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

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My upbringing is unique. I was born in the 1980s and raised as an atheist with classic liberal values in the Bible Belt. My parents taught me Rationalism and Empiricism, and I embraced those values and ways of thinking, as well as skepticism and Humanism. I also held strongly to the belief that I may disagree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it and have always been very anti-censorship. None of this was particularly popular when I grew up and I was often targeted for bullying by Christians (it is very hard for me to lie and say I believe things I don't truly believe so I was an easy target). Just as the sugar boycott was gathering momentum, petitions to stop the slave trade reached a critical mass. Between 1787 and 1792, 1.5 million British people signed anti-slave trade petitions: almost one sixth of the population. Behind the movement were nonconformists such as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and evangelical Christians including William Wilberforce and William Cowper. Cowper’s 1788 poem “The Negro’s Complaint” humanised the enslaved and influenced the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr almost two centuries later. As Nazi polemics go, The New Puritans is something of a disappointment. It’s a better read than Mein Kampf and less esoteric than The Myth of the Twentieth C entur y , but it’s pretty light on the old blood and soil. It turns out Doyle isn’t a Nazi at all, just a bog-standard, run-of-the-John-Stuart-Mill liberal. The New Puritans , far from a tract on Aryan racial purity, is an admonition against authoritarian trends in identity politics. Boy, are there going to be some red faces at the next Britain First reading group. Doyle is a very funny satirist, but this book is serious – perhaps too serious. 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. You become entangled in post-modern queer theory and the obscure jargon of “cisheteronormativity”. Arguing against affectations like pronouns makes you sound reactionary, even though there's nothing progressive about violating grammar. Objecting to the number of multiracial families on TV adverts on the grounds that only 2% of UK families are mixed race just makes you sound racist. I do care deeply about free speech and like Doyle I have concerns about how this is handled in the Social Justice movement and it is one thing that has caused me to be disillusioned with it. However, I do have to disagree with his statements about trump being deplatformed. Every right has limits and trump used social media to led an insurrection in an attempt to stop our rightfully elected President, Joe Biden, from taking office. People died in this insurrection, others have gone to prison, and it was a grave threat to American democracy. And unlike Iranian leaders who most Americans know nothing about, every American felt the impact of trump's actions. If anything the January 8th committee has done a brilliant job illustrating how trump used social media to do this.

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

One cannot argue”, Doyle says, “with someone who believes that argument itself is an oppressive denial of his or her truth”. The objective is not to critique society as it is, but to engineer an entirely fresh pseudo-reality through the limitations on language, thought and perception. They seek to publicly shame those they consider dissidents, and condemn all those who stray from the righteous path.” [15] Writing in 1693, the puritan minister Cotton Mather defended his role in Bridget Bishop's trial in Salem by claiming that there was ‘little occasion to prove the Witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders'. This common logical fallacy is known as the ‘appeal to self-evident truth’, and is similarly characteristic of the new puritans. Rather than initiate a discussion about difficult issues, they exhibit the infuriating tendency to simply make assertions, and treat with hostility anyone who challenges them. Without the standard of objective truth, the demons of unreason will flourish. Similarly, the rights of transgender people are important, the rights of women are important, and how do we deal with situations where these may be in tension? At least one obvious premise of the book is that simply assuming bad faith, indulging in name calling, and piling on the “unrighteous” is not only unethical, but ineffective. It has helped to rob important discussions of the nuance they require. This is, I believe, a very important book. The interesting thing is that I don’t agree with all of it by any means, and my personal politics are probably not highly aligned with the author’s, but that’s rather the point.A broadcaster and stand-up comedian, Doyle is also a recovering academic with a PhD in “Renaissance discourses of gender and sexuality ”, which takes some recovering from. It has, however, gifted him an intimate insight into a political insurgency that, in just a few years, has seized the commanding heights of government, law, medicine, education, journalism, the arts and private enterprise. Andrew Doyle has written a masterful broadside against the woke that will also discomfit the anti-woke, proposing to both the radical notion that rather than being identities, we embrace our status as individuals’ Critic I can easily imagine how all sorts of people whose worldview I as a radical feminist am completely opposed to would use this book to try and justify their inhumane opinions on certain things. There isn't anything offensive per say because the author is relatively nice and soft compared to many people in the same camp - the camp of sceptics, rational thinkers, sorta cynics, those for the total freedom of speech etc. But some things can be interpreted wrongly and used unjustly against some of us really fighting for our rights that are really under threat. What I'm leading to is his criticism of the idea of "lived experience". I agree wholeheartedly that a lot of the times it's used nowadays is to support claims unsupportable by real evidence and logic. However, the conclusion that I come to in relation to that is that this concept, first proposed to be used in such a context by Simone de Beauvoir, has been stolen from us and used in all the inappropriate ways that it wasn't meant to be, thus discrediting it in the eyes of many people. And, to my mind, a clear distinction has to be made between using it to talk about sexual abuse (stigmatized, old as the world itself, most of the time not even seen as what it is because of how deeply misogynistic our world is) and all other sorts of things that can at least theoretically be thought in terms of true and false... But Doyle goes on to mash all the uses of this concept, that has been of great help to even begin talking about sexual abuse as a problem because I guess it's really hard to recognize just how ubiquitous something so dehumanizing can be in a society that thinks of itself as liberal and democtaric, together, his critisism beginning not with those who appropriated and discredited the term but with Simone de Beauvoir herself. Engaging, incisive and acute, The New Puritans is a deeply necessary exploration of our current cultural climate and an urgent appeal to return to a truly liberal society.

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The architects of this movement are “the new puritan s” and their religion is critical social justice, Doyle’s term for what is more commonly known as wokeism. They are “a prohibitionist and precisionist tendency who seek to refashion society in accordance with their own ideological fervour ”. Their zealotry, philistinism and spiteful exercise of power over others reminds Doyle of the Salem Witch Trials and the vicious little girls whose “lived experience” sent 19 innocent women to the gallows. That’s pretty much been my response to the entire book, positive and not really necessary to be explained in more detail… So I’d rather include here a long paragraph with my criticism to a specific section that I wrote in my notes. Doyle traces this “frenzy of conformity” to the place where midwit thinking goes for subsidy and midwit thinkers for pensions: higher education. Critical social justice, in Doyle’s analysis, is “applied postmodernism ”. It turns out sending half our young people to ideological closed shops to be catechised in neo- Mar xist critical theory by Poundland post-structuralists wasn’t such a great idea after all. 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 ”. This has led to a “civilisational threat” under which “the objective is not to critique society as it is but to engineer an entirely fresh pseudo-reality through the imposition of limitations on language, thought and perception ”. Again, the religious undertones are plain: “ Their s is a belief in the perfectibility of humankind .” Inconvenient truths are to be erased from this new globe. Behavioural trends that emerge due to biological sex differences, for instance, are simply to be ignored because they defy the rules of the new terrain. Instead, there will be conspicuous lacunae bearing the inscription ‘here be dragons'.Doyle has been so thoroughly slandered as a right-wing demagogue that you might expect The New Puritans to be one of those anti-snowflake polemics. However, he offers a conditional defence of Eighties PC culture, which he believes “achieved some genuinely progressive outcomes in terms of social consciousness without having recourse to the kind of censorial police intervention or the mob-driven retributive ‘cancel culture’ that we see today ”. In fact, Doyle considers the heirs to the PC-gone-mad tabloid columnists of the 1980s to be the whiteness-gone-mad progressives of the 2 020s, who seize on highly individual incidents, dubious anecdotes and obvious myths to peddle hysteria about societal doom. Like fear of crime rising as the frequency of crime drops, “the unremitting focus on victimhood has seemingly escalated as social attitudes have progressed ”. We are reminded of Jesus saying to the people about to stone the female adulterer, “he who is without sin, cast the first stone!” People 2000 years ago had the conscience to stop and reconsider their punishment and their own past action, but apparently these days, the wokists too arrogantly claim sinlessness, able to complacently cast stones, because in their paradigm, virtuousness is so easy to achieve! Just follow their shallow rules and don’t step out of line or misgender someone! I suppose that is actually not hard to do, if you are just a keyboard warrior drone at your call centre job!

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Hachette UK

As a product of the eighties I am pleased to see Doyle make the case for the much maligned PC culture that he argues “achieved some genuinely progressive outcomes in terms of social consciousness without having recourse to the kind of censorial police intervention or the mob-driven retributive ‘cancel culture’ that we see today.” There is no parallel to the ideology of tday. But where else was there to take the intellectual arena of the abstracted, nihilist western mind, except into the surreal, absurd and unuseful? The intellectual mind itself doesn’t go anywhere inherently meaningful, and these “secular” New puritans clearly have the buttoned up arrogance and pseudo-morality of the old style religionists. Doyle's strong suit is just as a cranky social commentator even if his Oxford literary education makes itself obvious in his language. I preferred it when he was trying to make me laugh rather than repeatedly trying to explain Foucault. For example he really let loose making fun of Robin DiAngelo who deserves every bit of his ridicule and that was awesome. This is his normal dry sense of humor which you might find weird if your main exposure to him was the stupid Titania McGrath stuff or Jonathan Pie. Perhaps I see this issue differently from many other people, as what I am seeing is that there is an actual metaphiysical possession driving the bigotry and hatred people are calling “cancel culture”, which represents not witchcraft, but perhaps in the old parlance “demonic possession”. Mature student, Lisa Keogh, was suspended by Abertay University last year for saying in a debate that “women have vaginas”. Claim that a woman is an “adult human female” and you risk losing your job like, the tax expert Maya Forstater, and/or being investigated for hate crime by the police. As Merseyside Police put it: “Being Offensive is an Offence”.Andrew Doyle has written a masterful broadside against the woke that will also discomfit the anti-woke, proposing to both the radical notion that rather than being identities, we embrace our status as individuals' Critic