Purists & Culture

 I did not expect to do more than note LitHub's What Oslo’s Future Library Means for Writers and the Written Word, then I came across this passage:

In all of these cases, cultural objects and practices survived even though they could be understood as threats to those who nevertheless assured their survival. These objects certainly challenged any sense of cultural purity. Again and again, cultural history shows that it is purists and puritans, those invested in ideas of spotless virtue of whatever stripe, that are most likely to engage in acts of cultural destruction.

Purists also deprive their own cultures of valuable resources by limiting access to meaning-making strategies from the past and from other societies. Cultures thrive on the ready availability of different forms of expression and meaning-making, on possibilities and experiments, and to the extent that cultural contact increases those options, it stimulates cultural production and development. Those invested in purity, by contrast, tend to shut down alternatives, limit possibilities, and police experiments in cultural fusion. By doing so, they impoverish themselves while condoning or encouraging the neglect and destruction of those aspects of the past that do not conform to their own, narrow standards.

Against such purists stand the heroes of this book, the people who dedicated their lives to the transmission and continuation of cultural traditions, including those who committed to memory long stories such as those of the Trojan War, and those who perfected cultural techniques such as mosaics, fresco paintings, and writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Aztec picture-writing. Equally heroic are those who built institutions dedicated to preservation and transmission, including the great libraries of the ancient world, museums inspired by the new science of the past promoted by such nineteenth-century intellectuals as George Eliot.

Puritans always lead me to Nathaniel Hawthorne. With him, there always seemed to be critique and respect for his Puritan forebears. He knows their time is past, recognizes their deficiencies as they overextended their ideals into a purism that deadens life, while recognizing the good in their ideals against the ideals of his own society. Two texts come to mind while I write this: The Scarlet Letter and "The Celestial Railroad." We have our own cultural puritanism seeping out of the swamps of MAGA and Florida Governor DeSantis' brain. With them, cultural puritanism becomes an amputation. America has always been too strange, too disordered, too complicated for purists. Put in Thoreau and the cat is in the pigeons, but the same applies to Thomas Jefferson. Ralph Waldo Emerson's financial support of Thoreau complicates Walden, just as Jefferson's salves complicate The Declaration of Independence. We have John Calhoun and William Lloyd Garrison; Phyllis Schafly and Margaret Sanger; Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. My own support goes to the impure. Life cannot be bound by purists, they are the one fearing the abundance of life. The only purity given to us humans is death. Puritans love death; the impure favor life.

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