How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (Andrew Doyle)
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- Опубліковано 7 вер 2024
- The Michael Shermer Show # 297
Shermer and Doyle discuss: terminology of: PC, identity politics, woken, social justice, antifa, BLM, TERF, intersectionality • Critical Social Justice as a witch craze • Satanic Panic (1980s) • Recovered Memory Movement (1990s) • How widespread is the problem: minor skirmishes on social media or mainstream? • Hill-Harris 2021 poll: 32% voters ID as woke and 31% said they don’t know what the term means • new puritanism as a secular religion • Whiteness and White fragility • Implicit Association Test • Postmodernism • Neo-Marxism • Cancel Culture • hate speech • J.K. Rowling • pluralistic ignorance.
Andrew Doyle is a writer, satirist and political commentator. He regularly appears on television to discuss current affairs, and is a panelist on the BBC’s Moral Maze. He has written for a number of publications, including the Telegraph, Sun, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Standpoint, Spectator, and Sunday Times. He is the creator of satirical character Titania McGrath, under whose name he has written two books: Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, both published by Little, Brown. Titania McGrath has over half a million followers on Twitter. He was formerly a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, and a lecturer at Oxford University where he completed his doctorate. His previous book was Free Speech and Why it Matters. His new book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.
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Great discussion! As I listened, I became more thankful that I grew up in the 40s and 50s and not today. When I was a little girl, I didn't want to play with dolls, instead, I played kickball in the street and rode my bike all over town. When my mother tried to get me to play with dolls, I wrote an arithmetic book and taught it to my doll. When I went to high school, I concentrated on math and science, something girls were not supposed to do then. I also loved football and I still do. Eventually, I earned a PhD in biophysics. Later, I climbed the Grand Teton in Wyoming (13,770 ft). At no point in my entire life, did I have the slightest desire to be a boy or man. I was totally content to be a female. I enjoyed being "different." I was always attracted to boys and men but I still, very much enjoyed competing with them. I've never had any masculine tendencies.
If I may say so, and obviously without knowing you and having to assume a lot, I think you are probably a great example of those things we should never have assumed about boys and girls.
At the very beginning of your comment, I assumed you would end with "...and of course I am just gay, and not trans."
Poor assumption, though driven by a sincere desire to understand, on my part.
If we take you as an example, and of course the "individual who is you" is not important here, we can learn that the assumption (the process of assuming) is not helpful.
Thanks for what you wrote.
Yes, thank heavens you grew up in the forties instead of today, when all of those things are considered perfectly normal for girls, in fact doing all the things boys do is perfectly normal for girls. I'm assuming you have some kind of crazy idea that if a girl now does things like play hockey then parents and society 'assume she wants to be a boy' or 'hates men' or some crazy shit like that, but your experience is now more normal for MORE girls than ever. Thats kind of the point. So you seem to be arguing that it was better in the forties because only SOME girls did as you do despite those around them wanting to do something else, which is kind of an odd way to arrange a society.
I'm very thankful to be living today, when I was talking to a couple of guys teh other day about their daughters hockey team and the places they visit to play. In my day NO girls played hockey, it would have been considered crazy. Girls were cheerleaders, girls were groupies of the hockey players. In short they were not 'people', they were the accessories for the men. Thankfully those days are MOSTLY gone, any father who tells their daughter they can't play hockety would likely be jumped on by EVERYBODY, including lots of hte people talking like this thread. People like your mother would be criticized for trying to get daughters to play with dolls instead of what they wanted to do, at the same time dolls are still a billion dollar empire.
So ironically more women are now like you WITHOUT the idiotic parental and social pressure that what they are doing is wrong or strange. Thats a pretty good thing in my books.
Reading your comment, I am glad you grew up when being a tomboy was just something else a girl could be. You come across very self sure and confident. I’m not sure kids today are allowed to possess anything resembling real confidence. Instead, we offer them manufactured esteem and good old fashioned fears.
Am 15 mins in and Andrew Doyle is knocking this out of the park. Michael too of course, the voice of good old common sense.
Had a terrible eating disorder that went on for years. My therapist suggested (but didn't persuade) that I was possibly a victim of incest. I practically busted out laughing since my dad was the nicest kindest best dad imaginable. But I can imagine someone else very vulnerable in that position might be susceptible to this and imagine it was a repressed memory
My sister went to some "therapy" and said that she had repressed memories of our mother molesting her. I told her that our mom didn't molest her. For one, I was a much hotter looking little kid and if she was going to molest someone, it certainly would have been me and that didn't happen. It has been over 25 years since she told me that. I will have to ask her if she still thinks that. I am guessing she came to her senses.
@@MusicByJC Hotness rarely enters into, for perpetrators there are lots of other factors, like how likely it is whether a victim will stay silent. Those are personality traits, not physical ones. Repressed sexual trauma is very well studies and corroborated, as in, victims who later remember confront perpetrators, and the perpetrators admit it. So we know that repressed memories are NOT just 'people making shit up'. SOMETIMES it can be people making shit up, but that obviously is impossible to quantify. We know just how common sexual trauma is in young people, not just young women but young men. "Kindness" of course has been a trait often attributed to people found guilty of ALL kinds of things. The fact is NOBODY knows anybody, not that well.
Its also worth pointing out that psychologists and psychiatrists know how brains work. Throwing things out there isn't necessarily intended to evaluate what a persons response is, but HOW a person responds. There are few details there, but sexual trauma is a very common identifier with eating disorders, but of course hardly the ONLY one. You certainly dno't find out these things by NOT talking about them.
This kind of thing gets a LOT of play whenever studies come out about just how prevalant sexual assault and harassment actually is, particularly in young people. Its not even taken seriously with adults, and very rarely taken seriously with younger people.
@@mikearchibald744 i don't deny the existence of repressed memories. I do believe we naturally forget most of what happened to us before a certain age and other parts might get buried because they were too painful and perhaps the mind helps bury these as a defense mechanism/survival instinct. Yes I do believe trained therapists can use techniques to help people remember but also think it can be an area that is susceptible for corruption and some unscrupulous people might exploit this or make untrue claims in order to support their theories.
Andrew is great. Thanks for this content Dr. Shermer.
When Andrew "rambles" he makes good common sense. He doesn't ramble into incoherence, into silliness. His thoughts come out coherent, clear and well expressed. Let him ramble.
"I want to be a woman. It's my right as a man." Monty Python
ua-cam.com/video/sFBOQzSk14c/v-deo.html
😂😂😂 - Classic scene
Let's agree that you have the right to have babies, even though you have no womb, which is nobody's fault - not even the Romans.
@@pxxxbxxx1981 Where my rights are involved we don't need to agree but thanks.
I bet they never saw this coming.
The New Puritans is one of the best (included best written) books I have read. Interesting that A.Doyle quotes C. Hitchens as his writing often reminds me of the great American (born British) journalist. A fabulous conversation between two lucid intellectuals in a age of obscurantism.
These measured and reasoned discussions give me hope. The rising factions of reactionary, hysterical, self-absorbed, virtue-signalling, neo-fascist, and narcissistic SJWs need to be challenged and silenced with logic and evidence, the very qualities and capabilities they lack. Hopefully then the real issues facing genuinely disadvantaged people in the developing and developed world can be addressed, and those 'injustices that cause offence' invented by the SJWs as problems for which we apparently must find solutions for fear of being labelled such and such can be finally put to bed. Honestly, the world has gone mad.
54:56 The old saying about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions has been coming to mind a lot lately.
“My favourite writer since Christopher Hitchens” Just what I was thinking. Thank you 🙏
@ 56:45... "Identitarian"? Is that Andrew's own term? I love it.
I read (and watched) a lot of Hitch. After reading this, Andrew's second book, the same thought occurred to me. Bravo.
Children can not consent. Doctors should be stuck off and charged with some version of Grievous Bodily Harm to a Minor. Their parents and others involved should be charged with Conspiracy to Commit Grievous Bodily Harm to a Minor.
Now who is being fascist? Huh, you!
@@TheLiberalPersuasion Can children consent? No. Was grievous bodily harm done to them? Yes. Doctors: First do no harm. Is this correct? Yes. Doctors have broken their Hippocratic oath to irreparably harm children. To sterilize them. I wanting justice for these children. You consider this a fascistic position. It appears that you are in favour of sterilizing children. I will not name call. As you didn't ask me to clarify or indeed contradict anything I said, but went directly to insult, we can't have a conversation.
@@TheLiberalPersuasion No need to shout. Using an inside voice, your view on sterilizing children came though with full clarity without the need for an exclamation mark.
I recommend both of Andrew's books. Great reads!
In a online forum, related to gaming, I came across a pandemic of hate towards J.K. Rowling accusing her transphobia. The forum topic had nothing to do with trans issues. But as several activists were slagging off another fantasy author (not JKR) they dragged her in as an example of transphobic "hate-speech". I'm there defending JKR - because I read her tweets. On the basis of evidence, I said I couldn't find anything transphobic in JKR. I was just trying to stop the defamation; trying to stop the hate speech. So I am then accused of transphobia, told I'm "starting a culture war"; that's I'm guilty of hate-speech.
I must disagree with Andrew Doyle, these activists have bad intentions to other people. No such thing as "good intentions for society". Society isn't a thing. Individual people are. If you cannot treat the people you're with as people - like you - who deserve to be treated civilly and taken seriously - then your intensions are bad.
You can't reason with people who think that lesbians are transphobic for not wanting to sleep with people who have penises.
I have learnt to this age by experience that there is something good in every person, a human being deep down even in the most wicked of us, and that the worst ones are not those who are explicitly "bad", ler's say felons, or criminals, but those who we consider as goods. I have known plenty of criminals, even killers, and none of them have ever defended themselves, never said they are innocent, or victims, and they have kept their punishments eventually justified. Most of them have a moral compass after all, sometimes a very strong one. The goods, however, especially those who have so called good intentions, visions of the better, etc. I have found instead to be the most heinous, evil, cruel, and vicious, without any remorse whatsoever. The lack of any empathy or genuine goodness is covered with a sophisticated social role only, which may make them very dangerous if only the right circumstances come true. Unfortunately that day often comes, it must come, they just cannot hold back and keep their wickedness unmanifested their whole life through.
A lot of the hysteria and groupthink described by Andrew, especially during the witch trials, mirrors the Mass Formation theory of Mattias Desmet which he links to totalitarianism.
Indeed ... but you see the exact same hysteria and groupthink going on with the majority of Donald Trump supporters
@@TheMobileHomestead Precisely what's so scary about Trump supporters? Honest question.
Its made my entire university experience unbearably annoying and frustrating.
I can't imagine what it's like going to school now. It's bad enough just seeing this nonsense online. The poor grade school kids must be so confused about their gender. I had some confusion about my gender since I'm a masculine female, but it was just a minor background thing. Obsessing over it like kids are encouraged to do today would have been unhealthy.
Excellent conversation.
just to reiterate, authors, read your own books. i know it sucks, you´re not a professional voice actor, tasked with hours and hours of recording sessions, yet it´s totally worth it every time.
i had a mental tab open for this book for while, but now that michael mentioned, that andrew reads it himself, i just bought the audio version.
Regarding "preference falsification" people would do better to follow Solzhenitsyn's statement: "You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me."
One hopes that Doyle has read all the books on the shelves behind him. Good podcast.
Would there be a social justice religion if not for social injustice?
Apparently , yes!
A Supreme Court Justice of the US who is a Democrat refuses to define what a woman is.
Her name is Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Confusionism.
Fascinating discussion.
I found this channel recently. I like that I don’t know where the host stands since I’m new here. But I hear different arguments and learn.
I am just a good hearted human who leans towards snowflake.
Thanks for the videos.
How do we connect with people we love who are captured by the craziness? Confronting it will certainly just drive them away.
There is no craziness
@@TheLiberalPersuasion what the crazy always say
To conform with any craziness is even worse.
Recommended reading or film viewing: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
Never forgotten. I read it in a collection of her stories many decades ago. She died too soon. We lost a great talent.
I mentioned a conversation I heard about how men are struggling from being all lumped in as toxic or a variety of other characterizations. The person replied "oh f that f men". I thought oh ok so you feel this way about your family? Or male friends..? I was so disturbed
Sept 2023, many parents in Canada are finally revolting about what is being taught in Canadian schools.
It's not sad when someone the Queen's age dies. It nature.
How?
Through fear, intimidation and threats. Just like any other dogmatic cult.
His initial debunking of certain stories disqualifies him imo ....
These folks would make great fundamentalists. I can’t say which is worse.
Couldn't agree more! Coming from an ex-fundamentalist now atheist.
Common sense is becoming more and more fundamentalist, and truth becomes more and more a rebellion.
I love these guys.
Today, and not for the first time, I am in disagreement with both of them.
That does not matter to anyone, in the greater scheme of things, of course.
Allow me just to say, and in order to have my two pennies worth, that I wholly disagree with much of of what each of them says here.
And now, in order to be a reasonable chap and think about what it is that I disagree with, rather than blurting out something easy to write (but later to recant) on the spot, allow me to listen again (but not immediately) and respond.
Thank you both so very much.
so what happened 2nd time round?
@@simonrae3048 Simon, if that's a question for me, forgive me, I have not had the time yet. I am keen to listen again, more to understand better than to offer my views, though I will offer them.
If it takes you a week to gather your thoughts regarding the content here I'll assume you're a civil servant.
@@MAX-tw3qz Assume all you please, Max. I don't suppose your assumptions will bother anyone here. I will get to it when I have time and not before.
@@staninjapan07
Ooh listen to her!
When an Authoritarian regime comes into power, the first to go are the artists. That's because they express creativity and uniqueness which is a threat to its power. The despot demands sameness, submission and worship. No forms of individualism are allowed because that would inspire people and people who are inspired can think for themselves, which, again, threatens the despotic rule. After the artists, the regime targets the children. That's the quickest way to build the new empire. The despot doesn't want to wait while he murders all the dissident voices. He wants to mold the next generation quickly to accept his ideals. Remember the Hitler youth? Remember how Hitler completely too over the education curriculum? He replaced it with one that taught children to be future Nazis. He threw out most of the subjects and replaced them with military drill excercises, genetic theory, callisthenics etc. Of course, he also took advantage of children's need for belonging to a group and formed the Hitler Youth. Then he proceeded to militarise the rest of society as well. Life just became one big military exercise whose goal was to advance the Reich. There was no other purpose to life but to expand. Women were trained to be "good German mothers". To have future Hitler Youth members, to support her NAZI husband and to raise the next generation. Children were trained to form groups, to be ordered into military formation and function as a "mob". Men were trained to be soldiers or officers. How to count, tally and kill the numbers of Jews in their town. The Nazis were obsessed with numbers. They kept list of everything. The German obsession with order, precision and efficiency was what brought them down at the Nuremberg trials. They were so fastidious in documenting their success that they amounted a pile of millions of documents as proof of their war crimes. Despots demand glory and the narcissism inherent in the behaviour always serves to bring down their own demise. The narcissism they possess causes them to have blind spots that leads to error making. Errors that accumulate. Errors that cannot be corrected because of the inability to see beyond your own power.
I always thought the most remarkable thing about Joan of Arc was that she led a medieval army being a woman and it feels like that is now just negated. I always feel Shakespeare changes his mind about Joan several times in a few lines... as it was a collaborative play I often wonder if there was a difference of opinion 😁
Josh of Arc was executed for having lead and army.
Don't forget the churches firing gay people etc. It isn't just "cancel culture." It is also good old bigotry.
👍Great content! Thanks a lot! Subjects as Free spech, .politicaly correct’, social truth etc…should be debated more and more with huge attention. And Critical thinking should be learned properly to kids and young peole at school and universities - of huge importance now and in the future!!
Wow! Saying things that please others just to get what you want!!! It's called sales.
@1:07:55 we're going into Life of Brian territory again🤣
If this human tendency toward group moral panic is lying dormant somewhere in my subconscious, it must be very dormant indeed, because it hasn't expressed itself yet, and I can't imagine a situation in which it would. The pod people haven't got me yet, though they have cloned a lot of people who were previously atheists. Maybe this is an upside of being somewhat of a loner.
The moral panic is from those who obsess with a nonexistent problem.
Because the crown was so empathic... Oh, and puritans aren't the ones complaining about other's negative takes, and expressing that they shouldn't. Good stuff.
LMAO. Wow
Thank you for redeeming Joan, Elizabeth, JK Rowling and their pronouns😄Wokes seem to have morphed into monsters looking for victims.
Andrew Doyle is the only gay 'community' I ever want to belong to
This is literally the first interview I’ve seen where an American interviewer pronounced it Titania, not Titainia
Don't think it's a religion because it's not a made up ferry tale .It's more like a way of thinking
No, it's more like a fairy tale.
Those who control the meaning and the use of words, control the discourse.
Doyle’s got wings!😂🤔🇬🇧
As if Rowling wasn't part of the same new puritans some three years ago...
How? She’s never tried to silence and cancel others. She just has different political ideas than you do. She’s lovable!
The way the western world is supporting The Ukraine (truth, freedom and democracy) against the predations of Putin's Russia (lies, totalitarians, dictatorship, socialism) gives me optimism that freedom and truth will win eventually.
Lol, in what way is Russia socialist?
The Ukraine....you mean those nazis
Most are sincere about the reality structural discrimination across social differences. Yet we can not discount a few use it pish their own careers riding the wave.
What a let down, Andrew. The Queen's death and the attendant hysteria has nothing to do with the Salem hysteria you cite in the book.
I believe in a soul, an identity that is more than physical, and in a Spirit which is our essence and is not the body or mind but that doesn't mean I accept this trans ideology..we are born in a physical body with a biological sex and we can't pretend we can just change it.
Your beliefs are just that beliefs. Not objective truth.
@@robinhood20253 my point was that such a belief does not need to lead to notions such as a gendered soul and being in a 'wrong' body. Indeed in mystical traditions across the world the Spirit has no attributes at all and it is immaterial what body it is in so all this trans ideology feels misguided anyway. In other words I was trying to say that it isn't only materialists who see the flaws in it.
@@robinhood20253 My original message was not very well expressed, I was trying to compress complex ideas into too few words. I totally accept the biological fact of sex. I was just reflecting on Andrew's point that belief in a soul separate to the body seems to be part of trans ideology and is another reason the whole movement had a religious flavour to it. Though of course most people with a traditional faith are horrified by it. It is a sort of pseudo spirituality I guess. That's all I was trying to express. The instinct that we are more than body is an ancient one but does not need to lead down the current path of madness or deny scientific evidence.
@@joannemoore3976 biology supports it. Biology, the actual study of the anatomy and function of the body.
@@robinhood20253 yes, I am not denying that..I think we are talking at cross purposes lol
Socialism is a religion.
What a delight to hear Andrew. Yes, these pronoun people, nasty comments. They dehumanize with the word "terf". When Magdalen Berns died they were also celebrating.
If 'lived experience' isn't taken into account whatsoever, there are some realities which never become important enough to merit empirical, scientific measurement.
Huh?
@@hsmd4533 Deciding what to study means making a value judgment. It's possible that whole areas of scientific exploration are neglected because of a lack of diversity of viewpoints.
Bravo
I generally appreciate what he's saying, but he himself has lumped a bunch of disparate recent ideologies into one lump.
Awesome talk! My litmus test is this; If I rape, kill, torture you etc, because I like it, is that evil? If so and you do it to someone for god, the children, society etc, then it is still evil and you are doing evil, motivations matter not. Evil done by the "Good" is predicated on three things, self-righteousness, power/fear and social/tribal standing. I do evil but I'm not evil because I'm good and not like the evil, self-righteousness. I do terrible horrible things to show the evil what happens if they don't do what I want, power/fear. I am valued and have the support and protection of many other like me, social/tribal standing.
I think I agree with you .......but your punctuation is working well for me
Rationalizations have no bounds.
Why do males never have to answer the question, What is a man?
Biological females in men bathrooms, sports or prisons do not pose any problem to men.
Hitch who you love though (and who i adore) very much celebrated when Jerry Falwell died and he hated princess Diana too. Eff all snowflake clowns but also meh @ double standards.
The world would be better without shejocks, shermer.
There wouldn't be a social justice movement if so many in society hadn't been oppressed for so long. There is also an 'illiberal' movement on the authoritarian right that wants to transform society into an ultra-conservative Christian whites-only theocratic state . Victor Orban of Hungary has explicity voiced this only recently. Christian nationalism is a movement that is intolerant of non-Christian views. I'm sure that Michael, as an athiest, would be concerned by this. I wonder what Andrew thinks of this phenomenon?
Good thing social injustice ended decades ago.
There’s a particular breeding ground
Even Hollywood made a show about the phenomenon of seeing conspiracies when strange or unusual things happen. It's called The X Files. Scully (the man, I think) would always see the supernatural causes, the aliens, the demonic, while Mulder would bring him back to Earth and ask "Where is the evidence".
Other way around. Fox Mulder was the man and the believer, Scully the female skeptic.
@@skepticalbadger Damn!! I had a 50/50 chance. Thanks for the correction.
I'm replying to myself because someone has pointed out I got it wrong. Mulder is the man and Scully is the woman. Thanks to John MacFhearghuis for that correction.
Oh no, I hope there isn't gonna be any boomer talk in this.
Agism is the last acceptable ism.
What is Boomer talk?
I am afraid so. Not certain I can listen.
@@terranbiped8358 basically rational, adult,objective discussion
@@georgeanthony4834
I’d like to think so.
never , nowhere, ever
Always, here, now.
Wow I had to pause this. Not certain I will finish it. I wasnt really impressed by his obvious lack of understanding of the gender issue. However, even if the science did not exist to support those claims and people were actually choosing gender identity , knowing that they are usually happier and less likely to commit suicide, should be enough to accept it. He spoke on losing humanity, then seemingly attacked those who are defending humanity. If they a fascist, call them a fascist. If they are racist, call them a racist. These should not be politicol issues. These are basic human rights issues. Those who politically withhold human rights are in the wrong, not those who are fighting for them.
True, terfs are fighting for human rights
Sounds like name calling is your MO.
@@hsmd4533 what names? Identifying is not name calling.
@@robinhood20253 fascist and racist. I’m guessing that transphobe and TERF are also in your vocabulary.
@@hsmd4533 so why is calling a spade a spade name calling?
Before you watch this. Seek out @JimGoad.
He wrote a book over a decade ago called: The New Church Ladies.
He is a revolutionary. The answers are right there. We are just to subverted to recognize them.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus
One of the first trans people in history according to wikipedia's Transgender History page. Nothing to be proud of here. Why would they want to claim this guy?