A Review of Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning Lecture Series

In the Maps of Meaning lecture series, Jordan Peterson draws from many disciplines like religion, mythology, philosophy, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political theory, art, and history to make the case that human brains have evolved to create meaning and tell stories; to structure everything we experience by myths and archetypes—or universal and important stories told over and over again.

What he challenges is the idea that humans are blank slates onto which facts present themselves and that we create value, meaning, and narratives from them after the fact. Peterson makes the case that value, meaning, and framing life in archetypes arise from the way our brain is evolved and how its neuroprocessing works. For instance, the ability to speak a language is preloaded in the brain. When the baby is born, it babbles phonics heard in every language. The potential for language is already there. The baby then zeroes in on the language of its environment and mimics that. Just as the brain is preloaded with the potential for development of language, it is preloaded to create meaning and narrative. As data arrives, your brain is already sorting and categorizing and discriminating what is meaningful to it and its goals, and doing this subconsciously without your conscious permission because that’s what it is evolved to do. You can only notice that you experience reality the way your brain has arranged it for you.

Peterson spends time in these lectures going over a few Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist myths and stories to make the case that they all have similar or universal archetypes in them, or important takeaways for wisdom. The same archetypes can be found in Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, The Lion King, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars.

While Peterson believes he is deriving such complex wisdom from these stories and comparing them for their common archetypes, it seems to me that he’s reading all of that complexity into these stories and creating patterns of similarity rather by ignoring their stand-alone context. His long and infamous lecture series on reading the Bible through an archetypal lens depends on the same procedure. Just how many archetypes are there? No one knows. They can be multiplied endlessly.

Joseph Campbell, one of the most influential and popular mythologists in the past century was famous for scouring the world’s myths and religions for universal themes and seeing them as one, despite differences in details. His concept of the hero with a thousand faces says there is a single hero archetype played out in a thousand different specific heroes in a thousand different stories: usually that the hero is confronted with tragedy and evil and is then pulled into a quest where he can never go back, but must go into the unknown, face great danger, and return with something valuable and share it with humanity.

Critics of Campbell believe he is doing a disservice to specific, individual myths developed in different times, places, and cultures to speak to different needs and situations by trying to make them seem more universal than they really. Peterson is aware that he is doing the same as Campbell and sees the Bible both as a collection of stories written by specific people in specific times and places, therefore full of contradictions when collected as a whole, and as a collection of stories edited over time to reference and draw from one another and over again to create unified themes as a whole. It’s just a matter of which of these you intend to focus on in your analysis.

So does Peterson succeed in proving his thesis that certain archetypes arise over and over again in myths and stories because they are universal and birthed from the structure of our brain? I don’t know. It’s an interesting hypothesis that people far better informed than I am in these areas have criticized.

So is all lost if this project fails? No. There is much to learn from archetypes and universal truths, even if the specific myths and stories Peterson used to make his case don’t always map onto these archetypes comfortably. There is plenty of wisdom in these lectures, much of which is derived from psychology and his years of clinical practice as a therapist.

Yes, these lectures contain the expected jabs at Marxism, socialism, postmodernism, and the state of universities being social justice indoctrination centers that curtail free speech for ideology. But there are also jabs at Hitler, Nazis, totalitarianism, and online men’s communities that think poorly of women. Hardly what you would expect from an alt-right Nazi who fuels men to be misogynists as his critics are fond of saying.

What I got from these lectures has little to do with his thesis, but more with practical advice on dealing with how to rebuild your life once tragedy and chaos has disillusioned, disoriented, and destroyed you, and how to avoid becoming bitter, resentful, and wanting to die, encouraging listeners to get in touch with what’s meaningful to them, pay attention to their values, rise from the ashes, take responsibility, stand up straight, face the world, and create order from chaos. He encourages listeners to risk believing that life is good and that what they do is worth it despite the evil and chaos in them and all around them, and that what they do matters. No matter how bleak it looks, the potential to live a deep, rich, meaningful life is always in front of you. I’m thankful for that kind of encouragement.