John Horvat: Social Media, Jordan Peterson, and “Returning to Order”

“I’ve read Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life, and it has some points that I agree with. But I don’t think he goes far enough.”

A frequent criticism directed towards modern society is that it suffers from a lack of shared purpose, community, or, more broadly, “order.” Commentators such as Jordan Peterson, for instance, have gained considerable attention in recent years for discussing topics along these lines. In this interview, John Horvat II, the Catholic scholar and vice president of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, joins Merion West and Kambiz Tavana to discuss his book Return to Order, as well as to provide suggestions on how best to find structure and purpose in a fast-paced modern economy and culture.

Thank you for your time today, Mr. Horvat. Let me start with this questions first: How did you come to write the book, which is, as you know, a very peculiar book? It’s not just a book that you read and put aside; it’s like a toolbox—or like a resource you have to come back to over and over. So how did you come to write this book?

Well, it has a long history. It goes back to 1986, and it was a project that was proposed by an intellectual I knew, whose name was Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira; he was a Brazilian. He studied a lot about economics and culture and the moral aspects of society, and he proposed this book for me and a commission of people: about five or six others. So I did these studies, and I conducted many studies for years until, finally—in 2008—I spent four years writing the book. Together with the commission, I was bouncing around these ideas, and the result was Return to Order.