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

by Andrew Doyle

So while we must exercise a degree of caution when it comes to drawing comparisons between the antics of ‘woke’ activists and the horrors that Solzhenitsyn describes, we would be remiss not to note that their instincts are nonetheless authoritarian in nature. They may not support the violent suppression of their opponents, but they do generally countenance the removal of ‘problematic’ monuments, or the censorship of outdated books, or campaigns to expand ‘hate speech’ laws. Additionally, they display the tendency to reduce moral and political questions to the simplistic binary of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In other words, they see the world as an expanded Disney cartoon, divided into readily identifiable sets of heroes and villains. Solzhenitsyn reminds us of the folly of this approach. ‘If only it were all so simple!’ he writes. ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’