Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the University of California Berkeley’s Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging – but it makes for salutary reading. It demands that a low score be given to any applicant who “states the intention of ignoring the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treating everyone the same’”.

Such a diktat is the tip of a “woke” iceberg poised to sink Western liberalism, argues John Gray. “The university campus,” he writes in The New Leviathans, “is the model for an inquisitorial reign that has extended its reach throughout society.” Just as well, no doubt, that this former Oxford don got out of academia a few years ago, before the inquisitors moved in.

Gray doesn’t cite, say, virtue-­signalling personal pronouns that must sign off every corporate email, nor does he name-check former philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, driven out of her university post for arguing that biological sex is not a social construct. But such examples are implicit in his denunciation of what he calls “woke religion”.

That seeming oxymoron is typical of Gray’s elegy for western liberalism. In his 2007 book Black Mass, he argued that the secular ideologies that have shaped our history since the Enlightenment, ones ostensibly based on rejecting traditional faiths in favour of cool reason, were actually expressions of repressed religion. To such ersatz faiths as Bolshevism, free-market fanaticism, transhumanism and militant atheism, Gray now adds woke religion.

What irks him most is that the supposedly liberal world is being refashioned according to American norms. It’s US cultural imperialism, akin to the global success of Friends or McDonalds, but more sinister. Bestsellers such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, as Gray puts it, “provincialise a universal evil”. He contends instead that “a critique of racism cannot be based on 21st-century American theories of ‘whiteness’”. Racism is not just an African-American experience.