs away, drinks even more whisky and feels he can deal with his father. He goes back home and kills his father by bashing him with a fire-poker . His mother wants to shield her son from being hanged, so they clean things up to look it as if Gourlay fell. But Jock, by now plagued with delirium tremens and completely disoriented, commits suicide by drinking poison. Mother is now riddled with cancer. Mother and daughter now discover that the mortgage cannot be paid and they are going to be thrown out of their house. They have nowhere else to go. So, after reading a soothing chapter from the Bible, they both commit suicide by drinking such poison as Jock had left. The “bodies” and other gossipers think Gourlay got what he deserved. 

I do implore you not to blame me for this messy and in many ways ridiculous final melodrama. The House With the Green Shutters has many other faults. For those who do not understand Scottish dialects [and I am one of them] it is difficult to plough your way through some of the conversations on the page. Then there is George Douglas’s habit of describing characters physically in detail, but never making it clear why they behave the way they do. In other words, we do not really understand how they think, especially when it comes to the “bodies” and others. It is just taken for granted that they are malicious, just as we have to take it for granted that Gourlay is a violent bully without learning how he came to be that way. Boil the novel down and it’s essentially about the hubris and downfall of a tyrant in a small-minded town.

But this isn’t doing full justice to Douglas. First, there is obviously the truth that, in Scotland in the 19^th. century, technology was moving on and for the first time small towns were also moving on from horse-drawn carts to railways. That of course is part of Gourlay’s downfall, but it is dramatized clearly. Then there are some episodes that have a certain brilliance. In the early chapters, when young Jock is still an unhappy schoolboy, Douglas examines clearly how Jock thinks – intimidated by his father naturally, but he has his own perspective on the world. Jock is daunted by the thought of how huge the universe must be and how small and insignificant he must be. He escapes from his father by hiding in the loft and reading trash which he cannot follow. There are other high points in the novel, such as the vignette in which a pompous church-man, hearing that Jock has gained a prize for an essay, collars Jack and proceeds to try proving how erudite he is – which he clearly isn’t. There are other characters who stand out and – even if there are only one or two –they are compassionate and refuse to ridicule those who are down, such as the baker who calls out the “bodies” for their hypocrisy and their vicious gossip. 

Having said all this, though, The House With the Green Shutters fails to be a classic. There is little depth to it. Apparently, recently in Scotland there have been dramatized versions of the novel for the stage, but the novel is not likely to become a best-seller again.  

            Now for one of my awful confessions. I first read the novel by picking it off my father’s shelves when I was a young teenager, maybe aged about 14. I was intrigued by it, identified with the intimidated young boy [not that I had a father like Gourlay] and, at that age, shared some ideas about how vast the universe was and how daunting. As for the Scottish dialect words, I just put up with them. At that age I thought it was a great book. But that was then and this is now. I kept the book and it is the one that I now have on my shelves. It was published in 1933 by the old Collins Clear-Type Press. Included were five pictures by the artist Sidney Stanley, some of them almost surreal. The one that depicted Gourlay’s son overwhelmed by the “vast totality of things” still haunts me.

            Nasty Footnote: In 1932, the popular novelist A.J.Cronin wrote his first novel Hatter’s Castle. He went on to write such novels as The Citadel, The Stars Look Down, and The Keys To the Kingdom. All of them were turned into films, including Hatter’s Castle and very many others. He also invented the character of Doctor Findlay who became a British television favourite. But after Hatter’s Castle was published, some pointed out that it was very like George Douglas’s The House With the Green Shutters. I found on-line a letter that was published in The Spectator in the mid-1930s. It went thus: SIR,— No reviewer pointed out about “Hatter's Castle”… is nearly a replica of “The House With The Green Shutters”, the almost forgotten masterpiece of George Douglas….In both books a dour, avaricious Scot is the central figure—the hatter of Dr. Cronin's book is the alter ego of John Gourlay of The House With The Green Shutters—and the children of each are weaklings, with similar destinies. Whilst not suggesting plagiarism, I think that Dr. Cronin was sub-consciously influenced by the plan and general theme of the earlier novel.” Oh dear. How often writers steal ideas from other writers.

 

Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.    

                                     HOW FAR SHOULD SURVEILLANCE GO? 

In nearly all cities and in many towns, cameras are watching people and filming day and night. In most supermarkets and shops there are cameras watching and filming customers day and night. Owners of some pubs, houses and [the entry of] buildings [banks, department blocks etc] the cameras are filming. This is a great help to the police. In a democratic country, it is all to the good. Police [in New Zealand] do not track down drunks wobbling down the street… unless they start a fight or are part of a brawl. They do not track down people who jay-walk… unless they have created a real commotion such as holding up the traffic. They do not track down the great majority of pedestrians and drivers… although, very occasionally, police can make use of film to identify a person who has been charged with murder, rape or other crimes. Finding where and when the accused was at certain times could help prove the accused innocent or guilty. Supermarkets and shops etc. can more easily identify shop-lifters although, regrettably, many criminals who want to break in and steal now wear masks or use other techniques to disguise themselves… and they use violence.

 So the use of public cameras can be very legitimate and justifiable.

But can public cameras butt into people’s private lives and effectively destroy them?  Journalists – newspapers, television etc. – sometimes chase people down to get sensationalised images of innocent people. Then there are people who are not doing anything criminal, but are doing something very questionable. A few weeks back there were widely shown images, made by a “Kiss Cam” in an American stadium during a rock concert. A man and a woman were canoodling and petting. They were shocked to realise they were being filmed and seen by a huge audience, because they were having an illegitimate liaison. The man was cheating on his wife. Quite funny in one sense but destructive in another.

Now all these things are happening in open and democratic societies.  But what happens in totalitarian countries? In the People’s Republic of China, the Sky-net now consists of 700 million closed-circuit TV cameras which can span nearly every citizen in seconds. Faces are identified and even a citizen’s gait can be identified. If this were the system of an open society, it would be helpful in catching real criminals. But the main purpose of the Chinese People’s Republic is to control society, identify and destroy dissidents and ensure that the totalitarian system will not be challenged. This is surveillance without any real ethics. The mass population is forced to live as the Communist Party dictates. Yes, the Chinese Sky-net is sometimes used to catch real criminals, but the system is really along the lines of Big Brother is Watching You. Naïve visitors entering China often say that the people are happy and peaceful, but then they have to look that way don’t they?

FOOTNOTE: After writing and posting this commentary, I saw a documentary about Singapore and it followed the way in Singapore there are endless cameras surveilling people. Criminals are traced via cameras... but so are people who jay-walk or who drop some small trivial piece of rubbish, for which they will be fined. This is why Singapore is always very tidy, but it makes for an authoritarian state. Yes, there are different political parties, but the same party has ruled since the 1960's, when Singapore ceased to be part of the British Empire. And while those who dissent are allowed to protest, they are only allowed to do so in limited places in parks, with police surveilling them. Street processions are banned.