In New York, Francis and I were invited to attend a musical about the artist Tamara de Lempicka. Lempicka, the wife of a Polish noble, flees the Russian Revolution and ends up in Paris. With her husband struggling to adjust to his loss of status and wealth, the family lives in poverty until Lempicka is discovered as an artist. She gradually finds her feet and eventually thrives in the rapidly changing world of the 1920s.

Convinced that the unimaginable horrors of the past can never be repeated, Parisians cope with the trauma of World War I by what we would now call “living their best lives”. Lempicka thrives in this capital of hedonism, maintaining her marriage while also falling in love with a female prostitute who introduces her to the joys of opium. Celebrated as a female artist who finally gives voice to the power of the feminine through her work, she secures both wealth and popular acclaim.

This entire period is depicted as a time in which the boring old ways are abandoned in favour of exploring variety, or, as we might call it these days, diversity. In a scene that sums up the mood of the times, the proprietor of a lavish lesbian and transgender bar that Lempicka frequents opens it with the words “Fraternite, Egalite, LESBIANITE!”. While mainstream society remains sceptical, Parisian socialites do not just accept these minority sexual practices, they celebrate them as the antidote to the staleness of the old order—an order which put unity and social cohesion above the unlimited freedom of the individual.

Until I found myself sitting in the audience of Lempicka, I never really understood why Jordan Peterson spent so much time focusing on the duality of order and chaos. I do now.

Regular readers will remember that in the exchange I hosted here between James Orr and Stephen Hicks about Conservatism and Liberalism, Orr explained that the primary concern of conservatives is the preservation of order. We also know from evolutionary psychologists like Diana Fleischman that societies which experience an increase in disease become more conservative (note the small “c”), a statement which hardly needs explaining to anyone alive during the COVID pandemic. Put simply: as we ratchet up the amount of chaos, order rises to the top of people’s concerns.

As Lempicka’s story unravels, fascists and communists fight over the future of Europe, replacing the joys of chaos with the enforcement of order. Instead of celebrating variety and diversity, they detest and punish it. Instead of embracing difference, they suppress it. Instead of worshipping the strong independent woman, they produce grandiose masculine art and architecture, and put the woman back in her “rightful place” of wife and mother. They have no tolerance for individual differences: on the contrary, they believe that a nation can only function if people submit themselves to the good of society. Anyone who refuses must, naturally, be eliminated.