Jordan Peterson vs Sam Harris
Part 2: Vancouver Debates
Man is by nature a religious creature. Sorry Sam, but it happens to be the case. You just have to watch a world cup football game for evidence. Or observe fans of the podcast: ‘Waking up with Sam Harris’.
Attacking religion is like shooting fish in a barrel. If you make the barrel sufficiently small and narrow, it’s easy. Just ignore a few thousand years of human evolution and focus on Isis and Scientology. Ignore the great sages of the axial age—like Buddha, Confucius and Plato. Science, reason and ‘transcendental rationality’ are the new Jesus: they are the only thing that can really save us. That seems to be Sam Harris’s position more or less. His method for attacking religion is reduction and caricature.
The paradox is: the kind of secular spirituality and morality which Sam Harris deems desirable could only be born within the interpretive structure, set of axioms, collective practices and poetic enactments called religion. That is why Sam Harris is self-contradictory and his relentless attack on religion is so facile — and ahistorical.
Ok, it’s true that Sam Harris does admit that deep transcendental states are possible, only he refuses to acknowledge the contexts in which they were born. The problem is: he discards the teachers and the lineage so he can teach and market Buddhist spirituality on his own authority.
Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, has about 15 different definitions of God — none of which are easy to understand.
Just compare Sam Harris’s definition of God to Jordan Peterson’s in their recent debate (which as been leaked on youtube).
Peterson: God is the truthful speech (Logos) that rectifies pathological hierarchies and confronts the chaos of being itself and generates habitable order. A transcendental reality that is only observable across the longest of iterated timeframes. God is how we imagine and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time, as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves across the longest of timeframes but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in the here and now.
Harris interrupting Peterson: Excuse me Jordan but: is this God also the God who says that you can’t masturbate.
Obviously, they are talking about a different God here!
Harris has some brilliant one-liners but he won’t wrestle with Peterson’s deeper ideas. Sure, it is worth attacking biblical literalism—and everybody agrees that hand chopping is bad. Religion has its bad practices and pathologies—but science has its nuclear bombs. The point is to go beyond both scientific literalism and religious literalism.
Scientism is religion
The new atheists have made a religion out of science, unconsciously. They speak of being saved (by reason), worship certain martyrs of science (St. Christopher Hitchens and St. Galileo), wear long-white robes at the lab, and gather in stadiums for ecstatic recognition of various new atheist priests. Richard Dawkins has even started summer camps for children, where people are indoctrinated to believe in the absolute virtue of something they can never full achieve in this life: rationality, that is. They are taught that Santa Claus is a lie. And of course that scientific method is the only one way to get to the truth.
Sam Harris is a bit different than the other ‘celebrity atheists’ in that he has participated in long buddhist retreats. But this makes him a bit disingenuous as well. He has profited from of religious structures and teachers, and yet would like to discard them, to leave behind archetypes and authorities of religion and keep only the ‘enlightenment’. Harris won’t acknowledge his own moral and spiritual roots in tradition, to which he is entirely dependent on, as Peterson points out. This can be likened to an adolescent who won’t admit that he has parents, because he is angry about their transgressions. It is not a mature view, in other words.
There is something profoundly empty and disembodied in a merely rational vision of spirituality—the entire mythopoetics and rich symbolic lore of our traditions cannot be discarded so easily. Furthermore, Harris’s focus on ‘well-being’ as the meaning of life lacks realism and aesthetics depth. Peterson, on the other hand, is right to orient us towards meaning rather than mere happiness. Meaning has always been the realm of spirit as the measurement and observation of physical systems has been the domain of the sciences. To reduce religion to scientism strips the poetry from the spiritual endeavour and leaves us mere techniques out of context.
The apparent divorce between science and religion is a relatively recent one, and one that Peterson is trying to bridge. Actually, most of the early scientists were pretty religious — from Hildegard of Bingen to Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler. In fact they all were religious more or less—and we haven’t outgrown religion yet. The inconvenient fact is: that modern science was born from consciousness enacting itself through religious structures and practices.
In any case, nobody with any sense believes in the childish God that Sam Harris doesn’t believe in. But Harris is talking about god of Isis and Scientology—the God of modern, deracinated religions—as if they they represented the entire history of all religion. He puts them all into the same soup, which is an easy and reductive a game to play.
God and Masturbation
To Sam Harris, God is a mean Daddy who sits on his throne in the sky telling us that we can’t have the fun (read: masturbation) we really want to be having. God is the source of all bad legalism and conscience.
Well, certainly there have been some pretty murderous religious dogmas left over from the iron age. But is that the entirety of religious phenomenology or adaptation? No, religion has its nice music, Harris admits that.
The problem is: there has been murderous legalism and literalism in almost every single institution that ever existed, secular and religious. And atheism wins in terms of mountains of corpses. (see Soviet and Maoist China). No, but Harris isn’t that kind of atheist.
Legalism and dogma isn’t the only aspect of religion, but listening to Harris intone, you would think that religion is just a bunch of bad laws. And yet there are as many interpretations of religious laws as there are visible stars in the night sky.
To give an example, Rabbi Jakob, an eccentric Jewish mystic, claims that the Torah (the book of Jewish laws) was sent to man as a punishment for not really understanding what God wanted. The actual spiritual Torah (the oral Torah, he called it) was only revealed to those who could converse with the holy spirit directly.
In the mean time, we might need some laws (like go easy on the masturbation) so that we don’t become totally depraved or dysfunctional—just like we need traffic lights so we don’t crash into each other.
Of course, to some Jews, Rabbi Jakob’s views are heresy. The point is: there is a diverse spectrum of belief among religious practitioners. Moreover, Harris won’t discuss the fact that there is an exoteric (or outer) sense of religion and an esoteric (inner one). There are outer laws and there are inner ones.
Living and Dead Religion
Religion can be an enlivening or a deadening force. At it’s best, it brings forth collective poetry, meaning structures, and the salvation of the individual—at its worst it is dead ritual, crowd control, or cultic madness. However, the religious nature of human beings is embedded and can only be transcended to a limited extent.
If people were already enlightened, perhaps they wouldn’t need unreasonable ecstatic games to approach the transcendent. But again there is a range of practices in religion. Skilful means (upaya) is a Buddhist phrase that is close to what Peterson means by games: games of interpretation, rituals for imaginative invoking and enactment what is most divine and soulful in human beings.
Where is God?
When I was a student of Zen, an old Japanese master gave me a Koan: ‘Where is God?’. He wasn’t asking me to draw a picture.
If God exists He or She is not a measurable thing or fact. God is like a Zen Koan we can wrestle with—even for a Zen Buddhist, since buddhists don’t believe in God particularly.
This is close to Peterson’s view of God, which focuses less on belief and more on skilful means and action—God is a living principal to work with. To constantly wrestle with the God principal may be one meaning of faith, which is not the lock step march of ideology, but a state of openness.
It’s not as if you could ever define God, for Christ sakes.
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Thanks Stephen Lewis for the edits
