One way to approach this chapter is by looking at two of Peterson's 12 Rules from his bestselling book. Specifically, Rule 5 and 11:
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
These rules get at the heart of Chapter 3 in Maps of Meaning. Specifically, Peterson takes the ideas of the Great Mother and the Great Father and applies them to society, culture, and religion. Specifically, we don't step into the world ordering the chaos all on our own. We are born into a family, a culture, a nation, a faith, and a social contract. We step into and grow up within pre-existing maps of meaning. And the relationship here between the individual and culture is dynamic and changing. People explore and push boundaries. Cultures change and develop over time.
Peterson's key insights about this person/culture dynamic go back to his observations about the Great Mother and the Great Father archetypes. Specifically, like walking the line between order and chaos, or balancing risk and security, cultures can be overly flexible or rigid. Thus, Peterson's parental/cultural advice. Don't be too permissive or you'll let your children do things that make you dislike them. But at the same time don't be too controlling, let the kids take risks while they skateboard.
Looked at from the perspective of the developing individual, growing up in a society involves learning how to manage one's own life within the structures of that society. "Enculturation" here is akin to "apprenticeship." The goal of this apprenticeship is to produce an autonomous and mature member of society. We find here similar tensions that have to be managed--submission versus rebellion, dependency versus autotomy--as the developing person can lean too far one way or the other. In fact, this tension never goes away as every member of a group negotiates this balancing act within society. Shall I conform or shall I rebel? Too much of either leads to adaptive problems.
Summarizing, there's an old adage from the psychodynamic tradition, "Some people need tightening, and some people need loosening." Some people have a lot of difficulty with self-management. They lack impulse control. They also regularly violate social norms. These are my students who don't come to class, party too much, and get in trouble with the school, their parents or the law. These students need to tighten up if they want to grow into a functional adulthood. I have other students who need to loosen up. They are anxious, uptight, perfectionistic, compulsive, stressed out, and driven. Their academic performance is outstanding, but they are suffering emotionally. They need to learn that perfection isn't a realistic goal in life. Sometimes you just have to say, "That's good enough."
If you reflect upon Christian life you see a lot of these dynamics at work. Christian parents have to negotiate between being too loose or too tight in raising their children. Trouble lurks to either side. How many times have we seen Christian parents so rigidly control their children, in protecting them from the world, only to have the children leave the faith upon gaining independence? How often have we seen Christian schools and churches, through strictness, create the adolescent rebellion they were trying to avoid? We have to been attentive to these reactive dynamics. As we all know, the quickest way to get a child or adolescent to do something is to tell them they can't. Prohibitions create fascinations.
We also see these dynamics at work in our spiritual journeys. For many ex-evangelicals, raised in very strict moral environments, the journey has been one of loosening, moving from a guilt-saturated faith to a more gracious, non-judgmental faith. And yet, we also see stories of tightening, where some ex-evangelicals have felt that their journey became too loose, vague, permissive, and open-ended, and so converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.
In my own faith community we're walking this balancing act. A generation ago, the Churches of Christ were too tight. So my generation went on a journey of loosening. But today, as we try to parent our children, we're noticing that things have gotten too loose, and that we may need to lean into a little more structure.
