Keep your purity
I got Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis out of the library yesterday. It’s interesting but in places it’s also revolting. Jean Kazez talks about the main problem in an article in Philosophy Now and on her blog.
Haidt gives the example of a Hindu Brahmin relishing food that’s been offered to the gods, purifying himself in the Ganges, and feeling a socially sanctioned repulsion toward people of lower castes. That’s an ideal to strive for?
Apparently, yes. I read the passage in question this morning and…was revolted. He suggests we suppose we grow up as a Brahmin in Bhubaneswar (pp. 228-9).
Every day of your life you have to respect the invisible lines separating pure from profane spaces, and you have to keep track of people’s fluctuating levels of purity before you can touch them or take anything from their hands…Hinduism structures your social space through a caste system based on the purity and pollution of various occupations…The experience of meaningfulness just happens…In contrast, think about the last empty ritual you took part in.
Wrong contrast, bub. In contrast, think about someone in that situation who is not a Brahmin! Think about being one of the people whose ‘fluctuating levels of purity’ the Brahmin ‘has to’ keep track of, or one of the people whose pollution is inborn and permanent – then drool about the experience of meaningfulness. Think about being a dalit or a woman or both and then talk crap about meaningfulness versus empty rituals.
There’s a related passage on 190-1. It’s interesting, but it also goes off the rails in the same blind way. He says that some people he talked to in Bhubaneswar saw the rituals related to purity and pollution as just rules, what you did, but others saw them as ‘means to an end: spiritual and moral advancement, or moving up on the third dimension.’
Purity is not just about the body, it is about the soul. If you know that you have divinity within you, you will act accordingly: you will treat people well…you will come back in your next life at a higher level…If you lose sight of your divinity, you will give in to your baser motives…and in your next incarnation you will return at a lower level as an animal or a demon.
Or a woman or a dalit. Yet he doesn’t say that – he skips right over the nastiest aspect of Hinduism, the caste system, and all this hooey about purity and pollution. He just ignores that whole aspect. He should have remembered Rawls and the Veil of Ignorance. He seems for some inexplicable reason to be identifying himself solely with Brahmins and ignoring the fact that most people don’t get to be Brahmins. He wraps the whole nasty mess of that passage up by saying, roundly and utterly incorrectly, that ‘Emerson said exactly the same thing’ and then quoting this:
He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.
Boy is that ever not exactly the same thing. A Brahmin checking on his own purity is not the same thing as someone doing a good deed. Hello? Good deeds have to be other-regarding in order to be good deeds? Haidt is just seriously blind or confused or both, here. It’s just nonsense to say that purity is about the soul and connect that to saying ‘if you know that you have divinity within you, you will act accordingly: you will treat people well’ – because Brahmins don’t treat people well. Rules that treat some people as inherently or even temporarily polluted are not about treating people well. Dang – isn’t that obvious?
But is he just describing all that Brahmin stuff from the Brahmin’s point of view, or is he saying he approves of it? Genuine question – I haven’t read THH. I was just reading Haidt on Edge – here – and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it, although I don’t agree with everything he says about religion. But I didn’t get the impression that he personally approved of or intuited the purity-as-a-basis-for-moral-intuition thing, just that he hypthesises that many people do. Perhaps I didn’t read it carefully enough, or THH adds more.
He doesn’t explicitly in so many words say he approves of it. But the whole passage in context definitely gives the impression of – not exactly approval, but some kind of sympathy.
Funny, I asked Jean much the same kind of question on her blog weeks ago. It is a quite startling passage. It sort of oscillates between descriptive and normative – but in context there is definitely sympathy of some kind.
If nothing else, the causal chain he draws between divinity within and behaving well and treating people well seems to entail approval, as well as a strange blindness. It just isn’t true – it isn’t true that people who think they are purer and more divine than other, polluted people below them ‘treat people well’ – they treat people badly.
I just read Jean’s blog and your comment, and also re-read the Edge piece. In the latter, he is quite careful to draw the distinction between a descriptive account and any normative claim, and say that you can still normatively disapprove of the purity/sanctity aspect even if you accept his descriptive account. Perhaps he learned from Jean’s questions to him!
Well done Jean if so!
It’s odd though – even if his account in HH were purely descriptive, it would be very oddly incomplete. Why give a detailed description of the feeling of meaning and purity solely from the point of view of someone at the top? Maybe that’s what I’m balking at – the unexplained incompleteness. Brahmins just aren’t the only people who live in the purity-pollution system he describes – and he really doesn’t make it clear why he singles them out.
There’s some very interesting stuff about elevation though, and oxytocin and the vagus nerve and lactating mothers. I’ll do a post about that later – don’t want to be unfair to the guy.
I’ve just ordered it from Amazon, so it can join the tottering piles.
Maybe the Brahmin thing is partly random – he has talked a lot to some happy nice Brahmin he happens to know and not thought to put the conversation in a wider context? (until kazezed).
“kazezed” Ha! That book is set up with somewhat of a self-help orientation. He is trying to help you figure out how to live a happier and more meaningful life. So when he comes to the last chapter and starts trying to define “meaningfulness” I think he really is saying this is something to strive for. So it really does seem odd that the Brahmin is his example. That bugged me for the longest time (especially after reading A Fine Balance, on Ophelia’s suggestion. And by the way, I’ve started recommending that to other people.) I get the point about coherence on emotional, intellectual, and social levels. Yes, that sure sounds pleasant. But he leaves all the victims out of the equation. Ahhhh! (That’s a scream.)
On the other hand the book really is full of interesting stuff and I did find him a very likeable writer. So I do recommend it whenever I get the chance. You didn’t waste your money, potentilla!
You know you’ve made your mark when your surname becomes a verb (however suspiciously French it may seem).
Happy Rosh Hashanah. (That’s an ethnic thing, right? I just hope I’m not dabbling in the occult here.)
Kazez (v): : to point out gently and humorously that there might be another rational way to look at the issue. Or several.
How about that?
All of Rohinton Mistry is good, though AFB is maybe the best.
Just ask any kid who ever had other kids decide he or she had “germs” or “cooties” or whatever nonsense they make up… It doesn’t even sound that much fun for the Brahmins, having to worry about all those impure types lurking around must take up a lot of time/energy. But still, good note and comments.
Love the definition. And thanks for the Rosh Hashanah greetings, Doug. I had a nice time at synagogue yesterday– beautiful place, nice music, lots of people I know, fun for my kids to run around and make mischief. As I told them when we left (because I am a bad, wicked mother), the only problem is they sure talk a lot about God.
The book is indeed full of interesting stuff. I love social psychology. And Haidt is obviously a good guy – that’s probably part of why the blind spots shock me. This dates back to that interview in the Boston Globe a few months ago – I get very uneasy when sensible people say they’re influenced by Leon Kass, and think we can learn something from our automatic disgust reactions.