Andrew Doyle > Quotes

“The First Amendment codifies a ‘negative liberty’; that is to say, it affords citizens the right to freedom from government interference. While this is essential, it means that it is ill-equipped to tackle many of the free speech battles of the digital age. Historically, censorship has been enacted by the state, but with the rise of social media as the de facto public square, big tech corporations now have dominion over the acceptable limits of popular discourse. We are rapidly moving into an age in which unelected plutocrats hold more collective power and influence than any national government, only without any of the democratic accountability. This is why the argument that private companies should be free to discriminate at will is no longer persuasive or viable. They claim to be platforms committed to the principle of free speech, and yet at the same time behave like publishers who seek to enforce limitations on the opinions that may be expressed.”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

“There will always be those whose instinct inclines towards submission to authority, who are happy to shift beliefs in accordance with the fashion or decrees from above. Orwell called this the 'gramophone mind', content to play the record of the moment whether or not one is in agreement”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

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

“If our fear of free speech is that it facilitates the dissemination of bad ideas, then we have pre-emptively decided which ideas are beyond the pale. By doing so, we limit our own capacity to be challenged, and inadvertently reveal our existing prejudices.”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

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

“Opposition to free speech never goes away, which is why it must be defended anew in each successive generation. It is a privilege that has been denied to the overwhelming majority of societies in human history.”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

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

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

“True individuality, he says, is realised by ‘making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

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

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

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

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

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

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

“As political scientist Mark Lilla has argued, an overemphasis on diversity has created ‘a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups’. No enlightened individual would suggest that racism, homophobia and sexism should not be tackled, but more often than not the disciples of intersectionality are blind to everything but their own grievances. The solution to an economic system that has been failing the poor for decades is not going to be discovered through progressive posturing, or tokenistic appointments that benefit only a few – usually middle-class and often privately educated – individuals from minority groups. The new puritans have singularly failed to understand that, when it comes to inequality, money is what matters most of all.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“One immediately thinks of the now common intonation that ‘trans women are women’ or ‘trans men are men’. As journalist Helen Joyce has noted, such expressions fall into the category best encapsulated by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton as ‘thought-terminating clichés’, those ‘brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases’ that ‘become the start and finish of any ideological analysis’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

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

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

“writer and philosopher Peter Boghossian resigned from his post at Portland State University. ‘Students at Portland State are not being taught to think,’ he wrote to his former employers. ‘Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

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

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

“Yet taking offence is a matter of choice. Marcus Aurelius said it this way: ‘Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

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

“From the late medieval period, students at Oxford and Cambridge were first taught the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric.”
― Andrew Doyle, Free Speech And Why It Matters

“The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies.’ This is a line from Solzhenitsyn’s acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout The Gulag Archipelago we are reminded of what a society might come to resemble once it has dispensed with the primacy of truth.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“When social justice activists say ‘social justice’, they mean an emphasis on group identity over the rights of the individual, a rejection of social liberalism, and the assumption that unequal outcomes are always evidence of structural inequalities.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“It’s a worry when you can’t tell whether the person yelling at you is a twelve-year-old whose parents need to take their Twitter account away, or a professor of sociology’.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“The new puritans, then, are best understood as a clergy for a godless age, presiding over a dreamscape of their own making, rewriting our language, history and traditions as they go along.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Solzhenitsyn’s book so persuasively shows, can be encapsulated in one word: Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World