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

by Andrew Doyle

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.