Don't Bother Children Skateboarding - Part 2

This blog is designed to give people an inner look at a devotional life. Taking time each day to spend time with the Lord. The hope is if you travel on this journey with Rev. Jacob Shaw, you may be more inclined to spend time with the Lord as well. I encourage the use of a devotional, a scripture reading and prayer, then finally some form of artistic mark or photo to tie it all together. 

Today's devotional is taken from: Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: an antidote to chaos. Great Britain: Penguin Random House, 2018. Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding, pp. 302-317

Opening Thought: The fifteen pages of information I devoured today are more challenging to summarize into a neat package of two paragraphs, as Peterson reviews his significant distrust in Marxism and the post-modern philosophies which govern much of the liberal universities.

It is difficult to articulate because I am unsure of my reader’s knowledge base of the history of Marxism, I know for myself, that this has only become an active interest of mine since discovering Peterson, so I too am still learning. Prior to this peak of interest, I had some rudimentary ideas about Karl Marx and his legacy, and the history of socialist countries, but it wasn’t extensive. So, I caution against leaning on any statements about the subject matter because I am by no means an expert.

What I gather from Peterson’s work, is that his larger point for this chapter of 12 Rules, is how the Marxist-inspired institutions are eroding some of the essential qualities of the Western world, (which isn’t perfect, but is a lot better than much of the history of humanity has been able to cultivate), in favor of a failed utopian ideal which has been shown to corrupt again and again. Some of these qualities are merit, embitterment, hierarchies of skill and competence, free will, individual responsibility, individuality, and the tensions between agreeableness and confrontation. Peterson sees this as problematic, because the West is a house of cards, and if you pull out too many cards, or replace cards with new cards that are not stable the house will come tumbling down. Bad news for everyone, except those academic elites, who praise the collapse of the West as the beginning of their idolatrous utopian ideals, and never mind the collateral damage of the billions of people screwed over in the process. Don’t worry its progress, right. Peterson says no, not progress, it has been done before, let’s not repeat it again, Marxist socialism is dangerous!

Opening Prayer: Lord, I hope in all hearts there is a longing to care, even if it is buried beneath layers of rot, help us to uncover our desire to care for one another, to attend to the needs of others, not just the material needs, but the need of meaning and the Spirit, Amen.

Scripture: Psalm 14:1-4 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one. Do all these evildoers know nothing?

Reflection: Looking at a wider collection of Peterson’s work over the last year, I get the sense that Peterson would have spent much of his clinical time trying to bring people back to purpose and meaning. If you have meaning in your life, it will shape your purpose, and if you lack meaning, finding a trajectory of purpose will help to cultivate meaning. When you have 'meaning' you have a context to navigate the chaos that is existence. Meaning and purpose become the sword and shield in your adventures to discover the castle, fight the dragon, win your love’s affection, and discover the buried treasure. Meaning and purpose also echo a transcendent truth that combatting against the disorder of chaos is better than succumbing to it. If you have an ideology that minimizes reality to a series of false idioms, like Marxism does with its heavy focus on “power”, “dominance” and “exclusion” as the systemic forces of evil, then you remove the complexity of reality from our understanding. We rob meaning out of our purpose, and yes that means meaning is complex. When we perform this robbery, purpose suffocates, and we become merely fleshy automatons moving through the motions of existence. And since Marxism is often anti-religious, (Marx is famous for his descriptors like, religion being “opiate of the masses” or “the soul of soulless conditions”) it as a result denounces the pursuit of truth and transcendence. The challenge with Marx's prescription against religion is that objective morality is predicated on the existence of a transcendent source of the morality itself. Religion broadly speaking is a pursuit of that said source of morality, so for Marx to make a moral claim about the morality of religion, he has to rob from a religious worldview to do so, because you cannot make an objective moral claim from atheism, as atheism at most can provide a subjective disposition of an individual. Since Marxism and its partners in atheism, (and we could add secularism and postmodernism in there as well), rob the transcendent calling to the individual, which governs both their personal and communal meaning and purpose, reducing life to a  meaningless subjective material. Hard to feel motivated for life in a vacuum.

The skateboarding youth, which we spoke about last time, was an example of the primal connection we have to embitterment, developing skills, finding meaning, purpose, and joy in the pursuit of becoming our best selves with focused and attainable goals, which are both competitive and socially building. These are essential cards in the house we all rely on.

Challenge for the Week: What give you the most meaning and purpose in your life? Ask yourself, does my meaning and purpose pursue the transcendent ideal that we equate to God? If not, how could praying and meditating on the ideal help to improve your wellbeing and contentment?

Prayer for your week: Lord, help us to see you in all things, In our daily lives, in our intellectual pursuits, and in our humble praise and worship. Amen.

Final Thought and Picture: One of the books Peterson recommends reading is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the world is reshaped by cloning processes and ongoing human conditioning. People are born into a caste and are programmed to behave in preprogrammed ideals. The book centers around two individuals who break the mold slightly, making the corrupt backdrop of this supposed utopia come to light. They rob people of the human experience and lead them to an existence of labor and hedonism. They literally need opiates to keep themselves from going mad in this human-crafted utopia.

I don’t see a far stretch from this and our world today, we are not cloned, but much of our daily attention goes to fuel material hedonism, and opiate-like indulgences to keep the masses calm, it may not be an opium den, but an Apple store will do just the trick.