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

by Andrew Doyle

Eunuchs in a Harem The infatuation with representation in the entertainment industries has been largely reinforced by the influence that the new puritans have exerted on the discipline of literary and artistic criticism. Praise for Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk (2017), for instance, was offset by those who complained that he had not included a sufficiently diverse cast, in spite of the historical fact that the overwhelming majority of those evacuated were young white men. It seems to me that if your initial reaction to a work as arresting as Dunkirk is to appraise the degree to which its auteur has fulfilled diversity quotas, then you are not well equipped to judge his artistry. The actor Kenneth Williams once compared critics to eunuchs in a harem: ‘They’re there every night, they see it done every night and they know how it should be done every night. But they can’t do it themselves’