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

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I was firstly drawn to Doyle’s book because I had even started listening to audiobooks about the 17th century Puritans, to see how their views and perspectives were in alignment with this emerging mob I saw mostly coming out of the United States. 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. 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.

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

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 Michael Shermer Show

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 ”. Andrew 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.” 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”. 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: skewering the culture wars

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”. 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.’ 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]One cannot argue”, Doyle says, “with someone who believes that argument itself is an oppressive denial of his or her truth”.