- Alexis Shotwell → Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Time
- Argues that “personal purity is simultaneously inadequate, impossible, and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth.”
- Impossible to avoid some sense of complicity in our world, and we can’t control the problems we’ve inherited— climate change, institutional racism, etc. → instead of trying to avoid these things, need to acknowledge the complexity...
- “Better to stop pretending at purity, own up to our imperfections, and try to create a morality that works with them.”
- In reality, impossible both by definition & politically to focus on our individual responsibility
- Doing so leads to overwhelming sense of meaninglessness; or keeps us from aiming for larger, systemic change bc we feel personally absolved (kind of a fatalistic/fixed mind dynamic)
- Healthism → if we are in complete control of being “pure” and healthy, it becomes our fault when we’re sick too, and others’ faults when they’re sick... makes people ignore interdependence with environment and others (ex. pollution, poverty play into health)
- Relationship between individualism, value of purity— individualism implies defined boundaries between you and the outside world
- North Am cultures → guilt-driven: I didn’t do this, so I’m not responsible; vs more socially oriented cultures: I didn’t personally do this, but I am responsible for making it right
- “We’re historical beings and the world is a product of history... And yes, one impulse is to say, “I am not responsible for that. I didn’t do that.” In the book, I’m mostly interested in: What does it mean for us to understand that we’re a product of ongoing colonialism and genocidal plans for indigenous people of this continent? How do we not be guilty about that but instead recognize that we can take responsibility for that history? Taking responsibility for history doesn’t mean going back to change what happened. It means acknowledging this history, how do we move forward?”
- Need to give up on purity politics, esp on L, accept imperfection & work together anyway
- What does it mean to not aim for personal purity?
- Self-forgiveness: we’ve made mistakes, but we can still be of benefit, we can still be helpful
- Liberation from having to do everything ourselves → “The ethical obligation becomes not “How am I going to solve all these huge and enormous things,” but instead “What can I work on? What’s within my reach? What am I connected to?””