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

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Doyle makes the point that these people do not have defendable points, and they are not open to discussion and debate, as their ideas are not defensible in any sensible arena. Yet their loudness and viciousness online means that people are scared of them. Corporations and those in power, often don’t seem to have any ability to stand up against them, and such institutions are populated by people who were schooled in this literal nonsense at univsersity. 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. 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. 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”. 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]

9780349135328: The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social

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. These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. 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.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. Overall, though, since this is such an important issue I think it is something that does need a lot of thoughtful discussion and research to find the best approach to deal with propaganda and authoritarianism while preserving free speech on social media and elsewhere. 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. 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.

Andrew Doyle (Author of Free Speech) - Goodreads Andrew Doyle (Author of Free Speech) - Goodreads

Doyle's study is sprinkled with humour and is analytical and timely. One doesn't have to agree with it fully to recognise he speaks plenty of sense.— Irish Examiner

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 .” One cannot argue”, Doyle says, “with someone who believes that argument itself is an oppressive denial of his or her truth”. The journalist Helen Lewis explored the link between contemporary social justice and religious faith in a recent BBC Radio 4 documentary, The Church of Social Justice. As traditional religion has declined in both Britain and the US, Lewis argues, politics has taken its place. Many of us now carry our political beliefs with an intensity that previous generations reserved for religion. 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).

The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured

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 ”. 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. If future historians were to recommend only one book to help readers understand the "Critical Social Justice" madness that consumed the West in the early twenty-first century, it would be The New Puritans. Written by one of the ideology's most articulate and effective critics, Dr. Andrew Doyle's timeless perspective detailing the ideological takeover of venerable institutions also provides an impassioned defense of liberalism. A must read.— Peter BoghossianAndrew Doyle highlights how the issue in higher education goes onto to permeate in corporate institutions. higher education students he highlights how students are being 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.” 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 However, he makes a good case for taking this policing of language seriously. Somehow these guardians of moral propriety have become disturbingly influential in our cultural life, imposing their eccentric anti-science and often misogynistic doctrines on comedy, the arts, academic institutions, the civil service, even the police. There will always be those whose instinct inclines towards submission to authority, who are happy to shift beliefs in accordance with the fashion or decrees from above. Orwell called this the 'gramophone mind', content to play the record of the moment whether or not one is in agreement”