Maps of Meaning

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4: “The Appearance of Anomaly: Challenges to the Shared Map”

Chapter 4, Part 1 Summary: “The Paradigmatic Structure of the Known”

What happens when an anomaly threatens to disrupt the status quo in which an individual takes part? To answer this question, Peterson first considers religious and cultural traditions as walls between the individual and the forces of chaos. The individual sits in the middle of concentric circles of group identities and moral frameworks or paradigms. The further the outer walls reach, the more protected the individual is from anxiety and existential despair. Even when an individual thinks that these walls don’t exist, as in the case of religious identity, the individual continues to behave according to the moral system of that identity. Every religious and cultural identity embodies an ideal “personality” to which an individual aspires, such as Jesus in Christianity.

When humans denounce their larger cultural and religious traditions yet continue to act according to the moral norms of those traditions, they often sink into despair. Therefore, rather than denounce religious frameworks as outmoded, understanding why humans need such maps of meaning is far more useful.

Peterson writes, “Human culture has, by necessity a paradigmatic structure” (236). Cultures don’t concern themselves with objective description but with the description of cumulative “affective relevance or meaning” (236) of things. Cultures produce articles of faith, which they sometimes represent explicitly as axioms. Once a culture makes an article explicit, though, it becomes more susceptible to criticism. Humans must therefore resist the urge to critique an axiom for the sake of critique.

Within the walls of the known, paradigmatic world, the individual seems safe. The world outside the walls seems dangerous and fear-inducing. However, though the human brain clubs all threats from the outside as equally dangerous, some threats or anomalies have promising potential.

Chapter 4, Part 2 Summary: “Particular Forms of Anomaly: The Strange, the Stranger, the Strange Idea and the Revolutionary Hero”

Anomalous events threaten the known, safe world in four “mythologically inseparable” manners. These changes occur through environmental shifts independent of human activity (death, natural disasters, epidemics); through contact with a “heretofore isolated foreign culture” (244); through newfound critical skills that question belief systems; and through revolutionary heroic acts.

One may classify the first of these anomalies under the heading of “the strange.” The most horrifying and arbitrary of nature’s occurrences, these events unsettle even the most stable social systems. Societies that are flexible and adaptable, like post-war Japan, are much better at adapting to such disasters. In myths, the tyrant king often represents the inflexible society that fails to respond appropriately to disaster. The inflexible society, or tyrant king, is ineffectual at managing the dragon of chaos (the Great Mother). In such a case, the “lost son,” or the hero, must return to the kingdom, claim the power, and restore order to end the drought or the epidemic. The universal myth of the dying-and-resurrecting god is a variation of this theme. Often, a dying land regenerates with a god making a sacrifice of himself.

The coming of “the stranger” constitutes the second anomaly. Since all separate cultures have their own systems, values, and hierarchies to protect against chaos, contact with a new culture threatens the known social order. The existing culture perceives the stranger, or the strange culture, as a threat because it is not a fixture within the known social hierarchy. Free of accountability, it may commit acts that are sacrilegious to the existing order. Therefore, the cultures must negotiate their encounter thoughtfully. Nietzsche warns that the age of disintegration “mixes races indiscriminately” (250). Rather than read this as a xenophobic comment, Peterson posits that Nietzsche’s underlying meaning is that a period of chaos precedes a new society’s refiguring its social norms or an individual adopting a more integrated mindset.

As humans evolve, growing more linguistically sophisticated and more capable of abstract thinking, they become more critical of belief systems. This tendency is the third anomaly: the “strange idea.” The ability to abstract is not in itself dangerous and relates closely to the evolution of the self-aware hero. However, abstraction in practice becomes a threat when ideologues and people of facile intelligence use it with the aim of dismantling tradition to prove a point. Such abstraction leads to an undermining of faith systems (the Great Father) and to chaos. “Abstract verbal intelligence” (253) may criticize myths without understanding the implicit (unexpressed) ideas supporting them. Verbal intelligence often uses a single word or phrase to undermine not just a myth or a belief but the entire system of meaning and values on which the myth or belief rests. In turn, rational undermining of known faith systems leads to ennui or dissatisfaction, purposelessness, and anxiety. As literary narratives show, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s protagonists are stuck with inaction when facing excess knowledge, or a “cascade.” To abstract without destroying, the individual needs to evolve to the revolutionary hero.

The fourth anomaly—the “revolutionary hero”—changes society through reordering rather than destruction: “He is therefore the agent of change, upon whose actions all stability is predicated” (271). Instead of welcoming the revolutionary hero for his ability to change meaningfully, the dominant social order reviles him because he disturbs the status quo. The truth is that the hero is the “best friend” and true well-wisher of the state because he seeks to repair its ills. Shamans or tribal healers of central and north Asia are examples of such heroes, as are revolutionary thinkers and literary giants like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Freud, and Jung. Many of these thinkers underwent a period of intense psychological turmoil before formulating their ideas, thus representing the reordering that the revolutionary hero wreaks. In all narratives, the revolutionary hero faces a moment of crisis, a period of doubt, or even a death because he decides to courageously brave the unknown. He leaves the realm of the Great Father to enter that of the Great Mother, creatively reunites with her, and in consequence, reorders the Great Father.

Chapter 4, Part 3 Summary: “The Rise of Self-Reference and the Permanent Contamination of Anomaly with Death”

The greatest anomaly that humans face may be the extraordinary evolution of the human brain. As human ability for abstraction grows with each generation, humans can picture vividly all the threats to their existence, including death. In myths, this evolving self-consciousness is the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Consuming the fruit makes Adam and Eve aware of sin and death, thus marking the separation of a perfect heaven and a mortal earth. For humans, the unknown forever conflates with the fear of death. Fear generates anxiety as well as curiosity. Evolved as human consciousness has become, it has not yet solved the problem of confronting mortality.

Exploring the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve’s fall in this context, Peterson notes that Paradise is a walled garden. Thus, it protects Adam and Eve from the shadow of the unknown. Paradise reflects the positive side of uroboros or pre-cosmogonic chaos in that it is free from all oppositions, including birth and death. Childhood is the condition that mimics the mythical state of Paradise, since the young child is (perhaps) still free from the knowledge of death. Moreover, the young child is still in loving union with the mother in a state free from opposition. Growing up disrupts this paradisical state, a disruptive anomaly. The theme of knowledge itself as suffering is clear in the Buddhist story of Prince Gautama, before he evolved into the Buddha, or the enlightened one. When the protected prince first sees an old person, a sick person, and a corpse, these events shatter his state of ignorant bliss. Learning about the inevitable decay and death of humans plunges him into turmoil. Gautama must descend into self-imposed exile and anxiety before appearing as the Buddha and reordering the known universe. To overcome the fear of death, one must accept one’s own vulnerability—yet this is an extremely rare feat that few revolutionary heroes achieve. Humans typically live in a state of suffering, terrified of the unknown.

Chapter 4 Analysis

Returning to the themes of change and fear that Chapter 2 explored, this section delves further into the specific ways that momentous change presents itself. The examination of fear reinforces the motif that terror is an essential fact of human experience. Interestingly, Peterson posits that humans feel fear partly because of the limit of epistemological or knowledge systems. Since any episteme or knowledge is contingent, “limited by the temporal, economical, and technological resources we have at our disposal” (239), the object of its scrutiny always exceeds the episteme itself. The mysterious potential of any and every object or phenomenon naturally means that even the familiar has an unfamiliar face. In such a scenario, fear is a natural emotion. However, Peterson makes the subtle point here that the limits of knowledge do not imply that knowledge itself is incomplete but that knowledge “serves the ends of life, rather than existing in and of itself” (239). Peterson revisits an interesting and central concept in the context of the “unbearable present.” The present is the theater of suffering, anxiety, and pressure that marks the state of the modern individual. Visualizing an idealized future based on one’s epistemological means helps alleviate the suffering of the present. This forms the basis of everyday action. While all knowledge systems have limits, some are more expansive—the remembered values stored in myth and ritual.

The use of the word “anomaly,” derived from the Greek anomolia (irregular), to describe an unexpected event or forced, sudden change is particularly interesting here. A semantic analysis shows that anomaly is most associated with something abnormal, unusual, or irregular. Furthermore, anomaly receives frequent mention in medical and scientific literature, such as a scan showing an anomaly or astronomers observing an anomalous object in space. With its root and associations, the word anomaly carries a dire, catastrophic, and mysterious weight, which is Peterson’s intent in using it. His careful choice of this word illustrates his particular attention to semantics.

In discussing anomalies that threaten the regular order, Peterson broaches the growing proximity of the Great Mother and the Revolutionary Hero figures. This quasi-incestuous union is central to dealing with anomalies. Again, the subtext displays a simultaneous attraction and revulsion to the infinite feminine, itself torn between the Madonna/ Divine Mother and Whore/Witch/Destructor archetypes of the Western canon. In doing so, Peterson may be attempting a meta-analysis on the far-reaching nature of archetypes. Significantly, the only creative way of dealing with an anomaly—the hero’s way—involves confrontation, union, and subsequent cleavage from the Great Mother. In fact, an association grows between the hero and the Great Mother, uroboros, and the dragon of chaos, as “Figure 51: The Crucified Redeemer as Dragon of Chaos and Transformation” (280) shows. This figure depicts a serpent coiled around the sign of a cross. The hero is both the redeemer, or the Christ figure, and the dragon of chaos (because of his contact with the unknown). He also represents his own antithesis, the serpent or Satan, whom he conquers. Note how the symbology again weds contraries, a recurring motif in the book.

Later sections continue the marriage-of-contraries motif, as Peterson describes the hero who voluntarily journeys into the dark unknown for the sake of a culture and his people as a “brave coward.” Peterson’s use of the word “voluntarily” is significant: Involuntary descent leads to death, terror, and chaos with no hint of transformation.

As in Chapter 2, Peterson quotes from a dizzying array of material, including John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (circa 1667); literary critic Northrop Frye’s comments on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick; and stories from Biblical, Buddhist, and Hindu lore. Jungian archetypes and symbols of mystery, pursuit, and knowledge abound, and Peterson intersperses them with his own experiences and dreams. This enriches the reading experience and adds layers of meaning. In this context, Peterson discusses the ancient and medieval concept of axis mundi, which Jung researched and borrowed. Axis mundi is Latin for the earth’s central axis that connects its two poles. Pictures often show it as a central tree and a bridge, making a tripartite structure between the realms of heaven, earth, and hell. The world-tree is the source of the anomalous idea, “the revelation that destroys” (299). It symbolizes the axis of change and the conduit for the hero into the unknown. Again, it is simultaneously both benign and destructive, offering the fruit which causes man’s downfall and redemption, as in the Biblical story about the tree of knowledge.