Culturally we live in uneasy times. Difficult times, perhaps, and I am, at times, not at all optimistic. Our Late Modern/Post-Modern culture seems moribund, flaccid. Mediocre. Unsure. We nihilistic and cynical. Distrustful. Atomised. Our institutions often appear riven and weak, incoherent and lacking in self-confidence. Much of what is presented to us as having merit in contemporary art is at best mediocre; so many times I am reminded of what Peggy Lee once sang, 'Is that all there is? If that's all there is my friend then let's keep dancing.' This is a world explored by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq in such works as 'Les Particules Elementaires' and, lately, 'Soumission'.
In the last few years we have increasingly witness to the commodification of virtue (or morality, if you prefer) by Hollywood. We've kind of got used to the parading of wealth and status on the red carpet by the conspicuous consumption and display of 'designer' clothes and accessories - 'commodity fetishism' to borrow a phrase and concept from Marx - but now, in addition, there is a concerted display of morality to supplement and re-inforce that superiority. Late Capitalism has a tendency to commodify things over time, (and why shouldn't that happen when we've lost everything else to believe in?) - strange then that so many Hollywood liberals are so quick to do Capitalism's dirty work. What has emerged in this last couple of years or so is a culture that is both deeply censorious and deeply sexualised; a very clever feat of Hegelian dialectics to be sure but one that so riven with internal contradictions as to be incredibly unstable. It's no surprise, then, to see things begin to fray at the edges, 'things fall apart' - yet again. (More of that later.) Indeed in the past two hundred years or so we have witness any number of attempts to overcome the crisis of the 'Death of God', to find something to fill the 'God-shaped hole'. And that essentially is the great underlying problem of our cultural malaise - the 'collapse' of the West's great Narrative of redemption, the meta-narrative of our culture. Post Modernism, however says that there is no problem
And all the time, on a more prosaic level, there are the 'Culture Wars' raging across the Atlantic and that are slowly overwhelming us here There has to be more than this. Where in all of this is the authentic? Is there, indeed, any room for it at all, when Modernity has been fobbing us off with the shoddy, the second rate and downright false for too many years now?
And then into to our unhappy, confused and indeed chaotic culture drops a timely book: 'Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos'. The author is the Canadian academic and clinical psychologist Jordan B Peterson. A controversialist too, it appears; a bête noir to so called 'progressives' and a rallying point for their opponents of various shades in the Culture Wars. A brave man, who is willing to speak out on various issues. Certainly braver than I. As Peterson explains in his Prelude the origins of 'Twelve Rules' lie in his earlier, ground-breaking 'Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief', Routlege, 1999, in which Peterson proposed that the religious and mythic stories of Western Civilization - some incredibly ancient and oral in origin - are ways of positioning the reader in a moral drama that is the world, 'being' itself. 'Twelve Rules' is an exploration of the implications of that. Each of the rules is the starting point for a discursive exploration, and Peterson, we soon discover, is deeply interested in Existentialism, particularly Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience and Psychology. His also cites Freud and Jung among his influences. A heady brew, but the outcome is very interesting, very intriguing, and I think very important. Speaking personally, on a purely practical level it has already helped me order my life. As Tolkien wrote once: 'Life is above the measure of us all (save for a very few perhaps)', and this book is an attempt to help us get its measure. So part 'self-help' and part philosophical & cultural exploration, this book also provides narrative in a culture that is both shy of narrative and anti-foundational. In some respects it is a call to arms.
To give one practical example, Rule 6 is: 'Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world''. On the surface that strikes the reader as very hard. Hard, as in unsympathetic and difficult to achieve. He is asking a lot of the Reader there. But then many of the New Testament injunctions are hard, but I attempt and very often fail to live by them. Let me give you an example that may I hope shed some light on what I believe he means, and takes us back to the fraying and falling apart I talked about before. You may have seen nipping about the internet a video of a clash that took place in the bookshop Barnes and Noble (in New York?) between a relatively well known American actress and a trans activist. It is a car crash. Touching, heart rending even. But still a car crash. A little research on the net quickly showed that perhaps neither of them should have been pursuing an activist role, that neither were emotionally strong enough for that role and perhaps their activity, dare I say, was a form of displacement activity. Neither of them, we may surmise, had looked to themselves first and neither of them had followed Rule 2 either 'Treat yourself like Somebody you are responsible for'.
In researching this piece I've been reminded of a number 19th century English public intellectuals; Arnold, Jowlet, Pater and to some extent Morris. All were involved in a search for a cultural alternative to a faith they saw as essentially empty, that is they were looking for something that would re-anchor morality, that as de Sade pointed out had been cut adrift in the de-throning of the Divine. 'The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation", wrote Walter Pater in his famous Preface to his 'Studies in the History of the Renaissance' of 1873. I'm not so sure about that - Peterson argues elsewhere, cogently I think, that that is the role of art. He doesn't necessarily believe, like Arnold, say, in the higher moral calling of art, again as that substitute for the absent God. Be that as it may, both Pater and Peterson are calling for action, for in that action is the correct response to the problem of 'Being' or more accurately 'Being' after 'the Death of God'. For Pater it is to fill every moment with pleasure. Peterson is too rigorous for that essentially hedonistic, 'Lotus-eater', approach to 'Being'. Indeed one can justifiably ask just how serious or practical did Pater consider his philosophy to be. I could even go so far as to suggest that all of the above, Pater, Jowlett, Arnold and Morris, were at times and to varying degree naïve, if not deliberately blind. Can there me anything so astoundingly, breathtakingly naïve, for instance, than William Morris's 'News from Nowhere'?
Peterson's muse is sterner and more demanding. (He is also, I suspect, a pretty intense guy.) No, for Peterson the correct response to 'being' is action, is 'becoming'. There meaning is to be found. However as a Christian I believe that Higher Truth is to be found in 'process' but outside of the person. Regardless of any other niggles I may have, this, however, does not mean that this book hasn't value. I think it's value is very great. It may even have begun to chart the escape route for our culture out of the morass of Post Modernism. The trick will, of course, to retain those positive social changes that have happened since the Sixties (in which I have an interest!) and restore the ideas of value and meaning. It will be interesting to see where he will go next.
