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

by Andrew Doyle

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.