The New Puritans Quotes

“The ideology of Critical Social Justice has never caught on in poorer communities, because those who are facing authentic hardship have little patience for the exaggerated, manufactured or imagined grievances of the privileged.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The concept of 'anti-racism' is an illiberal notion cloaked in liberal terms. lt sounds bold, virtuous and active. No wonder so many well-intentioned people are declaring themselves to be 'anti-racist' with little understanding of its divisive implications. The worst possible way to tackle prejudice is to reanimate the racial divisions of yesteryear through a heightened emphasis on group identity. The wordplay of the anti-racist movement is sufficiently slippery to make rebuttals seem counter-intuitive. Anti-racism proponents have it backward. In order to oppose racism, one must be opposed to anti-racism.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Everyone has the right to identify as they wish, use whatever names and pronouns they prefer to describe themselves, and ask others to do the same. They do not, however, have the right to foist such decisions onto anyone else.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognizes the imperfectability of human nature.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Collective guilt, the damaging impact of cultural appropriation, our servility to amorphous power structures, the primacy of identity politics; all of these concepts and more are now uncritically accepted by many of those in positions of authority. When politicians use phrases such as 'white privilege' and 'systemic racism', for instance, they are deploying the language of Critical Race Theory without necessarily understanding the full implications of the ideas behind the buzzwords. They are the unsuspecting agents of applied postmodernism.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Most of us who champion free speech also believe in the idea of etiquette and the social contract. We simply do not believe that such parameters should be legally enforced by censorship or compelled speech diktats.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The belief of the apparatchiks of Critical Social Justice - that all our problems will magically disappear once we outlaw certain points of view or words that cause 'harm' - is a utopian delusion.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“For the new puritans, nothing need be explained or rationalized, because objective truth has become subordinated to -lived experience-. Where Marx saw society as an ongoing competition for resources and power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (a development from Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic), the high priests of Critical Social Justice see society as stratified according to identity politics.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The map of the Critical Social Justice world is not composed of the coordinate systems of latitude and longitude, but the invisible power structures derived from a Foucaldian understanding of human relations.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Just as the symbol of Christ's crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The struggle for gay rights was about equal treatment before the law and making visible those whose persecution by the state had driven them into the shadows of society. 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-.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“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.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Theres no harm un recognizing the more vindictive side of human nature, so long as we do not allow our reason to be dominated by our passion.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Education, like the job market, is a children’s party game where everyone gets the same prize. Yet many are laboring under the misapprehension that the goal of -equity- can be successfully reached by setting the bar so low that anybody can step over it with ease.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“When racial inequality is considered to be present in all conceivable situations, literally anything can be problematised by activists as racist; recent examples include breakfast cereals, the countryside, cycling, tipping, traffic lights, classical music, Western philosophy, interior design, orcs, punctuality and botany.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Where the New Left promoted the politics of unity, today’s intersectional reactionaries promote the politics of division.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“We cannot change the past, but we can learn from it. As platitudinous as this might sound, it is worth reiterating at a time when cultural revolutionaries are promoting a tunnel-visioned approach to history and the arts. An alternative reality based on a denial of the past is no kind of reality at all.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“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’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“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.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Identitarians on the right and left have an interdependent relationship; each one nourishes and sustains the other.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“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.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“the tendency among the ‘woke’ to disregard data if they do not corroborate their existing views, and to interpret all forms of inequality of outcome as evidence of systemic oppression.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“While no one would dispute the existence of other forms of oppression, for activists to prioritise anything other than class and still refer to themselves as ‘left wing’ is incoherent.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“it is much cheaper for corporations to hire diversity experts ‘to lecture staff about their alleged racism than it is to offer them better pay and working conditions’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“when it comes to inequality, money is what matters most of all.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“as with all holy books, many of the faithful are only superficially familiar with the contents.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“For the new puritans, nothing need be explained or rationalised, because objective truth has become subordinated to ‘lived experience’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“This tendency to persist with false convictions even when evidence is produced to contradict them is known as ‘belief perseverance’, and is a recurring trait among ideologues.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The culture war is one of oppositional narratives advanced by small groups of antagonists, while the majority of us are left looking on and scratching our heads.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World