Maps of Meaning

What happens when an anomaly threatens to disrupt the status quo in which an individual takes part? To answer this question, Peterson first considers religious and cultural traditions as walls between the individual and the forces of chaos. The individual sits in the middle of concentric circles of group identities and moral frameworks or paradigms. The further the outer walls reach, the more protected the individual is from anxiety and existential despair. Even when an individual thinks that these walls don’t exist, as in the case of religious identity, the individual continues to behave according to the moral system of that identity. Every religious and cultural identity embodies an ideal “personality” to which an individual aspires, such as Jesus in Christianity.

When humans denounce their larger cultural and religious traditions yet continue to act according to the moral norms of those traditions, they often sink into despair. Therefore, rather than denounce religious frameworks as outmoded, understanding why humans need such maps of meaning is far more useful.

Peterson writes, “Human culture has, by necessity a paradigmatic structure” (236). Cultures don’t concern themselves with objective description but with the description of cumulative “affective relevance or meaning” (236) of things. Cultures produce articles of faith, which they sometimes represent explicitly as axioms.