Re-Enchantment, Hierarchy, Jung, and The Sacred

I was trying to write about social power and fell down this rabbit hole

Retrophiles like Jordan Peterson defend the Hobbesian, fear-inspired and domination-driven perspective of the world (and pretty explicitly defend patriarchy) through appeals to theories on the “natural origins” of hierarchy and genetically predetermined social positioning.

There are significant problems with the line of thinking which proposes genetic and evolutionary inevitability of human hierarchy. It is ideology sitting on the shoulders of privilege, both dressed in a trench coat and claiming to be science. It is biological determinism, and humans are simply not biologically predetermined in the social domain. We may not even be biologically predetermined in the biological domain—Some researchers have observed that the discovery of fire and invention of cooking, humans digesting previously unconsumable food outside our bodies—led to a vastly altered diet, which some have suggested may have actually influenced the human body to develop a shorter digestive tract, ironically rendering us incapable of consuming the things our pre-human ancestors did. So we have the ability to transcend the constraints of mere biology through our agency and invention. In the social domain, biological determinism is particularly incorrect. Our capacity for symbolic thought and abstract language makes us capable of inventing social forms that transcend mere biology, genetics, or instinct. Nichola Raihani makes this point clear in her book ‘The Social Instinct’ in which she draws a clear distinction between the almost computational version of evolved cooperation among animals (which has been evolutionarily honed to optimize social configurations and behaviors for group and individual survival and genetic selection within a given environment) as contrasted with advanced human cooperation which can transcend these logics. We can consider self-sacrifice to be morally good (a social construct that is free to become untethered from mere biology) even if it confers no survival or fitness advantage to an individual or group. Our behaviors can, yes, be constrained by biology (see Dunbar’s numbers for example) or anchored in ancient, neuro-chemically pre-programmed instinct (which some science suggests actually drives cooperation in humans, not just selfishness/competition) AND they can also be driven by socially reinforced mental models and values. And the social constructs that undergird how we organize can and have been invented and deliberately evolved by us. Patriarchy is one such invention. So is communism. So is representative democracy, bureaucracy, holocracy, etc. etc. None of these are our “natural, rightful state” as many people like to argue (and we see “appeals to nature” from just about every angle).

One of my favorite sources on this topic is of course The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber, which deals significantly with the question of just how materially-determined our political configurations are. One of the main thrusts of their massive and thoroughly researched tome is that throughout the tens of thousands of years of Sapien history, the capacity to be “politically self-conscious”, to choose and experiment with different social configurations, has been available and widely exercised to various effects. They throw stage theories of social progress decidedly under the bus:

“We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.”

It might be the case that the Jungian Jordan Peterson believes in an almost supernatural “patterns of the universe” basis for social configurations like patriarchy. That’s how he talks anyways. While researching for a Substack post decrying excessive adherence to Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” (I’m not a huge fan of the atomistic “Great Man Theory of History” which I see as culturally socialized and reinforced by the ubiquitous Hero’s Journey), I discovered that my perception of symbolic myths as drivers of maladaptive and oppressive societal norms might actually be a feature, not a bug:

“Keith Dickson, a professor of Classics at Purdue University, says Campbell's work gives people the wrong idea about the purpose of mythology.

"Despite the pretense that these are ancient stories conveying what Joseph Campbell would call 'boons from the transcendent deep,' these are basically stories that are told by those in power in order to convince others that they should have power."

Dickson cites the story of Pandora's Box, the ancient Greek myth about the creation of woman, which depicts women as bottomless containers of nothing but evil and despair.

"Ancient Greek society considered women a threat to the integrity of families, a subject of uncontrollable sexual desire," he said. "Urban Greeks tended to sequester their women, to lock them up."

In that piece, I pronounced excessive adherence to Jungian archetypes to be a Red Flag. I’ve had friends who were all about Jung, and it didn’t seem like an issue. I think there’s a threshold at which you stop seeing Jungian archetypes as reflections of the things people and cultures talk about, think about, and thus are formed into socially constructed lenses through which we can and do see the world (ontological building-blocks of a socially constructed reality) and instead start seeing them as cosmic drivers of reality itself, like platonic ideals that are the inescapable, base-level matrix code underlying our world.

To illustrate just how firmly someone like Peterson adheres to symbolic archetypes as factual realities, here’s a bizarre exchange captured by a NYT reporter for this article:

“It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp. Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

It’s a hard one.

“Right. That’s right. You don’t know. It’s because those things hang together at a very deep level. Right. Yeah. And it makes sense that an old king lives in a desiccated tower.”

But witches don’t exist, and they don’t live in swamps, I say.

“Yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious. You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches.’ Yeah, I know what you mean, but that isn’t what you think when you go see a movie about them. You can’t help but fall into these categories. There’s no escape from them.”

Now it might be reasonable to infer from exchanges like this that he’s actually talking about the social construction of reality based on symbolic thought and language—these symbols might just be shared mental models that we propagate and socialize and they are therefore real in the sense that they ontologically constrain and drive patterns of society, which would be fair, but when Peterson talks about them it’s as if he’s invoking base-level, empirical truths that we have no hope of transcending. This seems a bit silly to me.

In the book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn discusses the role that metaphor plays in our understanding of the world. She describes the development of religion as “anthropomorphizing the universe” (granting it personality, consciousness, and agency as though it were human—a kind of metaphor). She shares how computational metaphors have become the de-facto ontology for cognition. She says “We have a tendency to forget that metaphors are metaphors. We begin to take them literally.”

This is the nature of ontology, and reminds me of a point I attempted to make in a piece called Sometimes It’s Not Time to Make Sense (comments on that piece helped me realize it should have been called “Stop Making Sense”). Here’s an excerpt:

I think often of this image from a tweet by John Cutler in which he describes three approaches to sense-making:

A - Exposing the mess

B - Clustering but leaving a path back to the mess (the preferred but most difficult approach)

C - Hiding the mess

When I initially encountered this image, I thought about how many people see the world only through abstractions, living purely in that third space where the mess appears to not exist. The mess is hidden to them. These abstractions often feel useful to us because they are coherent with our own lived experience (or we interpret our lived experience through the lens of the abstractions we've dogmatically adopted, resulting in a sense of coherence). This makes life feel less messy than it actually is.

But the mess is reality. The abstractions are simply useful fictions.

The clusters provide useful patterns in experience that can be exploited or employed in the design of solutions, but the majority of experience falls outside of those clusters rather than within them. They are simply points of overlap in otherwise turbulent information.

Ontology is the layer of categorical abstractions we lay over the mess. Not only does it hide the information which gave rise to such abstractions, it also serves as a filter and focusing lens for new information—directing our attention towards only that information which is coherent with and fits into the established ontology, preventing us from doing the work of sensemaking anew, in which we might consider alternate ways in which to categorize and respond to the information in front of us. This is the way that our brains work, and it clearly offers advantages for its speed and efficiency. Heuristics have a functional purpose after all—that is why they exist in the first place.

O’Gieblyn’s book is heavily focused on the concept of the disenchantment of society - a sociological construct from Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber which describes how scientific and economic pursuits in The West alienated us from direct experience with nature and “the sacred” through rationalization and bureaucratization. I highly highly recommend Andrea Wulf’s book Magnificent Rebels, which explores the philosophical singularity around the time of Schiller. One could understand part of Jung’s project as combating this disenchantment. But you don’t have to take it from me. The First Regional Conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies in 2011 put out a call for contributions on this exact subject:

“Theorists of the early 20^th century like Max Weber saw disenchantment as a transformative process in history whereby the magical and the sacred had given ground to the scientistic, mechanistic and positivistic. The consequent shift in the way the world was thought and imagined had led to a dispossession of the psyche, a division between mind and body, and a demystification of the world. This perspective in turn was rich fodder for new developments in a psychology aspiring to scientific objectivity, in large part inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis and a re-discovery of the unconscious.

C. G. Jung, like many others, was starkly aware that what had been left behind in pre-modernity was a coherence glued together by religious meanings, subterranean connections, expectations and explanations located in the spiritual, the animistic or the magical.  As a psychologist he saw this event manifesting as a contemporary loss of meaning, both personal and collective.  Indeed his psychological project may be credibly regarded as an attempt to come to terms with, and perhaps, reverse this event.”

I have no qualms with the deep desire to find and follow our own version of the sacred, but I do find fault with its tendency to hide from us the mess of the real world and in doing so justify the imposition of socially-constructed constraints on one another (often constructed exclusively by the dominant group in society). This is how we end up in a situation where patriarchy becomes justified as coherent with a base-level reality whose ontology was constructed by “men of their time” like Jung. It strikes me as profoundly more dangerous to do this in the domain of the sacred, where ontologies are decidedly less malleable and tend to have a retrophilic bent, than in the domains of scientific pursuit, where we at least have some semblance of systematic critique, inclusion, and development.

As always, these thoughts are not fully formed, and so I welcome your respectful commentary.