Us and Them: The Blog

Pure rites and dirty deeds

Before they set out on their mission, the September 11 hijackers purified themselves, body and soul. According to instructions found after the attacks, they were told to shower, and ``shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne.'' They also were to read the Koran, ponder their spiritual life, and pronounce blessings over their clothes, knives, passports and other effects.

Why did they do this? Why, more generally, do religiously-motivated rites and enterprises often have a component of hand-washing, house-cleaning, clothes-laundering, and so on?

It's easy to imagine a simple-minded association: Bodily cleanness promoting the spiritual kind. But perhaps there's another explanation.

Perhaps the point of religious purification is merely to separate the believer from everyday hunches and impulses about his behavior.

Such a separation from common sense could, of course, cause a believer to be more attentive to moral principles and their associated emotions. But that's not the only possible consequence. A break with ordinary moral rules-of-thumb could be a license to ignore everyday politeness and everyday desires for safety -- not to speak of morally charged feelings like empathy, guilt and fear.

The grubby, dusty, incoherent moral life of an ordinary household's ordinary Tuesday is much disparaged by many religions. But that life leaves most people with the feeling that they should behave decently to others. That they should not kill strangers. That they have a right, if not a duty, to preserve their own lives. Soldiers have to be trained to set these hunches aside. So did the hijackers, to judge by another passage in their instructions:

Remind your soul to listen and obey and remember that you will face decisive situations that might prevent you from 100 percent obedience [...]

Religions demand that people do many things that don't automatically ''feel right.'' Perhaps cleaning up, with its attendant physical feeling of ``I'm all right,'' helps suppress psychic feelings of ``I'm doing something weird, even wrong.'' Feelings that can arise if one is called to murder innocent people. Or suppress one's natural human sexuality. Or refuse food made the ``wrong'' way. Or engage, on a Sunday morning, in a rite described as literally eating God's flesh and drinking his blood.

What brings all this to mind is this report in The Economist, about a new study (pdf) by Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth. Schnall is interested in the interaction of physical and moral emotion -- for example, the way, as Paul Rozin showed years ago, that physical disgust makes people more prone to moral disgust.

In that vein, Schnall and her students posed ethical questions to people split into two groups. One consisted of people who'd been told to wash their hands before the session. Those people were more accepting of violations of what I've called common-sense morality (among Schnall's examples were using a kitten for sexual purposes, or taking money found in a lost wallet) than were the unwashed group. The same contrast emerged even if the distinction wasn't about a physical act. A group primed with words like ``pure'', ``washed'' and ``pristine'' also proved more accepting of moral violations than did a group primed with neutral words instead.

Physical cleanliness, of course, protects a person from disgust with himself. Schnall's evidence suggests that this protection can extend from the physical to the psychic realm. Showered, shaved, sweet-smelling in their cologne and blessed shirts, the 9/11 hijackers illustrate exactly why this fact of human nature is no blessing.

Depression 2.0

This piece, about how a new Great Depression now would differ from the last one, seems to me to miss a key point. In place of last time's bread lines and hoboes visibly criss-crossing the landscape, Drake Bennett forecasts a lot of unemployed people staying home, watching television. Suffering will take place in isolation, hidden from the public sphere, because we're all habituated to filling our empty hours with 21st century media.

Here's the problem: How will we pay our cable bills, if we're all out of work? Accustomed as we our to information access, we forget easily that it costs money. Money, if we crash, will be very scarce. And vital as Google feels to us all, fast-search never will compel people to spend in the same urgent way that food does.

So I think access to information -- 700 TV channels, yes, but, more importantly, the Internet -- will be the most important casualty of a new Depression. Economic collapse in our time instantly creates a great digital divide. In Depression 21st century style, some Americans would continue to take part in the Google-YouTube-Twitter world we know now.The rest of our people would become be digital Joads, no longer participating in modern life. The effects of that division would reach far and last long.

One more reason to hope we dodge the bullet.

Logical, analytical, arrogant, impatient with people who need time to understand ...

That's the type of blogger I am, according to this analysis from an automated blog-anatomist, to which a lot of bloggers are linking today, for obvious reasons. I like the diagram of my brain that accompanies the prose.

Actually, it doesn't seem too off-base, especially for an algorithm that took perhaps a second to render its verdict.

It says Drudge is among bloggers who are ``conservative by nature [,] they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.'' OTOH Josh Marshall and company apparently have the same brain I do.

The British, French and Imperial Roman Obama-equivalents ...

... are the subject of my piece, posted yesterday, in Slate. Check, as they say, it out.

I started on this subject with last week's blog post, which argued that the example of minority or ``foreign'' national leaders should remind us not to talk about identity as if it were fixed and unchanging. The new piece speculates a bit about what such leaders have in common.

Transition Atmosphere

Watching President-Elect Obama, at his first press conference, I noticed him repeatedly striking a note of thorough, cautious deliberateness. For instance, at one point, he said, ``obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion. I think we've got to think it through.'' And, a little later: ``I'm proud of the choice of chief of staff, because we thought it through. And I think it's very important, in all these key positions, both in the economic team and the national security team, to -- to get it right and not to be so rushed that you end up making mistakes.'' Imagining his team combing through the files of the Bush Administration, I found myself recalling Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. There's a scene there (when I dug up my old paperback, I found it on page 64) in which the reckless, violent cowboys of an Earth colony suddenly find themselves talking to an emissary from a more civilized planet:

``He looked about at the purple colonel, the flowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing specialists. Contempt came into his face. `You have not thought things through,' he said. By his standards, it was a brutal insult.''

I think Washington may have that atmosphere for a few months . . .

The Great Blind Spot

He is an implausible candidate to lead his nation. He has a foreign-sounding name, a father who wasn't a Christian, and a cool writer's temperament. Before his political rise, in fact, he was a best-selling author.

Barack Obama? Nope, I'm thinking of Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1816 he was a 12-year-old Jewish boy in an anti-Semitic nation; in 1876, after a glittering political career, he was made Earl of Beaconfield by his friend and admirer, Queen Victoria.

Yet this week the New York Times informed us, in this clunker, that no western European nation could elect a minority person, a conspicuous outsider, as its leader. There can't yet be a British, French or German Obama.

Hello? Disraeli may be the closest parallel to Obama, but other European nations have elevated leaders who were neither privileged nor typical.

One French Obama was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born, like our President-Elect, on a far-off island far from the national heartland, and he spoke French the way Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English, with a distinct accent.

Obviously, Schwarzenegger and Disraeli share few other traits besides electoral success as an ``outsider.'' My point isn't that such political events are good, bad or indifferent for a nation -- I'm simply noting that (a) they are not that rare and (b) my journalist colleagues and other professional explainers act as if they are.

All over the world, people have followed leaders who don't look or sound ``like us,'' from Alberto Fujimori in Peru to Sonia Gandhi in India. Non-democracies have done this too. Alexander the Great wasn't Greek. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus was African. Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian.

So why do we journalists stupidly tell each other that ethnic, cultural and class boundaries cannot be broken in politics? I think some of the answer points to a real problem with the way we all talk about identity.

Nations, ethnic groups, religious communities and the like are not things. Unlike trees and staplers and rainclouds, an entity made of people is an ongoing activity. It's created by thoughts, conversations and deeds. That means, literally, that the United States today is not exactly the same as it was yesterday.

Of course, much activity stays constant over time, which is why we have nations, ethnicities and social classes in the first place. A country is a great many people thinking, saying and doing the same things every day. But we all exaggerate the stability. We treat yesterday's activities as if they were a fixed object that will still be there tomorrow. So we imagine an unchangeability that is not really there.

Then we try to answer questions like ``Is America racist or not?'' Or ``Is Jane prejudiced or not?'' and go round and round in circles. The truth is that sometimes America is racist and sometimes it is not; sometimes Jane acts prejudiced and sometimes she doesn't.

To get precise about what that means -- to predict which times are which, for example -- we need to stop describing identity and its attendant thoughts and feelings as if they were objects. Historians describe change over time; they can map change over decades and centuries. We need a similar perspective for weeks and days and hours.

This is way, way easier to say than it is to do. The mind, I think, really is strongly biased to see identity as immutable and stable. But until we describe identity as processes that change over time, I think, we're stuck in a rut.

You-Heard-It-Here-First Department

A theme I kept returning to in Us and Them was the power of direct, personal experience on a mind that is always classifying and reclassifying people into groups. As I mentioned in the book, the Muslim-Christian division counts for a lot in Lebanon, but it was not difficult for experimenters there to create conditions in a summer camp that made its teen-age residents care much more about the boundary between Blue Ghosts and Red Devils. They were two gangs they had created on the spot, both of which were a mix of Christians and Muslims.

The depressing aspect of this idea is that people can decide that a Star Trek identity is the center of their lives. But the positive aspect is that people can easily drop longstanding ideas about ``others.''

Flash forward to last week, and this report about simple exercises that reduce people's scores on measures of prejudice. Four hours of conversation and parlor games with total strangers -- played with people of other races or ethnicities -- is all it takes, Benedict Carey writes (and the whole piece is very much worth reading):

``Trivial as they may sound, those exercises create a relationship `that is as close as any relationship the person has,' said Art Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University who developed the program with his wife, Elaine N. Aron.''