We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, just across the street from Washington Square Park. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.
Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.
The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.
IS JORDAN PETERSON (KINDA SORTA) RIGHT ABOUT RELIGION?
DO EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY & CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY SUGGEST THAT RELIGIONS PROVIDE "METAPHORICAL TRUTHS" THAT IMPROVE INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING & BUILD SOCIAL COHESION?
INTRODUCTION:
The title of this discussion is a bit of a misnomer since I originally wanted to call it "Are the 'Evolutionary Mystics' Right About Religion?" I wanted to use the term "evolutionary mystics" to denote a range of thinkers that over the past 20 years or so have used theories from evolutionary psychology to make the argument that religious cognition has proven to be adaptive in human evolution, and that religious beliefs -- while often factually incorrect -- often point to important "psychological truths" that we can't easily dismiss if we want to promote human happiness & maintain social cohesion. This pragmatic stance - what Daniel Dennett has called "belief in belief" - is often combined with agnosticism on the existence of god or an afterlife, and with some thinkers it strays over into a pantheistic view of nature and a teleological view of evolution, thus I thought "evolutionary mystics" was the most appropriate term.
However, I decided that "evolutionary mystics" was too confusing because it was my own invention, and unfortunately there's no other term for this loose group of thinkers -- at least not yet. So, for the sake of clarity, I somewhat reluctantly decided to re-title this discussion, "Is Jordan Peterson (Kinda Sorta) Right About Religion?" I say I did this reluctantly because I'm not at all sure that Jordan Peterson is the most articulate & knowledgeable advocate of this (seemingly) new approach to understanding religion. However, he is certainly the best known of the bunch and his claims have received a lot of scrutiny lately, so I figured I'd largely -- although not exclusively -- base our discussion around his ideas about religion.
For those who aren't aware, Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist & professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. For most of his career, he worked in relative obscurity, dividing his time between treating patients, teaching college students, and publishing research articles. His magnum opus was his 1999 book Maps of Meaning. It took him 13 years to complete, and describes a comprehensive theory about how people construct meaning, form beliefs, and make narratives. He incorporated ideas from various fields including religious & literary studies, as well as philosophy & psychology, to try to develop a modern scientific understanding of how the human mind functions. He reportedly hoped that an "analysis of the world's religious ideas might allow us to describe our essential morality and eventually develop a universal system of morality." He hoped this could help humanity prevent a recurrence of authoritarianism & atrocities like those committed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. He argues these regimes were enabled by outbreaks of moral nihilism in the wake of what Nietzsche called "the death of God." His book achieved some modest recognition in Canada when it was made into a 13-part TV series by TVOntario in 2004.
In January of 2017, many members of the skeptic & atheist communities were introduced to Jordan Peterson when he appeared on Sam Harris's podcast. They proceeded to irk most of their fans by debating in circles for 2 hours about the nature of "truth". As they began to talk about religion and whether religious claims were true or not, Sam insisted that truth was a matter of empirically verifiable facts, whereas Jordan preferred a much more mystical-sounding definition of truth. Since Peterson is a devotee of the early 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, he drew upon Jung's conception of "psychological truth" -- i.e. statements that relate to constructs & processes in the human mind rather than in the external world -- and combined it with the argument from evolutionary psychology that certain beliefs might be adaptive even if they aren't literally true, and should thus be considered "metaphorically true". Harris wasn't willing to accept this, so their discussion essentially went nowhere... However, several months later in March of 2017, Jordan Peterson reappeared on Sam Harris's podcast. They tabled their previous disagreement over the nature of "truth" and moved onto a wide-ranging discussion of Jungian archetypes, mythology, and the perennial human search for meaning. If you're interested, you can find these podcasts at Sam Harris's website: https://samharris.org/podcasts/what-is-true/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/meaning-and-chaos/
Over the next couple years, Jordan Peterson had similar debates about religion with several other prominent members of the skeptic & atheist communities, such as Michael Shermer, Matt Dillahunty & Susan Blackmore. Unfortunately, these intellectual exchanges were overshadowed by Jordan Peterson's involvement in a variety of public controversies, most notably opposing Canada's Bill C-16 which added "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act. While promoting his new self-help book 12 Rules for Life, he touted traditional gender roles and peppered his relationship advice to young men with some complaints about radical feminism that often resembled "men's rights" talking points. Like many conservative pundits, he also complained about campus activists infringing free speech, and repeatedly argued that academia was overrun with "postmodern neo-Marxists”. This thrilled many conservatives & gained him a wide following among young men frustrated with "political correctness", but it angered a lot of left-leaning people who preceded to condemn Jordan Peterson as a dangerous “Alt-Right" cult leader.
In addition to wading into political controversies, Peterson made some odd claims about how human dominance hierarchies are analogous to aggression in lobsters, expressed skepticism about anthropogenic climate change, and touted the benefits of an all-meat "carnivore diet", all of which led even some people who didn’t find him politically offensive to dismiss him as a crackpot. (The recent revelation that he had become seriously depressed in the fall of 2019 & flew to Russia in January to get treated for an addiction to benzodiazepines probably didn't help his credibility, although his predicament is somewhat understandable considering this came in the wake of his wife's kidney cancer diagnosis. Luckily, Peterson's wife is now in remission and he's successfully detoxed and on the mend.)
The result of all of this is that many people have written off everything that Jordan Peterson has said about religion as the rantings of a "right-wing crank" without realizing these ideas aren't something he just came up with on his own. Several of his major ideas about the social utility of religion date back over a century to psychologists like William James & Carl Jung, and his evolutionary psychology arguments have been promoted over the last couple decades by several lesser known but more respected academics & thinkers who share almost none of Peterson's controversial political views or eccentricities. Those who've made a similar cases for the adaptive value of religion include the biologist David Sloan Wilson in his book Darwin's Cathedral (1999), the anthropologists Pascal Boyer & Scott Atran in their respective books Religion Explained (2001) and In Gods We Trust (2002), the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), and the writers Nicholas Wade, Robert Wright & Karen Armstrong in their respective books The Faith Instinct, The Evolution of God and The Case for God (all 2009). As regular listeners of Sam Harris's podcast will know, the biologist Bret Weinstein and his brother - the physicist Eric Weinstein - have also made similar arguments for why religious belief may be adaptive & socially beneficial, at least in the right context.
In this discussion, I'd like to avoid discussing Jordan Peterson's political views (whether you agree or disagree with them) or his personal life, and instead we'll discuss his ideas about religion in the broader context of the theories being developed & promoted by these other thinkers I mentioned above...
In the 1st part of our discussion, we'll look at some of the basic arguments in evolutionary psychology about whether or not some basic aspects of what we might call "religious" or "spiritual" cognition are adaptive, i.e. they were favored by natural selection because they provided some benefit to either individual humans or groups of humans in our distant past.
In the 2nd part of our discussion, we'll look at the debates in cultural anthropology & the sociology of religion over the "cultural evolution" (or perhaps the "gene-culture coevolution") of religious ideas and how this has enabled humans to form progressively larger social units, moving from tribal hunter-gatherer bands with about a hundred members to agrarian kingdoms with thousands of subjects to industrialized nation-states with millions of citizens.
In the 3rd part of our discussion, we'll look at Jordan Peterson's arguments about how religious narratives are part of our culture's "metaphorical substrate" and repositories of valuable life lessons conveyed through "archetypes" and the "hero's journey". Peterson's Jungian take on religious narratives is a bit unusual among scholars today, but we'll see how this relates to some new theories in multidisciplinary fields like "cognitive poetics" and "Darwinian literary studies" that use cognitive linguistics & evolutionary psychology to try to understand the effects of literature on the minds of readers.
In the 4th & final part of our discussion, we'll look at Jordan Peterson's argument that most self-identified "atheists" in the modern West are actually closet theists & culturally Christian or "Judeo-Christian", since a "true atheist" by his reckoning would inevitably become a moral nihilist. He also attributes cultural Christianity to people who espouse various ideals like individualism & truth-seeking, since he sees these values as having Christian roots. When Peterson is debating an atheist, his tactic of telling them what he thinks they "really believe" often comes off as a crude sort of "mind-reading" and an ad hominem attack on their motives. However, we'll see how it also connects with more serious debates in the the psychology of religion about "implicit beliefs" and "revealed preferences" and in sociology of religion about the "rise of the Nones" (the religiously unaffiliated) and whether this means that Western nations can or cannot still be regarded as "culturally Christian" and what that might mean.
RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:
The 1st part of this meetup deals with evolutionary psychology. Back in February of 2017, we had a meetup entitled "Evolutionary Psychology and Its Skeptics". The skeptic community is split over evo-psych, with some high profile skeptics like Steven Pinker & Jerry Coyne arguing for its utility while other skeptics, usually polticially left-leaning ones like Rebecca Watson & PZ Myers, tend to dismiss most evo-psych theories as a mask for right-wing ideology like gender essentialism. Massimo Pigliucci's critique was one of the most detailed - he said that "behavioral ecology" allows us to make relatively reliable inferences about the evolutionary purpose of behaviors that occur in multiple species of animals, but "evolutionary psychology" often deals with behaviors that are unique to humans. In cases of "cultural universals" observed in many unconnected cultures around the world, an evolutionary purpose is still plausible. But when we move to behaviors unique to certain cultures, it's very hard to untangle nature from nurture, and it's more likely that local variations are caused by more recent types of cultural evolution. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/237590334/
The evolutionary psychology explanations of religion often hinge on the controversial theory of "group selection". In August of 2017, we had a meetup entitled "From Group Selection to 'Evolutionary Economics'", and in Part 1, we discussed what biologists have discovered about the adaptive value of altruistic behavior and how this ties into the debate over group selection. In general, most biologists think the genetic basis of altruistic behavior is probably limited to "kin selection" and "reciprocal altruism" in small groups where reciprocity can be closely monitored & rewarded, and they don't think the genetic selection of altruism could scale up to the level of large groups. Thus, to the extent that we see humans practicing altruism to benefit distant non-related members of large human societies, most biologists believe this must be the result of cultural evolution bootstrapping off our more limited genetic predispositions towards kin altruism & reciprocal altruism. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/242036681/
The 2nd section of this meetup deals with cultural evolution, and we had 2 meetups that dealt with this in 2017, specifically the cultural factors that have led to a long-term decline in violence and the cultural evolution of monogamy & romantic love...
In May of 2017, we had a meetup entitled "The Historical Study of Violence" and in Part 1 we discussed Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angles of Our Nature" and his argument that human violence has declined steadily over the past 250 years or so due to 5 major factors: (1) the rise of the nation-state with its "monopoly of violence", (2) commerce increasing the possibility of positive-sum interactions, (3) increasing rights for women, (4) increasingly cosmopolitan mass culture that unites people, and (5) increasingly rationalism which sweeps away old prejudices. Steven Pinker's thesis is heavily based on the beneficial aspects of the Enlightenment, and this partly contradicts Jordan Peterson's thesis that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the source of Western morality. If this was true, one would expect that violence in the West would've begun to decline with the rise of Christianity in late antiquity. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/239822337/
In July of 2017, we had a meetup entitled "Monogamy or Polyamory - What Is More Natural for Humans?" In Part 4, we looked at the cultural evolution of monogamy. Scholars have debated whether hunter-gatherers are monogamous or polyamorous, but most are that "polygyny" - elite males with multiple wives - begins with the wealth accumulation & inequality fostered by settled agriculture. In the West, monogamy appears to have emerged first among the ancient Greeks & Romans, and some scholars think it may have made their societies more egalitarian by preventing elite males from sexually monopolizing many women which meant that most men regardless of class could find a wife. Monogamy was later adopted by early Christians, and Christianity has been mostly responsible for its spread since then. We also discussed how some historians believe that medieval Christians invented the idea of "romantic love", although in the medieval context of "courtly love" it was detached from the arranged marriages that characterized elite monogamy. Instead, poets & knights would extol the beauty of married noblewomen but (ideally) love them from afar. Only once arranged marriages declined in the 19th century did the ideal of "marrying for love" become common. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/240665239/
The 3rd section of this meetup deals with the question of whether or not "cognitive poetics" and "darwinian literary studies" have found evidence that justifies the notion of Jungian "archetypes". In January of 2018, we had a meetup entitled "The 'Two Cultures' Debate: Science & The Humanities" and in Parts 3 & 4 we discussed "cognitive poetics" - i.e. the study of literature's effect on the human mind, as well as "Darwinian literary studies" - i.e. the study of narratives from the perspective of their adaptive value in human evolution. Both are new multidisciplinary fields & somewhat controversial. At its most conservative, cognitive poetics merely asserts that readers use "theory of mind" to imagine themselves in the place of characters. However, some cognitive poetics studies try to assess literature's effect on the brain with fMRI scans, but the conclusions they've drawn have been criticized as far too speculative. Darwinian literary studies is an even more controversial field, because it goes beyond analyzing the brain activity from reading literature and theorizes about what genes are involved & what selective pressures might have shaped the relevant aspects of human cognition in prehistoric times. Since we don't yet have a clear understanding of the genetic basis of cognition, the hypotheses of Darwinian literary studies are very hard to test, and they're often accused of being intriguing but unverifiable "just-so stories". https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/245952541/
