Jordan Peterson's Stairway to Heaven

A REAL-life Truman Show

.@jordanbpeterson just released his first Q/A video of his second wave.

His address of religion was based on three questions.

1. How to believe in the divine even though it is a loose end

2. How has your conception of God changed in the last year or two. Has your wife's burgeoning conception changed you? You said "the grace and mercy of God" in your return video...

3. Why do so many people follow an ideology blindly today as sort of replacements for religion, family or a meaningful life...

4. Why does your personal theology seem to align to Eastern Orthodoxy?

It's important to remember that he gleaned these questions and selected them in a particular order, and he decided to treat this area of common interest in his work first. Peterson, although he's a famous follower of rabbit trails in his speaking is quite intentional in planning.

What follows here is MY summary of @jordanbpeterson's work with a number of things I've added and integrated for clarity after studying this area of his work for the last 3 years.

The big take-away from Cognitive Science and the quest to create Artificial Intelligence is that the world is too large and in order for us to successfully compress it to interact with it productively we massively compress the data quite unconsciously.

"Religion" has been erroneously defined and pigeon-holed as merely dealing with "god" or "gods" or the "supernatural". The religious layer is the level of our implicit and most basic framework addressing our broadest conceptualization of reality. It’s the big picture. The worldview we need to manage a world too large for tiny, short lived, limited creatures that we are.

Narratives, ideas and conceptualizations of "God" and the divine are actually a massive compression scheme to conceptualize the whole of the manifest image. (See the work of Daniel Bonevac on Wilfred Sellars .) Regardless of our conscious we are of these conceptualizations they govern us as individuals and civilizations.

Because the world is too large we need these to know how to act. The potentiality is too large and so every action is an attempt to manage this potentiality and draw from it what we desire.

Value hierarchies are one framework that we implicitly or explicitly, naturally and inevitably develop to manage desire and behavior. These will get conceptualized and acted upon with representations some of which we identify as religious. Ideals will be represented, tested and disseminated in stories. They will be acted out individually and communally scaling all the way up into cultures and civilizations made up of these patterns. Can we know how they correspond a physical, non-human order?

These will compete and endure in the natural order therefore bearing a sort of Darwinian witness to that which is beyond human cultural development. This is how we can assess if our religious story-verse accurately reveals governing truths of the physical world. This is a revelation we can believe in and it seems to him that this is what has been going on beneath Western Civilization. We ignore the Bible and Christianity at our peril.

THE best conversation he had this year was with @PageauJonathan, his friend from before the first wave of popularity and notoriety. He won't foreclose on Christian miracles or the possibility of the resurrection of Jesus because of this revelation.

.@jordanbpeterson has built his life trying to live into this as he sees it, yet he has not identified with or religiously participated in the church. Based on this argument he has done it on his own. @PageauJonathan sees his suffering as a consequence of this.

Where @jordanbpeterson differs from church going Christians is the direction of this quest. Christians generally begin with the narrative and work their way down. They begin not with a psychological account of the origin of their revelation but with a story of revelation. They (psychologically and philosophically naively) just live into the story and through the story and act it out. Genesis starts with the God of the Hebrews and builds the world from there. @jordanbpeterson starts with Darwin and psychology and builds a stairway to heaven.

This excites both God-first story-living Christians and cultural conservatives who act out traditional applications of God-first story-living Christians but don't dress up and LARP on Sundays. They have cheered on his cause over the last 3 years. Among God-first story-living Christians this has initiated a "is he" or "isn't he", a "will he" or "won't he" drama about @jordanbpeterson's identity and submission to the church. People see movement.

I think, however, that one of the most accurate observations has come from one of his most repetitive critics, youtuber @RationalityRule who in this

notes that @jordanbpeterson always goes up to "the line" but not over (in public).

Jordan Peterson’s stairway to heaven has a line on it that he won't cross IN PUBLIC. His sensitivities of propriety have been bred in the modernist tradition where piety is private and his science. Psychology is public. Jordan has pushed this line further and more publicly than anyone else today, pushing the new atheists back on their heels. The problem is that the church repeated demands that professions of faith BE public. The demand of this church is that it BE public.

So here we wait, watching as Jordan builds a public stairway to heaven but never quite takes that final step, crossing that line. Will he or won't he. It's a Truman Show. Will he enter (or leave) the REAL world? Will he become a REAL boy?