Scottish Daily Mail

Rise OF THE new Puritans

Once, it was religious fanatics who sucked all the fun out of life. Today, as two provocativ­e new books argue, it’s joyless young social justice warriors. And JULIE BURCHILL refuses to bow at their altar of wokeness

- by Julie Burchill

THE American wit Gore Vidal once observed that, in the 17th century, the Puritans left E ngland for America ‘not because they were persecuted for t heir r eligious b eliefs, b ut b ecause they were forbidden to persecute others for their beliefs’.

Surveying the ever-growing pile-up that is wokery in Britain, it’s hard not to recall these words.Forwokeist­hefirstall­egedsocial­justice movement that seeks not to extend freedoms, but — in the manner of all vicious, bullying cults — to limit them.

The great progressiv­e crusades of the 20th century — from women’s liberation to civil rights for black and gay people — sought to increase the span of human dignity by making s ure t he s ame r ules a pplied f airly a nd to everyone.

But a s I p ointed o ut i n t he b ook I p ublished last year, Welcome To The Woke Trials: How Identity Killed Progressiv­e Politics, the woke

movement — that censorious, high-minded mob trying to force everyone else into following their narrow worldview — has n othing so liberal about it.

Instead, it has far more in common with the hysterical witch-hunting of the Middle Ages.

Now two new books take up my thesis: that wokery has a quasi-religious nature, and it’s only getting worse.

First, t here’s T he R ise O f T he N ew P uritans, by American Noah Rothman. And secondly

there’sAndrewDoy­le’sforthcomi­ngtome,The New Puritans: How The Religion Of Social Justice Captured The Western World.

All three of us have been struck by the strange cultish quality of the modern ‘social justice’ movement. For a start, there’s the

magical thinking. To the woke, a penis can belong to a female if the owner dons a dress: trans-substantia­tion!

A starving, penniless drug addict living in a doorway has ‘privilege’ — as long as he’s a white male.

Words mean the opposite of what they’re supposed to. At the BBC, ‘diversity’ is p arroting the same line on everything from the importance of breakfast to the folly of

Brexit. ‘Inclusivit­y’ is cancelling anyone who doesn’t mouth the platitudes of the mob.

Criticism o f I slam i s ‘ punching d own’, d espite it being the world’s fastest-growing religion.

(Farsaferto­kicktheChr­istiansins­tead.)And so on.

The h ierarchy o f t he n ew w oke p uritans, t oo, is s trikingly s imilar t o t hat o f t he o ld r eligions. There’s a priestly caste who are never to be questioned: men in frocks and their aggressive ‘allies’.

After a brief flurry of feminine freedom towards the end of the last century, once again men are the self-appointed experts on everything female.

The most recent and ridiculous example of this was Jason Grant, a young m acho m an — a nd former employee ofI mperial Tobacco — who was appointed S cotland’s first ‘Period Dignity Officer’. Because nothing says ‘dignity’ like

mentelling­womenhowto d eal w ith t heir i ntimate body issues.

Just like so many primitive o ld f aiths, c hildren a re being sacrificed to the woke religion — not the ritual child murders of the Aztecs or the child-raping of t he C atholic C hurch, b ut rather stunting children’s bodies with puberty blockers, sterilisin­g them and maiming them withm utilating surgery.

And t hen t here’s t he w oke congregati­on. Look how the flock parade themselves on social media, as they swing between primly signalling their own virtue and baying for the blood of the sinners.

The w itches o f b ygone t imes were mostly older women who dared to liveindepe­ndently of men,p referring cats. Younger women o ften d enounced t hem to the authoritie­s.

In an eerie parallel, today it’s older feminists of my own vintage who are

more likely to point out certain selfeviden­t truths: that ‘cervix-havers’ are w omen, s ay, a nd t hat p enis-havers

are not. Yet it is we who are are traduced by our younger sisters as ‘Terfs’: trans-exclusiona­ry radical feminists, the witches de nos jours.

Queen of the Terfs, of course, is J.K . Rowling, who has receivedde­ath threats from the woke cult ever since she made fun of their

language two years ago, saying: ‘“People who menstruate.” I’m sure thereusedt­obeawordfo­rthosepeop­le. Someone help me out.

W umben? Wimpund? Woomud?’

AS I SAY, most of the wokies savaging Britain’s mosts uccessful author are young: but sometimes they’re women old enough to know better. Joanne Harris,58,mildlywell-knownforas ingle novel decades ago and now

chair of the Society of Authors, was recently criticised by Rowling for, as Rowling saw it, insufficie­ntly defending authors from attack following the monstrous attempted murder of S alman Rushdie in New York state.

With Rushdie himself still fighting for his life in hospital, Harris found it the ideal moment to post a jolly poll on T witter: ‘ Fellow a uthors, H ave y ou ever r eceived a d eath t hreat ( credible or otherwise)?’

After Rowling pointed out that she had ‘received no communicat­ion whatsoever from Harris expressing sympathy for the death and rape

threats I’ve received’, Harris adopted a ‘characteri­stic tone of martyred saintdom’, in the words of Ian Leslie in The Critic magazine. She moaned

how ‘ exhausting’ w as h er e ndless f ight for authors’ rights.

But as Leslie also pointed out, only last year, authors including Ian McEwan had signed an open letter highlighti­ng the abuse Rowling faced on social media. Like any woke a dherent, Harris’s response was not to praise free speech — it was to p ublish her own letter in defence of t ransgender rights.

As Leslie aptly wrote, the letter described i tself a s ‘ “a m essage o f l ove and solidarity” — evoking someone smiling beatifical­ly as they spit’.

So much for publishing. But the woke p uritans l ive u p t o t heir n ame i n another sense: their utter, unending joylessnes­s. Oliver Cromwell’s 17thcentur­y P uritans c ancelled C hristmas and exhorted the faithful to enjoy — paradoxica­lly — ‘sober mirth’.

Today, studies show that people in their twenties drink less — and have less s ex — t han t heir p arents d id. A nd their comedy is explicitly unfunny —

and far more timid and prim than it was even a decade ago.

According to Noah Rothman — author of The Rise Of The New P uritans — the urge to police other people’s fun is a feature of every p uritanical movement, including the one that murdered ‘witches’ in M assachuset­ts in the 1690s.

In 2020, the height of socially approved comedy was Nanette, by

the Australian so-called comedienne Hannah Gadsby. Hannah has autism and ADHD, and the show included po-faced discussion­s of her gender and sexuality. It seemed to me to be explicitly and deliberate­ly not funny.

As Rothman notes: ‘Perhaps nothing is as important to the promotion of a virtuous society as what you’re allowed to laugh at.’

So on one side today there are heretics such as Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle: too big to cancel and spurred on to riffs of evermore seditious glee by every cry of: ‘You can’t say that!’

On the other side are the ‘comedians’ that the BBC endlessly promotes, but who are comedians only in the way that the undead can be called ‘alive’: your Nish Kumars, Shappi Khorsandis and Josie Longs.

Then there’s the ghastly Frankie Boyle. He jokes about rape and disabled children in a way that would normally get him banned from the woke airwaves for being too offensive — but since he’s got the ‘correct’ views on Palestine, that’s all right.

Meanwhile, in the manner of a maniacal Inquisitio­n burning books instead of appreciati­ng art for art’s sake, British universiti­es are today said to have more than a thousand ‘trigger warnings’ in place on their undergradu­ate reading lists.

Warwick University recently issued a spine-chiller describing ‘upsetting scenes concerning the cruelty of nature and the rural life’ in Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. Hey, farmer — leave them pigs alone!

Becoming a rock star was always the working-class dream: many of my generation swerved university for it. Traditiona­lly the music industry was so debauched that it made Hollywood Babylon look like Tunbridge Wells, and it would have been unthinkabl­e a few years back that the wagging finger of woke would scold this last bastion of sleaze into submission.

BUT last Christmas, there were two versions of Fairytale Of New York played by BBC Radio — an unexpurgat­ed one on Radio 2 containing the homophobic word ‘f ***** ’ and a censored one on Radio 1 for the lily-livered youngsters. If rock and roll were invented today, the young would be burning their parents’ records.

The New Puritans are the type described by Aldous Huxley in his novel Crome Yellow: ‘To be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour “righteous indignatio­n” — this is the height of psychologi­cal luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.’

Religious mobs in the West — unless they are a bunch of bearded Islamist buffoons up in arms about a film they haven’t seen or a book they haven’t read — have been replaced by woke rabble-rousers and their cultish followers.

The idea that great — or even decent — art can ever emerge from such an intellectu­ally frigid climate of fear and self-censorship is laughable. A quote from Andrew Doyle’s forthcomin­g book, The New Puritans: How The Religion Of Social Justice Captured The Western World, sums it up: ‘With its narrow perception of art and its prudish imposition­s, is it conceivabl­e that the new puritanism will ever achieve anything of lasting artistic value?’

Doyle continues: ‘This is the gang that would happily see Dionysus turn teetotal and Eros fitted with a chastity belt. Artists who are in the grip of this worldview tend to produce bloodless and dispensabl­e plays, books, films and other creative works, which are interlarde­d with social justice boilerplat­e. So much of it seems interchang­eable, like a mass frenzy of plagiarism. How could such a movement ever give us a Michelange­lo, a Bach, a Yeats, a Marlowe, a Bronte? Their halfmade bed will not admit such weighty occupants.’

Religion has been the source of many evils throughout history.

But the Enlightenm­ent, the separation of church and state and the rise of Protestant­ism have seen Christiani­ty move from darkness into light. And it has also been a force for good — think of the crusade against slavery.

The new puritans will leave no beauty in the shape of songs, or buildings, or good works. They will simply leave a steaming pile of cultural debris — and generation­s yet unborn, like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet Of The Apes, will fall to their knees in the rubble, wondering how so many people could have become hoodwinked — and joined their terrible cult.

 ?? ?? Dogma: A trans march in Soho and, right, Extinction Rebellion protesters block Whitehall
Dogma: A trans march in Soho and, right, Extinction Rebellion protesters block Whitehall
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 ?? Pictures: MATT DUNHAM/AP/MARK KERRISON/GETTY ??
Pictures: MATT DUNHAM/AP/MARK KERRISON/GETTY

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