06 Dec The New Puritans
As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, Joe Jackson’s 1982 album Night and Day contains one song that has proven timeless in the social commentary it offers. “Cancer” – a swingin’ jazz and salsa-inspired ditty – isn’t about sickness or disease or death or any of the other things one might normally associate with that word. It is, rather, about society’s increasing puritanical approach to anything people might theoretically enjoy:
No caffeine
No protein
No booze or
Nicotine
Remember….Everything gives you cancer…
As Jackson told an interviewer about a decade ago, “I think I was kind of ahead of my time with that song. Because what I saw was a trend was starting then, and it’s really become relentless now. Just a totally paranoid, fearful way of looking at health and risk and pleasure and so on. I think that song’s more relevant now than it was then….”
He was spot on. It IS worse now than it was then. And it just keeps getting worse. This is from last January, but I was reminded of it just this morning:
A video featuring elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, discussing how coffee production contributes to climate change infuriated social media users after going viral….
In the clip — which was shared to X on Monday and has since racked up over three million views and many comments — Keller noted just how many “tonnes” (metric unit equivalent to 2,204 lbs) of CO2 coffee makers put into the atmosphere globally when producing their product.
He said, “Basically, the coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of coffee. So we should all know that this is — every time we drink coffee, we are basically putting CO2 into the atmosphere.”
If Jackson were to re-write the song today, it would be called “climate change” – because everything causes climate change. And note, all the same things that Jackson sang about causing cancer are supposedly causing climate change as well: caffeine, protein, booze, and nicotine. Climate change is truly a wonder. It causes everything – from cold temperatures to warm temperatures, from snow to drought to excessive rainfall, from hurricanes to forest fires to earthquakes. More than that, though, it’s caused by everything, including human respiration.
All kidding aside, what this shows us is a couple of things. First, for all their prattling on about science and reason and all the rest, the climate-change nutters couldn’t care less about the scientific method. Because it causes everything and is caused by everything, climate change orthodoxy cannot be tested. It cannot be falsified. Second, and more to the point, the statist Left – the people who want you to abandon caffeine, protein, booze, and nicotine, both for your own good and for the good of the planet – is animated entirely by religious fervor. Today’s leftists are far more puritan than even the Puritans.
The term “The New Puritans” has been bandied about for years, but is most closely associated with the 2022 book written by Andrew Doyle by the same name, in which he describes the statist Left thusly:
These are the people who make grand claims of moral purity and brook no dissent, a mindset which has led to the development of today’s ‘cancel culture’. These are the powerful few who seek to control public discourse by deeming certain terms ‘problematic’ or supporting legislation against ‘hate speech’. These are the clerics who advance a modern-day equivalent of the Augustinian notion of original sin in the form of concepts such as ‘whiteness’, ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘heteronormativity’. These are the chosen few, the elect, the discoverers of individual ‘truths’ and ‘new ways of knowing’ that bear little resemblance to reality. These are the arbiters of justice who require no evidence of sin in order to detect and denounce the sinners in our midst.
These are the new puritans.
Of course, the identification of statism, socialism, Communism, Marxism, whatever-ism with religiosity is hardly new. As I have noted in these pages countless times, both the moral philosopher Eric Voegelin and the historian Norman Cohn identified the ideologies of the Left with religious utopian movements – Gnostics for Voegelin and Millenarians for Cohn. Likewise, Hilaire Belloc, in his beautiful tome The Great Heresies, referred to the Left generally as the “Modern Attack” and called it the greatest and likely most dangerous of all the heresies. This “religion of man,” with its ill-defined “spiritualism” would, Belloc argued, destroy the “moral and religious” nature necessary for virtuous self-government. Even the original attack on Marxism – penned by Marx and Engels’ erstwhile fellow “Young Hegelian,” Max Stirner – mocked the ideology as a religious movement. The “egoist” Stirner warned his former compatriots that the masses would never willingly swap one repressive religion for another.
The big difference between the old Puritans and the new ones is that the old ones at least believed in something. Their puritanism was motivated by the desire to get themselves and as many of their friends, family, and compatriots as possible to heaven. The new puritans are nihilists. They want to take everything good and enjoyable from you just because they can. They want power for power’s sake. They are grotesque and small and pitiful.
They want your martini, your steak, and even your cup of coffee. And if they can’t convince you that they’re taking all of it for your own good, they’ll make the case – mostly to their fellow leftists – that you are a menace to society, a threat to the global order, and that they have to take all if it to save the world. They don’t mean a word of it, of course. They just enjoy taking your stuff.
