Lately I have been investigating the work of Jordan Peterson which I have found to be of great value. Indeed, I have to admit that I am being persuaded but trying to keep a critical mind and balance between doubt and belief.
I thought this is a strong argument for a more sophisticated understanding of the function of religion that would be quite fun to throw to the LessWrong community for an attempt to dismantle ;)
You can find his lectures online on YouTube. The 'Maps of Meaning' series is a fairly detailed exposition of the concepts. For a quick taste you can watch the Joe Rogan podcast with him (they talk a bit of religion in the last hour or so) though in this kind of format you inevitably only get a sketch.
Have fun!
So it seems safe to say that Jordan Peterson is essentially claiming that morality exists external to and independent from minds, a sort of moral objectivism, and that humanity has essentially picked this up over time by evolving in accordance with it.
You will end up with a weaker belief in moral objectivism, yes. But I don't think you end up with "relativism" in the sense in which it is typically used: To refer to the belief that all cultural mores and taboos are equally true (or false), or equally useful. Rationalists usually come to believe the exact opposite of that.
Keep in mind that recorded human society has been around for only a few thousand years, which on an evolutionary timescale is almost nothing. But Peterson seems to be using the observation that we have a lot of similar stories that show up across the centuries to mean that there is some objective moral truth underlying all of it. He appears to be taking what he observes to be a relative constancy over a relatively short time-scale and inferring that that constancy has been around over geological timescales. And what I think he also might be doing is downplaying the significant differences you see in cultures over time - take the difference between Eastern and Western philosophy, for example. I'm sure Peterson could point out a lot of similarities (such as similar archetypes between the myths), but the problem is that he'd be missing the divergence that is most clear when you dig in to what each of the ancient archetypical sages actually taught.
Thank you for the thoughtful points.
I haven't heard of him stating it explicitly but I think it is fair to assume that this is at least partly true. For the moment we can agree that this is, at least, a valid hypothesis/possibility. But I would personally add that there is no need to prematurely extract a... (read more)