How, asked Douglas Murray, does the West support the Hamas cult of death? Why do its universities and activists find mass murder and rape admirable? Why does the West obsess about the exact date before which it is permissible to kill a fetus and under what conditions can we hurry the aged or disabled or uncomfortable off to a neat final solution?
[T]he proper use of science is when one “employs [these sciences] as … a means of a more affluent livelihood to be able to serve God.”
Jordan Peterson and Megyn Kelly have recently taken up some closely related questions. Why are our youth so unhappy? Why does our culture disrespect marriage? Why are all the Western countries (except for Israel) no longer replacing themselves, setting themselves up for suicide? Why have we cast aside the accumulated wisdom of what got us the (extraordinary by all historical measure) peace, wealth, and affluence we take for granted?
Recently, Jordan Peterson engaged Megyn Kelly in a long-form interview that centered on exploring the effects of the triumph of modern feminism. Kelly was invited because she is intelligent, well-spoken, strikingly successful in her career, deeply in love with her husband, and a proud and happy mother of three children. She is a grateful beneficiary of feminism’s drive to open the workplace to women and to inspire girls to consider careers mostly unheard of for women for most of human history.
She is also sharply critical of its uncorrected failures. She and Peterson sharply criticized its dramatic failures to help young people to shape happy lives. They lay the blame there because of the effective control of most of the educational structure in the West by advocates of an unnecessarily extreme version of feminism. The destructive work of its advocates, overly represented in our schools and universities, has devalued feminism’s achievements by unnecessarily making war on marriage, family, masculinity, and motherhood.
Deep into the interview, Peterson moves to place this phenomenon in the broadest context — the age-old human proclivity to worship our clever ideas as if they were final and all-inclusive truths. He turned to the archetypical narrative that addresses this: the snake’s seduction of humanity in the Garden of Eden.
I’ve studied malevolence for a very long time, the philosophical representations of malevolence, and the theological representations of malevolence. The deepest representation is Luciferian, and that trope underlies the evil scientist in popular entertainment, the idea of the intellect gone mad, the intellect that worships itself, that then usurps and attempts to put itself in the highest place. This is Milton’s idea, that Lucifer, who’s the spirit of the unbridled intellect, the light bringer, is the spirit that was most finely made, and that went most dreadfully wrong.
The reference to Milton is to Paradise Lost, in which Milton has the snake/Lucifer say these words to Eve as he attempts to get her to break faith with God:
And what are Gods that Man may not become
As they, participating God-like food?
The Gods are first, and that advantage use
On our belief, that all from them proceeds…
If they all things, who enclos’d
Knowledge of Good and Evil in this Tree,
… wherein lies
Th’ offence, that Man should thus attain to know?
…What can your knowledge hurt him, or this Tree
Impart against his will if all be his?
Milton was a Puritan poet and a mighty intellect who knew well the mind’s limitations and pretensions. It is precisely because of intellect’s great power that it can inflict great injury, cosmic injury. That is precisely the image in Christian literature of Satan as Lucifer — the being of great light who destroyed paradise by setting his light against its Creator.
Milton was not a Hebrew scholar, but he took advantage of the scholarship of John Selden and of others in the Christian world, such as Johannes Reuchlin, who transmitted knowledge of Talmudic and Kabbalistic sources to the Renaissance world. In one such source, the classic mystical text Zohar, we find this take on the snake and the sin of the Tree of Knowledge:
It is certain that Samael [a Kabbalistic alternative name of Satan] brought curses on the world through Wisdom and destroyed the first tree that God had created in the world.
He said to the woman: “With this tree God created the world; eat therefore of it, and ye shall be like God, knowing good and evil, for through this knowledge he is called God.”
The snake is proposing a new world view in which all is explained: God’s restraint is merely a power play. All the world is about power, so seize your own. All morality is merely a disempowering scam of the rulers.
The power in the Genesis narrative is that we know that God is so unselfish and loving that He created beings capable of loving and thus capable of rejecting as well. God is willing to abjure His infinite power to make love possible, for love cannot be forced. The snake undercuts that truth and gives Eve an idea which rationalizes her break of faith, and that use of the mind detached from God proves contagious enough for Adam to buy into it as well. This is the paradigm for all time of the human proclivity to force God into the image of our mind gazing into its own mirror.
The imperious, idolatrous mind wishes to impose a false duality — you are either for or against its Great Idea. It is a narcissistic test, for this Great Idea has been cut loose from its context within the Infinite. Thus, in the case at hand, the dominant, institutionalized feminism that Kelly and Peterson both critique lifts up its own ideas by cancelling ideas and institutions that it doesn’t understand well. It sabotages the possible paradise of preserving and enhancing the value of our greatest institutions — marriage and family — because it recognizes nothing superior to its own vision. It is stuck in a dualism. It needs to tear down a great good in order to make itself supreme.
It’s a very old story.
A little more than a century after Milton’s death, a rabbi wrote a book called The Book of the People in the Middle. It addresses the religious imperative to use the mind. It teaches that our true and sincere emotions of loving and reverencing God are born from a mind that learns to consistently turn towards the infinitely deep reality of the all-encompassing One.
This book teaches as well that because of the mind’s great power, its corruption has far more consequences than a corrupt heart. As the Bible reminds us, the heart tends to stray. The mind is meant to rule the heart and call it back to the love of God and the good path. It is capable of sharing the joy of its ever-deeper knowledge of the true, the good, and the beautiful. The heart learns and loves what it learns. That is the work of governance of which the mind is uniquely capable.
But if the mind strays, what calls it back? It tends to rationalize its missteps and so cements itself into its strayed state. As an old proverb puts it: The first time people sin, they are remorseful; the second time, they no longer feel the pain; and by the third time, they start to claim that it is a mitzvah — the right and necessary thing to do.
The author compares the limited damage done by foolish and thoughtless words that people may utter with the pseudo-sophistication of a debased mind. People will dismiss thoughtless words as the foolishness they clearly are …
since even fools and ignoramuses can speak that way. Not so in the case of the nations’ science whereby he clothes and defiles the intellectual faculties in his divine soul.
What he means by “the nation’s science” is an intellectual system that ignores or opposes God. This was apt for post-medieval Europe in which intellectuals increasingly believed at most in a watchmaker God largely irrelevant to our present lives.
This rabbi, though, was no more opposed to science than Kelly or Peterson are opposed to women having more opportunities than ever before. All that is required, for the rabbi or Kelly and Peterson, is the commitment to an integral approach that increases value across the board and does not degenerate into establishing its bona fides by hunting heretics and destroying the good that it doesn’t understand.
Instead, the rabbi teaches, the proper use of science is when one “employs [these sciences] as a useful instrument, viz., as a means of a more affluent livelihood to be able to serve God, or knows how to apply them in the service of God and His Torah.”
Go ahead and reap the useful material benefits science unlocks. Even better, see the greatness of God through the wondrous handiwork of this universe and share your disciplined insights.
Peterson piquantly summarizes the glory of the mind and the danger of its misuse:
And so the psychological idea there is that there isn’t anything more remarkable about human beings than their cognitive ability, but if it becomes master, instead of serving something higher, then look the hell out.
It’s a necessary point to make. The consequences of a society not turned consciously towards that which is deepest is a debased mind which malignantly spreads through its culture. That, precisely, is hellish.
It is quite a delight to hear these accomplished and brilliant people engage the malignancy with their formidable energy and intelligence. Following on Murray’s brilliant turn in analyzing our world affairs, it is an invitation back to life. It is time to spurn the serpent’s illusions. It is time to heal the malignancy that would destroy us. Let us make common cause with all who will join in a Western renaissance that would integrate all the good of which God makes us capable.
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