“Part of confronting the evil outside of us involves confronting the evil inside of us.” This quote is from Lila Rose during her appearance today on Matt Fradd’s YouTube channel, Pints with Aquinas. Lila is a fellow Catholic and author of the book, “Fighting for Life”, which explains how to use our wounded souls as a force for change; and how Rose’s life experiences, including her work as a pro-life activist, helped her transform her own life and walk with God.
The video clip in this article covers Lila’s exchange with Matt Fradd about facing our own wicked nature. So that we can better deal with evil around us. Lila and Matt related this to the book, “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson: Rule #6 is “set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world”.
Lila then went on to explain a problem – one that has a stronghold on Western society – and I absolutely agree with Lila: We have become so focused on being independent and sweepingly shunning dependence as a weakness, we have lost sight of how much we all crucially depend on each other, in just about every area of life — and that our primary focus should be to embrace fully God’s will for us.
However, the conversation took a slight left turn when Lila called out Jordan Peterson on his views about stridently “setting your house in order.” Namely, it included an assumption about Peterson’s view on independence: that Peterson thinks we should be fiercely independent. Given that, I am going to give my perspective on this and hopefully help clarify Peterson’s position on independence (though I am sure he is more than capable of doing that himself – and who knows, he may even be a guest someday on Pints with Aquinas! Or at least I hope so!)
Also, part of the reason I decided to write this article is I have been using a similar approach to Peterson in introducing seekers to the Bible. Drawing on my own background in psychology as well – and that Peterson and I have many of the same influences who also studied religious phenomenology – my aim has been to help people see the scores of raw, deeply human stories throughout the Bible – that we *all* can relate to the Bible and how it teaches us, and to quote Lila Rose again, that “confronting the evil outside of us involves confronting the evil inside of us.”
Having said that, here are my thoughts:
Although Lila Rose has a superb understanding of facing our own evil versus the evils we witness, and that almost nobody is entirely self-sufficient — she is taking Jordan Peterson’s “clean up your room first” a bit out of context. Peterson is not suggesting — at all — that people should have a purely “pull up your bootstraps” mentality about life, including not needing to depend on others. That is more of a trope perpetuated by relationship “experts” who spent have spent the past 30 years shouting from the rooftops that co-dependency is dangerous, and that if you are not hyper-independent, someone is going to swoop in and strip you of your identity, forcing you into a life-long, existential crisis. Which has now been used as a weapon against marriage / monogamous relationships. (And yes, there is a *a lot* to unpack with that subject).
Peterson’s “clean up your room first” — and throughout his entre book, ’12 Rules for Life” — is about understanding why individual sovereignty is a necessary right. Peterson even alludes to it as a Divine right in his lecture series on the Bible — as well as not falling prey to group identity movements that subjugate individual rights, or ideologies that could easily devolve into tyrannical leadership. If you read his books and watch his videos, he is clearly not a fan of group identity politics, authoritarian regimes, and anything that hints of destroying human rights. In other words, he is also thinking “big picture” as it pertains to human social evolution. Moreover, he strongly supports societies finding the healthiest ways to depend on each other and cooperate in peace.
Not to say that Peterson isn’t wrong on any topic — we can see that some of his insight on theology needs improvement — but he also doesn’t claim to take a theological approach to understanding human behavior. He is a psychologist. Therefore, while his approach to some topics may seem a little scattered, or may not fit exactly with how we as Catholics approach certain topics, he does recognize that he is not a know-it-all and is open to having his mind changed. And that shows he wants engaging discussions and to be able to depend on others for guidance.
Now, tying this back to Lily’s point about the evil we face within ourselves: There again is something that Peterson (and depth psychologists such as Carl Jung) has studied extensively: Cultures throughout the world have stories/myths that explain how to “die” to your wicked self, so that you may be reborn out of the darkness and into the light. It is the “slaying of the dragon” motif in many ancient myths.
Now we just need to get Peterson to see that Christ is the supreme Savior of our wickedness: that he gave us — out of *love* for us — the means to conquer the evil within through his death and Resurrection for us all. Call it the ultimate story that ties all other stories and life lessons together. And looking through that lens, we much better understand the sanctity of life — and therefore why we Catholics should be 100% *pro-life*.