On my Bookshelf 12 Rules for Life – Jordan Peterson

Pitched perhaps a little tongue in cheek as a self help book, 12 Rules for Life weighs in as something altogether more substantial, so much so I note there are now books that summarise it. Although clearly and compellingly written, I found I could only digest it in small bites, but these are big ideas, and worth mulling over. They’ll also lead you into other avenues of thought, some of them very old and which seem to be coming from so deep inside of us we’ve forgotten they’re there. Psychologically speaking then, these are archetypal patterns, in the Jungian sense, which, when we encounter them afresh like this, they join certain dots in the psyche and light us up.

Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the university of Toronto, rose to fame when he refused to obey a law that compelled the use of gender neutral pronouns when addressing members of the transsexual community. Viewed by some as an intolerant stance, the resulting furore was also evidence supporting Peterson’s thesis that many of our most intractable societal problems are the result of low resolution thinking, and ideologically half-baked responses to highly complex questions.

It takes only a little research to uncover the fact it was the compulsion of speech by law to which he objected, rather than the actual use of particular pronouns, that by submitting to such we risk sacrificing our freedom of discourse on a bonfire of indiscriminate political correctness. What this also tells us about Peterson is that if, on any given subject, political correctness is pointing in the opposite direction to the psychological reality, he will not hesitate to say so. This can be labelled courageous or provocative, depending on your point of view and has certainly won him both friends and enemies in equal measure.

He also draws fire for his view that in any society there can be no equality of outcomes for individuals, that there will always be a hierarchy. This is as pre-programmed into human behaviour, as it is into lobsters. Therefore, he argues, ideologies that promise egalitarian utopias are inherently doomed, that the important thing for the individual is to accept the reality of hierarchies, understand how they work, understand one’s place in them, and work towards ensuring those hierarchies do not become corrupt and tyrannical for those at the bottom.

Peterson is also known for his Youtube lectures, in particular the series on understanding Biblical stories from a mythical perspective. Much of that material, along with similar analyses of the works of Jung, Freud, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn, also anecdotes from his own life, and from his long clinical experience are all bought together here in a powerful synthesis. But, as happened with Nietzsche, psychological theories can be misrepresented to suit a notably right-wing agenda and to a degree, the same thing is happening with Peterson.

His outspoken criticism of left-leaning ideologues, gives succour to ideologues of the right, which, in turn, results in simplistic media support to the idea Peterson is himself right-leaning, when in fact he warns us against all ideologies, left or right. It is holding to ideologies, he says, in the absence of something else, that has resulted in the deaths of countless millions over the course of the twentieth century. It is what that “something else” is – the true essence of being, how we realise it, and how we can bring it to bear in our lives – Peterson tries to get at here.

Popular with young men in particular, who Peterson argues have been left behind, undervalued and to some degree even demonised in recent decades by a more strident feminist Zeitgeist, the book provides guidance on how to mature successfully, how to face the world in all its complexity, tragedy, absurdity and horror, as a competent, powerful and self motivated individual, without needing to seek support in otherwise seductive and simplistic ideologies. Ideologies might promise clarity and equity, but always fail to deliver on their particular Arcadias. The reason? People are not machines, they will often act contrarily and irrationally to authority, to rule and dictat. That’s when the trouble starts and the ideologues in charge turn to oppression, authoritarianism, and eventually to killing in order to maintain control.

Twelve Rules is intended to help us rediscover a sense of personal empowerment and to find the courage to face a chaotic world without the risk of harming ourselves or others in the process. The result is a psychological, philosophical and quasi-religious treatise that aims to put us back on our feet, essentially by reacquainting us with the underlying mythological, archetypal bedrock of our culture. I certainly feel I understand my own shortcomings a little better from reading it. Whether I have the courage to do anything about that is another matter, which I suppose is the challenge Peterson sets us, either to overcome the malaise of the secular west, first by overcoming it in ourselves, or to go on as we are and allow it to sink without trace, and ourselves with it.

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My life in service – the lost poem

My computer is dead! The last update of Windows Ten killed it. I don’t like Windows Ten. It updates my computer every Friday night whether I want it to or not. Then I come to it on a Saturday, thinking to jot down a fragment of a poem, or maybe tickle through an essay, and it says: “Oh, hang on, I’m doing something much more important, you’ll have to wait.”

So you make coffee and sometimes when you come back it says it’s ready for you, but then you find it’s not working right. Sometimes you have to wait all day to find out it’s not working right, or sometimes it doesn’t work at all. The computer grinds to a halt, as if the update poured treacle into the works; the mouse becomes sticky, or sometimes you can’t get past the login screen. Sometimes you have to wait a week for the next update to fix things, sometimes you have to wait two or three. It’s a good job I’m not up against any deadlines.

This time, I’m getting what they call a 100% disk usage error. From reading the self-help forums, I’ve learned it’s a common problem for which the solutions are legion, but I must have tried them all, and none of them work. Basically, the machine enters a state of infinite effort while actually doing nothing at all, the result being a condition of stubborn unresponsiveness verging on the catatonic. I even tried resetting my computer to a state as fresh as the day that it was born – thinking I was being very clever in working that one out – but it won’t let me do it. It’s beginning to sound like Arthur C Clarke’s HAL: “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t let you do that.”

I’ve forgotten what that poem fragment was now. I woke up with it running through my head, but its leaked away. I should have written it down. After all, Wordsworth never had this trouble did he? He wrote stuff on bits of paper with a quill pen, then sent it all off with a penny stamp, ink blobs and all, and hey-presto, he made poet laureate. Eventually. But no, I had to start fiddling, clicking this, pressing that, and all to no avail. Also, have you noticed, there’s nothing like a sick computer for spoiling your day, for making you realise how much you’ve come to rely on it, and perhaps despising yourself a little on account of that?

So how did I manage to post this then? Ah well, I have this other dead computer. The Internet killed that one too, long ago, but I managed to resurrect it with an obsolete operating system I bought of Ebay for a fiver. It’s now the fastest, most responsive and silky smooth machine in the house, but only because it can no longer connect to the Internet. I’m it’s master now, you see? So I wrote this on it, transferred it by memory card to my Android phone and posted it online that way. It’s hardly convenient, but where there’s a will there’s a way.

It’s also useful to be reminded that it doesn’t entirely serves us, this vast invisible thing we have wrapped the world in. It’s a marvellous invention of course. The simple fact of email was a step change in communications. But then most of the emails we get are junk, sent out by dumb robots, and we have to spend time sorting through them for the ones that aren’t junk and sent out by humans. And we all know our emails are scanned and parsed by the Internet anyway, looking for juicy clues about our likely buying habits. And we know too we’re being groomed and manipulated by its algorithms every day, that the non living, non self-aware intelligence of the machine is becoming far more important as an end in itself than anything we’re allowed to do when we’re connected to it.

So my poem has gone and, okay, it wasn’t going to change the world so there’s no sense getting too upset about that, but the point is the machine robbed me of a moment of human expression, which does not make it my friend. It has something far more important to do now than serve our often admittedly trivial needs, and we need to think very carefully about what kind of unthinking, unfeeling world the machine is leading us into while under the impression it’s serving us, when in fact we’re all in service to it.

Wait a minute,… I remember how that poem went now:

My computer once made me see red,
When it locked up and tried to play dead,
So I cursed it quite rough, cos I’d quite had enough,
Then I smashed it to bits with my head.

 

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On my bookshelf – the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth – Helen Darbishire Oxford Press 1958

Dorothy was the sister of William Wordsworth, also friend to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Though a diarist, and poet in her own right, she never sought publication and it was only in 1897, some forty years or so after her death, her earliest hand-written journals were taken up and printed by the historian William Knight.

They concern just two months of the year 1798, spent at Alfoxden, when Dorothy was 27. We also have 1800 to 1803 at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, though of the latter, only 1802 is complete. The Helen Darbishire version takes another look at the handwritten originals for the Dove Cottage years. For Alfoxden, the William Knight version is the only academic source now, Knight having ‘mislaid’ the original. She kept other journals – accounts of travel in Scotland and Europe, but these are not included here.

What’s striking is the diaries are either neutral in their bearing or wholly positive of the persons mentioned in them. We must therefore assume Dorothy was, to a degree, self-censoring, and this is fair enough, especially since it’s known she wrote with the expectation that at least her brother would be reading them – and no one is that magnanimous if a journal is guaranteed its privacy. In short, there is nothing here for the muck-raker, not even in that much psychoanalysed pre-wedding scene of June 1802.

But let’s go back to 1798. This was a significant year, marking the collaboration of William Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the publication of their “Lyrical Ballads”, a book that kicked off the English Romantic movement. The preface, written by Wordsworth, can be read as a manifesto of the movement’s aims and, for anyone who wants to know what English Romanticism is, or was, this is still the best place to start.

Then we have the early years in Grasmere, this period marking several revisions of the Lyrical Ballads. But Dorothy’s presence at the birth of English Romanticism is more significant than that, though in ways not always easy to get at. For a start, it seems rather a small slice of a life, just fragments of three and a bit years. So what is it about Dorothy’s jottings that’s kept them in print all this time? Is it simply that she was the sibling of a famous poet, is it prurient interest in the nature of their relationship, or do we glimpse something special in Dorothy herself?

Though I admire the Lake Poets, I find them difficult. Dorothy on the other hand is immediately accessible, her journals capturing with great brevity the most colourful pictures of her life and of the natural world. She was, in a sense, the mind-camera for William and Coleridge, who used her diary as a reference, the result being you will find echoes of Dorothy’s words, and the scenes she captured, in their work. She was also, in a sense, the embodiment of everything the Romantic movement was trying to get at – something profound in its simplicity, in plainness of language, and purity of feeling.

I plead ignorance of Alfoxden, but I do know the area around Grasmere, a village now so overlaid with an impenetrable veneer of chocolate-box tourism and dotted with the weekend residences of city-gazillionaires, it’s impossible to imagine any sort of authentic life being lived there at all. If we want to know what that place contributed to the Romantic movement, two centuries ago, we turn to the Lake poets, but if we want to flip through the stunningly vivid mind-pictures of life in the Lakes back then, and rub shoulders with its characters, then we read Dorothy’s journals. And in them we discover all is not lost, that if we can get away from the honey-pots, and beyond the fell gates, it’s still possible to see and feel the world as she did.

Much of the charm of these journals lies in their capture of nature; of the land and the weather and the creatures great and small, also a sense of the people in the landscape, moving upon it more intimately than we do now, and mostly, of course, on foot. The lack of petty tittle-tattle, though marked, does not diminish their interest. There is also great pleasure to be had from comparing Dorothy’s seasons in that brief window of her life with our own, and the feeling, still, of a Romantic connection with times past, as if no time has passed at all.

Given the immense age of the universe, a single life is no more than a match in the dark, a brief enough time in which to blink and respond to what we see before the light flickers and dies. But some matches are brighter than others, and some minds quicker at seeing what needs to be seen and responding with genuine heart and feeling. It’s also valuable, during the brief flaring of one’s own light if we can be shown what others have noted as worthy, because it gives us a head start in the growing of our own souls. Of course, not everyone possesses such a talent as makes it worth our while, but to my mind at least, Dorothy Wordsworth did. And I think that’s why we’re still reading her journals today.

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Not a nice word

I was reminiscing, thinking back on a particularly difficult week at the day-job that had left me feeling exhausted and resentful. So, I’d taken myself off over the moors, sat down on a hilltop and there I was revived by the sound of a skylark. It was a recovery of spirit only momentarily punctured by the nagging ping of my mobile phone, before I switched the damned thing off and tranquillity was restored.

I completed this cathartic experience some time later with a blog piece called Pandora’s little box of the absurd. It garnered a few likes, and kind comments from regular readers, and then, as is the way with these things, it sank into the sedimentary layers, I presumed never to be heard of again. More recently though, and quite unexpectedly, I picked up another comment which read – and I quote: what a load of bollocks.

Now, compared with some of the anonymous abuse that’s dished out elsewhere online, this was rather tame, and not a little ironic given the context of the piece. I hardly get anything of so blunt a nature, since I presume my little domain is rather an inoffensive backwater, and hardly to be considered “influential”. Moreover, since “what a load of bollocks” offered nothing constructive by way of explanation as to why that piece had so offended the sensibilities of the querent, I deleted it – the comment, not the piece. I have, however, been thinking about it in the larger context of abuse in general, and the increasing entrenchment of all manner of opinion, for which there seems little remedy other than for it all to play out to its own troubling and as yet entirely unpredictable, though possibly violent, conclusion.

To be sure, we live in increasingly polarised times, times when patience and tolerance are fast dissolving, when ambiguity and diversity are looked upon as untidy concepts we’d sooner be shut of, and we hark back to times when we imagine things were simpler, therefore easier to understand. Thus we read a piece of self reflective prose and, under cover of anonymity, we tell the writer it’s bollocks.

The implication is that our view of things is superior, and it may well be, but we cannot be bothered to say how or why. Yet in all cases the “how” and the “why” are of vital interest to anyone engaged in the field of existential enquiry.

I think this is bollocks because,… now, that is an opinion backed up by reasoning and experience, and we might all learn something from it, even if it is only to respectfully disagree. But mostly, we don’t know why we hold the views we do, we can’t be bothered self analysing, so we just say bollocks instead.

It’s not a nice word, though how the male testes became synonymous with a thing considered beneath contempt I don’t know, while the dog’s on the other hand,.. well, they’re considered rather fine, while a dog’s breakfast is something of a mess. And it’s doubly odd, since the male testes are, after all, not unimportant, located as they are at very foundation of the fountain of creativity, so to speak. Moreover, when brought into an harmonious coupling with certain other receptive factors – factors incidentally also used freely in derogatory speech – they further the human species immeasurably, to say nothing of giving great joy to life – at least if memory serves me correctly.

But that’s complicated – to think metaphorically, to think deeply about complex issues. It’s much easier to retreat into profanity and partisanship because then no explanation is necessary. We simply take our cue from others of our tribe, seek confirmation of our superiority in the amount of hurt we can cause, take also our reward from the cheers of approval from our fellow warriors.

We believe that by silencing argument, we win it – whether we silence it with profanity, or violence, it matters not. We don’t actually win, of course, but it can take the letting of a awful lot of blood before we realise it, before we look back, exhausted by the effort and the carnage and are totally ashamed of ourselves to the bottom of our souls.

It’s just a little world, “bollocks”, and, though offensive, it’s sanctioned as regular speech now. Placards proclaim it on the TV news every night, and certain of our politicians use it freely in their dismissal of important affairs of state – little wonder then it has found its way into my humble backwater. But if I can for a moment inflate myself, all be it delusionally, to that most modern of high offices, “the online influencer”, let me caution us all, we plucky Brits: go easy on the profanity, and if we think something is beneath contempt, then try at least to explain why we think it, in case we are asked, then we might be counted as part of the solution, rather than merely contributing to the problem.

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