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.