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

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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'.

The New Puritans: How the religion of social justice captured The New Puritans: How the religion of social justice captured

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. 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.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 ”. It is not a straightforward book to easily comprehend what the “new puritans” are. Dense and rambling at times it loses its message, focusing on his own argument rather than what is actually happening . Whilst there is much that Andrew Doyle takes from his personal life there is not much he seeks to investigate or analyse that he brings into the book. Through his weekly show on GBNews he is clearly in touch with news stories.

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Waterstones

This is apparently the new world, where due to critical race theory, everyone is in fact a racist, and so every white person is guilty, it is the woke cultures version of original sin. And in essence, every man is also a rapist, this the ideology of fear and uncertainty, of repression and treading carefully, lest you step out of line, is just the same as the one that western society has lived under for many hundreds of years, in the name of religious moralistic repression.

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In particular, we are bad at navigating the ethics of situations where the rights of individuals or groups have some level of tension with another. This was obvious in the acute stage of the COVID pandemic where the rights of individuals around vaccination, for instance have an inherent clash with the rights of groups of vulnerable people. We aren’t good in dealing with such matters without resorting to name calling. 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: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured

In the last decade of the 18th century, amid the abundance of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, 300,000 people in Britain gave up sugar. The Quakers were at the forefront of the boycott, which encouraged children to go without cakes and adults to drink tea unsweetened. During the middle of the 19th century and early 20th century, across the world – from the slums of British industrial cities to the estates of Russian aristocrats – many other people supported a ban on the sale of alcohol, which was advocated by the temperance movement. One of the saddest aspects of this social division is that Enlightenment-based thinkers are bemused at the fact that Social Justice Warriors/Critical Race Theorists wont, or can’t, engage in what, for want of better terms, I would call good old discussion and debate. As Doyle points out, many in this latter category have arrived there through good intentions (he quotes C.S. Lewis - ‘a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims’.) But once there, a conviction of moral certainty and absolute rightness and virtue, like the Puritan accusers of Salem, or the medieval Roman church which condemned the Cathars, obviates any necessity for considering the kind of humanist approach encapsulated by Montaigne’s ‘que sais-je?’ and his comment ‘je m’avance vers celui qui me contredit’ (I advance towards the person who contradicts me). The idea of aiming for consensus or compromise, that moving towards the contradictor and engaging in reasoned, evidence-based argument rather than threats of violence might actually change minds on either side, does not appear to be an aim of those whom Doyle calls the ‘congenitally intransigent’. To add to this conviction of moral certainty, the institutions of the land are often seen to uphold the views of the new puritans. Doyle writes ‘This is the tragedy of the identitarian approach; it rehabilitates the very divisions that we had striven for so long to overcome.’ A sober but devastating skewering of cancel culture and the moral certainties it shares with religious fundamentalism' Sunday Times Shermer and Doyle discuss: terminology of: PC, identity politics, woken, social justice, antifa, BLM, TERF, intersectionality • Critical Social Justice as a witch craze • Satanic Panic (1980s) • Recovered Memory Movement (1990s) • How widespread is the problem: minor skirmishes on social media or mainstream? • Hill-Harris 2021 poll: 32% voters ID as woke and 31% said they don’t know what the term means • new puritanism as a secular religion • Whiteness and White fragility • Implicit Association Test • Postmodernism • Neo-Marxism • Cancel Culture • hate speech • J.K. Rowling • pluralistic ignorance. Institutions are becoming more and more susceptible to releasing ‘guidance’ and other more sinister regulations that embed its own language at the cost of female equality there is much ground that could have been covered clearly here – the NHS, government departments, education – the public sector is a breeding ground.

He starts out by establishing a clear analogy of “wokeness” with a form of secular religion. This not only makes the movement more intelligible but also explains why it is often deeply confusing for observers.

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Hachette UK The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Hachette UK

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 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. When writers like Reni Eddo-Lodge publish books announcing that they are “No Longer Talking to White People about Race” every reasonable person's response is to say: this is hardly going to further racial understanding. This is then denounced as: “white fragility”. Basically while I think the aims of the Social Justice movement are laudable, I think their methods are horrific and counterproductive. This was always my gut instinct but since I supported the end goals, as it started to unfold I did sit on the sidelines at the beginning as I wondered if perhaps the people preaching these methods might be on to something because I agree with them on these other issues. But the more time that passed the more alarmed I become, especially as it reminded me more of how I was treated by Christians who were convinced of their moral superiority while growing up. Basically I know first hand how alienating is it to be treated that way and how it is a good way to turn outsiders away from your cause. And I feel as though Doyle had a good grasp of the shortfalls of the movement. That said, I feel that his accusations against the Social Justice movement were also rather vague even if I could think of good examples for him for every charge he lobbed. 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.Another factor here, many disbelieve that this is happening in the first place and many are so captured by their political or social affiliations that they simply don’t see it (typically till it happens to them)They just don’t see the bad faith behaviour or believe this irrationality is real. They want to be seen as caring and virtuousness people who “do the right thing”, and yet that tendency is being abused and many people are being siloed into ideological prisons, unable to speak out against injustice. Despite the parallels in everything down to their titles—TRotNP slightly beat TNP to market—“The New Puritans” distinguishes itself from the American “Rise” by being oh-so-British. It’s really more akin to Douglas Murray’s recent “War on the West” (yes, I realize Doyle is Irish, but we Yankees are known for flubbing such distinctions). Western society, and especially American society, with its highly individualised ethos, involving covering one’s arse first and foremost, is just rife with people of feet of clay, unable to step up and defend the sanity of “the commons”. And yet this is the world we live in, where there are not people guarding “concept creep”, where suddenly the definitions of “rape” have crept into absurd definitions, where suddenly verbally defending yourself against an upset woman is verbal rape or kissing a woman on the cheek is also rape, as happened to Pulitzer Prize writer Juno Diaz. And he is not the first and not the last man to be thrown under the bus, simply because people don’t want to sully the name of the holy hashtag. The puritans of the seventeenth century sought to refashion society in accordance with their own beliefs, but they were deep thinkers who were aware of their own fallibility. Today, in the grasp of the new puritans, we see a very different story. The missing part here, is that this tyranny, appearing within the culture, is a phenomena of possession of malefic spirits. Doyle and many others emerging from the secular intellectual world, will likely not become so superstitious or apparently foolish. Yet, as the western world becomes evidentially more mentally ill, it is not gaslighting to say that and it is demonstrable, where there is no essential moral compass anymore. We can clearly witness this inexplicably mad malevolence, this palpable feeling of teeth and this supernatural trancey insanity so reminiscent of 17th century Salem, where good people’s lives were destroyed by collective cowardice and fear, and the stupidity of the mindless mob, and those who choose to led us all astray, to not stand up to the insanity.