Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Andrew Doyle discuss the intentional irrationality of far-left doctrines using religious rhetoric despite the absence of God, their paramount desire to dismantle societal structures, regardless of need or merit, the argument for transcendence inherent in the pursuit of art, and how woke culture stifles genuine expression, forcing dogma in the place of fundamental truths. 

Andrew Doyle is a writer, broadcaster and comedian.  His latest book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.  He is also the author of Free Speech and Why It Matters, and has written two books under the name of his satirical character Titania McGrath – Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism.


- Links -

For Andrew Doyle:

The New Puritans (Book) https://www.amazon.com/New-Puritans-Religion-Justice-Captured-ebook/dp/B09FJL1LFF/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=623199749479&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9013202&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=1165765495605452418&hvtargid=kwd-1658071450267&hydadcr=22569_13493349&keywords=andrew+doyle+the+new+puritans&qid=1688643112&sr=8-1 

Andrew on Twitter @AndrewDoyle_com https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com

Hello to everyone watching and listening.

Today I'm speaking once again, because we've done it before, with playwright, journalist and political satirist Andrew Doyle, also known as Titania McGrath.

We discuss the intentional irrationality of the far-left doctrines that use religious rhetoric and practices despite the absence of God or perhaps the presence of a different God, their paramount desire to dismantle societal structures regardless of need or merit, the argument for transcendence inherent in the pursuit of art, and how woke culture stifles genuine expression, forcing dogma to take the place of fundamental truths and, say, purposefully doing so.

I think we're damn near friends, or at least I like you.

I don't know what you think about me, but...

Well, us reprehensible types, you know, we need to stick together.

So, the first, I thought I'd hassle you for a bit first.

I got 2 things to hassle you about, I think.

The first is, It says on your Wikipedia page, for whatever that's worth, that you regard yourself as left-wing, and so I think you deserve some harassment for that, but also I don't know what the hell that means anymore.

And then after I'm done bugging you about that, I thought I'd bother you about having a PhD in early Renaissance poetry and

Okay, let's start with the left-wing thing.

Well, firstly, I'd say that Wikipedia is full of errors.

I wouldn't trust absolutely everything you see on Wikipedia.

However, On that score, I think it's broadly accurate.

I know that, I mean, I've never voted for a right-wing party.

I did vote for Jeremy Corbyn, which to be honest, I now regret.

I don't really know what left-wing and right-wing means anymore.

I think the culture war has in fact obliterated those 2 designations.

I really do believe that because, you know, if you were to write down my views on most subjects and sort of give them to an impartial observer and say, is this person on the left or on the right?

I think broadly speaking, most of my values would fall into what traditionally would be considered left wing.

I think I have some sort of more conservative values when it comes to culture and education and the arts perhaps, but that's the same as someone like George Orwell, who was very much a cultural conservative as well as being a socialist.

I think economically speaking, I do believe in a fair disproportionate taxation of the wealthy.

I do believe in the welfare state, all of those sort of, I believe in redressing economic inequality, looking out for working class people, social mobility.

So all of these kind of things I think would traditionally be deemed to be left-wing, But I think what the culture war has effectively done is it's substituted identity, group identity, for the notion of class and money.

And what that now means is that people who describe themselves as left-wing are nothing of the kind.

I mean, most of the activists that you see, the sort of most vociferous cheerleaders of the critical social justice movement tend to be, well, let's put it nicely, quite posh.

They tend to have quite plummy voices, double-barreled names.

They're called things like Hugo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby and things like this, particularly the case with environmental activists.

You know, those people who glue themselves to Van Gogh paintings and the Statue of David or whatever it might be.

When they talk, they are almost like a caricature, like the kind of thing that I would have invented as a joke of a kind of-

Exactly, well, Titania McGrath has that name because she's very, very well off.

Part of the joke with that, and Part of what I find so funny about so many of these activists is that they are bleating about oppression and persecution and privilege, and they're independently wealthy.

They've had everything handed to them on a plate.

Andrew, you know, look, I noticed this when I was teaching at Harvard, at an Ivy League school, obviously.

So all of my students were the top 1%, obviously.

And if they weren't at that moment, they were going to be by the time they were 40.

So at worst they were top 1% in, in, what would you call it?

And so you might think that'd be good enough on the privileged side, but it seems to me that there's a small coterie of very noisy people for whom being rich and privileged is not enough, they also want all the victimization privileges of being oppressed.

Because then you can have bloody well everything, can't you?

And if you're a narcissistic psychopath, then everything is what you want, and you want it now.

And I want to just follow up on that a bit with regards to this left-wing issue, So, you know, there's about a dozen studies now, I want to write an article about this, or maybe even a book, there's about a dozen studies now, looking at the personality predictors of left-wing authoritarianism.

And so from the end of World War II until 2016, social psychologists in particular, and that's a rather dismal discipline, denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism outright.

It was only a right-wing phenomenon, apparently.

You know, I mean Stalin and Mao notwithstanding.

We did a study in my lab, first of all, showing that left-wing authoritarianism was a coherent, you could identify a coherent set of beliefs statistically that were associated with so-called progressive causes allied with the willingness to impose them using force, fear, force, and compulsion.

That's not a bad definition of left-wing authoritarianism.

But then a number of other studies have come out, and the most interesting ones concentrate on what's known as the dark tetrad.

And the dark tetrad is a group of personality traits that were too evil to make it into the standard personality models.

They were excluded by fiat to begin with.

Manipulativeness, that's Machiavellianism.

Psychopathy, which is predatory parasitism.

Narcissism, that was the original dark tetriad.

But that wasn't bad enough, so the psychologists had to add sadism to it to fill in the last quadrant.

And the correlation between dark tetriad personality traits and left-wing authoritarianism is so high that it isn't obvious that they're distinguishable.

it not similarly high amongst right-wing authoritarians?

Yes, it looks, I mean, this isn't clearly laid out yet, you know, but the focus at the moment, now, I think first of all, anybody who's willing to use fear and compulsion and force is likely to also be characterized by those dark tetrad traits.

But I think the additional pathology that emerges on the left, and this is something we can discuss obviously, is that you have to be a particular kind of evil snake to mask your psychopathic power mongering in the guise of compassion.

And I don't think the right-wing authoritarians do that.

They more or less come right out and say, like, fuck you.

I'm going to take everything you have, especially if you're a group I don't like." But the left-wing types, they say, well, you know, really I'm your best friend.

Historically speaking, is that necessarily the case?

I mean, you know, if you take the example of the Third Reich and Nazism, that was underpinned by a belief, a sincere belief, a sort of quasi-religious belief that what they were doing was for the good of society.

I know perfectly well that in the 1930s, for example, as the Nazis marched towards the death camps, their primary rationale for the original implementation of euthanasia, so to speak, of mass killing was compassionate euthanasia.

But then I would also say, and this is something we actually don't know, you know, that the Nazis were national socialists and their political stance was a weird mixture of what we would think of as left and right wing now, right?

I mean, there was the fascist component that involved the aggregation of power at the pinnacle, corporate and governmental and media, all of that, right?

So that seems kind of right-wing and monolithic.

There were socialist elements in the platform as well.

And so we don't know enough to sort that out, I would say, maybe on the statistical side.

But doesn't all of this sort of point to the fact, or not even the fact, but my contention, that actually thinking in terms of left and right when it comes to this is kind of redundant?

Because the debate has always been the struggle between liberty and authority.

And so, you know, to go back to whether I'm left wing or right wing, I think I think I'm probably just liberal.

I think there are liberal minded people on the left.

There are liberal minded people on the right among libertarians.

It's not something that is tied to a left-right worldview.

But when I hear people talking about how, trying to frame the culture war in terms of left and right, or to say that the culture war doesn't matter and there are more important things, actually this struggle between liberty and authority, which John Stuart Mill talks about in his book on liberty, George Orwell has written about this, that's the thing that matters.

And the recognition that there is an authoritarian impulse in humanity, that there is an enduring appeal to authoritarianism, whether you come from the left or from the right.

This is something that George Orwell, to go back to him, he tackled this as well.

It's precisely the reason why when he wrote Animal Farm, he couldn't get it published for so long because people were horrified by the possibility that left-wing people could be authoritarian.

And what he was saying is that this is something that doesn't, it's irrespective of a left-wing view or a right-wing view.

And I think although you might be able to pinpoint psychological differences and tendencies among those on the left who have an authoritarian bent and those on the right who have a similar authoritarian bent, Perhaps it's more useful just to think, particularly when it comes to the culture war, in terms of who believes in traditional liberal values.

I know that means something very different in America, but liberal values insofar as individual autonomy, shared humanity, freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, etc.

Those kind of liberal values, you can do whatever you want with your life so long as it does not impinge upon the rights of others.

That's something that left and right can agree on.

And the social justice warriors, whilst they might call themselves left wing, really their movement is characterized by authoritarianism.

And quite, well, not just what it looks like, quite explicitly.

I mean, the early critical race theory texts explicitly say, I mean, if you read Derek Bell, he wrote an essay called who's afraid of critical race theory He talks about how critical race theorists have always mistrusted liberalism They see them the liberal project as having failed because you we still live in a society where where racism exists And they take that as evidence that liberalism doesn't work rather than-

Right, because the previous societies were so non-racist.

Social liberalism is about an ongoing process.

It's about recognizing that we live in an imperfectable world and trying to do our best with a bad lot.

And the problem is that authoritarians tend to be as well kind of utopians, even though in the case of the social justice activists, I don't think they've got a clear sense of what their final ideal society would look like.

At the moment, they just seem to me to be on a sort of rampage of destruction.

I've always thought that Hitler got exactly what he was aiming at.

He shot himself while Europe was burning.

And it's like a big fuck you to God, fundamentally.

Well, that was because he was the personality type that would rather everyone was torn down rather than he fails.

You know, he would bore people with those lectures late at night when no 1 was interested.

1 thing that comes out very clearly, there's a great biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw.

1 thing that very much comes out about that is this guy was a narcissist, and when he knew that the game was up, he wanted everyone to pay.

I mean, near the end of the Second World War, when the Russians were advancing on Berlin, he continually expressed his dismay at the uselessness of the German people who had failed him.

And those who had failed on the Eastern Front, or from his perception, had failed, even though he put the military in an impossible situation, couldn't take any responsibility for his own mistakes.

But that kind of narcissism, I don't like comparing social justice activists to Hitler.

But I think you can definitely see that combination of narcissism and also a kind of religiosity, intolerance and yes, exactly what you say, a desire to destroy.

If we can't get our way, we'll just destroy everything.

I want to use that as a segue, and I haven't tortured you about having a PhD in Renaissance poetry, we'll get back to that.

I want to use that as a segue into the religious issue because you wrote a book here recently, just make sure I get the title exactly right, The New Puritans, How the Religion of Social justice captured the Western world.

And so we could talk about religious issues.

I've been thinking recently along the religious lines, let's say, that what we're seeing is just the modern manifestation of an eternal battle.

And that battle is laid out first, very early in the biblical corpus in the story of Cain and Abel.

Because what you have in that story is 2 modes of adaptation, which I think roughly parallel A kind of demented narcissistic authoritarianism and a kind of responsibility laden individualism.

But what happens is Cain and Abel make sacrifices, right?

And that's what people do when they work because work is the sacrifice of the present to the future.

I mean, maybe beavers work and bees, but look, essentially human beings uniquely work.

We're willing to sacrifice the present for the future.

Now what happens in the story of Cain and Abel is that Cain appears to make bloodless and relatively low quality sacrifices, whereas Abel's all in.

And the consequence of that is Abel gets rewarded by God and everyone loves him and things go well for him and Cain, nothing goes his way.

And then instead of noticing that maybe he has something to do with that, he calls God out for creating an improper cosmos and really puts him on the stand.

And God says, look, buddy, if you got your act together, things would go well for you.

And the fact that they're not might have more to do with you than me.

And Cain thinks to hell with you, God, I think I'll go kill your favorite.

And then, you know, Cain's descendants, including Tubal Cain, which is about 4 generations down the line, they're the builders of the Tower of Babel and also the first people who make implements of war.

So there's an idea there that there's a resentful and bitter, revengeful spirit that preoccupies mankind and that it can spread out from the individual and take out the entire polity.

And I can't help but see a reflection of that on the intellectual landscape now in the political domain.

I mean, I think now I'm curious about what you think about such things because you have described this new movement, let's say, as religious.

What do you think about these more metaphysical speculations?

The Bible is the root of all wisdom, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment.

The Hallow app empowers you to explore the Bible's profound teachings and to effortlessly incorporate them into your daily life.

A great place to start while you deepen your understanding of the Bible is to check out Father Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year, available on the Hallow app for brief daily readings and reflections.

Here you can dive into an extensive library of Bible reading plans, accompanied by insightful reflections and audio guided meditations.

Whether you're a seasoned Bible reader or just starting your journey, Hallow provides a platform for you to engage with scripture like never before.

Studying the Bible's literary brilliance has influenced countless writers, poets, and artists throughout history.

By studying the Bible yourself, you'll gain a deeper appreciation for the power of storytelling, symbolism, and metaphor, enriching your understanding of literature across different genres.

The HALLO app also helps you connect with a community of like-minded individuals, sharing experiences, insights, and encouragement along the path to spiritual growth.

Download the app for free at hallow.com slash Jordan.

You can set reminders and track your progress along the way.

Enrich your education and nurture your mind and soul today.

Download the Hallow app at hallow.com slash Jordan.

Hallow.com slash Jordan for an exclusive three-month free trial of all 6, 000 plus prayers and meditations.

I suppose I should be very clear about that.

I've called the book The New Puritans, and I refer to the religion of social justice, because 1 of the things I'm very keen to do, and 1 of the reasons why I feel that the critical social justice activists are winning, is because a lot of people do not understand their aims, they don't understand what they're about, and that they effectively fall for the linguistic tricks.

I mean, you all know that the culture war is largely about who gets to define the meaning of words.

Activists often use words, but they mean the opposite.

They call themselves progressive, for instance, but I believe that they are regressive.

They call themselves liberal, but they are deeply illiberal.

You know, they're in favor of censorship and authoritarianism.

They scream about fascism while they themselves are using fascistic tactics such as violence to silence political opponents.

So the language, unless you understand where they're coming from, and unless you understand that theirs is a belief system, which is largely tied to unfalsifiable claims, which depends upon a kind of coterie of high priests, edicts from above, telling the masses what they should believe and punishing those who dissent.

It has all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion, at least The idea of excommunicating heretics, sort of sniffing out heretics, searching for them, and doing the metaphorical equivalent of burning them at the stake, which is what we call council culture, destroying their livelihoods, destroying their reputations.

A kind of merciless, brutal, cruel, and vicious quality, which nonetheless dons the guise of compassion and righteousness.

You know, I'm sure that bullies and innately cruel sociopaths throughout history have probably been attracted to the priesthood because it gives them the opportunity to have a being a figure of authority to enact cruelty and at the same time to be validated as a principled and important member of society.

I mean like Pharisees and scribes, those sorts of people.

Exactly, and I'm not suggesting for a second, if you take something as brutal as the Inquisition, I mean, I'm sure a lot of those people involved felt that they were doing God's work and genuinely thought they were on the side of the angels, but you can be damn sure that there were some psychopaths who were attracted to those positions of power.

So when I'm saying that I talk about the religion of critical social justice, I'm doing so to try and make it accessible.

I found that if you just, because it is so baffling to everyone, most people are completely baffled because for a start, they have their own kind of esoteric language, this terminology like heteronormativity and toxic masculinity and cisgender, et cetera, words that most people just don't even know what they mean.

But if you see them as kind of a biblical script or a religious text.

And they do have their foundational holy texts, such as Foucault and Judith Butler and things like that.

If you make this analogy to religion, I think it makes the movement comprehensible.

And I think in order to defeat it, it has to be comprehended.

And I think most people can't comprehend it.

So let's try to get at something that might approximate a definition of religious.

So this is how I've been thinking about it technically.

So imagine that You see the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions Which you have to because you're fundamentally ignorant You have to presuppose things in order to move forward because you don't have infinite knowledge So you have to look at the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions Then you can imagine that some presuppositions are deeper than others.

And what that would mean is some presuppositions very little, very few other presuppositions depend on, and some presuppositions many other presuppositions depend on.

Sort of like, it's like citation depth in the scientific literature.

And so freedom of speech, for example, would be a presupposition in a liberal polity upon which almost all other presuppositions rest.

So if you move it, you're moving the depths.

So a religion specifies the deepest presuppositions, and they have to be axiomatic, because that's sort of where your ignorance bottoms out.

You have to say, I hold these things to be self-evident before you can proceed.

And that is something like the existence of a deity as a priest

So I read a lot of Carl Jung years ago and very deeply.

And 1 of the things Jung said about Protestantism, which I found remarkable, He criticized both Catholicism and Protestantism, you know, as a friendly critic I would say, pointing out that the temptation that Catholicism might fall prey to is 1 of centralizing authoritarianism.

And the temptation that Protestantism falls prey to is fractionating individualism.

He said, the logical conclusion of the Protestant revolution is that every single person becomes their own church.

And so it looks to me like that's happened and what's happened and psychologists have abetted this and even the great clinicians I believe have abetted this regardless of my admiration for them by substituting the self for God.

And I think what you have, especially on the psychopathic, narcissistic fringes of what used to be the left, and you see this on the right as well, is the momentary self elevated to the status of God.

Well, you see that an awful lot, which I think is why, I mean, you've identified the narcissism within these kind of movements, but also the rapidity with which they resort to religious terminology or religious ideas or religious modes of expression.

For instance, You remember when, was it outside of Netflix, when there were protests against Dave Chappelle's show, and there was that comedian protesting with a sign that said, we like Dave, or we like jokes.

And 1 woman cornered him and it was all caught on film.

And she screamed repeatedly in his face, repent, mother.

And I mentioned that in the book because I love that that sort of combined, that combination of rage and religiosity, I think really encapsulates what the movement is all about.

I think in terms of the presuppositions of that movement, which it takes as axiomatic, it's not supernatural, okay?

It doesn't talk about a deity, even though it has its profits, I think, from the French poststructuralists of the 1960s.

But I think it does have certain axiomatic presuppositions, such as there are power structures that dominate society that underpin all human interaction, and these are based on the notion of group identity, and that that is how society needs to be understood.

As Foucault talked about grids of power through society, power not being a top-down phenomenon, something that sort of is latent within all of our interactions and behavior.

And they see that they believe that these activists believe that they can pick this apart and understand it and remedy the wrongs in society.

So long as that they can identify where the power structures lie, and who is exercising privilege at the expense of the oppressed.

That's why critical race theorists, I mean, it was put like this in James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose's book, that the key question that you ask if you are a critical race theorist, is not did racism take place in this situation, but how did racism manifest in this situation?

So it's almost like a ghostly spiritual thing that is always there.

I think That's 1 of their major presuppositions.

Well, so here's another way of thinking about that from the religious perspective.

I mean, Milton's Satan is an authoritarian narcissist and he rules over hell.

And so He's a figure that's very much analogous to Mao or to Stalin, right?

He's someone who climbs the most pathological possible power hierarchy and then regards himself as a victor, even though he's actually the biggest loser.

And So, Satan is the spirit, you might say, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, who rules the world by force.

Now, the postmodern neo-Marxist types believe that there's nothing but power.

So I can't see that that's any different than a certain Christian heresy that rose up in the Middle Ages making the claim that Satan himself was the ruler of the earth, right?

Because the notion there is that power itself is the only or at least the ultimate motivator and well motivator is the right way of thinking about it.

And so and then it follows a lot of things follow from that right.

1 thing that follows from that is that there's no such thing as free speech because there's just conflicts between different claims to power And that if you promote free speech, that's just an indication of how conniving you are to use that entire philosophical language to do nothing but buttress your own colonialist power claims.

Yes, because their theories always put you in that position where you can't win.

You know, it's similar with critical race theory.

See all The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast transcripts on Applepodcasts

373. Social Justice: A Religious Movement | Andrew Doyle