Part two of the second part. Now I want to take on a criticism of 12 Rules for Life, namely that it is sexist. This one was difficult to write, by which I mean I did three complete rewrites and countless revisions of this post. It's a difficult topic, but I hope I have presented it in simple and straightforward terms.
Is 12 Rules for Life Sexist?
A common criticism of 12 Rules for Life is that it is sexist. In fact, this is a general criticism of Peterson's entire worldview. The subtitle of 12 Rules for Life is An Antidote to Chaos. In Peterson's view, as discussed in his book and elsewhere by him, order is masculine and chaos is feminine.
The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically--imaginatively--as masculine. It's the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression. Chaos, by contrast, is . . . the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, [and] it's presented imaginatively as feminine. . . . It's Creation and Destruction, the source of new things and the destination of the dead. [1]
To many, this particular move reeks of misogyny. Since his book is "an antidote to chaos" he is (it is argued) by extension saying the problem with the world is femininity, and more masculinity is the solution. Peterson has defended himself with, as far as I can tell, the following four points. 1) Both order and chaos are bad in their extremes. Order is not synonymous with good, and chaos is not synonymous with bad. 2) The world (or more precisely the West) is currently suffering from excessive chaos. If the world were suffering from excessive order, he would have written the book to reflect that. 3) Masculine and feminine do not mean men and women. They are psychic categories for understanding the world based upon our gendered experiences of the sexes, not the sexes themselves. 4) The traditional depictions of these psychic categories are the masculine, the feminine, and the child. We are not free to change the record on this. [2]
I think attacking Peterson on his metaphysical (or rather, meta-psychological) conceptualization of the world is 100% fair, and if that conceptualization of the world is found wanting in its treatment of the genders, then it is fair enough to call it sexist. However, to critique Peterson's theory on the level of "that's sexist" is to stop at the surface level. There are deep problems with Peterson's worldview, and demonstrating those problems cannot be reduced to modern cultural sensibilities, even if those sensibilities are well founded.
For the moment, let us observe that the imagination of the West is not limited by what Peterson considers to be the traditional representation of order and chaos. There are plenty of counterexamples within our traditions that prove so. Consider this small sampling:
- In his Divine Comedy, Dante is led through the infernal chaos of hell by a man, Virgil, but when he finds himself in the celestial orders of heaven, he is led by a woman, Beatrice.
- In the Cosmographia by Bernardus Silvestris, both order (Noys) and chaos (Silva) are feminine.
- In Greek mythology, the goddesses Eris and Harmonia represent chaos and order (harmony) respectfully.
- In Roman mythology Concordia and Discordia, both goddesses, represent order and chaos.
- Law and order is captured by the feminine symbolism of Lady Justice, who traces her roots back to the Greek goddesses Themis and Dike. Themis represents the divine order, and her daughters are collectively the Horai: Dike (Justice), Eumonia (Good order), and Eirene (Peace).
- The feminine depiction of Wisdom in the Bible (in the canonical book of Proverbs and deuterocononical books of Wisdom and Sirach) does not seem to fall in neatly with Peterson's order/chaos theory.
How Peterson would respond to these counterexamples is something I don't want to speculate on. One could perhaps explain them away. But counterexamples to the side, have we noticed just how antithetical Peterson's view is towards the Christian and Western tradition which has, I would argue, sought to destroy this symbolism?
Peterson's source material draws heavily off of Jungian psychology, and in particular it draws from Erich Neumann's book The Great Mother: An Analysis of an Archetype. [3] This book is controversial in many ways, not the least of which is its lack of scientific methodology. In researching this book, I read multiple scholarly book reviews from around the time it was published, and the lack of methodology is the primary observation in all of these.[4]
What separates the archaeological/anthropological understanding of archetypal myths from the psychoanalytic understanding of these myths is that the former treats myths and goddess worship as a cultural phenomenon that died out. The Great Mother myths are a belief of the past. On the other hand, the psychoanalytic tradition of Jung, Neumann, and Peterson, holds that this gendered (Sky-Father, Earth-Mother,etc.) understanding of the entire universe is built into our collective unconscious. We must view the world as masculine and feminine, not because it is a cultural phenomenon, but because it is founded in the collective unconscious of all people. [5] Thus, Peterson calls masculine order and feminine chaos "the constituent elements of the world as drama." [6]
But is this symbolism really as inevitable as the Jungian tradition says? I say no. If it is true that chaos has been interpreted in the West as female, and order as male, it is just as true that the West has come to completely reject this symbolism, even if it did not reject other gender norms and customs.
On a philosophical level, the Greeks began to question their myths. Instead of gendered spirits inhabiting the universe, Pre-Socratic philosophers, like Xenophanes, questioned their myths. [7] Others, like Zeno of Elea (remember Zeno's arrow?), shifted Greek thinking from pondering myths to pondering paradoxes. These are not the same thing. A myth presents the world as a theatrical drama. A paradox keeps the tensions of myth but removes the drama and focuses on pure concepts. Paradoxes have the same force on the human imagination as myth, by that force turns abstract. The masculine and feminine dramatis personae recede into abstraction. The world comes to be understood as concepts.
Thucydides invented history, offering a way of understanding the world based upon concrete event rather than mythical events. Euclid created geometry, offering a way forward to understand the universe in conceptual, non-mythical, terms. To be granted, none of these developments did away with myth, but slowly they began to offer alternatives to myth.
Then Socrates and Plato introduced a whole schema for understanding the world as pure ideas, one which deliberately tries to transcend myth, even if producing its own myths. Among the various ideas laid out by Plato, which I won't delve into, we might consider three. 1) We should reject myths or the mythological understanding of the world. [8] 2) We should reject gender distinctions. [9] 3) We must come to understand the world in terms of the one truth, the true form, not as a drama between opposing forces. [10]
Finally, when Christianity was coming into its own, building up from the Hebrew traditions, the Christian imagination set out to understand creation ex nihilo. Gone were the myths of father-sky and mother-earth. The "nothing" prior to creation had to really be understood as nothing, not a feminine chaos which God impregnated; God didn't create "in the belly of the celestial woman" as Neumann says [11]. God doesn't encounter genders. He creates genders. God did not create masculine order in a feminine chaos. He spoke order, both male and female, into creation. And so, when Christian theologians talked about the nothing, the void before creation, as Augustine did, it was purely as abstraction, mired in paradoxes like Zeno's to be sure, but not a cosmic feminine force. [12] It was not the personified void or abyss (Chaos is Greek meaning "gap") found in Hesiod's Theogony. [13]
Having studied a fair amount of Christian existentialism myself, I am tempted to want to start theorizing on this further. However, for the sake of not losing focus, and not getting too bogged down in my own (probably also errant) philosophizing, I will only reemphasize this point. God created the masculine and feminine as part of his order. The Christian tradition squarely rejects dualism, whether in the form of Manicheanism, or in the form of a cosmic drama between the masculine and feminine.
Thus, the West, in both philosophy and religion, set out on a tradition of rejecting this very schema that Peterson says is "traditional." What he really means by tradition is primitive paganism. We should not confuse the gender roles present in primitive paganism with the gender roles present in Christianity. Pagan gender roles suppose the masculine order and feminine chaos. Christian roles suppose the order of the masculine and feminine by God, and the subsequent disorder of both by sin.
Here, of all places, is a surprising convergence of Biblical Christianity and modern feminism in combating this gendered worldview. In her book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir relates that the deification of femininity in the Great Mother figure creates an idol of woman. Reflecting almost biblical language in condemning idolatry, she writes, "All the idols made by men are in fact subordinate to him." [14] The Great Mother idol is not a profound discovery of the symbolic feminine, but a testament to women being turned to stone, of becoming like the idol itself. In such an idolatrous world, de Beauvoir writes, "[Woman] remained doomed to immanence, incarnating only the static aspect of society, closed in upon itself." [15]
A Christian understanding of masculinity and femininity needs to be just as careful not to create idols of the masculine and feminine. These are not the constituent elements of the universe as drama, as Peterson claims. As St. Paul says, our struggle is not one of flesh and blood but against principalities and powers. [16] The Christian worldview does not contain a masculine order and a feminine chaos, but a Godly order and demonic chaos. To elevate the masculine and feminine to these roles is to create idols.
Coincidentally, this is also the danger Christians can fall into when they adhere so strictly to the "biblical" gender and familial roles that they justify spousal or child abuse in the name of enforcing biblical standards. When you take these roles, such as the subordination of woman to man, and turn them into an idol, you risk real damage. As C.S. Lewis notes, "A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a man would have to be . . . indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, [this] sort of sovereignty." [17]
Humans are created in the image of God. They are not gods themselves. Worshiping an image is idolatry. To understand the world as being a drama between masculine and feminine, order and chaos, is to mistake the image of God for God. Christianity, at its core, cannot accept this.
So, to those who wish to attack Peterson for his characterization of these cosmic forces, I say go for it! To those who see an ingrained sexism, I say make your critique! Just be sure to dig deep. Lay the ax to the root. Don't offer up mere sentiments.
Finally, there will be those who are fine admitting that I am right and that Peterson is wrong on this point. But, it will be argued, this detail has absolutely no effect on his advice. It is just a theory he uses to understand the world. Even if it is wrong, it's not going to perpetuate sexism? His advise doesn't depend on it or create sexist practice.
Fortunately, after the second chapter,* most of this talk of masculine order and feminine chaos goes by the wayside. However, I do see problems with his theory that will have real affects on people. Here's the most clear-cut instance in the book where his theory has concrete implications:
Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters. Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85% percent of men as below average attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male. It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, "NO!" [18] (I have removed parenthetics from this quote.)
There are three problems with this passage. The first problem here is theoretical. Peterson jumps from the "eternal feminine" to "women" to "female human" to "Woman as Nature" (whatever that is) all in less than a single paragraph. Yet, supposedly he is careful to distinguish between the masculine/feminine dichotomy and the male/female dichotomy. Peterson does not, in fact, keep these ideas separate and distinct.
The second problem here is anthropological. Is female choosiness really a good explanation for the gap in male vs female lineages? A far better explanation is that we have more female ancestors than male ancestors because the men murdered each other and raped the women. There's a reason 1 out of every 200 men are descended from Genghis Khan, [19] and it wasn't because the ladies were fawning all over him! It was because the other men were dead (you know, from being killed by Genghis Khan), and the women were forced into marriage (or at least forced into bed). I mean, for crying out loud, Kind David in the Bible didn't have a boatload of wives because of female choosiness! He had a boatload of wives because he literally sent their husbands to the front line of the battle to kill them. [20] Female choosiness my eye!
The third problem is ethical. When you misplace your criticism, you misplace you opportunities for addressing the real problems. Instead of stopping to look at potential problems with online dating sites (the errors and assumptions of the social media platforms that need to be addressed), Peterson puts the focus on women. Is it really women's nature which makes men feel rejected, or is it the dating websites which have been built on false promises and superficiality? And at a data point when Peterson should be examining the violence of men, he places all the onus on the choosiness of women. Another missed opportunity!
It is no secret that Peterson rejects the notions of toxic masculinity or rape culture. And I'm not asking anyone to accept those concepts. But when your ideology (idolatry) forces you to interpret data in a way that lays the onus on women (even when you insist it's about the "feminine," not women) you close off fields of inquiry that may lead to self-improvement for men; you invalidate the experiences of women whose "No" goes unheeded and for whom men represent chaos; and you validate men who blame women for their problems, when you could be helping them clean their own room.
To be absolutely fair to Peterson, I do not think most of his advice is like this. I think most of his advice is fairly good and free from these sexist tinges. However, whenever I see these spots in his work, I roll my eyes and shake my head. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed.
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Citations and Footnotes:
[1] 12 Rules for Life, pg. xxviii
[3]Peterson recommends reading this book in footnote 37 in 12 Rules for Life.
[4]Reference the following reviews:
- Review by: B. A. L. Cranstone, Man, Vol. 58 (Feb., 1958), pp. 31-32
- Review by: John F. Haskins, The American Scholar, Vol. 25, No. 2 (SPRING, 1956), pp. 248-249
- Review by: Jacques Schnier, College Art Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1956), pp. 78-80
- Review by: Tarmo Pasto, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Sep., 1958), pp. 128-129
- Review by: Robert M. Grant, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Oct., 1956), p. 257
- Review by: Franz Hančar, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Vol. 54 (1957), pp. 288-289
Statements on the opposite sex become much less questionable when, as in the structural analysis of the Archetypal Feminine, the material on which they are based stems in large part from the collective unconscious. The objectivity of this profound stratum, its imperviousness to human influence, are so great as to leave relatively little room for distortion through the inadequacy of the observer. And this means that even if our interpretation is open to all the objections that can be raised against a subjective view, the abundance of the material presented guarantees at least a relative objectivity. (The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Erich Neumann, Princeton University Press, pg. 25)
Notice that in this quotation, Neumann states that he has direct access to this Archetypal Feminine through the collective unconscious, which is supposedly objective. As a result, he excuses his own lack of methodology. After all, why do you need method when you have this direct access? This, of course, is circular logic. He is proving that the archetypes exist by his direct knowledge of the archetypes. Then he classifies these archetypes as objectively real and impervious, i.e. we cannot get rid of them.
[6] 12 Rules for Life, pg. xxvii
[7] Xenophanes questioned the anthropomorphization of the gods. He wittily commented that if horses and oxen had hands to make statues of the gods, their statues would look like horses and oxen. (Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, 3rd ed. Hackett Publishing Company Inc. 2005, pg.22)
[8] See Plato's Republic, book 3: "And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity of morals among the youth." (392a) As correlated with this, Socrates was put to death for heresy and corrupting the youth. In the Republic, the character of Socrates is arguing that orthodoxy is what is corrupting the youth.
[9] See Plato's Republic book 5, starting at 451c, The character of Socrates argues that men and women have the same nature and therefore should be given the same tasks.
[10] In Plato's Symposium, he rejects the gender based theory of love, as offered by the comic Aristophanes, and accepts the theory, offered by Socrates, of the transcendent form of love, which Socrates had learned from Diotima.
[11] The Great Mother, pg. 40
[12] See, for example, Augustine's Confessions, book XI, chap. 5:
All these praise Thee, the Creator of all. But how dost Thou make them? How, O God, didst Thou make heaven and earth? Verily, neither in the heaven, nor in the earth, didst Thou make heaven and earth; nor in the air, or waters, seeing these also belong to the heaven and the earth; nor in the whole world didst Thou make the whole world; because there was no place where to make it, before it was made, that it might be. Nor didst Thou hold any thing in Thy hand, whereof to make heaven and earth. For whence shouldest Thou have this, which Thou hadst not made, thereof to make any thing? For what is, but because Thou art? Therefore Thou spokest, and they were made, and in Thy Word Thou madest them.
[13] In the Theogony, Chaos (gap) gives birth to the first five gods, Gaia, Tartarus, Eros, Erebus, and Nyx. The fact that Chaos means gap lends itself to a feminine personification, for reasons that require little imagination.
[14] The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, Vintage Books Edition, 1989, pg. 73
[15] ibid.
[16] Ephesians 6:12
[17] The Four Loves, in The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis, Inspirational Press, 1987, pg. 268. I have admittedly taken this quote out of context, as Lewis was specifically talking about erotic love and the playfulness of myth surrounding erotic love. However, I believe the meaning remains substantially the same.
[18] 12 Rules for Life, pg. 41
[20] Read 2 Samuel 11
* Correction: I originally wrote first chapter.
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