the defilement thesis, expanded

In a recent post I spoke of what we might call the Defiling of the Memes, and suggested that Paul Ricoeur’s work on The Symbolism of Evil might be relevant. Let’s see how that might go.

In that book Ricoeur essentially works backwards from the familiar and conceptually sophisticated theological language of sin to what underlies it, or, as he puts the matter, what “gives rise” to it. If “the symbol gives rise to the thought,” what “primary symbols” underlie the notion of sin? Sin is a kind of fault, but beneath or behind the notion of fault is a more fundamental experience, defilement, whose primary symbol is stain. Before I could ever know that I have sinned (or that anyone else has) there must be a deeper and pre-rational awareness of defilement happening or being. I think of a passage from Dickens’s Hard Times:

‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’
‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’

First we know that defilement is, “somewhere in the room”; then we become aware that we have been somehow stained. From those elemental experiences and their primary symbols arise, ultimately, complex rational accounts that might lead to something like this: “I have defiled myself by sinning, and therefore must find a way to atone for what I have done so that I may live free from guilt.” But that kind of formulation lies far down the road, and there are many other roads that lead to many other conclusions about what went wrong and how to fix it.

Ricoeur writes as a philosopher and a Christian, which is to say he writes as someone who has inherited an immensely sophisticated centuries-old vocabulary that can mediate to him the elemental experiences and their primary symbols. Therefore one of his chief tasks in The Symbolism of Evil is to try to find a way back:

It is in the age when our language has become more precise, more univocal, more technical in a word, more suited to those integral formalizations which are called precisely symbolic logic, it is in this very age of discourse that we want to recharge our language, that we want to start again from the fullness of language. Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.

But what if you have not inherited such a sophisticated moral language? Might you not then be closer to the elemental experiences and their primary symbols? That might help to account for the kind of thing described here:

The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

So here's my (highly tentative) thesis: when you have a whole generation of young people whose moral language is severely attenuated — made up of almost nothing except Mill's harm principle — and who have been encouraged to extend that one principle to almost any kind of discomfort — then disagreement, or alternative points of view, appear to them not as matters for rational adjudication but as defilement from which they must be cleansed.

And this in turn leads to a phenomenon I have discussed before, and about which Freddie deBoer has written eloquently: The immediate turn to administrators as the agents of cleansing. This is especially true for students who have identified themselves as marginal, as social outsiders, as Mary Douglas explains in Purity and Danger: “It seems that if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others. He cannot help his abnormal situation.”

And yet another consequence of the experience of defilement: the archaic ritualistic character of the protests and demands, for example, the scapegoating and explusion of Dean Mary Spellman of Claremont McKenna College, and the insistence of many protestors upon elaborate initiation rituals for new members of the community in order to prevent defiling words and deeds. (Douglas again: “Ritual recognises the potency of disorder.”)

I have described the thinking of these student protestors as Baconian — a notion I develop somewhat more fully in a forthcoming essay for National Affairs — and while I still think that analysis is substantially correct, I now believe that it is incomplete. The anthropological account I have been sketching out here seems necessary as well.

Again: these are behavioral pathologies generated by simplistic moral frameworks and a general disdain for rational debate. The sleep of reason produces, if not always monsters, then a return to a primal experience of defilement, and a grasping for the elemental symbols and rituals used from ancient times to manage such defilement. And in light of these recent developments, the world of criticism seems less like a desert than an elegant and well-furnished room.

cultural appropriation, defilement, rituals of purification

I think it's now generally understood that the disaffected cultural left and the disaffected cultural right have become mirror images of each other: the rhetorical and political strategies employed by one side will, soon enough, be picked up by the other. At this particular moment, the right seems to be borrowing from the left — in ways that make many on the left distinctly uncomfortable.

See, for instance, this recent post by Michelle Goldberg, who notices that conservatives who want to protect women from sexual predators disguised as transgendered women are using the same language of “safety” more typically deployed by the left. And Goldberg admits that it’s not easy to say why they shouldn’t:

There’s no coherent ideology in which traumatized students have the right to be shielded from material that upsets them — be it Ovid, 9½ Weeks, or the sentiments of Laura Kipnis — but not from undressing in the presence of people with different genitalia. If we’ve decided that people have the right not to feel unsafe — as opposed to the right not to be unsafe — then what’s the standard for refusing that right to conservative sexual abuse victims? Is it simply that we don’t believe them when they describe the way their trauma manifests? Aren’t we supposed to believe victims no matter what?

And if conservatives can’t logically be denied use of “safe space” language, then they can't be denied appeals to “cultural appropriation.” As I’ve noted before, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for that concept — appropriation is what cultures do — and I found myself cheering when I read these comments by C. E. Morgan:

The idea that writing about characters of another race requires a passage through a critical gauntlet, which involves apology and self-examination of an almost punitive nature, as though the act of writing race was somehow morally suspect, is a dangerous one. This approach appears culturally sensitive, but often it reveals a failure of nerve. I cannot imagine a mature artist approaching her work in such a hesitant fashion, and I believe the demand that we ought to reveals a species of fascism within the left—an embrace of political correctness with its required silences, which has left people afraid to offend or take a stand. The injunction to justify race-writing, while ostensibly considerate of marginalized groups, actually stifles transracial imagination and is inextricable from those codes of silence and repression, now normalized, which have contributed to the rise of the racist right in our country. When you leave good people afraid to speak on behalf of justice, however awkwardly or insensitively, those unafraid to speak will rise to power.

(Morgan also says “I was taught as a young person that the far political right and the far political left aren’t located on a spectrum but on a circle, where they inevitably meet in their extremity” — which is the point I made at the outset of this post.)

But if you’re going to say that cultural appropriation is a thing, and an opprobrious thing, then you can be absolutely certain that people whose views you despise will make the concept their own. Enter Pepe the frog. Pepe has been appropriated by lefties and normies, and the alt-righties who think he belongs to them are determined to take him back:

“Most memes are ephemeral by nature, but Pepe is not,” @JaredTSwift told me. “He’s a reflection of our souls, to most of us. It’s disgusting to see people (‘normies,’ if you will) use him so trivially. He belongs to us. And we’ll make him toxic if we have to.”

Anything to avoid the pollution of Our Memes being used by Them.

The more I think about these matters, the more I think my understanding of them would benefit by a re-reading of Paul Ricoeur’s great The Symbolism of Evil (1960), especially the opening chapter on defilement. Ricoeur brilliantly explains how people develop rituals of purification in order to dispel the terror of defilement. Our understanding of how we live now would be greatly enriched by a Ricoeurian anthropology of social media.

And with that, I’ll leave you to contemplate the rising political influence of people who think that Pepe the frog is a reflection of their souls.