 No social critic is more withering toward identity politics and cancel culture than the playwright and comedian Andrew Doyle. Whether it's creating Titania McGrath, the Twitter parody of a woke 20-something poet or penning a best-selling defense of free speech, the Oxford educated and openly gay Doyle never misses an opportunity to show the folly of political correctness. He sat down with reason to talk about his forthcoming book, The New Puritans, how the religion of social justice captured the Western world. Andrew Doyle, it's good to be talking to you again. Thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me. Nice to see you. Let's, you know, we've talked a couple of times over the past few years on similar, although, you know, disparate themes, but they all revolve around kind of wokeness, political correctness, conformity as the enemy of the good society, of critical thinking, of anything that approaches progress. The new book, which is, I'll just say, editorialized at the beginning is a phenomenal read. It's a learned read that is, you know, it makes, it's cream spinach. It tastes delicious while also giving you fiber and much needed minerals and vitamins. So it's The New Puritans, how the religion of social justice captured the Western world. What is the elevator pitch? So you are with one of your heroes, Rawl Dahl in the glass elevator that shows up in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What do you define the book in an elevator pitch? It's a fact. I mean, I suppose the pitch relates to the reasons why I wrote the book. And I think we are at a stage now in this culture war or whatever we want to call it, where many, many people are baffled. There's this movement that has sort of seized control of all of our major institutions, be they political or academic or the media over in the UK, the NHS, even the army, the judiciary, absolutely everywhere, seized power and control in a way that the political correctness movement of the 80s and 90s never did. And this is the major distinction between the two. And yet the movement, and we can see, most people can sort of see that this ideology has regressive elements is taking us back, taking us to some very dark places, that it is a liberal, that it is divisive, all the rest of it. And yet people are confused because it uses language that describes itself in the opposite terms. So it is a movement that is grounded in what they call social justice. And yet it works against true social justice. It uses phrases like anti-racist, which of course, everyone wants to get on board with because we're all opposed to racism. And yet people can see that, oh, hang on a minute, suddenly we have schools segregating children by skin colour in the name of this anti-racism. What's all that about? It uses words like equity. And people think that sounds great as well, because they think it's the same as equality. It calls itself progressive when it is regressive. It calls itself liberal when it is illiberal. So ultimately, the more I've read and thought about this, the more I've realised that the cultural war of the present is really a battle about language and who gets to control definitions of words. And so in order to combat it, there's an extra shield, if you like, you know, you can't just challenge the ideas that are being presented in the way that in a traditional method through the Socratic method or through additional evidence led and enlightenment values, because this movement is impervious to reason. And that is a deliberate aspect to it. And also, its practitioners have the habit of redefining language so that you end up they can basically dance around the salvos of their critics. Because when you try and criticise them, they say, yeah, but the words that you're using to criticise us don't mean the things you think they mean. So the book has been written, hopefully, to make all this accessible. In other words, I'm using a number of analogies. I call it the religion of social justice. I think using the analogy of religion is a very accessible way to make sense of this for most people. I'm comparing it to, I call them the new Puritans, because I believe it is a kind of purity culture. It's a culture that has expectations of moral purity in line with what these ideologues believe to be morally pure. I have to sort of caveat that. So I'm using those analogies. I'm talking through the various language, the origins of the movement, where it's come from, how it sees control. I give innumerable examples of where it sees control. When people say there is no culture or it's a right wing myth, well, I've layered example upon example and read the footnotes you'll see. And I should have you point out, you are not a man of the right. No, no I'm not. Yeah. How do you define your politics or your ideology or your worldview? I mean, I've reached the conclusion that this present culture war has effectively killed off right and left in terms of those words are now generally not meaningfully used in the most part. So I find that very difficult. I think if you were to scholars of politics, if they were to think about what right and left have traditionally meant, and if you were to take my views, most of them would fit into the left wing category when it comes to certainly economic issues and social issues. You could make a case that I have more conservative values when it comes to education, perhaps. Your aesthetics are a little bit suspect from my point of view, but that's also partly because you're not only English or well, you're not English, right? You're Irish. No, well, I'm English. No, I'm English. I mean, I'm English. My family's from Northern Ireland. Yes. Well, you see, this is the point of contention. My family is from Southern Ireland. But I'm not a nationalist. I don't have those impulses which are associated with the right. Right. But you have, I was merely getting at the point that you are, and actually we'll get to this, you talk about tradition in the arts and aesthetics, not as the enemy of innovation, but rather as the base from which innovation changes. So you're conservative in the sense that you value all of the great artists, certainly, of the British tradition, but you're not an enemy of experimentation and change. I suppose you would, well, in that case, what you would say is I suppose I'm broadly left leaning, but I am culturally conservative on a number of issues. But then of course, the left has always traditionally had cultural conservatism really at its heart. If you read The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell, you will know this, that it's not something that undermines being left wing. It actually bolsters it. And many of the great modernists, I mean, the most experimental modernists were oftentimes were right wingers. So somebody like Ezra Pound or even T.S. Eliot are hardly left wingers as they're smashing traditional forms. Well, so let's talk about, the book is called The New Puritans and that's a controlling metaphor that you come through and it ties into the religious dimension that you say this is fundamentally religious. At various points, you talk about wokeness or critical social justice, I guess is your preferred term, as counter enlightenment. Just very briefly sketch out what you mean by the enlightenment. What are the key virtues and values of the enlightenment? And then how does critical social justice act as counter enlightenment? I suppose the key values would be evidence-led epistemology, reason, rationality. In other words, assessing the data and drawing a conclusion from it, challenging oneself, not assuming that one is right about absolutely everything, avoiding faith-based positions wherever possible. And then arguments from authority, which faith-based arguments tend to be. Yes. So the phrase counter enlightenment is borrowed from Isaiah Berlin, although he wasn't talking specifically about this, but it seems to me that when ideologues dismiss the enlightenment as just the product of cis white males, dead white men in periwigs is a phrase that is used. Then I suppose we are right to call this the counter enlightenment. And of course, so much of what is being propagated now is based on belief. I mean, we hear that phrase lived experience practically all the time. One individual's perception of something is suddenly taken as evidence. You'll notice that their accusations are taken as proof. So it is drawing us back and it depends upon the abandonment of critical thinking in order to operate and all of that. What is the role of the individual in kind of enlightenment thinking and then in counter enlightenment kind of pushback? Yeah, there's a bit of a conflict within the critical social justice movement about this, because really they are collective. They are conformists. They believe in, as with all ideologies, there is a set of rules that one follows and that's why when you meet one of these woke activists, you will know what their opinion is on every single subject because they're not thinking for themselves, they're following a script. So they are collective insofar as they see people predominantly through group identity, predominantly through race, gender, and sexuality, and therefore they see people in terms of collectives. At the same time, they make grand claims to hyper-individualism and expressing themselves as who they really are and all of this kind of thing. But no, they are collectives and I think one has to think in terms of the individual and I mean that kind of thing terrifies me, the idea of sort of bundling people together in terms of some immutable characteristic over which they have no control. The very nature of art and this is why I emphasize the practice of art so much in the book is that it is, I mean I quote Emile Zolder's definition of art which is life seen through a temperament and I think art is the ultimate expression of individuality. The great artists could not be replicated by any other individual, it is solely them. They can certainly influence others in terms of the craft of art, but ultimately the creation of itself is very, very, is always singular in great artists. The, you know, the enlightenment is fascinating and you know, I'm a follower of Friedrich Hayek when he talked about, you know, there was, and he's not original in this thought, but you know, that there was not one single enlightenment, but many enlightens, but most of them fixated on some empowerment of the individual that, you know, individuals finally got the ability to choose among different options and how to live. They were set free from collective identities forced on them from religion or, you know, or government or whatever in economics they gained more freedom and that's all great, but at the same time it is true that the enlightenment also ushered in, you know, some of, you know, in a freer society where people did all sorts of things, there was also the development of new kind of scientific based understandings of groups. Racial science is really an outgrowth of the enlightenment, like making racism obviously always existed, but it became scientific. When you look at people like Freud, Marx and Darwin, the kind of three great, you know, thinkers of enlightenment, of the enlightenment in many ways, they reduced people in various ways to urges that kind of minimize individualism. So within the the enlightenment, there is kind of a struggle over group identity or, you know, or motivation and individualism. Absolutely. I mean, you can't just simply say the enlightenment is this one set of values that is applied. I mean, it's like it's like anything else. It's like conflicts within Marxism or within conservatism, you know, that you always have those conflicts, although notably the conflicts within critical social justice are few and far between because what happens is someone steps out of line ever so slightly and they turn on them and attack them and destroy them. So that's their sort of way to, and that's, I think, that's what makes it such a banal ideology. You know, it doesn't have space for those kind of discussions and disagreements. Oh, yes, I'm not trying to simplify the enlightenment. What I'm trying to do is draw out what I consider to be its key virtues. Virtues, by the way, which have underpinned all of our progress over the past 200 years. Yeah, material and moral, right. And artistic. And I think all of that and, you know, drawing on John Stuart Mills on liberty, when he talks of this idea of individuality has to be prioritized, you know, in order to enable freedom. So what I'm doing there, I suppose is just, yes, just drawing on those virtues and saying that effectively, given all that we have achieved as a civilization, thanks to those enlightenment values, wouldn't it be terrible to jettison those values now? And that is precisely what the critical social justice movement is not just asking us to do, demanding that we do. And that to me is why I feel, and this is another reason I wrote the book is because I think this is hugely important. I think it is an existential threat. And I think there are far too many people who are dismissive of it and saying, you can just ignore these people and they'll go away. It's fine, don't worry about it. It's, you know, and they have completely missed the extent of the chokehold that they hold over our society. And it has to be addressed, I feel. I mean, do you feel that it's not a coincidence then that as enlightenment ideals are being kind of deeply challenged or shunted aside, that we also see a rise of a kind of tribal identity, not simply in universities or something like that, but at the national level in the countries of old Europe and whatnot. Are these linked somehow? Well, yes, I mean, I think it is all wildly connected. I think the political tribalism that we are seeing is very much intimately connected to the rise of the critical social justice movement, even down to the degradation of political discourse. I mean, we've recently had a new Prime Minister, you know, we, you know, by the time this comes out, it might be another five or six. Exactly. And the discussion around the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and, you know, commentators calling him extreme right wing, and just, it's the, which is not, it's the discourse of Twitter is now being parroted by politicians. You know, we have a Labour politician here calling Tories scum, for instance, that was Angela Reina referred to Tories as scum. It's, it's, it's the infantile binary thinking that has been encouraged by social media and particularly by the critical social justice group who believe in effectively good versus evil. They believe in a kind of disneyfied view of the world, heroes and villains and nothing in between. And that has now migrated into the realm of politics as well. And, and so I, and that's happening not just in the UK, but like you said, across Europe. So I think that tribalism is very much connected to this. And, and any form of, of tribalism means a sort of negation of the individual, doesn't it? So I do think it's, it's very much connected. So the book is titled The New Puritans before we talk about them and kind of their theology. Sketch out, who were the old Puritans? How are, how are you, who were they and why are they important as the starting point of your controlling metaphor? Well, well, I'm actually very, being very specific about the analogy I'm drawing there, and I'm not talking about Oliver Cromwell, I'm not talking about the, the, the, the Mayflower, I'm not talking about the, I'm talking actually very specifically about, and I draw an analogy very specifically with the Puritans of Salem of New England. I like the word Puritans because it has always had connotations. In fact, the origins of the word are as a, as a slur, meaning those who have a kind of precisionist and prohibitionist tendency, what we might call priggish, I suppose, as well. Those who seek to refashion society in accordance with their values, that the, these are all Puritan ideas. And this applies very much to the, the ideologues of the critical social justice movement, but they're not the same. They're in fact hugely different. The Puritans of old always had a hyper awareness of their own fallibility, you know, of their own unworthiness before God. This is the exact opposite of the, what I call the New Puritans because they, of course, never seem to doubt themselves at all. And they know that they are right. They just know it. So what I'm doing, but I, but I did want to draw very specifically a comparison with Salem. And the reason for that is the Puritans of Salem were God fearing, decent people, you know, and for a very short period, they entered into this hysteria. It was not typical at all of Puritan behavior. They were not inveterate witch hunters. This is not something that happened. It happened a hell of a lot more in Europe. It wasn't something that they generally did. It lasted a very short period of time. So what was it? February 1692 to May 1693. So the little over a year came and went in a flash. And in that, in that, in that moment, you have the girls of the village crying witch and all various people and people going along with this hysteria, getting caught up in this hysteria. And as a result, 20 people were executed and further five died in jail. So but, but everyone thereafter repented their part in this and they knew that they were wrong and they, you know, but what that comparison, that analogy, I think is quite revealing to what is happening today, because I think so many of these activists and those who believe them are caught up in a kind of hysteria that is based on what they call today lived experience. In Salem, the prosecutions were secured on the basis of what they called spectral evidence. In other words, the girls lived experience. The girls saw these demons and devils and, and that was their truth, their way of knowing. And that was taken as evidence. In fact, the Salem witch trials collapsed in their entirety when the deputy governor of the colony wrote to the leading clergymen in the country to ask whether spectral evidence was admissible in court and was told by no means. Absolutely not. And therefore, all of the cases collapsed because it was solely the lived experience of the girls that secured the prosecutions. There was no further evidence beyond that because it obviously didn't happen. In some ways, the victims kind of consented. Some of them, I mean, some of them famously were like, fuck you, you know, you're wrong, but others were like, I guess I'm guilty of something. That's how cancel culture works, isn't it as well? I mean, you know, this is why the comparison works because so many people go along with this out of fear for their own necks, out of fear of, you know, because of self preservation. This was the key thing that Arthur Miller talked about when he wrote The Crucible. He said the thing that really drove him was seeing during the Red Scare, during the era of McCarthyism, seeing powerful people capitulate for the sake of self preservation. He found that terrifying. And that's why you get this clear sense in The Crucible, that the magistrates don't really believe it. And that is made very, very clear in the film adaptation that Miller wrote the screenplay for. There's an extra scene in that where Abigail Williams, played by Winona Ryder, goes to see the judge, I think it's Danforth, yeah, and says, oh, and accuses Reverend Hale's wife. And Danforth says to you are mistaken. Now that actually happened. Reverend Hale's wife was accused and no prosecution was forthcoming. So there were so many cases where the magistrates, where a powerful person was accused, and the magistrates just gently corrected the girls and invited them to move on, which suggests very strongly that they knew it wasn't real. Most notably, Reverend Samuel Willard, who was the acting president of Harvard, was accused. And they simply said, no, you must mean Constable Willard, who's already in jail, you've already accused him, because the devil doesn't make those kind of errors. But you see, why I think that's important is if we see the activists of today, the crazy blue-haired anime avatar types you find on Twitter, who are screaming that there are fascists in every corner, turfs everywhere, witches in other words, those who are crying witch in other words, it wouldn't matter if we could just ignore them. If we just said, you know, be on your way, it wouldn't matter. But all of the elites capitulate to them, chuckle to their bidding. They implement policy at the highest level on the basis of what these screaming activists say. And that's the equivalent of the elites, the magistrates and the ministers in Salem, who rather than say to the girls, this isn't true, they said they went along with it. And that's why I think the comparison works. Yeah, so dig into that a little bit, both in Salem, but then also more importantly, in contemporary times, why do people in the place of power who could say, no, you're wrong, or we're not going along with this? Why do they capitulate, not just, not grudgingly, but they seem to go in whole hog oftentimes? We're going to restructure the entire university, the entire corporation, the entire nonprofit world around these claims. I can't read minds, of course, so I can't be sure. But there are various reasons why people do, and we can talk in abstract terms here. Most importantly, fear and intimidation. Even someone like Rebecca Nurse in Salem, who was one of the most respected women of the town, of the village rather, was, you know, she said the girls aren't being truthful, this is one of their silly seasons, and she was hanged. So the consequence, so this is the same reason why people don't speak out in support of JK Rowling, because they see the rape and death threats she gets all the time, they see how people attempt to brutalize her, and they don't want that, people want an easy life. So fear and intimidation cannot be underestimated as an impulse. And if you don't think that powerful people get afraid, you would be wrong. If you look at so recently, Keir Starmer, who's leader of the opposition, one of the most powerful men in the UK, was asked the question, do women have penises? And you could see in the interview the terror, the terror behind his eyes, he was absolutely frightened, he was stammering, he was stuttering, he couldn't answer the question, he couldn't tell the truth. And it's a weird question, isn't it? Because not only can they not speak the truth. It's kind of like the inverse of a surrealist image or something, like can a fish be soluble? It's bizarre, it's funny because he must know that we all know that he knows the answer to that question. And that compounds the fear, because not only is there the fear of what the activist will do to him if he gets it wrong, but there's also the fact that he's clearly humiliated, he's embarrassed not to be able to answer it truthfully. So all of that's going on, I think that's part of it. Do you think some of it is also generational in the sense, and you touch on this a couple of times in the book, and I'm not sure, I mean, it's interesting in the Salem case, and I've read different kinds of analyses that are all fascinating, a Marxist analysis of the Salem witch trials, and that it was really about dispossessing certain people of property. Well, that could have been part of it. And there's like psychological ones, etc. But part of that, what's interesting is that it's young girls who are generally not that powerful in a, not in that society, but it was a youth movement in a particular way. But in contemporary times, now, although clearly people like Ibrahim X. Kendi and Robin D'Angelo, who are kind of lead or bestseller book authors in the United States are not exactly spring chickens, but this has the feel of a youth movement. We are at a period where the baby boom generation, which has been just clogging every hierarchy, every level of society for decades now. Going back to the 60s is getting a little bit feeble and old. How much of this is a generational thing of where every every maybe 25 or 30 years, people get cleaned out and this you use any means necessary. And this happens to be the means to kind of get rid of the old guard. Well, the reason why this isn't really a generational thing is because the studies into the prevalence of this mode of thought are quite clear that the woke if we want to call them that are a minority in all generations, including the young. I mean, you could say that there are more of them in the younger groups in Generation Z, but most of Generation Z are against this stuff. So, with that in mind, the idea of interpreting this as just older people failing to keep up with changing norms is just factually wrong. And also, my experience has been that the most vociferous proponents of the woke movement are basically people of my age and a bit older. How old are you? I'm 44. You mentioned Robin D'Angelo. You mentioned if you make a penny, but there's also the academics who have really driven this in various humanities departments. I mentioned this in the book, but when I gave a talk at Aberystwyth University, the young people were great and they didn't necessarily agree with me on everything, but they wanted the conversation and wanted to be challenged. And it was the department. It was people older than me who said this talk is against and certainly all of the theoretical kind of apparatus that's being used here. And you go into this. This has been kicked around the university when I'm 59. I was in grad school in the late 80s and the mid 90s and literary and cultural studies. And all of the theories that were being taught then are the ones that are being applied. Exactly. So I don't think we can put this down to generational differences at all. I just think that doesn't work. But it is, I guess one thing that is fascinating is that, you know, and particularly universities, right? Because universities are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old and they are slow moving conservative traditional institutions. It's kind of amazing how they are revealed to be paper mache and they just get pushed over. They go down, you know, I mean, they go down without a fight, it seems. It's frightening, isn't it? And that has been the problem as I continually tried to emphasize in the book is that it's not the people making the demands, it's the people capitulating to the demands, it's the people in power. That has been the problem from the start. And it's horrifying, isn't it? That academia in particular is susceptible to this stuff. I mean, we all thought this could sort of be contained within the humanities, you know? Because people in the humanities have the luxury of saying that there's no such thing as objective truth. And, you know, they're dealing with poetry and things like that, metaphysics. But when you get into the role of science, you know, when you have, I mean, I mentioned in the book that example in New Zealand where the New Zealand government wants to introduce multiple ways of knowing into the classroom alongside the theory of evolution. So you're teaching evolution, but you also have to teach the kids that maybe raindrops are tears of a goddess, a forest goddess. Now, and when one academic, in fact, a number of academics signed a letter sort of saying, look, we respect Indigenous people's rights to believe whatever they want and that there's value in tradition and culture. But this has no place in a science classroom. They were hounded and destroyed for it. And if you go with that, then it's not far that you're going to be teaching that tears are rain that are really tears from Eric Clapton. Right. Well, maybe you might even go down that road. Absolutely. And he who is like it, who was likened to God for much of his career. You could go anywhere with this. That's the problem. And the fact that now the sciences appear to be captured, then now that major medical journals are publishing scientifically illiterate nonsense, that's a problem because then there's a legitimation crisis. Then we don't know, you know, when a leading medical journal says that sex is a spectrum and anyone and even a child can tell you that's not true, where the hell do you go from there? It's a terrible. Explain that when you say sex is not a spectrum because people are either they either have male or female sexual reproductive organs. Well, that's not necessarily the case because there's all sorts of ambiguities when it comes to secondary sex characteristics. We're talking about the production of gametes. Every human being is produces one or the other large gametes or small gametes. There is no intermediate sex. People who mention intersex people, intersex people are either male or female. And by the way, intersex people are getting pretty sick of being used as a pawn to make this false point about science. And so there's a confusion between sex, which is a biological reality and gender or sexual orientation or other things that do exist either at least partly as performance or on a spectrum. Well, no one ever had a problem with the idea of gender being largely socially constructive and performative as Judith Butler argued back in the day, although she seems to have gone full 180 on that. No one ever had a problem with this idea because we all know we all have combinations of traditionally masculine and feminine traits. There is no one who is solely masculine, solely feminine. That's not but the problem with this is not an awareness or acknowledgement that gender is something that is not fixed, that is fluid. That doesn't mean that what activists are saying is that they want gender to replace sex in terms of the formation of public policy. And that's where it gets, that's where it's a problem. And it gets into you, I think you mentioned in the book, I mean into kind of Cloud Cuckoo Land of somewhere like the National Health System or something in England, but people were talking about what was it? People who menstruate rather than women. But you get into a situation where everybody is being treated as if, you know, I mean just basic medical information oftentimes doesn't get communicated because we are trying to make sure that we don't offend anybody who identifies as a particular sex. You will know from, you know, back in the day there were all sorts of, I mean a lot of feminists said that gender was fully socially constructed and of course it's not, it's a combination of biological factors and social factors. But they also used to, some of the more radical feminists said that biological sex was a social construct as well. And now that has become a fairly commonplace view as well. I mean I remember reading that when I was an undergraduate and thinking and knowing how absurd it was then. But now that has been, and I never thought it would catch on as being a sort of legitimate thing. But when you start advancing, and it's an ideological thing, when you start advancing the notion that sex is a biological construct, which it isn't. But when you start lying and saying that, it has actual... I'm sorry, that sex is a social construct. Yeah, sex being a social construct, right? So there are, when it comes to, let's see the example of the NHS, the National Health Service, you know, we all have our biological sex encoded into our NHS number. We all have an NHS number. And now, because of this prioritisation of gender, you can actually contact the NHS and get your number changed, that it codes you as being the opposite sex. That means you don't get then invited for smear tests if you might need them or things like this. It means there are actual ramifications. To give a very specific example, when recently there was a case in London, there was a hospital, a woman was sexually assaulted on the ward. In the UK, people are accommodated according to their sex. There are single sex wards in the NHS. But they also have a policy called Annex B, where if someone says they're non-binary or identifies as the other sex, even though they are fully intact male, they will be put on a female ward straight away, no questions us. So people are actually accommodated according to gender identity. Now, recently, this woman was sexually assaulted on the ward. The police were called. The police went to the members of staff at the hospital and said, there's been a sexual assault on this ward. We need to investigate. And they said, that is not possible because there was no man on that ward. Now, that is actual NHS policy. The staff had to say that. They had to lie because the man in question identified as female. So that means a rape investigation was stymied. Well, not only do we have the rape happen in the first place, which it shouldn't have happened, but then the investigation is stymied. That's the NHS. That patient was the rapist. It was a man who identified as a woman. We have a situation where men, male rapists, will identify as female and be transferred to female prisons. That's actually happened. In some cases, they've gone on to commit further sexual assaults. So it's not just theoretical. People's lives are being ruined because of this stuff. So it does need to be addressed. Right. So let's talk a little bit about where it comes from. Where does critical social justice, what are the roots of it? And... Well, the way I talk about it in the book is that I consider it to be a misappropriation of Foucaultian principles that it is... I've always said that let's take the issue of sexuality, for instance. So Foucault, in the first volume of the history of sexuality, talks about how the notion of... And we're talking about Michel Foucault, the French social theorist, historian, philosopher, polymath who emerged by the end of the 20th century. And it's kind of fascinating as basically the most quoted scholar, at least in the social sciences and the humanities. Right, exactly. Now, probably best known in the United States and it may be different in England for discipline and punish. Yes, for discipline and the notion of the nopticon. And the idea of... I mean, his treatise on mental illness, for instance, which he sees as just another... There has been an overdiagnostic element to society of demonizing people who think... Or that he, in books like Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, argued that a lot of medical discourse is actually a means of social control. And you can see how you can get from that to the idea that biological sex as a category is something that has been created by a patriarchal system of power. Okay, so... Yeah, or a system of power, which could be patriarchal, it could be many other things. Exactly. Well, he sees power very much as not a top-down phenomenon, but there's a grid running throughout society in all forms of strata. And I would say, I was going to give this specific example of the history of sexuality because it pertains to what I studied at university for my doctorate. He made this claim that the homosexual did not exist before the word existed. In other words, or at least as a kind of coherent identity. And yeah, that homosexual, which is a portmanteau term, that comes from Greek and Latin, shows up in the late 19th century. And it defines... Yeah. And it's not that people didn't know that there were same sex acts before that, but the idea of the homosexual as this type of person who, by definition, is ill or perverse or somehow wrong. Exactly. But that's not correct. And there are all sorts of ways in which there have always been people who are exclusively attracted to their own sex. And there have always been ways in which they have expressed that. And it pertains to my work for my doctoral thesis, because one of my subjects was a poet called Richard Barnfield. And if you read Richard Barnfield's poetry, it is about the expression of a gay identity. He just didn't use the word, right? So there were phrases. There were equivalent phrases. They used to use phrases like Ganymede or masculine love was a common one. Joseph Cady's written about that. But anyway, my point being that you can see how if you start to... That premise can be misappropriated hugely into this idea of the new construction of homosexuality, the idea that, in other words, language brings things into being. And this is a sort of fundamental preset, which comes again and again through the various postmodernists. The idea that our understanding of reality is wholly constructed through language. And that there is only language, and that language does not really refer to the outside world. It refers to other words and concepts. And I've always, if I may, the first academic paper I wrote was about how a kind of vulgar version of postmodernism essentially replicates the Sapier worth hypothesis and linguistics that we only know things that we have words for. We can't even see things, the most extreme version. And again, I don't think it's true. No, no, it's plainly not true. I mean, this has been disproven by just in that particular instance, there are languages that don't have a full spectrum of color terms, but it's very easy to show that people who do not know the word red can reliably pick red out from other colors, etc., and things like that. But that extreme version that reality is simply a function of language undergirds a lot of... I like the fact that you call it a misappropriation, I think of Foucault and of other postmodernists, but that's where you're saying the critical social justice comes out. You can see it lingering in, you know, they have phrases like, you know, this language normalizes hate, legitimizes hate, they have this belief that language is like a toxin. And it's why the critical social justice ideologues support hate speech laws and support censorship. It's integral to the woke movement is this authoritarian belief that language needs to be controlled. And you see that was played out in Orwells 1984, the party knows that in order to control thought, they control language and in Orwells essays, of course. So this is really at the heart of this movement. And all of that can be traced from Foucault, from the French postmodernists. You can see it's got the same DNA, can't you? Most of the ideologues I'm talking about won't have read Foucault, but you can see how these ideas linger. But is it any wonder? Because Foucault, rather like Marx, became an almost religious figure. You know, by the time you get to the era you were talking about the late 1990s and the early 2000s, you have people, I mean, people in academia in the humanities weren't even questioning Foucault, because there was a book called Saint Foucault Towards a Gay Hagiography that was written by David M. Halperin. And it's also, just as a side, I'm sure you know this, but you know, as people are rediscovering the historical Foucault, like the actual person, there's been a series of books about his, among other things, his dalliance with the center right in France during the 1970s and where he consistent with his idea that a lot of medical discourse or helper discourses of means of social control, he questioned social security payments, not as a way of helping people, old people, not to start, but rather to control populations that were getting antsy and things like that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And inevitably, when someone is deified or sanctified in this way, it draws them further and further away from who they actually were. So, and that's really, I think, well, that's why I don't see this as a straightforward succession of ideas. I don't see, you know, I mean, I talk in the book a bit about the Frankfurt School as well. Yeah, I would like to talk about that because in many ways, I mean, well, let's talk a little bit more about postmodernism. And I, you know, and I sound like a social justice warrior. Now, I identify as a postmodern libertarian because I take seriously both the way that power kind of, power masks itself and kind of suffuses throughout a system in ways that are, it often hides its power, particularly governmental powers, but Jean Francois Lyotard, the French philosopher in a book called The Postmodern Condition. I know you know all this, but he defined postmodernism as incredulity toward meta-narrative. You know, basically, not necessarily cynicism, but skepticism towards large explanatory systems that become naturalized or normalized to a point where they are glasses we're wearing without realizing that we're wearing glasses. And you know, I think a positive vision of postmodernism is that it asks us to account for how does knowledge get produced as well as does it function in, you know, to help us become richer, smarter, freer, whatever. And there's an interesting, you know, there are interesting intersections certainly between somebody like Friedrich Hayek, who at various points is in books like The Counter-Revolution of Science, is always emphasizing, it's a critique of what he calls the French Enlightenment or the Continental Enlightenment. And he says that, you know, what they do is they emphasize the extent of knowledge and they have, they jump from the physical sciences to human society and say, just as we know how, you know, how things work because of physics, we can adapt all of that to human society and speed up or slow down or redirect progress. And he thinks that's a, that's, you know, that's a, you know, that way leads to the concentration camps, essentially. Well, I, you know, I share the idea that we should ought to have skepticism about meta narratives, simple explanations. You know, I don't, I think there is value in the post, in the postmodern idea. And I do believe the postmodernist and Foucault included would have taken this critical social justice movement to task. It is, it is an elaborate power grab. It is a new meta narrative. It's, it's, it's, it's people who think they're on the right side of history. You know, they are, they would just, they would just as much come under scrutiny. So I think that's, so I think that's important to acknowledge that it is a kind of, that it is a misappropriation or, well, and, and I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, put you on the spot because of my petty obsessions, but it seems to me that vision, a kind of Hayekian postmodernism, I think, a particular type of Foucaultian postmodernism is actually part of the Enlightenment because what is important about Enlightenment is that it actually builds in a critique of itself, which is missing from what you're talking about. There is no auto critique of social justice. It, it can't, it cannot critique itself. Exactly. And the problem is, I think when it becomes cynicism about meta narratives, you know, when it's, when, is when you start saying there is nothing of value within that meta narrative, you know, the church or, or medicine or, you know. Yeah, there is only power. Right, exactly. And, and, and who is operating it. And power is, you know, power is important, but it's not everything. And, and, and that's the problem with these post Foucaultians is that they reduce everything to power games and to zero sum power games. And it's not accurate. And this is also why they can say things like social liberalism is a failed project because racism still exists in society. Right. Or is as bad or is worse than it used to be because now it's invisible. That sounds like a joke. They say that. They say that. Yeah, no, I'm thinking of passages in your book. The failure of today's kind of social justice movement to acknowledge, you know, massive gains according, you know, if for all of the populations that they claim need to be liberated, it's, I'm always amazed inevitably when you hear people like Donna Heesey Coates in the United States talk about race relations in, you know, 2020. He cites James Baldwin in 1955, as if nothing has transpired of meaning in that. Or that it's got worse, you know, I mean, Yeah, again, because because at least back in James Baldwin days, you know, they called black people the N word to their face. And now it's, you know, you can you can graduate from Harvard, you can become president of the United States, but they're still just as racist, but they're hiding it from. Well, that's also the problem when you take postmodernism to the extent that and you see power structures running through everything, and you start to believe you're the only one who can detect them. You start seeing things that aren't there. You start seeing ghosts, you know, and that that's what I think, you know, when when Robin D'Angelo says that Jim Crow was not as bad as the structural racism of today, which sounds like an absurd, but she says it. And she's saying that because it's harder to detect. But thankfully, we have, you know, Robin D'Angelo coming down from on high in her Deus Ex machina to explain everything for us. Thank God for her, right? She gets even more complicated because she knows as a white woman, she is doesn't really fully appreciate it. But somehow she has managed to find the skeleton key that unlocks all these doors. It's so messed up, isn't it? It's the way in which that she's constantly self-flagellating. And at the same time, pontificating about race is amazing. Yeah. So let's talk about the Frankfurt School a little bit because then you and you talk about this in the book. I don't know how it plays in in the UK. But in the United States, there was a term which still gets used a bit called cultural Marxism. And this is a term that is, you know, the right wing uses it to attack anything that they disagree with. But you talk a little bit in the book about that and about the Frankfurt School and the Frankfurt School explain who they are and how they fit into this because in profound ways, the leaders of the Frankfurt School, people like Theodore Adorno and sorry, Adorno and Horkeimer and Herbert Marcuse were not post-modernists. They were kind of like the last gasp of a certain type of European modernist. Right, exactly. And the phrase cultural Marxism is often used by far right groups as a kind of shibboleth, anti-Semitic trope because of, you know, because the Frankfurt School obviously is Jewish emigrates to the to the US. And it's always I mean, I you got to give the right, they don't have a lot going on. But like the way they're able to insinuate that a bunch of people who fled Nazi Germany are somehow really Nazis. Like that's always lurking. It's so there's that. And that's why I advise against using the phrase cultural Marxism simply because but I also say that a lot of the people use the term do not mean it in any kind of anti-Semitic way. But it has become loaded with that baggage. So but we also should be generous in our interpretations. And I think if someone uses them, let's not assume that they're they're being anti-Semitic. However, what I and again, it's it's not a direct line. I just see, as with post-modernists, I see elements of the thought within the Frankfurt School being preserved within the critical social justice movement. For instance, I would say most notably, actually, the mistrust of popular culture, you know, I mean, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School did believe that the failure of a left wing revolution, the fact the failure to bring that about was largely because of the the masses were kind of lotus eaters, you know, not popular culture. I mean, yeah, this is straight out of brave new world, right? That that what somehow that a brutal capitalist society that lives on the bodies of the working man, but would then send them to a movie and in a passage, which I'm sure was funny when it was first were unintentionally funny when it was first written, but it gets better every year in dialectic of enlightenment when Adorno and Horkheimer talk about how the working man or Donald Duck gets his punishment in the movies so that the working man understands how to stay in line, you know, at work. Right, exactly. And I think that that is that that is most definitely preserved in so far as that a lot of the attacks from the critical social justice movement are on popular culture and the effects that pop the corrupting influence of popular culture has on the masses. So there's that. But but also I think when it comes to the Frankfurt School, I think the most revealing essay is Hobart-Marcus's essay on repressive tolerance because it feels like a blueprint for woke activists, even though they never cite it. But I would say this idea of a complete intolerance of and he specifically talks about the right and, you know, forcibly containing those ideas by denying rights to those groups. And this is something very much that the the authoritarian critical social justice movement and Marcus is a fascinating figure because he did come from Europe, ended up in California in the 60s, where he became an influential thinker among a lot of people on the New Left, the concept of repressive tolerance, where if tolerance allows all kinds of thoughts to happen, it provides a safety valve where real revolution is never going to take place. So you have to you have to shut down the thought and the behavior of he was talking about what he considered right wing fascist and things like that, which is, you know, I'm almost wary to to quote him because I don't want to draw attention to his essay because I think the woke would love love that idea and would run with it or they already are, I suppose. And he I mean it's fast. I know in the shadow university Alan Kors and his co author, this was from the late 90s, talked about Marcus as the he's kind of the ghost at this banquet that nobody is quite acknowledging that he he kind of created in a way of blueprint for getting past liberalism or the idea that there should be a marketplace of ideas or a free exchange of ideas because then nothing no revolution will happen if everybody gets to say their piece. Yeah. But nice to say with all of these thinkers and these ideas, they aren't really creating the conditions within which this ideology flourishes. It's it's almost as though certain ideas take hold within academia. Fashion explains a lot, I think. Yeah. I don't believe in this sort of concerted march long march through the institutions. I think it's just that certain ideas stuck and other ideas died. And in the end, you end up with this kind of concatenation of various thought processes and the ideas that remain fashionable. And then they spill out into society. And that's why I think it's always, you know, I talk about the Frankfurt School and the post modernists and the new left, just to show where these ideas germinated. Yeah. But I'm certainly not suggesting a direct line. I'm really not doing that because I think Oh, no, no, that comes through very clear. I think the critical social justice movement is a new beast, which just has, which is just elements of these ideas, but they don't even necessarily know where those ideas have come from. Now, I mean, you cite a couple of times in the book, Frederick Jamison, who is a Marxist literary and cultural critic who hated post modernism or he or he believes that post modernist thinking literally in the subtitle of one of his books is the cultural logic of late capitalism. But you would find again and again, people who are kind of taking this part of Marx and this part of Foucault or whoever and putting it together into something new, which is, you know, that's the way ideas work and things like that. But you're right that this it's, you know, people have rummaged around or been affected by ideas that in the past, these people might have been spewing fire at each other, but right now it's built this new kind of critical social justice. Exactly. You can't say the critical social justice is an extension of the French post modernism. I mean, look at the way that Derrida and Foucault used to fight over ideas, you know, so it just doesn't work that way. That was a, there were so many different ideas going on within that discourse. It wasn't a blueprint. And more than that, the French post modernist weren't, they were theorizing, they weren't pushing for social change in the way that the activists of today are pushing for social change. Actually, there's an interesting Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book talk about this moment, what they call it applied post modernism, or the applied turn in post modernism. And I think they date it to 1989, because all of a sudden in 1989, you have all of these post modernist theorists now saying, not just theorizing about the way culture and society and power work, but now we should implement this in educational terms in public policy. And that's the difference. It's why critical race theory, as part of critical race theory, it demands praxis. It demands practical application in the classroom. It isn't just teaching kids about these invisible power structures that professors of whiteness studies are singularly well placed to detect. It's about applying it in the classroom. And when you do that, you end up with, you know, racial segregation in schools, as you did in Brentwood at the Brentwood School in California, as you did in the American School in London, that was the most expensive day school in the UK, where they were dividing kids up by skin color for afterschool activities. That's praxis. And critical race theory demands it. It isn't just theory. What explains that turn to praxis? And, you know, and there are issues, I mean, James Lindsay in particular is a kind of difficult character to cite on a regular basis if you watch his videos where he's practicing his samurai sword things and all of that kind of stuff. I think he's very good at the samurai sword. I think he's very skillful. Well, he also, you know, I guess as a true academic, he has a really bad habit of alienating his co-authors kind of on a sequential basis. But I think in that book, you know, the idea of applied postmodernism and that turn to praxis is real, it certainly accords with my experience in grad school. Something was different. The 60s generation who might have actually gone to, you know, taking courses with Herbert Marcuse, UC Irvine or whatever, they were talking about something different than the people who were 10 or 15 years younger than them who were like, we're not we're not creating critical thinkers here. We are creating missionaries who know the truth and are going to go out and enforce it. What explains that turn to praxis? Like why, you know, that's a very good question. I'm not best placed to answer that question. I think, I think James and Helen's book on this cynical theories does a very good job of explaining the conditions within which that originated. I think it's a very good question and it did happen all of a sudden, but I come back to this idea of fashion. I think so many things in academic theory, but also in literary, in literature, the arts, they just all sort of, you know, coalesce at the same time. And this is what happened at this period in the late 80s. And all of a sudden, they were people's academics theorists start to see themselves as evangelists. They started, you know, as moral guardians. I wonder if it had something to do maybe with the collapse of the Soviet Union and whatnot. I mean, I had the experience of being in grad school both when the Berlin, you know, when TMN Square started, the Berlin Wall fell and then the Soviet Union absolutely collapsed in Eastern Europe. And what was amazing to me is all of my, you know, all of my colleagues were like, I am a committed socialist, blah, blah, blah. And like when the Berlin Wall fell, I was like, did you see what happened? Like, isn't this amazing? And they're like, I'm not interested in that. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, they were like, you know, politics is, you know, is not an interesting, you know, kind of realm of ability. But then the next thing you know, they're teaching, I don't know, you know, the most insane kind of theory, or they're becoming political organizers. I mean, I wish I could tell you the reason why I don't know. And also, for whatever reason, all of a sudden, all of these academics lost their humility. And there's, I mean, I think humility is a big part of this, you know, if you want to talk about the Puritans, who are very good on humility, you know, people don't have it at all. They don't even have a grain of it. You know, so they believe that they not only has all of human history got it wrong, and they are the first generation to come along and know everything and get it absolutely right. And they will never be judged by future generations because they found the eternal truths. I mean, it's kind of hilarious because you have to be historically illiterate to believe that that can be possible. Right. And may explain, I don't, again, I don't know if this trend is the same in the UK, but in the United States, college is becoming less of a destination, relatively speaking. I mean, it's still, you know, popular, it's important, et cetera, people are kind of looking for alternatives because it's become, you know, I mean, we are not religious anymore in the United States. Why would we go to church for four years and spend 100 grand paying for it? Exactly. And I think that that's why the universities are collapsing. And particularly the Ivy League ones, particularly Oxford and Cambridge here, I mean, they are the most woke of all the universities we recently had last week. I think Cambridge University German department, we're basically teaching their German, as in the students who are specializing in German, not to use gendered pronouns in German. And, you know, the head of the German Language Association said, these students are going to go to Germany and people are going to laugh at them. They're going to look like idiots. You know, this is, it's, there's something very odd about how the most privileged, I mean, I talk in the book about how closely connected this movement is to the upper middle classes. It is a bourgeois movement. Yeah, explain that. Why is that? Well, there's all sorts of potential reasons for it. But I mean, firstly, I'm just observing that it is the case that the majority of cheerleaders for this movement tend to be double barreled names, privately educated, very privileged. And of course, they're constantly hectoring everyone else about their privilege. And you do wonder whether there is a lot of projection going on here. But also the movement is so obsessed with group identity along the lines of race, gender and sexuality. It doesn't care about class. And this is why I don't think it is a left wing movement in any way. And for woke activists to call themselves left wing is incoherent, because they have absolutely no interest in redressing economic inequality. Why do you think is is that I mean, if we apply a kind of Foucauldian analysis, is it because that is the one thing they don't want to disrupt that? You know, in fact, they are, they're the winners of the class system. So they're going to kind of confound everybody by saying other real issues are gender and sexuality and racial or ethnic identity. Right. Yeah, I mean, again, that's in tuiting motive, isn't it? Which I don't like to do. But you know, certainly, if I was now that victimhood has become a means to acquire power, you know, if I'm a millionaire, I haven't got much victimhood, have I? But unless I start saying, it's not really about the money. It's about my skin color, my sexuality or some sort of my gender identity, you know, then, then all of a sudden you can be a millionaire victim. And it doesn't that feel great. So I guess I guess if you want to start going down the road of why do people think the way they do, I think all we can do is speculate. That's one thing I shouldn't say. I don't know why people do this. But I would imagine, you know, whereas when I was young, the idea of being a victim was something you would never want to be seen as and you would find it a source of humiliation. Now, it's a source of how you wield power over others. And so therefore, yes, I suppose, those who are the who are the most privileged in society at a time when victimhood is currency. Yes, I suppose the emphasis should become on group identity. Well, they get everything else, right? Why shouldn't they get victimhood? Well, not just not just about your existing demographic, but actually identifying yourself into an oppressed class. I mean, there was a recent survey in America of something, I think up to 40% of a younger group identified as LGBTQ, which means that most of those people will be heterosexuals. But queer has now become a word for heterosexuals with a kink, right? Right, yeah. So now you have heterosexuals who historically have been the predominant category claiming victimhood by saying, I'm now queer, because I don't identify in the way other heterosexuals do. Or that my kink is like missionary position, or I assume the missionary position is verboten among certain groups now. It's even more boring than that. I mean, you had someone recently who was it was very famous politicians daughter came out as demisexual, which means that she only she only can form a sexual bond with someone if there's a romantic element to it, right? What demisexual means is old fashioned straight person. Like it's it's they're basically taking really boring the most vanilla sexuality and claiming that it's queer. It's not even French Fidel, I forgot to say. No. So what are what are ways out of this? And you suggest a couple, one one revolves around art, kind of like looking at art or the experience of art. Talk a little bit about that, because I think we share a concern. You know, you mentioned that, you know, when this stuff was just contained to the humanities, nobody gave a shit because the humanities who cares. But that's terrifying, right? Like, you know, as people who spent a lot of time getting, you know, learning a lot about the humanities, it's like horrible to see that totally devalued. But, you know, the humanities, art, music, literature, fields of creative expression, history. I mean, these are, you know, how these are these are major things that are, you know, that help define us as human beings. How can art help us get out of this critical social justice cul-de-sac? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's no accident, is it that a lot of the environmental activists of today who are protesting are attacking the great masterpieces of history. It happened the other day with the girl with the pearl earring. It happened with the Mona Lisa. It happened with Vincent van Gogh's sunflowers in the National Gallery. You know, attacking art and and they say they're doing it to draw attention because obviously it made the state, you know, everyone's talking about them all of a sudden. And that might be true. But I think it's also quite revealing because so many of the environmental activists consider themselves to be intersectional activists. In fact, the family of the Extinction Rebellion talk about how it's not really about climate change at all. It's about white supremacy and, you know, heteronormative values, et cetera. So when you have an identitarian intersectional movement, you will find that there's a correlation between that and a disregard for the great artistic achievements of humanity because they see the Mona Lisa as just a paint on wood, which has been daubed by a powerful white man in the interest of other powerful white men. They can't see the numinous within that imagery. They can't see art. And they can't judge art. They don't understand it. And there's something quite fundamental about that and about the way in which it negates. It's a repudiation of everything our civilization has achieved, really. And so I think a... I mean, I used to do this thing. I mentioned it in the book because when I was a teacher and I taught the very younger kids, the 11-year-old kids, I used to have this exercise where I would print out on sort of glossy big paper, a great masterpiece from history, one for each of the kids. And I would ask them to sit and just consider it for five, 10 minutes just in silence, just to look at it and consider it and then talk about it. And by doing so, I feel that I helped to cultivate this appreciation for art, which is really lacking within our educational system. I think art history should be embedded at the primary school level. I think unless you have the capacity to appreciate art, firstly, it's kind of a life half lived, isn't it? It's so much about the joy of being a human being is that capacity to move towards the transcendental, which is what art is, I think. Great art, I mean. And I think it also encourages humility, doesn't it, when we see these great masterpieces. And if when we look at art or read a novel or watch a play by Shakespeare, if all we can see is the power structures that we are now being trained to identify, which may or may not be there. And of course, Shakespeare is all about power, power conflict. But that's not all it is. It's far from it. And if all you're seeing, and also if you're only interpreting power through the lens of group identity, then you're also, you haven't even got a grip on power and power structures and how power works. So, you know, it's it's such a reductive lens through which to view art. But more than that, it's, I do not believe that art can thrive in this current climate. I don't think we can produce great artists in a world in which everything is reduced to power structures on the basis of group identity. I don't think we can produce great artists who are afraid to take risks. I mean, the very notion of genius is one who is able to think in a way without precedent. That's what it means. How can that possibly work when all of the gatekeepers of all the creative industries are saying, no, you've got to produce propaganda, not not art. You know, I have a friend who a crime novelist, he's now had to leave his publisher and start self publishing, because the the sensitivity readers kept coming in and saying, no, your your your characters can't say this, that his villains can't have these negative attitudes towards minority groups, his serial killers. So they're fine with the serial killers chopping bits off people and torturing them and hanging them on a meat hook. But if they say something problematic about gays, that's got that's got to change. So so and you can't you can't be an artist if you are constantly being curtailed in this way. It's it's fascinating to me too. And you know, Hayek in the counter revolution of science of all books and Frederick Hayek is not the guy that I think of as like, oh, he I really want to get his restaurant and film recommendations. But he talks about how literature and art is the storehouse of human experience and that you know, it's a way of communicating with the past and coming to terms with it. And I always think when people talk, you were you were talking about wokeness or social justice as as it's about experience that unless you belong to a particular group, you cannot understand it and you never will. And so you just have to accept their testimony. There's this amazing passage in Frederick Douglass's autobiography where he had been taught to read illegally by the mistress of one of his owners or overseers. And then he somehow came across 19th century pamphlets written by Irishmen who wanted to be freed from England. And they were talking about individualism and liberty and freedom. And he says something like when I read those pamphlets, I realized what I wanted. And it's this incredible transatlantic empathy where he figures out what he wants by reading. Irish people across the ocean in a different context is kind of amazing. And then it's just to make it even more bizarre when he escapes the freedom and goes to Massachusetts and works as a ship cocker. He gets beaten up by Irish people who see him as a threat because he's going to undercut their labor. But it's like you know, without reading, without being able, I mean, how do you know what other people are thinking and how do you know yourself as an individual? I mean, how do you become an individual if you don't start to connect with different people having experiences that are either very similar to yours or incredibly different? Which is also why this idea that authors and writers should stay in their lane and only write about their own experiences is so damaging and wrong. And you're absolutely right. The reason why literature is so important is it connects us to the past, it connects us to the great minds of history. It enables us to think about our own lives in different ways. It is the foundation, I think, of empathy in a lot of cases. I think... And there's tons of revisions to the canon to be done. I mean, this is where I think a lot of conservatives are wrong where they say, well, there are 10, maybe 15 great writers and we should just read them all the time and they get antsy. If you introduce... You talk about a particular... I wanted to bring her up because if we can get her... You talk about a writer named Stella Benson, who you're very fond of. Could you explain who she is and why she is not getting the kind of readership she deserves? So, Stella Benson was a suffragette, was a writer who... Her novels... What are her dates now? She's late 1800s to, I think around 1930. I think she died around then. I think that's about right. So, she wrote some incredible works. Her novels are brilliant. I mean, she has such a poeticism to her language. She's so eccentric and, you know, often when I read novels, I often underline particular terms of phrase that I think are striking. I had to stop with her because I'm doing it four or five times every page. And yet, no one's heard of her. I mean, no one has heard of her. No one reads her. And I think it might be... And there's no chance... What I say in the book is there's no chance of her coming back. Because if you read her first novel, it's called I Pose, which is a massively eccentric piece of work. It's two chapters. Chapter one is something like 300 pages. Chapter two is 10 pages. Everything is off kilter in this book. It's bizarre and funny and satirical and just everything. But it has some depictions of race that even made me think, Blimey, that's a bit much. It's by our standards, these are racist depictions. They weren't by her standards in the society that she occupied. Because of that, this will be dismissed as just a racist piece of work. And that means we've missed an incredible artist and she cannot be rehabilitated in this climate and we cannot read her. And I think that's a real tragedy. And I understand why reading depictions of race that we find offensive today, that I find offensive today, can be off-putting. But this is why I also think education helps because you are able to contextualize and understand that ethical trends change over time. And the meaning of those words in her context are not the same as in ours. But I think one of her other great books is called The Poor Man, which is a really fantastic piece of work. She captures something about the pathetic young male who has no prospects and is always second place in just a really great, fascinating way. So I would urge people to read perhaps that book, perhaps The Poor Man is a good way in. So encountering art, apart from ideological filters or going back to a Soviet model of art where there should only be propaganda for the one true way of living. That's one way around this. You also stress critical thinking. And you obviously have a PhD. You are a performer in different kind of outlets and things like that. You taught how important is critical thinking and how do we get there, particularly given the educational system that seems to have kind of settled like a plague on most of the developed world? Yeah. So because what critical social justice does is it offers you a guide, a set of rules and it invites you not to think. It invites you to outsource your thinking to someone else. This is why it is so damaging on an individual basis and it is anti-educational. So I think it would die if we had critical thinking built into our education system. No ideology could be sustained in that way, just in the way that people used to be educated out of extreme religious belief. If you are educated properly, I don't believe you could succumb to critical social justice as a belief system. I don't think it would be possible. So I think how would you embed it? Well, lots of people have tried to create these courses called critical thinking and quite literally have them as a class. I used to teach critical thinking A-level to 16, 17-year-olds. But it doesn't really work. I mean, in a sense that there are helpful elements of it and people understand why when they're indulging in ad hominem, they've already lost the argument when they're in tuiting motive or the fallacies that it's useful to be aware of. But actually, I think a better way is to embed it in every lesson all the time as just a general way of being rather than another set of rules. Giving people a set of rules of how to argue doesn't necessarily teach them how to think. It is about your pedagogical practice. It is about challenging all the time, challenging ideas, even if you hold them yourself, testing where the thought process of pupils goes to. Not simply saying, this is the way things are. Was there a time when people did that or in your education? I mean, I know in my education in the United States, I went to mediocre Catholic schools and there wasn't a lot of emphasis on- No, no. And perhaps that's always been lacking. But one of the ways through it is literature, actually. Because if you're exposed to a wide range of ideas about the world, you inevitably will start to realize that one way of thought thinking isn't right, that there are multiple ways of seeing the world. And that's why it's really important that the canon is diverse, actually. And I think the humanities in particular lend themselves to critical thought because you are exposed to such a wide range of world views. And that is how genius is produced as well. Yeah. It's a shame, then, that the humanity. I mean, in the United States, I know that, you know, this is one indicator among many, but the number of English majors is plummeted everywhere. And other language literary majors, you know, their departments are just disappearing because people are not interested or it's not seen as relevant or it's too churchy, you know. Why would you want to go and get her rang for four years as an undergrad? But even when I was at university, when I was an undergraduate studying English, the way to get a top mark was to problematize the text, explain why you think the Merchant of Venice is homophobic, explain the evils of the author. Tease out. This is what, this started back with the feminist critiques, like Kate Millet's sexual politics, where all of a sudden Norman Maynard, D.H. Lawrence, these are just misogynists now. Right. And, you know, maybe they were, but, you know, I believe it was Norman Maynard's second wife that he stabbed would probably be misogynist. But there's a case for that, right? But, you know, I don't care about an artist's moral shortcomings because I'm of the view that art has nothing to do with morality. And I know that art can be moral. There are great works of art that preach a particular message. Let's say Guernica, for instance, if you want. You could say the works of Dickens, George Orwell wrote an essay about that. He doesn't think that Dickens went far enough with his moral tutelage. But nevertheless, I think the best art is that which is completely divorced from the idea of morality. I quote in the book The Preface to Dorian Gray, the picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, because he was responding to his critics. You know, the critics were so outraged by this book that he added a preface which I think all critics should read. It's about how good and evil are just materials for an artist to play with and about how he uses the phrase, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. I very much subscribe to that view. And so when you talk to me about how Eric Gill was a monster and therefore we should destroy his statues, I'm not going to go along with that because I don't care. I care that this is not to be flippant about that his crimes. If he were alive today, I want to see him. Explain who he is for an American audience. He's a British artist who was who, if you come to London, if you go to the BBC Broadcasting House, you'll see a statue of Ariel and Prospero from Shakespeare's The Tempest above the main entrance. And it's a beautiful piece of work. And he is a tremendous artist, modern artist. By the way, also a self-described rapist, right? Or a sexual criminal. Rapist's daughters and the family dog. I mean, a monster, really. And I would want him on trial and in prison. Were he alive today? But I do not want his art destroyed because his art nevertheless did anyone. And I think you absolutely have to be able to separate the art from the artist. I think it's absolutely key because if you don't do that, the Western canon is going to is gone. Basically. Yeah. Well, in England or in the UK, it's similar that it's right-wingers who want to ban books. In the US, to the extent and nobody's actually banning books. But kind of when things come under challenge, particularly in high schools, it's usually conservatives that are leading the charge. Definitely used to be. That's changing now. Now it seems to be coming from a woke activist who call themselves left wing. I mean, the example I give in the book is the Ontario District School Board. Was it Ontario? Toronto, maybe? Sorry. It's somewhere in Canada where a school body, which was in charge of 30 elementary schools, took 5,000 books off library shelves because they contained outdated stereotypes, racial stereotypes, and they burnt some of them. And not only did they burn them, they called it a flame purification ceremony. It's like they're reading Ray Bradbury. It's like what this is insane. And they even use the ashes to plant a tree to show what a progressive, beautiful idea it was. So, you know, that's I mean, that's the destruction of art and literature is always authoritarian. You know, there's no getting around that. But that to me, so many of the problems we're seeing in terms of censorship, in terms of publishing houses, who are attempting to tell what their artists can and cannot say, those people all think they're on the left, right? So, and yeah, you're going to get the, I mean, right wing reservations about about art and literature has always been largely prudish actually, right from a sort of a sort of sense of moral indignation. But also a belief that if people are exposed to corrupting influences in art, they become corrupted and they become evil. Bad people read bad books. There's no question. And that's the same that the woke believe the woke are very close to the right. When it comes to these ideas really close. So indistinguishable actually, you know, to bring it back to the Puritans, you know, one of the witch trial judges Samuel Sewell, famously, he was the first one to recant and say, you know what, we really fucked up like this. This was wrong. He went so far. He published a long apology for it. He wore sackcloth and ashes and kind of wander around Salem for most of the rest of his life. He ended up writing the first anti-slavery tract in the colonies, the selling of Joseph. Who will be or does the end of critical social justice or the wokeness fever that we're in, does it need Samuel Sewell's like people from within who are like, holy moly, this was, you know, I'm sorry, this was just wrong. And who do you think those people will be? It's going to be very difficult because whenever the woke are shown to be implementing ideas that lead to great moral evils, they double down. So it's going to be really hard, particularly because the stakes are very high. One of the examples that I think is most important is the the transing of children, you know, and in America, it's a lot worse. You have young, healthy teenage girls having double mastectobies. You have young boys, a feminine boys having their genitals removed and put on lifelong medication. There's a young gay man called Richie Herron who's currently suing the NHS here in the UK because his genitals were removed. And now he doesn't have a sex life because he was encouraged because he was a young gay man struggling with his homosexuality. He was encouraged to believe he was actually a woman. The vast majority of children who experience a sense of gender dysphoria end up being gay, you know, and the vast majority end up being that ends up being resolved through the natural process of puberty. So what we have done in the name of... Can I just to die light on that for a second, you write in the book that body dysmorphia or gender dysmorphia is real. It exists, but overwhelmingly, particularly in prepubescent kids or in children under the age of legal majority. It resolves itself either where the kids turn out not to be gay or they are gay or they can transition when they're older. So... Yeah, you can't make any assumptions about a child's sexuality or anything like that. But what you can say is that we have got the data on this. There is a strong correlation between gender nonconformity in youth and homosexuality in later life. So it's not an exact science, but very, very strong correlation. Autism as well is often associated with disproportionately with feelings of gender dysphoria in youth. So what you... But the Tavistock Clinic in London and various clinics in America take the gender affirmative approach. So a boy comes to them and says, I think I'm a girl. They say, then you are a girl. And let's put you on puberty blockers, which always leads to cross-sex hormones, which often leads to infertility and irreversible damage. So the problem here is we're doing what they do in Iran. You're fixing gay people. You're heterosexualizing them. You're saying if you don't conform to traditional gender stereotypes, you must be altered so that you do. It's the most reactionary, heteronormative, if you like, form of gay conversion therapy. That's what it is. So and it's extreme. It's medicalizing and sterilizing gay kids. Sounds like something out of Nazi history. And it's been done in the name of wokeness. Now, at some point, people are going to have to admit that they mutilated their own children. That's a big ask, isn't it? And I don't think people are going to want to admit that, even to themselves. And so they will have to double down. But ultimately, we're getting a lot of detransitioners now, people who are now adults, who were set on this path as children. There's up to a thousand different families potentially suing the Tavistock Clinic in London at the moment. So this is a medical scandal that is going to break big. And particularly in America, where you're also litigious over there, it's going to be extreme. And I think people are going to have to concede that they did this terrible thing from the best of intentions. That's what makes it slightly different, doesn't it? Just as a side note on that, it seems that the term turf, trans, exclusionary, radical feminists, that seems to be more of a thing in England or in Britain than it is in the United States. That you have kind of second, maybe third wave feminists who are very emphatic that trans women are not the same as women, as women who are born female. What do you think explains that? Why does there seem to be a stronger commitment to slightly different type of feminism in the UK? I think it's just that intersectional feminism has originated in America. I think it's more advanced and deeply set. I think the religion of gender identity is now your state religion, I think. It's just there. So I think they call us turf island, don't they? What it means is we have a lot of people over here who understand that the biological differences between men and women, and we can still do that. But you've got someone who was recently appointed to the Supreme Court who claimed that she couldn't define woman because she's not a biologist. So the rot is pretty deep in America. That turf slur, it's the equivalent of which, that's all it is. And it's level that people who aren't transphobic, who aren't hateful, who want people to be able to live their lives however they want to, but also want us to acknowledge that women's rights and gay rights are predicated on the recognition of biological reality. And if you don't accept, if you believe that men and women are men and women because they identify as men and women, if you see these as identity categories as a kind of sexed soul as Helen Joyce puts it, well then there's no such thing as gay rights anymore. It's gone. It's obliterated. So there are serious things at stake here. I just think it almost feels like America's lost on that. Canada certainly is. But there is still, I mean, there are things happening in the UK now. We now have a Prime Minister who is saying openly that the Equality Act here is there to defend, to protect people on the basis of biological sex. And that does not mean gender identity. And he's made that very clear, which means that you won't have biological males in women's prisons. You won't have biological males in domestic violence, refuge centers or rape crisis centers. You won't have biological males in women's sport, in women's changing rooms. And that's important. It's an important safeguarding issue. But in America it seems like a man can win the gold medal in a swimming race, in a women's swimming race, and everyone has to play along and pretend he's a woman. And that's not good. You closed the book with a kind of anecdote about the Ipswich Bridge. And I think that might be a good way to end this interview because it goes to this question of how do we, how do we pull back from the most ridiculous aspects of critical social justice, of wokeness, of political correctness? What is Ipswich Bridge and why does it show up at the end of your book? Because it was a moment in the history of the Salem Witch Trials that I think is quite key. The hysteria spread. It started in Salem Village. It went over to Salem Town and over Topsfield. And, you know, there were residents calling for the girls of Salem to come and diagnose their people who they thought might be, you know, possessed by devils. And there was just one moment where the girls were on Ipswich Bridge. And I think it was in Andover, Ipswich Bridge, or near to Andover. And they passed a woman on the bridge and they did their thing. They started falling into convulsions and fits and pointing and screaming witch and all the rest of it. And everyone just ignored them. All the adults there, rather than say, oh, you know, what's happening here? We should arrest this woman, etc. They just walked on. They ignored them. And the girls stopped screaming and just got on with their business. And it is said that after that event, they never cried witch on anyone again. And I think that's why I say this is our Ipswich Bridge moment. We can continue to pander to the insane hysterical fantasies of these activists who say that there is no such thing as men and women, that fascists are in every shadow, that systemic racism is that racism underpins every human interaction, etc. Or we can ignore them and say, no, your fantasies are your fantasies. And they're your problem to deal with. Society doesn't get reconstructed around your collective fantasy. Not anymore. And that's what's happened in Salem. And that's what I'd like to see happen now. And that's why I mean, I think this is the Ipswich Bridge moment. And if we don't seize this opportunity, well, the future looks pretty bleak. It looks because the woke movement is an authoritarian movement, we're paving the way for authoritarianism. It's never good. All right, we're going to leave it there. The book is the New Puritans, How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. Andrew Doyle, thanks for talking to us. Thank you very much.