Can we all know and select meanings and values that can make us worthwhile and comfortable? Can we all know who we’re and should be? Can we all know ourselves, construct community and relate to God and others correctly and well?
Jordan Peterson argues we will find meaning even within the chaos and suffering of life. Bernard Lonergan, S.J., demonstrates easy methods to transcend ourselves in knowledge, easy methods to heal our culture, easy methods to discern and discover truth, and easy methods to relate to the loving mystery of God. Father Lonergan shows us the method to progress and easy methods to counter the forces of decline. These two Canadians address our punishingly polarized, religious and cultural controversies—but in radically alternative ways.
Jordan Peterson and Bernard Lonergan, S.J., address our punishingly polarized, religious and cultural controversies—but in radically alternative ways.
Who’s Jordan Peterson?
Peterson, a public mental, global phenomenon and omnipresent YouTube star, is a clinical psychologist and an excellent speaker. He revels in denouncing the postmodern denizens of latest academe. He discovers deep meaning in every little thing from academic journals to biblical stories to classical literature to Disney movies to Harry Potter to the lives of his two children. Peterson decries Jacques Derrida’s proposition that every one is interpretation and Michel Foucault’s assertion that every little thing is only a struggle for power.
Peterson preaches that our existence is structured by natural hierarchies, rooted in nature. Inequality has its advantages (although he realizes an excessive amount of inequality is eventually destructive). Gender fluidity, most leftist ideologies and a few contemporary movements for social justice (e.g., Black Lives Matter) are targets of his withering critiques. He argues that such utopian visions are ultimately harmful to the individuals they pretend to help. He’s rightly haunted by his extensive studies of the worst people, places and events of the twentieth century: Hitler’s atrocities, Stalin’s gulag, Mao’s cultural revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s killings.
He defends capitalism, supports those that lean toward the upkeep of the establishment, and questions those that too quickly and unreflectively tear apart established orders without knowing where such revolutionary energies eventually lead.
For Peterson, the perfect we will do is devise strategies for balancing the threatening forces of chaos with order.
For Peterson, the perfect we will do is devise strategies for balancing the threatening forces of chaos with order, characterised by sensible freedom and societal compromises that don’t allow liberties to turn into tyrannies. His astute evaluation of the difficulties of perception calls attention to the ways wherein our own internal functioning(s) cause us to see the world in certain ways. Curiously, he approaches questions of being and God but pulls back from definitive pronouncements on such matters. Perhaps it is a sign of an admirable heuristic humility. But in the ultimate evaluation, he offers more technique of survival than reasons for transformative grace and hope.
Peterson’s two best-sellers, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order (along along with his earlier academic tome, Maps of Meaning), provide observations and stories, many from Peterson’s personal life and clinical practice. Like Scott Peck’s 1978 The Road Less Traveled, whose first words were “life is difficult,” Peterson begins with the pain and suffering of human existence. He trumpets his message, especially to young men: Get your act together. Don’t expect anyone to make life easy for you. Confronting life’s inevitable tragedies and tribulations requires sacrifice. Get off the couch in your parents’ basement. Select a path. Work to make things the way in which you would like. Be honest, truthful and clever. Be strong. Be heroic. In doing so, you can find a meaningful life and be a worthwhile person.
Who was Bernard Lonergan?
Among the many Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan’s works are two major undertakings: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) and Method in Theology (1972). Each are demanding but rewarding reading (hint: Start with Method). Lonergan describes our lives as a part of cosmic processes of emergent probability. Cycles of progress and decline characterize human history.
The rock on which we will construct is the transcultural, transtemporal, self-evident fact of the deep and disinterested desire to know that characterizes human individuals. To disagree with Lonergan’s start line is contradictory: Such disagreement demonstrates the will to know at issue. For Lonergan, the act of understanding reveals our cognitional structure, which reveals a metaphysics (what is basically real and true) and ushers forth an ethics (the revelation of what we should do).
For Lonergan, conversion is essential. Our commitment to authenticity, lived in our accepting the wisdom of the transcendental precepts, makes for progress.
Lonergan’s method is transcendental. The appropriation and practicing of Lonergan’s method lead us beyond ourselves to relations with others and, ultimately, God. The purpose is self-appropriation of our consciousness, i.e., awareness, on the degrees of experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding. Each of those levels reveal intrinsic transcendental precepts, or rules: Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible. I’d add that creative motion calls us to be loving.
Lonergan profoundly analyzes evil rooted in the fact of bias. As much as we desire to know and desire to come back to the act of insight, we may be blind or obstinate, and thus can resist the challenges of the transcendental precepts mentioned above. Bias operates on personal and communal levels. We screen out data (e.g., racists’ refusal to appreciate that other races are equal); communities and cultures can grow to be corrupt (e.g., Nazi abominations); one can authentically appropriate an unauthentic culture and meaning system.
Bias can also infect our common sense, causing us to guage social problems in overly simplistic ways. Take gun control for instance. Many individuals coming from theoretical approaches ask questions just like the following: Why will we see mass murders almost every day in the US, while other nations see so few? Why are so many incomprehensible mass shootings carried out by unhappy, isolated, friendless, young white men? Why are so many murders in our cities the results of young Black men killing young Black men? Why will we refuse to sanely regulate guns? There aren’t any easy, commonsense answers to such questions. And yet note that it will not be unusual to listen to simplistic dismissals like “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
For Lonergan, conversion is essential. Our commitment to authenticity, lived in our accepting the wisdom of the transcendental precepts, makes for progress. The alternative, inauthenticity, may also lead to say no. Being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible and loving is best than ignoring reality, being silly, reveling in being unreasonable, refusing responsibility and frustrating the ability of affection with apathy and hate. By conversion on the mental, moral and spiritual levels of our being, we transcend to the fact of God.
Lonergan’s owner’s manual for humans also goes wider and deeper than Peterson’s binary of chaos and order.
Divergences and convergences
Peterson is well value reading and hearing, even when one disagrees with a few of his pronouncements. Further, his popularity and impact force us to ask: What need within the culture and times is he fulfilling? His recipes for locating ways to good and true humanity are attractive to many, albeit those that are dissatisfied with the more leftist readings of social reality. Ultimately, Peterson argues that the one method to set the world right is to repair oneself.
Lonergan, then again, realizes that we will only truly meet our challenges with collective effort. The group, not the person, transforms culture. Lonergan’s owner’s manual for humans also goes wider and deeper than Peterson’s binary of chaos and order.
In Chapter 7 of Insight, Lonergan describes his theory of “Cosmopolis,” an evaluation of social reality written within the Fifties within the wake of World War II that sounds eerily like a prescription for the ills of our present world. Cosmopolis recognizes that overly individualistic solutions will not be viable. We’re all on this together. We, not only I, must reply to the challenges of our times. Matters like climate change, extreme income inequality, racism and sexism require a metamorphosis of ourselves, our communities and our culture.
Cosmopolis is the yet-to-be-constructed set of social relations that can make a world of peace and liberty and justice for all. It calls us “to talk the straightforward truth though truth has gone out of fashion,” as Lonergan puts it; to open ourselves and our communities to solutions and answers we regularly need to avoid. But Cosmopolis will not be easy to construct, since the cycles of progress and decline will not be understood by common sense, and our different theories about progress clash. We’d like the grace of the next viewpoint.
For Lonergan, that higher viewpoint is faith, the knowledge born of non secular love. Aquinas taught that grace is the flexibility to do what we couldn’t do before. To avoid the descent into latest types of totalitarianism, to grow to be who we deeply desire to be, we must discover easy methods to relate to at least one one other and God in ways in which increase freedom and love while diminishing the destruction of decline.
Faith can be about opening ourselves to God setting things right. Authentic ways of knowing and selecting and loving lead us to “being in love with God,” Lonergan writes in Method in Theology, and that love is “the essential achievement of our conscious intentionality. That achievement brings a deep-set joy…. That achievement brings a radical peace.… That achievement bears fruit in a love of 1’s neighbor that strives mightily to bring in regards to the kingdom of God on this earth.” Further, the failure to succeed in such achievement fills us with “the conviction that the universe is absurd.”
Each Lonergan and Peterson realize our most excruciating conflicts are over meaning. Peterson’s emphasis on the person causes him to neglect the ability and creativity of community, while for Lonergan, common meaning constitutes community. Still, our church and world will profit from each voices: Hearing the contemporary longings to which Peterson responds, and studying Lonergan’s paths to realizing the achievement of our deepest desires and, ultimately, our redemption.