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

by Andrew Doyle

Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent. You are, as the saying has it, either with us or against us. This is the essence of bigotry.

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

The ongoing culture war, whose existence is often denied by its chief antagonists, is no longer something that any of us can afford to ignore. Culture warriors have always been small in number, but lately they have inveigled their way into positions of power and influence. As a result, the sphere of combat has extended into our homes, our schools, our places of work. Families, friendships and other relationships have been ruined. Many of us would prefer not to participate, but weapons have been forced into our hands. Culture warriors threaten to divide us even as they claim to be healing division. They couch their regressive ideas in progressive terminology, and those who attempt to slow their momentum are quickly subdued.

Those of us who recognise that we are beneficiaries of the Enlightenment have been troubled by the rise of a movement – nebulous but somehow omnipresent – that is impervious to reason and regards the marketplace of ideas with suspicion. Many of us feel powerless to stem these illiberal trends that threaten to sabotage all the progress we have made since the civil rights movements of the 1960s. We have seen the evangelists of ‘social justice’ take control of our major cultural, political, educational and corporate institutions, thirsty for opportunities to be seen to vanquish devils, be they real or imagined. These are the people who make grand claims of moral purity and brook no dissent, a mindset which has led to the development of today’s ‘cancel culture’. These are the powerful few who seek to control public discourse by deeming certain terms ‘problematic’ or supporting legislation against ‘hate speech’. These are the clerics who advance a modern-day equivalent of the Augustinian notion of original sin in the form of concepts such as ‘whiteness’, ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘heteronormativity’. These are the chosen few, the elect, the discoverers of individual ‘truths’ and ‘new ways of knowing’ that bear little resemblance to reality. These are the arbiters of justice who require no evidence of sin in order to detect and denounce the sinners in our midst. These are the new puritans.

With the recent rise of the new puritans and their religion of ‘social justice’, there are many good reasons to reflect on the lessons of Salem. The willingness of the villagers to believe the girls’ visions serves as a reminder of the human susceptibility to false narratives, particularly if they are more readily comprehensible than complicated truths. 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. This episode in history offers a stark example of the conflicting loyalties and tribal instincts that can manifest in any society if the conditions are right.

We are living through a frenzy of conformity, in which the opinions of a minority of activists are falsely presented by the media, political and corporate classes as though they reflect an established consensus. The impact is being felt in all walks of life. For instance, after the seismic events of the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, an actor friend of mine was contacted by her agency because she had not posted anything on social media in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. She was told that she must do so immediately if she wanted casting directors to consider her for any future roles. I have heard many such anecdotes, but invariably they are communicated privately. There is a strong general feeling that to publicly object to the prevailing dogma is to jeopardise one’s career and social standing. I have lost count of the number of emails from academics, artists and media figures who have contacted me to express sympathy for my criticism of the new puritans, but who admit that they could never endorse my sentiments in public for fear of ‘cancellation’. It is a circular problem that can only possibly be resolved if sufficient numbers speak out.

the analogy of ‘the new puritans’ is useful mostly because of what the concept of puritanism has come to represent. Theirs is a belief in the perfectibility of humankind. 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. They seek to publicly shame those they consider dissidents, and condemn all those who stray from the righteous path.

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. Yet, for all their clout, there are still some among us who steadfastly refuse to praise the elegance of the emperor’s new clothes, who would rather point and laugh at the naked man in our midst. Not for the first time in human history, our way out of this madness will depend upon the heretics.

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 new puritans have become adept at the reapplication of existing terms that deviate from their widely accepted meanings. Phrases such as ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘equity’, ‘whiteness’, ‘violence’, ‘safety’, and endless others, now bear connotations that are understood only by a minority of activists. They have apparently taken their cues from Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). ‘When I use a word’, he says to Alice, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’. 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.

One of the reasons why this ideology has been so successful in its infiltration of major institutions has been due to the appealing language it adopts. Few would claim to be against social justice, and so to oppose the movement feels counter-intuitive for the majority of decent people. It is a ‘Trojan Horse’ term, by which bad ideas are smuggled into popular discourse. As early as 1956, Charles Curran in the pages of the Spectator was dismissing the term as a ‘noble bromide’ and a ‘semantic fraud from the same stable as People’s Democracy’. The economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek devoted a substantial proportion of the second volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty (1976) to what he called ‘the mirage of social justice’. In it, he argues that it is a ‘hollow incantation’ and that ‘the people who habitually employ the phrase simply do not know themselves what they mean by it and just use it as an assertion that a claim is justified without giving a reason for it’. He continues: It is not pleasant to have to argue against a superstition which is held most strongly by men and women who are often regarded as the best in our society, and against a belief that has become almost the new religion of our time (and in which many of the ministers of old religion have found their refuge), and which has become the recognized mark of the good man. But the present universality of that belief proves no more the reality of its object than did the universal belief in witches or...

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.

I find it endlessly surprising that some of the most truculent and juvenile online behaviour I have witnessed has come from teaching staff in higher education, but such is the constitution of the new puritans. As Helen Pluckrose pointed out to me, ‘It’s a worry when you can’t tell whether the person yelling at you is a twelve-year-old whose parents need to take their Twitter account away, or a professor of sociology’

Factions of the media were also taking sides. After the New York Times ran an article by a Republican senator calling for military intervention, an in-house dispute broke out between the old-school liberal journalists who believed in diversity of opinion, and the mostly younger staff members who saw the article as tantamount to violence. The opinion editor James Bennet was eventually fired and replaced with Katie Kingsbury. Her first act in her new role was to issue a directive to her staff: ‘Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism, headlines, social posts, photos – you name it – that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately’. With journalists being openly invited to spy on their colleagues and report them for wrongthink, it was safe to say that the New York Times’s 170-year-old reputation for liberalism had come to an abrupt end.

The hectoring and dogmatic tone, the obscene generalisations, the unfalsifiable claims in lieu of evidence, the lack of self-awareness, the narcissistic conviction that they can read other people’s minds, the impulse to interpret critics in the most uncharitable possible way, the outright bigotry and intolerance of dissent: all of this is characteristic of the new puritans.

In effect we are dealing with the old ‘motte and bailey’ tactic. This relates to the medieval castle structure comprising a fortress on a raised mound (the motte) surrounded by a walled courtyard (the bailey). Given its location and fortifications, the motte is relatively easy to protect, as opposed to the bailey which is vulnerable to attack. As an informal fallacy in argumentation, the metaphor works as follows. Someone advances a tendentious viewpoint which we refer to as the ‘bailey’ because it is so difficult to defend. When challenged, our disputant retreats to the ‘motte’, which represents a far more modest proposal, and is able to claim that his or her ‘bailey’ argument has not been successfully refuted. 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’. This ‘motte’ represents the kind of position held by virtually everyone, which means that they are able to entice others into its walls and claim them for their ‘bailey’. This technique means that liberal-minded people are coaxed into advocating illiberal causes, or at the very least are counted as fellow travellers.

‘identitarian left’ would be to accept their claim to be in any meaningful sense ‘left wing’. 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.

Lived experience One of the key factors of Enlightenment thinking is the prioritisation of evidence-based epistemology rather than that which is grounded in faith, superstition or intuition. This is rejected by the ‘woke’ in favour of ‘lived experience’, which proposes that there are multiple ‘ways of knowing’ and prioritises individual ‘truths

This taste for obscurantism among the intelligentsia is a recurrent bugbear in the essays of George Orwell, who complained that when reading their jargon ‘one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’. His reflections are just as applicable to the sloganeering of the academic culture warriors of today: A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. One immediately thinks of the now common intonation that ‘trans women are women’ or ‘trans men are men’. As journalist Helen Joyce has noted, such expressions fall into the category best encapsulated by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton as ‘thought-terminating clichés’, those ‘brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases’ that ‘become the start and finish of any ideological analysis’. 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 o...

The most scathing assessment of this particular brand of academic culture is to be found in Paglia’s essay ‘Junk bonds and corporate raiders: academe in the hour of the wolf’, ostensibly a review of Halperin’s book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), but really an onslaught against the insular and self-satisfied nature of this parasitic branch of the humanities. In Paglia’s judgement, Halperin’s ‘strategy of obliterating distinguished past scholarship and flooding us with minor works by callow nonentities allows him to emerge in the post-Foucault landscape as king of the pygmies’. This Year Zero approach to scholarship and culture is one that remains popular among the new puritans, both in and outside higher education.

Are we seeing the culmination of the so-called ‘long march through the institutions’? The phrase was coined by the German revolutionary Rudi Dutschke, based on Antonio Gramsci’s conception of institutional and cultural ‘hegemony’. Put simply, as an alternative to violent revolution, influential thinkers, teachers and artists would gradually infiltrate the major cultural institutions – churches, universities, the media, the arts – and help to formulate a new power base of the left. The strategy isn’t quite as conspiratorial as it appears, not least because its architects were open about their intentions. Much like the avowed tactic of the Fabian Society, a slow ‘permeation’ of culture, as represented by their symbol of a tortoise with a raised fist, the long march was to be an inchmeal affair in plain sight. Gramsci’s idea was to create the conditions within which revolution might become possible, what he described as a ‘war of position’ which would precede the ultimate ‘war of manoeuvre’. For Dutschke, a successful slow-motion cultural revolution could obviate the need for a violent uprising. The conspiratorial element of all this is open to mockery, and the reality is far less exciting. There is no doubt that the ‘long march’ had its prime movers, and in the early years was actuated by those who were persuaded by Dutschke’s vision, but most of those who have contributed to the climate of intellectual conformity in higher education have done so unwittingly. Part of the app...

today’s ‘Antifa’ agitators have expanded the definition of ‘fascism’ to such an extent that they can excuse violence against anyone they happen to disagree with. This is why feminists who were protesting against California’s gender self-identification laws – which had been exploited by a known sexual predator to expose himself to women and children at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles – were mobbed by groups calling themselves ‘Antifa’. Here we can see clearly how the slippery word games of postmodernists can serve as a justification for needless violence. Whereas what Bray describes as ‘the construction of societal taboos against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression that constitute the bedrocks of fascism’ was undoubtedly once necessary, this cannot possibly apply in today’s society where such taboos already exist. In other words, the core of Bray’s defence of anti-fascist violence rests upon the belief that the progress of civil rights and social liberalism has been negligible – or, at the very least, that fascism continues to operate as a mainstream force

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.

‘The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies.’ This is a line from Solzhenitsyn’s acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout The Gulag Archipelago we are reminded of what a society might come to resemble once it has dispensed with the primacy of truth. In a world where falsehoods are the only acceptable currency, anyone can be branded a criminal. If one person’s ‘lived experience’ is sufficient to condemn another as a racist, homophobe, sexist or transphobe, there can be no adequate defence for the accused.

The greatest trick of authoritarians is to convince their subjects to rejoice in their own subjugation. The rise of the new puritanism has meant that it is not uncommon to see self-proclaimed ‘leftists’ cheering on multi-billion-dollar corporations as they ratchet up their policies on censorship and their determination to control the parameters of acceptable thought and speech. The strength of feeling against Donald Trump has meant that his permanent ban from all major social media platforms was treated as a victory for progressive values. The instinctive sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing one’s enemy silenced prevented many from apprehending the broader ramifications. These are the imbeciles who stare at the finger as the wise man points at the moon.

broadcaster Katie Hopkins. It should surprise nobody that controversial figures have an interest in defending freedom of speech given that uncontroversial speech is never under threat. The principle cannot be said to be invalidated simply because those we dislike endorse it. In surrendering our ideals out of fear of guilt by association, we subordinate our own moral agency to those we fundamentally oppose. A former friend of mine once told me that defending Meechan’s right to free speech was out of the question because Tommy Robinson got there first. I asked him why, if he so despised Robinson, would he grant him the power to dictate which principles he should or should not uphold? He was unable, or unwilling, to answer.

Then there is the slippery term ‘alt-right’, a catch-all that rivals ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ for the way in which it is deployed so thoughtlessly. Even Jordan Peterson, the famous clinical psychologist whose opposition to tyranny in all its forms could not be more well documented, has been branded as ‘alt-right’ by numerous media outlets. In common parlance, the term has become irrevocably associated with white nationalism and movements helmed by the likes of Richard Spencer. So when Peter Walker, political correspondent for the Guardian, claims that the meaning of ‘alt-right’ is ‘subjective’, he is either being disingenuous or naïve. According to Walker, it ‘can be associated with a sort of highly robust, fairly confrontational libertarian right-leaning politics with a dash of support for Trump’, but his use of the modal verb is telling. That a phrase with such potentially libellous connotations can be defined in multiple ways should surely give journalists pause for thought. Unless, of course, their intention is to imply a correlation with white supremacy, safe in the knowledge that the get-out clause of ambiguity will excuse the smear. We see the same problem with the notion of ‘Islamophobia’, which has been weaponised to great effect. As a consequence, people with legitimate criticisms of Islam are gratuitously pigeonholed alongside the sort of reactionaries who shout abuse at women in hijabs or throw bacon at mosques. Even Muslim critics are dismissed as suffering from ‘...

Hysteria is no sound basis for political analysis, and nor is it advisable to allow genuine fascists the opportunity to claim greater support than they actually command. For all the alarmism of the new puritans, we do not live in a country in which racism, homophobia, misogyny or anti-trans hatred are considered in any way acceptable. Even the mildest suspicion of such tendencies can result in a form of social excommunication. That is not to say that such prejudices have been eliminated – human nature is far too flawed for that – but it is reassuring that we appear to have reached a civilised consensus.

might ‘be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of the supreme power’. Just as language can be manipulated, it can also be compelled, which is a similarly coercive method of control. Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson first became widely known due to his opposition to the compelled use of gender-neutral pronouns. Contrary to popular belief, he had never objected to addressing his students according to their preferences, but he drew the line at legal proscriptions against refusing to do so. ‘Tyranny grows slowly,’ he reminds us, ‘and asks us to retreat in comparatively tiny steps. But each retreat increases the possibility of the next retreat’. Once we permit speech to be compelled under certain circumstances, we create a precedent whose limitations will be impossible to predict.

As with so many debates in the culture wars, the issue of pronouns has been misrepresented as a simple question of whether one is on the right or wrong side of history. Activists insist that it is just a way to be inclusive and polite, and in many instances that is clearly the intention. Yet the case against these measures is essentially liberal, and is worth outlining in full, given that most of us, at some point in the near future, will be faced with the choice between explaining our reasons for refusing, or capitulating in order to avoid conflict. When you ask someone to declare pronouns you are doing one of two things. You are either saying that you are having trouble identifying this person’s sex, or you are saying that you believe in the notion of gender identity and expect others to do the same. As a species we are very well attuned to recognising the sex of other people, so for the most part to ask for pronouns is an expression of fealty to a fashionable ideology, and to set a test for others to do likewise. This is akin to a religious conviction, and we would be rightly appalled if employers were to demand that their staff proclaim their faith in Christ the Saviour or Baal the Canaanite god of fertility before each meeting.

.c1

Announcing one’s pronouns has no practical purpose in most scenarios, given that we do not refer to individuals by their pronouns unless we are talking about them, rather than to them. In other words, there appears to be little utility in announcing pronouns other than to endorse the notion of gender identity. But this is a specifically ideological stance, one that people should not be pressurised into making against their will. Moreover, even raising the question can be offensive. Feminist campaigner Julie Bindel has pointed out that women who reject traditional notions of femininity are frequently told that they ‘look like men’. To ask such an individual for her pronouns can be construed as a kind of attack, given that she will have struggled to achieve acceptance as a woman who simply does not conform to sex stereotypes. Then there is the added complication of neo-pronouns. On university campuses, it is not uncommon for badges to be distributed during freshers’ week in order to limit the potential for faux pas. ‘My pronouns are he/him/his’ the badge might say, but it could just as easily be ‘they/ them/their’, ‘xe/xem/xyr’, ‘ne/nym/nis’, ‘ve/ver/vis’, ‘fae/faer/faers’ or ‘zie/ zim/zir’. This kind of cryptic puzzle makes for quite the initiation. Although no employers are as yet mandating pronoun declaration, there is something coercive about the request. An actor friend of mine recently told me that it is now common practice for members of a new cast to announce their p...

.c2

It would seem that the pronoun game is one that the new puritans cannot lose. Those who fail to comply are branded as reactionary and opposed to progress. The alternative is to accept and thereby legitimise the notion of compelled speech, a precedent that lays the groundwork for future exploitation. Those of us who are conflict-averse will be tempted to acquiesce, but the cost may be substantial in the long run. If you feel uncomfortable with stating pronouns at work, my advice would be to make your feelings clear. A refusal need not be antagonistic, and most employers will be happy to hear your reasons. There is always the possibility that you could be accused of transphobia or hate, but this is simply part of the coercive strategy.

.c3

The rise of the religion of Critical Social Justice has been termed the ‘Great Awokening’ because it maintains that a more authentic understanding of reality is attainable from the perception of the marginalised rather than the myopia of the privileged. Worse still, this view has spread to the realm of journalism, an industry in which a commitment to the truth is surely paramount. Bari Weiss powerfully expressed this point in her resignation letter from the New York Times, writing that ‘a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else’. Yet this assault on objective truth does little to improve the lives of the powerless. Rather, it substitutes a flattering claim of superior insight which can only ever be based on faith. It is only through reckoning with the truth that we might seek to ameliorate the many inequalities of our world. For all the emphasis on ‘lived experience’, objective truth still matters. We should be wary of those who tell us otherwise in order to preserve the delicate scaffolding of their pseudo-reality.

As the regalia and lexicon of the LGBTQIA+ movement grows ever more farcical, one cannot escape the feeling that many of its proponents are nostalgic for the oppression of the past. As we have seen, identity politics as practised by the new puritans is rooted in narratives of victimhood. This makes sense in countries where being gay is illegal or even punishable by death, but no sense at all in a country like the United Kingdom where equal rights have been long established.

.c1

Now that equality has been achieved, Pride has descended into a corporate orgy of identitarianism. The rainbow flag and all its tawdry spin-offs are a marker of virtue for companies that wish to sell products to the gullible and declare their commitment to ‘diversity and inclusion’. As psychiatrist Norman Doidge observes, ‘Telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion’. Last year I had the misfortune of dining at a restaurant in Soho awash with rainbow flags, with signs that openly stated that the company was proud to uphold equal rights for LGBT people. Why would they suppose anyone would assume otherwise?

.c2

The question ‘what is a woman?’ is hardly the riddle of the sphinx; a reasonably intelligent six-year-old would be able to give an adequate answer. So when USA Today publishes an article claiming that ‘a competent biologist would not be able to offer a definitive answer’, we can be sure that the publication has been ideologically captured and has little merit as a source of reliable information. Increasingly, the question has been seen as a ‘gotcha’, but it might be better understood as a means by which we can assess the honesty of the ruling class.

the potential for children to be misdiagnosed and encouraged to stave off puberty with hormone blockers because they do not fulfil old-fashioned gender stereotypes is far from trivial. At the Tavistock Centre in London, a gender clinic that has been accused of ‘fast-tracking’ children into life-altering treatments without proper assessments of their psychological and social circumstances, there was a running joke among the staff that soon ‘there would be no gay people left’. The perception that some of these treatments are tantamount to ‘fixing’ gay children to better align with heteronormative expectations is controversial, but understandable. There is overwhelming evidence that gender nonconformity in childhood is a reliable predictor of homosexuality in later life. A preponderance of ‘detransitioners’ – those who have undergone sex reassignment surgery and later wish to revert – are gay men and lesbians. Although the notion that a child can be ‘born in the wrong body’ has gone out of fashion, it was for many years a common mantra among trans activists.

Social contagion, particularly common among teenage girls, must also be taken into account, a point made forcefully in Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: Teenage Girls and the Transgender Craze (2020). In addition, a disproportionate number of those who transition are on the autistic spectrum. As Helen Joyce notes in Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021), the traits associated with this condition can result in misdiagnosis: dissociative feelings ‘can be misinterpreted as gender dysphoria’, and rigid thinking ‘can lead someone to conclude that deviating from sex stereotypes makes a person trans’. According to Joyce, research shows that around 80 per cent of children eventually become reconciled with their biological sex, either before or in the early stages of puberty, if they ‘are permitted to express themselves how they wish but not encouraged to believe that they are members of the opposite sex’. Puberty blockers, in other words, in most cases simply postpone the very process that would resolve the problems that these young people face. While the trans debate is continually misrepresented it will be difficult to make any progress. For the most part, trans activists and gender-critical feminists share a belief in bodily autonomy and the right to identify however one pleases. The contention has arisen because many trans activists take the view that self-identification renders biology irrelevant, whereas for feminists the preservation of single-sex spaces – such...

The prioritisation of gender over sex has become established practice in many of our major public institutions. In March 2022, Baroness Emma Nicholson spoke in the House of Lords about a woman who had allegedly been raped on a hospital ward. Apparently, when police contacted the hospital they were told that there were no men on the single-sex ward, and ‘therefore the rape could not have happened’. This form of ‘gaslighting’ is part of a policy known as ‘Annex B’. The NHS accommodates patients by gender identity, not biological sex, and if a female patient complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not true; there are no men present. As the official NHS guidelines make clear: ‘Views of family members may not accord with the trans person’s wishes, in which case, the trans person’s view takes priority’. One cannot help but be reminded of Orwell’s words in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’

Critical Race Theory originated in the work of American legal scholars such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, but has now expanded further afield. Its online disciples – those who are perhaps not so well read in the subject they seek to defend – often attempt to ‘gaslight’ critics by claiming that any concerns about the impact of Critical Race Theory on society are futile given that, as a field of study, it is restricted to law schools. Yet the practice has been rolled out throughout American universities, corporate training schemes, public services and government policies. It is astonishing that the lie of Critical Race Theory as a specifically legal discipline should have been so widely accepted, given that there have been hundreds of articles, books and podcast discussions on the importance of applying it to one’s pedagogical approach at all levels of the educational system. Perhaps its defenders hold their critics in such low esteem that they assume they struggle with the concept of an internet search engine. As early as 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV were arguing for ‘a critical race theoretical perspective in education analogous to that of critical race theory in legal scholarship’. For those who sincerely believe that Critical Race Theory is unrelated to the field of education, I would recommend the following books: Critical Race Theory in Education (2006), edited by Adrienne D. Dixson and Celia K. Rousseau An...

Any progress towards racial equality that has been made is not understood as evidence of the triumph of the liberal approach, but rather is explained away as ‘interest convergence’. Critical race theorists concede that black people have enjoyed remarkable success – the election of a black president of the United States being the most obvious example – but maintain that any such achievements have only taken place because they have been in the interests of whites. Those of us who value evidence-led epistemology are left in a bind. Black people in poverty can be taken as proof of racial inequality, but black millionaires can be taken as proof of white supremacist ‘interest convergence’. This is how Robin DiAngelo is able to dismiss the institutional and political power of the likes of Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio and Barack Obama: ‘They support the status quo and do not challenge racism in any way significant enough to be threatening’. When perceived in this way, no outcome can conceivably exist that would cause the proponents of Critical Race Theory to doubt their own precepts. The rules of the game have been rigged so that its critics will always lose.

These are assertions piled upon assertions, with little or no evidence to corroborate them. Having accepted the ‘prejudice plus power’ formulation of the critical race theorists, DiAngelo is able to justify her broad generalisations as a virtue because ‘social life is patterned and predictable in measurable ways’. There is barely a page of White Fragility in which DiAngelo does not assert that which ought to be proven. By the closing chapter she is able to claim that she has ‘tried to show throughout this book [that] white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions’. But unsupported proclamations do not ‘show’ us anything, however often they are repeated.

the suggestion that rigorous standards of spelling, punctuation and grammar are inherently ‘elitist’ overlooks one of the chief benefits of standardised English: that it guards against the development of a multi-tiered system of communication which bars certain individuals from the top echelons of society. Throughout history and across cultures, low levels of literacy have been the key factor in sustaining class divisions. It is in the interests of the powerful to keep the lower orders in a state of ignorance. Education brings with it equality of opportunity and the possibility of social mobility. Standards in written English do not perpetuate elitism, they act as a guarantee against it. If it is true that pupils from particular demographics are failing to achieve their goals, the solution is not to dispense with standards altogether but to improve the education system itself. There is a perverse determinism, not to mention a mild form of racism, in the suggestion that certain ethnic groups are destined for academic failure. As headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh has argued, the proposition that accurate written English is ‘white, male and elite’ does nothing to close the attainment gap, but rather ‘masks the fact that our schools are not delivering and ensures only rich white guys will ever succeed’

the association of academic success with ‘whiteness’ has already been debunked. The UK government’s recent Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities found no evidence that the legal and educational systems of this country are rigged against minorities and noted that pupils from ethnic minority groups consistently outperformed their white peers, with the exception of those from black Caribbean backgrounds.

.c1

The conflation of material success with ‘whiteness’ is reminiscent of the guidelines issued by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, which claimed that ‘white culture’ is defined by qualities such as independence, rational thought, hard work, respect for authority and politeness. According to the Smithsonian’s guide, even the tradition of the ‘King’s English’ is a Trojan horse for white supremacy. Many black people were naturally outraged at the implication that such positive traits were alien to them, yet this sort of bigotry of low expectations now carries the approval of President Joe Biden, his government, and an American media in thrall to the agenda of the new puritans. It is, in other words, a rebranded form of racism, which some are now calling ‘neo-racism

.c2

The report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities provided an important corrective to the prevailing narrative of systemic racism in the United Kingdom. It repudiated the view that any differentiation in outcome by race is evidence of racial discrimination. It pointed out that if it were the case that racism was built into the system, we would not have a situation where black Caribbean pupils perform badly, but black African pupils outperform their white peers. It would have to be a very targeted form of racism that kept black Caribbean pupils down, but actually elevated those from an African background. Crucially, the report showed that crude racial aggregates are misleading, and that other factors ought to be taken into consideration. These might include different cultural norms, trends in family structures, geographical inequalities, and the lower economic resources that are typical of first-generation migrants. The report was not denying the problem, but rather making the case for a multivariate analysis in order to successfully address it. The response to this compassionate and eminently reasonable approach was remarkable, with many political and cultural commentators simply refusing to accept the findings. Some critics claimed that the report was denying the existence of racism, even though it explicitly stated that ‘racism still exists in the UK’ and ‘has no place in any civilised society’. The report’s authors had committed the cardinal sin of advancing a...

in keeping with most religious groups, the clerics of Critical Social Justice have made the indoctrination of the young a priority. Children who had once been taught that treating people differently on the basis of skin colour was morally wrong are now being encouraged to see everything through the prism of race. The skewed rationale of Critical Race Theory has left us in a position whereby a mixed-race child could be encouraged to perceive one parent as the oppressor and the other as the oppressed. ‘O that I could steal all the daughters from their mothers and lock them in a monastery’, wrote Sister Serafina of Capri (1621–99) to her confessor. From a strategic point of view, it makes complete sense to indoctrinate children at an early age. As I have argued, the very notion of critical thinking and reasoned debate is anathema to the new puritans, because, once examined, their ideas quickly deteriorate. But Arthur Schopenhauer was almost certainly right when he wrote that ‘there is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five’. This accounts for the sudden proliferation of ‘woke’ children’s books, presumably intended to produce a whole new generation of activists. Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity (2016) by Brook Pessin-Whedbee, aimed at three year olds and over, takes readers through the multiplicity of fashionable new identities such as ‘genderqueer, non-binary, bigende...

Cancel culture, then, is often a form of vengeance against those who have dared to stray from the permitted ideological pathway. It depends upon the dehumanisation of the victim, because – in most of these cases – basic empathy would give its practitioners pause for thought. In other words, a person selected for ‘cancellation’ must first be monstered to justify the slaying. It is a malicious and inhumane trend that perversely elevates the instinct for vengeance above the virtues of forgiveness and compassion. As Solzhenitsyn reminds us, ideology blinds good people to the evil that they commit.

The Witch Hunt The Rowling case merits further scrutiny, as it seems to exemplify so many of the problems I have been describing. It all started a few years ago, when Rowling accidentally ‘liked’ a contentious tweet. Soon after, she followed on Twitter the gender-critical feminist Magdalen Berns, then in the last stages of the brain cancer that took her life. This online activity was taken as evidence of Rowling’s ‘transphobia’, and she was subject to attacks from activists and in the LGBT press. The major catalyst came in December 2019, after tax expert Maya Forstater lost a tribunal against her employers for wrongful dismissal. She had been fired after voicing her opposition to the government’s proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act, which would have allowed transgender people to self-identify as the opposite sex without medical consultation. Rowling tweeted her support using the hashtag #IStandWithMaya, writing: ‘Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?’ The backlash was seismic. Extreme trans activists blitzed Rowling with misogynistic abuse. She has stated that the volume of death threats has been such that she could ‘paper the house with them’

.c1

The situation escalated even further when Rowling criticised an online article for its use of the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ rather than the more obvious, and certainly less cumbersome, ‘women’. The invective reached fever pitch; some former Harry Potter fans even went so far as to burn their copies of Rowling’s books. If only they had read their history, they might have thought twice about the optics of such a move. One journalist somehow reached the incredible conclusion that Rowling had been ‘radicalised online’. This alarmist phrase brings to mind all manner of transgressions. It’s not as though she joined a fanatical death-cult, or endorsed a national policy of eugenics, or embedded subliminal Nazi propaganda into her latest book for children. Rather, her ‘radicalisation’ amounts to a belief that there are biological differences between men and women. ‘If sex isn’t real,’ she tweeted, ‘there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth’. That anyone could possibly consider this a form of ‘radicalisation’ speaks to the loss of critical faculties when one becomes immersed in an ideological thought process that can never yield to reason or compromise. This kind of mass moralistic outbreak is usually described as a ‘witch hunt’, a term which most obviously brings th...

.c2