2: Chaos: The Feminine?

Welcome to my second post. Since I am on a Jordan Peterson kick I thought I’d talk about the one area of what I’ve heard/read in his material that I am not quite clear on.

What follows is a poorly and loosely constructed recount of JP’s work, something I vaguely remember hearing in a podcast and the question as to how they reconcile.

In his second book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Peterson talks about many things. Among them the way that life is best lived when one can approximately balance between the forces of order and chaos. These two poles are central to each moment in life and at the same time color and drive absolutely everything around us. From the organization of our brain into two hemispheres, one that masters operation of the known and another who masters navigation of the unknown, neither of which can thrive without the other’s complimentary contribution, to the philosophies that undergird our political systems, and everything in between, this polarity between order and chaos, is a reality to be accepted and mastered if we are to survive as individuals, families, tribes, nations, and specie.

At one end of the spectrum is chaos. A world, a state of being, characterized by the unknown. A dark state that cannot be predicted or mapped. A state of potentiality that contains both opportunities and threats. A world of partial chaos is one that allows for new information to enter, some of which can help the specie survive a change in the environment. Art is indeed an exercise is making contact with chaos. Bringing the unknown to the conscious to be examined. A world of partial chaos, of art, discovery, creativity, is in touch with a flow of new solutions. It is a flexible and thus survivable world. A world of complete chaos is one in which position is unknowable and direction is undeterminable. Natural disasters, wars, tigers, mother bears, moral relativity, and the resulting collectivist disasters of socialism and communism are all examples of loss of touch with security and direction and thus subjugation to inevitable demise.

On the other side of the spectrum is order. A world consisting of boundaries. A state of predictability and efficiency, marked not by uncontrollable emotions but by inescapable logic. A world of partial order is a world efficient at self-organizing, at processing raw material into effective products, at reducing waste and maximizing fruit per unit of effort. The modern day corporation is indeed an example of successful application of order. It contains codified processes with distinct boundaries of behavior and actions supported by sub-process upon sub-process. The more boundaries are clearly defined and ownership assigned, the less that is left undetermined, the more efficient and thus successful (profitable) the business. A world of complete order is a survivable world only in so far as the conditions do not change. Characterized by disdain of loose boundaries, and even a disgust of the “other” (a concept only possible because of the observance of boundary), a world of total order is always at risk of falling into non-empathic, robotic maximization of logic beyond its human impact, at risk of profit untethered to human cost, at risk of the drive to exterminate what doesn’t belong within the boundaries, as did Nazi Germany.

Ok, those severely abbreviated summaries are probably significantly off the mark. If you want the real thing, go read the real book. The concepts are well and good with me. The takeaway is not difficult to formulate. Don’t go full OCD or else you’ll squeeze the color, warmth, and the creative problem solving right out of life…and then your ossified society will be destroyed by an outside influence you refuse to adjust to….and by the same token, don’t hope and wish for total kaleidoscopic, hedonistic, boundryless, orderless chaos, because nothing can be organized into any significant system of survival of the elements without some order.

The next layer is to connect the gender dominance. Peterson connects this to the statistic that men are slightly more often interested in things (and thus, seek to boil observations into their underlying systems and forces…logic and vector) and women are slightly more often interested in people (and thus the nuanced, colorful, granular, and organic art over science). This, he explains is characterized by how in the most egalitarian political and economic systems in the world, the Scandinavian countries, men are MORE prevalent in the STEM fields and women MORE prevalent in the caring industries (nursing, etc), meaning that the more we remove barriers to choice, the more women choose right brain dominant work and men left brain dominant work. He also explains that this behavior is also observed in infant primates and thus is not an artifact of culture or society. Again, if you’re not following me so far, go read it for yourself and provide a correction as to where I’m misinterpreting. If you don’t agree with the factoids, take that up with Peterson (and the social science he is quoting, which is conducted by the homogenously left/liberal community of social scientists).

This leaves the stage set to say that order is a masculine characteristic and chaos feminine. I believe he takes a much deeper dive into this in his book Maps of Meaning, which I have not read, mostly because after watching his lectures on the subject, I think I am not yet intellectually prepared to digest the depth of it.

Casting aside the trouble of how not take personally that you represent chaos, another idea is worth exploring.
It is the case that some species have no sex. There are organisms that replicate basically as an act of self-cloning. One could say that every individual is therefore either sexless, or perhaps female. And this brings up the question, why would it be advantageous to have two sexes when it is so much more efficient to simply self-replicate?

One answer, I think the generally accepted answer (biologists please chime in), is that the evolution of the male in a specie brought one specific advantage: variance. With the emergence of two sources of data as requirements for procreation, the likelihood of corrupt data, damaged DNA, and also new combinations of genotype increased. This was potentially chaotic for the individual and simultaneously advantageous for the species, come an environmental change. At such a time, genetic variance within a specie would increase the likelihood that some part of the specie would be better suited for the changing environment and thus survive the change and carry the specie forward. Evolution. If this is true, then in a strictly biological sense, it is maleness that created the necessary randomness/chaos that enabled survival in a changing environment. And so therein lies my question. Where in the biological history does that flip into the modern day finding that female brain/mind leans (even if slightly) away from order (towards openness/creativity/chaos) and maleness towards order?

Any ideas?

Is my question valid? Answerable?

Any evolutionary biologists (or Peterson disciples) in the crowd? Please chime in! Educate!

Until next time.

Cheers.