Ritual purity
Had a meeting last night where the topic of so-called “ethical investing” arose. The idea is, you’re a good person, so you wouldn’t want any of your money going to help support any bad thing. And it’s pretty easy to start listing all the bad things you’d want to avoid, though everyone’s list will be different. Then just avoid those things, right?
This stuff drives me crazy. It’s not just that the list is unstated, or stupid, or ineffective, or invalidly applied in the case at hand. Or that the people are complaining aren’t the ones whose money it is, or that precious time and energy of the organization is being wasted, instead of trying to accomplish the presumably worthy goals of the organization. No, I think it’s the puritanical nature of the entire exercise, this ideal of living in a state of holiness, disconnected and disengaged from the society in which we live. It’s not that ritual purity is new or rare, it’s present in radical religious and political movements since, like, forever. Nor is it that it has no appeal for me. I think I just like to try to be a bit self-aware of when I’m indulging, and spend most of my time in the world.
I shared my experiences with attempting to get to work in an ethical manner. Cars, as we all know, are polluting, require rapidly depleting liquid fossil fuel, whose acquisition kills people in a wide variety of far-off lands and supports terrorist regimes. Buses ditto, except for nastier-smelling pollution, and stealing time which ought to go other places. Bicycles are fun, and steal less time than buses, but probably consume as much fossil fuels as cars. (The very nearly literal sense in which I’m consuming fossil fuels when sitting at the dinner table continues to bother me.) My electric bike runs off of grid power, which hereabouts is mostly coal, still fossil, still depleting (though it’ll last longer than oil), but pretty high impact on pollution and warming. I could campaign for nuclear, but even if I succeeded it’d be ten years before a plant could get built, and enviro-wackos would still complain, though coal likely releases more radioactivity than nuclear. I could buy a PV solar panel, $800 for one which would power the bike, according to the salesman I talked to at Earth Day. Even then, I ought to evaluate the impact of producing that large sheet of high purity silicon. Not to mention figure out what the salesman and panel producer are going to do with the money they earn, who knows, perhaps I wouldn’t approve…
I wasn’t kidding when I said this stuff drives me crazy.
One interesting facet of purity laws is their focus on cleansing. In other words, on restoring purity once the violations occur. It’s as if they universally realize that adherence to such laws is impossible, and instead focus on regaining holiness after inevitable infractions. Perhaps the environmental / social justice movement could do more here. After using a disposable diaper, how to regain purity? If you pair 100 shares of Talisman with 100 shares of Whole Foods Market, are you good? Can you drive an SUV, if you’ve bought a TerraPass bumper sticker for it, and are thus carbon neutral? These questions are difficult, and there are no central authorities to rely on for answers. Radical Islam has this problem, too, with competing mullahs all offering their own edicts.
Actually, ethical investing wasn’t my only contact with ritual purity yesterday. A coworker decided to help out by washing up the coffeepot. By taking it into the lab. And using the cleaning supplies for the laboratory equipment, sponges, etc. Big no no. Cross contamination is a worry in both directions, and unfortunately, the protocols for recovering from the sin aren’t well described in Leviticus.