The previous post mugged me after having read a few things in recent days and then encountering Chicks with chicks.

a recent article on The Femivore’s Dilemma, about the prevalence of women in the new old food movement. . .

the more profound ideas behind the article and the commentaries are fascinating. Personally, I’m not sure that there really is a gender divide, and it would be salutary to see this in a global context.

Indeed. I'd add history as well since farming and food are often women's work: in the present in some cultures and in the past in others at similar stages of development.

What had been on my mind was Liberal Purity.

At Yourmorals.org we have always found that scores on the Purity/sanctity foundation are higher on the political right than on the left. Conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, live in a more sacralized world. Liberals, particularly secular scientifically-minded liberals, live in a more materialist, un-magical world.

Yet there are enough hints of “liberal purity” scattered about that we at Yourmorals are actively trying to measure it. (You might want to take our survey, here, before you read any further. You’ll have to register or sign in along the way). It can be seen in the liberal tendency to moralize food and eating, beyond its nutritive/material aspects. (See this fabulous essay by Mary Eberstadt comparing the way the left moralizes food and the right moralizes sex). It can be seen in the way the left treats environmental issues and the natural world as something sacred, to be cared for above and beyond its consequences for human – or even animal—welfare. So how do we define purity/sanctity in a way that can capture the purity concerns of both left and right?

Consider this famous quote from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience:

Religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

So as long as you act as though there is an unseen order which imposes moral obligations and limitations on human actions above and beyond the consequences that those actions have for other people (or perhaps animals), then we are in the realm of religion or quasi-religion, and potentially in the realm of sanctity and sacred order.

There seems to be order, but can anyone know it? I think not, or at least not yet, and that those who claim to know it are deluded. Worse, when they seek to impose their delusions on others they become bullies, which leads me to suspect that they are merely bullies who will use some reason or another to justify their predations.

If we seek some sort of improved way to live it seems to me that a first step is to thwart the bullies so that we can more peacefully pursue our studies of order and do our diverse best in the process. Perhaps those who come after us will benefit from our efforts and build on them - or tear them down due to new information, as we have done.