VIRGINIA POSTREL: Purity, Sorcery, and Cancel Culture. “The quest for purity informs cancel culture. It pushes partisans to ever-greater extremes, even when those positions are politically self-defeating. It turns historical heroes /into villains and closes nuclear power plants in the face of climate change. It makes the ideal the enemy of the improved, the perfect the exterminator of the better. If we want to understand our cultural moment, we need to think seriously about purity. . . . Purity is about identifying and eliminating contaminants—anomalies that are sources of danger. The danger may be physical, spiritual, cultural, or moral. To purify is to purge whatever is out of place. It establishes what belongs by banishing what does not. ‘The quest for purity is pursued by rejection,’ writes anthropologist Mary Douglas in her landmark 1966 book Purity and Danger. . . . The 21st-century American version of sorcery allegations are charges of racism, sexism, harassment, and similar offenses. Many examples of ‘cancel culture’ occur in enclaves—fan groups, for instance, or loose professional associations. In 2020, the online knitting community was torn apart by what British journalist Gavin Haynes dubbed a ‘purity spiral,’ in which people who thought of themselves as kind-hearted liberals were suddenly ostracized and boycotted for alleged white supremacy.”

I don’t care for puritanism in any form.