Jordan Right 5/12

I think a comment on a bare summary of the 12 rules falls within fair use.

1)

Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Comment

Not 24/24, I hope?

2)

Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Comment

Hmm ... I think there is a bit of atheism involved ...

3)

Make friends with people who want the best for you

Comment

As they define my best or as I define it?

4)

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Comment

Sounds a bit as if he's against Syndicates preaching wage equality and "same wage for same work" ?

Putting the latter in citation marks, since I think a family wage can earn more for a family breadwinner than for a single man doing same job, but still.

5)

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

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For how long? Till 18? Till they leave your house? Past both?

6)

Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world

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Oh dear ... not too bright for those defending poor selves against rich, since poor selves have less capacity to set own house in perfect order

7)

Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Comment

Hmmm ... I like that one.

8)

Tell the truth—or at least don't lie

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I especially relish the first half, the second sounds a bit like what is sometimes expedient

9)

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't

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There are clear exceptions to this one - when you have seen each item of the list in a previous comment on internet.

10)

Be precise in your speech

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I think in writing it is even more important - but OK, in speech it is appreciated too.

11)

Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Comment

In a sense of accidents, should one bother anyone when skateboarding?

I mean, certain activities take concentration and are dangerous when the concentration is interfered with.

12)

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

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Well, I would actually wait till the cat comes to me ...

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Hardcover – 16 Jan 2018, by Jordan B. Peterson (Author)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/0241351634/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Actually, here is some more:

The great myths of the hero—from Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker and Bilbo Baggins—typically recount the story of someone who leaves complacent domesticity behind in order to venture into the dangerous unknown, where he manages to find something of enormous value to his family or village or society. One key to psychological/spiritual fulfillment is to embody this archetype of the hero, to live one’s life as an adventurous exploration of the unknown. So Peterson tells his readers—especially young men, who have been cowed into complacency for various reasons—to throw back their shoulders, stand tall, and face the challenges of life head on. This archetype of the hero also allows us to read the story of Adam and Eve with fresh eyes. In Paradise (the word itself denotes “walled garden”), our first parents were secure and innocent, but in the manner of inexperienced children. Leaving Paradise was, in one sense, a positive move, for it permitted them to grow up, to engage the chaos of the unknown creatively and intelligently. This reading of Genesis, which has roots in Tillich, Hegel, and others, permits us to see that the goal of the spiritual life is not a simple return to the Garden of dreaming innocence, but rather an inhabiting of the Garden on the far side of the cross, that place where the tomb of Jesus was situated and in which the risen Christ appeared precisely as “gardener.”

This is from the résumé of the book by one Robber Baron of Theology, as I tend to call him.

He adds:

On balance, I like this book and warmly recommend it. I think it’s especially valuable for the beleaguered young men in our society, who need a mentor to tell them to stand up straight and act like heroes.

The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon
by Bishop Robert BarronFebruary 27, 2018
https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/the-jordan-peterson-phenomenon/5717/

If Robert Barron was anything like tongue in cheek about the fall, and Robert Peterson's Tillich's, Hegel's* and so on take on it, I missed that. The final quote from him seems to indicate, this was not the case, he agreed with it. Or at least found it an interesting and worthwhile take. I most totally disagree.

Leaving paradise was not a move, it was a punishment, it did not make Adam and Eve greater, but lesser, it did not make them more creative, but less so.

Some of the punishments would have been God's way of restoring perhaps half or a third or a quarter of the creativity or greatness they would have had, if they had remained without sin.

The innocence and security were coupled with** inexperience (indeed, Eve must have been inexperienced to talk to a talking snake, a housewife these days with even some basic catechism would probably have resorted to holy water and calling an exorcist as speedily as if pots and pans were flying around the kitchen outside her own tantrums or another family member's). We are savvy about poltergeists and would probably be so about talking snakes, she wasn't.

B u t, she was not just physically but also mentally equipped to her role as mother of all living. She did not need to fall and she certainly did not grow by the mere fact of falling. The innocence and security did not depend on her remaining inexperienced, except insofar as there are "experiences" we would all like to be spared ("ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo").

The reading given Genesis 3 is one I think I recall as reading of as a Masonic and a Mormon one, it is not that I know a Catholic one.

Yes, one experience really made Adam and Eve greater for eternity which they got through their fall : being redeemed by the Cross. O felix culpa, quae tantum nos meruit salvatorem.

But apart from that one, in the "humanist" sense he espouses, no. Over Solzhenitsyn I vastly prefer Tolkien. "To grow is not to lose innocence". And alas, it is Solzhenitsyn and not Tolkien who is — it would seem — Jordan Peterson's hero. Even if perhaps he takes one of his from Tolkien.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Longinus
15.III.2018

* One can note, as C. S. Lewis was an ex-Hegelian, he did not share this error of Hegel in his Christian writings. At all. ** They were coupled with inexperience, but not per se permanently. They were not inexperience.