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

by Andrew Doyle

When social justice activists say ‘social justice’, they mean an emphasis on group identity over the rights of the individual, a rejection of social liberalism, and the assumption that unequal outcomes are always evidence of structural inequalities.

When most of us say that we are ‘anti-racist’, we mean that we are opposed to racism. When ‘anti-racists’ say they are ‘anti-racist’, they mean they are in favour of a rehabilitated form of racial thinking that makes judgements first and foremost on the basis of skin colour, and on the unsubstantiated supposition that our entire society and all human interactions are undergirded by white supremacy.

The economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek devoted a substantial proportion of the second volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976) to what he called ‘the mirage of social justice’. In it, he argues that it is a ‘hollow incantation’ and that ‘the people who habitually employ the phrase simply do not know themselves what they mean by it and just use it as an assertion that a claim is justified without giving a reason for it’. He continues: It is not pleasant to have to argue against a superstition which is held most strongly by men and women who are often regarded as the best in our society, and against a belief that has become almost the new religion of our time (and in which many of the ministers of old religion have found their refuge), and which has become the recognized mark of the good man. But the present universality of that belief proves no more the reality of its object than did the universal belief in witches or the philosopher’s stone.

A present-day example of this kind of linguistic prestidigitation is evinced by activists who organise under the banner of ‘Antifa’ – a contraction of ‘Anti-Fascist’ – who are thereby able to engage in violence and intimidation against political opponents and simultaneously evade accusations of fascistic tactics. Like ‘Black Lives Matter’, these groups rely on the good nature of a public who are likely to interpret their name literally. After all, only a fascist would complain about anti-fascism. One prominent political correspondent fell for this basic rhetorical trick when she described the Normandy landing of more than 150,000 Allied troops as the ‘biggest Antifa rally in history’. Activist singer Billy Bragg posted an image of Winston Churchill captioned simply with ‘ANTIFA’. These are the kinds of simplistic misunderstandings that such word games are always apt to engender. Likewise, even as we criticise adherents to the ‘social justice’ ideology, we inadvertently support their cause by adopting their preferred branding. To return to Curran’s point, the notion that self-styled ‘social justice activists’ are advancing social justice in any meaningful sense is akin to believing that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an authentic democracy. In their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (2020), Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay favour a capitalised form of ‘Social Justice...

There are all sorts of examples of how we have been urged to take on trust a variety of extraordinary claims. Practitioners of ‘Fat Studies’ maintain that there are no authentic health risks to obesity, and that the seemingly irrefutable evidence to the contrary is the product of the inherent bigotry of the scientific method. An image of an individual with a bloodstained crotch is shared online to prove that men can menstruate, when we can all quite clearly see that this is a biological female who identifies as male. According to the new puritans, the observable realities of existence are a mirage. Only they have access to the truth, and we are all invited to jettison verifiable facts and nod along. Is this really any different from a preacher who insists that his supernatural interpretation of the world must be uncritically accepted without any evidence to support it?

This is not to suggest that there is not a problem with resilience among students but, as broadcaster and free speech campaigner Claire Fox has outlined in her book I Find That Offensive! (2016), this is largely a product of over-protective teaching and parenting strategies by older generations, as well as an approach to anti-bullying that has encouraged young people to believe that trauma is inevitable and permanent. In a principled effort to shield children from harm, we have put them at greater risk by promoting the idea that to be challenged is a form of emotional abuse. That a culture of offence is taking hold in higher education is undeniable, but it is unhelpful to write off all young people simply because of the actions of an entitled minority who wish to go zorbing through life in their bubbles of hot air.

I make no secret of my hope that the high priests of the religion of Critical Social Justice will soon lose their collective stranglehold on our media, our arts, and our major educational, political and law-enforcement institutions. I yearn for the day when their more hysterical grievances will be treated with the insouciance they deserve, and that their seemingly interminable culture war will draw to a close. But in a time of such uncertainty, when so many are feeling browbeaten into silence, we have to find a way to reinstate the importance of dialogue. To stand up to these new puritans, we need to understand where they have come from, what it is they hope to achieve, and where we go from here.

Activist Vicky Osterweil even wrote a book entitled In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (2020). The very same people who would openly pronounce ‘microaggressions’ and controversial opinions to be forms of ‘violence’ saw no contradiction in redefining vandalism and physical assaults as non-violence.

The hectoring and dogmatic tone, the obscene generalisations, the unfalsifiable claims in lieu of evidence, the lack of self-awareness, the narcissistic conviction that they can read other people’s minds, the impulse to interpret critics in the most uncharitable possible way, the outright bigotry and intolerance of dissent: all of this is characteristic of the new puritans.

The new puritans have eschewed the traditional socialist goals of redressing economic inequality and redistributing wealth and replaced them with an obsessive focus on race, gender and sexuality. These are deemed to be the source of all disparities in power, in spite of the obvious truth that privilege is most commonly determined by money, class, heredity and nepotism.

For those who have imbibed the postmodern hallucinogen, and have become convinced that our understanding of reality is wholly constructed through language, there is no harm in casually redefining terms – or outright lying about how such terms are generally used – if the ends justify the means. It’s the same reason governments refer to swingeing cuts to the welfare state as ‘efficiency savings’. It’s why the CIA has referred to torture as ‘enhanced interrogation’. It’s why the Ministry of State Security during the era of Soviet forced labour camps did not ‘sentence’ a person, but rather ‘imposed an administrative penalty’. In his book, Imaginary Homelands (1991), Salman Rushdie recalls hearing a US military spokesman during the Vietnam War describe a deadly bombing raid as having ‘obtained a 100 per cent mortality response’. This is the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that Orwell warned us about, and the ‘woke’ are masters of the art.

Most people who are concerned about ‘woke’ culture, and describe it as such, are referring to the very specific mindset outlined above. For them the term is merely descriptive, although we would be unwise to ignore the vocal few who have adopted ‘woke’ as a form of insult and who genuinely oppose the noble goal of confronting prejudice. Debates which have been framed as ‘anti-woke versus woke’ smack of tabloid sensationalism, which has led to a general misapprehension of what is really at stake. It is also arguably why such terms ought to be avoided, as the word games are a distraction from the issues at hand. At heart, however, this distinction is best approximated as a conflict between liberalism (‘anti-woke’) and authoritarianism (‘woke’). In spite of those who wear the mantle of ‘anti-woke’ as a means to advance illiberal and regressive ideas, the overwhelming majority of those who take an ‘anti-woke’ stance are trying to resist bigotry rather than uphold it.

This is not to suggest that tackling injustice and prejudice should not be a priority, but the application of this kind of framework only creates a new kind of hierarchy, one in which various factions compete to be the most victimised. Moreover, there are infinite possible variables when it comes to gauging levels of oppression. We need not look beyond our own experience to know that individuals who are conventionally more attractive tend to enjoy undeserved advantages. Indeed, there are countless ways in which one person can be privileged over another. Many are accidents of birth – such as health, temperament, height, or intelligence – and the list could go on indefinitely. The solution for the intersectionalists is to restrict their framework to a few key factors: race, gender and sexuality. As already noted, it is remarkable that class, the most direct source of social privilege, is usually overlooked.

There is a curious moment in Norman Douglas’s Fountains in the Sand (1912) – an account of the author’s travels in Tunisia in the decades after French rule had been established – where he meets a Polish count wandering the streets of Gafsa in a haze of melancholia. He has fallen on hard times, his friends have abandoned him and, unaccustomed to work, he can think of no route back to the life he once knew. As ever with Douglas’s encounters with strangers, the conversation turns philosophical. ‘Tell me,’ says the count, ‘is not poverty a kind of madness, an obsession that haunts you night and day? To puzzle, at every hour, how to meet this demand and how to shun that one; to deny yourself the necessities of life, and your friends those poor little pleasures that you are yearning to bestow upon them – is it not a mental malady, a fever; is it not damnation itself?’

In truth, the reality of poverty is often unfathomable to those who have not experienced it. As a boy I often felt jealous of the children at the local private school whose families took holidays abroad, and who seemed to me wealthier than Croesus. But when I heard my mother talk about her upbringing in a working-class area of Derry in the 1950s, living in a small house with no indoor plumbing, having to share a bed with two sisters, and using bicarbonate of soda as an affordable substitute for toothpaste, it quickly put an end to any self-pitying thoughts. In his memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), the American cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams recalls his mother telling him that ‘poverty, real poverty, was nothing so much as it was the permanent sense that nothing ever works’. The nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt compared the want of money to ‘travelling in a foreign country without a passport – you are stopped, suspected, and made ridiculous at every turn’. This is a world away from the experience of those accustomed to wealth who, although not exempt from the inevitable tragedies of human existence, are at least able to evade the daily aggravations that only money can make disappear.

Class distinctions may be closely tied to levels of income, but more pertinent is the outlook that such conditions foster. Consider former prime minister David Cameron, who once said in an interview: ‘The papers keep writing that [my wife] comes from a very blue-blooded background. She’s actually very unconventional. She went to a day school’. This is the kind of innocent myopia that comes about when one’s entire worldview has evolved in a state of relative affluence. There is a good reason why leftists whose predominant obsession is identity politics are often reluctant to consider issues of economic hardship. The attempt to perceive class as an identity like any other falls short; we are not dealing in abstracts here, rather the tangible impact of poverty.

This is why some have struggled with George Orwell’s tendency to put himself through difficulties in order to write about them. In the first half of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), for instance, he describes his time among the working-class mining communities of the industrial north. In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) he recounts his experiences of purposefully living for a time as homeless. Many of his essays have a similarly immersive quality. In ‘The Spike’ (1931) he stays for a night in a squalid workhouse in London. In ‘Clink’ (1932) he deliberately drinks to excess so that he will be arrested and be forced to spend a night in prison. Orwell didn’t write at a distance, and his wor...

This taste for obscurantism among the intelligentsia is a recurrent bugbear in the essays of George Orwell, who complained that when reading their jargon ‘one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’. His reflections are just as applicable to the sloganeering of the academic culture warriors of today:

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.

One immediately thinks of the now common intonation that ‘trans women are women’ or ‘trans men are men’. As journalist Helen Joyce has noted, such expressions fall into the category best encapsulated by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton as ‘thought-terminating clichés’, those ‘brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases’ that ‘become the start and finish of any ideological analysis’. How often have we heard commentators intuiting the motives of their opponents through accusations of ‘dog-whistling’, the practice of sending out secret signals that only one’s followers can hear? Or the kind of amateur clairvoyance that denounces people for being ‘on the wrong side of history’? Or dismissals of legitimate opinions as ‘right-wing talking points’? The implication of all such clichés is that there is no further discussion to be had, but those who utter them tend to give the impression that they are determined to evade serious argument. They act as hermeneutic shortcuts which disoblige the speaker from considering carefully whether or not his or her ideas have merit.

Take, for example, the deconstructive approach to literature, by which students are encouraged to tease out the contradictions and covert prejudices in any given text. This technique renders the act of reading not so much an exercise in literary judgement, but an inquisition by which authors are reprimanded for their moral failings. One of the earliest and most famous examples of this school of analysis was the late Kate Millett’s book Sexual Politics (1971), in which she denounced the likes of D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer for their supposedly sexist and patriarchal tropes. This is activism masquerading as criticism, a significant feature of what the philosopher Roger Scruton called a ‘culture of repudiation’. There’s a good reason why Paglia once described Millett as the woman who ‘made vandalism chic’.

In other words, when it comes to their activism, the new puritans have clearly imbibed from the fountainhead of poststructuralism and neo-Marxism. Just as Critical Theory seeks to expose the hidden sins embedded within texts, the religion of Critical Social Justice casts judgement on what it perceives to be ‘unconscious biases’, often based on feeble evidence. The promiscuous and unjustifiable accusations of ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘misogyny’ and even ‘fascism’ now so ubiquitous in the mainstream media and online discussion forums are not solely tactical manoeuvres. They are based on activists’ tendency to arrogate to themselves the superpower of detecting wrongthink. They are the bastard offspring of Kate Millett and Tomás de Torquemada.

One of the most common complaints aimed at those who blame postmodernism for the excesses of the Critical Social Justice movement is that these activists are not ‘postmodernist’ in any genuine sense. They have a strong case. The same people who cite the Foucauldian precedent of power structures in society are, more often than not, guilty of asserting their own power through such mechanisms. With its exploitation of victimhood as a means to dominate others, the religion of Critical Social Justice could just as easily be said to exemplify precisely the kind of ‘power-knowledge’ that Foucault sees running through all strata of society. The postmodernists sought to deconstruct the meta-narratives that have been historically significant for humankind, such as religion, science and rationality. But the overlapping schools of Critical Social Justice, intersectionality and identitarianism, have merely created a new meta-narrative, one in which their advocates position themselves as being ‘on the right side of history’. In other words, although these movements are postmodernist in origin, their grasp of postmodernism is insecure. They represent, rather, a perversion of postmodernism. Foucault is not so much the deity of Critical Social Justice as its dancing bear.

Confusions often arise because the term ‘postmodernism’ has been used by so many in wildly different ways. In the 1950s, the term generally denoted the work of artists who parted company from the modernist conventions of the time. By the 1970s, it had been broadened from the arts and literature to incorporate architecture. For the Spanish writer and critic Federico de Onis, ‘postmodernism’ was a literary genre of poetry that sought to curb the excesses of modernism. For Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, ‘postmodernism’ was a specific historical period of late capitalism. For historian Arnold Toynbee, the postmodern era heralded the decline of Western civilisation, beginning with the advent of the twentieth century and its global conflicts. The term has been implemented in so many different ways that many postmodernists do not even describe themselves as such.

When Jacques Derrida received his honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in 1992, an open letter from numerous academics appeared in The Times casting doubt on his status as a philosopher. They criticised his incoherent and paronomastic prose style, claiming that on the rare occasions when his assertions were clearly expressed, they were ‘either false or trivial’. They concluded that ‘academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason,...

The postmodernists had taken a hacksaw to modernity, but once the activists of the early 2000s had successfully penetrated the major cultural institutions, this destruction was no longer merely theoretical. Pluckrose and Lindsay note that the perceived demise of postmodernism in the late 1980s served to disguise its mutation into various new branches, such as Postcolonialism, Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory, all of which followed naturally from the applied postmodern turn of 1989. More recently, its manifestations have become readily identifiable from the use of the word ‘Studies’, with Whiteness Studies, Fat Studies and Disability Studies being the most obvious examples. In all these cases, the activist element is front and centre; the goal is to reconstruct society in order to combat the oppression of minority groups. This is an undeniably laudable aim, but when a theory advances the idea that power structures infuse society at every level, oppression will be perceived everywhere. And if you can’t see it, this is taken as evidence of your collaboration with the system.

Today, the term ‘reactionary’ is typically reserved for nationalists who fear that without the lynchpins of custom and tradition we risk the irreparable fragmentation of society.

Conservatism, however, need not necessarily be reactionary. In the words of Edmund Burke, its champions seek to ‘reform in order to conserve’. That is to say, we draw from the wisdom of the past in order to adapt to the changing circumstances of the present.

By contrast, in its ongoing efforts to unravel the achievements of the civil rights campaigns, the religion of Critical Social Justice is reactionary in the truest sense of the word. Drawing from the implications of postmodernism, it seeks to abjure the very notion of objective truth. It believes that there is no reality beyond the constructions of language by which we make sense of our lives. According to this mindset, the lessons we have learned from our ancestors are just camouflage for tyrannous power structures. This is now the predominant orthodoxy in higher education throughout the Western world. It is the reason why the writer and philosopher Peter Boghossian resigned from his post at Portland State...

the new puritans have repeatedly associated free speech with the political right, encouraging many on the left to abandon the principle altogether. One columnist for the Guardian goes so far as to argue that free speech is ‘not a value’ but ‘a loophole exploited with impunity by trolls, racists and ethnic-cleansing advocates’. To defend the right of unpleasant people to speak their minds is frequently, often wilfully, misinterpreted as a defence of the sentiments expressed.

Intersectional activists who claim to be the heirs to the legacy of Martin Luther King are both self-aggrandising and misguided. Their hostility to free speech situates them unambiguously in opposing camps to the great civil rights luminaries. Their infatuation with group identity is incompatible with King’s famous dream of a future in which people ‘will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. This is because the religion of Critical Social Justice is fundamentally identitarian in nature and sees people less for their individual qualities and more for the demographic they happen to represent. Where the New Left promoted the politics of unity, today’s intersectional reactionaries promote the politics of division.

None of this is to be taken as a denial of continuing inequalities in society. One of the cruel ironies of the new puritanism is that it relies on strategies and conceptualisations that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate and even exacerbate the very injustices they seek to counteract. The claim that the power structures embedded in society can not only be detected, but quantified and regulated, is bound to exasperate those who remain unconvinced that they exist at all. It is as though the argument stage has been entirely bypassed; activists assert what they know to be true, without even the most cursory attempt to persuade others of the validity of their point of view. This is the behaviour of theocrats.

It is a truism that people are often educated out of extreme religious beliefs. With good education comes the ability to think critically, which is the death knell for ideologies that are built on tenuous foundations.

It is inevitable that the principle of freedom of speech should become a casualty when powerful people are obsessed with language and its capacity to shape the world. Revolutionaries of the postmodernist mindset would have us believe that societal change can be actuated through modifications to the language that describes it, which is why Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School maintained that it was not possible to conceive of the liberated world in the language of the existing world. As for the new puritans, they have embraced the belief that language is either a tool of oppression or a means to resist it. This not only accounts for their approval of censorship and ‘hate speech’ legislation, but their inability to grasp how the artistic representation of morally objectionable ideas is not the same as an endorsement. It further accounts for their hostility to debate. According to this view, the airing of toxic ideas enables their promulgation, and so there is a moral duty to ensure that they are silenced. This is the logic behind the practice of ‘no platforming’ or ‘deplatforming’ which sees visiting speakers disinvited from appearing on university campuses due to their contentious opinions.

Science is about deepening our knowledge of what is true, not what is less likely to cause offence or promote diversity and inclusion. This hasn’t stopped the New England Journal of Medicine from arguing that ‘sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people’. The Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry has even produced new guidelines to ‘minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content’. Predictably, the very notion of offence is framed specifically according to the now compulsory emphasis on ‘lived experience’. As the guidelines make clear, ‘it is the perception of the recipient that we should consider, regardless of the author’s intention’. This is not to suggest that scientists are not subject to their own biases, but the scientific method works against human error by attempting to falsify its own claims. For those who believe in embedded structural racism, even a rigorous system of peer review is suspect because it has emerged within the context of a fundamentally oppressive discipline. This is why Professor Rochelle Gutierrez from the University of Illinois can make the claim that ‘on many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness’. It is difficult to know what to do with such a bizarre declaration, other than pray for her recovery.

The writers, all professors at the University of Auckland, acknowledged the cultural significance of indigenous traditions and beliefs, but noted that ‘in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself’. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out, it would be like teaching ‘Druid “ways of knowing” in British science classes’. The shrewd reader will have guessed what happened next. The signatories were all denounced not only by their own vice chancellor, but by the Royal Society, the New Zealand Association of Scientists and the Tertiary Education Union. Two of Cooper’s colleagues issued their own open letter in response, in which they complained about the ‘untold harm and hurt’ he had caused, and an official investigation ensued. When the journalist and free speech campaigner Toby Young reported on this incredible story, he asked a simple but pertinent question: ‘Why punish a scientist for defending science?’ It seems counter-intuitive, but positionality is now a dominant framework in higher education. This is why the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington DC, recently included ‘objectivity’ on a short list of ‘harmful research practices’. Objectivity, it is claimed, is based on ‘the belief that neutrality on a subject is the best way to determine its facts’, allowing researchers ‘to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience’. Even ‘rigor’ is considered harmf...

A few years ago a teacher friend of mine suddenly found himself confronted with the kind of anti-gay language he had not heard in a long time. For whatever reason, pupils at this boys’ school had rediscovered terms such as ‘faggot’ and ‘queer’ as insults and were apparently bullying those who they perceived to be gay. He sought advice from Stonewall, the country’s leading gay rights charity, in the hope that they might be able to send some resources to help tackle the problem. I saw these ‘resources’ for myself. They took the form of a series of posters and pamphlets, none of which addressed the issue of homophobic language but instead focused on the importance of respecting those who identify as alternative genders and prefer to be known by ‘they/ them’ pronouns. Needless to say, this material was useless. It did not address the actual issue that my friend was facing and, as an English teacher, it would be sending mixed messages if he were to suddenly advertise the use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun when he was trying to uphold grammatical standards. On further investigation, we soon realised that Stonewall had quite recently pivoted into new ideological terrain. No longer was this an organisation committed to the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, but it had instead developed a singular fixation with transgenderism. There are many organisations that campaign specifically on behalf of trans people, and they have good reason for doing so. Those who are affected by...

The rainbow flag for Pride has been through a similarly confounding metamorphosis. It was designed in the late 1970s to supersede the pink triangle, which had been appropriated from Nazi concentration camps as a gesture of empowerment and defiance. The new rainbow symbol was a conscious attempt to distance itself from such dark connotations and express a more joyful and optimistic outlook. Originally featuring eight stripes, it was soon whittled down to a more striking six-stripe version, which was the standard for many decades. With the ungovernable escalation of identity politics and intersectionality over the past few years, various interest groups have competed for ‘representation’ on the flag. The ‘progress flag’, for instance, adds a five-stripe chevron: the pink, light blue and white stripes signify trans rights, while the black and brown stripes represent people of colour; as though the original rainbow was some kind of literal depiction of the skin colours that are acceptable in the gay community. There are now flags for every conceivable sexual or gender identity. These are not necessarily representative of groups that have been historically persecuted, but rather a hotchpotch of neologisms that can be seemingly selected at will like so many fashion accessories.

Flags have been designed for those who identify as pangender, aporagender, agender, bigender, trigender, genderqueer, genderfluid, demigender, demigirl, demiboy, neutrois, polyamorous, non-binary, asexual, omnisexual, poly-sexual, abrosexual, androsexual, gynosexual, skoliosexual, aromantic, gender questioning, gender non-conforming, and many more. Surely it would be far easier to create one giant flag for narcissists a...

We are all in favour of unity, equal rights and taking a stand against prejudice and discrimination, which is why flags and convoluted strings of letters that generate alienation and division seem well past the point of any utility. The allure of qualifying for victim status has made it voguish to ‘identify’ oneself into an oppressed class, with almost a third of American millennials now claiming membership of the LGBTQIA+ community. Just as the symbol of Christ’s crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.

According to guidelines from Hull University, the expectation that students ought to be able to write fluently is ‘homogenous, North European, white, male, and elite’. Academic staff at the University of the Arts London have been instructed to ‘actively accept spelling, grammar or other language mistakes that do not significantly impede communication unless the brief states that formally accurate language is a requirement’. However well-intentioned, the suggestion that rigorous standards of spelling, punctuation and grammar are inherently ‘elitist’ overlooks one of the chief benefits of standardised English: that it guards against the development of a multi-tiered system of communication which bars certain individuals from the top echelons of society. Throughout history and across cultures, low levels of literacy have been the key factor in sustaining class divisions. It is in the interests of the powerful to keep the lower orders in a state of ignorance. Education brings with it equality of opportunity and the possibility of social mobility. Standards in written English do not perpetuate elitism, they act as a guarantee against it.

As the author and critic Leslie Stephen noted in Hours in a Library (1892): ‘Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence’.

One wonders how she would fare under the scrutiny of a ‘sensitivity reader’, those priggish moralists who are regularly employed by publishing houses to ensure that authors are not inadvertently causing offence? In particular, her debut novel I Pose (1915) contains passages that would be deemed extremely problematic by modern sensibilities. Still, it is a captivating and eccentric book that defies all expectations and deserves to be more widely read.

Pupils learn about common fallacies such as the ad hominem (personal attack), tu quoque (counter-attack) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (mistaking correlation for causality), along with others derived from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The Latin may be off-putting, but in truth these are simple ideas which are readily digestible. If one were to discount arguments in which these fallacies were committed, virtually all online disputes would disappear.