The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

a man who shares your surname eugene peterson's book uh the message

and what i was struck by in this version of acts was the vivacity of the lividness and vitality of the book and how the sense of urgency of christianity that it you know think of the critiques are often slung in your direction conservatism it stayed but you know this is a very sort of and admittedly it's 2000 years old but a very sort of a vibrant call to arms an urgent sense that oh my god we're living we're living in an atrophying and dying ideology we must become alive with christ we must change the world and and and even the accounts that are given in there are accounts of people jailed and on trial that even though it is literally biblical they're not that it's very distinct from the old testament with its locusts and its deserts and its tribes and its manner now it sort of feels overtly and and literally political

we were talking about Hunter S Thompson earlier and famously he wrote a book called Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail if I remember correctly which is quite the riotous account what did you learn about American yeah yeah absolutely absolutely and it's a book I mean it's a very interesting piece of cultural history now but it's certainly a book that stands on its own merits as well as being an interesting journalistic

I was reading The Daily Laws before setting up this interview and I'm going to read one. It's a set of meditations, 366 meditations on power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature. And so here's the one for June 7th and I think it's relatively representative of the book.

Play a soccer to catch a sucker, seem dumber than your mark.

The Third Awokening or Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.

The title in Britain is called Taboo.

And what this book really is about, what it really argues is that what we're seeing, council culture, for example, attacks on the past, on history. This is actually a continuation and an acceleration of a preexisting set of ideas. It is not a deviation from this.

What we're seeing is really a continuation of a set of ideas, which arguably go back a century.

And so these are the ideas really of left liberalism. And we have to understand ourselves as living within an acceleration of left liberalism, a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first decade of the 20th century as liberal progressivism.

I think I forget the name of it there's a stone mountain Georgia which is this etching of I think four Confederate generals go back to I'm like 1910 when it opened and you listen to the speeches to the people commemorating that it's a lot of white supremacy all right it's the same time the Ku Klux Klan rose up at the same time the Jim Crow got put in place was actually pretty interesting book I forget the name of it I think it's A Fever in the Heartland by Timmy again about how the clan took over Indiana okay not talking Alabama talking Indiana early 20th century in the fight that had to go to move that back so that history exists all right and we have to wrestle with that history and fear what does it mean how do we better treat people equal and not fall back into that now I have participated in some DEI trainings not that many um and there's two parts that I really like and then I think there's an incredible missed opportunity the parts that I like is we talk about this history because a lot of people don't understand this history I mean they they don't know it's like well okay yeah the Civil War happened the North won and there was discrimination in the South and then everything sort of sorted itself out well well no actually it didn't um well into the 70s 80s 90s okay there were significant problems in all these areas and if we educate ourselves about that history we will better understand our own country and frankly I think we'll better understand how difficult it is to achieve the ideals that you talked about that this is what we're trying to do but it doesn't necessarily come easily so understand that history and then the second piece of what they try to do is and the individual that you're working what's their story who are they okay you know if you are a black person growing up in America you had a different experience than if you were a white person growing up in America and if you're going to work for somebody whether it's in an office or a school or wherever having a conversation and understanding your colleagues I think is a very positive thing now where it goes off the beam in my estimation is it then sort of talks about how discrimination and bigotry is unique to white western culture okay yeah that yeah that's pretty that's that's what well to call that wrong is to barely scrape the surface yeah universal human proclivity it is but understand that under the circumstances and there's a lot of different reasons but white European culture emerged as the dominant culture around a 19th century thereabouts actually I'm reading a book called When China Rules the World it's written in 2009 it's an assumption about how China's coming and what's it going to be like and it sort of walks through this history of you know how and it to some degree was an accident of history you know guns germs and steel right you know whatever played out this particular group of people became dominant it was white men so therefore that discrimination was the discrimination that dominated a significant chunk of the globe it's not irrelevant all right to point out that that came to pass I think it is more helpful in going all the way back and I'll close with this to your identity comment what I find most useful is when we talk about things that talk about our shared humanity as opposed to the things that make us different and of course we're different of course men are different from women of course whatever your cultural background is it's going to make you a little bit different from somebody else it's so much better when we talk about the things that we have in common and I think one of the things we have in common no matter who you are is a feeling that other people don't understand you okay I mean that's a pretty universal thing in my experience so if you want to get together and talk about what here's my experience but we shouldn't segregated it based on race or anything like that we should put humans together and say discrimination bigotry bias these can be problems you know let's talk about how we have things in common instead of how we're different so I think we could do a lot better but again the problem is and I we had this debate in the House Armed Services Committee on this year's defense bill now that the Republicans have retaken the House I was the chairman of the committee for four years when Democrats were in charge now I'm the righty member diversity equity inclusion was a huge part of debate and the debate on the right was we got to get rid of it lock stock and barrel we just got to get rid of it um I just think there's got to be a better answer I don't necessarily not necessarily I don't like the way the far left does diversity equity and inclusion but the idea that we can just say that's all good no racism here no bigotry let's just move forward and not talk about it I am at least equally troubled by

I thought to myself that idea Bonhoeffer wrote a book The Cost of Discipleship where he famously talks about cheap grace because the excuse given by the Germans the theologians and pastors at the time was well it's all about grace it's it's it's less about what we do because Luther said oh we're not saved by our works well congratulations you're correct you're not saved by your works however there is a little scripture in the epistle of James that says faith without works is dead another words if you're foolish enough to believe that you can have faith and not events it in how you live then you're a fool then actually biblically you have no faith and so I think that that bad idea about grace and faith which you know we get and again these are always you know these are good ideas taken to extremes right well you know faith is what I believe uh yes that's that's a nice idea but it can become unmoored from the reality that what you believe has to be lived out it has to be an integral part of who you are it has to be holistic and the Germans were particularly guilty of this and what I'm saying is that the American church is particularly guilty of this today and it's always manifested in the idea that oh we shouldn't be political and I thought to myself that's preposterous if you're against slavery and you live in the mid 19th century people will say oh you're being political just stick to the gospel well that's what Hitler said to the past is just stick to your little your little gospel I'll worry about the third right I'll worry about everything else you just worry about your little theology and that thin theological view that some Christians have of what it is to have faith is profoundly wrong it is unbiblical your theology has to be lived out it has to be integrated into every part of your life um and that's where we have drifted to this idea that people say I can be against something in my mind but I don't have to do anything about it I don't have to live out my life heroically I don't have to put my life on the line I don't have to put my career on the line if you believe these things then of course you have to put your life in your career on the line otherwise it's obvious you don't believe these things

"We've Got Issues" is definitely the case both psychologically and socially in the West.

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one back.

I don't like it when people criticize and then don't offer a better alternative.

If you don't have a better alternative why don't you just shut up because all you're going to do is just poking holes in something.

I think the subtitle of this book is as important as the title, because the book is very prescriptive.

He is currently writing a memoir tentatively titled Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family, and social class to be published in late 2022 by Gallery Books, a division of Simon and Schuster.

And so we have a book called The Power of Culture. And the reason why it's called The Power of Culture is because, you know, that quote, culture eats strategy for breakfast. I am constantly watching our culture and keeping it just where it needs to be.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the bestselling author of "Infidel" (2007) and "Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now" (2015).

And you know, at the end of Tolstoy's Confessions, I don't know if you ever read that, but it details something very much like what you described happening to you.

One of the things you pointed out in your 2022 book was that in the 1950s, there were 80 cities in the world with populations of more than a million. And now there's more than 500.

The Third Awokening or Taboo, How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution.

The title in Britain is called Taboo.

And what this book really is about, what it really argues is that what we're seeing, council culture, for example, attacks on the past, on history. This is actually a continuation and an acceleration of a preexisting set of ideas. It is not a deviation from this.

What we're seeing is really a continuation of a set of ideas, which arguably go back a century.

And so these are the ideas really of left liberalism. And we have to understand ourselves as living within an acceleration of left liberalism, a set of ideas that kind of come together in the first decade of the 20th century as liberal progressivism.

Shelby Steele in his book White Guilt, which I recommend to everybody - he's an African American, he grew up in the South, experiences what he called a dramatic shift almost overnight where the cultural power goes away from whites, where Black people had to kind of genuflect to whites, to suddenly white people having to sort of virtue signal that they're one of the good whites to Black people.

I always think of comedy like that because we're putting the severed parts together that other people may not see.

I think she wrote that in Three Guineas, but one of my favorite books.

I have that. And what you have that book. It's hilarious. It is. It's all his tweets.

But I read through that and I thought, oh, man, like he's he's definitely underappreciated as a comedian because like he's very pointed, like very, very pointed.

Oh, yeah. He's just hilarious and people love it.

But that actually turns out to be a real problem. And it's a problem with regards even to the meme idea, because you don't have to extend Dawkins' work very far to understand that religious stories are memes. And there's a hierarchy of memes. And some of them are very functional.

I think Terry Eagleton said that listening to Dawkins on theology is like listening to somebody write a book about biology whose only knowledge of the subject is having once read the great British book of birds.