This review appeared in Volume 11(1) of The Semiotic Review of Books.

Re-mapping Snow's Gulf

Review of: Peterson, J. (1999). Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture Of Belief. New York, NY: Routledge.


Chris Westbury
Department Of Psychology,
P220 Biological Sciences
University Of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E1

E-mail: chrisw@ualberta.ca


Keywords: neuropsychology, mythology, meaning, belief, culture

       Just over 40 years ago, C.P. Snow (1949) published a little book entitled The Two Cultures. His title referred to the cleaving of the world of ideas into two domains: one inhabited by scientists alone; the other by everyone else who might wish to lay claim to being an educated thinker. The division Snow was writing about was hardly new, and he was not the first to write of it. However, as he pointed out, by the middle of the last century the gulf that separated the two domains was rapidly growing. The astonishing accumulation of scientific knowledge seemed to make it possible, for the first time in history, for a highly-educated person to take a kind of perverse pride in his ignorance of non-scientific matters; to dismiss an interest in such things as an unnecessary weakness. Whatever science couldn't know seemed increasingly irrelevant compared to what science did know: how to decipher the structure of DNA, how to build machines that could solve problems their human creators could not solve, and how to fell entire cities at a single blow.
       Since Snow's book appeared, the gulf between scientific and non-scientific thinking has grown. In psychology today, that same gulf is threatening to rend the discipline apart. Many of the hard-science psychologists- those who deal every day with neurons, hormones, brain tissue, microscopes, scalpels, and canulas- increasingly feel that they have nothing in common with their colleagues who deal mainly in abstracta- the social psychologists, clinicians, cognitivists, experimental computer scientists, hermeneuticists, semioticians, and moral philosophers with whom they have been uneasily sharing departmental quarters. In universities around the planet, the hard scientists are living up to their name, drawing a line that deliberately excludes their erstwhile colleagues in the Faculty of Arts. Increasingly, they are demanding, if not their own separate departments of Neuroscience, Comparative Biology, or Behavioral Science, at least their own floor and their own hiring committees.
       A few psychologists- hard scientists or otherwise- view this development with despair. To them, the division of their discipline into the objective and the subjective cleaves our world at precisely the point that is most psychologically interesting. There are important questions that fall squarely into Snow's Gulf, questions that demand answers. How does simple neural tissue sustain our rich phenomenological world? What is the relation between what we see and what exists? What does it mean to be human? Why are we so destructive? How did I get to be me?
       Scientists are understandably leery of addressing such grand questions because any answers offered must clearly be speculative and partial. Jordan Peterson's book Maps Of Meaning tries to show that this is not the same thing as saying those answers are completely unconstrained- that is, it is not the same as saying we have no idea at all what the answer will look like. If we identify real constraints on the kinds of answer that humans can offer to any question, we also make some progress towards finding an answer to the grand questions. Where might such constraints lie?
       On one on side of Snow's Gulf- the newly-developed side of hard science- there must be identifiable limits grounded in neurobiology. After all, human beings are mammals, with mammalian nervous systems and with all the biological, chemical, and computational limitations to which such systems are inherently subject. Answers to questions about how the world appears to us, about what that appearance means, are certainly constrained by the hard limitations of our neural wetware.
       On the other side of Snow's Gulf, the kinds of answers we can give to the big questions are limited by our ability to compress complex information into coherent narratives. Any answer to our grand questions- any answer that could ever matter to beings like us- has to be both tellable and comprehensible. It has to seem to make a kind of sense. Not just anything does. So, suggests Peterson, if we want to understand the limits on the answers to the big questions, we can try to understand the limits of meaningful narrative. We can try to understand what makes a story seem interesting, coherent, and satisfying.
       It is remarkable how little attention has been paid to the connection between these two limits. Clearly, the structure of our brains must to a large extent structure our narrative worlds, just as it structures our perceptual world. Peterson tries to outline the connection between these two limits, narrowing in on it from both sides of the gulf at once. The book-length argument he offers is dense and long. However, the essence of it might be stated in a single aphorism: Action grounds belief. Less pithily, we might say that what we believe is rooted in our need to select behaviors appropriate to our situation. Unpacking the implications in that statement takes some doing.
       The argument from neurobiology is perhaps the easier side of the argument to grasp. Peterson lays it out early in his book. The key idea is one that no biological scientist would have the slightest trouble accepting or justifying on evolutionary terms: what is unknown is frightening. Mammals like us, Peterson points out, are built to fear what we do not know, what we do not understand. A little-remarked consequence of this is that what is unknown constitutes a single entity with a single affective valence: "Fear is the a priori position, the natural response to everything for which no structure of behavior has been designed and inculcated. Fear is the innate reaction to everything that has not been rendered predictable, as a consequence of successful, creative exploratory behavior undertaken in its presence, at some time in the past" (p. 57). The dizzying variety of places and things that any single individual (man or mouse) does not understand are in a real sense (for all practical purposes) one single thing. The unknown constitutes the most primitive metaphor or mapping of one thing onto another. It constitutes the most primitive archetype.
       Peterson reviews the neural processes underlying this collapse of the unknown into a single category. When a mammal like us approaches what we do not know, a small almond-shaped organ called the amygdala- with strong links to cortical and subcortical memory circuits- starts firing. That firing underlies a huge shift in normal neural functioning, which is experienced subjectively as anxiety or fear. The only way to escape being continually thrown into this unpleasant state is to transform the unknown into the known.
       For most mammals, the only means of effecting this transformation is by directly interacting with the unknown. A mouse or monkey can only familiarize himself with what is novel by actively scouting it out. For most of our evolutionary history, our species was probably no different. If we wanted to understand a thing, we had to interact with it- observe it, touch it, walk on it, taste it. Things had no conceivable separate existence from our experience of them. Anything we had not experienced (directly or vicariously) fell into the category of the unknown.
       As our store of knowledge of the world increased in size and complexity, we began to organize it for transmission to others. Part of this transmission was in the form of simple know-how about particular aspects of the world: information such as 'Don't eat these mushrooms or you will die'. Peterson is more concerned with a different, more general method. Human beings began to learn, codify, and share general principles which could be used for turning any unknown entity into a known entity: "we can learn not only the precise behaviors that constitute adaptation, but the process by which those behaviors were generated...we can learn not only skill, but meta-skill (can learn to mimic the pattern of behavior to generate new skills)" (p. 76). It is trying to explain the implications of this transmission of meta-skills that forces Peterson to jump to the non-scientist side of the gulf. The bulk of his book is devoted to fleshing out the claim that mythological narrative in all cultures is intended to play the role of transmission of meta-skills for turning the unknown into the known- that it is precisely "the encapsulation of meta-skill in a story that makes that story great" (p. 76).
       In simplest terms, Peterson (citing and building upon a large body of previous mythological analyses) argues the structure of such great stories always hinges on a character- a hero- who motivates himself to overcome his fear of the unknown by imagining a future in which he will be better off for having done so. With a future in sight as a goal, he is able to formulate a plan of action that might turn what Peterson calls 'the Unbearable Present' (now made even more unbearable by its contrast to the imagined goal state) into 'the Ideal Future'. By definition, such a plan plunges the hero into chaos, since it necessarily forces him to confront what he necessarily fears: the Unknown.
       Citing extensively from mythological literature, Maps Of Meaning explains how this simple narrative structure is complicated by a great many factors. One complication is that in many cases we do not have access to our own motivations. The hero of mythology, just like you or I, may have "a very narrow window of expressible 'frames of reference'- conscious stories" (p. 88). If the hero is nevertheless able to proceed in his journey through the Unknown, it is because of metaphoric, imagistic processes, whose import and neurological underpinnings Peterson elaborates in some detail. A second complication is that our hero may be influenced by those metaphoric, imagistic processes which have been implanted and cultivated by his exposure to the ritualized, dramatized, analogized, or only partially understood stories of previous heroes. Adaptive process can be codified through such means without necessarily being explicitly expressed in words. A third complication is that the process of journeying from known to unknown may be recursively embedded, in many ways. One hero may serve as the motivation for the next, and his story setting the stage for the next story. One may today find oneself fighting for justice because a favorite contemporary novelist read Henry Thoreau, who (let us imagine) read about Don Quixote, who found himself fighting because Christian knights found themselves fighting because Jesus Christ found himself fighting because he knew some great stories. And so on. To make things even more complicated, a single narrative (or lived experience) may itself contain multiple adaptive processes recursively embedded within it.
       A fourth complication concerns Peterson very much. This is the historically-recent emergence of Snow's Gulf, as a result of the explicit codification of the scientific method. According to Peterson: "Before the emergence of empirical methodology, which allowed for methodological separation of subject and object in description, the world-model contained [only] abstracted inferences about the nature of existence, derived primarily from observations of human behavior. This means, in essence, that pre-experimental man observed 'morality' in his behavior and inferred...the existence of a source or rationale for that morality in the structure of the 'universe' [the known world] itself" (p. 103). The growth of Snow's Gulf reflects the fact that scientific methodology has given man the means to uncouple factual knowledge from morality, which Peterson defines as a body of codified knowledge rooted in behavioral consequences. Our pre-scientific ancestors lived entirely on the ancient side of Snow's Gulf, in a world governed in all aspects by such behavioral consequences. We (especially those of us who have laid stakes on the new side of Snow's Gulf) live in a world governed by facts which are independent of those who know them- a world in which things have, as it were, a life of their own, independent of us.
       The behavioral consequences marking the bounds of the knowable world for our ancestors were sometimes extremely restrictive, imposing strict limitations on what could count as 'known' and therefore as acceptable. An important part of Peterson's project is to analyze how shared understanding of these limitations come to define cultures. The rise of the boundaries defining cultures allowed for the rise of tyranny, intolerance, xenophobia, and war, as those culturally-defined limits of the known came to be experienced in just the same way as natural limits of the known: because they were marked out by fear and anxiety. Peterson cites Nietzsche (1966), who wrote: "Consider any morality with this in mind: what there is in it of 'nature' teaches hatred of the laisser [sic] aller, of any all-too-great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks- teaching the narrowing of our perspective, and thus in a certain sense stupidity..." (cited on p. 220).
However, there was, Peterson argues, also one positive aspect to such a morally-bounded universe: it was experienced as meaningful. The manner in which we conceive of 'meaning' is, Peterson insists throughout his book, deeply rooted in codified behavioral information. To try to sever that link is, in mythological terms, to follow the path of one of the most dangerous archetypes, to which Peterson devotes his final chapter: the eternal adversary, the hostile brother, the cruel tyrant. The devil. Such severance amounts to succumbing to the sin of pride, by living according to a belief that one's own abilities- unchecked by the codified wisdom of ancestors, unconstrained by concern for consequences- are wholly sufficient for understanding how to proceed in life. Peterson argues at length and with passion that such a belief is not, as it may appear, the logical extension of the hero myth- the hero as ultra-capable loner, unconstrained by anything other than his own abilities. It is rather a perversion of the hero myth which can only end with a spiral descent into the decadent chaos of meaninglessness. If you need an example, think of how the Unibomber's personal project was received by society at large. Even as he travels on his mythic journey, a genuine hero necessarily exists because of and for a larger group whose existence has made it possible for him to venture out. The existence of such a group grounds and dignifies his journey. It makes that journey possible, worthwhile, and comprehensible.
       Summarizing the gist of this sprawling book hardly does it justice. Peterson's passion for relevant work on both side of Snow's Gulf is evident, and the book is richer in neurological, mythological, literary, and philosophical summary and analyses- helpfully buttressed with diagrammatic and chapter summaries- than can be conveyed in just a few pages. Indeed, its richness at times presents an impediment to understanding its complex argument. Weighing in as it does at nearly 500 dense pages, this is a book that demands from its reader a good proportion of the passionate devotion that obviously went into its construction. In a preface as unexpected in this kind of a book as it is moving, Peterson explains in detail where his own passion for his topic comes from. Peterson began the work that eventually lead to this book as a form of self-therapy, to overcome a crisis of faith he experienced which left him with nightmares, compulsions, and a horror of living in a world as close to the brink of self-annihilation as our modern world is. His study of psychology was motivated by his need to understand how the world- and he- had come to be what they are.
       This personal passion of its author informs all aspects of Maps Of Meaning, and lends the book a rare and compelling force among academic works. In his preface, Peterson approvingly cites Jung's (1976) claim that: "The very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee that that speaker has really experienced it, and gained something from his sufferings. He will then reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us the truth." Neuropsychology and mythology are demanding and often dry subjects which are difficult for a non-specialist reader to tackle. Few readers can come to Peterson's book with the appropriate knowledge, since he tries to tie together subjects that are usually considered far apart, and rarely successfully conjoined. (Sure, Carl Jung tried- but scientists who can read Jung with understanding are rarer than Snow's poets who can cite the Second Law Of Thermodynamics with understanding.) Peterson makes strong demands on his reader to understand both mythology and (to a lesser extent) neuropsychology. His own clear passion, and his insistence in the importance of such multi-disciplinary understanding and the importance of his argument, will push readers from both sides of the gulf to make the extra effort to comprehend what the other side has to offer.
       No book of this scope can hope to give the final word on its subject matter. The questions it addresses are too big. The answers provided by any single author can only point to paths which each reader must go on explore in his own way. It is interesting to see how strongly Peterson's viewpoint dovetails with and extends the viewpoints of others who have tackled similar questions. Maps Of Meaning enriches and extends the ideas laid out, for example, by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). Like Peterson's book, Philosophical Investigations attempted to lay out how the apparent structure of the mind was conditioned by cultural and historical variables, and to explain why rules for interpretation could not be cited as the final ground of meaning, but themselves stood in need of explanation. Wittgenstein was interested in (although sceptical of) both neuropsychology and mythology, and I suspect he might have appreciated Peterson's book as a rightful 'heir to the subject that used to be called philosophy'. Peterson's ideas also resonate fruitfully and in profound ways with Gregory Bateson's (1972) cybernetic/ecological understanding of mind. Bateson emphasized that we need to think of information as an active transformation of a perceived difference. For Bateson, differences that make a difference (his definition of a 'bit' of information) are error activated, insofar as they are perceived to exist by an organism only in situations where they hold a behavioral relevance. This belief led Bateson to conclude, much like Peterson, that the complex human inner world is built largely on the perception of similarities between abstracted descriptions grounded in behavioral relevance. Peterson makes a few brief passing references to Wittgenstein, but none to Bateson, suggesting that the similarities may reflect some genuine convergence of views on a tricky topic, rather than simply a lineage of intellectual influence. Peterson's book enriches and extends the viewpoints of these predecessors.
       How does simple neural tissue sustain our rich phenomenological world? What is the relation between what we see and what exists? What does it mean to be human? Why are we so destructive? How did I get to be me? These questions will be asked and re-asked as long as humans live. Answers will be told and re-told. None will ever satisfy all critics. The answer Peterson has worked so hard to outline in his book satisfies me, because it deepens and extends my understanding of what it means to ask and answer these kinds of questions. It reminds me why they are vitally important, even if our most powerful question-answering tools cannot address them. Maps Of Meaning tries to build a bridge across Snow's Gulf by treading through some of the most unstable, impenetrable, and delicate territory in that gulf- the territory of Meaning. No scientist who understands the matter can doubt that Meaning is destined to forever escape science's amazing toolbox. All that matters to us as living human beings will never be expressible only by reference to our physiological structure and its lawful neurophysiological state transformations. The subjective experience of those states as meaningful is deeply shaped by the cultural milieu in which the human neurophysiology is placed. If we are to understand what it means to be human, why we experience ourselves the way we do, then we will certainly need to understand what properties our cultural milieu has, what constraints it imposes on our own experience, and why. Maps Of Meaning is a big, bold attempt to show us that those properties are not simply random or of 'merely philosophical' interest just because they fall squarely on the ancient side of Snow's Gulf. It is an attempt to explain why an understanding of those properties need not be 'mere' story-telling. Effective story-telling, Peterson insists, is never 'mere'. It is a vital element to understanding who we are, and why our brains deliver the world to us in the way that they do.

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps To An Ecology Of Mind: Collected Essays In Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, And Epistemology. New York: Ballantine Books.

Jung, C. G. (1976). The Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche. Bolligen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nietszche, F. (1966). Beyond Good And Evil: Prelude To A Philosophy of the Future. (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Snow, C.P. (1959). The Two Cultures. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell