Maps of Meaning

• Title: Maps of Meaning
• Author: Jordan B. Peterson
• Published: New York: Routledge, 1999

This book has deepened my perception of myths, archetypes, dreams, and ultimately how I understand myself and those around me.  It presented a new perspective on how I look at fear and the unknown.  Peterson presents his book as a process of discovery.  Through personal revelations, thoughts, dreams, and even a letter to his Dad, he takes us on a journey of discovery. 

“Our most fundamental maps of meaning – maps which have a narrative structure – portray the motivational value of our current state, conceived of in contrast to a hypothetical ideal, accompanied by plans of action, which are our pragmatic notions about how to get what we want.”[1]  We have where we are, where we want to go, and how we plan to get there.  Whether we realize it or not we have maps that we use every day.  The comfortable map of what we know versus that which is not on our map, the unknown.  This unknown is the chaos that surrounds us. 

Fear is not conditioned; security is unlearned, in the presence of particular things or contexts, as a consequence of violation of explicit or implicit presupposition.  Classical behavioral psychology is wrong in the same manner our folk presumptions are wrong: fear is not secondary, not learned; security is secondary, learned.  Everything not explored is tainted, a priori, with apprehension.  Any thing or situation that undermines the foundations of the familiar and secure is therefore to be feared.[2] 

Often, we are told that fear is a learned response.  That we would not naturally be afraid of something or someone unless we picked it up from someone else.  Peterson argues against that commonly held notion and presents the concept that fear is primary, security and comfort is secondary and learned.  Meaning that it is quite normal for one to be afraid of what one does not know.  It is exploration, knowledge, discovery that lessens the natural first fear we have.  This fear is a basic protection routine that our psyche runs to protect us.  I feel this is a very important concept.  The ramifications are large and can impact many of the ways we understand our reactions to people, situations, and cultures that are different and unknown to us.  The answer may not be in discounting that fear, but by acknowledging the fear and by countering it with a story or map that to use as a guide.

“A story is a map of meaning, a “strategy” for emotional regulation and behavioral output – a description of how to act in a circumstance, to ensure that the circumstance retains its positive motivational salience (or at least has its negative qualities reduced to the greatest possible degree).”[3]   A story, myth, dream, etc., can give us a potential scenario and what to expect.  It provides a possible map or plan to see us through an experience.  This will alleviate some of the fear because not all is unknown.  Having stories ready will help us deal with the unknown.  It is just like an emergency response team practicing different scenarios so that they “encounter” them before they happen so that they can map out a proper response when needed.

Creation myths are generally considered primitive or superstitious attempts to perform the magic of modern science.  We assume that our ancestors were trying to do the same thing we do when we construct our cosmological theories and describe the generation of the objective world.  This presumption is wrong.  Our ancestors were not as simple-minded as we think they were, and their theories of the generation of the cosmos were not merely primitive science.  Archaic theories of creation attempted to account for the existence of the world, as experienced in totality (which means, including meaning), and not for the isolated fact of the material world.  The world as experienced in totality is made up of the material things we are familiar with, and the valences we consider epiphenomenal; of the objects of experience, and the fact of the subject, who does the experiencing.  The world brought into being in archaic myths of creation is phenomenological, rather than material – it includes all aspects of experience, including those things we now regard as purely subjective.  The archaic mind had not yet learned how to forget what was important.  Ancient stories of the generation of the world therefore focus on all of reality, rather than on those distant and abstracted aspects we regard as purely objective.[4] 

Our current ideology is such that we are prone to throw out all the old knowledge, myths, and stories as so much nonsense.  They are so quaint with their old outmoded ways of thinking.  What can one expect from people who did not have computers and live in the age of the internet?  Sarcasm aside, I believe we have a lot to learn and we discount the past at our own peril.  I believe the most pronounced problem with understanding the past is ignorance.  Peterson is combating this by asking pertinent questions and to look at the issue from a different angle.  This does not mean we need to go back and live in the past.  Rather we must understand what we have learned from the past and use it to go bravely into the future. 

The terrible unknown compels representation; likewise, the beneficial unknown.  We are driven to represent the fact that possibility resides in every uncertain event, that promise beckons from the depths of every mystery.  Transformation, attendant upon the emergence of change, means the death of everything old and decayed – means the death of everything whose continued existence would merely mean additional suffering on the part of those still striving to survive.  The terrible unknown, which paralyzes when it appears, is also succour for the suffering, calm for the troubled, peace for the warrior, insight and discovery for the perplexed and curious – is the redemptive jewel in the head of the toad or in the layer of the fire-belching dragon.  The unknown is the fire that burns and protects, the endlessly mysterious transcendent object that simultaneously gives and takes away.[5]

The unknown beckons to us.  Will it improve our situation or cause us harm?  Without some hero to delve the depths and march into the chaos, we will become stagnant.  This motif is played out throughout all of history.  It is part of what makes us human, “To boldly go where no man has gone before…”  The explorers that mapped out geography, cultures, chemistry, medicine, etc., understood this beckoning call and answered it.

The exploratory hero, mankind’s savior, cuts the primordial chaos into pieces and makes the world; rescues his dead father from the underworld, and revivifies him; and organizes the “nobles” occupying his kingdom into an effective, flexible and dynamic hierarchy.  There is no categorical difference between the individual who explores and the individual who reconstructs “society,” as a consequence of that exploration.  Accommodation to new information is an integral part of the exploratory process: an anomaly has not been processed until the preexistent interpretive schemas extant prior to its emergence have been reconfigured to take its presence into account.  Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary – and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker.[6]

Peacemaker… one who succeeds in a revolution or reconfiguration.  Something to ponder.  The one who brings about real change and revitalization.  The stories that we tell are children are very important.  They are the maps that our future heroes will need to save us in the future.  Are the stories we tell today useful and good?

Mythological thinking is not mere arbitrary superstition.  Its denigration – cascading even through literary criticism, in recent years – is not only unwarranted but perilous.  This is not to say that religious institutions and dogmas are not prey to the same weaknesses as all other human creations.  The ideas and patterns of action that underlay and generated those institutions remain of critical importance, however – remain important for sustaining individual emotional stability, maintaining group tolerance, cohesion and flexibility, supporting capacity to adapt to the strange, and strengthening ability to resist domination by one-sided and murderous ideologies.  The idea that we have superseded such thinking is a prime example of the capacity of the “semantic system” to partially represent and to thoroughly criticize.  This is wrong, arrogant and dangerous.[7]

Boom!  No mincing of words there.  One has only to look around us to see the fruits of this way of thinking.  There is a power in myth because it speaks of truths that are rooted very deeply in who we are.  To trivialize these and make them appear childish and naïve is a dangerous road to go on.  I agree with Peterson whole heartedly with this.

Evil, like good, is not something static: it does not merely mean breaking the rules, for example, and is not simply aggression, anger, force, pain, disappointment, anxiety or horror.  Life is of course endlessly complicated by the fact that what is bad in one circumstance is positively necessary in the next.  I noted previously that the answer to the question “what is the good?” must in fact be sought in the meta-domain, so to speak: the more fundamental mystery – given the context-dependent nature of “the good” – is “how are answers to the question ‘what is the good?’ endlessly and appropriately generated?”  The “good,” then, becomes the set of circumstances that allow the process of moral construction to flourish or becomes the process of moral construction itself.  The problem “what then is evil?” must be addressed similarly.

Evil is rejection of and sworn opposition to the process of creative exploration.  Evil is proud repudiation of the unknown, and willful failure to understand, transcend and transform the social world.  Evil is, in addition – and in consequence – hatred of the virtuous and courageous, precisely on account of their virtue and courage.  Evil is the desire to disseminate darkness, for the love of darkness, where there could be light.  The spirit of evil underlies all actions that speed along the decrepitude of the world, that foster God’s desire to inundate and destroy everything that exists.[8]

Flourish versus decline, good versus evil, creation versus destruction.  That which is good raises us up to some higher ideal.  That which is evil or bad lowers us, makes us less than we could be.  I put this quote in here because it is important to see where Peterson stands on the issue of good and evil.

Christian mythology portrays Satan as the “highest angel” in God’s “heavenly kingdom.”  This fact renders his association with reason more comprehensible.  Reason may well be considered the “highest angel” – which is to say, the most developed and remarkable psychological or spiritual faculty, characteristic of all men (and therefore, something transpersonal and eternal). … Reason, the most exceptional of spirits, suffers from the greatest of temptations: reason’s own capacity for self-recognition and self-admiration means endless capacity for pride, which is the act of presuming omniscience.  It is reason’s remarkable ability and its own recognition of that ability that leads it to believe it possesses absolute knowledge and can therefore replace, or do without, God.[9]

How smug we get.  How full of ourselves.  We think we have an answer for everything.  Observable facts only.  Just the facts and nothing but the facts.  Think of the pride of modern science and recall how many times we present knowledge as absolute.  We are still explorers.  Not everything fits snugly into our modern secular philosophy.  Do we just ignore that which does not?  I believe there is much more, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

It is not that easy to understand why the act of presuming omniscience is reasonably construed as precisely opposite to the act of creative exploration (as the adversary is opposite to the hero).  What “knowing everything” means, however – at least in practice – is that the unknown no longer exists, and that further exploration has therefore been rendered superfluous (even treacherous).  This means that absolute identification with the “known” necessarily comes to replace all opportunity for identification with the process that comes to know.  The presumption of absolute knowledge, which is the cardinal sin of the rational spirit, is therefore prima facie equivalent to rejection of the hero – to rejection of Christ, of the Word of God, of the (divine) process that mediates between order and chaos.  The arrogance of the totalitarian stance is ineradicably opposed to the “humility” of creative exploration.  [Humility – it is only constant admission of error and capacity for error (admission of “sinful and ignorant nature”) that allows for recognition of the unknown, and then for update of knowledge and adaptation in behavior.  Such humility is, somewhat paradoxically, courageous – as admission of error and possibility for error constitutes the necessary precondition for confrontation with the unknown.  This makes genuine cowardice the “underground” motivation for the totalitarian presumption: the true authoritarian wants everything unpredictable to vanish.  The authoritarian protects himself from knowledge of this cowardice by a show of patriotic advocacy, often at apparent cost to himself.][10]

I believe this is a very important point to consider.  It is through humility that we can be truly courageous.  This makes me think back on the cardinal virtues: Prudence, Courage, Temperance, and Justice.  Prudence is understanding which path to take into the darkness and chaos of the unknown, Courage is strength and fortitude to step forth knowing that you have an incomplete map, Temperance in the act of humility, and Justice to pull from the past that which is right and use it to measure correctly what needs to be done.  Sometimes we cling to tightly to the past and this can lead to stagnation or worse.

When conservatism destroys the capacity for individual creativity – when it becomes tyranny – then it works against life, not for it.  The “spirit within” has withdrawn from the group afraid to develop.  An absolutely conservative society cannot survive, because the future transcends the limitations of the past, and the absolute conservative wants to limit what could be to what has already been.[11]

We cannot live just in the past.  We can use the past, understand the past, take the best parts and revitalize it for the future.  But we cannot just stay stagnant.  That is the way to death and decay.  I believe in a strong conservative structure with open windows to allow the opportunity for growth and change.  Today it appears that we are more likely to throw the baby out with the bath water.  That is what leads to ideas that change is good.  Is does not matter what it is as long as we are changing.  I feel that is foolhardy.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” does not mean “live the life of the grasshopper instead of the ant, sing in the summer and starve in winter,” but concentrate on the task at hand.  Respond to error, when committed.  Pay attention, and when your behavior produces a consequence you find intolerable, modify it – no matter what it takes to produce such a modification.  Allow consciousness of your present insufficiency to maintain a constant presence, so that you do not commit the error of pride, and become unbending, rigid, and dead in spirit.  Live in full recognition of your capacity for error – and your capacity to rectify such error.  Advance in confidence and faith; do not shrink back, avoiding inevitable contact with the terrible unknown, to live in a hole that grows smaller and darker.[12]

No matter what it takes.  Peterson often remarks in his talks that nothing he ever really put his mind to ever really ended in a total negative.  It always had some sort of positive outcome.  It may not have been what he intended, but it was growth or progress toward some ultimate unknown good end.  This is usually followed with his clean your room speech.  Personally, I think it is great advice.

Like the rest of us, Peterson has struggled to find a meaning for the tragic things that occur in life.  I often think of the conversation between Ivan and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov when I ponder why bad things happen to good people.

But why is life tragic?  Why are we subject to unbearable limitation – to pain, disease, and death; to cruelty at the hands of nature and society?  Why do terrible things happen to everyone?  These are, of course, unanswerable questions.  But they must be answered, somehow, if we are to able to face our own lives.

The best I can make of it is this (and this has helped me): Nothing can exist without preconditions.  Even a game cannot be played without rules – and the rules say what cannot be done, as much as what can.  Perhaps the world is not possible, as a world, without its borders, without its rules.  Maybe existence wouldn’t be possible in the absence of our painful limitations.[13]

In his letter to his Dad describing why he wrote this book he states: “I had a notion that confronting what terrified me – what turned my dreams against me – could help me withstand that terrible thing.  This idea – granted me by the grace of God – allowed me to believe that I could find what I most wanted (if I could tolerate the truth; if I was willing to follow wherever it led me; if I was willing to devote my life to acting upon what I had discovered, whatever that might be, without reservation – knowing somehow that once started, an aborted attempt would destroy at least my self-respect, at most my sanity and desire to live).”[14]  He included a letter to his Dad!  This is that personal touch, that risk of vulnerability, the realistic honesty that Peterson portrays.  It increases his validity and gives power to his words.  He is not just saying this stuff; he believes in it.  He is a man of principles and is struggling and trudging through this life just like the rest of us.  But he wants to make a difference.  He feels compelled to make a difference.  Not just any difference, but a good difference.  He wants us to understand the journey he has gone through so that perhaps we might also go on this journey of self-discovery.  So that we might learn something about ourselves and those around us.  And with this knowledge, do something good with it.  Help make the world a better place by taking responsibility for our own actions or inactions.

Overall, I was very impressed with the book.  I am glad I read it.  I plan to read his other book soon and I continue to listen to his podcasts.

About the Author

Jordan B. Peterson was born in 1962 and is a Canadian clinical psychologist and Professor at the University of Toronto.  He has published two books: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999) and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018).  He became very popular on YouTube after posting his response to Canadian Bill C-16.  There is an ever-increasing collection of videos and podcasts available online from Peterson.  He is married and has two children. 

Jordan B. Peterson website

---

[1] P. 22

[2] P. 57

[3] P. 72

[4] P. 108-9

[5] P. 168

[6] P. 179

[7] P. 270-1

[8] P. 309-310

[9] P. 314

[10] P. 316

[11] P. 334

[12] P. 398

[13] P. 452

[14] P. 458