Maps of Meaning

The most important theme that Chapter 3 explores is the necessity of tradition for an individual’s development. One can also interpret tradition as the Great Father; thus, this section explores the Great Father’s role in human development. The book’s engages with this theme on two levels: the developmental and the “intrapsychic,” or psychological. In the first sense, Peterson draws on various theories of development and anthropology to show that the human infant is physically helpless. Affiliations of belief, tribe, and culture bind adherents into protecting the young of their group. This is a variation of the axiom “it takes a village to raise a child.” In the second sense, the psyche cannot face the chaos of the unknown world except by approaching it from the vantage point of a fixed position. Tradition provides that vantage point.

Thus, the book debunks the modern idea that all tradition is bad or retrogressive. In the absence of all tradition, the meaning-seeking human mind devolves into anxiety, and the growing child wilts before blooming. Significantly, though, Peterson does not advocate that tradition, and group identity is sacrosanct. On the contrary, the book treats the formation of group identity as a step, stage, or apprenticeship that prepares individuals to forge their own paths. In fact, Peterson well recognizes the dangers of dogmatic group identity, as is clear in his critique of socialist groups. Group identity is useful only if it allows the individual to outgrow and reform it in their own image.

Peterson’s complex relationship with group identity must be read in the context of his life experiences and his place in time and culture. As a fierce individualist who nevertheless craves meaning, he finds group identity both repulsive and magnetic. Furthermore, his views of the danger of ideology-based group identity stems from his despair at global violence as well as his reading of Nobel-winning Russian philosopher and writer Aleksandr Isayevich (A.I.) Solzhenitsyn.  Solzhenitsyn helped raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), particularly the Gulag system. Although Peterson doesn’t explicitly state his mixed relationship with group affiliation, it forms the subtext of this section. Tellingly, he mirrors this mixed relationship in using antithetical terms, such as a limit that frees. Also interesting is that the book presents initiation rites as a symbolic permission for the individual to outgrow the group fold or begin to travel the borderlands between the realms of the Great Father and the Great Mother. Baptism for instance, which is an initiation and rebirth into the church, involves sprinkling water from the church’s font, a “symbolic analog of the uterus” (225), the realm of the Great Mother.

Chapter 3 is notable for Peterson’s radical reading of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a fierce proponent of the cult of the individual. Many thought Nietzsche opposed the Catholic Church—which his work often attacked—and considered him a nihilist, a philosopher who abandons faith and redemption. However, Peterson considers Nietzsche “consciously salutary” in his opposition to Christianity. In other words, Nietzsche critiqued Christianity because he was a well-meaning friend and wanted its tradition to evolve with modernity. Furthermore, Peterson quotes from Nietzsche’s writing to support the point of view that the philosopher in fact proposed a period of obedience, discipline, and apprenticeship rather than advocating nihilism: “Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his ‘most natural’ state is the free ordering, placing, giving form [...] and constructing in the moments of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws […]” (219). Peterson’s fresh, unusual reading of Nietzsche further establishes the former as an iconoclastic, provocative thinker.