I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy.

Having weathered more than one social-­media s- -t storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger ­McCarthyite blacklisting.

But that isn’t the fear in its entirety. Suppose a perceived violation of progressive orthodoxy translates into the kind of institutional cowardice on display in the forced resignation of Ian Buruma from The New York Review of Books. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, my literary agent and ­my publisher would decide they could no longer afford association with a pariah. My current manuscript wouldn’t see print, nor would any future projects I’m foolish enough to bother to bash out. Yet what I most dread about this bleak scenario is my 13 published titles suddenly becoming unavailable — both online and in shops.

Because that’s the direction we’re traveling in. For reasons that escape me, artists’ misbehavior now contaminates the fruits of their labors, like the sins of the father being visited upon the sons. So it’s not enough to punish transgressors merely by cutting off the source of their livelihoods, turning them into social outcasts, and truncating their professional futures. You have to destroy their pasts. Having discovered the worst about your fallen idols, you’re duty-­bound to demolish the best about them as well.

After Roseanne Barr’s notorious tweet last May slagging off former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett in racial terms (Barr claims, charmingly, that she “thought the bitch was white”), ABC canceled her new revival sitcom, “Roseanne.” Viacom pulled reruns of the revival across all its channels, as well as reruns of her original series. Roseanne the person may continue to mouth off, but, however iconic, “Roseanne” the series has been disappeared from television listings (though it is still available online). Last fall’s 11-­episode spin-­off, “The Conners,” used the same cast minus a certain someone, burying the character six feet under with an opioid overdose. Now that’s what I call overkill.

After being exposed, if you will, for masturbating before multiple underwhelmed women, the comedian Louis C.K. had his film “I Love You, Daddy” withdrawn a week before its American wide release and subsequently shelved. HBO dropped his series “Lucky Louie” and several stand-­up specials from its on-­demand platform. Once Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault, he was sentenced not only to three to 10 years but to cultural near-­oblivion. Amazon has held out, and DVDs are kicking around stores, but otherwise no trace remains of “The Cosby Show” on any other channel or platform.

In some instances, that erasure has been unnervingly literal. Having learned that Steven Wilder Striegel is a sex offender, 21st Century Fox completely eliminated a scene from “The Predator” in which the actor appeared. Since “the predator” might justly be his handle, Kevin Spacey was removed from Ridley Scott’s completed “All the Money in the World” at considerable expense. Disney deleted Louis C.K.’s voice from the animated TV show “Gravity Falls” and redubbed the part.

What artists of every stripe care about most is what they have made. The contemporary impulse to rebuke disgraced creators by vanishing their work from the cultural marketplace exhibits a mean-­spiritedness, a vengefulness even, as well as an illogic. Why, if you catch someone doing something bad, would you necessarily rub out what they’ve done that’s good? If you’re convicted of breaking and entering, the judge won’t send bailiffs around to tear down the tree house you built for your daughter and to pour bleach on your homemade pie.

Why, if you catch someone doing something bad, would you necessarily rub out what they’ve done that’s good?

For artists, the erasure of their work may be a harsher penalty than incarceration or fines. Eliminating whole series from streaming platforms, withdrawing novels from bookstores and canceling major gallery retrospectives constitute, for those in the creative professions, cruel and unusual punishment.

Though I’ve never been especially interested in making connections between the biographical details of artists’ lives and what they make, I accept that art and artist are not unrelated. But with Roseanne Barr having been officially christened a racist, it seems to me that to pull her original series you would still have to separately prove that “Roseanne” the program was racist. To remove any of Louis C.K.’s series from streaming platforms, you should have to demonstrate that “Louie” the program is abusive of women. Instead, the content of these banished products is clearly immaterial. The films, series, books and paintings are tainted by association.

Do we really require the people who make our movies, fiction and artworks to be above reproach in their personal lives? If so, how are they to understand their own material — in the main, the lewd, scheming, cheating, thieving, covetous, malign, murderous, hateful and rapacious human race? I worry that requiring artists to be perfect means either no art or bad art.

We seem to have established a protocol of imposing total social and professional exile for having said something deemed distasteful, or for small lapses of judgment wildly shy of illegality. Even during the post-­trial communal shunning of O.J. Simpson — when what was at issue was double murder — there was no campaign to take reruns of “Roots,” “The Naked Gun,” and “The Towering Inferno” off the airways. Nowadays, those who violate progressive pieties risk ejection from the tribe and the wholesale effacement of their handiwork. Mirroring the Scientology custom whereby anyone who bad­­mouths the church is ostracized as a nonperson, the practice smacks of a cult.

And is one’s exile for life? It’s still up for grabs which targets of juggernauts like #MeToo will ever be considered to have paid their dues and be allowed to rejoin the faithful. Last September’s ouster of Ian Buruma suggests not. Weak-but-still-interesting essays by perpetrators of sexual misconduct in The New York Review of Books triggered social-­media outrage. The ­NYRB publisher capitulated by sacking his editor.

Which brings us to the party that really pays for the new puritanism: the arts consumer.

In the instances we’re examining here, the distributor makes that decision for us. As if we need to be protected. In truth, we’re being punished too, along with the alleged perpetrators. I wanted to see the new Louis C.K. movie. But presumptuously, patronizingly, I’m not allowed. In ditching the revival of “Roseanne,” we’ve lost the one program that exhibited the kind of diversity of which this country is starved: It sponsored a real live Trump supporter.

I’m one of those throwbacks perfectly content to watch “Rosemary’s Baby” for a fourth time, even if Roman Polanski was convicted of statutory rape. It’s a good film. That’s what I care about. I’m a cultural materialist. I want the stuff, and in truth I wouldn’t be all that bothered if the director were an ax murderer. I can see differing with me on this point, but I want us all to be able to act according to our own rubrics.

More broadly, I can’t be the only one to find this contemporary convention of levying total banishment for often relatively small, noncriminal offenses against progressive mores a little creepy. I wish I would read a little more often about some actor vilified for making an unwelcome pass on set, and the agent, for example, says, “Know what? I’m sticking by my client. We’ll weather the storm.” Instead, I read repeatedly that “all ties have been severed,” all doors slammed in the scoundrel’s face. Herd behavior is by nature mindless. Parties to modern excommunication never seem to make decisions on the merits for themselves and in consideration of the depth of the relationship, but race blindly to join the stampede. Ian Buruma and NYRB publisher Rea Hederman had been friends for 30 years. That didn’t count for beans.

Lionel Shriver is an author and columnist. This article is an adapted excerpt from Harper’s Magazine. Copyright @ 2019 Harper’s Magazine. All Rights reserved. Reproduced from the February issue by special permission.