In his excellent post, “The Purity Olympics,” in The Beautiful and the Horrible (Substack), Lyle W. Fass discusses the trendy culture “that has turned ethics into branding.”
He looks at the competition over “who boycotts more things, who has severed more ties, who consumes the most righteously, who has the fewest stains, who can identify contamination the fastest, who can leap into a conversation and announce that actually this museum is compromised, this artist is compromised, this platform is compromised, this friendship is compromised, this memory is compromised….”
Fass asks us to choose harm reduction over constant accusation, to consider that moral life requires judgment, proportion, context, memory, and the possibility of growth, rather than to accept every compromise as endorsement.
I have selected several paragraphs from Lyle’s essay that most resonated with me.
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I do not trust people who think they have already arrived. I trust people who know they have failed, know they have changed, know they are compromised, know they are trying, know they are capable of getting things wrong again. I trust people who understand that adulthood is not a state of purity but a series of negotiations with reality. I trust people who can say, this is the least harmful choice I can make right now, and I wish the options were cleaner.
I trust people who can hold onto a childhood memory without collapsing into endorsement of the adult monster attached to it. I trust people who know that human beings come with warts and all, and that love, friendship, politics, and art do not get conducted in some antiseptic laboratory free of contradiction and stain. The real divide now is between those who understand that moral life is messy and those who are still addicted to fantasies of spotless virtue. One group is trying to live responsibly in a broken world. The other is trying to win the pageant.
And the pageant never ends. That is the real joke. No one is ever pure enough for the person who thinks they are the purest. Eventually the knife comes for everyone. The boycotter gets boycotted. The denouncer gets denounced. The person screaming about contamination gets caught with a stain of their own. That is the inevitable end point of any culture built around purification rather than proportion. It makes people terrified, performative, and mean. It turns moral life into a permanent audition for absolution that no one will ever receive.
I am tired of it. I am tired of the competitive holiness, the little secular excommunications, the online clergy forever sniffing the air for traces of heresy. I am tired of the fantasy that maturity means becoming stainless. It does not. It means getting honest. It means reducing harm where you can, admitting contamination where you cannot, and refusing the childish lie that a human life can be lived without contradiction. That lie has made enough people insufferable already.