Moral cleanliness

You've probably seen something about Sally Rooney, Hebrew translations and BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions). Sam Leith has a nice little piece here trying to see things from Rooney's point of view. What, he asks, does she think she will achieve? 

I'm no supporter of BDS, for all sorts of reasons that I won't go into here but, like Leith, I have tried to see things from the point of view of someone who is.

On reflection, I don't think the underlying motivation behind things like BDS is a desire to help. Rather, I think it is simply the impulse to say: "I don't want to have anything to do with that place. Would it help? Would it hurt? I don't know. I just know that I'm not going to be a part of it." 

That's a very human feeling. Think of charities who won't take money from X, or publicans who won't serve Y, or those who will never cross the threshold of (or shake hands with) Z. Does it do any good? Maybe not. But so what? The people who take those stances - who make those refusals - are motivated by a moral impulse, but not one to help anyone. Instead, I would described it as the desire for "moral cleanliness": what they are saying is "I will not be sullied by association with - I will not be anywhere close to complicit in - that."

You can come up with utilitarian justifications for this kind of impulse: if X gives money to charity then won't X benefit by association with the charity - won't X's reputation be laundered? If we all shun Y then won't Y mend his ways? But that's not what's really going on. The money might have been given in secret, or some time ago, but still the charity wants to reject or return it. The publican who refuses to serve Y is well aware that Y is welcome in every other pub in town - he just wants to make a stand. Those who never cross the threshold of Z are nonetheless invited to all the cool parties that happen there and desperately want to go.

I have tried to see what might be wrong with this kind of thinking, why we might be able to say to someone that they can't simply maintain their moral cleanliness in this way. I confess that I found it hard. The normal counter-argument to BDS is double-standards: "you object to Israel but you don't object to [insert worse country here]". I don't think that works for moral cleanliness. The response is easy: "I don't know much about [worse country]. All I know is that I'm having nothing to do with Israel." That's not a double standard. The double standard argument works against someone who claims to have identified Israel as uniquely evil; it doesn't work against someone who just says that they have chosen not to be involved with Israel. It's like the Liverpudlian newsagent who refuses to stock The Sun after its coverage Hillsborough: it's not that he believes that newspaper to be uniquely evil, it's just he doesn't stock The Sun.

Another potential attack is to note that sometimes this kind of desire for moral purity can go too far. This is a great account of people being 'cancelled' which sets out the awful ostracism they can suffer as others try to insulate themselves from moral contamination. But saying that you can go too far is not a knock-down argument: as the old saying has it, you have too much of a good thing. You can also go too far with a desire for physical cleanliness - scrubbing your hands raw or dousing your intimate regions with unnecessary chemicals - but that's not a good argument against washing your hands after you use the lavatory. Let's go back to the Liverpudlian newsagent or the man who will never shake the hand of the man who jilted his daughter: life goes on, no harm done.

There is, however, one well-known source of moral teaching tradition which is notably antipathetic to concerns about moral cleanliness, namely the New Testament. The complaint most consistently made against Jesus was that he was not morally clean: he dined with sinners, went to their houses, hung out with them and touched them. His most famous stories, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, both involve a lack of cleanliness: the son who feeds the pigs but is yet embraced by his father; the man who is avoided by the prissily religious but helped by a Samaritan. 

The stories around Jesus' death are especially full of people with whom we are not meant to sympathise who are obsessed with moral cleanliness: Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair springs first to mind, but think also of the Jewish leaders who handed Jesus over so that someone else would kill him. Perhaps the single most famous refusal to accept tainted money arises from Judas' attempt to return his 30 pieces of silver (see Matthew 27). We all want to refuse blood money, but now I wonder whether, if the Chief Priests and Elders had taken the money and assured him that it would go to a good cause, Judas might perhaps have felt that he had started to make amends. Did their desire for moral cleanliness contribute to his despair and suicide?

For all that the New Testament seems quite clear on the matter, I have not noticed any particular tendency among Christians or Christian teaching to deprecate concerns for moral cleanliness. Perhaps those Christians who worry too much about Israel today should perhaps think more about what the New Testament says happened all those years ago in Palestine. 

But for everyone else I have nothing to offer but congratulations: well done to you for being so perfect that the merest touch of the imperfect things of this world will give you an unendurable taint.