Against the Purity Spiral

Back in 2020, the journalist Gavin Haynes popularized an evocative phrase for a familiar and disturbing phenomenon: the purity spiral. 

“A purity spiral occurs,” he wrote, “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 industrial-scale orgy of murder and destruction.

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.” 

“A bidding war for morality turned into a proxy war for power”: remember that phrase. It names a process that is coming to a location near you. 

The metabolism of this Machiavellian morality play invariably entails that the operation of a 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.”

Freud put his finger on one aspect of the purity spiral in his discussion of “the narcissism of small differences.” Tocqueville sifted through the same psychological sands when he noted that the more equal people become, the more sensitive they are to whatever small differences remain. 

Writing in New York magazine, the commentator Andrew Sullivan noted the prominent role language — that is, the effort to police language — plays in the economy of coercion. 

“Revolutionaries,” Sullivan wrote, “also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order.”

The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. … The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

Exactly. And where does it end? At this point, no one knows. Haynes focuses on two niche activities, the world of knitting and young adult fiction. Are there any more unlikely candidates for corruption by wokeness?

But that is just the point. Everything must be susceptible to the demands of the purity spiral. You can never be revolutionary enough, Comrade, or sufficiently Green, or fervid enough in your “anti-racism.” How dare you pretend that knitting is exempt from the demands of racial justice!

The examples that Gavin Haynes describes are plenty surreal. And a look at the day’s news is full of examples of the purity spiral at work. First it was statues of Confederate soldiers. Then it was the statues of imperfect abolitionists. Then it was Lincoln himself.

The British historian Nigel Biggar, writing about the clamor over a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, predicted this process of what we might call “repudiation inflation.” “If Rhodes must fall,” Biggar said,

so must Churchill, whose views on empire and race were similar. And so probably must Abraham Lincoln. While Lincoln liberated African-American slaves, he doubted they could be integrated into white society and favoured their separate development—their apartheid—in an African colony. If we insist on our heroes being pure, then we aren’t going to have any. Last year the shine on Mahatma Gandhi’s halo came off, when we learned of his view that Indians were culturally superior to black Africans. Should this blot out all his remarkable achievements? I think not.

Purity spirals end only when confronted and exposed. Efforts at conciliation, like the habit of appeasement, serve to increase their ferocity and their velocity. Haynes notes that purity spirals involve a process of “moral outbidding … which corrodes the group from within, rewarding those who put themselves at the extremes, and punishing nuance and divergence relentlessly.” The key to disrupting them is to find strategies to short-circuit that metabolism, disrupting the pipeline of rewards. 

One prerequisite for the successful deployment of such strategies is the homely virtue of courage. Long ago, Aristotle pointed out that courage is the most important virtue, because without courage we are unable to practice any of the other virtues. Courage has been in notably short supply in Western countries in recent years as people have allowed petty bureaucrats to turn them into sheep who parrot absurd ideas about sexuality, litter their business cards and correspondence with meaningless phonemes they call “pronouns,” and obediently quiver in place and refuse to be seen out-of-doors without a mask. What we need is a short course in George Orwell, who knew that the surest first step in battling tyranny is having the courage to call things by their real names.

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