The Fall of Modernity and the Rise of Spirit
Dissecting the Jordan Peterson, John Vervaeke Conversation
Today's video is the second release of the commentary on @jordanbpeterson conversation with @vervaeke_john.
When this video first dropped on Monday the reaction of many of us was "What was THAT?!" There is still no consensus on how to account for this unusual conversation. The title calls it "psychedelic". I think it's more shamanic.
A key theme I've been developing for a while now in my videos is that the disruptions of what @WisdomRebel calls "sense making" is the cause for a lot of the societal, political, and ecclesiastical chaos and disruption.
Modernity was able to achieve broad consensus in many areas through mass media where the propagandistic elements were so pervasive most couldn't see it. It would be best scene if you were part of a sufficiently cohesive ethnic, political, or religious subculture.
That began to break down in the political sphere with the coming of Fox news. Then there were two bubbles who were just delivering propagandistic "facts". The Internet plus the rise of Social Media platforms made everyone look like a propagandist except ME and my little tribe.
Modernity invites the individual to imagine himself/herself above a world of objects or a world of facts that they directly observe and pass judgment on.
In many ways Descartes got this going with his invitation to strip away everything from the subject, even making "thinking" something differentiated from the self.
.@vervaeke_john is asserting that this Cartesian way of knowing is increasingly undermined by cognitive science.
In order to mentally "grasp" an object the subject doesn't simply stand apart but must conform itself to the object as the hand conforms to grasp the cup. In order to know the subject one must to a degree participate in the object.
"Distributed Cognition has a property 'collective intelligence' that is not just the sum of individual intelligences." @vervaeke_john asserts here.
In mono-focal propagandistic Modernity sense-making this dynamic is masked. We participated in vast sense-making stories naively, taking them in deeply deriving our identities from them.
As the mass media grip on the zeitgeist was increasingly disrupted first by cable TV and then by the Internet consensus within the body politics continued to break down. Awareness especially during the Trump campaign rose with "fake news" and the loss of "facts".
This process happened long ago in the Western church with the Protestant Reformation fueled by the rise of the printing press. Western churches adopted mass media techniques to keep their collective cognition whole in addition to historic Christian communal sensemaking.
The current bi-partisan political desire to "reign in social media" is an attempt by Modernistic mass media to recapture their lost world but it will fail. Technology has killed modernity in a similar way that it killed the Medieval Roman Church.
What we will find beneath the rubble of Modernity is a far older way of talking which will not be unfamiliar to Christians who didn't completely translate away their Bibles, that of "spirit".
What @jordanbpeterson and @vervaeke_john are doing in this conversation is the unmasking of Spirit beneath the rubble of Modernity.
@vervaeke_john non-theistic project of developing "a religion that's not a religion" within an ecology of practices has discovered that Logos emerges as people intentionally pursue some form of distributed cognition.
@jordanbpeterson keeps trying to map John's observations onto his psychological reading of Christianity. I believe part of the reason JBP triggered a sacramental Christian religious revival is that he's been unmasking Spirit in the Modern frame.
.@PageauJonathan has been doing similarly but with the non-confrontative exposure of "pattern" as an accessible, static metaphor for Spirit.
Ancients would of course find all of this to be most obvious. Spirit has always been the word used to account for the movement of individuals and groups. It was just discarded in the Naturalism Lab Leak that shamed people from talking that way.
Instead of dreading dissecting this Shamanistic conversation I'm NOW motivated to continue into it. I hope these explanations make it more accessible.
Paul, I too am only 30 minutes into JBP/JV, and had started your commentary first but stopped when I saw you felt confused and bothered. I wanted to see the original for myself before seeing your take (which is what I usually do). As an aside, I'm a Star Trek fan who loved Enterprise on its first run because I stayed away from negative commentary that could influence me. I have a history with this, lol.
So only 30 minutes in, while Jordan's interruptions have been a bit bothersome, I have two observations.
1) There's a give and take between them that make this a far more casual conversation among *peers* than either one's usual MO. They speak the same language, easily, and have clearly had some conversations over the years to know how the other one reacts/overreacts/interracts. There are inside "jokes" and personal knowledge coming out that make this more of an eavesdropping than an interview. We are all flies on the YouTube wall with this.
2) As someone with ADHD for over fifty years, this begins to sound like what goes on in my monkey mind -- which is usually treated as a negative. In this case, though, it's as if each person is a side of the brain. John takes the part of the Left brain with reasoning, logic, details. Jordan takes the Right side, with intuition, imagination, creativity. Order and Chaos. The Center and the Edge. These interjections and interruptions are more normal to me as I THINK than as I speak or listen. And as Jordan has said many times, you have to speak in order to think. In the beginning, he's blurting out his speaking part as he tries to think with John's Left brain.
And they each actually know exactly what the other one is talking about, when we have no idea.
I'm really excited to see what all comes out of this as it spirals out into our little corners of the world.
This conversation is fascinating.
"We all belong to cults. The cult you cannot see is the one you belong to." - paraphrasing overseas journalist Michael Yon.
... Thank you, Paul. I think you mean you 'ARE' motivated to continue diving into this conversation. I appreciate now having your Substack to digest your thoughts along with gathering up snippets of your video commentary (although those are edifying immensely). I am about halfway through he JV/ JBP conversation and 30 min through your first commentary. Normally I try to listen to podcasts at 1.5x to get more information in but I had slow theirs down to 1x to even attempt to follow them. You framed the language that it seemed JBP was 'manic' or 'schizophrenic' in the lay sense of the terms and I found it annoying that he kept interrupting JV. As you asked- 'Is JBP alright?'. That question is still out there. Still, if JV (still a member of the Blue Church in good standing) thought he wasted his time or was offended by JBP, how come he consented to having the conversation released? (Or am I mistaken and JV is embarrassed to be party to this 'insane' conversation?) .... Fascinating. I continue finding meaning following you on this path online and in person. Regards, sir. I've got to get back to my day job.