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

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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. 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. There is so much in Doyle’s book that is admirable: the extensive research and hard evidence, the clarity and intelligence of the argument, the different topics covered. In the chapter ‘Transcendence’ he talks about literature, art and creativity, commenting: ‘They (Critical Social Justice Theorists) forget, or do not know, that transcendental art is a reminder of our smallness in a vast and unfathomable world.’ Doyle is a traditional left winger, who saw his fellow left wingers captured by what he may describe as metaphorical dark forces, as a political pole shift has occured and yet Doyle and many others do not at all fit into the traditional right wing or “alt right”.

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

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. 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. In the throes of victimhood, these children had found the means to become the most powerful members of the community. They could see their fellow citizens executed on the basis of ‘spectral evidence’ alone, what we might today refer to as ‘lived experience’.” [8] 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 .”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. These campaigns – to restrict substances that provide pleasure – were united by a fervent form of Christianity. And although their advocates were not Puritans (members of a 17th-century religious sect that sought to rid the Church of England of any vestiges of Roman Catholicism), they were puritan in a wider sense: they spoke out against “indecent” pleasure and championed virtue. I do not state that I feel it was right that trump should have been deplatformed lightly. And I admit I might be wrong. Social media is so new that I don't think we have good, empirical data on how best to manage it. My thinking now is that when a public figure with as much power as trump did misuses it in the manner that he did and with the dire consequences that resulted then that public figure needs to face serious consequences. 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.

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

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. 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.This book is a call to arms in an existential battle . . . it's thrilling to be led by such a brilliant commander— Spectator