God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values … God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time …
God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.
—Jordan Peterson, during his June 2018 debate with Sam Harris.
When you understand the level of evil in the world, you understand that (following the second law of thermodynamics) the only equal but opposite force to that must be God …
Even God as a concept becomes a real thing. If you have a thousand people and they believe in God … and that makes them act righteously, even as a concept God becomes a real force.
Whatever disagreements they might have, what Peterson and Tate are both expressing in the above quotes is a false faith, a bluff. They may believe in God but find that their faith is inchoate so far as their ability to articulate it. That’s a question we cannot judge—what they do articulate, however, is technically speaking an idol.
The West’s second religiosity
To worship an “imaginative and collective representation” of consciousness “across time,” that is, within our heads and within time, rather than beyond these, is technically idolatry.
To worship a force that is opposite but equal to evil, and a concept whose reality consists in affecting behaviour, is no different.
Given the prominence of Tate, I should add—although it isn’t the focus of this essay—that whether or not he is guilty of the crimes for which he stands accused—he obviously promoted moral rot through gambling and a webcam business. This track record remains significant insofar as his legions of fans have yet to hear him explicitly repent, so far as I know (a lack of repentance which may be related to his tendency to argue for God’s existence as a socially useful “operating system” rather than as a genuine transcendent source of moral truth).
It is a technical matter of religiosity, to my mind, that sin should be repented from publicly if sin was promoted publicly. During his interview with Candace Owens, the two agreed that one should not regret past mistakes. Fair enough. But a mother who had a child with a man who was not her husband need not regret the life of that child to repent of the adultery.
Tate’s un-repentance for pushing moral corruption may well go hand in hand with his tendency to think about God as a social operating system.
Worshipping utility?
We have here two prominent, globally-known spokesmen for what we might call the anti-woke, sociologically right-wing side of things. That they invoke personal and social utility to justify belief in God, rather than classical theistic formulations, at once more robust and more straightforward, strongly suggests that we are dealing with what the historian Oswald Spengler called “second religiosity” (or “second religiousness”) in his Decline of the West. What this term means is that earlier, earnestly-held religious beliefs are rehashed largely as a cultural stance against declining social conditions and the establishment.
I should add that I don’t agree with the details of Spengler’s narrative of historical development and decline, but this particular concept is very helpful in understanding where we are today.
In fairness, Spengler tends to describe second religiosity as more of a dreamy, soft-headed desire to believe, a giving up on proofs and precision. On the face of it, this sounds more like New Ageism than the masculine affectation of a Tate would allow.
Ultimately, however, the Peterson-Tate line fits Spengler’s model, not only in relinquishing the classical tradition’s philosophical lucidity, but also in being a late, pseudo-morph that comes across as embarrassed at the older, simpler idea of God and feels the need to rest it instead on empiricist, psycho-social grounds.
Politicizing religion?
It isn’t the social and political content that Peterson wants to give religious faith that’s the problem.
In fact, I would go quite far in this direction and point out that the Bible often refers to nations as units of spiritual edification; communities of salvation.
It isn’t wrong for people to articulate universal principles, including the worship of God, in the context of what some would refer to as nationalism. Furthermore, historically, reactions against treacherous, exploitative political elites have tended to take on some kind of a charismatic, spiritual character; upheaval against a system that is found to hate its own core demographic is often marked by the character of religious revival, as the historian Arnold Toynbee points out (see “Revolt of the Core”). Today’s truckers and farmers demonstrating against the policies that cause their purchasing power to plummet throughout the West are an example.
Philosophically speaking, the universal must always be expressed in a particular. You don’t get to have beauty in the abstract. A transcendent quality like beauty requires that the beautiful racing horse be fully a horse, the beautiful sunset fully a sunset.
If a universal good is pursued abstractly (rather than treating particular wholes and their harmony as its proper manifestation), then this pursuit damages life. Concepts of unity and justice turn into terrible experiments of totalitarian homogenization and monocultural globalism.
Spiritual principles and religious faith must be pursued in terms of existing local cultural forms and identities. Religious traditionalists will often deny this and devalue politics, culture, local identity as altogether secular, inferior forms of human endeavour.
The mistake of many religious traditionalists towards excessive abstraction mirrors the mistake of the second religiosity. One denies particularity from above, saying that politics and identity don’t matter; the other from below, making it all about politics.
A culture, a community, a nation, no less than a person or household, is a little archetype, a very specific name for God. Nothing exists but that God is saying something through it. If the second religiosity is to give way and the rebellion of the West’s “internal proletarian” is to constitute itself as a “church” (to use Toynbee’s idiosyncratic terms), it must ultimately reject its own empire. It would need to be anti-Caesarian (the political correlate of second religiousness, per Spengler), and instead reach for a new communitarianism of the sort effected by the Christian revolution when it transmogrified the Roman slave-owning villa into a medieval village.
