The popular psychologist’s blinkered reading of the Bible does his cause no favours
, the prolific Canadian psychologist turned lifestyle sage. The temptation is to respond not to the work but the person : irascible, derisive, uncompromising, contrarian. But here, the work itself poses problems; it is a sprawling, repetitive text that could have done with some ruthless editing.
There is the social pressure to adjust, not to reality itself, but to fashionable orthodoxies – particularly around gender fluidity, racial sensitivities, the reluctance to call people to responsibility for their actions. And there is the internal pressure of a self-serving, sentimental quest for low-cost answers to challenges of moral significance – false compassion, over-identification with the supposedly vulnerable, cheap indulgence of the surface wants of self and others.
The second point is connected. Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth.
In fairness, he does pick out some distinct trajectories within the stories, for example, in the narratives about Moses. But the expositions constantly shade into meandering polemic about a range of modern issues, especially gender, on which Peterson has made his position pretty clear elsewhere.
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