Moore argues that European medieval society created categories of “dangerous” groups—Jews, heretics, lepers, homosexuals—whose ostracization made the majority feel safer. Moore’s theory conflates neatly with Mary Douglas’s notions of purity and danger. Douglas points out how societies put into place edicts, laws, social proscriptions, and prejudices that maintain the preexisting conservative underpinnings of society by controlling or stopping what they understand to be cultural pollution.
