The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

A similar accusation could be made of those employees at the Canadian branch of Penguin Random House, who called for Peterson’s book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021), to be cancelled. After multiple complaints were filed, they confronted their management at a meeting in which some burst into tears and shared their stories of how the evil Professor Peterson had caused such emotional havoc in their lives due to his ‘problematic’ opinions. According to a report in Vice, ‘one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalised their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend’. In the days following the announcement of the book, it was widely denounced on social media for its hateful content. This was quite a feat of collective fancy, given that nobody had read it yet. These viperous attacks on Peterson can only be described as a kind of hysteria. He has been smeared as a ‘Nazi apologist’ and a ‘fascist’ by people whose familiarity with Peterson’s work amounts to a few bad-faith articles and a smattering of quotations taken out of context. He has routinely been called ‘far right’, even though the core tenets of the actual far right – a sense of racial or national superiority, support for authoritarianism and the worship of the state – represent the polar opposite of Peterson’s worldview. Many critics have attempted to broaden the traditional definition of the ‘far right’ – incorporating cultural conservatism, ...