The last time I reviewed a book by Jordan Peterson, a cleverly edited excerpt of my negative opinion (I described it as “bonkers”) appeared on the cover of the paperback edition, giving readers the misleading impression that I had endorsed it. So this time I shall have to be clear. The new book is unreadable. Repetitive, rambling, hectoring, and mad, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (Portfolio, 2024) repels the reader’s attention at the level of the page, the paragraph, and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word.
Peterson has won innumerable fans with the tough self-help principles of the bestselling 12 Rules for Life and his courageous opposition to the excesses of progressive politics. He is—and I suppose I risk seeing these words quoted back to me on the cover of his next book—a gifted popularizer of evolutionary psychology and a polemicist of near genius. But in recent years his thought has taken on an unignorably zany complexion. In a much-watched recent debate, he sought to persuade the scientist Richard Dawkins of the “biological reality” of dragons.
Now comes this sprawling allegorical study of the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus. Surely even Peterson’s most devoted fans are struggling to keep up at this point. I can’t imagine many of them will manage to follow their prophet—who cuts a more raddled and wild-eyed figure with every passing chapter—through this arid and bewildering desert of prose.
We Who Wrestle with God is not a conventional work of biblical exegesis. Its author is almost entirely uninterested in historical or theological interpretation. It is unclear whether he believes in God. He certainly does not believe in rational argument. Peterson’s thesis, familiar from previous books, is that the biblical narratives contain certain significant motifs or characters that encode eternal truths about the structure and meaning of existence. These “archetypes” recur throughout the most influential stories in Western culture. For instance, the archetype of the intellectually arrogant adversary represented by the biblical Cain is manifested in the figures of Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Faust, as well as, less exaltedly, “Felonious Gru, of Despicable Me fame,” Jafar from the Disney film Aladdin, and “Syndrome in The Incredibles.”
The obvious problem is that if you convince yourself that every animated children’s film is rich with ancient allegorical meanings, it induces a kind of symbological paranoia. Potential allegories lurk behind every tree and lamppost, waiting to be interpreted. Like the madman who glimpses messages from the CIA in the clouds, Peterson sees revelations about “the intrinsic nature of being” in the most banal and improbable places.
This is biblical scholarship as conspiracy theory. Everything is connected. Nothing happens by chance. The snitch in the Harry Potter game Quidditch is “a manifestation of the spirit Mercurius … an emissary of the dreamworld of the unconscious—a psychopomp who flits on the border between the human and the divine.” What if it’s just a made-up magic ball game, you want to ask. But the Bible means whatever Peterson decides he wants it to mean. And because he employs no interpretative system other than his whim, the reader is soon overtaken with apathy. Your job is not to be persuaded or argued with, but just to sit still and be instructed in the specious art of Petersonian symbology: “Shoes signify class, occupation, purpose, role and destiny,” “smoke is essence, gist or spirit,” the rainbow “represents the ideally subdued community, which is the integration of the diversity of those who compose it.”
This is biblical scholarship as conspiracy theory. Everything is connected. Nothing happens by chance.
Much of this, I suppose, is inoffensively spurious. A more civilized variant of the hippy-dippy nonsense that is so popular in our increasingly superstitious culture, with its tarot readers and astrology addicts. But the really nuts idea, which Peterson pushes more forcefully in this book than ever before, is that archetypes can be said in some way to exist. They may even be “more real than the facts,” he suggests. “Ideas are living spirits … extant both in the collective and in the individual psyche.” This is the explanation of the stuff about the “biological reality” of the dragon.
Because Peterson’s ideas about the biological reality of dragons have no basis in reality, he attempts to dignify them with the superficial impression of rigor by employing a pseudo-philosophical jargon that is wearyingly heavy on abstract nouns. “Adam has just been confirmed in his role as describer and delineator of the world; he is the locus of the differentiated consciousness upon which being and becoming themselves somehow mysteriously depend,” runs a characteristically rebarbative sentence. “The entity residing in or characterizing the ultimate up can detect the quality of a sacrifice in the upward rising smoke,” runs another.
If these seem entertaining taken out of context, imagine getting to the end of one sentence like that and having to read another just as bad. And then another. And another. And so on for more than five hundred pages. The reader’s patience is further tested by Peterson’s habit of lurching from the spurious to the pedantic. One minute he’s loftily discussing the intrinsic nature of being, the next he is informing you that the archetype of the “Luciferian/Babylonian nightmare” recurs “most explicitly and famously in The Terminator series, which includes The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015), [and] Terminator: Dark Fate (2019).” By this point you have the strong impression that the book’s editor has simply given up and gone home.
If We Who Wrestle with God offers the reader any relief at all, it derives from the inadvertent comedy of Peterson’s attempts to combine humorless biblical analysis, pop culture fandom, and conservative polemic in the space of a single misbegotten sentence. Internet pornography, we are told, “has turned young men into online sex addicts pathetically mating with Tinkerbell, the porn fairy.” (Peterson’s campaign against porn stars, “the modern whores of Babylon” vaunting their “delectable but untouchable succubus delights,” is a diverting subtheme of the book.)
The hours do not exactly fly by in Peterson’s company. He will just not go easy on the Bible. Peterson wrestles and batters each clause until he’s pounded every possible allegorical meaning out of it, like he’s in the WWE of biblical hermeneutics. Discussing the symbolism of Moses’ staff, Peterson suggests it represents “the serpent/tree dynamic that is equivalent to the burning bush (transformation in the midst of living order)” and “a continuation of the extremely ancient and foundational idea of the cosmic center.”
After pausing for a discussion of the “importance of the pole” to stories that the native Arunta tribe of Australia tell about “the divine being Numbakulla,” we plunge laboriously on to learn that Moses’ staff represents not only “the holy mountain that unites heaven and earth” but also “the tree [that] ancient shamans climbed in their ritual attempts to attain the wisdom of the Gods.” Plus, it might be “the beanstalk of Jack and the Beanstalk” or even “the stabilizing effect of the spirit of the ancients on what could all-too rapidly become the demented consensus of the present.”
At this point, the reader is starting to wonder whether it might not just be quicker to list all the things Moses’s staff doesn’t represent. No such luck. Peterson finishes this allegorical excursion with the dispiriting information that “we will return to the serpent/staff motif later.”
Peterson’s campaign against porn stars, “the modern whores of Babylon” vaunting their “delectable but untouchable succubus delights,” is a diverting subtheme of the book.
Progress is further slowed by his habit of pausing to quote from multiple translations of the Bible, weighing up their relative merits. Days after I finished the book I was still shuddering at the memory of a long discussion of which English word might be best for a Hebrew term denoting the pleasing smell of cooked animal fat. Peterson quotes from the King James Version, the Literal Standard Version, the New International Version, and the Amplified Bible. If all this were in the service of serious scholarship, it might be rewarding. But there is something dispiriting about spending multiple paragraphs agonizing conscientiously over different translations, only to be breezily informed a few pages later that Jiminy Cricket is the archetype of Jesus Christ.
And even when I reached the end I couldn’t relax. I recalled that in an earlier chapter Peterson had intimated darkly that this book is only the first in a series. The stories of Job and Christ, he hints, “will be dealt with exhaustively in a forthcoming work.” Oh God. Please not exhaustively. I can’t take it.
The paradoxical effect of reading We Who Wrestle with God is to win you round to Peterson’s profoundly pessimistic worldview. “Who among us has not or will not be tempted to scream in frustration, rage and despair at the sky; to curse fate itself for the dreadful burden existence has placed on us?” he asks. Well, I have. That’s pretty much exactly how I felt reading this book.