Good review I read at the weekend. Addresses this topic well.
Andrew Doyle’s book
The New Puritans starts with an absolutely shocking scene. Out of nowhere, a friend of Doyle and the father of his godson calls him a “f***ing Nazi c***” in a bar in Soho, London.
Doyle is gay, socially liberal and fiercely opposed to racism and authoritarian politics. Why the abuse? Doyle had voted for Brexit.
JK Rowling, the most popular living writer in Britain, has distinguished herself over the past 25 years for her philanthropic generosity and progressive beliefs. Yet in the past few years she has been denounced as a bigot for her view that there is some conflict between the rights of natal women and transgender women. Dave Chappelle, the African-American comedian, has likewise been castigated because he has made jokes about trans people in his Netflix comedy shows. These two, both previously darlings of the left, have been demonised.
The New Puritans provides an answer to what is going on. Over the past ten years, Doyle contends, a movement that was previously confined to the fringes of academia and the internet has gained mainstream prominence. This movement is known by many names: woke politics, identity politics, the successor ideology, the Elect and Critical Social Justice. Doyle simply calls the followers of this movement the new puritans. These new puritans treat political differences in morally dogmatic terms. If someone disagrees with you on race or trans rights or feminism, they are not simply wrong. They must also be evil. For Doyle, such activists are part of a religion. “They have,” he writes, “simplistically divided the world into sinners and saints and have presumed that they ought to be grouped among the latter.”
Doyle points out that these activists even invoke the language of religious fundamentalism when they denounce anyone who deviates from their beliefs. For instance, in October 2021, outside Netflix’s headquarters in California, a woman went up to a comedian called Vito Gesualdi, who was supporting Chappelle, and screamed at him: “Repent, motherf***er!” Doyle writes: “I can think of no more apposite phrase to encapsulate the combination of rage and religiosity that characterises this movement.”
By religion, Doyle really means a particular type of religion that is fundamentalist. When he uses the word puritan, he is not literally describing these modern-day activists as religious dissidents who want to purify the Catholic church and abolish theatre. He is drawing an analogy. What he means is that these activists eschew critical thinking and tolerance in favour of moral absolutism.
In fact, he thinks in some respects that the new puritans are worse than the older iteration. “Among the puritans of New England,” he writes, “there existed a profound and pervasive consciousness of human fallibility and their unworthiness before God.” The modern ones, by contrast, “give the impression of never having questioned their own ideological certainties”.
This is why, on issues such as cancel culture, which he describes as “a method of public humiliation and harassment which could often lead to the target losing his or her means of income”, Doyle thinks a more useful literary reference than George Orwell’s dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four is Arthur Miller’s 1953 play
The Crucible. It is about the Salem witch trials in 17th-century America, but also speaks to the time it was written, the McCarthyism of early 1950s America, where anyone suspected of communism was persecuted and ostracised.
Many say that cancel culture isn’t real, it’s simply about making powerful people accountable. Rowling and Chappelle haven’t been successfully cancelled, they say — Rowling still produces books, Chappelle still makes comedy shows — but the key point, as Doyle puts it, is this: unlike Rowling, most women “have neither the finances nor the influence to shield themselves from the depredations of the online mob”.
He points to the example of the children’s author Gillian Philip, who was dropped by her publisher for supporting Rowling and has subsequently trained as a lorry driver. Philip has said that “the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive — and a lot less misogynistic — than the world of children’s writing”.
What distinguishes Doyle’s book from many writings on the vexed subject of the culture wars is his sober and reasonable tone. For instance, he doesn’t make sweeping generalisations about young people. Quite the opposite. “The tendency to dismiss the younger generation as â€snowflakes’ is both counter-productive and inaccurate,” he writes. This is because “my various experiences of speaking on university campuses is that students are, by and large, eager to be challenged and open to hearing views that they have been assured — usually by academics of my generation — are beyond the pale”.
Doyle comes at this issue from the position of someone who supports social and cultural progress. He doesn’t believe racism, sexism and homophobia have vanished from society. Far from it. What he does believe, though, is that under the guise of progressivism these prejudices are being encouraged rather than challenged.
For instance, being an anti-racist, up until recently, meant believing that someone’s racial identity should be irrelevant in how we judge them. That belief, in many progressive circles, now seems antiquated, and racialised thinking is becoming ascendant.
On the issue of sexism, moreover, how can we protect women’s sport and other sex-based spaces if we can’t define what a woman is? And on the topic of homophobia, if, as Stonewall’s chief executive, Nancy Kelley, argues, lesbians not dating trans women is a form of “sexual racism”, how can we defend and protect the rights of gay people to love who they want to love in peace?
“It is my wish,” Doyle writes near the end, “that within a generation this book will be obsolete.” I hope so too, but for now his erudite and persuasive thesis is the perfect introduction to anyone interested in understanding the culture wars that are gripping many of our institutions — from schools and universities to public charities, private companies, art galleries, the media and publishing.
The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World by Andrew
[ Tomiwa Owolade SUNDAY TIMES]
www.rte.ie
www.theguardian.com
