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

by Andrew Doyle

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.