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Amphy64 t1_ja4uu6g wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Are the books of Jordan Peterson worth reading? by Mfgenji

A better room-tidying book is Decluttering at the Speed of Life. Otherwise, what were you wanting to learn/why were you interested?

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[deleted] t1_ja4v9vc wrote

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tigerCELL t1_ja55ku2 wrote

Reading is great, but experiencing is even more impactful. You can read about racism, for example, but when you actually meet Black people, spend time with them, talk and eat with them, worship with them, listen to them, it has a bigger and longer lasting effect. It's like learning languages, you can Rosetta Stone all day, but get on a plane and actually go to the country and immerse yourself. Then you'll get it, often even without it being explained.

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Amphy64 t1_ja4x37k wrote

Big topics! He's not going to teach you about those things - he can be criticised on purely factual grounds. If you just read fiction from different time periods you'll soon see what Peterson is claiming plain isn't true (this isn't about political divides, rightwingers here in the UK would extremely rarely be taken in by him, just because here we tend to be exposed to more history), and I think you'll learn about people, too.

If the references to mythology Peterson makes appeal to you, then it may also help you start picking more of those up, and you could read about it directly. Maybe even a book about Roman civilisation - I wanted to know more about that and felt a bit confused/overwhelmed, found SPQR is really accessible while containing loads of information.

Maybe you can narrow the topics down further, to a specific area of interest?

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[deleted] t1_ja4xs5g wrote

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Amphy64 t1_ja53koj wrote

I'd definitely recommend SPQR as a starting point then, it really helped me put the pieces together later when references to Roman history came up in what I was reading, and there's a lot about the politics in it.

Religion as you mentioned above, a lot of writers in the Western canon are coming from Christian traditions, from Chaucer's corrupt and model religious officials in The Canterbury Tales, to vice, virtue and hypocrisy in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, to Dickens' redemption of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, to Trollope's examination of different approaches to Christianity in The Barchester Chronicles and also some of the Palliser series (which is more about the contemporary political structure. Trollope himself had tried to become a MP). Honestly, if you read just Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey, which is pretty short, think about how Agnes relates to contemporary ideas of Christian virtue (Anne especially is interested in these ideas, her sisters less so but it's still an aspect, they were the daughters of a clergyman) and about women's role, I'd guarantee you'd learn more than Peterson will ever teach you about how women actually lived (if reading fiction, don't forget to notice lower class women, who may not always feature prominently. Men too).

Life of Pi is a contemporary novel that's significantly about faith and its importance to people, and very quick to read - it can also be interpreted in terms of Jungian archetypes. Jungian models are much better for analysing literature than real people, though. I'm going to see the play streamed to cinema next month, and there's also a movie adaptation.

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