Many years ago, I was enjoying this music video by Muse. The video is immaterial, save for why a lot of people were watching it: The song, "Supermassive Black Hole" was featured on the then-most recent Twilight soundtrack. I made the nigh-criminal mistake of checking out the comments of the video--comments now so deeply buried that it isn't worth the effort to find them--and was bemused by one of the poster's worry. "Muse fans," he (probably a he...and I'm paraphrasing, despite the quotes) wrote, "we are being overrun by Twihards! We can't let them ruin good music!"
I've thought about that sentiment a lot over the years, rolling over the implications of what the poster was trying to say. I find it bizarre that he thinks that this one of many Muse videos would be a rallying point for anti-Twilight fans to congregate (I guess? To whom is he speaking when he writes "Muse fans"?). His use of the plural "we" is likewise ambiguous, though I suppose he's incorporating other fans of the band within it. But he's also ignoring the possibility that someone could like Muse and be a fan of Twilight (like my wife, for example). The two aren't really mutually exclusive. And while I would agree that Muse makes, for the most part, really good music, I fail to see how fans of a flash-in-the-pan vampire romance book series could "ruin" the music of a British alternative rock band. I mean, heck, the song was part of the movie's soundtrack--it was obvious that Muse, at the very least, was content taking money from the Twilight Saga production, giving it a de facto approval of associating their music with the franchise.
I bring this up because there have been a lot of issues lately with what it means to actually belong somewhere. Whether it's within activist and social justice circles (I'm thinking particularly of the critiques of "white feminism", but there are others) or litmus tests for "political purity", there's a strange desire for an unsullied participant. There was a time, in fact, probably about when that Twilight movie came out, where RINOs were a type of political punching bag--Republicans In Name Only were considered traitors to the conservative cause because of their audacity in compromising and working with the Democrats.
I feel like this type of thinking is immensely perilous. It's a cyclical thing, I think, cropping up every couple of generations before fading for a little while, only to bring it out again. We see it in almost every single religious war that's ever fought. The Shia/Sunni split. Protestant burnings. Counter-Reformation. Jewish pogroms and strife between orthodox and reform. Even the LDS church has had some acrimony in the division between the main sect and the derivations, including the (rebranded) FLDS and RLDS communities. While these aren't all necessarily part of a violent past, there has been a lot of bloodshed over these concepts of purity.
The problem I have with this concept is that it becomes absolute in the worst possible way. Rather than saying that there's a standard that is, perhaps, impossible to attain, but we ought to strive for it, it is the kind of thinking that condemns someone for failing to abide by the impossible standard. I believe that we must have things that are larger than ourselves--a sense of our place in the world, the impact our choices have to others, both living and yet-to-be-born, an afterlife for which we ought to prepare even now, or any other number of worthwhile goals that people embrace--because it pushes us out of our egotistical impulses and into the broader, more beautiful world. In other words, I feel like standards ought to be things for which we strive, rather than rods with which we bludgeon those who fail.
The idea of being pure is one that is deeply steeped into my religious culture, so it can be difficult to discuss this topic in anything approaching nuance. "For the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance" the scriptures claim (Alma 45:16), and then the flawed humans use that as license for condemnation and carving out sharp boundaries.
It often falls into the fallacy of "No True Scotsman", which becomes particularly tricky when there are separate sets of belonging, and only part of them are prescriptive. For example, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there's a pretty clear way of determining if someone is a member or not: She's been baptized and has her name on the records of the Church. It's definitive and uncontroversial. If she hasn't been baptized and her name recorded, then she's not a member. So on one hand, the line of Mormon or non-Mormon (or Gentile, as is sometimes used...which is weird, because that would mean Jews are Gentiles; but for Jews, Mormons would be Gentiles) is limpid.
But when we start looking at behaviors of members of the Church, there's an entire panoply of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not" style commandments that, to one degree or another, members do (or don't) comply with. Thanks to the 89th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, members feel constrained not to drink "hot drinks". What does that mean? Official Church policy means no tea or coffee. But what about iced coffees? Iced teas? Herbal teas? How is coffee different than, say, hot chocolate? And if a member decides to drink iced tea but not hot herbal teas, is she being "purer" than someone who imbibes the opposite? And if both the iced tea drinker and the iced tea abstainer are baptized members, which is the "true" or "pure" Mormon?
This can be pulled toward any concept: A public school teacher is the beneficiary of the redistribution of tax dollars--their employment is done because of socialist policies that reassign capital for public services. Is a teacher who hates socialism and constantly rails about it in her classroom "not a true teacher" because of the hypocrisy? Or is she a really bad socialist? If I don't much care about the theatrical traditions that have been a part of preserving Shakespeare outside of the ivory towers of academia, am I an impure Bardolator? If I don't much care for Nintendo's intellectual properties, am I a "fake gamer"?
I think the aspect of this that really bothers me is the arbitrariness-set-as-absolutes. Yes, there's opinion that's running through these assumptions, and that's its own problem, but it's like the cartoon gag where the character saws a circle around himself. Usually, the floor drops and the circle stays in place. Carving out a niche of safety from within that circle of safety, then declaring only those within the circle have claim to security seems disingenuous to me.
Maybe I'm just not a good enough thinker. Maybe I'm impure. Or I'm pure.
I don't really know.
I've thought about that sentiment a lot over the years, rolling over the implications of what the poster was trying to say. I find it bizarre that he thinks that this one of many Muse videos would be a rallying point for anti-Twilight fans to congregate (I guess? To whom is he speaking when he writes "Muse fans"?). His use of the plural "we" is likewise ambiguous, though I suppose he's incorporating other fans of the band within it. But he's also ignoring the possibility that someone could like Muse and be a fan of Twilight (like my wife, for example). The two aren't really mutually exclusive. And while I would agree that Muse makes, for the most part, really good music, I fail to see how fans of a flash-in-the-pan vampire romance book series could "ruin" the music of a British alternative rock band. I mean, heck, the song was part of the movie's soundtrack--it was obvious that Muse, at the very least, was content taking money from the Twilight Saga production, giving it a de facto approval of associating their music with the franchise.
I bring this up because there have been a lot of issues lately with what it means to actually belong somewhere. Whether it's within activist and social justice circles (I'm thinking particularly of the critiques of "white feminism", but there are others) or litmus tests for "political purity", there's a strange desire for an unsullied participant. There was a time, in fact, probably about when that Twilight movie came out, where RINOs were a type of political punching bag--Republicans In Name Only were considered traitors to the conservative cause because of their audacity in compromising and working with the Democrats.
I feel like this type of thinking is immensely perilous. It's a cyclical thing, I think, cropping up every couple of generations before fading for a little while, only to bring it out again. We see it in almost every single religious war that's ever fought. The Shia/Sunni split. Protestant burnings. Counter-Reformation. Jewish pogroms and strife between orthodox and reform. Even the LDS church has had some acrimony in the division between the main sect and the derivations, including the (rebranded) FLDS and RLDS communities. While these aren't all necessarily part of a violent past, there has been a lot of bloodshed over these concepts of purity.
The problem I have with this concept is that it becomes absolute in the worst possible way. Rather than saying that there's a standard that is, perhaps, impossible to attain, but we ought to strive for it, it is the kind of thinking that condemns someone for failing to abide by the impossible standard. I believe that we must have things that are larger than ourselves--a sense of our place in the world, the impact our choices have to others, both living and yet-to-be-born, an afterlife for which we ought to prepare even now, or any other number of worthwhile goals that people embrace--because it pushes us out of our egotistical impulses and into the broader, more beautiful world. In other words, I feel like standards ought to be things for which we strive, rather than rods with which we bludgeon those who fail.
The idea of being pure is one that is deeply steeped into my religious culture, so it can be difficult to discuss this topic in anything approaching nuance. "For the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance" the scriptures claim (Alma 45:16), and then the flawed humans use that as license for condemnation and carving out sharp boundaries.
It often falls into the fallacy of "No True Scotsman", which becomes particularly tricky when there are separate sets of belonging, and only part of them are prescriptive. For example, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there's a pretty clear way of determining if someone is a member or not: She's been baptized and has her name on the records of the Church. It's definitive and uncontroversial. If she hasn't been baptized and her name recorded, then she's not a member. So on one hand, the line of Mormon or non-Mormon (or Gentile, as is sometimes used...which is weird, because that would mean Jews are Gentiles; but for Jews, Mormons would be Gentiles) is limpid.
But when we start looking at behaviors of members of the Church, there's an entire panoply of "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not" style commandments that, to one degree or another, members do (or don't) comply with. Thanks to the 89th section of the Doctrine and Covenants, members feel constrained not to drink "hot drinks". What does that mean? Official Church policy means no tea or coffee. But what about iced coffees? Iced teas? Herbal teas? How is coffee different than, say, hot chocolate? And if a member decides to drink iced tea but not hot herbal teas, is she being "purer" than someone who imbibes the opposite? And if both the iced tea drinker and the iced tea abstainer are baptized members, which is the "true" or "pure" Mormon?
This can be pulled toward any concept: A public school teacher is the beneficiary of the redistribution of tax dollars--their employment is done because of socialist policies that reassign capital for public services. Is a teacher who hates socialism and constantly rails about it in her classroom "not a true teacher" because of the hypocrisy? Or is she a really bad socialist? If I don't much care about the theatrical traditions that have been a part of preserving Shakespeare outside of the ivory towers of academia, am I an impure Bardolator? If I don't much care for Nintendo's intellectual properties, am I a "fake gamer"?
I think the aspect of this that really bothers me is the arbitrariness-set-as-absolutes. Yes, there's opinion that's running through these assumptions, and that's its own problem, but it's like the cartoon gag where the character saws a circle around himself. Usually, the floor drops and the circle stays in place. Carving out a niche of safety from within that circle of safety, then declaring only those within the circle have claim to security seems disingenuous to me.
Maybe I'm just not a good enough thinker. Maybe I'm impure. Or I'm pure.
I don't really know.