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

by Andrew Doyle

You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out – to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy? The road to tyranny, then, is circuitous and often navigated at a glacial pace. We might today sanction the occasional act of censorship on the assumption that it is for the greater good, but in doing so we accelerate a process that we may not always be able to control. Our lawmakers may insist that intention is irrelevant to the commission of a crime, but once that precedent is established, we cannot be certain how it could be abused by later governments. We may divide the world into the binary of good and evil, but we have no way of controlling how the leaders of the future will choose to apply these designations. The new puritans now routinely denounce behaviour that at one time would not only have been tolerated, but seen as a virtue.