Monday, November 27, 2023

Jordan Peterson in Belfast, and Solzhenitsyn


If a nations spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse
by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development.
A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
– 
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

........


I went to the SSE Arena in Belfast a few weeks ago to see Jordan Peterson in action - I was invited and offered a ticket so I went along, mostly out of curiosity. I'll not attempt to explain or summarise who he is. It was the first date in a 'tour' which culminated in a conference in London called ARC - his wife Tammy took to the stage first and explained that they had just been to visit her grandfather's childhood home in Hatfield Street in Belfast.

The place appeared to be reasonably well filled, but not to capacity. On the way out, I got speaking with a guy a bit younger than me, from an area of Belfast which he said had significant paramilitary undercurrents directing the lives of young men, who was dismissive of Peterson's ivory tower glibness within the Q&A session at the end of the night.

But this video by Glen Scrivener gets to the heart of many of the reservations I have about Peterson and in particular his almost Gnostic handling of the books within the library that is the Bible. (The Solzhenitsyn quote above is from the Konstantin Kisin talk, at 6:50).



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