In 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts, transgressions as small as kissing one’s spouse in public on a Sunday could earn one several hours of public shame in the stocks.

In the stocks, offenders were exposed not just to the elements, but also to the insults, kicks, spit and frequent urine of passersby. In comparison, sanction hours for getting caught drinking Natty in your New South room seem like a vacation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about the cult of public humiliation in Puritan society in “The Scarlet Letter,” a novel that has bored high school students for the last 165 years. But it may be time to take a second look at public humiliation and its disturbing new place in our society.

It’s certainly a ripe time to do so. Twenty years after the affair that plastered her across the front page of every paper in the nation, Monica Lewinsky returned to the pages of The New York Times this weekend to tell her story of how public shaming and humiliation not just ruined her life, but in many ways ended it.

And a little more than a year after one idiotic tweet by Justine Sacco making a joke about AIDS in Africa drew the ire and vitriol of millions on Twitter, journalist Jon Ronson is out with a book exploring with unflinching honesty what happens to those people who through accident or fleeting fault enrage the Internet.

Group punishment through social shaming and ostracism is very different from a court date and a jail term. After all, most prisons in this country are formally penitentiaries.

That name itself is an achievement of 19th-century progressivism that has putatively shifted the function of criminal justice from primarily one of punishment to one of rehabilitation and reform.

Social exclusion has none of this as its goal. Instead, ostracism and public punishment brand their victims permanently as outsiders, evildoers and subhumans.

Don’t agree with us? Look no further than the victims: Monica Lewinsky will forever be synonymous with fleeting poor decisions she made as a 22-year-old intern.

Such punishment is neither effective nor just, but it is terrifying. Disturbingly, a small but highly vocal and visible group of many social justice movements has made shaming and ostracism not just its preferred method but practically its raison d’être.

Such shaming often extends far beyond simply naming and shaming individuals who have transgressed. Increasingly, there is a vast and complex orthodoxy to which everyone must conform or be labelled as ignorant, bigoted, chauvinist or Satan incarnate.

Examples are rife. When Macklemore released “Same Love” in 2012, celebrating the gay rights movement, many online LGBTQ activists attacked Macklemore for having the gall to talk about the gay rights movement even positively while simultaneously being a white, heterosexual male. When Emma Watson spoke before the United Nations last year calling for women’s rights worldwide, many activists online similarly attacked her speech, decrying the manifest evil of celebrity feminism.

Reading the vitriol from these social media crusaders, you would practically think that Macklemore and Emma Watson’s statements were acts of subjugation upon the very groups they purported to empower.

Such statements do not just distract from the very real, much more pressing sources of subjugation and oppression, they also distort reality.

While their eyes were busy popping out of their heads, many online activists failed to note that Macklemore donated every penny of the proceeds from “Same Love” to funding the successful campaign for same-sex marriage in Washington State.

Every fight for social justice in this country has been one of inclusion. Inclusion brought white marchers along with black marchers behind Martin Luther King, Jr. Inclusion is similarly enshrined in the ideals of the LGBTQ rights movement, whose flag is a rainbow because we strive for a society where everyone belongs — including those people who spat on us, hated us, vilified us and oppressed us.

Inclusion is how social justice is achieved, advanced and maintained. It is the lifeblood of an equal society.

But this is not the method or goal of the Facebook crusaders who think that activism means shouting into a vacuum. Instead, it is being right by branding others as wrong. And in an era in which the agenda of social justice is increasingly addressed on our Facebook and Twitter feeds, it alienates our generation from the real work of social justice: lifting people up.

Our generation can definitely strive for better dialogue. But it remains to be seen whether we will, or if we will just keep posting Facebook statuses. But eventually we may discover the same thing that the Puritans realized: Witch hunts rarely find witches.

Tucker Cholvin and Thomas Christiansen are seniors in the School of Foreign Service. Culture Clash appears every other Tuesday.