A process of moral outbidding is corroding small communities
from within
BY Gavin Haynes
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. by the same
author The growing power of the YouTube Right
It's not just another word for ‘woke culture', or even
‘cancel culture', or ‘virtue signalling'. Even though
intersectional social justice is a pretty great breeding ground for
purity spirals, it is one among many. Nor is it confined to the
Left: neo-Nazi groups offer some of the clearest examples of purity
spirals: the ongoing parsing of ethnic purity into ever-more Aryan
sub-groups. Perhaps the most classic one of all hails from Salem,
Massachusetts.
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.
A purity spiral propagates itself through the tipping points of
preference falsification: through self-censorship, and through
loyalty tests that weed out its detractors long before they can
band together. In that sense, once one takes hold, its momentum can
be very difficult to halt.
Our documentary analysed just two latter-day purity spirals —
Instagram knitting culture and young adult novels. Both seemed
perfectly-sized to be taken over — they were spaces big enough
to have their own star system, yet small enough for the writ of a
dominant group to hold.
In each, a vast tapestry of what were effectively small businesses
competed for attention online by fluidly mixing personal and
professional brand. On social media, opinion, diary and sales often
existed within the same posts. Each individual small business was
uniquely vulnerable to being un-personed, ‘cancelled'. But,
simultaneously, each could benefit enormously from taking on the
status of thought leader — from becoming a node that directed
moral traffic. suggested reading How I was cancelled by Doctor Who
To take the example of Instagram knitting: the unravelling began
with a man called Nathan Taylor. Gay, living with HIV, nice as pie,
Taylor started a hashtag aimed at promoting diversity in knitting,
Diversknitty, to get people from different backgrounds to talk. And
he did: the hashtag was a runaway hit, spawning over 17,000 posts.
But over the following months, the conversation took on a more
strident tone. The list of things considered problematic grew.
The definition of racism began to take on the terms mandated
by intersectional social justice ideology. Knitters who wished
to be on the right side of history began to post pictures
of the books they were reading. Two came up over and over
again. White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, or the Me and White
SupremacyWorkbook, by Layla Saad.
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…
By January 2019, this narrative of white supremacy and racial
privilege had saturated the knitting world. What happened next
was not something very important. In fact, it was the opposite.
Something very trivial happened; a tiny spark, that landed on bone
dry tinder. suggested reading Will maths succumb to the woke wave?
In January, a popular knitter from Nashville, Karen Templer, wrote
a blog about her upcoming first-ever trip to India, in which she
suggested the experience would be like “being offered a seat on
a flight to Mars”. Cue: outrage at her racial insensitivity.
Hundreds of comments later, Templer issued a lengthy apology:
turned out she loved Big Brother after all.
Seeing what had happened to Templer, in January last year a Seattle
wool dyer called Maria Tusken decided she would take the smallest
of stands. In passing, she announced on her vlog that she was
taking a break from Instagram because of what she saw as ‘online
bullying' in the knitting world.
If she had any lingering doubt about whether or not the bullying
was real, the tsunami of denunciation that ensued probably cleared
that up.
Clearly, the spiral had entered its final phase: it was no longer
enough to just stay out of it. Only positive affirmations of
support — and only in the most-correct tone and timbre — could
save you now.
Professor Timur Kuran is Professor of Economics and Political
Science at Duke University, and the father of ‘preference
falsification'. His theory relates to things like the fall of the
Soviet Union, where almost no one saw the end coming, because they
hadn't realised that an entire population was falsifying their
experience to each other. He sees a clear parallel.
“People who are trying to prevent members of society from
speaking the truth will often punish minor criticisms,” he told
me. “Simply to send the message to the rest of society that no
dissent will be tolerated and no attempt to form an opposing group
— even one that differs only slightly from the status quo —
will be tolerated. If you allow minor differences, you allow people
to coordinate around minor differences, and that can encourage
even greater opposition. If people get that sense, then the whole
process can unravel.” suggested reading Identity politics is
Christianity without redemption
Finally, just as the guillotine had eventually come for
Robespierre, Nathan Taylor, who had founded the #Diversknitty
movement, found himself at its sharp end.
When Taylor tried to inject positivity back into Diversknitty, his
moral authority burnt up inside minutes. A poem he'd written
asking knitters to cool it (“With genuine SOLEM-KNITTY/I beg
you, stop the enmity”) was in turn interpreted as a blatant act
of white supremacy. When the mob finally came for him, he had a
nervous breakdown. Yet even here, he was accused of malingering,
his suicidal hospitalisation described online as a ‘white
centring' event.
Once it has gathered momentum, the dynamics of a purity spiral are
those of a leaderless cult. You hold a viewpoint that privileges an
abstraction of the world over the messy reality. You have a sense
of mission which sets you apart from the world, and you derive
social status from being holier than the next acolyte.
So when someone comes calling from “realityland” with a list
of questions, the mere fact of having their viewpoint interrogated
represents an existential threat to the sacred viewpoint. They
circle the wagons. suggested reading Why I've reported Douglas
Murray to the police
In making the programme, I approached more than 20 of the leading
social justice knitters for comment. I assumed these strident
anti-racists would be delighted to proclaim their gospel on the
Beeb. Not one did.
Where does a purity spiral end? Results may vary. “I get lots
of emails these days from people in all kinds of walks of life
where this is happening,” said James Lindsay, one of the three
grievance studies hoaxers, and a long-time foe of intersectional
social justice ideology. “I get reached out to from Dungeons &
Dragons societies, rock climbing, from religions.”
Lindsay pointed to the atheist movement of the mid-2000s, from
which he'd come: a community that once had the wind in its
sails, but had imploded into infighting by 2011, as half of its
members jagged off in an social justice direction. Soon enough,
the likes of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins were being
problematised as stale, male and pale. The rules on who could speak
became more byzantine, and, eventually, half the audience stopped
bothering. These days, there are effectively two communities
bearing the New Atheism tag, each much weaker and less coherent.
For knitting, the situation had gone from bad to very bad, but
there was no evidence it had bottomed out. As the summer dragged
on, the Nordic wool bible Laine magazine was forced to apologise
for having too many white faces on their pricey knitting retreat.
The auto-cannibalisation doomsday clock had gone so far that now
even the instigators were having their privilege severely checked.
Ysolda Teague, a Scot who had been one of the leading social
justice knitters, published a lengthy apology on Instagram which
began with the immortal line:
“Earlier this week I conducted a live interview in which I
failed to acknowledge the extent of the deeply painful, difficult
labour BIPOC [Black and Indigenous Persons of Colour] have done in
our community since January…”
But then, at the end of September, something twitched. Nathan
Taylor published a vlog setting out his side of everything that had
happened. The social justice knitters dismissed it in the usual.
Many recommended that others not watch it — always a signal
that something has struck a chord. suggested reading Spare us the
bedtime morality tales
After sharing his story, Nathan received well over a thousand
messages of support. He also saw a huge spike in pattern sales —
so much so that in two weeks he recovered all that he'd lost in
cancelled work.
Having been an unhappy tourist inside a couple of purity spirals
for many months, my sense is that the phenomenon isn't going
anywhere. These are deep psychological truths about humanity,
carved into the cliff-face of how we construct our societies. The
cudgels of morality will always be a convenient lever for hidden
competition — you can pretend to be socialising the private
realm, when in effect you're privatising the social realm for
your own status gain.
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.
The Purity Spiral airs on Sunday at 1.30pm, BBC Radio 4
