At the end of We Who Wrestle with God , Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation. The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order – the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism.
The remedy is fearless self-examination, an agonising struggle against despair that points to a realm beyond the self. But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age? Thirteen years in the making, this compendious volume –the first of two, Peterson tells us – consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture. Reflections on the Genesis story of the Fall, Cain, Abel and the meaning of sacrifice lead to a two-chapter meditation on Moses, over 100 pages long, and a final chapter on the story of Jonah who, instructed to convert Nineveh, ends up being swallowed by a whale.
In the section on Moses, Peterson refers to the Israelites who “regressed to the paganism of possession by instinct”, worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountaintop communing with God: “The narrative here...
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