The chronicler of woke who prays his own book will soon be obsolete

More listening and less arguing is the way to end these millennial ‘absurdities’

Andrew Doyle’s book starts with a bang: a (now former) close friend hurling a three-word insult at him. Only the middle word, ‘Nazi’, is publishable here. A gay man who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, Doyle is as unlikely a fascist as can be imagined, which is of course the point. ‘Our era is characterised by the white heat of political tribalism,’ he says, ‘and, as it has escalated, I have watched with a growing sense of incomprehension the curdling of rational minds.’

Doyle is best known as a comedy writer of satirical characters, including the news reporter Jonathan Pie and the painfully woke Twitter sensation Titania McGrath, but there is little amusement to be found in The New Puritans (though I did chuckle at the deadpan retelling of a student activist dismissing John Stuart Mill’s seminal On Liberty as ‘just s***’). This is a serious book about a serious subject – the arrogation of moral purity and cultural orthodoxy by a small but influential posse, and Doyle’s anger and disbelief come through on every page.

There have always been culture wars, of course: they are neither rare nor necessarily undesirable. But the difference now is that one side refuses to countenance even the slightest amount of opposition or doubt. Far from being something of interest only to the chattering classes, Doyle says, the current culture war has serious effects both macro (Brexit and Trump) and micro (the effect on individuals who have found themselves on the wrong end of ‘the arbiters of justice, who require no evidence of sin in order to detect and denounce the sinners in our midst’).

Doyle’s reference points are eclectic and enjoyably varied: Salem and Victoria Wood, George Orwell and Monty Python, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci and Stormzy, Quentin Tarantino and Pope Stephen VI. He is very good on the ways in which language is at the heart of the conflict: when a word can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean, as with Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking-Glass, meaningful debate is rendered all but impossible. Doyle emphasises that, despite the sound and fury, the extreme opinions are those ‘of a minority of activists... falsely presented by the media, political and corporate classes as though they reflect an established consensus’.

Rather than jump on the bandwagon of lambasting snowflake students, he instead places much of the blame on their lecturers: ‘Students are, by and large, eager to be challenged and open to hearing views that they have been assured – usually by academics of my generation – are beyond the pale.’

And he points out that the emphasis on race, gender and sexuality when studying power structures leads to downplaying or flat-out ignoring the biggest determinant of all – class.

There are a few minor cavils. Some main points are repeated too often, with the same thing simply being said in different ways. He refers to the ‘evangelists of “social justice” [taking] control of our major cultural, political, educational and corporate institutions’ without acknowledging the breadth, depth and influence of opposing conservative outlets (including this one).

And, though he is eloquent on the confirmation bias exhibited by the new Puritans, this is an accusation that can be levelled to some degree at pretty much every part of the political spectrum these days. Few of us are wholly immune from ‘the human susceptibility to false narratives, particularly if they are more readily comprehensible than complicated truths’.

It is not until late on in the book that Doyle addresses perhaps the key question: how best to deal with this? His answer – ignore the zealots and try to engage with those for whom rational argument is still a possibility – may appear unsatisfactory, but is in sad fact entirely realistic.

Even from this place of mild resignation, however, he finds hope. ‘In this age of unreason, we must find a way to learn again how to talk to each other... Too often we are guilty of treating an argument as an opportunity to enhance our status, to defeat our rival, or to convey a message, when we ought to be listening. Somewhere between fight and flight there is the impulse for compromise.’

He ends with a wish that ‘within a generation this book will be obsolete. The few who remain with any interest in perusing these pages will, I hope, smile and shake their heads at the bubble of absurdities that enveloped us in the first few decades of the millennium.’

It is an optimistic conclusion somewhat at odds with the rest of the book, but every decent reader, irrespective of political leaning, must surely hope that he is right.