We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan Peterson review – a culture warrior out of his depth | Jordan Peterson

IIt is not easy to review any book by Jordan Peterson, the prolific Canadian psychologist turned lifestyle sage. The temptation is to respond not to the work, but to the person (or persona): rebellious, mocking, uncompromising, contradictory. But here the work itself causes problems; it’s a sprawling, repetitive text that could have done with some reckless editing. Ostensibly a step-by-step guide through the biblical narratives of Genesis and Exodus (and for some reason Jonah), with the aim of uncovering wisdom to help meet the moral challenges of today, it actually continually returns to some of Peterson’s favorite tropes about modern culture, its flabbiness and confusion.

On one level, its structure and argument are clear enough. The text of scripture confronts us, says Peterson, with a series of life and death choices. We can adapt our rebellious fantasies and myth-driven aspirations to the underlying moral structure of reality, or we can refuse. If we refuse, we destroy our own lives and the lives of others. If we instead recognize reality, we face two kinds of pressure.

There is the social pressure to conform, not to reality itself, but to fashionable orthodoxies—especially around gender fluidity, racial sensitivity, reluctance to hold people accountable for their actions. And there is the internal pressure of a self-serving, sentimental search for cheap answers to challenges of moral importance—false compassion, over-identification with the presumed vulnerable, cheap indulgence of surface desires for self and others. But if we are prepared to stand firm in the face of these pressures, the reward is a life of integrity, inner strength, and the ability to live with “adventure” (a favorite word). The stories of the Jewish scriptures—read with a strong admixture of Christian material—provide stark illustrations of the consequence of dishonesty or unreality and powerful images of the kind of integration and strength created by obedience to the truth.

Two points to begin with. One is that Peterson remains ambiguous on what many would consider a fairly crucial question: when we talk about God, do we mean that there is actually a source of agency and love independent of the universe that we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with some spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement,” he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when the deepest inclinations of his soul are called upon”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as an important source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who suggested redefining God as that which is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages suggest that God is identical with the highest human aspirations—which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to know if we actually meet a real “Other” on the religious journey.

The second point is connected. Peterson’s readings are oddly like a medieval exegesis of the text, where each story is really about the same thing: a stern call to individual heroic integrity. This is an interpretive style with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols of the growth of the spirit, paradigms of how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of smoothing over aspects that do not fit the template. Each story is pushed toward a set of Petersonian morals—single-minded individual justice, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.

The effect is somewhat one-note; the very way the stories develop, talk to each other, correct each other, deal with internal tensions and debates is muted at best. This is the sort of thing that classical rabbinic exegesis really enjoys, and that some more modern Jewish discussions—by Emil Fackenheim, Jonathan Sacks, Nathan Lopes Cardozo, and others—model very powerfully. Peterson is rightly hostile to anti-Semitism, and this might have led him to engage a little more in the rich world of Jewish interpretation. Instead, he relies heavily on rather dated Christian commentaries (and seems to have a limited knowledge of Hebrew, a disadvantage for a project like this).

In fairness, he selects some distinct paths in the stories, for example in the stories about Moses. But the exhibitions constantly shade into meandering polemics on a range of contemporary issues, particularly gender, on which Peterson has made his position quite clear elsewhere. Eve’s yielding to the serpent’s temptation, for example, is seen as the characteristic female error of sentimental, pseudo-compassionate acceptance of the unacceptable seen in bad parents, especially mothers who “cripple their children so that they can make a public show of their martyrdom and compassionate virtue”.

Well, there’s certainly a discussion to be had about toxicity in parenting, but to find it in the second chapter of Genesis requires impressive single-mindedness (and it’s worth noting that Jewish exegetical tradition, unlike Christian, has never been that interested in Eve ). Peterson argues that analyzing the patriarchal subtext of the biblical stories is a ridiculous distraction, observing that Genesis portrays both men and women negatively. What he does not seem to acknowledge is that discussion of patriarchy is about recognizing patterns of social power embedded in the stories, rather than whether specific men are painted in favorable or unfavorable lights. This makes it impossible for him to admit that such discussions can help us avoid some of the spectacularly destructive exploitation of biblical material which has reinforced the degradation of women throughout Christian history.

Predictably (for those familiar with his online struggles), he sees any qualification of the simple binary gender identity as tantamount to denying the difference between good and evil, a rejection of the fundamental polarities of reality. But most serious discussions of gender fluidity do not deny evolutionary biology or sexual differentiation as such; they call for more careful attention both to the social construction of roles and to the particularities of dysphoria. They deserve a better level of commitment.

And so on, also with other issues (most bizarrely, the conclusion of the Book of Jonah is made the occasion for a tirade about valuing the “natural” world over human life, which seems to have something to do with Peterson’s hostility to some forms of environmental ethics; not really what the text is about). These rabbit holes do no great service to the broader challenges that Peterson wants to highlight. There are truly corrosive manifestations of hedonism, relativism and infantilism in our culture; there really is a mentality that tricks us into believing that we can be whatever we want, and that any notion of short-term sacrifice for a more durable and fully sharable good is unthinkable.

But the insistent disregard for nuance and disagreement (“idiotic,” “addled,” “egregious”) and the reduction of any alternative perspective to its most superficial or trivial form does not encourage the serious engagement Peterson presumably desires. This is a strange book whose effect is to make the resonant stories it discusses curiously abstract. “Matter and insolence mingled,” in Shakespeare’s phrase.