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. 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] 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.

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

In the last decade of the 18th century, amid the abundance of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, 300,000 people in Britain gave up sugar. The Quakers were at the forefront of the boycott, which encouraged children to go without cakes and adults to drink tea unsweetened. During the middle of the 19th century and early 20th century, across the world – from the slums of British industrial cities to the estates of Russian aristocrats – many other people supported a ban on the sale of alcohol, which was advocated by the temperance movement. 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.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. I think the author made some beautiful connections and explained some things well that had mystified me for a long time. For instance, given the extent of the bullying I received for being an atheist while growing up and seeing how people who embraced Christianity were lauded, the narrative that Christians are persecuted in the US always mystified and enraged me. I often wished the Christians who embraced the persecution narrative would try to live as an open atheist for one day so they could learn that people do not laud those they are persecuting and what it really feels like to be persecuted. Doyle's observations about the persecution of a perfect man leading to salvation were very helpful for me to understand the role this plays in their faith. 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' Critic 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”.

The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured

Basically while I think the aims of the Social Justice movement are laudable, I think their methods are horrific and counterproductive. This was always my gut instinct but since I supported the end goals, as it started to unfold I did sit on the sidelines at the beginning as I wondered if perhaps the people preaching these methods might be on to something because I agree with them on these other issues. But the more time that passed the more alarmed I become, especially as it reminded me more of how I was treated by Christians who were convinced of their moral superiority while growing up. Basically I know first hand how alienating is it to be treated that way and how it is a good way to turn outsiders away from your cause. And I feel as though Doyle had a good grasp of the shortfalls of the movement. That said, I feel that his accusations against the Social Justice movement were also rather vague even if I could think of good examples for him for every charge he lobbed. Overall, though, since this is such an important issue I think it is something that does need a lot of thoughtful discussion and research to find the best approach to deal with propaganda and authoritarianism while preserving free speech on social media and elsewhere.

The Michael Shermer Show

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

The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle: skewering the culture wars

Life takes us to strange places and as I grew older I was surprised as atheism became more popular. The more time passes the more I am disheartened over how the atheism that I grew up with, that stressed classical liberal values, is not the type that has become popular and that in a lot of ways this popular brand of atheism feels more like the Born Again Christian movement that surrounded me while growing up in different clothing. So I was interested when I heard about this book. 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. 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. 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]

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. 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'.