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

by Andrew Doyle

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.