A Petersonian hyper-real refuge for the Book of Mormon?

[drumdude]

It seems to be that LDS leaders are beginning to abandon the “merely real” historicity of the Book of Mormon in exchange for a Jordan Peterson-esque “hyper-real” interpretation of the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8Xc2_FtpHI

At around the 1:13:00 mark, Jordan Peterson begins talking about what makes good drama (I take "drama" to be interchangeable with "fiction" here.) It's good food for thought. Here is a quote from what I think is the most interesting part:

“Is the drama real? And the answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by “real.” I think that great dramas are more real than real. They’re hyper-real. They’re hyper-real because they provide guidelines about how to act that are abstract and even perhaps generic, but applicable across an extraordinarily broad range of situations. So imagine this: you get up in the morning and you do a bunch of things, and someone asks you what you’re doing, what you did and you tell them “well the first thing I did this morning was open my eyes and the second thing was think about whether I wanted to go back to sleep…and I took off my blankets and put my feet on the floor and I stood up and I was blinking while I was doing all of this and I was also breathing.” You really want to listen to that guy? You don’t want to listen to that guy. It’s like why are you telling me that? I want you to tell me something interesting. Well, what is it that’s interesting? And why isn’t that interesting? It’s not obvious.

So now imagine the guy actually tells you a pretty interesting story, a little adventure. Probably, he was doing something normal and something unexpected happened. He had to conjure up some new responses and he either settled the problem or didn’t settle the problem. Yeah, you’re interested in that, especially if he settled the problem because if he could tell you how, when he encountered some unexplored territory, he was able to sew it back together…..That’s kind of a classic story.

A classic story, roughly speaking, is there’s a guy or woman going about their life relatively normally, and something blindsides them and they’re in a state of chaos. Chaos is a place. Chaos is the place you end up when what you’re doing and the world stop matching. And the chaos can be of different degrees.”

https://www.writingforums.com/threads/j ... ma.169915/

It doesn’t matter if the book is real, because it can now be “hyper-real.” It’s beyond true, it’s archetypal. The Book of Mormon is a timeless story with endless applications for our modern lives.

This effectively sidesteps the historical question, and allows Mormons to still say they know the book is “true” in the way Jordan Peterson thinks all archetypal fairytales and morality tales are “true.”

[I Have Questions]

I wonder if people who state “I know the Book of Mormon is true” have a clear understanding of how to articulate what they mean by that statement? What does it mean, specifically? I’ve yet to hear someone give a clear explanation of what they mean when they say that.

[huckelberry]

drumdude, why would you think that LDS leaders are abandoning the real history view of the Book of Mormon? In general, that sounds like an extremely unlikely course. The whole idea of restoration and priesthood authority is built upon the Book of Mormon revelation story. Take it away and what is there left?

I think that Peterson's take on reality of literary fiction is a pretty standard understanding of how fiction can be meaningful.

[drumdude]

drumdude, why would you think that LDS leaders are abandoning the real history view of the Book of Mormon? In general, that sounds like an extremely unlikely course. The whole idea of restoration and priesthood authority is built upon the Book of Mormon revelation story. Take it away and what is there left?

I think that Peterson's take on reality of literary fiction is a pretty standard understanding of how fiction can be meaningful.

I’m referring to a recent thread in which a general authority made some comments about historicity, but I was unable to find the thread on the front page. If anyone finds it please link, but I believe I’m representing their thoughts correctly- that historicity is not of primary concern, the “hyper real” elements of the book are.

I’m not aware of any common understanding that fiction being meaningful makes it “more real than real” as Peterson often puts it.

[huckelberry]

drumdude, what you refer to is on page two. It opens:

The Book of Mormon is not primarily a historical record that looks to the past. Rather, this volume of scripture looks to the future and contains important principles, warnings, and lessons intended for the circumstances and challenges of our day. Hence, the Book of Mormon is a book about our future and the times in which we do now and will yet live.

Ancient voices from the dust plead with us today to learn this everlasting lesson: prosperity, possessions, and ease constitute a potent mixture that can lead even the righteous to drink the spiritual poison of pride.

First, it seems Bednar is starting down the path toward a belief in a non-historical Book of Mormon, emphasizing lessons, warnings, and principles intended for the future.

Second, the irony of an LDS church leader preaching that prosperity leads to the poison of pride is rich. (Pun intended, as the hoard of money LDS leaders are no longer successful in hiding is obscene.)

Is this a bid to convince members they are better off being poor, and therefore they should let the institutional church have their assets?

Maybe I am being a stick in the mud but I just do not see this as a possible course for the LDS church unless it intends to self destruct. As I observed in that thread what I see here is an old observation that it is believed that by inspiration the book was a message for our time. I feel pretty sure I heard that idea multiple times from LDS sources so I am not seeing it as anything new.

Hyper real is a colorful choice of phrase.

[Physics Guy]

The question of whether stories are real came up once in an English class that I took. At the time I said No, because in a story a character can sit on a chair made of no particular material, but real chairs have to be made out of something specific. I still think that this is an important distinction between fiction and reality, that reality is more detailed.

Peterson has a point, all right, that some stories are more interesting and important than a lot of facts. Those stories have something, and it may well be worth emphasizing that whatever this property is that those stories have, it's a serious competitor with reality. Conceivably it shares some features or aspects with reality. To say that this thing they have is reality, though, just seems wrong. It's the opposite of an insight. It removes most of the value that was gained by noticing this impressive thing about stories, to misunderstand it so badly. We would have been wiser just to laugh at the funny pictures without thinking about the story at all, than to notice how arresting some stories are but then declare that this is reality—let alone hyper-reality.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Whatever it is that those stories do have, what they do not have is this, and this is certainly worth something, too.

[Gadianton]

Like Hardy making the Book of Mormon deep with deconstructionist insights, making BS stories important by hyperreality would be another postmodern venture except an archetype isn't the same things as hyperreal. I've never been able to define these terms adequately for those in the know, however, I think deconstruction would be something like, the relation between signified and signifier is unstable and the signifier can become the signified, whereas in hyperreality the signifier has broken loose from the signified and out there living a life of its own. Note that in Saussure's structural linguistics, a signified is like a concept and signifier a word, it's not a thing in itself, and so building reality with that language is already relativistic before getting to the criticisms of it in poststructuralism. Jean Baudrillard invented hyperreality. The late Clark Goble was the guy who pointed out to me that in the first Matrix, Neo had a copy of one of Baudrillard's books. The most concrete example of hyperreality I can think of would be Baudrillard's most ham-fisted attempt of his own idea. He wrote a book called "The Gulf War Never Happened." You can guess what he means by that without buying the book. The Gulf War is a story constructed by language failures significantly fueled by capitalism. But that doesn't make the failure an archetype. Or if it does, Peterson would need to explain how that works.

The huge irony is that one of Peterson's better known debates, which was the largest failure in communication I've ever witnessed, was with Slavoj Zizek, who is a Marxist. Slavoj is a trendiest of the trendy western Marxists who engages with postmodern thinkers (who criticize Marxism) in that same incomprehensible intellectualizing of "continental" philosophers. Baudrillard was also a critic of Marx, but it's like, they are both critics of capitalism, and Baudrillard is saying, "you Marxists have it wrong, capitalism is way worse than you think!" I mean, capitalism is like the "core" example of hyperreality. Peterson's framing of Marxism and capitalism in that debate came right out of semester 1 at a community college econ class, while Zizek was talking Marxism as the topic has evolved into social theorizing that has nothing to do with GDP and inflation. Zizek would have been right at home discussing hyperreality if Peterson would have been interested in learning something about it then.

I'm not putting down semester 1 of econ, it probably has way more value than anything in postmodernism. However, it's hilarious to watch Peterson up there insisting on the most straightforward, earthbound discussion when it comes to his concerns about high taxes and the left. Yet when it comes to his grift as a promoter of religion, he's diving deeper and deeper into pseudo-postmodern pseudointellectualism to make right-wing religious nut-bag thinking sound all nuanced and important.

[Morley]

I don't remember the poet, but his line was that to name a thing is to write its eulogy--in other words, to describe something has the unwanted side effect of killing it. It constrains, expands, or warps it, until the the language itself becomes the reality, so that the description of the thing eventually consumes the essential reality of the thing. Unfortunately, this destruction of reality through language has too often become the goal, rather than the diagnosis. See: Either today's MAGA movement, or some descriptions of Mormon theology.

Post-structuralists are sometimes blamed for creating this approach of looking at the world. They would say that they didn't create it, that they were just describing and predicting that it would happen.

[Physics Guy]

This might rather be something for the D&D thread in Spirit Paradise, but one time I put something into the game based on my thoughts about fiction and detail. It was a famous lost book of magical lore, known as the Vast Grimoire because it was supposed to be an enormous, encyclopaedic volume. In a great adventure it was found, and turned out to be a single page, with a single line of text in large letters: "You are reading the Vast Grimoire."

The glyphs on the page were, however, extremely ornate. On closer inspection, the curls and decorations within each word were seen to be glyphs in their own right, providing further details about the thing mentioned. The finer details in the word "Grimoire" described the huge book's ancient leather binding, and so on. The finer details in "reading" specified that you were sitting in a cushioned chair, in a wood-panelled room.

The smaller glyphs in the decorations were also ornate. On even closer inspection, they too appeared to be glyphs, spelling words that provided more detail, about the grain in the leather or the patterns on the silk of the cushions. And these glyphs too, in their turn, were ornate ...

At some point readers thought of examining the word "you" more closely, and discovered that its decorative details really did describe them accurately, including their posture and facial expressions, even though this parchment page had been lying in a dragon's hoard for centuries. The problem was that as soon as anyone noticed the uncanny fact that the glyphs seemed to be perceiving them, they went into a trance. Subjectively, they found themselves in that chair, with that thick book on their lap. The thick book had thousands of wide pages, but it was only an index. Beyond the door of that nice panelled reading room was an enormous library.

It was possible for the dreamer to get out into the library, find information, and remember what they had learned after awakening from the trance—if they could manage to awaken. I forget what exactly the challenge was in awakening, but it was tricky. Getting out of the Vast Grimoire was harder than getting into it.

I liked the idea, and the D&D players did, too, but I'm afraid I never really found anything to do with it. I didn't actually have any cool enough ideas for exactly what lost lore the Vast Grimoire might contain. Welp.

[huckelberry]

Gadianton, I decided to watch the linked video of Peterson. It is long winded and I admit not making it to the very end but did listen to most of it. What I understand is the Peterson's thinking is pretty squarely in the area of thinking of William James and Joseph Campbell. I am sure his use of hyper real as a description is not the same as post modern usage of the term. Now I am more familiar with James and Campbell so it is possible I am missing colors in postmodern usage. Jean Baudrillard is only faintly familiar to me but what little I have heard sounds pretty alien to Peterson's thought which I heard in terms of fairly traditional approaches to meaning in literature. He proposed that what matters to us in planning and acting is more real than matter(physical stuff) I think that clarifies what he meant by hyper real.

//Gadianton I should add I enjoyed your post and thought you were making a game effort to spice up Peterson's presentation. One might find Peterson's presentation as belaboring things which might be pretty basic, trying to give them added allure through multiple words.