Closer to our own time and place, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman in the novel “Native Son,” and then rapes and murders a black woman; Gore Vidal wrote with sympathy about Timothy McVeigh; and David Mamet composed “Oleanna,” a prescient play about sexual harassment, accusation, guilt and innocence that, famously, had no clear resolution.

Crucially, this tendency did not remain in the preserve of high art. The elevation of moral complexity over moral condemnation, once the special province of high culture, made its way over centuries into mainstream thinking about justice and tolerance, helping to bring us to the enlightened values of modern liberal democracy.

Today, however, our dominant cultural style is very different. We thrill to a kind of pornography of exposing and shaming. We favor predetermined verdicts that have been arrived at by collective sentiment — a cultural style that accuses first, presents evidence often without questioning it, then makes a judicial finding and passes a sentence.

The representative figure of our age is not the poet, the artist, the novelist, the scientist, the businessman, the actor, the athlete, the statesman. It is the prosecutor. There exists a kind of silent censoring of any attempt to understand a person’s ugly behavior rather than seeking exclusively to punish it.

If, in a spirit of free intellectual and imaginative inquiry, you dared to suggest that a man who masturbated in front of a woman he barely knew without her consent might have been acting out, in an attitude of aggressive contempt, his own shame and emasculation — if you tried to understand his actions, without justifying them — you would be shouted down and vilified.

Imagine the outcry if you went further and speculated about why Harvey Weinstein allegedly manipulated some actresses dependent on his power into watching him while he was naked. Could it be that Mr. Weinstein, who reportedly had often been mocked for his appearance, wanted to dehumanize these women as well, while at the same time turning himself into a person who is watched and admired, like a person of beauty?

If even a fraction of the charges against him are true, Mr. Weinstein should be banished to the distant reaches of society. But however justice is finally administered in his case, we should try to grasp what social and psychological forces made him what he is, without the distracting din of moral denunciation forbidding us from doing so.

In matters of law and public morality, let justice take its course along the lines of due process and fair play. But in the realm of the free operation of intellect and imagination that is culture, let there bloom the suspension of moral judgment for the sake of a better understanding of our moral natures. It’s not because we owe anything to the likes of Harvey Weinstein; it’s because of what we owe ourselves.

Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of “The Draw: A Memoir.”

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