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| Image by Victoria from Pixabay |
I was at a Royal Ranger adventure camp last weekend. Camp was fun, but this post is not about camp. That’s just the setting for when I heard the thing I want to talk about. On the last morning, the speaker* played a clip that included the following quote:
“A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.” – Jordan Peterson
I’m sure Mr. Peterson has said that more than once. I couldn't find the exact clip used by the camp speaker, but you
can find those words at the end of this clip from an interview Jordan Peterson did with Jocko Willink.
I heard those words, and I did not like them. They felt… wrong
somehow. Not completely wrong. More like incomplete or misleading. I am writing
this post in an attempt to understand why I don’t like the words. Writing helps
me organize my thoughts. If you like, you can come along for the ride.
Warriors
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Batman. He was tough and
cool and helped people through the power of punching bad guys in the face. I
also wanted to be a knight because they had cool armor, were heroes, and saved the day by stabbing bad guys or dragons or trolls in the face. My
brothers and I would make cardboard swords and cover them in tinfoil to make
them shiny and then beat each other over the head with them. I also pretended to be
Wolverine because he was a gravel-voiced loner who saved the day by stabbing bad
guys in the face with his fist-claws like a Batman-knight hybrid.
There is something about heroism, about the use of strength
and skill and violence for good, that resonates in the hearts of men. It touches
something deep inside us. We hear stories of great battles and heroic self-sacrifice
and an ancient place deep inside of us stirs. Mr. Peterson’s quote appeals to
that place inside of men that yearns to be powerful for the sake of our family and
friends. A place that yearns to be the right kind of dangerous.
We need warriors. As a Christian, I believe that we live in
a fallen world. I believe humanity’s rebellion has released sin. The world
exists in a constant state of war between good and evil, between God and Satan,
and between man and man. We hurt each other, steal from each other, mock,
belittle, and abuse each other. Paradoxically, humanity needs warriors to help
establish peace.
So is Mr. Peterson wholly correct in his assessment? Should
all men strive to be dangerous (violent) and to keep that violence in check by
force of their will? Is that the quintessential man, man in his proper and true
form?
No.
Heroes
One of my favorite fictional heroes is Superman. He is
incredibly strong and nearly invincible. He can fly. He can shoot laser beams
from his eyeballs. One of his chief opponents was a normal human. Just some
bald rich dude named Lex. But Superman, with all his powers, doesn’t just snap
off Lex’s head or laser-beam him in the face because Superman is bound by a moral
code. In that respect, he is the epitome of the dangerous man from Mr. Peterson’s
quote.
But who sets the moral code and when is it okay to use violence? Warriors aren’t really warriors if they refuse to go to war. Are all men who have the potential for violence and only use it when their moral code allows good? There were many brave warriors fighting for the Nazis in World War II. They were dangerous and only used violence when allowed by their moral code. They didn’t roam through Berlin wantonly killing any person they saw, after all. But they did evil. Their moral code was twisted. It takes a gross revision of history to make the Nazis heroes, and we cannot call them good.
Compare them to Desmon Doss. Young Mr. Doss was a shipyard worker in Virginia in the early 1940s. He joined the Army to save the world. But he was a pacifist. He refused to carry a gun. He was, in other words, harmless. By Mr. Peterson’s definition, he was not a good man and could not be a good man. He was weak and cowardly.
You can read more about him here, but the short version is that Mr. Doss is one of only three pacifists to win the Medal of Honor. Dozens of men were saved by this harmless, no-good man who kept rushing into danger to pull his fellow soldiers out of harms way. Willingly putting yourself in danger in order to save your fellow man in service of a greater cause has to be called heroic. It has to be called good or at least it has to be call something in service of good.
Then sings my soul
I said earlier that Mr. Peterson’s definition of good men resonated
in men’s souls. What I left out was that it resonates because it gets close to
the truth, but it is not the truth. It is incomplete and misleading in its
incompletion. Mr. Peterson is misconstruing the ability to commit violence with
the will to act.
David killed Goliath. He stained the field with the giant’s
blood. Mr. Peterson would approve. The Apostle Paul went around selling tents
and telling people about Jesus. He spent a good deal of his life after meeting
Jesus getting beaten to a pulp by angry Jews. He was violent pre-Jesus, but
decidedly non-violent as a Christian. Was he no longer a good man?
David and Paul share this is in common: They were willing to
lay down their lives in service of God. And that part, that willingness to
self-sacrifice, that willingness to act, to go into danger in the service of
others, is what makes my soul sing. It’s what separates a pacifist from a coward
and a hero from a bully.
The world needs good men and women willing to do hard things
in the service of true good. The ability to commit violence is not what makes
one good. That approach misses the real point.
Sincerely,
Me
*I should add that the camp speakers message was challenge for the boys to go out of their comfort zone in service to Jesus, which is a good message. This post isn't a critique of the camp message.
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