Purity Spirals

This really isn't a bad explanation for why parts of Twitter seem utterly, utterly mad. 

Lately we’ve been witnessing more and more small worlds fall apart under the weight of their vast moral centre of gravity. In the past year, the middle-class, middle-aged, overwhelmingly female knitters of Instagram have descended into internecine conflict over racism allegations. Young adult fiction has exploded into an ethical gazumping war over who is allowed to write about what colour of character. In Canada, the music business has become so consumed by ethical etiquette that a juror who submitted the band Viet Cong for the nation’s top music prize was compelled to write a lengthy apology over how culturally insensitive his action was.

I’ve become fascinated by the link between what we see in examples like these, and a dynamic we’ve seen play out through history.

In 1967, Mao’s Red Guards took to the streets determined to root out the ‘four olds’ of traditional Chinese culture, killing hundreds of thousands in the process. By 1968, they had fallen apart as factions fought each other to represent the truest version of Maoism. In 1794, Robespierre found himself on the same tumbrel he had prescribed for so many other problematic persons. In both cases, a bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power.

In my new BBC Radio 4 documentary I wanted to join the psychological dots between history’s pinnacle nightmares and what happens at the end of your road. I decided to call both the phenomenon and the documentary, “The Purity Spiral”. A purity spiral occurs when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation. The result is a moral feeding frenzy.

But while a purity spiral often concerns morality, it is not about morality. It’s about purity — a very different concept. Morality doesn’t need to exist with reference to anything other than itself. Purity, on the other hand, is an inherently relative value — the game is always one of purer-than-thou.

Read the whole thing. And catch the BBC podcast as well.

The entire dynamic may also have consequences for dating markets.