• Login
  • Register
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

Peterson vs Peter Pan

by James Alexander
6 August 2024 11:06 AM

Has anyone heard of the puer aeternus? I learnt about it from Christopher Booker’s book Seven Basic Plots. It is a wonderful idea: it is the boy who never grows up. It came to its literary height in Peter Pan, the story written by the diminutive Scot, J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan is the boy who is destined to remain a child. Seven Basic Plots is a great book. Part of Booker’s intention was to explain the structure of the seven plots, and then to explain how they are basically the same. But the other part of his intention was to register a great criticism of the modernity he supposed emerged around the time of Stendhal in the early 19th century: a modernity in which stories started to go wrong. Stories before, say, 1820, according to Booker, always ended in resolution: where resolution took the form of marriage for the comedians like Rosalind and Benedict and death for the tragedians like Macbeth and his Lady. There was an ‘inevitability’ – to use a T.S. Eliot word – about what happened. Great poetry and drama had inevitability about it. Booker argued that, after 1820, everything changed. Stories no longer resolved. There were no recognition scenes. Dialogue became interminable. Plots were left unfinished. Or they ended with a non sequitur, a moving on to another adventure. There was an obsession with unliterary reality. This obsession, alas, generated a literature far more literary and unrealistic than the one before.

It also meant that characters could remain undeveloped, unfinished, unrecognised, unresolved. From now on Alice would never grow up, or learn anything from Wonderland. Frodo would learn nothing from Mordor. In fact, does Rupert Birkin really learn anything through the course of Women in Love? Does Paul Pennyfeather learn anything through the course of Decline and Fall? Do the boys learn anything in Lord of the Flies? Nay, one just rewinds the tape and plays it again.


To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a donor will also entitle you to comment below the line, discuss articles with our contributors and editors in a members-only Discord forum and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.

There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.

Tags: 1960sChildhoodJoe RoganJordan PetersonPermanent adolescencePeter PanSexual revolutionStudentsWoke Gobbledegook

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

Good Morning Britain Branded “Embarrassing in the Extreme” as Ed Balls Interviews His Wife Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to Defend Handling of Riots

Next Post

Why is the Covid Inquiry Still Not Recommending Research into the Effectiveness of Lockdowns?

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

16 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Dinger64
Dinger64
9 months ago

“Peter Pan is the boy who is destined to remain a child”

Bit like the current prime minister then?

7
0
JXB
JXB
9 months ago
Reply to  Dinger64

Two Tier Pier.

1
0
stewart
stewart
9 months ago

Yes. But it’s very difficult to get a population to grow up in a society driven by a state that insists on making everyone permanently dependent on it.

For healthcare, for education, for retirement, handouts for those not working.

Any time anything goes wrong the braying public cries out for the state to fix it. And the state happily accepts the responsibility and takes for itself the power it needs to pretend to fix the problem.

Against that current, it’s very difficult for people to grow up and take charge.

16
0
JXB
JXB
9 months ago
Reply to  stewart

👍

1
0
Kornea112
Kornea112
9 months ago
Reply to  stewart

Well, isn’t that the truth! And most of those people live far from nature in city bubbles.

1
0
nige.oldfart
nige.oldfart
9 months ago

An excellent read, thank you. I have to say I wear a tie/ cravat when aboard, and don’t subscribe to the kindergarten dress code. When I was growing up we strove to grow up and be accepted into the realms of the adult. Those aspirations have long since disappeared.

10
0
Dinger64
Dinger64
9 months ago
Reply to  nige.oldfart

👌

2
0
sskinner
sskinner
9 months ago

“I’m not young enough to know everything”
J. M. Barrie

7
0
JXB
JXB
9 months ago

Puer aeternus: sums up the British population born after the 70s into the cradle-to-grave welfare-state, they stay in the cradle until they die.

2
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
9 months ago

I don’t know much about him but from what I have seen he seems like a rather brittle and fragile neurotic opportunist who probably wakes up in a different state of mind to that he goes to bed with. This talk about casting aside childish things. It means nothing to declare this and I don’t think that the movement in literature away from a denoument has anything to do with it. When Paul spoke about adulthood he was talking to people who were already on the spiritual path. There was no sense that this would ever pull the masses away from the cloying saccharin reality that they were addicted to.

0
-1
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
9 months ago

If you allow the idea of reincarnaton back into your consciousness then everything changes. The cabal know very well about reincarnation and they think in accordance with it to an exquisite degree. You might be more advanced than the next man. This isn’t because you are superior to him it is just that you have incarnated more times.

0
0
Claphamanian
Claphamanian
9 months ago

C S Lewis thought that adulthood was the silliest time of life.

A child is not childish. In the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth held up children as exemplars of the kingdom of heaven. The child’s trust in and copying of their parents are the same characteristics that Jesus had towards His Father in heaven.

Additionally, a child displays intense concentration in whatever task they are engaged in, such as would have been demonstrated in the bracelet-making workshop in Southport. Again, this singlemindedness is a characteristic of Jesus’s doing of His Father’s will.

Unless one becomes as a child, Jesus declared, it is impossible to enter the kingdom of heaven.

The other characters in novels who don’t grow up are the children in Lewis’s Narnia stories. This has received extensive criticism. There is of course one of Lewis’s characters who notoriously does grow up, and in doing so is ‘no longer a friend of Narnia’.

This is Susan. However, the reason for her ceasing to be a friend is never noticed. This is because it has been repeated so often that Susan is banished from Narnia for wearing lipstick and nylons that everyone has stopped thinking.

A careful reading of the passages in The Silver Chair and The Last Battle show that Susan has come to believe the claim of the Green Witch. The Witch tries to persuade the children that they should grow up. This is urged on them because, in her words, Narnia is just ‘childish tricks (‘games’)’. When they wake up tomorrow after they give up belief in Aslan, she promises them, they will be better, sober people.

Compare this with what Susan says to the children. She uses the same words to describe Narnia as the Witch. “Fancy your still thinking of all those funny games we used to play when we were children.”

Lewis has Aslan say that “all find what they truly seek”. He is alluding to Jesus who declared that if you seek, you shall find. If you want to find reasons to believe in Christianity, you can. If you want to find reasons not to believe, you can find those too. The Edwardian bishop of Durham defined a Christian simply as a person who has a trusted Christ.

Peterson may be said to have found his place which is like that of the Dwarfs in The Last Battle. Wishing to have “no (human) king, and no Aslan”, they refuse to be taken in (to Aslan’s heaven) because they refuse to be deceived, to be ‘taken in’ (by religion used as a means of control). They find themselves in a stable (another allusion to the Gospel story), a halfway between the mortal Narnia that has ended and the eternal Narnia.

Therefore, beware what it is that you truly seek.

3
0
Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
9 months ago

You can’t invoke seriousness. Either circumstances provoke it or they don’t. And if they don’t do so for prolonged periods then something nasty will come to fill the gap and feed off your energy. The moment you realise that you are in serious times you can shake the parasite off your back. It is difficult before this point because your rational mind asks, why should I prepare for something arduous when it doesn’t even seem likely? This is not necessarily wrong but it allows for great inequality of preparation.

2
0
Jeff Chambers
Jeff Chambers
9 months ago
Reply to  Jabby Mcstiff

A good post. Thanks.

0
0
paul6316
paul6316
9 months ago

“Becoming Peterson at least means wearing a tie.”

A tie with an elaborately tailored, and no doubt fabulously expensive, clown costume. Have you seen some of this man’s suits? The example in the photo above is one of the more quiet, tasteful ones. That and his ludicrous Canadian accent make me wonder how anyone takes him seriously.

Last edited 9 months ago by paul6316
0
-3
The Enforcer
The Enforcer
9 months ago
Reply to  paul6316

Close your eyes and listen.

My wife and have followed him for years and we are fans ….but..of late, he has started to interview a number of interesting people and he is tending to smother their views with his own statements, which while interesting, is not the point of an interview. Do I detect some self importance creeping in which will ultimately spoil his oft inciteful comments.

1
0

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

DONATE

PODCAST

In Episode 35 of the Sceptic: Andrew Doyle on Labour’s Grooming Gang Shame, Andrew Orlowski on the India-UK Trade Deal and Canada’s Ignored Covid Vaccine Injuries

by Richard Eldred
9 May 2025
4

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

9 May 2025

Electric Car Bursts into Flames on Driveway and Engulfs £550,000 Family Home

9 May 2025

News Round-Up

10 May 2025

“I Was a Super Fit Cyclist Until I Had the Moderna Covid Vaccine. What Happened Next Left Me Wishing I Was Dead”

9 May 2025

Ed Miliband’s Housing Energy Plan Will Decimate the Rental Market and Send Rents Spiralling

10 May 2025

News Round-Up

51

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

23

Electric Car Bursts into Flames on Driveway and Engulfs £550,000 Family Home

25

What Does David Lammy Mean by a State?

27

Teenage Girl Banned by the Football Association For Asking Transgender Opponent “Are You a Man?” Wins Appeal With Help of Free Speech Union

16

NHS Nurse “Forced Out for Mocking Trans Flag” to Sue Hospital

10 May 2025

Hugely Influential Covid Vaccine Study Claiming the Jabs Saved Millions of Lives Torn to Shreds in Medical Journal

10 May 2025

Teenage Girl Banned by the Football Association For Asking Transgender Opponent “Are You a Man?” Wins Appeal With Help of Free Speech Union

10 May 2025

Reflections on Empire, Papacy and States

10 May 2025

Ed Miliband’s Housing Energy Plan Will Decimate the Rental Market and Send Rents Spiralling

10 May 2025

POSTS BY DATE

August 2024
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Jul   Sep »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

  • X

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In

© Skeptics Ltd.

wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment
Perfecty
Do you wish to receive notifications of new articles?
Notifications preferences