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

by Andrew Doyle

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’.