patrick.net

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. ...

It is a social dynamic that plays out across that community — a process of moral outbidding, unchecked, which corrodes the group from within, rewarding those who put themselves at the extremes, and punishing nuance and divergence relentlessly. ...

The term ‘racism’ had taken on its broad, all encompassing, ‘systemic’ meaning: the idea that “we live in a racist society”, and that this inbuilt, inescapable institutional racism is policed by a thousand and one daily micro-aggressions.

White Fragility in particular implied that all dissent from its tenets was itself a sign of racism. Like Stalin’s show trials or witch-ducking, the loop had been closed. In game theory terms, objecting to something was now always a dominant strategy, and rejecting an allegation of racism was always a losing strategy. Inevitably, a ratchet effect took hold in which those with the most strident vision of what ‘diversity’ meant were effectively handed the keys to the castle. That is — until someone with a more strident vision turned up behind them…

The problem is that we tend to see the dynamic for what it is only in its aftermath. In the moment, the mesmerism of ideology fills the screen entirely. What’s scary is that an individual alone can almost never win: you can’t define reality in the singular; it takes a much larger critical mass, hundreds, recognising the purity spiral’s signs and saying so.

The simplest solution is to notice earlier, to notice better, and to call it out as something that has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with purity — and to say why that’s different.

If you call its name, it flinches. After all, the best defence against witch-finders is a population that doesn’t believe in witches.