Unpacking Jordan Peterson’s new book – with great exhaustion

A biblical approach

Praise be, there’s a new book from psychologist and YouTuber Jordan Peterson. We who wrestle with God is about how ancient myths and legends, while perhaps not literally true, contain valuable and even universal lessons about life and humanity.

The feedback nodded to this. Anthropologists will tell you that there is much to be learned from studying myths. You can get a glimpse of how earlier societies thought about the relationships between ordinary people and elites, or what their views were about humanity’s place in the natural world.

But then we got to the last page of the introduction and the penny – which had somehow remained held up – fell. This is not a global survey. It’s all about stories from the Bible, and almost exclusively from Genesis and Exodus, because the Bible is “the story on which Western civilization rests” and “simply the foundation of the West.”

Feedback’s understanding of intellectual history is admittedly a little unclear, but we are fairly certain that Western societies and modern science, although influenced by Christianity, were also influenced by ideas from the ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Norsemen, and Arab scholars that founded intellectual history, the foundations for the scientific revolution, and more.

But we will not pretend to be experts in biblical exegesis. We’ll happily leave the theological criticism to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who says Peterson “relies heavily on rather dated Christian commentary” and has a “persistent contempt for nuance and disagreement.”

Instead, we’ll unpack a small section in which Peterson attempts to connect his ideas to human biology – something we know a little about.

The problem with Eve

Chapter 2 is about Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden after Eve, tempted by a serpent, eats a forbidden fruit and persuades Adam to do the same.

Peterson says this reflects fundamental errors in the thinking of men and women. “The temptation that woman is eternally faced with,” he writes, “is the idea that maternal benevolence can be proudly extended to the whole world, even to the most venomous snake…for her compassion, however misplaced and false may, “claim to undeserved moral virtue and ability.”

Meanwhile, people have “a corresponding and equally deadly sin,” namely, the belief that they can “incorporate, dominate, name, and subdue, and bring into proper order whatever you put before me”—no matter how “excessive.” or “absurd”.

It is women’s job to be compassionate and draw men’s attention to those suffering, while men must exercise their “emerging authority” and make judgments about who deserves help.

Given that this book purports to reveal absolute truths about human nature, Feedback was pleased with the lack of self-reflection in this line about the dangers of “exaggeration.”

Now one might expect Peterson, a psychologist, to provide psychological evidence for these differences between men and women. You would be wrong. But he tries to connect it to the biology of birth. Labor, he explains, is painful and dangerous because human babies have evolved larger brains that have to fit through a narrow birth canal that cannot widen, otherwise “women would have difficulty walking.”

This triggered the activation of a neuron in Feedback’s overloaded brain. Peterson repeats a hypothesis called the “obstetric dilemma,” proposed in 1960.

Today it is one of the most controversial ideas in anthropology: the underlying assumptions have all been shown to be untrue or questionable. A 2018 study was bluntly titled “There is no ‘obstetric dilemma’.” A counter-speech from 2021 said (take a deep breath): “It is unjustified to reject the obstetric dilemma hypothesis entirely because several of its basic assumptions have not been successfully refuted.”

Feedback is not smart enough to resolve this thorny dispute. But unlike Peterson, at least we know that. He goes on to say that pregnant and breastfeeding women show “increased dependency” and therefore cannot compete with men for status, and at that point we exercised our Emergent Authority and stopped reading.

Word of the year

Feedback enjoys the annual ritual where dictionaries announce their word of the year, which tells us about changing mores. We were particularly pleased to learn of the existence of the Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, and its decision that the 2024 Word of the Year is “enshitting.”

This excellent word was coined by writer Cory Doctorow to describe how companies gradually degrade their services as they squeeze more profits out of their customers. He was referring to companies like Google, whose search results are full of ads and untrustworthy AI-written summaries, and Facebook, whose newsfeed is so full of memes and ads that it’s hard to see anything from friends or family.

This word has been used in feedback since we read Doctorow’s first essay, and we’re pleased to see it finding a wider audience.

Do you have a story for feedback?

You can email stories to [email protected]. Please enter your home address. This week’s and past feedback can be found on our website.