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

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An example Doyle gives of applied postmodernism is the NHS policy Annex B, which combines religious literalism with a zeal to inculcate the heathen. Since “the NHS accommodates patients by gender identity, not biological sex ”, Annex B requires that “if a female patient complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not true; there are no men present ”. The Jesuits used to say: “Give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man .” The priests of the new religion say: “Give me a healthcare bureaucracy and some Stonewall training, and I’ll give you a woman too afraid to question the man in the next bed .” These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. Learn how to not be cowed into submission by the new puritanical scare tactics and silencing tactics of this minority of witch-hunters who dominate as the Squeaky Wheels in media/politics at the moment. 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”. 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.

New Statesman The “woke” may be dogmatic, but social - New Statesman

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. 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 ”. 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. The ideology of Critical Social Justice has never caught on in poorer communities, because those who are facing authentic hardship have little patience for the exaggerated, manufactured or imagined grievances of the privileged.”

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.’

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Waterstones The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Waterstones

A sober but devastating skewering of cancel culture and the moral certainties it shares with religious fundamentalism' Sunday Times I wasn't aware of him prior to a friend recommending this book - but in both positive and negative ways Andrew Doyle reminds me of Owen Jones. 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 .”Andrew Doyle frames his account of the social justice movement by analogy with the Salem witch trials and finds many chilling analogies.

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle | Hachette UK

Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours. A sober but devastating skewering of cancel culture and the moral certainties it shares with religious fundamentalism— Sunday Times 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. 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.

Life takes us to strange places and as I grew older I was surprised as atheism became more popular. The more time passes the more I am disheartened over how the atheism that I grew up with, that stressed classical liberal values, is not the type that has become popular and that in a lot of ways this popular brand of atheism feels more like the Born Again Christian movement that surrounded me while growing up in different clothing. So I was interested when I heard about this book. In The New Puritans, Andrew Doyle powerfully examines the underlying belief-systems of this ideology, and how it has risen so rapidly to dominate all major political, cultural and corporate institutions. He reasons that, to move forward, we need to understand where these new puritans came from and what they hope to achieve. Written in the spirit of optimism and understanding, Doyle offers an eloquent and powerful case for the reinstatement of liberal values and explains why it’s important we act now. The new puritans have become adept at the reapplication of existing terms that deviate from their widely accepted meanings. Phrases such as ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘equity’, ‘whiteness’, ‘violence’, ‘safety’, and endless others, now bear connotations that are understood only by a minority of activists.” [20] 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). 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

Andrew Doyle’s side – for now | The Spectator I’m on Andrew Doyle’s side – for now | The Spectator

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. The New Puritans generally don’t have any true creative ethos or directionality, and why would they? By focussing on wider political issues, they can obvert their own unkindness and shitty interpersonal behaviour into an uncreative, shallow avenue of just enforcing a moralising high ground, that actually doesn’t in any way evolve or improve the human situation.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! 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.