The Unbearable Burden
You already have an opinion on this man. You may like him, you may dislike him. You may have a long list of gripes about things he has said or things you imagine he has said: “He claimed that dragons are real! He wanted to give bride-slaves to incels! He insulted a plus-size model! He posted a clip from a weird porn film on Twitter because he thought it was footage from a Chinese Communist semen-harvesting facility! He tweeted ‘go fuck yourself’ to Elmo!” I don’t know why anyone would have an issue with that last one, but regardless, you can put all these points aside. Bracket your preconceptions. Clear your mind.
Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God has some points in its favor. If this angers you, take a deep breath. Restrain the impulse to slam your laptop shut. Take ten seconds. Now, if you’re still reading this, you’ve passed the first test. Hang in there. I promise we’ll get to the critical comments soon.
We Who Wrestle with God is a study of major stories from the Torah, with the Book of Jonah offered as a digestif. To his credit, Peterson takes the Bible seriously. In an era when critics tend to dissolve the text in ideological acid—“the Bible is patriarchal, sexist, racist, a bunch of fairy tales, just really dumb, etc. etc.”—Peterson sees it as a source of moral wisdom, wisdom that is reflected in biological and psychological fact.
His interpretations often touch on a familiar Peterson theme: the conflict between order and chaos. In theory, Peterson admits that chaos is not actually evil. He sees order and chaos as being complementary, needing to exist in balance like the duality of Yin and Yang. But in practice, We Who Wrestle with God is a full-throated defense of order against the encroaching menace of civilizational chaos, represented by Jung’s archetype of the overly indulgent “devouring mother,” who prevents her children from evolving into sovereign individuals. Peterson identifies this power with the ancient Babylonian she-dragon, Tiamat, who is slain and defeated by the chief of the gods, Marduk. The serpent in Genesis, who seduces Adam and Eve out of the garden, is like a miniature version of this big bad forerunner.
As he considers the virtues of order, Peterson also ponders “the resentful spirit of Cain,” a hatred for the ideal that gives rise to such phenomena as the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution. He further considers Noah as an apostle of order, escaping chaos through the “habitable order” of the ark, before discussing Abraham as “the archetypal individual,” Jacob’s famous wrestling match with God, and Moses as “the archetypal leader.”
Peterson sees the God guiding these prophets and patriarchs largely in psychological terms, interpreting him as a guiding aim towards goodness, which helps people navigate reality. This is much to the consternation of many Christians who otherwise enjoy his work. He is apt to write things like, “God is what has encountered us when new possibilities emerge and take shape,” and is famously cagey about his exact stance on whether God really exists or not. He is also less interested in the personality of the Biblical God, which emerges so intriguingly and disconcertingly from the pages of Genesis and Exodus and isn’t easily reducible to a set of psychological principles.
At times, Peterson lets his ideological priors get in the way of a clear-eyed interpretation of the text. He argues that Eve’s great flaw, which leads her to give into the serpent’s temptation, was an arrogant form of false compassion. In his interpretation, she ate the apple because she desired the power to re-order reality and become a maternal figure to all. This fits Peterson’s notion that society is currently threatened by domineering human resources and DEI commissars, but is it actually in the Biblical text? It sometimes feels like Peterson is arguing with people on Twitter when he’s supposed to be interpreting the Bible.
Now, I have to admit something: I didn’t enjoy reading We Who Wrestle with God. Peterson’s first breakthrough book, 12 Rules for Life, had humor and a friendly avuncular tone. You felt more of his personality, his curiosity and openness. He talked about his psychotherapy practice, told amusing and illuminating stories from his life, and ranted entertainingly against Elmo. You felt the presence of a knowledgeable and literate friend, offering real but warm-hearted advice to people who were struggling. I also found the way he would frequently tear up on podcasts to be endearing.
12 Rules for Life was admittedly a self-help book, whereas this is supposed to be a more serious analysis of the Torah. That can explain part of the difference in tone, I suppose, but not enough: We Who Wrestle with God is filled with doom and gloom. The clock hands hover at a minute to midnight throughout its five hundred pages, and, while Peterson’s voice thunders, the continually gathering clouds never let a ray of grace or mercy slip through. In Peterson’s reading, the Torah demands nothing less than total sacrifice, total obedience, the lifting of an almost unbearable burden. And if you can’t lift it, you’re toast—doomed, like the Israelites who complain about the insubstantial bread they are given to eat in the desert (God sends fiery serpents to bite them). Peterson thunders against OnlyFans girls (“the modern whores of Babylon”), vegans, New Agers, and socialists, among others. All seem destined to expire in the ruins of the Tower of Babel, perish by fire in Sodom, or drown in the same flood of primordial chaos that Noah managed to escape in the ark—metaphorically, of course. But it still seems like a bit much.
Peterson’s path is the way of nature rather than that of grace. He interprets the Old Testament God’s smiting and scourging as a metaphor for the consequences of going against nature, of violating the basic biological and psychological boundaries of life. It might seem harsh that the Israelites get killed by fiery snakes for complaining about bread, but, hey, that’s how nature works: whiny losers get killed by the fiery snakes representing the personal chaos they’ve unleashed in their lives, plummeting further into an abyss of pain and suffering.
This highlights the problem with treating the Old Testament solely as a source of moral advice. The text is bizarre and mysterious, by turns moving and disgusting, attractive and repellent. To reduce its mingled sublimities and barbarities to easy moral lessons often risks seeming ridiculous.
While Peterson contemplates worthy objects, his greater conclusions frequently seem objectionable. According to Peterson (writing on Twitter), “The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.” In the book he goes so far as to say, “The essence of man and God is the will to take on the heaviest possible burden of life.” This sounds like remarkably bad advice. In fact, it sounds like a perfect recipe to drive yourself to a nervous breakdown.
Peterson, unfortunately, is absolutely crushed by his overwhelming consciousness of responsibility, ethics, and obedience to cosmic law. It’s killing him. There are facets of the Abrahamic religions that many might consider essential—divine grace, mercy, ecstatic devotional love, a sense of bliss in surrender to a higher power—none of which appear in We Who Wrestle with God. The entire book is consumed by the need to live up to nigh-on impossible demands, with destruction waiting those who fail to identify and lift the heaviest of all possible bearable burdens. The tone of this weighty tome reminded me of W.H. Auden’s comment on Captain Ahab: “His whole life, in fact, is one of taking up defiantly a cross he is not required to take up.”
It pains me to write this because I enjoyed Peterson’s early podcast episodes on Genesis and found 12 Rules for Life to be a book likely to help a young person adrift in our time. But We Who Wrestle with God is so somber and dark, so lacking in even a wink or a smile, that, at times, I could feel “the resentful spirit of Cain” rising up in myself, demanding that I turn off my Kindle. When there is humor in it, it seems shot through with bitterness. For instance: “It is also the engineers [of the Tower of Babel] who have built the systems that bring the modern whores of Babylon and their delectable but untouchable succubus delights to the sticky laptops of the basement-dwelling techno-incels.”
I don’t want to be overly harsh here. I think Peterson has done significant good, and I feel annoyed that this book will give ammunition to his enemies, many of whom are indeed quite bad. But when you completely abandon irony and levity to trudge forever on the bleak road out of Sodom, you leave yourself open to these attacks (though I’m not sure his critics have read enough of the book to properly identify the actual points of weakness). As Auden said, “The man who takes seriously the command of Christ to take up his cross and follow Him must, if he is serious, see himself as a comic figure.”
To be a man of faith, I think, requires a salutary helping of irony regarding oneself. This is why A.A. works: in the duel between the ego and the bottle, the bottle always ends up getting on top. That’s why you surrender to a higher power. You can’t take yourself too seriously, can’t listen to Peterson when he asserts that the Bible says, “It’s all on you.” That’s a maddening and destructive thought and, to boot, not really what the Bible is getting at.
This is also why J.R.R. Tolkien selected the hobbits to be the ring-bearers in The Lord of the Rings. They could bear the burden of the ring of power because they didn’t take themselves too seriously, whereas humans became too quickly corrupted by its allure and the temptation to use it. Judging by We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson needs to re-connect with the hobbit in himself. He needs to re-evaluate what bearing responsibility for your life really means and should look like. Then, he might be able to show a little grace to the OnlyFans girls and vegans.
Sam Buntz writes from Chicago. He is the author of The Great American Cougar Hunt and The God of Smoke and Mirrors, both available on Amazon. You can find him on Twitter @SamBuntz.
