The journalist Gavin Haynes has a great phrase for a familiar and disturbing phenomenon: the purity spiral.
“A purity spiral occurs,” he writes, “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.”
Students of history will know all about this species of perverted gustatory over-indulgence. The French Revolution is one locus classicus. In that macabre carnival, the more extreme Montagnards consumed the (somewhat) moderate Girondists before turning to consume themselves. No citoyen, not even Robespierre himself, could be sufficiently virtuous to satisfy the inexorable demands of revolutionary zeal.
Mao’s cultural revolution provides another classic example. In the late 1960s, the Red Guards took to the street to identify and destroy anyone and anything involved with traditional Chinese culture. The result was an orgy of destruction and murder on an industrial scale.
Haynes points out that the phenomenon is not confined to the Left. The Nazi obsession with race involved a purity spiral as thoroughgoing and murderous as any in history.
The point is that the logic of the process transcends ideology. In every case, as Haynes notes, what we see is “a bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power.”
Thus it invariably happens that the purity spiral is also a search for enemies, a concerted effort to divide the world between the tiny coterie of the blessed and the madding crowd of the damned. The game, Haynes notes, “is always one of purer-than-thou.”
Roger Kimball – The Epoch Times – June 28, 2020.
