following on and in response to Bryan’s piece “Something Meaningful”. Here are some notes I wrote while watching this debate.
“Peterson is a hard man to categorize” – he frowns at the very idea!
“The new atheists have a problem with establishing an ethic”
“Measuring well-being” – right
Harris & meditation (Blackmore does it too, see below)
“Agreeableness is not a long term strategy for society”
“Religion as a virus of the mind”
“Dawkins would do well to read Jung”
“The deeper explanation of Meme is to call it an archetype” (but Blackmore wants to go with Dawkins’ definition)
Partly grounded in biology, so it’s the behaviour itself, both the instinct and the manifestation of that instinct.
But it’s also encoded in our mythologies.
In other words it’s not just a question of contagious ideas [i.e. transmitted in doctrine, social media & crowd psychology]
Your position in a dominance hierarchy? Gets reinforced and becomes biological over 350 million years
Blackmore: I think you’re being unfair to memes. A meme [qua Dawkins] is that which is imitated, that which is copied from person to person. So the idea of dominant hierarchies can be a meme.
Peterson “we can think of hierarchies of memes” [this is an instance where his hand movements brilliantly convert a super-meme into sign-language for the visually-impaired]
Blackmore: [still arguing Dawkins’ case] “so genes are one replicator, via chemical processes in bodies; memes are a second replicator, by imitation and interactions between human beings, which hardly occurs in any other species at all – i.e. culture”
Peterson “what happens when memes influence human evolution?” The meme-gene interaction is the religious instinct. There is selection in favour of a certain meme, say
“Which leads to what is reality?”
[as discussed at length between Bryan & Vincent, in days of yore!]
Peterson: “we could say reality is that which selects – an evolutionist, rather than a materialist, viewpoint” furthermore “what is selected by that reality is in some sense correct”
Peterson’s book 12 rules for life is full of biblical illustrations – why?
@ 16mins through the video:
The tragedy of life leads to malevolence or religion—that’s what the bible deals with
The story of Cain & Abel is short but there’s no end to the depth one finds in it.
Hyperlinked with our entire culture
Blackmore: “Bible stories! Grrrrr! The story of Adam and Eve says that God made us to suffer because we are wicked and bad”
Peterson: “Nietzsche grieved that God is dead and predicted catastrophe, prophetically”
Blackmore: “How come the most dysfunctional societies are the most religious?”
Peterson: “We are living on the corpse of our ancestors – an old idea. It is not being replenished”
“christianity declares that the individual is sovereign in regard to the state” [this rules out Islamism, not to mention plain old Sunni Islam, as strictly practised in my street]
At least 2 notions of religion: there is the dogmatism of belief and there is the spiritual element
Dogma appeals to those who are conservative in a certain sense spiritual to those who are more liberal
Limits of rationality starts at 29:00. “My respect for you is embodied”
I like the way he describes Dawkins as protected by concentric circles of stuff, with him and his university professorship in the middle, and his assumption that he can just float off on his own not acknowledging his dependence on all that.
I note that Susan Blackmore never for a moment betrays any understanding (i.e. personal experience) of what Peterson means by “spiritual”. Which doesn’t mean that she lacks that experience, but she doesn’t include it among the things she is grateful for (such as the train which brought her to the studio, etc)
Blackmore: “I’ve meditated every day for 30 years” turns out it is the Chinese form of Zen.
She tries to put her feeling of gratitude into a rational framework.
The interviewer asks whether the feeling of gratitude needs to be addressed to someone or something. Peterson says “That’s a good question”
[I often mention it myself, whether in a post or verbally with the person I’m with, including my Christian sister, who still has hopes for me. But even recognizing that it’s a good question, I don’t bother asking it any more. You might say that gratitude is its own reward, and any true God that I envisage is going to be unconcerned as to whether I believe or not. But if Susan Blackmore thinks that everything comes within the scope of reason, that’s her belief & a kind of religion therefore too. If reason is her god, why should I not respect it?]
Blackmore feels gratitude to the Universe. He asks why, she says “I don’t know”, and he nods because that is her tacit acknowledgement, despite herself, that she hasn’t taken the trouble to fit it into her system of reason. [which she probably thinks is her lazy shortcoming against her rational god.]
Now we get to where Peterson says happiness is not an ultimate goal (she says ultimate good but he corrects her).
Is she accepting the meaninglessness of life by going through her daily actions? [The Myth of Sisyphus, as depicted by Camus, as a philosophical alternative to suicide] He wants to make her think more deeply. He says her hunger is “not constructed”, nor is her need to use the loo.
I like very much when he says (@38mins) listen to your body. This has been my own guiding intution, ever since my instant cure from CFS 13 years ago; and my sense that spirituality is not separate from the body.
I like when Blackmore says “isn’t it offensive to say…?” that she’s not an atheist! Not that she’s offended, needless to say.
And his beautiful ending about the Logos and the divinity of each human being. Whatever is your highest value, that is the god in your life.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Some further thoughts on this:
I think Peterson has a better appreciation than his opponents of the gravity of the problem of meaning, and that’s at least a start — if nothing else, I’m convinced that it is a legitimate issue. His opponents, such as Susan Blackmore, seem to me at least, to be dismissive or even defensive, about the issue, either because it makes them uncomfortable to be put into a position where they look like they don’t have anything to offer on that front, or because they think it’s a non-issue that’s just being raised to justify religion. For instance, she kept bringing up “meditation” as if to say, “I’m a deep person; no I AM!” But maybe that’s cynical. I just get the sense, listening to them, that, whether they realize it or not, they have this vision of the future where human history has gone radio silent, where we just accept that we’re masses of replicating cells, that we’ll lay down to die and decompose with bemused tranquility, no longer mystified by our existence. It’s like, sure, we’re tormented with doubt and anxiety and fear NOW, but I think on some level they lay that all at the door of religion, and they think it won’t be an issue that they’ll have to deal with once religion is laid to rest. When Peterson brings up Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, I think he’s trying to tell them, “Oh no. You won’t get that lucky.”
However, I’m not sure that Peterson has compelling answers to the problem either. I’m not always entirely sure what it is he’s even proposing. (I often used to think that about you as well in our old conversations.) And I of course have my doubts that religion in general is a compelling answer. Besides, there’s certainly no guarantee that life ISN’T meaningless, and that we just have to somehow come to grips with that and find a way to make our existence bearable and even worthwhile. It may even be dangerous to become TOO convinced that someone has those kinds of answers. That seems to be the gravitational property around which cults and radical ideologies form their followings.
It may be enough, at least as a start, to acknowledge that life can be bleak and we need some way of justifying it; we need SOMETHING more to sustain us. Otherwise, you go to the other extreme, where Susan Blackmore tells her students that life is pointless, but you’ll get out of bed, you’ll go to the bathroom … Oh, don’t worry; you’ll do something! This just leaves these students adrift. It gets them to about 9am, but what are they supposed to do with the rest of their lives? Is it any wonder that they latch on to any facile cause that sweeps through their campuses?
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“life can be bleak and we need some way of justifying it”—important starting point. On the one hand there is Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, along with Susan Blackmore perhaps.
And then, discarding the shell & apparatus of Christianity in its many forms, we are still left with the truism that we are asking for a let-down if we
or we rejoice in the high princely life like the young Gautama, heedless of old age, disease and death, till hit by them.
Are there treasures we can invest in, without the trappings of religion, which is as liable to “moth & rust” as anything else? I happen to think so, but wouldn’t presume to teach “techniques” or a “path”.
Like Bryan, I look to the poetic for a way to communicate the sense of these “treasures”. But I once placed a lot of value on “Fingers Pointing to the Moon“.
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