DR. PETERSON'S REDEMPTION?

I am reading Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." I watched his recent presentation in London on You Tube. I admire Dr. Peterson's capacity to think about and convey complex ideas. I must say this short reflection barely touches the obvious depth of Dr. Peterson's education, reflection and hard work on his book. 

Dr. Peterson ended his lecture in London by saying that the quest for Being (whole?) within the scope of his 12 rules will never end until this world is "redeemed". This fascinated me. Dr. Peterson's grounding in behavioral psychology and neuroscience comes forth forcefully in his book. He presents a vision of integrated individual human existence between Order and Chaos. He stresses the immutable within human brains and observable universal probabilities. It is deep, tinged with religious ideas and historical psychological thought. 

Dr. Peterson is an hypnotic lecturer. An unlikely one. He paces and speaks in a punctuated ramble while often looking at the floor. But he manages to get some very complex concepts across with humor and personal anecdotes. I find it hard not to listen to him when I bring up one of his many You Tube videos. 

Yet there are nagging questions in my mind about his perspective on human existence. For example, he professes religious ideals from the Judeo-Christian tradition as representative of his view of what is good and evil. But his lectures reveal a strange cocktail of archetypal beliefs, individualism and metaphysical naturalism.  He sees an unavoidable comparison between the hierarchy in human existence to the hierarchy evolved in lobsters over 350 million years. In other words, he feels we are born somewhere on a natural scale from one to ten. Ones rule. Tens grovel. He also sees the Pareto Scale as a valid summation of just about everything: Basically 10% rise to the top of any system. The rest fall to a graphed chasm of inferiority.

But redemption? There seems no room for redemption in this scheme as presented. Dr. Peterson contradicts his assertion of the dour realities of biology with exhortation of individual change and purposeful responsibility. He advises personal death and resurrection through progressive life remodeling. Letting that which impedes die to give birth to the functional. Perhaps this is the redemption he envisions all (biologically impaired) humans capable of in some distant era. 

The self-determinism implied is also paired with a human exceptionalism from the Judeo-Christian tradition. This comes across as somewhat scattered, since so much of Dr. Peterson's formulations come from comparisons of human biology to the biology of other living creatures across the natural spectrum. It feels like a stretch to me. An attempt to join the strands of his views on human existence together harmoniously. It left me wondering if aliens who are greatly advanced beyond us humans, but incapable of communicating with us on our level, might someday try to compare themselves to us in the way Dr. Peterson compares us to lobsters after they have dissected enough of us to figure it out.