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”. 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. 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] As a product of the eighties I am pleased to see Doyle make the case for the much maligned PC culture that he argues “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.” There is no parallel to the ideology of tday.

Andrew Doyle’s side – for now | The Spectator I’m on Andrew Doyle’s side – for now | The Spectator

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). 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. 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. 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. Institutions are becoming more and more susceptible to releasing ‘guidance’ and other more sinister regulations that embed its own language at the cost of female equality there is much ground that could have been covered clearly here – the NHS, government departments, education – the public sector is a breeding ground.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. 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.

The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Ca…

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

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

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. These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community.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. This book is a call to arms in an existential battle . . . it's thrilling to be led by such a brilliant commander— Spectator