OUTLOOKS

Author: Christian Munthe
Year: 2022
Publisher: Alhambra
Language: Swedish

The novel is like a long journey by car or a train through a foreign country. Through the window, you watch the scenery as you make your way toward the goal of your voyage. You see the landscape as it changes. Villages come and go, rolling hills become mountains and then valleys, cities and forests alternate before your eyes. You absorb the impressions and through them learn about the environment, the architecture, the nature, the history, and the life of the people who live in these lands. You allow the impressions to flood you like the waves of an ocean flushes a beach.

Suddenly, you see something that catches your eye. Maybe it is something you do not understand. Maybe something of particular beauty or value. It could be something you have seen in a picture but never visited live. You stop your car, you get out, and you spend some time focusing on this one particular thing, whether it be a landmark, a historical place, a cave, a sunset, or a herd of sheep grazing on a hillside. You take your time to savour this particular phenomenon. This brief stop, by contrast to the moving car, is a short story. An opportunity to drill into one single issue or topic, or to evoke one particular thought or emotion.

This is precisely how I read Christian Munthe’s collection of eight short stories in a volume titled “Utsikter” (not available in English but the title could be translated as “Views” or “Sights” but also “Outlooks” or “Forecasts”) which in various ways address the nature of humanity in a rapidly changing and mechanised and digitised world.

The first story, “Strandfynd” (“Flotsam”), is a tale about a small coastal community and the drastic consequences of a bubble bursting when a person who thinks he is keeping a secret about his private life is made aware that he is the only one who actually considers it a secret.

“Överlevarna” (“The Survivors”) is a study of the metamorphosis of ethnic and national identity across generations on the backdrop of a Jewish family that left Poland during the Nazi occupation, and how such an identity can come about by destiny as much as by choice.

 “Sanningens pris (“The Price of Truth”) is a futuristic account of a world order where not only science and research are subject to global market mechanisms but truth itself is determined by supply and demand.

The fourth text is “Högt över ytan” (“High Above the Surface”) which is told in the shadow of the widely overlooked shipwreck of M/S Jan Heweliusz in 1993, dwarfed by the loss of M/S Estonia a year and a half later.

In “Videomöten” (“Video conferences”), which is the shortest of the stories in this collection, Munthe investigates the nature of communication and how poor-quality online meetings using tools such as Teams or Zoom, can serve to keep a relationship alive but also how they reshape it and become an integrated part of the relationship rather than just a vehicle for it.

“Medborgare Roskow” (“Citizen Roskow”) tells the story of the totalitarian apparatus and how power can be exercised by the use of narratives rather than people, and the dangers of turning rights into privileges.

The seventh and longest text has also lent its name to the entire collection, “Utsikter”. Again, Munthe takes us into the future, this time to dwell on the concepts of time, distance, and responsibility as the main character is leading a group of scientists with the mission to find a way to travel between solar systems and establish human (or pseudo-human) colonies.

The final part of the book is “Vålnaden i Nanzen-Ji” (“The Phantom in Nanzen-Ji”) which pits a family man against the memory of his abusive father, the influence of weakness and pettiness across generations, and the undetermined relation between forgiveness and liberation.

Reading these stories, it is clear to me that they have been written by someone who is used to writing, but even more to reading. Not only because Munthe is a professor of philosophy and is more than familiar with the philosophical and sociological thinkers of past and present, but even more so because the thoughts contained in the stories, and the way they are being tested and presented show a comprehensive familiarity with world literature. The issues raised herein, seem to have been on the author’s mind for some time before he finally decided to put them in words in the form of fictional stories.

Even though, I read them all with great interest (with a slight reservation to the eponymous “Utsikter” which I found somewhat messy and disorganised), I will contain myself to commenting on only two of them here.

“Sanningens pris” is in my view a highly perceptive and intriguing story. The main character, Oskar Kamp, is the Head of Market Monitoring at the relatively recently inaugurated Knowledge Liability Office (“Kunskapsgälden” in Swedish) in charge of monitoring and reporting deviations in the trading patterns of science, research, and truth. The point of the exchange traded truth is to allow the invisible hand of the global market to determine what is true and what is false. It is a dystopian world where investor sentiment, rather than facts and public interest, dictates not only what academic endeavours to finance and what research projects to pursue, which to some extent is the case in our society already, but moreover it determines what is and is not true. It is a chilling proposition, but it does not end there.

One of the disciplines that has an index on Oskar Kamp’s monitor is economic science which is considered basic research. This means that the truth-assumption of the science that constitutes the platform for the Knowledge Liability Office is itself subject to the market forces monitored by the same. This problem resembles Russell’s paradox in set theory where the set of truths in this case include the truth that depends on and evaluates truth itself.

“Medborgare Roskow” is at its core a power analysis. There is the clearly visible power structure that divides the population up in denizens and citizens where the former have some basic rights and privileges but are excluded form higher offices, freedom of movement, and higher education whereas the latter constitute a small elite to which all doors are open. Officially, there is nothing stopping any person from becoming a citizen, if they can pass a rigorous test. But there is also an invisible power structure which is the privilege of the ruling party alone and above which no denizen or citizen stands.

Munthe’s power analysis seems to hark back to the Marxist thought on class struggle but as I read it, this is merely a mirage. The division between the citizen elites and the denizen masses is actually an artificial ruse intended to give society a veneer of class difference, but as Robert Roskow will find out, true power is vested elsewhere. Whoever controls the definitions, controls the people. Citizens and denizens, although having different roles and privileges, are equally oppressed, albeit not equally abused, by the system and its enforcers. In that sense, the story becomes a critique of the failed implementation of Marxism in the 20^th century (cf. my review of the Communist Manifesto from August 2021). In a Swedish context, it can serve as a visualisation of the right-wing parties’ adamant claim that there are true and less true Swedes, but they have a hard time defining what they mean by it. How would they propose to test the difference between a Swedish citizen and an alien denizen without being openly racist?

One of the drawbacks with the short story format is that characters are not really supposed to develop. There just isn’t room for it. Instead, their personalities and backgrounds are there to test them in a particular situation or conundrum. Munthe does a solid job sketching his characters. To me, Oskar Kamp is much akin to Leo Kall and Winston Smith as the one cog in the oppression machinery that begins to wobble. Robert Roskow is the expired part that is replaced by version 2.0. Both are rays of humanity in the darkness of a faceless machinery.

Without a doubt, “Utsikter” is a delightful read with each of the stories offering just the right amount of food for thought to keep your mind busy during the day without freaking you out. I warmly recommend it to anyone who appreciates having their circles moved a bit from time to time. Although this was the writer’s first attempt at belletristic writing, I surely hope it will not be his last; whether the next publication be a long journey, or a curious stop along the way.    

 

 

12 RULES FOR LIFE: AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS

Author: Jordan B. Peterson
Year: 2018
Publisher: Allen Lane
Language: English

Jordan Peterson rose to fame largely thanks to his smash hit “12 Rules for Life” in 2018 and has since then taken a place among the most notable popular thinkers and educators of today alongside Richard Dawkins, Slavoj Zizek, Sam Harris, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb to mention a few. His right-wing, conservative, Christian perspective on culture and the human psyche fills a void in the non-academic discourse that, whether you agree with him or not, is a valid viewpoint in Western society. His academical credentials (PhD in Psychology from McGill, teaching positions at Harvard and Toronto, long practical experience from clinical psychology and therapy) are impeccable and he gave lectures, participated in debates, and featured on talk-shows and panels around the world long before he became a superstar.

“12 Rules for Life” is exactly what it says on the cover. Peterson lists twelve rules and elaborates on how following them may lead a person to a better and more harmonious life. The rules are

1.      Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Peterson’s point of departure is similar to Hobbes’ as described in “Leviathan” (see review from April 2022), that chaos is a state of nature and the driving force for each individual human is to dominate other humans. Peterson here argues that if you act like a winner, you will be perceived as a winner, and ultimately become a winner.

2.      Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Peterson notes that people are more likely to pamper their loved ones (or even pets) than themselves and encourages his readers to pay as much attention to themselves and their needs as they do to others.

3.      Make friends with people who want the best for you. Friendship, to Peterson, is a reciprocal arrangement. There has to be value in friendship for both parties engaged in it. If you realise nothing good for yourself is coming out of your relationship, or if you would not recommend one of your friends to your sister or your father, then you may be better off not entertaining friendship with that person.

4.      Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Life choices are games of success and failure. Our selective mind compares us unfairly because the standards it chooses for our comparison are arbitrary. Peterson argues that we see what we expect to see so our experience of success or failure can be managed by adjusting our expectations.

5.      Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Children are monsters. And if they are allowed to remain monsters into adulthood, it can only end in calamity. Peterson tells his readers to take responsibility for assimilating their children into society in a way that will make other people like them. A person that is appreciated by others has a better chance of getting ahead in life. And it is the parents’ responsibility to make this happen.

6.      Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Being prepared is a virtue. The only thing that you can truly influence is your own life and your own house. You have full power to prepare your house for a flood or a storm, in a way that you do not have to prepare your neighbourhood, or town or country. Peterson wants us to dig where we stand.

7.      Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). Work and sacrifice are delayed gratification. By sacrificing something small today, we may gain something significant tomorrow. This insight, according to Peterson, is characteristic for humans and makes us superior to other creatures. He wants us to invest in our future, instead of hunting for instant pleasure.

8.      Tell the truth – or, at least don’t lie. Peterson argues that people lie when reality becomes too hard to handle. Lies are a tool to warp reality. However, if reality becomes warped, we ourselves risk getting lost in a mirage. We lose sight of what is real. Therefore, lies eventually come to hurt ourselves in the end.

9.      Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. People seem to be gripped by fear of having to change their minds. Conversations usually turn into power struggles. Peterson claims, that the search for knowledge is the highest form of wisdom. By this rule, he wants our dialogues to be centred on knowledge, and not on ourselves.

10.   Be precise in your speech. The world is simple when it behaves. That is why people navigate via categories. It makes the world predictable. Simple minds require simple rules. A person who does not know him- or herself, can find comfort in ignorance. Self-discovery, however, is empowerment. The more we know, and the better we know it, the more precise we can express ourselves, and the better we can formulate our goals, our critique, and our demands.

11.   Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. People are not risk-minimisers; they are risk-optimisers, says Peterson. Exploring the limits of danger, fear, and one’s own capacity builds confidence and self-awareness. Boys and girls play different games because they have different predispositions. Male aggression is natural, not cultural. That is why one should allow boys to be boys and girls to be girls. Both in school and elsewhere.

12.   Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. Suffering is the baseline of life, says Peterson. Every major religion is based on the assumption of suffering. By finding moments in life where suffering can be temporarily suspended, we keep ourselves from perishing or going mad. Peterson advises his readers to pay attention to every little ray of light in their lives, even if that ray is just petting a random cat. Dogs are fine, too.

Many of these rules seem rather straightforward and uncontroversial at first glance. I can certainly subscribe to the advice that we need to take care of ourselves and engage in relationships that are mutually beneficial or to take the time to smell the roses (or pet cats) every now and then. Still, I would like to make one or two remarks.

First, it is imperative that the reader understands that the rules in this book are not universal but rather intimately associated with the Western, or I should say even Northern American, culture. Even though Peterson’s worldview is rooted in his base postulate that life equals suffering, which he shares with many major religions including Buddhism, his antidote to chaos is narrowly focused on people like himself. His frequent referrals to Scripture (most notably the story of Cain and Abel in the Genesis) and his own upbringing in Fairview, Alberta, as a proxy for society as he perceives it, make an unmistakeable statement about his intended audience.

Second, Peterson is quick to make claims in a way that suggests that his conclusions are the only possible ones from the evidence at hand. But that is not always so. Even if we may agree with him, intellectual honesty demands that we remain open to alternative interpretations of the facts. Peterson proposes a simplified universe and tolerates no disputes. To a lesser mind, his assertiveness may sound powerful, but to an educated reader, this constitutes a weakness in Peterson’s argument.

Third, Peterson assumes that each individual person is an independent agent and that there is no option for collective action. Society, in Peterson’s eyes, is a Leviathan or a law of nature that cannot be changed or influenced, since all intervention by any human being must be done on an individual level. Every rule in his book is rooted in this assumption.

Apart from these three general observations, some of the individual rules require particular unpacking. As this book has been twisted and turned by readers far more competent than I in both philosophy and psychology, I will not claim to make a comprehensive analysis of the Peterson-doctrine, but I will allow myself to highlight a few of the many thoughts and arguments that caught my attention.

Rule 4. Jordan Peterson seems to align himself with the neoclassical dogma of the rational man that governs modern economics. “If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it.” This seems like a very bold statement for a psychologist to build a rule of life upon. There are countless of reasons why people knowingly commit acts that they are fully aware are not optimal for them. This happens due to an array of reasons such as laziness, fear, hatred, malevolence, self-harm, mental illness, or (as Peterson points out himself in Rule 7) as a pursuit of instant gratification rather than long-term benefits. Actions are not always based on decisions. On the contrary, we are just as busy deciding subconsciously what not to do as we are deciding what to actually do. The bulk of human actions are driven by instinct and emotions, and very little is subject to conscious and rational deliberation. As Peterson says himself in Rule 9, “[p]eople think they think but it’s not true.”

Rule 5. In this rule Peterson, again, makes some sweeping claims. He suggests that humans (Homo sapiens) are naturally violent, and presents as evidence the violent predisposition of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as our species’ closest relatives, claiming that evolution maintained aggression in our branch of the evolutionary tree of primates. What he fails to address is that another branch of Pan, equally closely related to humans, the Bonobos (Pan paniscus) are significantly more docile than chimpanzees and possess little of the aggressive instincts of their slightly larger cousins. This doesn’t mean that Peterson’s claim about human aggression is false, but his evidence is by any standard inadequate.

Rule 11. This is probably the most problematic of the twelve rules and the one where Peterson does away with all scientific or pseudo-scientific decorum and indulges fully in his personal opinions and preferences. He goes on a completely unsubstantiated rant on how the educational system, from primary school all the way through higher education, favours girls/women and how post-modernism was created as a way to oppress men by calling out the myth of the patriarchy as the root cause for every female failure or short-coming. To his credit, he admits that culture (I prefer the term “society” or “social norms”/“social expectations” but I will humour Peterson in this regard) is an oppressive structure and his thought on the balance between oppression and opportunity that culture provides is valid for the type of popular science that this book is supposed to be. But he then dismisses the claim of the patriarchy as “perverse” without offering much more than anecdotal evidence that sounds more like coming from an anonymous twitter-troll than a world-renowned professor of psychology. As an example, he submits that “[t]he Swedes, /…/, push equality to its limits” without explaining what the limits of equality might be. Can men and women be too equal?

To conclude, there is abundant evidence that what we are witnessing now, and which is causing the right-wing backlash in many communities, is the final hour of the White, Christian male hegemony. Peterson himself, is a prominent warrior in defence of a world-order that is being challenged by non-Whites, women, and gender fluidity. It is a valid, albeit problematic position to desire the perpetuation of the old world order, but it does not do anybody any favours to deny its premise or misrepresent the ideas that challenge it.

“12 Rules for Life” is a textbook on how to preserve current power structures and how each and every one of us can and should assimilate ourselves and our offspring into the matrix without questioning it or trying to influence it. “If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, /…/ it’s time to examine your values.” A recurring theme in Peterson is just this. Life is suffering. Don’t try to change it. Learn to live with it. The only thing you can change is yourself, the world is unchangeable. Don’t even try. This message is hammered in through every single one of the rules.

If you agree with this doctrine, then this book will certainly give you massive support and I do not doubt that it will offer useful advice on how to make space for yourself in the purgatory that is life and make your time on earth less torturous. If on the other hand you believe that the world can be changed and should be changed, and that cooperation and collective action are a thing, Peterson has very little to say that will convince you.

Having said all that, I want to make perfectly clear that I hugely enjoyed reading “12 Rules for Life”. I would not have chosen it myself but received it as a gift from a friend whose opinions and taste in literature I highly value. This encounter gave me the opportunity to reflect upon my own hierarchy of values and my arguments in support of my standpoints on various issues. Moreover, it offered me a window into the mind of a competent conservative thinker which gave me insights I would otherwise not have been able to gain in my everyday environment. In the spirit of Peterson’s Rule 9, I would therefore like to add one additional rule.

Rule 13. Read books that you receive as a gift and that you wouldn’t have picked yourself.