The world is a dirty place. The biosphere we live within is made of dust, rocks, poop, dead things, plus a splash of water to mix it all up. Human beings add their own toxic pollution and synthetic trash to the blend. Conceptually, it’s inevitable for us to feel messed up, given the outrageous expectations and conflicting moral codes that define a worthwhile life. It feels impossible to do the right thing.
Nobody wants to carry the psychological weight of their failings, of course. So, although we can’t take back our mistakes, people invent rituals of purification. They follow Marie Kondo’s advice on how to make their homes more tidy, expunging their waste into landfills instead. They adhere to dietary regimens that are supposed to rid them of toxins, without ever really understanding what specific toxins they’re supposed to get rid of. They acquire coupons as tickets of permission for extravagant spending, reframing it as a form of saving, a moral as well as financial redemption. They purchase carbon offsets in compensation for burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, though the offsets don’t really remove much pollution from the air. They meditate in the vain hope of quieting their disturbing desires.
To feel pure is to feel clean, but rituals of cleaning don’t really eliminate any filth. They just remove our filth from our sight, placing it somewhere far away, where we don’t have to think about it. To create purity in one place requires creating pollution somewhere else.
A psychologically effective ritual of purification gives us permission to distance ourselves from the inherently compromised nature of our lives, to pretend that we’ve become pristine. It’s only a matter of time until we feel degraded again, but for a short while, we can entertain the fantasy of being untouched by the foulness that inevitably accumulates in the wake of our journey through life.
