The Jordan B. Peterson Experience

A holistic review of Dr. Peterson's We Who Wrestle With God show.

I never thought I’d find myself buying a nosebleed seat for an academic lecture. But here we are. Last night I attended the Pittsburgh stop on Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God tour, held in the (admittedly somewhat too large) PPG Paints Arena.

Why? Curiosity. And finals week starts in two days so I’m looking for anything to keep me going. It’s one thing the Grove City Registrar’s Office has no ability to screw up. So here we go: Jordan Peterson, live in Pittsburgh—is his latest offering worth it?

The Audience

There are serious questions to be had about products that are marketed to everyone, but Peterson’s show actually did pull interest from many different social groups, from teenagers to 70-year-old academics, and a lot of college students. The mother and daughter I sat next to described finding Dr. Peterson through his online series on the Bible, a YouTube series where Jordan lays out his view on the psychological meaning behind many biblical stories. The mother explained her perspective on Peterson as a religious mom from West Virginia as a “whole new level of analysis. “It’s great to have a different perspective.”

Oh, it’s different all right.

The Opening Act

Yes, Jordan has an opening act: an eclectic English guitarist named David Cotter, whose music exudes an odd psychedelic vibe blended with more traditional classical guitar. The last bit, I’m fairly certain, was based on themes from Interstellar. Honestly, it’s the kind of weird that suits Peterson. Grounded, and you can tell where the influences come from. But still weird.

Cotter closes with, “I hope the patterns of music pave the way for the patterns of thought this evening,” before the lights go dim and the giant overhead screens play two video plugs for Peterson’s products: his new educational tool, Essay, developed with his son Julian, along with his online course offerings at Peterson Academy. “If you’re not writing, you’re not thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re going to fall into a pit,” says Peterson in the Essay commercial. Man, what a sales pitch.

Lights dim again, and out comes Father Mike Schmitz, who would moderate the virtual Q&A with Peterson later in the evening (the event started at 7:30 and ended at 10, so you’re getting your money’s worth on content). He primed the crowd by musing at the curiosity of a clinical psychologist being capable of reaching an audience that ranges from teenagers to the elderly, including in the audience. He’s the intro guy for Peterson, and as the lights dimmed for the last time, people in the audience were giving a standing ovation before they even came back on again. And then.

The Main Event

“You’re obviously starved for entertainment here in Pittsburgh.”

Peterson enters stage right, thanks the audience for coming, and immediately gets down to business, kicking off the lecture with a stream of consciousness, ranging from the phenomenon of being a performer in front of an audience, to the archetypal role of story (Breaking Bad is mentioned, for all of you addict readers), to the role of sports in personal formation, from both a player and spectator role. All of the analogies he throws out epitomize the process of identifying and hitting your aim—in many ways, the most famous exhortation of Peterson’s career as a psychologist and public intellectual. It’s about “finding the target and hitting it dead on.”

And then the religious undertones become overtones—to Peterson, correctly hitting your target is a “way to offer the aroma that’s pleasing to God,” a clear reference to the story of Cain and Abel in the book of Genesis.

“We’ve forgotten that there’s a reality to morality,” Peterson tells his audience, further opining that, in his experience, the United States has a remarkable track record of “recognizing success without coveting it,” particularly in contrast to the moral makeup of the citizenry in the Soviet Union. While Americans might roll their eyes at this portrayal (and I was really tempted to), it makes sense from a very specific angle. Take the charitable framing of Peterson’s analysis—the free enterprise economic system, in sharp contrast to the dog-eat-dog world of the vast majority of human history, gave us the ability to see wealth creation and success as a non-zero-sum game.

And now it’s back to the Bible, specifically the story of Elijah being comforted by the still-small voice of God after confronting the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings, prophets Peterson describes as “nature worshippers” to make a point about the modern day: “The Christian world is in danger of being overrun by the nature worshippers.” Against such odds, Peterson argues, the only consistent response is a personal commitment to moral responsibility and upright living.

“God isn’t always found in the whirlwind or the earthquake but in the still small voice that upbraids us for missing the mark.”

Peterson then goes backward in the Bible, going back to Moses as an archetype of what it means to be a man. In his view, Moses is the model of proper manhood - taking up a position of defending the innocent as a shepherd. And it’s the motif of the burning bush that particularly provides fodder for Peterson’s analysis. “Meaning calls you,” he argues, pointing to the burning bush as capturing Moses’ attention in a way wholly outside the prophet’s control. It’s an interesting point and one that hearkens back to fellow public intellectual Jonathan Haidt’s analogy of the elephant and rider. In the archetypal analysis that made him famous, Peterson then riffs on the details of the bush story—Moses removes his shoes as an example of shedding his identity in the face of the call of God.

If you’ve been paying attention, the event heavily relies on Peterson’s stream of consciousness. At one point, he takes his audience from the burning bush to the tree, to the archetypal significance of life depicted as trees, to a burning tree, to a burning bush, to the fire of love for a spouse or a child. All of this in the space of about 3 minutes.

“There’s no meaning without being called forward,” he declaims. “There’s nothing more real than meaning.”

“What is the highest aim?” For Christians, the ultimate question of Peterson’s talk rings oddly familiar. He’s one step away from asking what the chief end of man is—as it happens, we have an answer for that one.

“Man does not live by bread alone.” He ends the quote there—and I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the second part of the verse is left out.

The Appeal

A large part of Peterson’s talk is centered around masculinity, and no wonder— his message to young men is a major driver of his global popularity. Later in the talk, he uses the story of Abraham as a metaphor for the human condition: leave your comfort zone. Have your adventure.

Yet it presents an interesting level of analysis: is it we who’re supposed to wrestle with God through Peterson’s talk? Or is this talk an outworking of the psychologist’s own wrestling with the divine? All this talk of having the detritus burned away in pursuance of true adventure—it’s overwhelmingly clear that he’s talking about himself.

The talk contained a wealth of practical advice, and it’s here that Peterson shines. He offers a full-throated rejection of Richard Dawkins and Sigmund Freud’s notions of the meaning of sex and relationships: it’s “more than donating your selfish genes to the future,” he quips. To some, it might feel sterile. But it’s not. Peterson’s concepts of marriage as an elevated form of friendship and whatnot are profoundly human. And more healthy than many pastors and religious figures, particularly in the nondenominational world are offering.

Throughout the hour-and-a-half lecture, Peterson hammers home the link between responsibility and meaning, and that’s where that marketability question comes through, especially for a quasi-religious figure speaking to non-religious audience members. Peterson isn’t a pastor, and doesn’t purport to be anything of the sort. As such, he gets to opine on the roots of religious belief and the social order it creates without people saying it’s not spiritually orthodox enough.

At moments, however, his lack of theological training shows. Near the end, he discusses walking from the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and how Christ was crucified in the center of a community. Yet, that narrative is questionable. The whole point of Christ’s crucifixion is not that he was crucified within a community. It’s that he was crucified outside the polite circles of Jewish society—paradoxically rejected by men that we, His people, might be accepted by God. Given Peterson’s knowledge of Christian thought, it’s hard to argue that he’s unaware of the parallels to Christ contained in the Old Testament, or the prophetic callbacks to the Old Testament within the Christ story. It’s an interesting dichotomy: is he truly missing the Christological narrative of the Bible, or purposefully not highlighting it?

Let’s be clear: if you’re a young person, especially a young man, looking for meaning in your life as opposed to nihilistic bleakness, you’ll find it from someone like Peterson. There’s real wisdom to be gleaned here. The notion of responsibility and agency is an animating one, and if you don’t understand how hungry young people are for such notions, you’ll never understand why Peterson’s recognized worldwide or has achieved the level of fame and influence he has.

“If you lie your way through life, that’s the lie living. Your actual life is sitting on the shelf, rotting away. Whatever happens to you when you tell the truth is the best possible thing that can happen to you. With the truth on your side, what can actually go wrong?”

Yet, Peterson’s choice to talk about wrestling with God makes his worldview come up short against the odds. Peterson closes his talk with the story of Jonah, portraying Jonah falling asleep in the boat to Nineveh as an analogy for taking solace in ignorant bliss. It kind of is. But it’s also an analogy that’s fundamentally rooted in someone far more important than Jonah or Peterson.

“An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” Matthew 12:39-41.

Peterson closed out the audience Q&A by telling a story about a client who struggled to clean his room at 40, even buying a vacuum cleaner only to leave it at his bedroom's threshold and avoid it for a week. But cleaning the room presented a step-by-step path out of chaos. “Maybe it’s the best you can do. And if it’s the best you can do, it will be accepted.”

It’s true for life. But it’s not true of the God that Peterson’s wrestling with. The Canadian psychologist is one good push away from falling into the arms of Christ—for the sake of his soul, let’s hope that’s where all of this wrestling will end up.