Out of Chaos, Order

Not the Other Way Around

Waxing Crescent Moon in Gemini

No Mortal with a finite mind can ever truly comprehend the source of it all. Even Carl Sagan grappled with this, although he was over-confident in thinking that his legitimate take-down of a masculine Enlightenment deity put even a dent in the descriptions of God put forward by Anselm, Aquinas, Aristotle, most of the Church Fathers, Spinoza or Tillich. And when one looks at the Dharmic faiths of India, we can see complex and even abstractly philosophical conceptions going so far back as the Mesolithic, often times much more brilliant than anything dreamed of in 18th Century Europe.

So when an anti-trans misogynist attempts to tell you about Order of the Will of God thanks to some mastery of the theological concerns of third century BCE, you can accept that they may be intelligent, perceptive, and even well-read — but they are not an authority.

This is all coming on the heels of the rise to fame of a certain Psychology professor (and sometimes therapist) who published a best-seller with the audacious subtitle “An Antidote to Chaos.” Not only is it impossible to dissolve Chaos, but the phrase “Antidote to Chaos” is a contradiction in terms, and Dr. Peterson should know that. Order can certainly be destroyed. Chaos, which we might call “God,” can not. Hence the book of Revelation, where that is the precise fate of the temple, by a source who is both “the Alpha and the Omega.” (Preceded by the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva trinity of the Dharmic faiths, and later echoed in Shelley’s “Destroyer and Preserver”).

Indeed, often Order is no more than an Idea. Queue Stevens:

                           It was her voice that made   

The sky acutest at its vanishing.   

She measured to the hour its solitude.   

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,   

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,   

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her   

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

                   — “The Idea of Order at Key West” 

Any time some ballyhoo jockey goes around blathering about how people with sophisticated notions of gender are destroying “Western Civilization” (as did the loathsome Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire in Iowa City last week), we can remember that that “West” wasn’t built in a day. (Hell, it wasn’t even built in seven.)

More, we can remember that not only is Dr. Peterson’s subtitle a contradiction in terms, but his logic also holds grave inconsistencies. Ostensibly, he is devoted to the theory of evolution as a guiding principle for understanding the whole of life, and (though I applaud him for not allowing Pageau to push him into Orthodoxy [although I wonder whether his wife isn’t pushing him into Catholicism]), he doesn’t seem to continue to believe in Evolution once he begins to explicate the psychological underpinnings of the Abrahamic faiths.

Evolution is a process that takes billions of years, and millennia of adaptation, exaptation, mutation, extinction, and survival of those with traits most beneficial for any given environment. Now that this particular species has reached a peak of being, the bulk of our survival is accounted for. Our biggest concern now is how to avoid overturning the environment itself. But rather than allowing Sapiens to flourish to be our most actualized selves, Peterson wants us to instead force ourselves to behave in a regressive way to maintain some kind of Order which is not only unnecessary, but undesirable.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Unfortunately, in a bizarre twist of fate he rose to fame because of a stupid YouTube video when he whined about having to be troubled by the complexity of pronouns in the post-Stonewall era. Instead of recognizing the error, apologizing, and course-correcting, Peterson (likely due to issues of resentment which started early in his career and festered and intensified over time) has chosen instead to dig in his heels and harden — as the meaning of his surname suggests.

Gender is no less complex than sexuality, and — as it should be for all human traits — individuals should be treated with dignity and respect. While Peterson claims that his protest is actually in response to the idea of compelled speech, in reality he is perfectly happy associating almost exclusively with anti-trans types, weakening his credibility. In fact, his biblical history series is airing exclusively on the Daily Wire, the same network which offers Mr. Walsh sanctuary — a fact which will prevent me from seeing it, although I would very much like to. I simply refuse to give those fascists money.

Indeed, these types of people do have some validity to their critique that there’s a generation of people who really don’t want to pay attention to any ideas that came before the 1960s. It is sad that people would see the imperfection of our predecessors as a reason to discount their best ideas — whatever intention said predecessors may have had regarding groups unlike their own. It would be better if everyone could gain merit from the best aspect of past thought without constantly feeling like we need to be insulted by those thinkers’ inability to see into the future. Moreover, Peterson’s message about the need for Rights to be accompanied by Responsibilities could be really helpful, psycho-emotionally and otherwise, to the people with whom he has chosen to become enemies. And it would benefit all of us to tone down the vitriol and start to accept that if we’re going to prevent disaster (and there are many potential disasters looming) we need to accept one another and work together.

We can’t expect people to look to the great minds of the past when we simultaneously tell them that they don’t deserve to make their own health-care decisions, and that their gender is a fiction. In other words, if we think of them as less than human, less valid (and valuable) than ourselves. It’s no wonder that there is a rebellious push back who views the heteronormative hegemony (which has destroyed so much to profit so few) with suspicion. It is discordant with reason to expect the typical citizen in a pluralist society to be expected to adopt what on the surface seems to be a regressive system of values when they are themselves viewed with contempt.

In sum, it is not just to demonize the so-called “cultural left” for destroying the society, when they have been told time and time again that they don’t belong in it. This is not to say that there are not legitimate concerns to raise, or that everyone needs to accept any assumptions or presumptions without appropriate reservation. But until we start to act in good faith and charity, we're just going to make it harder and harder to get along. And that wouldn't be Chaos — it would merely be Disorder.