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“Should John Lennon’s “Imagine” Become Our Reality? TVO’s BIG IDEAS will be co-sponsoring a debate between Canadian philosopher Ronald de Sousa and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson.”

On Tuesday I went to the CFI, TVO and University of Toronto Secular Alliance’s debate on living with(out) the sacred. I will interject my personal comments on a couple particular things that were brought up as I explain what went on but will start by saying this: yikes!

The topic, standing alone, is relatively interesting (which is probably why the 500 person theater was packed in the first place). However there were a couple major problems. The first being that it seemed like the debate was never really framed appropriately for the debaters and that there was no exchange of ideas before hand or clear direction given. This created the second major problem, the speakers just kept speaking past one another. Peterson used a very sociological definition of “the sacred” (which isn’t always religious) while De Sousa was obviously there to defend a world without religion. Thus, as you will see, Peterson kept saying pretty uncontentious things and De Sousa simply had to agree with him. Then De Sousa would make arguments against religion but religion alone wasn’t what Peterson’s definition of “the sacred” was and thus he just talked past these points and saw them as pretty invalid. Either the people who named the debate know nothing about the academic use of the word “sacred” and simply wanted to convey a different meaning entirely or… the tag line for the event was pretty misplaced or… the speakers were never informed about their intended use of the word “sacred”.

So! What was said… read on my friends… For the most part I took almost word-for-word notes so should be able to represent their arguments pretty well. If anyone else was there and thinks I misrepresent something – please correct me in the comments.

De Sousa opened the debate by stating that ancient texts may not bring any kind of wisdom that is relevant for the modern world. In fact, he argues, letting the sacred and these ancient writings intervene with our daily lives takes away basic human rights such as wanting to end our own life or burn a book. When a value is considered to be absolute then there is no room for any other argument, but in our society there are a lot of reasons we would need to nudge what is seemingly absolute. For example we ban guns so that people can’t murder one another but we allow people to drive cars despite the fact that other people will kill people in them, we’ve just decided that it is a more acceptable risk and have “nudged” our absolute accordingly. He argues that this is because we don’t really believe life is sacred and that we don’t really believe what religious people say, we simply pretend to because it gives us an excuse not to really think about what is valuable and important in life. Things from the past such as art and poems, these are beautiful illusions but religion is a delusion which should be left behind.

Peterson’s opening statement began with him talking about evolutionary biology and Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate. He says that if we take Pinker’s arguements seriously we either have a blank slate on which anything can be written or we have an intrinsic human nature. He continued by saying that evolutionary biologists and rationalists know nothing about religion, so they essentially make a strawman about religious beliefs that make them akin to the function of a 13 year old and then crush these very basic, narrow and uniformed views with their “high IQs”. (In part I agree with Peterson here – there is a lot that some people who argue against religion don’t know about deep religious views. It is easy to be against the surface values that some religious people uphold that are harmful, but I think it is much harder to be against deep spiritual philosophies that simply shape a person’s mindset and decision making processes which either have no effect on others or at least not a harmful effect. I also think that very few athiests take the time to learn hard theoretical components of theology and just attack the very tip of an extremely large ice-burg.) Then Peterson takes a crack at the argument that something must be sacred by sharing a story about a Nazi concentration camp. The story was that some German soldiers had Jewish prisoners, who were already 3/4 dead, carry 100lbs bags of salt back and forth throughout the concentration camp for no reason other than torture. Peterson decided that this is inherently and absolutely wrong and because of this you have an absolute, which is a sacred. He finished by stating the old debate about religion is skipping over what is really important – a cross-spiritual discussion about morality.

These two paragraphs essentially sum up what the two arguing over the next hour and twenty minutes – neither really address the others points… so I’ll keep the rest of these run-downs as short as possible.

In De Sousa’s rebuttal he said he agreed with Peterson and that there are values and some are more important than others but says the problem is who gets to decide which values are the absolute ones. He said Hitler probably didn’t think his story was all that bad, but the Hitler’s of this world will certainly think their actions are right and, in fact, absolutely right. The problem then, with absolute values (such as religion) is not when people are ready to die for them, but when they are ready to kill for them. Then he made some stereotypical comments about religious people being the arrogant ones because they think they have a direct line with God, and that faith is simply “believing what you know ain’t true” and thus God is silly and society needs to rid themselves of him.

Peterson’s rebuttal doesn’t address any of these points and instead starts to talk about this theory he has (he didn’t say “I have this theory” he just started talking about it and you could tell it was one of his pet projects) about beliefs being too rigid in any form. Either the belief is too totalitarian (in the case of Muslims killing people over the Quran burning) or belief is too nihilistic (as is the case with atheists), either way is bad. There is all this potential in the middle for which we use to make decisions and the values that we use to end up somewhere in the middle are our sacred values and end up giving us a meaningful life (if we flush out those values in a meaningful and purposeful way). Then he started talking about consciousness and apprehending undifferentiated meaning when you look around and this consciousness is divine and sacred.

De Sousa tells him … well, that’s all lovely but it has nothing to do with the topic. But he does defend relativists as not being nihilistic just simply that humans are complicated and that sometimes in life… “it depends”.

Then Peterson keeps talking about his nihilism/totalitarian thing and that people have evolved to deal with nature, for example when something is meaningful you tend to be more attracted to it and that is being attracted to a midpoint between order and chaos. At this point, enough of what you know is stable, and you begin maximizing information flow so that you can remain adapted and you end up occupying a mental and physical space/state that you want to be in. He argues that De Sousa simply did not understand this point when he said it was irrelevant because the body we inhabit has adapted to who we are, and then life revealed something so intrinsically valuable to us that it is the sacred (and this is that equilibrium, I think). He argued that this is a profound experience in ones life that can not be rationalized.

So then De Sousa simply pushes this aside by saying the nihilism/totalitarianism dichotomy is false and that we have more options than that. We, as rational beings, can reasonably make our way to accommodations. He says the way we can really understand the way in which nature shapes our behavious is taking the sacred and the mysticism out of it and leaving it up to science and inquiry.

This back and forth goes on with Peterson bringing up some random piece of information and using it to backup his main theory and De Sousa essentially saying he doesn’t disagree with anything that Peterson is saying because Peterson isn’t answering the question. The only thing they seemed to disagree on that was touched on just for a few minutes was absolute values and relative values, but they didn’t flush it out at all. De Sousa says this in his closing statement:

” We agree about so much, what we disagree about is about how to describe the truth about where we should encourage people to go in their lives…. We can see beauty and meaning just from our rationality, asking questions etc… So do we need anything to be sacred? The answer is “no”.”

 

I left during the Q&A because it’s always painful to listen to people explain their question who were supposed to get cut off at 1 minute but ramble on and on while saying “yeah, I’m almost done” like 8 times.

I liked listening to Peterson much more than I liked listening to De Sousa, not because I disliked anything De Sousa had to say but simply because I had heard what De Sousa said many times before at different debates. (I actually really like De Sousa, he’s interesting to listen to, very smart and well spoken.) Peterson was pretty far off topic, simply because he was talking about “sacred” in a whole other way than everyone else in that room was, but he did have some really interesting ideas about how to describe ones own personal journey and commitment to a spirituality. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with the topic at hand and he was speaking to the wrong crowd – there were very few people in that room that would be able to relate to what he was saying or would have understood the origins of his arguments unless they had taken some theology classes.

The majority of people I spoke to after the debate seemed pretty disappointed because they were either bored or didn’t understand what was going on. People went in thinking they were going to hear a debate about religion and instead they got, on one hand, an atheist giving them the same things they’ve heard over and over and being unable to rip apart because the hand was talking about some really heavy and difficult theological theory that had little relation to the intended debate topic. And actually, in my humble opinion, the response I heard from some of the atheists about Peterson sort of shows the point that some people who argue against religion don’t really understand the deeper parts of it…  Because it *is* really complicated and not only what people see on the surface and decide what is bad about religion.

I’ve seen debates like this fall apart too many times – the speakers need to be given better information, sample arguments from the other side and be briefed on exactly what the intended topic is. Then this really really irritating thing that always happens in debates won’t happen: “You’re argument is really interesting, valid and entertaining but it’s not on the exact topic of the debate and therefore I’m going to ignore it.”