The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World
Rate it:
Kindle Notes & Highlights
1%
Flag icon
Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent.
3%
Flag icon
Many are being forced to undergo ‘unconscious bias’ training, even though there is overwhelming evidence that such schemes are unreliable and ineffective. To raise a complaint is taken as proof of the kind of prejudice that the tests seek to expose. After all, only a witch would deny the existence of witchcraft.
3%
Flag icon
While the puritans of the seventeenth century remained forever uncertain whether they were among God’s elect, the new puritans seem to go about their business with a narcissistic lack of self-doubt. They have simplistically divided the world into sinners and saints and have presumed that they ought to be grouped among the latter.
3%
Flag icon
puritanism per se, perhaps most memorably achieved by H. L. Mencken’s definition as the ‘haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
3%
Flag icon
The objective is not to critique society as it is, but to engineer an entirely fresh pseudo-reality through the imposition of limitations on language, thought and perception.
3%
Flag icon
They seek to publicly shame those they consider dissidents, and condemn all those who stray from the righteous path.
4%
Flag icon
almost as a form of holy writ. They have their own esoteric language, originating in largely outdated postmodernist jargon, and enshrined in foundational sacred texts by the likes of thinkers such as Michel Foucault
4%
Flag icon
All of this amounts to the legitimisation of bullying on a grand scale.
4%
Flag icon
The most vicious remarks you will find on social media come from the racist far right and intersectional activists. They are two faces of the same chimera.
4%
Flag icon
That is not to suggest some kind of moral equivalence. One of the most tragic aspects of this movement is that many of its acolytes are well-meaning.
6%
Flag icon
According to the new puritans, the observable realities of existence are a mirage. Only they have access to the truth, and we are all invited to jettison verifiable facts and nod along.
6%
Flag icon
The majority of ordinary people, however, still hold to the liberal, post-Enlightenment notion of striving towards knowledge, truth and justice in an imperfectible world.
7%
Flag icon
Labels such as ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘homophobe’, ‘transphobe’ and ‘Nazi’ – extremely serious allegations that should only be used when there is incontrovertible evidence – were now so promiscuously applied that they had all but lost their impact. This not only provided cover for the far right, but also actively promoted the worst people in society by creating an illusion of widespread crypto-fascism.
8%
Flag icon
The very same people who would openly pronounce ‘microaggressions’ and controversial opinions to be forms of ‘violence’ saw no contradiction in redefining vandalism and physical assaults as non-violence.
8%
Flag icon
Hannah Arendt criticised the ‘rather fashionable’ tendency among white liberals to accept collective guilt, which she described as ‘the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits’. In this, she was articulating something that we all instinctively know. ‘Where all are guilty, no one is,’
9%
Flag icon
On the face of it, when an activist such as Emily Gorcenski states that ‘all TERFs [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists] are white supremacists’ it makes little sense.
9%
Flag icon
Seen through the prism of Critical Social Justice, identity is elevated as the single most important aspect to human existence;
9%
Flag icon
standpoint epistemology, which rejects reason in favour of individual knowledge as determined by identity and ‘lived experience’,
9%
Flag icon
The virtues of individualism, one of the many products of Enlightenment thinking, have been all but rejected by the commissars of Critical Social Justice and their acolytes. They would much rather see people defined predominately by their race, gender and sexual orientation, as opposed to their own distinct qualities. Racists, misogynists and homophobes tend to adopt a similar approach.
10%
Flag icon
When activists champion ‘woke’ causes, they are referring by and large to the kind of postmodern purity culture that is the subject of this book. When challenged in any way, they are able to cite the traditional definition of ‘woke’, which is ‘to be alert to injustice, especially racism’.
11%
Flag icon
the new puritans are adept at glossing their illiberal ideas with progressive terminology.
11%
Flag icon
Just as fear of crime has risen as actual crime has dropped, the illusion that we live in a country plagued by social injustice is more common than ever before.
11%
Flag icon
the application of this kind of framework only creates a new kind of hierarchy, one in which various factions compete to be the most victimised.
12%
Flag icon
Critical Social Justice in its current form is an overwhelmingly middle-class concern, and its failure to address issues of economic inequality is not so much a glitch as the key to its success.
13%
Flag icon
Identity politics is not progressive; it is a bourgeois fig leaf that often conceals the realities of economic inequality.
13%
Flag icon
it is much cheaper for corporations to hire diversity experts ‘to lecture staff about their alleged racism than it is to offer them better pay and working conditions
13%
Flag icon
The ideology of Critical Social Justice has never caught on in poorer communities, because those who are facing authentic hardship have little patience for the exaggerated, manuf...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
13%
Flag icon
Are we really so surprised to see rich teenagers demonstrating an undue sense of entitlement?
14%
Flag icon
life-changing advice. ‘Don’t become an academic,’ he said. ‘You’ll end up deranged, running around the quad screaming “Why did I waste my life?”’
14%
Flag icon
The origins of the current culture war can be traced back to these academic ‘pygmies’ and their collective chokehold on the arts, humanities and social sciences.
15%
Flag icon
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.
15%
Flag icon
This is activism masquerading as criticism,
15%
Flag icon
They are the bastard offspring of Kate Millett and Tomás de Torquemada.
15%
Flag icon
although these movements are postmodernist in origin, their grasp of postmodernism is insecure. They represent, rather, a perversion of postmodernism.
16%
Flag icon
One of the more depressing aspects of applied postmodernism is that it emerged just as a consensus had been reached on issues relating to equality and fairness.
16%
Flag icon
the new puritans have repeatedly associated free speech with the political right, encouraging many on the left to abandon the principle altogether.
16%
Flag icon
Their infatuation with group identity is incompatible with King’s famous dream of a future in which people ‘will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. This is because the religion of Critical Social Justice is fundamentally identitarian in nature and sees people less for their individual qualities and more for the demographic they happen to represent.
16%
Flag icon
One of the cruel ironies of the new puritanism is that it relies on strategies and conceptualisations that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate and even exacerbate the very injustices they seek to counteract.
16%
Flag icon
activists assert what they know to be true, without even the most cursory attempt to persuade others of the validity of their point of view.
18%
Flag icon
Critical Social Justice bears the DNA of Marxism, most notably the utopian belief that equality of outcome is both desirable and possible, even though its realisation would take the implementation of totalitarian measures.
19%
Flag icon
The ‘woke’ ideology, he notes, has become ‘a wonderful vehicle for the highly ambitious and manipulative to manoeuvre themselves up the greasy pole without necessarily delivering the departmental outcomes expected
21%
Flag icon
Throughout The Gulag Archipelago we are reminded of what a society might come to resemble once it has dispensed with the primacy of truth.
22%
Flag icon
the dominance of the new puritans in Silicon Valley has led to a self-contradictory phenomenon: an avaricious corporate oligopoly comprising those who nonetheless believe themselves to be ‘left wing’.
24%
Flag icon
Claiming to be an ‘antifascist’ is rather like wearing a badge saying ‘I am not a paedophile’; it makes others wonder what you’re hiding.
25%
Flag icon
Richard McNally, the director of clinical training at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, who writes: ‘Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD’.
25%
Flag icon
Brendan O’Neill has described trigger warnings as ‘a slippery form of censorship’, insofar as they ‘don’t outright ban books but they do shroud them in suspicion; they treat them as dangerous objects; they tell readers, “Watch out – this book might hurt you”’. And once we countenance the premise that words can be ‘harmful’, the next logical step is the withdrawal or destruction of books.
28%
Flag icon
The evolution of language is inevitable and unpredictable; the imposition of language is authoritarian and should be opposed on principle.
28%
Flag icon
politicians so often reiterate the view that the transgender community are one of the most abused and marginalised groups in society, in spite of overwhelming evidence that this is not the case. The narrative of a widely demonised trans community is sustained not by facts, but by testimonies of ‘lived experience’, and the conflation of words and violence which reconceptualises ‘misgendering’ as a form of hateful assault.
28%
Flag icon
when a complainant is rebranded a ‘victim’ it amounts to a dismissal of the presumption of innocence.
28%
Flag icon
Anyone who is any doubt about the dangers of false memories should read Richard Webster’s The Secret of Bryn Estyn
« Prev 1 3