Among the writers who appeared last year in this column are Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism), J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy), Rod Dreher (Operation Benet, Don’t Live by Lies) and Patrick Deneen (Why the liberalism, regime change, towards a postliberal future). The group photo of the orchestra of post-liberal conservative intellectuals who liven up the parties of the New Right would be incomplete without the profile of Canadian Jordan B. Peterson, psychologist, cultural critic, YouTuber and best-selling author of self-help such as Twelve Rules for Living. An antidote to chaos (Catalan translation in Columna and Spanish in Planeta).
Peterson’s trademark image is the use of biblical passages to think through perennial problems that endure in new forms in modern life, a formula for success that has not taken long to be copied by publishers here and there who they deploy strategies for religion to recover the positions it has been losing during the process of secularization of society and the cultural debate. In the case of Peterson, this resource is explicitly based on the assumption that the Bible is the backbone of Western civilization and that its stories offer almost exclusively, without classical literature assuming real competition, not just outlines of ‘a deep psychological meaning that helps us better understand ourselves and the world around us, but also patterns of behavior that explain how we behave and how we should do it.
Unlike Rod Dreher, who casts the net of new conservatism among Christians of one denomination or another who feel persecuted, Peterson’s fishing for men (and the cultural initiatives that share his roadmap) is ‘directs to another decisive sector of citizens in the cultural war in which the political future is addressed, the one formed by those who, despite considering themselves atheists or agnostics, may come to assume that, leaving aside the theological virtue of faith and its dogmas, being a Catholic or a Christian is a way of being in the world that allows you to adopt a mental position suitable for putting lives or societies back on track with which you can identify by family and national tradition. Peterson, who has shown great skill in the art of extracting juice as a martyr to the dissidence of the discourse of the politically correct, has become one of the main baits for this fishing. And, perhaps for this reason, last year he received from President Katalin Novák, the Order of Merit of Hungary, a country where he returned last week to participate, as a guest star, alongside Giorgia Meloni , in the Demographic Summit that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had convened to weigh which are the most persuasive policies for Europeans to obey the divine mandate “be fruitful and multiply”.