I have recently been rereading 12 Rules for Life. It has been an interesting experience; the last time I read it, I was an atheist, with a very basic grounding in philosophy and ethics, and no idea who Joseph Campbell was. Revisiting the book now and reading it through a theological lens (and having made at least one attempt to hack my way through the tangled undergrowth of comparative mythology) has yielded all sorts of interesting nuances in Peterson's work. Some of them do lead me to wonder if he was perhaps insufficiently discerning about his sources- I seem to recall him quoting Christ from the so-called "Gospel of Thomas", a pseudepigraph which famously ends with the Son of God declaring that "every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven"- and, though I am intrigued by his identifying the mediation between chaos and order with the hodos, or "Way", of John 14:6 (and also his relating it to the Chinese concept of the dao),¹ I am far from convinced that they are the same thing. That said, it is clear that the philosophy conveyed in Peterson's 12 rules is the product of prolonged meditation on profound matters, and it offers much which is wise and beneficial; I can attest to the positive effect his philosophy has had in my own life.

The point which I would like to pick up on here comes in the seventh rule: "Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient." This chapter of Peterson's work covers a protracted examination of the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism; interwoven with this is a lengthy treatment of the development of Christian ethics, and their critique by the nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche. It is, I think, the philosophical summit of the book; in a sense, all the other rules are founded on this one, and if Rule 7 is adopted as a fundamental maxim then the rest will arise naturally. It fixes its gaze unerringly on the hideous things we humans will do to each other, and asks "what could any of this possibly mean?" Peterson's answer is what caught my eye:²

There are some actions that are so intrinsically terrible that they run counter to the proper nature of human Being. This is true essentially, cross-culturally- across time and place. These are evil actions. No excuses are available for engaging in them. To dehumanize a fellow being, to reduce him or her to the status of a parasite, to torture and to slaughter with no consideration of individual innocence or guilt, to make an art form of pain- that is wrong.

This statement is worth reading and rereading. Peterson has laid his finger on a serious problem: the sceptical, nihilistic philosophy that underlies the secular Western world has eroded our ability to talk in terms of moral imperatives. Peterson's contention, in response to this, is that some actions are wrong: not matters of opinion, not accidental byproducts of evolution, not I-live-my-truth, you-live-yours moral relativism, but objectively, inarguably wrong. They represent violations of a transcendental moral order. It is possible to miss Peterson's point; I know this because I missed it myself, reading the book as I did when I was an atheist. Reaching this point, Peterson does not digress into its theological import, but speeds away almost immediately to chase down its practical and psychological applications. The theological import, however, is what most interests me.

Peterson talks here about "the proper nature of human Being." What he's describing is called telos: the intended aim, purpose, or end of a thing. It forms a standard by which you can judge a thing to be good or bad. A fountain pen, for example, is good insofar as it fulfils the telos of writing: a fountain pen which cannot retain ink is thus a bad pen. I find that most people are happy to go along with this line of reasoning just as long as they think they can leave it within the bounds of the fact/value distinction: telos is a subjective thing, confined to the brain of the person making the judgement. As soon as this distinction becomes threatened, however, they retreat from the concept. I do not think this is appropriate, for the reason that Peterson has outlined: you are forced into the position of saying that the horrors of the twentieth century were not really wrong, merely unpleasant for those who suffered them. "Wrong", after all, is a normative claim; it implies an objective standard of justice, a telos of human nature which can be violated. The sceptical, nihilistic treatment of this issue would reduce the wrongness of an action to a matter of opinion; this is the one thing, Peterson argues, we cannot do. He continues:

What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong.

This, Peterson says, became the "cornerstone" of his belief.³ His decades of wrestling with the extremes of human depravity brought him to the conclusion that some actions are morally unjustifiable. That, I note, carries with it the assumption of a standard which transcends the human mind, and thus forces us to acknowledge that we are accountable to a superordinate moral principle; if it is possible for an action to be wrong in all cases, then that implies by sheer necessity the existence of a highest good, a supreme standard by which all actions are to be measured. This prompts the question: if it isn't a human invention, then where did this objective morality come from? And note where we are now. We are talking about the existence of a metaphysical reality, supremely good, unchanging, transcending human thought and feeling. Almost by accident, we have found ourselves on God's doorstep; ironically, we have arrived there through the fact of evil, which is the very thing that for so many sceptics is meant to serve as disproof of God's existence.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of the issue; I think Peterson's "reverse problem of evil" would require some developing to be an effective argument. Even so, it is worth contemplating in its present form. To call any action "wrong" immediately places the sceptic in dangerous territory, and yet to refuse to do so is equally ruinous. This is not so much a moral dilemma as it is a dilemma about morality, an impossible choice which faces the secular moral relativism of our time. Call something evil, and you must explain the transcendence of what is good; call nothing evil, and you have reduced the worst atrocities of human history to mere differences of opinion. Either option, I think, is ultimately fatal.