Order Out of Chaos: The Political Theology of Jordan Peterson

Abstract

Jordan Peterson has risen to prominence as a genuine public intellectual on the New Right within a North American context that (unlike Europe) generally eschews the elitism of educated intellectuals. He has tried to construct a coherent ontological system in order to rejuvenate previously dead cultural forms without recourse to unenlightened fundamentalisms. Critiquing Enlightenment rationality from a post-metaphysical perspective, Peterson seeks to ground a Darwinian materialism in an affective-drive theory of subjectivity. It is only the religious imaginary that holds the key for the renewal of the West, and which can combat the dark-black shadow of nihilism that hangs over Western civilization. Synthesizing psychoanalysis with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, religious anthropology, and existentialism, Peterson forges an ontological structure that endeavors to invert the death of God and re-establish a conservative political project upon a resurrected religious metanarrative.