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

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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.

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

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. 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. 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. 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. 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' CriticIn 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] 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” And as another thing I am preoccupied with is dissecting everything that has happened since the 2016 elections in America, Doyle's observations about why the Social Justice movement has lost the support of blue collar workers were similarly astute even if some of it was hard medicine to swallow. One cannot argue”, Doyle says, “with someone who believes that argument itself is an oppressive denial of his or her truth”.

Andrew Doyle — How the Skeptic » The Michael Shermer Show » Andrew Doyle — How the

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. The objective is not to critique society as it is, but to engineer an entirely fresh pseudo-reality through the limitations on language, thought and perception. They seek to publicly shame those they consider dissidents, and condemn all those who stray from the righteous path.” [15] 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.’

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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.

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

This topic has become something of an obsession of mine lately as both parties in the US have taken off screaming down the road to lunacy. The reason this topic in particular grabs me as opposed to all the other political histrionics is because while I've always been an independent and not a party-line voter, I've aligned myself primarily with the left for the last 15 years and now they leave me feeling totally alienated and quite alarmed for their mental health, and really indignant that I'm supposed to go along with their totally hysterical nonsense. He fell victim to the tyranny of literalism. Irony is dead. If you don a Hitler moustache and parade in a patently ridiculous manner, like John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, you are now likely to be accused of actually endorsing the doctrines you are satirising – and be cancelled, as Cleese was, by streaming services like UKTV. In this punchy polemic the author articulately rails against the excesses of the "woke" left. Some very solid arguments, well presented and mostly engaging to read.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”. Found it very repetitive and frankly quite boring. Doyle uses quotes liberally despite several times noting that people should think for themselves and find their own way of expressing their ideas.

new puritans | Stephen Daisley | The Critic Magazine Those new puritans | Stephen Daisley | The Critic Magazine

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. 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. 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 ”. 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. 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).I do care deeply about free speech and like Doyle I have concerns about how this is handled in the Social Justice movement and it is one thing that has caused me to be disillusioned with it. However, I do have to disagree with his statements about trump being deplatformed. Every right has limits and trump used social media to led an insurrection in an attempt to stop our rightfully elected President, Joe Biden, from taking office. People died in this insurrection, others have gone to prison, and it was a grave threat to American democracy. And unlike Iranian leaders who most Americans know nothing about, every American felt the impact of trump's actions. If anything the January 8th committee has done a brilliant job illustrating how trump used social media to do this. 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. 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. Don’t become an academic,’ he said. ‘You’ll end up deranged, running around the quad screaming “ Why did I waste my life?”’"