Some thoughts on Jordan Peterson

My favourite Anglican theologian, Alastair Roberts, has written in some detail on Jordan Peterson, and in order to get to grips with his thought from a Christian perspective I recommend reading this post of his at least. For the benefit of my own readers--and, as often on this blog, to clarify my own thinking--I want to take a different approach, and say something reasonably brief on why Catholics should welcome, in part, and disagree, in part, with the Peterson phenomenon.

For it is indeed, a phenomenon. Sometimes these things are shortlived but Peterson is, at least by social media standards, an intellectual heavyweight, which I think will give him greater staying power. In any case, he is influencing a lot of people, and I think that over the next decade we will increasingly encounter young people, particularly men, who have been influenced by him. It's really that which motivates me to write. So what is it all about?

The Psychology of Traditionalism

Ordinations for the Fraternity of St Peter in Wigratzbad in 2009

Guide to this series:

The Psychology of the Rigid Personality

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

The Psychology of Ecclesiastical Incompetence

The Psychology of Traditionalism

Before my series of posts about Norman Dixon's Psychology of Military Incompetence, I'd been writing about Mgr Basil Loftus, who exemplifies the attitude that respect for rules indicates a conformist, 'anal', weak-ego individual. This inference enables him, and many others, to conclude that theological and liturgical conservatism and traditionalism manifests a kind of 'rigidity' incompatible with pastoral effectiveness.

I have shown what is wrong with this argument in general terms. It is a truism that people with weak egos and an unhealthy fear of failure will be risk-averse, and will seek the approval of their peers and superiors by conforming. In the post-conciliar situation, however, this approval is not forthcoming to conservatives and traditionalists in mainstream Catholic or non-Catholic institutions: it is, rather, given to those who toe the liberal line. It is rather remarkable that Loftus and his like have not noticed this, but as I have observed that classical presentations of the psychological theory they draw from, including Norman Dixon's, are prone to confuse the risk-taking non-conformism of a person with a strong ego and moral courage, with the liberal violation of traditional norms, and with the norm-violation of the merely self-indulgent.

The psychology of Ecclesiastical Incompetence

Bishop Mark Jabale at the LMS Annual Requiem in Westminster Cathedral

Guide to this series:

The Psychology of the Rigid Personality

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

The Psychology of Ecclesiastical Incompetence

The Psychology of Traditionalism

The reason I've been writing about Norman Dixon's theory of 'rigid' personalities and military incompetence, is that the Church has certain interesting parallels with the military. The Church is hierarchical and authoritarian; the Church's training institutions are places where people can enjoy the predictability of institutional life (particularly in religious communities) and the rewards of conformism. It is inevitable, therefore, that the Church, like the army, will attract conformists, and that good superiors in both cases must be on the look-out for those whose conformity to the necessary discipline of the institution hides a debilitating lack of self-confidence. Priests lacking in self-confidence will be useless in the field, so if they don't gain the necessary maturity they must be weeded out. Things will go very wrong if, on the other hand, the conformists gain the upper hand. In that scenario it is the self-confident ones who will be weeded out, and pastoral effectiveness will suffer across the board.

The tensions just described are built into the nature of things, and so the psychology of the use of authority in the Church, and especially in seminaries, could remain constant, in certain ways, through the Vatican II revolution. Institutions which had been taken over by conformists under the Old Regime could change their theology without, necessarily, changing their psychological dynamic, for the New Regime. Liberals might think that their 'let-it-all-hang-out' ideology had banished the authoritarianism/ conformism pattern of the past, but it didn't: it simply meant that instead of conformism meaning slavish adherence to late 19th century neo-scholasticism and the ruthless weeding out of liberals, it now meant slavish adherence to Hans Kung and his friends and the ruthless weeding out of conservatives. And indeed, since the products of such a system were priests who were conformists first, and conservatives or liberals second, a change of ideology would not even necessarily require a change of personnel.

I put forward these theoretical observations as a way to interpret certain historical patterns. Not all Catholic seminaries and communities were or are the same; nor were all the products of these institutions the same, with people bucking the trend in both good and bad ways. Nevertheless, I think few will dispute generalisations such as the following:

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

The last stand on the retreat from Kabul (Wikipedia)

Guide to this series:

The Psychology of the Rigid Personality

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

The Psychology of Ecclesiastical Incompetence

The Psychology of Traditionalism

In my last post, I described part of the theory of the 'anal personality' widely used by psychologists of the 1960s and 1970s, and to an extent both before and after. Stripped of its Freudian explanatory basis (which is a lot of outdated and indeed laughable stuff about potty-training), the theory says that people with a 'weak ego' and a fear of failure will seek the approval of superiors and peers by conformism and playing it safe. This is not so much a theory, in fact, as a statement of the obvious.

I described how this observation has been applied in a one-sided way, by looking for conformism solely in terms of strict adherence to traditional rules. If attention is fixated upon this specific model of conformism, then it can seem inconceivable that a person opposed to traditional morality or social forms could be a conformist. This is the state of mind of seminary rectors, for example, who see theological or liturgical conservatism in seminarians as prima facie evidence of a weak ego, which would in turn indicate that the seminarians in question would be incapable of the flexibility of mind necessary for pastoral work.

This also seems to be the way that Pope Francis thinks. I don't want to pick him out, however: this is a very widespread attitude among senior clerics of his generation. The situation in seminaries and religious communities is beginning to change as a result of the retirement of this generation.

The Psychology of the 'rigid' personality

Guide to this series:

The Psychology of the Rigid Personality

The Psychology of Military Incompetence

The Psychology of Ecclesiastical Incompetence

The Psychology of Traditionalism

I've been reading Norman Dixon's 1975 classic, The Psychology of Military Incompetence. It has many insights, and also many flaws; one point of interest in reading it today is to see how psychology was done in the 1970s.

I was stopped in my tracks by one passage, a quotation (p254). It is from Peter Kelvin, The Bases of Social Behaviour, 1970. He is talking about the 'authoritarian' personality. (Elipses are Dixon's.)

These tendencies reflect on a type of individual who needs to feel that his environment is highly predictable ... he needs to know where he stands; and so he fastens on to norms: he does not 'let himself go', for fear of where this might lead; he looks to authority as a guide ... [He also] relies very heavily on stereotypes in [his] perception of the social environment. Moreover, the stereotypes used by an authoritarian personality tend to be very clear-cut, and the characteristic infelixibility of this personality leads to relative inability to modify the stereotype once it has been formed.

This is a concise characterisation of what progressives, in the Church and outside it, in the 1960s and 1970s, thought was wrong with their opponents. It also seems to match what Pope Francis has in mind when he talks about 'rigid' people. We don't have to imagine that he ever read Kelvin: these ideas which were widespread when the Holy Father was at an impressionable age.