A biblical perspective
Well, there’s a new book by psychologist-turned-YouTuber Jordan Peterson. We who wrestle with God It’s about how ancient myths and legends, while they may not be literally true, have valuable and even universal lessons about life and humanity.
He was nodding at this feedback. Anthropologists will tell you there’s a lot to get out of it study of myths. You can see how past societies thought about the relationships between commoners and elites, or their views on humanity’s place in the natural world.
But then we got to the last page of the entry and the penny – which had somehow remained inflated – dropped. This is not a global survey. It’s only about the stories in the Bible, and almost entirely about Genesis and Exodus, because the Bible is “the story upon which Western civilization rests” and “the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”
Feedback’s understanding of intellectual history is a bit vague, but we’re sure that Western society and modern science, while shaped by Christianity, were also influenced by the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Roman Empire, Norse and Arab scholars. the foundations for the scientific revolution, etc.
But we will not pretend to be experts in biblical exegesis. We’re happy to leave the theological criticism to former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who says Peterson “relies heavily on antiquated Christian commentaries” and has “an abiding contempt for nuance and disagreement.”
Instead, we’ll get a small episode where Peterson tries to relate his ideas to human biology, something we know a little bit about.
Eve’s problem
Chapter 2 deals with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, after Eve, tempted by a serpent, eats a forbidden fruit and talks Adam into doing the same.
Peterson says this reflects fundamental flaws in the minds of men and women. “The temptation that forever confronts woman,” he writes, “is the idea that a mother’s benevolence can be proudly extended to the whole world, even to the most venomous snakes…to use her mercy, however misplaced and false, to claim unearned moral virtue and ability.” .
Meanwhile, men have a “corresponding and equally deadly sin,” which is the belief that “anything you bring before me can be incorporated, dominated, named, and subjugated, and placed in proper order,” no matter how “excessive” or “violent” it may be. or “violence”. absurd”.
Women’s role is to be compassionate, to draw men’s attention to those who are suffering, while men must exercise “emergent authority” and make judgments about who deserves help.
Given that this book aims to reveal absolute truths about human nature, Feedback enjoyed the lack of self-reflection along these lines about the dangers of “exaggeration.”
Now, you might expect Peterson, a psychologist, to provide psychological evidence for these differences between men and women. You would be wrong. But he tries to relate it to the biology of childbirth. The birth, he explains, is painful and dangerous because human babies have developed larger brains, which must be entered through a narrow birth canal with no dilation or “women would have trouble running.”
This caused a neuron to fire in Feedback’s overloaded brain. Peterson is repeating a hypothesis.obstetric dilemma“, Established in 1960.
Today, it is one of the most discussed notions in anthropology: his underlying assumptions all have been false or questionable. A 2018 exam was given a clean title “There is no such thing as an ‘obstetric dilemma'”. in 2021 the answer he said (deep breath) “it is not without reason to reject the obstetric dilemma hypothesis entirely because several of its basic assumptions have not been successfully discounted.”
Opinion is not wise enough to resolve this knotty conflict. But at least, unlike Peterson, we realize it. He goes on to say that pregnant and nursing women are “more dependent” and therefore unable to compete for status with men, at which point we exercised our emergent authority and stopped reading.
word of the year
Feedback enjoys the ritual of dictionaries announcing the word of the year, which tells us something about changing habits. We were particularly delighted that the Macquarie Dictionary, Australia’s national dictionary, has decided that it is the word of 2024.enshitification“.
This great word was coined by writer Cory Doctorow to describe how companies gradually screw up their services as they extract more profits from their customers. He was talking about companies like Google, whose search results are littered with ads and reliable AI-written summaries, and Facebook, whose news feed is so full of memes and ads that you see almost nothing from your friends or family.
He’s been using the word feedback since we read Doctorow’s initial essayand we are glad to see that it is finding a wider audience.
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