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 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] 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. Inconvenient truths are to be erased from this new globe. Behavioural trends that emerge due to biological sex differences, for instance, are simply to be ignored because they defy the rules of the new terrain. Instead, there will be conspicuous lacunae bearing the inscription ‘here be dragons'.

How the culture war became a crusade | The Spectator

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”. 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”. 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. 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. My upbringing is unique. I was born in the 1980s and raised as an atheist with classic liberal values in the Bible Belt. My parents taught me Rationalism and Empiricism, and I embraced those values and ways of thinking, as well as skepticism and Humanism. I also held strongly to the belief that I may disagree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it and have always been very anti-censorship. None of this was particularly popular when I grew up and I was often targeted for bullying by Christians (it is very hard for me to lie and say I believe things I don't truly believe so I was an easy target).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.

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

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 ”. 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. 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] A sober but devastating skewering of cancel culture and the moral certainties it shares with religious fundamentalism' Sunday Times 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!

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.’ 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. 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. 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.

9780349135328: The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social

Befitting someone with “a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry” from Oxford (apart from the ‘seriously-WTF!?’ factor, I like that it’s necessary to designate ‘early,’ as if to declare he’s into the Renaissance poets before they sold out), TNP is awash in literary references. I’m even tempted to re-read Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” which Doyle cites often. 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. Followers of these movements were sanctimonious and fired up by an abrasive, religious passion. But at a time when Enlightenment thinkers and sceptics of religion such as Voltaire and David Hume considered non-white people to be inferior, the moral universalism of figures such as Cowper is remarkable. One cannot argue”, Doyle says, “with someone who believes that argument itself is an oppressive denial of his or her truth”.

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 are signs that the we may have reached peak woke. There have been some high profile legal cases like Maya Forstater's, who won a landmark ruling against her employers dismissing her for “transphobic” views. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission recently ruled that it is legitimate to believe that people cannot change sex. That the EHRC actually had to state that human biology is legal speaks volumes about the state we're in. In Is everyone Really Equal? (2017), Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo emphasize that the mainstream understanding of ‘social justice’ is not the aim of their movement. This, after all, would be a liberal humanist approach, one that the ‘woke’ ideology explicitly seeks to undermine. Rather, a ‘critical approach to social justice refer to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e. divided and unequal) in significant and far reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality and ability.’ Critical Social Justice, therefore, ‘recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e. as structural) and actively seeks to change this.’” [26,27] 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. Of course, Doyle makes many clear references to exactly HOW this inane culture, has all the worst aspects of religion, with none of the good, “redemption, forgiveness, compassion”. And so this woke religion is an insane religion, driven by hatred and full of arrogance that its abstracted intellectual wankery, is the epitome of intelligence - common sense be damned!