![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In Meeting for Business Sunday, someone spoke in complaint about the language and justification being used for a ballot measure to end the death penalty. The framing of the measure is that it's cheaper to incarcerate someone for life than plan to execute them and put them through the death row process. I suspect no one in the Meeting for Business believes that's the reason why we should abolish the death penalty. The speaker touched on many different areas, including "being in the world and not of the world" and being contaminated by the political process and how the whole thing made hir feel like e had dirt "and something else i won't mention" on hir.
I felt moved to speak forcefully about my suspicions when purity is made part of an argument. I am aware that purity is one of the "universals" of moral or ethical reasoning (Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity [list lifted from Jonathan Haidt]), but as i listened to this person conclude and refuse to mention manure or shit or dung or whatever term for excrement that could only be obliquely inferred, i was overwhelmed by a sense of how oppressive purity concepts can be.
I'm not sure that anything in (Liberal) Quakerism supports arguments from purity. Indeed, Jesus' flouting of Jewish principles of purity strike me as part of the key to the early Christian movement. I haven't done much reasoned reflection, but i found myself standing and stating my suspicion that when an appeal is made to purity, we are not accepting all the voices, whether it's women or people who work with unclean animals, or race purity or so on.
I feel i should be open to the possibility that there's some value to concepts of purity, but i mainly find myself aligning with a pragmatic consideration of risk management. Even then, as i reflect on how clean my water needs to be, it's not literally clean but having any disease agents rendered harmless that i value. Boil it for the neti pot: the vectors of concern are rendered harmless, not absent.
Pure blood lines seem like a recipe for inbreeding and harm: i value the surprise of diversity and variation.
Purity of thought seems to be a bizarre concept to me the more i think about it. What non-thought contaminants are we purifying: emotion? I can imagine a purity of emotion-free thought, but as soon as the "pure of thought" fears contamination it has occurred. "Pure of thought" in my thought experiment must not fear the impure or be proud of purity. Can curiosity and compassion exist with out emotion? Can *motive* exist without emotion?
To refer to purity of principle seems to be an incomplete statement: what are the contaminants? Other principles the person measuring purity doesn't hold would seem to be the answer.
I can respect practices of purity, rituals of handwashing, footwashing, bathing to soothe and heal our broken lives. I can respect that cultures and groups may have their own purity of practice, and may not want to bring in practices from other cultures. Purity in the French language: i get it.
I suppose i can also respect that there's an issue of strength (fear) that goes with purity. I can imagine individual cases where individuals need "purity" of some sort to protect them from a weakness. And i can imagine a community choosing to practice the purity needed to protect the weakest in the community: eg: no alcohol because some are alcoholics, cut tags to protect others from undesirable content.
Purity as a value in and of itself? I think it's a privileged position to take, and can be used oppressively.
I felt moved to speak forcefully about my suspicions when purity is made part of an argument. I am aware that purity is one of the "universals" of moral or ethical reasoning (Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity [list lifted from Jonathan Haidt]), but as i listened to this person conclude and refuse to mention manure or shit or dung or whatever term for excrement that could only be obliquely inferred, i was overwhelmed by a sense of how oppressive purity concepts can be.
I'm not sure that anything in (Liberal) Quakerism supports arguments from purity. Indeed, Jesus' flouting of Jewish principles of purity strike me as part of the key to the early Christian movement. I haven't done much reasoned reflection, but i found myself standing and stating my suspicion that when an appeal is made to purity, we are not accepting all the voices, whether it's women or people who work with unclean animals, or race purity or so on.
I feel i should be open to the possibility that there's some value to concepts of purity, but i mainly find myself aligning with a pragmatic consideration of risk management. Even then, as i reflect on how clean my water needs to be, it's not literally clean but having any disease agents rendered harmless that i value. Boil it for the neti pot: the vectors of concern are rendered harmless, not absent.
Pure blood lines seem like a recipe for inbreeding and harm: i value the surprise of diversity and variation.
Purity of thought seems to be a bizarre concept to me the more i think about it. What non-thought contaminants are we purifying: emotion? I can imagine a purity of emotion-free thought, but as soon as the "pure of thought" fears contamination it has occurred. "Pure of thought" in my thought experiment must not fear the impure or be proud of purity. Can curiosity and compassion exist with out emotion? Can *motive* exist without emotion?
To refer to purity of principle seems to be an incomplete statement: what are the contaminants? Other principles the person measuring purity doesn't hold would seem to be the answer.
I can respect practices of purity, rituals of handwashing, footwashing, bathing to soothe and heal our broken lives. I can respect that cultures and groups may have their own purity of practice, and may not want to bring in practices from other cultures. Purity in the French language: i get it.
I suppose i can also respect that there's an issue of strength (fear) that goes with purity. I can imagine individual cases where individuals need "purity" of some sort to protect them from a weakness. And i can imagine a community choosing to practice the purity needed to protect the weakest in the community: eg: no alcohol because some are alcoholics, cut tags to protect others from undesirable content.
Purity as a value in and of itself? I think it's a privileged position to take, and can be used oppressively.
Tags:
no subject
no subject
no subject
"H2O" (pardon my lack of subscripting) is only "pure H2O" if it has no other chemicals in it, but "Drinking water" is purely and completely drinking water with all *sorts* of other things than H2O in it, and if it *doesn't* have those it's *not as good for drinking* -- it tastes flat and somehow 'off.'
It behooves me to be as purely my-own-self as I can manage; but that has to include all the crap I may not want to acknowledge. (If I didn't have crap, after all, all that other stuff would poison me and I'd die!)
I think you're right that it's a dangerous metaphor, but it's an interesting one to consider.
no subject
"Purity concerns have a lot to answer for" has become one of my aphorisms over the past several years. As you note, purity-as-a-goal-in-itself leads to disproportion at best. If nothing is to be done except for the purest motives (and argued for in purest-motive terms), we may likely be unable to get valuable things done.
And as for oppression: with a priority on purity comes a fear of infection. And fears of infection breed shunning and containment and therapeutic execution and so on, and there is little limit to the scope of the fears....