Thinking Dawkins and Peterson
Scientific Materialism Meets New Age Jungianism Meets A Failure To Think Christian Atheism
Last week two of Western cultures most influential intellectuals met for a mediated discussion. While many are commenting on the meeting as a “frustrating” “car crash” where they “miss each other”, we should be first quick to reflect that the spaces of frustration, crashing, and missing each other can actually be the place where we learn the most. Moreover, thanks to the mediation of Alex O’Connor — whom I hold in high regard as someone who embodies the “Atheist” end of a proper “Christian Atheist” intellectual disposition1 — this conversation went much better than their first unmediated conversation in which Peterson kind of “talks at” Dawkins until they stumble upon the realisation that they both dislike and do not understand Jacques Lacan.2 Perhaps that’s why the first conversation had top comments that read like:
While at least the second conversation had top comments that read like:
Not to mention our poor friend Alex:
As “corpus collosum” — presumably inspired by neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s notion of the left and right hemispheres, with Dawkins representing the “left hemisphere” as “mechanistic” seeing everything in reductionist bits, and Peterson representing the “right hemisphere” as “living complexity” seeing everything as connected in a flow of meaning, emotion, and value — O’Connor keeps the conversation centred around “memes” and “archetypes” as well as attempts to balance Dawkins’ bias towards “scientific truth” (or “facts”), and Peterson’s bias towards “symbolic truth” (or “myths”).
While we can get into the weeds with all the different topics where Dawkins and Peterson “miss each other”, I attempt here to basically summarise their main points of contention, as well as offer a brief description of how I see the “frustrating crash” and the stakes for thought, culture, and politics. For Dawkins:
Culture is driven by memes which spread by imitation like a virus (e.g. backwards baseball cap)
Dawkins’ prioritises perceptions based on “facts that are true” and “supported by evidence”
He seems to have discovered in the conversation that he is “naive literalist” when it comes to mythological truth claims (e.g. Did Cain exist or not? Was Jesus born of a virgin or not? Did Jesus die for our sins or not?)
Legitimacy and credibility of “true facts” “supported by evidence” is verified by “predictability” (which places quantum physics above religions like Christianity in terms of truth value)
We can rank order cultural systems in terms of ethics but that religious systems do not compare to secular systems in this regard (with radical Islam seemingly functioning as the worst ethical system)
There is a non-scientific mythical dimension underlying the scientific enterprise (required for the valuation of facts by stories into a hierarchy), but maintains that this dimension is only “vaguely interesting”)
Christianity may have had a role as a historical pre-condition for science but that doesn’t increase his trust in the truth of Christian propositions (e.g. again he is a “naive literalist” re: “virgin birth/resurrection”)
He seems disappointed that the Bible does not read as a book of scientific facts (e.g. Earth is a sphere that orbits the Sun), and leaves him cold when he can only find “moral lessons” derived from myths (e.g. sacrifice for the other, be fearless in confronting death etc.)
His perspective emphasises “reality” (e.g. predators/prey) over what Peterson call “hyper-reality” (symbol of the Dragon as a meta-predator) because this allows for a Darwinian analysis of natural selection (differential replication)
Archetypes could facilitate the spread of memes via the “Baldwin Effect” whereby organisms learn new tricks so fast that they become assimilated into the genome (he suggests that this would happen fastest with sexual selection)
Sexual attraction can also spread like an epidemic in sexual displays, where natural selection would favour individuals best at X, which could give rise to a genetic tendency via the Baldwinised memes
He closes by emphasising that he is only interested in “eternal things” that were “true before humans existed” and will be “true after humans are extinct”, which allows him to ignore “symbolism and metaphor”
For Peterson:
Memetic spreading is connected to underlying motivational structures (emotional valences, positive-negative)
Jungian Archetypes are manifestations of an instinct in image/behaviour, where instinct represents a drive that the archetype tries to express in ideation)
The history of religious ideas are histories of the rise/fall of archetypes as cultures mix and gods compete in the imagination of human beings
We can only process facts through the lens of story (myths), which is the truth of post-modernism and the cause of the culture war (we are struggling to prioritise our perceptions in a new hierarchy, probably due to globalisation/internet)
Cain is an example of an “eternal archetype” which is “hyper-real” and has “always existed” and that while Cain may or may not have existed, “Cain types exist” (e.g. representing the instinctual conflict between brothers)
Religious metaphysics and specifically the Bible is counter-intuitively informative in a similar way that quantum physics is counter-intuitively informative (and mysterious)
Biblical literalism does not get to the point of the myths/stories or recognise the power they have had historically (e.g. Christian myth powerful enough to bring Rome “to its knees” and “demolish the pagan enterprise”)
Biblical literalism does not undermine the Biblical enterprise because it is about how the myths orient our perceptions, but he still maintains an agnostic stance re: virgin birth/resurrection
Preconditions for the scientific enterprise include: (1) truth as a unity (of facts/values), (2) logical order is intrinsic to cosmos, (3) fundamental order is good/intelligible to human beings, (4) discovering that order/aligning ourselves with it makes for life more abundant, (5) Truth sets you free
He claims that this mythological substrate is what is now under attack from the “post-modern neo-Marxists” or “Woke politics” which undermines the conditions of possibility for scientists like Dawkins or engineers like Musk to do their work
Biblical stories dramatise important values in myths that are aligned with contemporary neuroscientific data on the importance of de-centering from our immediate pleasures/needs towards the field of others (e.g. from short-term/short-sighted motivations towards communal existence and protection of the future that at the same time cares for the present)
You can find analogous ideas to the meme in the religious work of Eliade which is needed to “demolish post-modern Neo-Marxism”
Now you can make up your mind about what you think of all that, but I think it is a pretty fair and accurate representation of what was said. Now from a Christian Atheist perspective, I am going to try to demonstrate why I think this concept is so important — as it holds the contradiction between the two terms — and opens up conversations that, perhaps, we would find “less frustrating”, and “less of a car crash”, where we “can find each other”.
The first is the obvious fact that what we see in Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson is the collision between the ideologies of “scientific materialism” on the one hand, and “New Age Jungianism” on the other hand. Scientific materialists tend to perform as a neutral dispassionate and disinterested character who are simply describing reality the “way it is” and sticking to “the facts” independent of mythological stories or narratives. New Age Jungians tend to perform a more personalised religiosity in relation to “eternal archetypes” that can be used to explain human behaviour as a transhistorical reification. We saw both of these patterns in the “car crash” between Dawkins and Peterson.
For Dawkins, as a scientific materialist, he was basically obsessing over the impossibility of the factual reality of religious phenomena (judging them based on “empirical” “scientific standards”). This approach fails to realise that this in no way undermines their historical validity as religious consciousness at the time, or even religious consciousness proper now, is not something measuring religious phenomena by their factual reality, or their empirical historical sensual event status. Moreover, the scientific materialist, in centring work and interest around “truths independent of human history”, in many ways cut themselves from truth and also fall into easily avoidable contradictions. For example, when Dawkins names the types of truths that interest him, he suggests things like “the age of the Earth” or the “history of life”, while also saying things like “sending rockets to the Moon” (which of course depends on and is entangled with humans and our history). It is almost as if the scientific materialist lives in an imaginary universe of the “before times” of human beings while radically isolating themselves to the reality of human beings with the exception of admiring “cool things” that techno-science produces in a vacuum.
On the side of New Age Jungianism, there is a different tendency towards a non-historical analysis in the positing of “eternal archetypes” that seem to exist independently of human beings and our historical process (Peterson explicitly states that “Cain” is an “eternal archetype”). In this positing there is the reification of images derived from instincts that also lead to cutting oneself from the truth and falling into equally easily avoidable contradictions. Perhaps the most persistent contradiction that derailed the conversation with Dawkins was his inability to disassociate the empirical literal truth value of the archetypes from their imaginary historical function, and also his persistent insistence of confusing the imaginary domain of “meta-representations” like “dragons” with biological realities of “lions” and “tigers”. Also consider that throughout their discussion Peterson was obsessed with getting Dawkins to value the literal Biblical truths as well as the moral lessons of literary fiction on the standard of “empirical” “scientific” truths, essentially treating him like a big Other who could validate Jungian archetypes with the science of memes.
What we see in this collision is thus a failure to think human history on its own terms: the scientific materialist just seems disinterested in it and therefore gives the impression that it is irrelevant, and the New Age Jungian seems contain all interpretation of human history in an eternal imaginary domain. Both are total failures when it comes to thinking the way that history and eternity themselves intersect or collide on the level of the living idea. Christianity is not valuable for its mythological eternal truths independent of contemporary existence of human subjectivity, but rather reflects a truth that can be discovered in an abyssal existential truth process (or not) which modifies the structure of belief itself. That very transformation opens towards — not the reification of the “eternal archetypes” (ideas) that facilitated or mediated a certain truth process — but rather opens one to a form of Atheism without a transcendental guarantee. In the context of both Dawkins and Peterson, this level of Atheism seems impossible to comprehend: Dawkins clings to a big Other in the form of eternal scientific truths independent of human beings, and Peterson clings to direct identification with Christian myths as if they cover over everything that can be thought in human history.
In this sense, the big Other persists equally, if in opposite directions, for both the scientific materialist and the New Age Jungian. What this big Other hides or covers up, most likely, is the transmutation or sublimation of negative affect that is intrinsically involved in ethical engagement with the realm of human others. Here, while Peterson understands the realm of myth as facilitating that ethical engagement (which is perhaps equivalent to requiring training wheels to ride a bike), and Dawkins seems to take this form of ethical engagement as an unquestioned given (which is quite possibly elitist and arrogant), both fall into near identical traps of eternalising something quite independent from actual historicity. The challenge here for scientific materialism is questioning why the function of a big Other is still required for it to maintain itself historically; and the challenge for the New Age Jungian is questioning why direct identification with images is required to sustain ethical life. My hypothesis is that the scientific materialist wants to continue sustaining itself without embedding itself in actual human historicity (which would require and demand that it dialecticise its materialism inclusive of the necessity of religion), and the New Age Jungian wants to cover over the gaps and cracks in reality with an imagistic identity (as opposed to actually learning from the gaps and the cracks as such).
To put it very simply, the challenge that I see in the Christian Atheist project, and a challenge that clearly emerges internal to German Idealism as well as the continental tradition that it gives birth to, is the challenge of thinking the coincidence between eternity and history. While both Dawkins and Peterson, at least in explicit reflection, appear to be against “post-modern relativisation” of eternity to a pure historicism, neither are capable of thinking the “absolute contradiction” of “eternal historicism”. Here the main test of “eternal historicism” is not learning about all the facts independent of human beings either before our existence or after our existence, nor is it learning about all the images that represent instinctual patterns in a seemingly ahistorical form, but rather thinking the actual negativity of human history itself. In other words, in “eternal historicism” “eternity itself” does not have any positive content, and it is this negative dimension which makes impressive historical phenomena like humans going to the Moon or building some fantastically complex device, or humans sacrificing for the other or being fearless in the face of death.
There are some concrete practical consequences of this distinction. On the side of Dawkins, there is the seeming inability to think the link between science and its historical conditions of possibility, which requires that a culture is capable of transcending its dependence on eternal archetypes while also helping facilitate the next generation into a process that will necessarily involve eternal archetypes as a type of vanishing mediation (an extremely difficult task, and something that it seems historical science has failed to embody). On the side of Peterson, there is the temptation towards a conservative-traditionalist reification of religion which serves monarchical tendencies in neoliberal “middle” capitalism.3 This reification of religion as imaginary depends on an equally imaginary external opposite for its own stable identity (in Peterson’s case: “post-modern Neo-Marxism”). Perhaps more disastrous, and as is true for many conservative-leaning religious subjects, this leaves totally unsublimated or untransformed a form of anger and hatred that actually puts him in jeopardy of failing to embody the values he purports to uphold as ideals (which is again the importance of working with the gaps/cracks of the negative dimension as opposed to covering them with images).
While the conversation between Dawkins and Peterson will potentially resume around issues of memes and archetypes, with the idea that archetypes could enhance the spreadability of memes, and that such a discovery would represent the meeting point between two disparate literatures (cultural evolution of memes and the history of religious ideas), I think the truth for our culture will not be found in the simple unification of Dawkins form of scientific materialism and Peterson’s form of New Age Jungianism. Dawkins as a thinker is extremely valuable on technical aspects of evolutionary science, but seems quite set in stone when it comes to his political and theological orientation as a liberal secular thinker who is very much content and capable to continue thinking in this way until his death. This makes his thinking less relevant for genuine theopolitical transformation. Peterson is a thinker who is clearly helping a whole new generation confront the meaning, value and significance of mythology and symbolism, an art that has been neglected in past decades or perhaps much longer. However, he seems to feed into the culture war rather than getting to a dimension that could transcend the culture war, or bring us to a genuinely new way of thinking on the level of universality. He will likely continue his imaginary battle with “post-modern Neo-Marxism” and employing a eternalised concept of Christian myths in order to depict himself as the hero saving the West from itself.
For more on the concept of Christian Atheism, see: The Case for Christian Atheism.
Outstanding work Cadell, this captured beautifully the discussion and how it points to Christian Atheism.
I've been waiting for this. And you weaved it so wonderfully into the lecture yesterday. Mike dropped moment for Christian atheism 💯