We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (edition 2024)

by Jordan B. Peterson (Author)

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Title

We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

Author

Jordan B. Peterson (Author)

Rating

Review

"… the insistence throughout Exodus that redemption is found through continual voluntary exposure to that which is threatening." (pg. 338)

I must admit to being a bit blindsided by this book. Moving on from his 12 Rules – or 24 Rules, if you count Beyond Order – Jordan Peterson's next step has been a retrenchment of his ideas rather than a new chapter. Hewing much closer to the tone and depth of his 1999 academic masterpiece Maps of Meaning than the more consciously user-friendly, quasi-polemical bestsellers 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, I was slightly unprepared for this shift and struggled to engage with parts. Even when I managed to lock myself in, I found We Who Wrestle with God to be a more intensive analysis of ideas already addressed in previous books – and in the lectures and podcasts where Dr Peterson's message truly thrives.

In the last few years, Jordan Peterson has been delving much deeper into the stories of the Bible, with lecture series on Genesis and Exodus and with the religious allusions that had always been there in his work becoming more overt and less apologetic. We Who Wrestle with God is a summary of these last few years of thought, providing exhaustive commentary on the main stories of those first few books of the Bible – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses and Jonah – through the lens of Peterson's Logocentric philosophy, underpinned by his astute psychological observations. Fans of Peterson's work will already be familiar with how he utilises the story of Cain and Abel (for example), and this book is in effect the definitive written record of Peterson's perspective on such things.

There are drawbacks to this. There is a lack of freshness here, at least for those of us who already have a longstanding interest in Peterson's work. I personally feel that the Biblical stuff Peterson talks about works better in small doses, in the digressions in his lectures and podcast appearances, or as the profound examples that illustrate wider, more freewheeling points in 12 Rules for Life. We Who Wrestle with God, however, is – at 570 pages – certainly not a small dose. At its best, it feels like Maps of Meaning, that astonishing but heavy-going tome that requires academic grit and endurance. At its worst, when it's exhaustively querying what a feature of a particular story tells us about what God requires of us, or presenting different translations of Bible verses, it can feel like an extended hardback version of one of those leaflets that get pushed through your door.

Once I accepted it would require the same application as Maps of Meaning, I could accommodate my fatigue better, but I think the book would have been better if it had been less exhaustive and closer to the ready engagement an everyman reader could have in 12 Rules for Life. Its methodical approach, combined with the familiarity of its core ideas to regular Peterson readers, makes it less compelling. In previous books, a Peterson argument could sometimes end up in a place that stopped me in my tracks, but on most occasions in We Who Wrestle with God, I knew where Peterson was going and, regrettably, was impatient for him to get there. The message might not be lost along the way, but some of the interest in it is. More a commentary than an argument, the book would've been more charming if it had engaged the reader more on an adventure, rather than presenting them with a schematic of one.

This is not to say, however, that We Who Wrestle with God fails, or is underwhelming. Quite the contrary. The Logocentric interpretations of the stories of Genesis and Exodus are fascinating – if sometimes a little overcooked in some chapters, losing their flavour – and the serious, unashamed advocacy of the value of the Bible to our civilisation and its morals is intriguing in a modern secular society that has longed since decided such things are uncool. We need to "reestablish our covenant with the God" who has oriented us on this path of consciousness, Peterson argues at the end of his book (pg. 505), and he has provided plenty of evidence on why we should do so.

Peterson's contention is that we as a species discover our moral and societal values by acting them out, not only in personal behaviour but through our stories. The Biblical stories are those that have endured – and consequently, might well have the most fundamental things to say about our behaviours. The Biblical stories are "not an argument for the existence of God, rendered against the doubt of believer and unbeliever alike", as the atheists and the dogmatic theists would like them to be, "but a description of what is to be held properly in the very highest of places, so that the continuation of man, society, and world may be ensured" (pg. 173). There are "a million paths of deviation, detour, and defection, and very few (perhaps one) that enable effective, efficient, productive, generous, and unified movement forward" (pg. 457); a common theme Peterson identifies in the stories is that "when terrible things happen… faith, humility and courage… nonetheless constitute the best strategy, the best pathway forward" (pg. 139).

For Peterson, then, the stories are 'true', and God is 'real', in the sense that being oriented by this concept of a God, and following the examples of the stories in your behaviour, lead to positive outcomes that are, in your life, true and real. And this is not a sleight-of-hand argument, but one coming from the proposition that humans are "not the submissive receivers of simply self-evident truths. Every perception is an effort" (pg. xxvi) and has been learned over countless generations of humans observing what behaviour works and what doesn't, and then abstracting those lessons into stories which are then passed down through the generations. This is why we can experience a "sense of revelation… when reading, say, a particularly profound book"; there is a connection between our personal perspective and this "collective unconscious" (pg. 18). It glows because it communicates an underlying shared truth, even if we did not know it.

It is a magnificent and inspiring concept of human development, even if We Who Wrestle with God feels at times like an extensive Appendix to Peterson's three previous books rather than a player in its own right. When I read the Bible myself some years ago, I began it as a scofflaw atheist but more importantly as a lover of literature; I quickly came to appreciate that the stories were meant to be taken in that profound, revelatory way that great literature is meant to, rather than the gotcha-style literalism some of my atheist influences had taken it. Since then, Peterson's recognition – and subsequent curation of – a more "psychological and relational definition" of God (pg. xxv), rather than a literal one, has seemed to me entirely right, and one that I had reached, appropriately enough, through exploration in my own story, Void Station One.

We Who Wrestle with God is the most overt and in-depth curation of this idea, which has been underpinning Peterson's worldview for decades, and the book's sometimes excessive weight serves as a sturdy anchor for it. Readers should nevertheless be advised that they will need to undergo much wrestling of their own should they choose to open it, and consequently navigate some considerable fatigue.

"Those who attend assiduously to their focal 'narrow' concerns will first journey deeper and deeper into the narrowly defined unknown at hand, learning first the details directly relevant to those concerns, but soon after coming to understand the broader webs of associations and causal pathways that are inevitably part of the phenomenon in question. Nothing exists in isolation. Anything studied with sufficient depth thus eventually comes to speak of everything." (pp326-7).

Publication date

2024

Publication

Allen Lane (2024), 576 pages

ISBN

0241619610 / 9780241619612

Number of copies

Pages

576

Dimensions

9.52754 x 6.41731 x 1.37795 inches

LC Classification