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

by Andrew Doyle

A new censorial and identity-obsessed brand of social justice activism has given rise to a climate in which blind ideological affiliations are the norm.

Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent. You

It is a common characteristic of ideologues to assume that any challenge to their belief-system must be symptomatic of an evil nature.

When bad ideas are allowed to spread unchecked they take on an illusion of incontrovertibility, and when figures of authority are captured by dangerous ideologies, resistance becomes a feat of courage that few will dare to attempt. But perhaps the aspect of Salem most redolent to today’s cultural skirmishes is the development of an intense climate of fear and mistrust.

In the religion of ‘social justice’ we are facing a new kind of purity culture, one which is intolerant of any attempt to question its core tenets.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, for instance, claimed that the puritans ‘hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators’.

The new puritans, then, are best understood as a clergy for a godless age, presiding over a dreamscape of their own making, rewriting our language, history and traditions as they go along.

American physicist Steven Weinberg famously remarked that ‘with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion’.

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. Identitarians on the right and left have an interdependent relationship; each one nourishes and sustains the other.

How does one tackle a bully who bullies others in the name of love?

When most of us say ‘social justice’, we mean the concept of equality under the law, opposition to prejudice and discrimination, and equal opportunities for all. When social justice activists say ‘social justice’, they mean an emphasis on group identity over the rights of the individual, a rejection of social liberalism, and the assumption that unequal outcomes are always evidence of structural inequalities. When most of us say that we are ‘anti-racist’, we mean that we are opposed to racism. When ‘anti-racists’ say they are ‘anti-racist’, they mean they are in favour of a rehabilitated form of racial thinking that makes judgements first and foremost on the basis of skin colour, and on the unsubstantiated supposition that our entire society and all human interactions are undergirded by white supremacy. No wonder most of us are so confused.

Ben Clements in the Cornell Law Review, defining ‘religion’ as ‘a comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience’. If a non-supernatural belief system such as Confucianism can be considered a religion, advancing as it does a humanistic philosophy that perceives ‘the secular as sacred’, then why not social justice? Recent books such as John McWhorter’s Woke Racism (2021) and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. (2021) also argue that this ideology is a religion in an authentic, rather than merely analogous, sense.

the notion that self-styled ‘social justice activists’ are advancing social justice in any meaningful sense is akin to believing that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an authentic democracy.

‘Critical Social Justice’ and ‘Liberal Social Justice’. The latter is the belief that inequalities and injustices in society are best addressed through civil discourse, the free exchange of views, and evidence-based analysis. The former is the belief that society is irredeemably unequal and unjust, that these structures are maintained by oppressive groups wielding power over the oppressed, that these groups are defined in terms of identity (i.e., race, gender, sexuality), and that the solution lies in the forcible reconfiguration of language, history and social norms.

Unlike most religions, Critical Social Justice does not encourage the kind of self-reflection that allows us to acknowledge our own faults. Rather, it promotes an unshakable sense of certainty in one’s own convictions and a complete intolerance of non-believers. In truth, it more closely resembles a fundamentalist religion – insofar as it demands a belief in the unfalsifiable at pain of excommunication – but for the sake of concision the word ‘religion’ will suffice.

To borrow a metaphor from C. S. Lewis, the symphony of the world would be insufferably bland if all the instruments in the orchestra played the same note.

insouciance

It also explained the monomania over ‘power structures’, which followed on directly from the Foucauldian notion of the interconnectivity of power and knowledge. In other words, the rot was there from the outset. As C. S. Lewis observed, ‘if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong’.

If we were to write the drama of the twenty-first century culture war, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020 would be the dramatic crux. So, while acknowledging that the cultural revolution that ensued was not necessarily dependent on this crime, with hindsight it is clear that this was the event horizon. We had reached the point of no return.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for creating the ‘1619 project’ – an overview of American history so revisionist that even its own fact-checker raised concerns – declared that ‘destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence’. This statement was entirely in keeping with Critical Social Justice doctrine, according to which words may be redefined at will for the sake of political expediency.

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.

‘Where all are guilty, no one is,’ she wrote. ‘The real rift between black and white is not healed by being translated into an even less reconcilable conflict between collective innocence and collective guilt’. Yet this was now precisely the kind of conflict that was being fostered.

is characteristic of the new puritans. This is because the various branches of Critical Social Justice activism, from the extreme elements of the transgender movement to Black Lives Matter, are all underpinned by a form of identitarianism siphoned from the same source. In these circles, there is no distinction between the racist, the sexist, the homophobe, the transphobe; each designation implies the other. One may as well use the term ‘sinner’ and leave it there.

they have a united belief in what Pluckrose and Lindsay describe as the ‘postmodern knowledge principle’ (‘that objective knowledge cannot be obtained’) and the ‘postmodern political principle’ (‘that society is structured into systems of power and privilege’). This amounts to a form of standpoint epistemology, which rejects reason in favour of individual knowledge as determined by identity and ‘lived experience’,

John Stuart Mill wrote, without the mental exercise of defending one’s point of view, one is left holding ‘a dead dogma, not a living truth’. Little wonder, then, that Mustafa dismissed Mill’s seminal work, On Liberty, as ‘just shit’, which is precisely the kind of critique one has come to expect from activists of an identitarian disposition.

It is the responsibility of genuine progressives to reassert the centrality of open debate as the cornerstone of any free society. In short, we need to robustly defend the liberal values that the new puritans have rejected as forms of institutional oppression.

The culture war is best apprehended as word games writ large, and so to grapple with the key tenets of the new puritanism, we must first decide how best to describe them.

The matter is complicated further by specious claims that ‘woke’ is merely a snarl word invented by the right, a tactical manoeuvre which undermines the ability of critics to effectively identify the phenomenon they are describing. An enemy without a name is impossible to defeat on the battleground of ideas.

The new puritans have eschewed the traditional socialist goals of redressing economic inequality and redistributing wealth and replaced them with an obsessive focus on race, gender and sexuality. These are deemed to be the source of all disparities in power, in spite of the obvious truth that privilege is most commonly determined by money, class, heredity and nepotism.

Censorship First and foremost, ‘wokeness’ is a belief system underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is constructed through language. Its adherents are convinced that words can be a form of violence and that censorship – either by the state or Silicon Valley tech giants or societal pressure (colloquially known as ‘cancel culture’) – is therefore necessary to guarantee social justice.

Power The ‘woke’ maintain that society operates on the basis of invisible power structures that only those who are trained in Critical Theory are qualified to detect. This conceptualisation is derived from Foucault, who saw power as produced by discourses that permeate all society in all directions, and not solely as a top-down phenomenon.

Society must be reconstructed in order to guarantee equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. In other words, we are talking here about ‘equity’ rather than equality.

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. How else might one explain a report in the Pink News about a group of ‘queer hikers’ who seek to prove that ‘the great outdoors isn’t just for cis, straight, middle class folk’ – as though anyone ever assumed it was – and have reached the extraordinary conclusion that there exists ‘a lack of equality around access to the outdoors’. Most gay people are perfectly capable of walking in the countryside, and only a pampered few with a grotesque yearning to self-identify as ‘oppressed’ would ever pretend otherwise.

If oppression can be inherited, one can still be a victim while maintaining a life of relative privilege.

there are countless ways in which one person can be privileged over another. Many are accidents of birth – such as health, temperament, height, or intelligence – and the list could go on indefinitely. The solution for the intersectionalists is to restrict their framework to a few key factors: race, gender and sexuality. As already noted, it is remarkable that class, the most direct source of social privilege, is usually overlooked.

As biologically hierarchical creatures who are subject to an infinite number of external social forces, human beings cannot be reduced to abstractions based on ‘matrices of oppression’, and the idea that to do so could deliver equality of outcome seems hopelessly quixotic. The best that we can do is to attempt to redress all forms of injustice as and when we encounter them, and we don’t need intersectionality to show us how to do that.

Poverty is not an identity, but a reality of those for whom the machinery of living has broken down. In its eschewal of class politics, leftist identitarianism cannot help but be a pursuit for the relatively affluent.

Those who know anything about rhetoric understand that clarity of expression is key to meaningful dialogue.

A. C. Grayling hits the target when he describes the postmodernist literary theory of this period as ‘a sort of ersatz, easy, do-it-yourself philosophy’ in which ‘various playful because inconsequential forms of jargon-rich lubrication take the place of substantive commentary’. Or, as philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum puts it in her analysis of Judith Butler’s turgid prose, ‘obscurity creates an aura of importance’.

How often have we heard commentators intuiting the motives of their opponents through accusations of ‘dog-whistling’, the practice of sending out secret signals that only one’s followers can hear? Or the kind of amateur clairvoyance that denounces people for being ‘on the wrong side of history’? Or dismissals of legitimate opinions as ‘right-wing talking points’? The implication of all such clichés is that there is no further discussion to be had, but those who utter them tend to give the impression that they are determined to evade serious argument. They act as hermeneutic shortcuts which disoblige the speaker from considering carefully whether or not his or her ideas have merit.

The postmodernists sought to deconstruct the meta-narratives that have been historically significant for humankind, such as religion, science and rationality. But the overlapping schools of Critical Social Justice, intersectionality and identitarianism, have merely created a new meta-narrative, one in which their advocates position themselves as being ‘on the right side of history’. In other words, although these movements are postmodernist in origin, their grasp of postmodernism is insecure.

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.

‘Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom’.

Peter Boghossian resigned from his post at Portland State University. ‘Students at Portland State are not being taught to think,’ he wrote to his former employers. ‘Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.’

Most of us who champion free speech also believe in the idea of etiquette and the social contract. We simply do not believe that such parameters should be legally enforced by censorship or compelled speech diktats.

The mark of a healthy liberal democracy is that it is able to reach a consensus regarding civility without having recourse to criminalisation or mob pressure to enforce such terms. The belief of the apparatchiks of Critical Social Justice – that all our problems will magically disappear once we outlaw certain points of view or words that cause ‘harm’ – is a utopian delusion.

Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right even to suppress them, for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to anything as deceptive as rational argument, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Popper’s formulation is often cited by activists, but his insistence that we ought not to suppress intolerance so long as it can be restrained by the force of public opinion is often overlooked.

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.

Schumpeter understood that once a series of tenets are accepted as articles of faith, debate is no longer feasible. In such instances, he says, ‘the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is disapproved of not only intellectually but also morally. There cannot be any excuse for it once the Message has been revealed’.