Customer Reviews

Moral Purity and Persecution in History

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this book, Moore's stated purpose is to delineate some historical connections between ideas of moral purity and persecution or ostracization. After a few moments of reflection, however, it strikes me as difficult to think of many instances in which persecution that didn't have their roots in some notion of purity, moral or otherwise. It especially won't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the wide swath of anthropological literature on the subject, like Mary Douglas' "Purity and Danger." I thought this book might have something new or interesting to say about it, but I was wrong.

This book has at least two problems that should be considered egregious shortcomings in a book of such sweeping history. Firstly, the paucity of examples from which he chooses to draw is problematic. He considers only, in chronological order: the literature of the Old Testament, the religion wars of sixteenth-century France, the French Revolution, and "Asiatic civilizations." Secondly, one walks away from the book with the idea that the topologies of persecution - how they shame, in what circumstances they occur, their sociological functions, et cetera - are never explored. There is nothing for the almost two millennia between the Old Testament and the France of the 1500s. And then there's the fact that "Asiatic civilizations" is so anachronistic as to be risible. But then again, so is the picture in the back of the book, showing him with a gigantic corncob pipe hanging out of his mouth.

The thesis of the book is that, in the first three historical instances, persecution and concepts of moral purity were closely tied together, while in "Asiatic civilizations" (he considers Confucian and Buddhist religious thought here mostly), the connection is much more tenuous, and perhaps even nonexistent. We are simply told, in instance after instance, that people were persecuted or driven out of different movements or societies (the radicals in the Revolution, Jewish society of the Old Testament, et cetera) because they broke some sort of ethical-moral stricture. This almost reduces the entire book to a set of linear, historical treatments whereas I thought that it would bring in something more integrative and interdisciplinary.

Moore brings a lifetime of penetrating insights into the sociological mindset necessary to create "the moral approval for cruelty" to bear in this amazing work. It is easy to say that his research is shoddy due to the small number of examples he brings into play in the book, but that is simply because he is deliberately taking an approach whereby he leaves out the most obvious and overused examples and focuses on the ones that most people do not know about. He is providing a model and an insight that come from a lifetime of research--he leaves it up to the reader to apply these to the majority of history, and to the world at large.

Christians will almost certainly like this book no more than they would like S. Dennis Ford's Sins of Omission, but it's important to be able to see the darker side of religion. We speak about how we must "never let the Holocaust happen again," but how long did it take European Jews, the very persecuted people of 1940s Europe, to turn around and turn the Palestinian people into their own subhuman subclass? How long did it take American pundits to call for forcible conversion of Islamic nations after 9/11? The lessons of this book should not be so easily dismissed...

Although I hope that Moore's assessment of monotheism is flawed, he demonstrates an accute understanding of how group conflict emerges. He carefully shows the importance of the ritualized, pure "self", in opposition to the heathen impure "other." Given the circumstances of the NYC and DC attacks, we must ask ourselves if Moore is right or not.

The author does a fine job of convincing us that moral zealotry and persecution, including torture and murder as well as mere reputation smearing, are typically the work of those with a sense of the pure and the impure. The chapter on the deterioration of tolerance in China is especially helpful here. Mao and his moral dogmas were the catalyst. Prior to that, a Confucian tolerance reigned. The chapter on the French Revolution shows convincingly that the purists can be revolutionary, as any walk across campus today can reveal. The author is not interested in the zealots on campus these days, but instead aims his big guns at political tyrannies such as Communism and Fascism.