Andrew Doyle, the comedian with a serious side and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, has a new book out, and it’s certainly his most important and serious contribution to the public discourse so far: The New Puritans; How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.
Doyle is the creator of the hilarious persona Titania McGrath, originally created as a Twitter account to satirise Wokeness and the excesses of the Social Justice Warriors online. He was a writer for the Jonathan Pie persona and is currently hosting the TV show Free Speech Nation on GB News. Apart from two satirical books under the McGrath persona, and one under the Jonathan Pie persona, Doyle has also written Free Speech and Why it Matters (2021).
His new book, on the “religion” of social justice, is a well-written and thoroughly researched critique of the key tenets of the world-view we often call “woke” – a slightly tabloid catch-all phrase – that has influenced so many people in the US but also increasingly here in Britain and Europe, within academia, in our institutions (even the august National Trust and the police) and increasingly politics and the laws.
Doyle is not the first to compare the current woke social justice movement with a religion. John McWorther in his recent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, calls wokeness literally a religion, because, he explains, they have certain core beliefs that you have to accept on faith without evidence, and these you need to state and restate (as a Credo) in order not to be excommunicated from the fold; the movement has certain holy writs which you must read and accept uncritically and certain prophets whose words you must take to heart. Questions are not encouraged but taken as evidence of the “original sin” of White Privilege. But there is no Pope nor a formal hierarchy of accountability, and so the teachings of this “religion” may shift from day to day. As O’Brian says in Orwell’s 1984, “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”, but in this case, even who the party is may shift and change. Dr. McWorther calls it a “catechism of contradiction”.
These contradictions and lack of basis in empirical data and logic are the main weaknesses in a broad cultural movement that contains fourth wave Feminism, intersectionalism, transgender ideology, Critical Race Theory and more, all of which tends to be referred to as “woke” ideology. The great value of Andrew Doyle’s book is to tackle the foundational texts of this “religion” head on and thus “call out” the nakedness of this many-headed Emperor.
The Sources
The book firstly provides an excellent overview of the sources of this approach from the Marxist dialecticism of intersectionalism, through postmodernist thinkers and the Frankfurt school, including Michel Foucault’s notion of language as power and Herbert Marcuse’s idea of “repressive tolerance”, and concludes that there is a direct line from these ideas and today’s “hate speech” laws, which over the past five years have seen 120,000 people getting “non-crime hate incidents” records, which will show up in an enhanced CRB check and bar them from certain jobs, and 3000 people per year arrested for “offensive remarks posted online” (P. 36).
Thought Crime
Although the College of Policing’s guidelines have been amended recently following the Miller vs. College of Policing case, the wording still betrays the subjective nature of these “crimes” – they are quite literally thought crimes, but worse than that, there are no objective criteria for these so-called crimes as they are defined as (my bolding): “A hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice […], and a non-crime hate incident is defined as “Any incident where a crime has not been committed, but where it is perceived by the reporting person or any other person that the incident was motivated by hostility or prejudice“.
This means that something is a crime if someone claims it is a crime; there need not even be a victim, because if “any other person” perceives the words or actions to be “motivated by a hostility or prejudice” that is enough to make it a “hate crime” or indeed a “non-crime hate incident”, but even the use of the wording “perceived by the victim” presupposes there is a victim before there has even been an investigation. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? This level of subjectivity as part of legislation and law-enforcement, undermines the Rule of Law and is a direct consequence of accepting ideas from Post-Modernist philosophy into our political and legal discourse.
This is why Doyle’s book is important: his overview, drawing the lines of inspiration and demonstrating where these ideas have gained real influence – including the unintended consequences that are harming real people and society as a whole.
The Holy Texts
It’s worth looking at Doyle’s criticism of some of the key texts that have brought Critical Race Theory to general public attention. As he points out, this “theory” is not a scientific theory in the way this term is commonly understood.
You may be familiar with Karl Popper’s falsification principle, which essentially says that if any theory might be incompatible with one or more possible empirical observations, then it is scientific (it CAN be proven wrong); but a theory which is compatible with all possible observations, either because, as in the case of Marxism, it has been modified to accommodate such observations, or because, as in the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific.
Let’s consider Critical Race Theory on that basis. Doyle refers to data from 2014 to 2019 which show that across all higher education institutions in Britain, 996 formal complaints of racism were made, 367 of which were upheld. That is an average of 1.5 formal complaints per year per institution. But rather than rejoice in the low numbers, Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at Cambridge and proponent of CRT, took the low numbers as proof of a failure by universities in defining racism properly and claimed that students were so “exhausted” from all the racism they face that they just gave up on reporting.
Indeed, as Doyle says, “Through the lens of Critical Race Theory, any challenges to claims of institutional racism may be taken as proof of the structural problems they describe.” (P. 189)
Any disparity of outcome between “race” categories is seen by proponents of CRT as proof of systemic racism.
A recent report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities actually found that in the UK “pupils from ethnic minority groups consistently outperformed their white peers” with some minority categories doing better than others. (P. 203). Again, rather than celebrating the fact that there was no evidence of racism in the system, the fact of not finding it was taken as proof that it was there by the CRT devotees, such as The Runnymede Trust, who in response to this report published their own saying that society is “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”, but produced no empirical evidence to support this claim.
This ran rather counter to their own report from 2000 by professor Bhikhu Parekh, which concluded that race relations in the UK were the best in Europe. Has racism become worse over the intervening 20 years?
The EU’s 2019 report on Discrimination in the European Union “…found that citizens of the United Kingdom are among the least racist in the world”. Similar conclusions were found in a report published in Frontiers in Sociology in 2018, and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (“the UK had one of the lowest reported levels of race-related harassment and violence in the 12-country study”).
One of the High Priestesses of CRT, Robin DiAngelo, whose 2018 book White Fragility is one of the sacred texts that has acted as a superspreader for these ideas, dismisses the institutional power of black people such as Colin Powel, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio and Barack Obama, because, she claims, they merely support the current system, and any black success is merely seen as proof that the whites are “allowing” some black success in order to protect the status quo.
At the time of writing this, Britain has just seen her first Prime Minister of Indian heritage take the office. An instance of the neo-racialism that CRT/intersectionalism encourages, the Labour MP Nadia Whittome wrote in a since deleted Tweet that this was “not a win for Asian representation” apparently because Mr. Sunak was a successful businessman before becoming a politician. Is it not typically Asian to succeed in business, perhaps?
In other words, as Doyle puts it, “When perceived in this way, no outcome can conceivably exist that would cause the proponents of Critical Race Theory to doubt their own precepts.”
Now, if we hold that up against Popper’s test, that a theory that can be true in any and all circumstances cannot be scientific, it is clear that CRT is not a scientific theory.
That in itself does not mean that it is useless in all circumstances. But it does mean that it must be viewed as a theoretical and/or ideological approach that offers one possible interpretation of reality, rather than a scientific theory that helps us understand reality.
DiAngelo’s racism
The widespread influence of DiAngelo’s book is troubling, especially as Doyle says, she makes assertions without offering any evidence for them. He praises her for her honesty in admitting to her own racism (such as feeling deeply uncomfortable that a picnic she’s invited to may consist of mostly black people) but takes issue with the automatic assumption she makes in her book, namely that her own racism is proof of racism in others.
“[DiAngelo] is projecting her own racism onto the racial demographic to which she belongs.” (P193).
So we are in the deeply ironic situation that a book by a self-confessed racist, in which she accuses other people of being as racist as she is, without any evidence offered, is being used as a foundational text in anti-racism.
More troubling is that this text, as well as texts by others peddling the same non-scientific ideology, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Reni Eddo-Lodge, and a slew of books that Doyle lists, have gained such widespread traction amongst people who ought to know better. Is it fear of being on the “outside” that drives this?
Social Justice
I do have a couple of quibbles with Doyle’d book, firstly on his insistence that all good people are in favour of Social Justice as he defines it. I for one am not; then again, perhaps I am not a good person. He claims the term has been co-opted and misused by the Woke, in a way that lends them legitimacy. His solution is to distinguish between “Liberal Social Justice” and “Critical Social Justice”.
But there is a slight logical discrepancy when he says “…we inadvertently support their cause by adopting their preferred branding” (P. 26), then goes on to say that we should call their version of it “critical social justice” to show that it is connected to Critical Race Theory.
However, a little further down he quotes aforementioned DiAngelo from the 2017 book Is Everyone Really Equal, co-written with Özlem Sensoy, where they make the distinction between “social justice” as commonly understood (which they don’t see as their goal) but instead favour “a ‘critical approach to social justice …’”.
In other words, calling it “Critical Social Justice” may be more accurate, but it is also adopting their preferred branding, which Doyle counselled against.
What is “justice”?
To be fair to Doyle, he very much impressed me when he brought in F.A. Hayek, the Austrian born philosopher and Nobel Prize winning economist, who criticised the concept of social justice in his seminal work Law, Legislation and Liberty.
But I feel Doyle evaded the fundamental point that Hayek brought against social justice as a concept:
“Strictly speaking, only human conduct can be called just or unjust. If we apply the term to a state of affairs, they have meaning only insofar as we hold someone responsible for bringing it about or allowing it to come about. A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust.” (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek, p. 198).
He goes on to explain that in a free society that is not designed and commanded from above, it makes no sense to talk about “justice” to describe the set of circumstances that result from the otherwise just actions of individuals.
“…since their wholly just actions will have consequences for others which were neither intended nor foreseen, these effects do not thereby become just or unjust.” (Hayek, p. 234).
To call a set of circumstances socially “unjust” and to have a goal for society that is “just”, you have to first agree what these “just” circumstances are; that can, as Hayek points out, only lead us in a more centralised and authoritarian direction.
But what is clear is that the proponents of social justice – whether in the common “liberal” understanding of it that Doyle favours, or in the more “critical” version that DiAngelo puts forward – do indeed “hold someone responsible”, as Hayek puts it, for the inequity between various categories of people in society.
White people are responsible that non-whites are not as wealthy and powerful in white-majority countries, men are responsible for women’s perceived lack of power and influenced, wealthy people are responsible for poor people’s poverty, straight people are responsible for gay people’s lack of perceived normality, non-trans people are responsible for trans people’s marginalisation in society, etc., etc.
And importantly, when someone is responsible, they can be punished for it. This, as Kendi and other argue, can be done through what Americans tend to all “affirmative action”, what in Britain is called “positive discrimination”. I.e. to racially discriminate against whites. As Doyle rightly points out, “In order to oppose racism one mst be opposed to anti-racism.” (P. 201).
The problem is that holding on to a logically inconsistent concept, such as “social justice”, can only help those who wish to spread this peculiar ideology; Doyle would have done better in my view to reject it altogether.
Political correctness
The second slight objection I have is to what Doyle says about political correctness. He claims that the change in social attitudes to things such as gay marriage and minorities has shifted over time due to the political correctness of the 80s and 90s (P. 88). He goes on to say that whereas a prospective member of Parliament in 1964 could use a racial slur in his campaign material, “…this would be unimaginable thirty years later [and that this is] surely testimony to the success of political correctness.”
Doyle fails to clearly define what he means by “political correctness”, other than to refer to how it tended to manifest itself in the 90s and thereabouts. Various dictionary definitions exist, but the article in Encyclopædia Britannica gives the most thorough exposition of the concept in my view. It’s worth looking at a couple of quotes:
“The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line).”
It then goes on to explain that the concept developed into meaning that language actively shaped people’s thoughts, a notion that George Orwell so darky satirised in 1984.
“According to the Sapir-Whorf, or Whorfian, hypothesis, our perception of reality is determined by our thought processes, which are influenced by the language we use. In this way language shapes our reality and tells us how to think about and respond to that reality. Language also reveals and promotes our biases. Therefore, according to the hypothesis, using sexist language promotes sexism and using racial language promotes racism.”
Doyle seems to have implicitly accepted this understanding by saying that the pressure to use politically correct language changed attitudes. He does not, however, entertain the possibility that it was perhaps the changing social attitudes that caused language to follow suit.
In other words, I believe he is committing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of assuming that because two things occurred at the same time, one thing is caused by the other.
My guess is that social attitudes changed from one generation to the next for a number of different reasons and this attitudinal change in turn changed language. With those changes in attitudes certain words, expressions and utterances became unpalatable and this then created a certain social pressure to avoid them.
Political correctness therefore is not about being polite or considerate, it is about trying to change people’s minds by controlling what one is allowed to say, as Orwell said about Newspeak,
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” (Orwell, 1984).
I will deal with Political Correctness more thoroughly in another article, but for now it is enough to recall how it was impossible in the 90s and early 2000s to argue against multiculturalism, immigration and EU membership without automatically being branded a “racist” and “xenophobe”. This stifled the political debate to such a degree that it gave rise to the BNP and UKIP, the former of which were not representative of many Brits in most aspects, but gained a considerable following because they took people’s worries seriously, something mainstream politicians couldn’t do due to political correctness. The same is true of UKIP, who gained such a following that they threatened the Tory vote, and so were finally successful in achieving a referendum on the matter in 2016, something that had been promised by Labour’s Tony Blair and successive Liberal Democrat leaders for many years, but never delivered on.
As Jonathan Rauch points out, it was once politically incorrect to defend gay marriange and lifestyles, and only the right to free speech gave those who wished to campain for it the opportunity to do so. Political correctness would have seen that debate closed down, not opened up, as Doyle seems to suggest when he refers to a friend laughing at the idea of gay marriage in 2003.
I remember as a young, politically active guy in my native Norway in the early 90s, that gay marriage was discussed and it was not political correctness that caused it to become widely acceptable, but the fact that the younger generation saw marriage mostly as a legal contract between two people, and not primarily as a sacrament. Andrew Sullivan wrote his book about same-sex marriage in 1997, not because it was politically correct at the time – quite the opposite in fact – but his book helped to shift the conversation.
Political correctness is the bleach of societal discourse; it doesn’t open up new intellectual avenues nor does it give a space for discussing difficult and sensitives issues, it simply tries to clean those away from polite society altogether, so that those who dare raise them are ostracised, marginalised and generally put on the naughty step.
It therefore feels too convenient when Doyle says that “…we need to draw a clear distinction between the PC era of the 1990s and the opposition to free speech that has since been enshrined in “hate speech” laws, often now abused by the state to clamp down on controversial opinions.” (P. 90).
That clampdown is exactly what happened back then and it should be remember that the Public Order Act goes back as far as 1986; an act that with its various amendments includes more and more utterances that in a free society should be allowed, such as “Jesus Gives Peace, Jesus is Alive, Stop Immorality, Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord“. Yet in October 2001 Harry Hammond, a Christian, was arrested and charged under section 5 of said Public Order Act because he had displayed to people in Bournemouth a large sign bearing these words. These WORDS! He had done nothing to no-one. He had not assaulted anyone, nor followed them about shouting it in their ears, he had merely peacefully stood about displaying his opinion in written form. He was fined £300 and ordered to pay costs of £395, for expressing these politically incorrect opinions.
That is punishing thought crime, rather than actual crime, and it is what comes of accepting the premise behind political correctness, namely that by controlling people’s words we control what they are allowed to think and therefore do.
Doyle is closer to the truth when he says “The age of political correctness is over, and we are left struggling with its ugly offspring.” I would say that the age of political correctness is not by any means over, but that its ugly offspring has intensified it and we are living with the logical and necessary consequences of our capitulation to Political Correctness.
Cancelled culture
One way Political Correctness expresses itself these days is in the way people are sometimes successfully “cancelled”, either from certain events, but also their jobs, positions, or as commentators in the media, or dropped by publishers, etc.
Doyle spends a good part of the book discussing “cancel culture” and its chilling effect on the general public discourse as well as academia. As Jonathan Rauch, and Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt point out in their respective books, The Constitution of Truth and The Coddling of the American Mind, the number of people reporting that they are afraid to speak their mind, and afraid to declare where they stand politically, has increased dramatically on campus, to currently around 60% in America! At the same time the number of conservative leaning academics and professors have gone down significantly both there and over here in Britain.
To those who say that cancel culture isn’t real because look at all these famous people who have been attempted cancelled but who are still around, it is worth remembering what Steven Pinker said about the attempt to have him cancelled; they won’t succeed with people who are well-established or who has tenured positions, but the process will send a signal to those further down the pecking order. Toe the line or you’re next. (Watch video interview with Dr. Pinker here)
Doyle puts it well when he says, “Cancel culture works pre-emptively by fostering a climate in which most people are wary of speaking their minds for fear of misrepresentation, wilful or otherwise.” (Doyle, p. 219).
Crucial contribution
Andrew Doyle’s book is an extremely useful contribution in the on-going “culture war”, not least because he’s able to give an overview of some of the salient issues at hand, in a cogent, knowledgeable and extremely well-written manner.
The book is uncomfortable in what it lays bare, but so beautifully written and scattered with Doyle’s witticisms, drawing on his enormous comic talent, that a topic that could have been overly heavy and depressing, becomes engaging and as light as such a read can be, without compromising the academic quality.
Highly recommended reading.
M.W. Hagerup – Words Matter 