Wherever Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is staged, it is first confronted with the expectation that it clearly position itself in relation to the here and now. If his multilayered allegory was aimed – if it was aimed at all – at McCarthyism, frenzied persecution, collective paranoia and small acts of obedience, then where exactly do we find these things today? Who does it concern? And isn’t this whole spectacle of seventeenth-century fanatics a bit of a stretch, if not outright offensive, when we draw parallels with what is happening here and now, among us – whoever “we” may be and however long “now” may last?

Salem is an American backwater from prehistory – surely we are not going to compare ourselves to that? We are far removed from such a social crisis. When was the last time we saw public growling, the invention of enemies, shouting and lies constituting a community? Where have we heard sanitised and coded connotations or witnessed an aggressive trance? Are our institutions riddled with networks, while their satellites and local sheriffs are training themselves in discursive force? Hardly. Surely our do-gooders are not snooping into everyone’s private lives; if anything, the opposite is true. There is no longer any pathological prying, pressure, denunciation or religious dogmatism turning into a truncheon. Artists work freely and without persecution. And as for the collapse of moral authority, let’s not even go there: our idols are pure, not wild conformists. The time of anonymous inquisitors who take out their frustrations on the Other is long gone. What blindness are you talking about when today we all see everything, know everything and remember everything? What witches today… come on.