It strikes me that what I meant to write when I wrote about purity a few posts ago, was that it stands, in a very real way, as a proxy in most people's thinking patterns, for the capacity to respect or be respected.
Without purity, there can be no respect. With purity, there can always be respect (even veneration). In that, we have an intuitive sense of whether someone is pure, whether their actions are valid, whether what they tell us has only one layer, whether there is something essentially clean about them, and trusting that instinct is easier than thinking about, or evaluating, their behaviors toward us, or even toward themselves, or toward their other friends. As in, it allows us to believe that if we've been treated with a pure sense of purpose, then a person him- or herself is in fact respectable.
Discipline seems to be the number one way to acquire purity, i.e. to restrict oneself, or to purify oneself if you've become dirty.
Once someone has become dirty to us, we sincerely dislike interacting with them and brand them inauthentic.
And once we do that we find justification in all sorts of treatment, not the least of which is talking about them in a dis-respectable manner (i.e. broadcasting our conclusion about who they really are).
The most extreme example of this treatment is, naturally, straight up torture and murder. What torturing and murdering other people--what gossiping about them--does, is to cleanse us of them.
Anyway, even if you don't agree with my last statement, you'll surely recognize your own repulsion to lewd behavior. And I'd bet that our repulsion is in part because certain rules of purity have been crossed.
(Not that purity or the idolization of purity is necessarily bad, just that we should perhaps recognize why it is we're insanely attracted or repulsed when exposed to something).
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