The Purity Fetish: How American Moralism Replaced Knowledge in 21st-Century Storytelling
In the 19th century, writers like Prosper Mérimée and folklorists like Francis James Child sought understanding through study. Mérimée's novella Carmen treats Spain not as a moral symbol but as a tapestry of Andalusian, Basque, and Romani worlds shaped by ancient Rome, Islamic dynasties, and linguistic cross-pollination. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads preserves not just English verses but Scots laments like "The Twa Corbies", valuing dialect as cultural memory rather than error. Both figures, for all their limits, shared a conviction that empathy begins with knowledge—with the humility to learn how other people speak, worship, and imagine.
By contrast, much of 21st-century Anglophone media confuses empathy with emotional self-congratulation. In an age dominated by activism and image, "diversity" has become a form of moral capital. Netflix's Queen Cleopatra reframes a Greek-Macedonian queen as a symbol of Black empowerment; Bridgerton reimagines Regency England as an integrated aristocracy; Disney's live-action The Little Mermaid recasts a Danish fairy tale with American racial symbolism while discarding the cultural melancholy of Hans Christian Andersen. Such choices are marketed as justice, yet they reduce history to a canvas for moral projection. The past is not studied—it is purified, repainted, and sold back as comfort.
The secularization of purity
This obsession with moral cleanliness is not new. It is the secular descendant of American Puritanism, a culture that equated virtue with visible proof of inner grace. When theology faded, the moral structure remained: the world is divided between the righteous and the fallen; salvation depends on confession and public virtue. Where earlier generations sought salvation through faith, the modern cultural industry seeks redemption through representation. Casting choices, hashtags, and performative empathy serve as the new sacraments of belonging.
The result is a media landscape governed by purity rituals rather than intellectual curiosity. Producers avoid historical complexity for fear of "contamination"—the charge of racism, sexism, or insensitivity. Characters must symbolize redemption, not reality. As the critic Barnty Barnabas observes in his study "Fascism and Cults: Historical and Ideological Overlaps", both cults and authoritarian systems thrive on "centralized authority, charismatic leadership, myth-making, and psychological manipulation… employing propaganda, fear, and rituals to forge loyalty and suppress dissent." (Barnabas 2024) The resemblance is chilling: the modern culture industry functions as a moral cult, uniting followers through fear of impurity and emotional spectacle.
Moral comfort versus historical complexity
What disappears under this regime is the very texture of culture. Mérimée's Spain was ethnographically messy; Carmen acknowledges Romani vocabulary derived from Sanskrit and Greek, acknowledging centuries of migration. In contrast, modern Western period pieces and fantasy reboots prefer a flat moral universe populated by idealized victims and villains.
Even studios celebrated for cultural specificity are constrained by this logic. Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, whose Wolfwalkers explores English colonialism through the friendship between an English girl and an Irish girl, avoids acknowledging the complex hierarchies within England itself—class, dialect, and regional subjugation. Robyn Goodfellowe and her father speak northern English dialects related to Scots, yet the film never hints that such speech marked them as lower-class or semi-foreign under Cromwell's rule. Historical accuracy would disrupt the simplicity of the "colonizer versus colonized" allegory, and thus the purity of its emotional appeal.
This same flattening defines American entertainment. Hollywood dramatizes colonial guilt abroad but ignores the internal diversity of the English-speaking world: Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and regional English cultures erased by Anglicization. The racial category "white" functions as a moral solvent that dissolves centuries of difference in class, language, and faith. The oppressed and oppressor become archetypes, not humans.
The psychology of "progressive purity"
Purity culture depends on shame—once sexual, now ideological. Social media has become the confessional of a new secular religion: the more one repents for "privilege," the more purified one becomes.
This culture mimics the dynamics of a cult (Barnabas 2024):
Centralized authority: moral legitimacy is dictated by corporations, influencers, and entertainment monopolies.
Charismatic leadership: audiences project salvation onto celebrities and symbolic figures.
Fear and ritual: public apology, cancellation, and moral testimony replace debate.
Binary moralism: artists are sorted into saints and sinners; ambiguity equals guilt.
Thus, moral fervor replaces scholarship, and history becomes a therapeutic performance. The individual's need for moral cleanliness outweighs the collective need for factual understanding.
Why Japan's storytelling diverges
In contrast, modern Japanese media often approaches culture through aesthetic curiosity rather than moral anxiety. Satoru Noda's Golden Kamuy explores the violence of Japan's northern frontier, yet its power lies in ethnographic precision—the Ainu language, hunting rituals, and foodways are meticulously depicted. The story neither canonizes nor condemns its characters; it revels in multiplicity.
Japanese creators, though shaped by their own national myths, rarely treat representation as a moral test of purity. The tone of Golden Kamuy, Princess Mononoke, or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is Romantic, not therapeutic: nature and humanity are tragic, intertwined, and particular. Knowledge, not absolution, drives empathy.
What the 19th-century Romantics, philologists, and folklorists understood—and what modern media forgets—is that empathy requires knowledge. To study dialects, to trace migration routes, to listen to the cadences of an old ballad—these acts demanded humility before the real. Today's cultural producers, by contrast, practice empathy as spectacle. They claim to "center voices" while refusing to learn the languages those voices speak.
The purity fetish makes ignorance feel righteous. The viewer need not understand the Gaelic or Romani worlds; it is enough to feel morally aligned. This is not liberation but infantilization: the reduction of moral life to mood.
Toward a post-purity ethics
If modern storytelling wishes to escape this spiral, it must recover the Romantic courage of inquiry—the acceptance that knowledge complicates emotion and that empathy without precision is sentimentality. Artists must be allowed to err, to question, to study cultures not their own without fear of ritual condemnation. Audiences must learn to value difficulty over comfort.
Real diversity lies not in optics but in worlds of meaning: dialects, histories, and ways of making sense of life. Francis James Child's ballad collection, Mérimée's linguistic curiosity, and Noda's ethnographic imagination share a single ethic—the belief that human beings deserve to be understood in their own terms. Against the Puritan urge to cleanse, they offer the Romantic will to know.
Until Western media rediscovers that humility, its "diversity" will remain a mirror turned inward: a cult of purity that mistakes moral display for moral depth, and empathy without knowledge for truth.
The Forgotten Question of Hawthorne
The tragedy is that this moral fetishism is not new—it was already diagnosed by Nathaniel Hawthorne nearly two centuries ago. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne dissected the psychology of Puritan New England, showing how a community obsessed with sin and virtue destroys its own humanity. Hester Prynne, forced to wear the scarlet "A" of adultery, becomes paradoxically freer and more honest than her judges; Reverend Dimmesdale, the moral authority, is eaten alive by his secret guilt; and Roger Chillingworth, the avenger, becomes the very image of spiritual rot.
Hawthorne's genius was to portray moral purity as a form of moral blindness—the refusal to see complexity in others or oneself. None of his characters are wholly innocent or wicked; all are caught in the same web of repression and desire. The novel anticipates what modern psychology would later describe as splitting—the inability to tolerate ambiguity, to see good and evil coexisting in a single person.
Yet the 21st-century American culture industry, heir to Hawthorne's language and history, seems incapable of learning from him. In its self-image as morally enlightened, it repeats the very Puritan reflex Hawthorne condemned: the urge to cleanse, to categorize, to punish. Every controversy—whether over casting, cultural representation, or historical framing—becomes a ritual of public penance. The red "A" has been replaced by the label of "problematic," but the logic remains the same. Hawthorne's insight—that compassion requires ambiguity, that knowledge begins with doubt—is exiled from the very culture that once produced it.
This is perhaps the most damning irony of all: a nation that once birthed a literary critique of moral absolutism now exports moral absolutism as entertainment. The Puritan nightmare Hawthorne exorcised through fiction has returned as spectacle—its symbols rebranded, its theology secularized, its fervor renewed.
Barnabas, Barnty (2024). "Fascism and Cults: Historical and Ideological Overlaps." ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386282718_Fascism_and_Cults_Historical_and_Ideological_Overlaps
