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

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Doyle’s book is an essential guide to the shape that this tyranny presently has in our culture, along with James Lindsay’s book “Cynical Theories”. Doyle quotes Humpty-Dumpty in 'Through the Looking Glass': ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean –neither more nor less. Doyle plays a Reverse Uno on his progressive critics, contending that they are the real reactionaries.

How the culture war became a crusade | The Spectator

Like fear of crime rising as the frequency of crime drops, “the unremitting focus on victimhood has seemingly escalated as social attitudes have progressed ”. While this is essential, it means that it is ill-equipped to tackle many of the free speech battles of the digital age. Taught that reality is constructed through language and language is a tool for oppression, a generation of arts and social science graduates “have taken this ideology into adult life and the institutions they now occupy ”. I was firstly drawn to Doyle’s book because I had even started listening to audiobooks about the 17th century Puritans, to see how their views and perspectives were in alignment with this emerging mob I saw mostly coming out of the United States.The Jesuits used to say: “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man . The Scottish Government's Hate Crime Act punishes anyone for “stirring up hatred” even in the privacy of their own home. But some things can be interpreted wrongly and used unjustly against some of us really fighting for our rights that are really under threat. Who can stand up to the idiocy and dare to point out that these labels don’t fit and that the witches are not actually witches?

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle: skewering the culture wars

I sometimes wonder if it is worth trying to take on the brittle guardians of woke propriety intellectually since in doing so you inevitably wander onto their own obsessional territory – and risk becoming a bit like them. Clearly “the academy” has lost its way, post modernism and post-structuralism have led us completely down the garden path to the point, where there are not even solid facts anymore.

The book does go to the heart of the increasing polarisation in society, and how the way in which we communicate the most important issues increasingly lacks nuance. However, it's validating just to hear from someone else left of center that I'm not crazy and not the only one who thinks this sh*t is untenable, unscientific, ahistorical, narcissistic and deeply illiberal.