This confrontation between two professors had been a long time coming. It represented nothing less than a war between civilisations. But the task was more complex than appeared at first sight. It was to seek an alliance between the empirical atheists of the scientific revolution and Christocentric believers against the political post-modern atheists who are poised to take over the West.
There was something deeply dramatic and rather exciting about Jordan Peterson taking on, engaging with, confronting and negotiating with Richard Dawkins.
What would frame this encounter? Was it client and therapist? University symposium? Arts versus science? Faith versus atheism? Fact versus value? And what would emerge from this clash of the intellectual and cultural titans?
The answer was a very unsatisfactory and rather tetchy car-crash. There was no meeting of minds. They were forced to agree their minds were differently constructed. There was no merging of “reality”. They lived in, saw, engaged with and thought in different realities. It turned out also that they wanted different things.
Dawkins wanted to win a debate. He is someone who relishes winning arguments, and this was one in which he was confident of triumph. He looked to score points, eviscerate gullibility, impose a laconic scepticism on what he perceived as the fragile flame of trust, pour scorn where scorn was justified.
Peterson just wanted to save humanity. But he needed Dawkins' cooperation to do it, and Dawkins was not going to play.
Peterson was after a meeting of minds, and merging of realities, the building of a triumphant and unique bridge between two worlds that had been for ever divorced.
Peterson wanted to heal Western culture of schizophrenia. “Surely,” he cried from his heart, “truth tends towards unity.” Dawkins had no idea what he was talking about. Truth was what Dawkins had and Peterson lacked.
“You are drunk on symbols,” Dawkins rather laconically and bitterly complained.
The scene was set for this in intellectual terms in 1959 by CP Snow. He warned that society was soon going to be divided into two groups that were incapable of understanding each other. There would be those who read Shakespeare, and those who understood the second law of thermodynamics.
The bifurcation between arts and science he thought was going to have serious consequences and it has, only they are exponentially more serious even than he imagined. This is partly because we have entered a culture war, in which one side is determined to eradicate the memory of Christendom and the values that it represented, replacing it not so much with atheism, as intellectual and moral anarchy.
Peterson has been fighting the forces of cancellation, the anarchy of post-modernism and the energy of cultural Marxism, but he had hoped to find an ally in the beneficiaries of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment which Christianity facilitated.
He hoped that Dawkins might provide an ally with whom he could create a bridge across the chasm between science and religion, fact and value.
Peterson kept on appealing to Dawkins, saying, “If you don’t believe that truth unifies, you must believe that it creates contradiction, and how can that be?”
But Dawkins either didn’t know what he meant or didn’t care.
The approach that Peterson took to woo Dawkins was to suggest that the latter’s invention of the meme was so similar to the psychologists’ notion of the archetype, that perhaps these were the pillars that would support the unifying bridge between fact and value, measurement and meaning.
Dawkins was underwhelmed. He rather enjoyed teasing Peterson by asking him if he “literally” believed in certain religious propositions. Surely, you don’t believe in a real “Cain”, and since no real Cain existed the meaning you deduce from him must be invalid.
Dawkins pressed on demanding Peterson say whether he believed in the Virgin Birth, hoping to force him to either admit to being a Christian and be mocked for it, or repudiate it, and be shamed for it. Peterson wriggled and insisted that Dawkins was asking the wrong question. Dawkins didn’t think so, and pressed on, enjoying digging a twisting finger in a open wound.
Peterson tried to persuade Dawkins to go on an as yet unknown (for him) quest for values and meaning that derived from more than scientific measurement.
And when Dawkins resisted, they both came to the frustrated mutual realisation that “ you have a different mind from me” and “your reality is different from mine.” Tragically, it really did seem that each man meant something very different by “reality”.
The futility of what Peterson was trying to achieve and a window into Dawkins’ soul suddenly emerged when Dawkins exclaimed with excoriating impatience “religion is about morality, but morality leaves me cold”.
It may of course be that atheists repudiate the idea of God not so much because they don’t believe, but because they want to be morally unaccountable to anyone but themselves. No God, no external morality.
Trying to draw Dawkins into the world of metaphor Peterson asked him if he believes in dragons. Dawkins’s eyes boggled. Had he never fought any dragons?
“I’m not interested in dragons,” Dawkins muttered sullenly.
“But you are interested in predators and their evolution,” cried Peterson, “can’t you see that the dragons is a pictorial representation of the abstracted concept of a predator?”
“A dragon is a deep meme,” he continued, trying once again to reach out across the chasm. To which Dawkins replied testily, “It doesn’t impress me. I like reality.”
“It doesn’t take THAT much imagination” pressed Peterson begging him to release his hold on literalism and flirt with allegory. But Dawkins appeared to have no imagination, and was strongly disinclined to abandon fact for allegory.
“We have different kinds of minds,” Dawkins grumpily reiterated.
Peterson replied: “I think that at bottom truth is unifying. And what that is going to mean in practice is that the world of value and the world of fact coincide in some manner that we don’t yet understand. And the fact that union is equivalent to what is being described as divine order across millennia.
“If we accept the presumption that there is a unity of knowledge, many sense of that those two pathways have to unify, and we don’t know how to unify them in the west. That’s why there is a conflict between the scientific and the religious.
“It’s not as though I know how to rectify that. The best I can offer is to say this is what I have learnt from studying those stories.”
Peterson made one last attempt to motivate Dawkins into a fresh exploration the quest for meaning.
He reminded him of the imminent destruction of universities at the hands of the post-modernists where solipsistic imagination was crushing the claims of both rationality and science.
Biology was no longer sufficiently authoritative to determine a woman. Could Dawkins not see that science was being overwhelmed by a heretical dysfunctional imagination that could only be countered by an authentic quest for meaning and different values?
Dawkins wasn’t so easily lured from his factoid bunker. He suspected a trick.
The last part of the conversation produced a sliver or reluctant mutuality, and it seemed a little unfortunate it had to do with studies detailing women’s preference in pornography setting the scene for something called the Baldwin effect (learned evolutionary behaviour) as yet one more avenue of approach to allow the world of memes and the world of archetypes to share the same “reality”. But it didn’t get very far.
Peterson deserves respect and credit for at least attempting to find common ground with what has become old-fashioned irascible atheism.
His own struggles to avoid being identified as a believing Christian added a layer of complexity that dismissed his capacity for straight-talking. But one suspects that he is trying to keep his agnostic audience of millions on side.
He is right however, that only a new alliance between the “fact and measuring” people and the “Christocentric archetype meaning” people may be able to push back on the “anarchic-totalitarian-relativistic-post-modern-Marxist” people who have suddenly shown that they have indeed briskly trotted through the institutions and are busy cancelling the opposition.
It may be that the freedom to do science that Dawkins takes for granted may only be preserved if he can find the motivation Peterson tried to present him with to engage with the world of meaning, value, and so problematically for him, faith.
My enemy’s enemy is my friend, in this war of civilisations. Or as Jesus put it (in Mark 9) “whoever is not against us is for us”.
