CANCEL culture is nothing new. The conviction that there is good and there is evil, and that the good must stand guard against the bad, has always been hard-wired into what was once Christendom, and is now the West. Even those who imagine that they have emancipated themselves from the legacy of Christianity still tend to bear the stamp of Pauline teaching on the law of God: that it is written on the heart.

This is why over the course of Christian history an anxiety to patrol the boundaries of what can acceptably be said and thought has been such a consistent theme. It was manifest, in the wake of the Albigensian Crusade, in the efforts made by the recently founded Order of the Dominicans to investigate and painstakingly sift the evidence of what the heretics brought before them actually believed. It was manifest too, in Calvin’s Geneva, in the determination of the reformer to break the sinners of the city to his own demanding standards of virtue, and to instil in them the dread that the eyes of the elect were always on them, watching, marking, judging.

So the social justice warriors of Twitter, ever-ready to pull down anyone who expresses an unacceptable opinion, stand in a clear line of descent from the Inquisition and the Consistory. The moral standards they believe themselves called upon to uphold may have evolved; their certitude that moral standards require upholding has not.