Stacking the Fractal Paradigms of Peterson, Pageau, and McGilchrist
Several influential thinkers today speak in terms of fractals – shapes that are built out of smaller versions of that same shape, which also combine to form still larger versions of that shape. The power of understanding a fractal scheme is that, once grasped, it gives and endless supply of insights at every scale, as when Jordan Peterson says that a meaningful life begins with cleaning your room. By doing so you are embodying the victory of the gods over the perennial dragon of chaos. Personal goals and civilizational goals embody the same pattern, the same dynamics. Fractal schemes apply equally to the self, a relationship, or a culture; equally to physical and spiritual perspectives.
Some of the most well-known fractal schemes today include the chaos-order dichotomy of Jordan Peterson, the center-fringe dichotomy of Jonathan and Matthieu Pageau, and the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy that Iain McGilchrist is famous for today (though that is also something that Marshall McLuhan wrote about vis-à-vis media in his career).
Though these thinkers all approach these schemes from unique angles, the fractals they describe can be overlaid to create one cohesive sensemaking system. I’ll walk through them and show how each builds on the others to add layers of sophistication.
Jordan Peterson: Chaos and Order
Before he was ever the political lightning rod that he is today, Jordan Peterson published his systematized psychological work in his Maps of Meaning. It’s a technical laying out of the underlying sensemaking processes in our mind through which we understand ourselves and our environment so that we can properly orient our actions. Following Carl Jung, he draws on the images and patterns of religious myths to construct a framework that rests on the opposing poles of chaos and order. While he is routinely maligned as teaching some simplistic “Chaos is bad, Order is good” message, he’s far more interesting than that.
Chaos, understood in the broadest possible terms, has a positive and negative element to it. Negatively, chaos is the unknown that threatens the stability of the status quo. It is embodied in the dragon that might devour us. But that dragon always guards a hoard of treasure – and that is the positive element. Within the unknown there is always potential to be realized, opportunity to be seized.
Order is the power that continually strives against that chaos and draws out its potential. It creates the stable status quo that can sustain life. But if that ordering power leans too heavily into its established rules and does not continue to engage with the chaos around it, it rigidifies into a tyranny that is incapable of drawing renewal and refreshment from its environment. The tyranny inevitably withers and collapses, defeated by the dragon.
The proper way to navigate the chaos-order dichotomy is to voluntarily plunge yourself into chaos and learn to master it, to bring the dragon’s treasure back to the side of order and expand the kingdom. This is equally true of, say, learning a new language as it is of starting a new business, or learning how to conduct yourself at parties. Learning to master small environments gives us the tools necessary to master larger ones. Thus the path to a prosperous kingdom begins, as Peterson would say, with cleaning your room.
If we do not voluntarily engage with the chaos around us, we become that fearful tyranny that will in some way or other be involuntarily plunged into chaos. It is the involuntary plunge that is deeper than the voluntary one. It leads to a kind of death, a path through the underworld. It takes a heroic act to return from that depth, but that is a drama that almost all of us have experienced on some scale.
So here is the first layer of our system:
Jonathan Pageau: Center and Fringe
When Jordan Peterson needs someone to dialogue with to work through the symbolic import of some image or pattern, he often turns to Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox Christian icon carver. As an artist steeped in the tradition of iconography, Pageau is fluent in the same imagery that Peterson draws upon to create his psychological system. But Pageau tends to conceptualize more in terms of a center-fringe dichotomy rather than chaos-order. Jonathan’s brother Matthieu did much to systematize this scheme in his book The Language of Creation.
The Pageau and Peterson systems agree that the proper center-point is a balancing act that is threatened by death to the right and left. But what the Pageau system adds is an element of verticality to the scheme, literally adding a second dimension. The center-point is not only in the middle, but also above the death that is found on the fringe.
The beginning and focal point of this system is the Tree of Life at the paradisal mountaintop. This focal point is the connection between heaven and earth, where form and meaning descend from above to fructify the material potential below. This material experiences its own ascent to this coupling as the culmination of its existence, the realization of its purpose.
To depart from this ideal synthesis is to fall as Adam and Eve did into Death below, a place that is simultaneously the chaos of thorns and the tyranny of Babylon. In order to return to the mountaintop where we belong, the path leads first through death, which is baptism, the path of Israel through the sea. From there the path is continually marked by sacrifice, burning away those lower elements until only that which truly conforms with the ideal remains. It is the uniquely Christian equivalence of the Tree of Life and the Cross of voluntary sacrifice that puts this scheme into its final profound form. The reconciliation of Heaven and Earth is at last attained as the marriage of Christ to his bride, the Church. God descended to the cross, and we ascended to meet Him there. But in the final turn, that cross of suffering is turned again into our joyful partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life.
The addition of the vertical element in the scheme adds the necessary holiness and transcendence that we intuitively perceive in the world. Without a vertical element, the world is devoid of the meaning that we yearn for as humans; it’s not for nothing that we don’t just seek meaning but “higher” meaning to our lives. Verticality adds a qualitative dimension – a source of transcendent beauty, goodness, and holiness – to an otherwise merely quantitative world.
When combined with the chaos-order paradigm we see that the fractal shape of movement in our world is not just a back-and-forth of chaos and order, but an up-and-down movement of fall and redemption, death and resurrection. The ideal is not just a center-point but a paradisal height, not just mastery of chaos but a redeemed beauty and holiness that restores the world, a realization of meaning. This is the right path of all things: the individual, the marriage, the civilization, even God Himself, who journeys down and out to the utmost fringe – the cross outside the city and Hell itself – to bring all who will follow Him back up the Holy Mountain to the center.
McLuhan and McGilchrist: Left and Right Brain Hemisphere Sensemaking
The back-forth/up-down movement through which things gain identity, stability, and meaning is also mimicked in the left-right movement of our sensemaking inside the brain itself. I first came across this idea reading McLuhan in one of his later works, The Laws of Media, published decades ago, but it has since been taken up and brought to comprehensive expression in the work of Iain McGilchrist in his The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.
The insight here is that, just as we can experience the journey into chaos and the return as a narrative or history, that same pattern occurs in the simple act of perception itself. The scene around us would be a veritable chaos of kaleidoscopic lights and sounds were it not for the mastery of consciousness, able to order those infinite details into sensible wholes (victory of order over chaos again). But notice we cannot comprehend the entire room at once. We focus our attention on one thing at a time – one little mountaintop of meaning nested in a web of relationships that is its context.
It is the right hemisphere that directly perceives the meaning of an object by intuiting it and its contextual web at once. The object becomes a focal point of meaning, a gestalt that is defined by the relationship of that object to its context (a “figure-ground relationship” as McLuhan terms it). What happens next is the passing of this object of perception to the left hemisphere of the brain. What the left hemisphere does is isolate that object of perception to hyper-focus on its component parts and inner workings. The analytical ability of the left hemisphere adds content to the intuition of the right-brain gestalt, which it can then pass back to the right hemisphere in order to integrate that detailed understanding back into the whole.
A short example might be helpful. When we see a face of a friend, the right brain will immediately see the face as a meaningful whole and recognize it. The left brain will perceive the component parts of the face – the eyes, nose, lips, etc. – in high-resolution detail, and pass that information back to the right brain. If there is something new about the appearance, say a haircut or nose piercing, the right brain will be glad to receive that updated content from the left brain, but will still perceive those new features as belonging to the friend that they know. (Oddly enough, some people with right brain damage would not be able to recognize the face of a friend if they got a haircut; they cannot preserve the gestalt). The content supplied by the focus of the left brain is integrated into the gestalt of the right brain. And the process goes constantly back-and-forth.
The left brain does its work by defining a boundary around the object of perception, cutting it off from its context in order to analyze it as a static object (a “figure without a ground” as McLuhan says). This cutting off is necessary to apply the hyper-focus of analysis, to properly pull it apart. But the risk of this process is in cutting the object off from its true identity and meaning, which is defined relationally to its context, the dynamic role it plays in its environment. It is easy to mistake the boundary around the center for the center itself. Over-emphasis on analysis risks the loss of meaning, the death of the Tree of Life at the mountaintop. As Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect.”
This, in short, is the root of the meaning crisis in the left-brain obsessed West, says McGilchrist: We have an extreme degree of analytical understanding of our world, but we can no longer perceive any higher meaning in any of it. This absolutization of boundary is the tyranny that Peterson warns us of, which, devoid of the life-giving spirit at the center, inevitably collapses. Stability requires permeable boundaries so that we can journey again into the chaos to discover what else may be integrated into the beautiful whole. This is the heroic work of the artist.
Nevertheless, some boundary-setting is necessary to proper perception. We define objects both in right-brain terms of meaningful gestalt (center/mountaintop/purpose) and in left-brain terms of the outer edge that distinguishes the object as something separate, having its own identity. This is most obvious if we consider visual perception: We make sense of our visual field by defining the boundaries of objects to separate them from each other. But the bounded approach to sensemaking is also how philosophy proceeds: e.g. How can we define “justice” propositionally such that that definition “contains” all the content of justice and excludes everything else? Both visual processing and philosophical analysis are left-brain functions.
So if we add the center-boundary dichotomy of perception to the above paradigm, we see that what separates the meaning at the mountaintop, the link to Heaven and Life, from the surrounding chaos is a boundary. The purpose of that boundary is to define and stabilize the object and keep it distinct, save it from dissolving into its surroundings. It is only after this separation that the individuated object can be re-integrated into its proper place in the greater whole. Thus, in the passing of the golden ball between hemispheres, we can realize both unity and multiplicity and processually resolve the classic problem of the One and the Many.
But again, because this is a fractal shape, this pattern is evident outside of cognition. When Moses ascends the Mountain of God, the meeting place that defines the meaning and role of Israel, he descends with the Law, the boundaries that reinforce and stabilize that central identity. The history of Israel after that is one of crossing that boundary (transgression which leads to death) and the return journey to the tabernacle/temple at the center, a journey of repentance, sacrifice, and ultimately forgiveness to restore their identity.
This out-and-in motion is the process of becoming generally, whether we are speaking of ourselves, our marriage, the history of Israel, or of all mankind in the Biblical story – the journey out of paradise and back again.
Understanding Fractals by Stacking Concepts
The way of thinking that I am describing here might sound mystical, and in a sense it literally is. But that is only because we are unaccustomed to thinking fractally. To understand a fractal, you have to consider the multiple scales of its manifestation simultaneously. You can do this by “stacking” concepts on top of each other to help you intuit the underlying pattern.
For instance, we can stack all the meanings of the “center” from the above paradigms to get a better sense of how they all come together to form one fractal pattern. The center-point between chaos and order is also the Tree of Life, the meeting point of Heaven and Earth (Jacob’s ladder), of form and matter. This place is where we should be, our proper home. Getting there is a realization of our purpose and the discovery of the meaning of our lives. Because this is the place of meaning on the grandest scale, we can also say it is the place of meaning on the smallest scale of perception, as in the right-brain perception of a meaningful gestalt. Put together, the center is Life/meaning/right-brain gestalt perception/ purpose/understanding /paradise /logos/form/Heaven.
Around that meaningful center-point lies a boundary that separates the content of that meaning from its surroundings. This boundary-line can be the outer edge of something we see in our visual field, the personal boundaries or relationship boundaries that therapists advise us to create, or the law that defines what is or isn’t acceptable in a political state. In mythology, paradise is almost always a walled garden.
The mass of earth beneath that mountaintop fills the content of that meaning. Whatever falls within the boundary of that meaning is the proper embodiment of the meaning, the content of the idea. Outside of that boundary lies the fringe where the identity breaks down, the content that can’t be linked to the higher idea, chaos that dissolves the meaning. So, it is the place of confusion, of unconsciousness, sleep, and death.
Lastly, the final dimension of this paradigm is our movement across it. The “there and back again” journey of Bilbo Baggins is the same as the fall and redemption of mankind. It is death and resurrection of Christ, the setting and rising of the Sun, the descent and ascent of Jonah. It is consciousness striving for understanding, leading content back to higher meaning just as Christ leads captives out of Hades. The mind of the infant takes shape around the focus on his life-sustaining mother at the center after exile from the womb. Things only have existence and meaning to the extent that they can be integrated into Life. The rest is discarded as meaningless chaos.