Summary of Noah Driver’s by Jon Bowen
You … are talking about proselytization as if it was some kind of black art. What Noah meant, he said in his own words–people are able to become ideologically possessed so easily by these social justice courses because they’re utterly unacquainted with the great works that formed our civilization. How can such a banal and vicious ideology take root? Because there’s just nothing grander or better in their imagination. Noah’s suggesting becoming familiar with the texts and getting others to read them. It’s basically education.
If you don’t like the p-word, use a different one–spreading the message, imparting the education, etc. Fundamentally though, isn’t that what we have to do? Induct people into a view of the world that they don’t currently have? This isn’t nefarious, it’s just a statement of what we have to do to keep us from culturally self-aborting.
Summary by Noah Driver
The purpose of my post can be distilled into a call to put together a plan to help people gain a certain minimum level awareness of the trajectory and specific novelties of the canon of Western thought such that they can be conversant with it and operate effectively in defending it’s goods. We don’t a have the luxury or the energy to spend hundreds of hours reading, so let’s work to create a way to help those who don’t but still want to help enrich their societies in a positive way that will give rise to a better, less hopeless future.
*So we’re basically on the same page, I just think that a structured, planned approach might yield some truly powerful results. Who else wants a renaissance? I want one.
By Noah Driver, August 3 2017
So efforts are being discussed and made to preserve Dr. Peterson’s online materials should the event arise that the powers that be try to snuff out his online presence.
I have a tangential proposal, but it requires a bit of a preface.
I’ve just finished reading Moby Dick, one of the most intellectually stimulating and dense novels (if you can even call it a novel and not a poem or… something else) that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. I began reading it in June. It was my third attempt over the course of the past five years, and only then did it hook me – there was something profoundly important going on here, and I had to finish it this time. What that is would take a lot of space to explain – several very long books, in fact. Therefore, instead of attempting the utterly futile, I’m going to give some of my observations on why most people can never appreciate Moby Dick and why it should matter to this group.
Moby Dick is a story about a crazy old sea captain hunting after a sperm whale with an unusual white hide because it tore off his leg in a previous hunt. This is what everyone who hasn’t read Moby Dick (probably) already knows about the novel, and accounts for roughly ten percent of the book. Look over the Amazon reviews of the book and you’ll find no shortage of people bemoaning the “boring” parts dealing exhaustively, and seemingly inexplicably, with the minutiae of whaling and of whale biology and classification.
These reviews are written by people who were not ready to read Moby Dick.
Why?
Because these chapters, which actually make up more than half of the novel, and are possible even its most important feature, are engaging with a conversation that has been going on since the deaths of Socrates and Moses. Consider the following speech by Ahab to Starbuck, his first mate:
“Hark ye yet again – the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
This is a quite deliberate engagement with the simile of the sun given in the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, in which the sun is given analogously to that ultimate truth which makes all truths true and all realities real, or more accurately, that perfect form (in Greek eidos, from which we gain the word “idea”) of being in which all existent, being things take part by virtue of sharing that quality of being. This perfect form, this highest truth, is masked through layers of lesser representations, the things in the world, which are like the blank, pasteboard masks of reality. The sun? To strike it is as to strike God, which in the Western tradition by Melville’s time via the blending of the Hebrew and the Greek canons, is equivocal (roughly) to the Platonic Sun. This is indeed truly what Ahab intends by hunting the white whale, itself a literal blanc.
Does someone who hasn’t read Plato understand the significance of this truly and deliberately blasphemous statement? I know that I didn’t. All this to say by demonstration that the heights achieved by what we so often call, if inadequately, the Western tradition, can only be reached by a slow and steady climb that fewer and fewer of us know to scale, and which can only be truly started at the beginning. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” This is a statement which might seem ridiculous or whimsical to anyone who hasn’t actually made several false starts at various points midway before starting the long journey through the canon from the initial baptism into philosophy that is The Republic of Plato, or, as chance may have it, an equivalent regard for something occupying a similar space to Plato’s sun via an upbringing in some derivative of the Hebraic tradition (Christianity, Islam, Mormonism etc.).
One cannot understand the rarity and profundity of the Western tradition without at least some degree of awareness of and engagement with the individual works that comprise its extremist outlines. What is the Western tradition? It is the long dialogue initiated by Socrates and carried on between the greatest minds and the most creative geniuses spanning thousands of years and kilometers, weaving through the greatest empires on this Earth and giving birth to the great scientific and political achievements of the modern world. Without this awareness, without the ability afforded by careful study of the beginnings of this truly Earth shaking tradition, one can never truly understand how delicate and precious are the freedoms and thoughts that we moderns too often and destructively take for granted.
When a university demands a social justice course requirement for all students and allows one to take a black studies course in lieu of a history or philosophy requirement, it takes the fruits of those course, namely, those thoughts and ideas which make the university not only sensible but vital, for granted, and thus allows its students to discard them in advance even of recognizing their existence.
The result? Without having read Plato and the Bible, Moby Dick is just about a crazy man chasing a whale. So it goes with those other creations of Western culture: democracy, public education, free speech, civil liberties, universal suffrage, etc. These things cannot be treated as given, or else the circle broken by Socrates will melt back into one solid loop and we’ll find ourselves mired again in a tyranny, albeit one by modern technology made matchless in force.
What does that mean for us? Jordan Peterson’s greatest achievement, I have often remarked to friends, is to soften the hearts of those who were brought up to be indifferent to the most magnificent intellectual and artistic achievements of their culture. Who else has gotten so many atheistic college students to listen to hours upon hours of bible lectures? This is a wonderful feat, and it required the brilliant courage of one brilliant but flawed man at just such a time as all the most obvious fruits of the Western tradition, the ability to hear what others have to say and to speak one’s own thoughts to a listening audience, the love of which is the unspoken common ground between all true seekers after knowledge and defenders of freedom, were under assault by those who had love neither for truth nor freedom.
I propose that if we truly want to honor Doctor Peterson’s acts of bravery, and give back to him what he has given to so many of us, we ought to revive in ourselves and among each other the learning that once defined those who know from those who don’t, only now instead from those who won’t. We should not fall into that category. We should all know Plato, Aristotle, the Christian and Islamic thinkers who honed and transmitted them and the political theorists from Aristotle through Al Farabi to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and on to the present day.
How do we start? Dr. Peterson has himself suggested in proposing his own online university that a survey of the great books is a good place to start. I propose that, as a study group, we should not simply watch and preserve Peterson’s videos and written materials (although we should certainly do this too), but also begin reading and helping others to read, the great books that begot our modern world, and what is more this should be done systematically and thoroughly. This will have innumerable personal and social benefits, among which will be a general ascendancy in the cognitive power, self awareness and articulacy of those of us who value freedom and the search for knowledge, and this in turn will be inspire the intellectually and aesthetically starved children coming out of the hoary corpses that are our public education systems to challenge themselves and to aspire to greatness.*
I propose that we work together to build, follow and then teach a curriculum to bring more and more people into this great conversation, that it might continue far into the future and with a greater vivacity than ever before.
* I minored in religious studies in University, and the Mormons had an excellent strategy for proselytization that I think could be instructive for us. Rather than preach the goodness of their religion, they would try to embody in themselves the best that man could be, and it was often jealousy that motivated tired, hopeless families to convert. A fascinating avenue of research for anyone who finds such things interesting, the LDS (Mormon) church seems to use their missionary work as a way of raising the missionaries, not so much for creating converts, to which the missionaries have always contributed, at least in the West, a very small number.
This content was original contributed to the Jordan Peterson Study Group. See it here.
Noah Driver is a Political Science graduate from the University of Victoria, loves Bach, Debussy and the paintings of John Martin. Huge Ocarina of Time fan and believes that, owing to the botched state of public education, Sunday school is one of the last avenues for a classical education for average youngsters in the contemporary world.