Jordan Peterson's Return to Cambridge Is a Huge Deal

Why Feed a Baby Who Is Crying If the Sun Will Envelop the Earth in Four Billion Year' Time?

Jordan Peterson is unlike any other luminary alive today. He has a captivating, prophet-like presence, and a truly rare power of articulation. With astounding knowledge and sophistication, he delves deep into matters concerning the human experience and, uniquely to him, is able to convey his conclusions and thoughts in a manner that both academics and laymen can grasp. Peterson’s quality of humility, candid respect for working men, and utter lack of condescension is strongly reminiscent of George Orwell, and, in my mind, is what sets him apart from many fellow academicians. 

His entrance to the stage at the University of Cambridge on November 24th infused the packed hall with intense anticipation. The focused audience sat silently, watching the noted academic’s every move and hanging by his every word. It was a level of concentration and attention unlike any I have ever witnessed, and when he paused in contemplation, standing silent on the stage for a good few seconds, the audience froze. Not the faintest, remotest sound could be heard as they awaited Peterson’s highly anticipated Cambridge oratory.

Exuding calm confidence, the famous clinical psychologist conveyed his deep gratitude to his Cambridge hosts for their invitation and expressed his awe at the beauty and richness of the 800-year institution. The captivating talk that followed illustrated Peterson’s tour de force intellectual prowess and his ability to make us freshly examine the ordinary and the (seemingly) simple. Why does music have such a transformative effect on us? Why are we filled with awe when we gaze at the night sky or behold the sight of great architectural beauty? Why do we derive pleasure from spending time with a loved one? Why are children afraid of the dark? To Peterson, every action, gesture, sight, or sound is telling of human behaviour and the cosmos. It is no wonder his replies to questions from the audience can easily run for 15 minutes. 

One such question directed at Peterson during his Cambridge talk concerned the essence of meaning, and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, his reply spoke of the actual value we assign to everyday tasks: “Why feed a baby who is crying if the sun will envelop the earth in four billion years time?” he asked the intrigued audience. After all, “if we are all doomed to ashes and decay, then why bother?” His question triggered laughter from the audience to which he quickly responded with a reassuring “that laughter, that’s a sign of wisdom — you know that's preposterous. But why?” 

This is a real existential question that some of Peterson’s clients have wrestled with. Indeed, individuals who have picked a “time frame of evaluation” often arrive at the feeling that their present efforts seem futile and people’s immediate emotional, and often physical suffering, has made them lose sight of the worth in their everyday actions. To them, all tasks and actions are futile and unworthy of the slightest effort. To Peterson, however, they are very much mistaken: 

“If you are adopting a time frame that makes what you are doing appear trivial, the problem isn't necessarily what you are doing, the problem is that your mind has picked a timeframe inappropriate for the task. Instead, identify where meaning glimmers in your life and pursue that. Where can meaning be found? It can be found in the everyday activities and interactions from which we derive pleasure. You know what it’s like, you get engaged in something, a deep conversation, a piece of music, a piece of art, something you love doing, someone you love being with, you get engaged in that and you lose your sense of temporality. When this happens you don't think ‘I wish I picked a timeframe that made everything irrelevant’, you think, ‘hey, I could do that some more, like, how about all the time?’ and that's a good goal.”

This enjoyment, Peterson emphasised “literally,” is a “profound neurophysiological signal that you are in the right place at the right time.”It is accompanied by “a sense of deep wellbeing — a literal antidote to suffering.” According to the academic, the objective when treating clients suffering from such ills was not to “make them happy” but to help them find something meaningful that would “keep them going,” and keep them from thinking homicidal and genocidal thoughts. “Meaning,” concluded Peterson, is “the antidote to suffering.” 

You Don’t See Objects and Infer Meaning, You See Meaning and Infer Objects 

The subject of Peterson’s Cambridge talk was perception; a topic he “has attempted to wrestle with” for a long time. “How much do we bring to the act of perception, imagination and thought,” he asked the audience. “How much is revealed to us by what we perceive?” We thought we understood such queries well enough to make practical progress after the Second World War, but “there were doubts that bedevilled people operating in all sorts of disciplines that became increasingly explicit.”

For Peterson, the most remarkable revelation of this problem occurred in the world of artificial intelligence. He referred to several Russian researchers, highlighting the work of Eugene Sokolov who discovered the ‘orienting reflex’ phenomenon, the electrophysiological response to error detection.

“If you are walking down the road, and there is a loud noise behind you, perhaps a car has jumped a curb, you will stop and turn and orient towards the place in the space and time continuum where your stereo vision has localised the noise, and you do that really without thinking, I would say this is an act that occurs outside the domain of free will. [The reason you do that is because] you might die if something unexpected happened, something that's outside your framework of expectation. [Your presentation of the world is rather shallow and low resolution], it is good enough to get you where you want to go most of the time, but sometimes it is error-ridden enough that the error will kill you. You are equipped with instinctual mechanisms that orient you towards the source of the revelation of your ignorance.”

Certainly, the idea of humans “having an instinct that points them to the source of their ignorance” is baffling on a neurophysiological, theological, and philosophic level. What Sokolov outlined was the “underlying, neurophysiological mechanisms that made this orienting reflex possible” — a discovery that Peterson believes should have earned Sokolov a Nobel prize. 

Peterson went on to show how the quest for artificial intelligence to imitate human behaviour (behaviour that Peterson himself noted took evolution billions of years to refine) has revealed just how complex and evolved our actions and instincts are. Partly stemming from Sokolov's work came the idea that we build models of the world and that’s how we operate in the world. However, according to Peterson, such ideas are “wrong” — a fact demonstrated by the fact that we don’t have general-purpose robots. 

“They cannot model the whole world, so they build a toy environment that the machine can learn. What was discovered is that even a simple environment made of pyramids and cones posed serious problems such as varying lighting. Is the pyramid in the morning the same as the pyramid in midday, for example? What about five minutes past midday or three seconds past midday? How much illumination change is necessary before the object is no longer the same object?”

To Peterson, these are dilemmas that have bedevilled AI researchers for a long time. The conclusive bottom line is that “there is an endless number of things you can do with a single image of anything,” and this, in itself, puts into question the very possibility of world perception. This problem also applies to text where an individual’s inability to “perceive something even simple, in some canonical manner” renders it impossible to derive a single canonical interpretation of a given text. The sentence ‘in the beginning’, for example, can be interpreted in an endless number of ways and, in this sense, “endless is a real problem” because to ‘perceive’ something there has to be an end.    

Peterson demonstrated this challenge of categorisation with the seemingly simple task of arranging a book library:

“You might think that there is not an infinite way to arrange the books but then age, thickness, density and colour come into play. How about the thickness of paper? How about the thickness of the spot exactly half an inch below the 35th page in the third chapter? You could say this is a stupid way to organise your books, but how do you know it is stupid?”

Still, artificial intelligence research has increased our understanding of how we perceive the world: “We think object, thought, motor response” explained Peterson, using the bottle of water in his hand to demonstrate the sequence of spotting the water, wanting the drink, and acting upon the need by grabbing the bottle. But, rather shockingly, it is in fact the object itself that announces its utility in the perception.

“When you see a door you will go through it,” he explained. “It’s not that you think door means walk through, it is rather that door is a ‘walk through place’. You don’t see objects and infer meaning, you see meaning and infer objects.”

Perception has also baffled postmodernists whose claims Peterson was quick to dismiss, terming postmodernists’ conclusion that “some pathological socially constructed process is at the basis of the act of perception and categorisation itself” as cynical beyond belief and “corrosive beyond our capacity to deal with it.” 

“The first claim,” he said, “[is that] there is no canonical interpretation that's self-evident — the idea that there is a multiplicity of potential interpretations is valid. What isn’t true is the idea that we use power and domination to solve that problem. What that claim means is that you solve the problem of categorisation by imposing your will-to-power on the world in some winner-take-all game of oppression — a cynical view of the mechanism that makes habitable order out of chaos.”

Why Jordan Peterson’s Return to Cambridge Is a Huge Deal 

Roughly coinciding with the news of controversial Cambridge head Stephen J. Toope’s resignation, Peterson’s return to the university marks a pivotal victory for free speech within academia and society at large.

In early 2019, a fellowship offer extended to Peterson by the university was abruptly rescinded, not due to the noted academic's actions or words, but because a photograph had emerged of him standing next to a fan whose tee-shirt carried an ‘Islamophobic message’. The university’s action at the time caused great uproar, reverberating well beyond the realms of academia and bringing to light the extent to which Wokeism, a force so potent that even long-established institutions such as Eton and Cambridge cannot withstand its assault, has invaded our culture.

Introducing Peterson, Cambridge’s Dr James Orr reiterated the university’s commitment to free speech and open debate, heralding the institution’s readiness to put this dark episode to rest. A full apology was extended to Jordan Peterson during the post-lecture ceremony as he was presented with a first edition Darwin publication and a generous joint of red meat. Humour aside, the university should be congratulated for righting the wrong that has tarnished its reputation as a bastion of free enquiry and open debate. 

Unlike the academics who bowed to pressure and shunned Peterson, the organisers of the 2021 talk, all of whom fought for his return, seem to appreciate the magnitude of the intellectual giant before whom they stand.

Hannah is a London based journalist covering culture and current affairs. She writes about photography, film and TV for outlets in the UK and US, and covers current affairs with particular interest in the Jewish world. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and photographer. Her films were screened in festivals worldwide and parts of her documentary about Holocaust survivor Leon Greenman were screened on the BBC.