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

by Andrew Doyle

The writers, all professors at the University of Auckland, acknowledged the cultural significance of indigenous traditions and beliefs, but noted that ‘in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself’. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins pointed out, it would be like teaching ‘Druid “ways of knowing” in British science classes’. The shrewd reader will have guessed what happened next. The signatories were all denounced not only by their own vice chancellor, but by the Royal Society, the New Zealand Association of Scientists and the Tertiary Education Union. Two of Cooper’s colleagues issued their own open letter in response, in which they complained about the ‘untold harm and hurt’ he had caused, and an official investigation ensued. When the journalist and free speech campaigner Toby Young reported on this incredible story, he asked a simple but pertinent question: ‘Why punish a scientist for defending science?’ It seems counter-intuitive, but positionality is now a dominant framework in higher education. This is why the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington DC, recently included ‘objectivity’ on a short list of ‘harmful research practices’. Objectivity, it is claimed, is based on ‘the belief that neutrality on a subject is the best way to determine its facts’, allowing researchers ‘to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience’. Even ‘rigor’ is considered harmf...