I sometimes quip about the millennials, many of whom seem adrift and aimless, confused by the chaos of life. The Canadian clinical psychologist and educator, Jordan B. Peterson, has made it his mission, and his business (and a lucrative one at that), to help such people straighten out their lives. He may well be the best followed of today’s pop intellects, a cadre that includes Ben Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake and Sam Harris. I like Dr. Peterson. I suspect that he must have been a very challenging child; my expectation is that he was precocious, sassy, enquiring, and manic. He certainly thinks….and thinks. I find him to be an engaging speaker and a sharp and voluble intellect. Most of his following seems to be millennial males, and I am glad that there is someone like Jordan Peterson to challenge these young men and redirect their attention to new perspectives.
Peterson points out that life is tragic, full of pain and sometimes malevolence. He seems to say we should embrace the suffering because that is what gives us depth. He says our goal should not be happiness. Yet he urges his listeners to make better decisions that will help them reduce their suffering and that of the people around them, and I find that contradictory. It’s a bit like the people who claim that heaven is this great place to where they really want to go when they die --- way better than life here and now --- and yet they fight to hang onto this inferior life. If heaven is so great and you are going there when you die, why resist death? Put your money where your mouth is. Likewise, if suffering is the richness of life, why try to reduce it?
I have not, so far as I know, heard Peterson explain what he means by “depth” when he says that it comes from suffering. Does he mean depth of understanding? Or, does he mean emotional intensity? Or something else?
Hindu philosophy seems to me to say that what we reap in this life is consequential to what we sowed previously. One would think that we should help people in distress because this would mean better rewards later, but No, to help relieve someone’s suffering means to be thwarting karma. If they are suffering, they are reaping it as they are supposed to, and we are not to be interfering with that. It’s a contradiction even as Peterson’s teaching seems to be.
I disagree with Dr. Peterson: we should aim for happiness. Our suffering comes from our rejection of our here and now. This rejection is characterized by emotions that don’t feel pleasant: boredom, anger, frustration, despair, and so on --- emotions that we feel when we do not like what’s going on. These are painful emotions. And they distract us from doing the wise thing. Or they sap the energy we would otherwise have for doing the loving thing. Or, as in the case of anger, they unleash energy that often is channeled into doing the harmful thing. Happiness gives us an equilibrium --- a balance or centeredness --- that allows us to focus on doing right.
I agree that someone who has never known much suffering is shallow…and yeah, I know I am not defining that. Suffering does teach us something for sure. But it is not productive to have it continue. That doesn’t mean that it is not productive to have the circumstances continue, for it is not the circumstances that produce the suffering: it is our response to the circumstances that yields the pain. The suffering can impel us to reprogram our minds to respond differently. I have long remembered what I heard Ken Keyes Jnr. say years ago when he declared something like “now being in this wheelchair would be a problem for me…..IF I wanted to walk.”
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