Burrowing into Books - "12 Rules for Life"

Sydney M. Williams

swstotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                    October 9, 2018

“12 Rules for Life”

Jordan B. Peterson

“…without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions –

and there’s nothing freeing about that.”

                                                                                                Dr. Norman Doidge

                                                                                                Author, “The Brain that Changes Itself”

                                                                                                Introduction to 12 Rules for Life

Dr. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist who practices in Toronto and teaches at the University of Toronto. Previously, he taught at Harvard. His interests and expertise range. He has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people and has published more than a hundred scientific papers. One might wonder why would I, a non-scientific sort and now in my autumn years, find compelling a book written by a medical doctor about rules? In part, it is because his rules are unlike most we deal with. They come with titles like Rule 1, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back;” Rule 7, “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient);” and Rule 12, “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.” But most important, it is because his observations make sense and are lucidly offered.

In the first chapter, when the author writes of standing straight, he is speaking not only of the physical act, but metaphorically, of accepting the responsibilities that come with the “burden of Being,” that as humans we have an obligation to live civilly and respectfully. He writes of navigating between chaos and order, order being explored territory – the “tribe, religion, hearth, home and country” – and chaos being “the domain of ignorance…the place you end up when things fall apart…” He writes, “Order is the shire of Tolkien’s hobbits: peaceful, productive and safely inhabitable…Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug.” But order alone does not advance the individual. “Thus,” he writes, “you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.” It is the experience common to all high school seniors, in the fall of their final year. For twelve years, they have known where they were headed the next September; this fall they face an unknown future. Like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins, with experience they become wiser and more confident, using what they have learned to explore and conquer the unknown. 

He tells us that it is through stories we learn the virtues of honesty, perseverance and diligence. He uses literary figures to make his point. He quotes from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago, a book “written with the overwhelming moral force of unvarnished truth.” With his wide-ranging interests, he references the Bible, George Orwell, Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Stephen King and John Milton. He quotes Goethe through the voice of Mephistopheles, of hurdles a rules-based culture can overcome:

“What matters our creative endless toil,

When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?”

He writes of Carl Jung and Christianity. In Chapter 7, “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)”, he offers his fundamental moral conclusion: “Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death.”

Rules are embedded in our democratic republic through our system of laws, which guide our behavior. They lead us between chaos and order; they provide the balance necessary for a productive, fun and interesting life. He tells us we should be obeisant to rules, but unafraid of the unknown future, to venture (carefully) toward chaos. We should be stable enough to be secure, but flexible enough to transform.  “Clear rules,” Professor Peterson writes,“and proper discipline help the child, and the family, and society, establish, maintain and expand the order, [which] is all that protects us from chaos and the terrors of the underworld…”

At a time when moral clarity has evaporated into a miasma of moral relativism, when lives can be destroyed because people are convicted in courts of public opinion absent any empirical evidence, when ethics are set aside to gain political advantage, when red herrings are tossed up to deliberately conflate issues, this is a book to savor, to keep on the shelf, to peruse at will, to help cope with this complex, contradictory and sometimes unfair world. 

Burrowing into Books - "Lord of the Flies"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                        September 11, 2018

“Lord of the Flies”

William Golding

“Evening was come, not with calm beauty but with the threat of violence.”

                                                                                                            Lord of the Flies, 1954

                                                                                                            William Golding (1911-1993)

It behooves us all, from time to time, to re-read those books we read when young, to see if they still hold our attention as they once did, to discover if their words still have their power, if lessons garnered today are different from ones learned as adolescents. An additional benefit, for those with children and grandchildren, is that doing so allows a connection with youth, for many of these books are included on summer reading lists.  Over the past five years I have read, or rather re-read, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Lord of the Ringstrilogy and two of the Narnia Novels, along with half a dozen Dickens’ and other classics, like Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne. Golding’s 1954 novel is another such example.

The story is disturbing, but apt at a time when bullying has become, if not more frequent, at least more discussed and when children are coddled, delaying the rigors and rules of adulthood. “Safe places” protect youths from uncomfortable words, but they leave them ill-prepared for the harshness and reality of adulthood. And we have all known children like Piggy who are teased without remorse; the quiet and illusive Simon; Ralph, who commands respect, and bullies like Jack. We have all been witness – adult and adolescent alike – to emotions that devolve into mass hatred. It is a sense of “there, but for the grace of God, go I” that makes this story so personally compelling.

William Golding – born in England in 1911 and Oxford educated – is the anti Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18^thCentury French philosopher who believed that a child was born with an immaculate spirit, untouched by culture and society. He wasmankind before tempted in the Garden of Eden. Golding wanted to correct that image – to show how young boys would behave when alone, without the influence of adults or any societal guidance. He based the story on an unsentimental understanding of what he had been like at the age of twelve or thirteen – that he could be kind and decent, but that he could also be monstrous: That evil is not learned, it is inherent – that devilish traits remain hidden behind a façade of rules necessary to live in civilized company. In his book, 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson wrote: “Bullying at the sheer and often terrible intensity of the schoolyard rarely manifests itself in grown-up society. William Golding’s dark and anachronistic Lord of the Fliesis a classic for a reason.”

Lord of the Fliesis the story of boys surviving alone, amidst chaos, division and friendship, for a few weeks on an uninhabited island in the south Pacific. The plane, which had carried the boys, crashed. No adults survived, only a few dozen boys aged six to about thirteen. Ralph and Jack became leaders, reflecting opposing and conflicting traits: “Ralph,” as Stephen King wrote in the introduction of my copy, “embodied the values of civilization and Jack’s embrace of savagery and sacrifice represented the ease with which those values could be swept away.” Jack asks: “Who cares about rules?” Ralph responds he does: “Because rules are the only thing we’ve got.” A conch shell is used to assemble the boys. But a conch cannot substitute for the discipline of adults. While most young readers identify with Ralph, Piggy is the most memorable. Perhaps, because his character is more fully developed. Perhaps because the reader understands his physical vulnerability, despite his intelligence, condemns him to a tragic end.

The boys are eventually found. Smoke from an out-of-control fire alerts a passing British naval cruiser. Golding leaves us with these words: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” 

World War II, which had concluded less than a decade earlier, had shown the brutality of totalitarianism. Its opposite, anarchy, is also barbaric, which is what Golding wanted readers to understand. Civilization depends upon navigating the straits between the Scylla of the former and the Charybdis of the latter. What is wanted is a society that relies on common-sensical rules (laws), ones that reflect the will of the people, are binding and judiciously enforced, so that liberty is ensured and chaos avoided. What the boys learned (and hopefully what readers will as well)was what James Madison wrote in“Federalist 51”: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But they are not, so it is.