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

by Andrew Doyle

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...