Having finished Andrew Doyle's PA course on Shakespearean tragedy, I eagerly started looking for something to keep him in my brain and ears. I was so taken with his eloquence and charm - to be fair, he had me from the first lecture, making off-hand comments about the woke deluge the Globe Theatre has been under, this past decade.
Now, I'm not normally one for audiobooks. I have a racing mind and tend to wander off when someone's reading at me. But I'd gotten used to Andrew Doyle's voice and the combination of Britishness and superbly articulate snark had me reaching for my headphones.
Much as I enjoyed Doyle's style, I was apprehensive about The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, as I am of most books in this specific genre. I wasn't worried it might be bad - quite the contrary, I was pretty certain it was going to be good. But I'm ever wary of creating an echo chamber for myself, and judging by the title alone, I knew it was going to be a book I'd agree with.
That's not always desirable. I try to read things that challenge my held opinions and expose me to potential new horizons (as long as they are articulate and well-thought-out, both in great scarcity among the left-leaners extreme enough to write books).
True enough to expectation, The New Puritans doesn't necessarily bring up new material for anyone who's fairly reasonable. It discusses topics that most of us will be familiar with already: the left's efforts at changing the language, the various abuses in sports and public safety resulting from trans propaganda, book burning is the new black, etc.
So, it's not a book that will have you go away with new ideas/knowledge necessarily. However, it does present an interesting angle, I thought, especially in talking about how this extremized gender reassignment ideology and focus on trans stuff may be hurting the LGB contingent (Doyle himself being a gay man). It's something that's long been on my mind. It doesn't seem obvious at all to me that people in the same-sex attraction bracket (gay, bi, lesbian) are well-served by throwing in their lot with (some) rather extreme supporters of trans, non-binary ideology.
After all, as Doyle himself points out, a lot of people who are nowadays pressured to start identifying as the opposite gender, undergo hormone replacement therapy and even surgery, are actually just gay. It seems a great disservice to tell an effeminate young boy that he's probably really a girl. As Doyle points out throughout the book, these so-called woke ideas are doing little more than reinforcing the oppressive, "traditional" gender stereotypes and rigorous gender roles that they publicly lambast.
Wasn't the whole point of this to let effeminate boys be effeminate?
The book also deals heavily with the importance of free speech and the critical situation we're in, largely thanks to a small minority of lunatics. As a writer, I sympathized with Doyle's own outrage at the censoring of famous literary works and the actual physical burning of books that some of these nutjobs have carried out. It being a depressing subject, Doyle's wit and superb vocabulary manages to make light of an otherwise grim predicament - how can one not laugh at the sheer idiocy of adding a trigger warning to "The Old Man and the Sea", as it features "scenes of extreme fishing"?
Finally, it deals with the extremely worrying censorship in social media, drawing (of course) on Donald Trump being banned by Twitter in pre-Musk days.
"The instinctive sense of self-satisfaction that comes from seeing one's enemy silenced prevented many from apprehending the broader ramifications. These are the imbeciles who stare at the finger while the wise man points at the Moon."
Even when one overlooks the cohorts of said imbeciles, it's frankly frightening how few average Joes and Janes seemed alarmed. Many of us just took it in stride that this was the Orwellian new reality (with many of us not even bothering to consider the "Orwellian"). After all, as a non-US, center-leaning individual, why should I care? It wasn't my voice that was silenced.
Overall, The New Puritans is a refreshing read/listen delivered by an extremely well-educated and talented writer that reminds us not only of the perils of the modern world, but also sprinkles a dose of optimism on an otherwise depressing situation:
"The desire for a quiet life is entirely understandable," Doyle writes in the closing lines of the book. "But surely, we have reached a point where the keys of the kingdom must be wrenched back from the hands of the crazy children."
It's important to not succumb to this seemingly endless madness and remember that common sense and reason can prevail. Especially with such impressive, smart individuals on our side.
