Understanding purity in times of nationalism

Across the world, an obsession with purity is driving political, religious and moral agendas. In reality, a retreat from complexity is no guarantee of future harmony

ll around the world, governments and wouldbe governments appear overwhelmed by complexity and are championing quests for the pure. In India, for instance, a politics of Hindu purity is wrenching open deep and bloody fissures in a diverse society. In Myanmar a politics of Buddhist purity is massacring and expelling the Rohingya. In the United States a politics of white purity is marching in white hoods and red baseball caps, demonising Muslims and Hispanic people and brutalising black people, jeering at intellectuals, and spitting in the face of climate science.

And what of Europe? Europe, too, is rekindling its love affair with purity, with signs of this deadly ardour everywhere, from the rise of the far right in Germany and Austria to the endless emergency in France to the ethnonational cracking of Ukraine and Spain. And then there is Brexit, illustrating only too well the politics of fission and the unleashing of the forces of purity.

First, or so it was said, the British took back control. But the Scottish and Northern Irish seemed not to want to take back control. So the English took back control from them. And also from Londoners, for London had long ceased to be properly English.

And also from the young, addled in their thinking by the ever increasing numbers of the non-English in their midst. In some English newspapers today dissenters are called traitors. In England’s north-west frontier, which is to say Northern Ireland, a return to violence is feared. The ruling party is paralysed, riven by factionalism. No one is deemed pure enough, brazenly English enough, to govern. Judges, journalists, parliamentarians, citizens: everyone is suspect.

In these pure times, you believe more impurity is desperately needed. Only impurity can save us now. But, fortunately, there are reasons for hope. Our species was built on impurity, and impurity will probably come to our rescue once again, if we let it. Biology is instructive here. Every child is a combination of genetic material from two different sources. Every child is a mix.

There is a clear reason for this: it works better than the alternative. Over time, our inescapable, systemic, fundamentally human impurity gives us the capacity to do what has not been done before, to make creative leaps: in our biology, in the diseases we can resist and the foods we can digest. And in our thinking and culture and politics too. The coming together of people from different backgrounds, with different ideas, allows breakthroughs to occur.

Constitutional democracy as currently practised around the world owes a great deal to America and Britain and France, but it also owes a great deal to the ancient Greeks, and to the Arabs who built on and transmitted Greek thought to a Europe where the ancient Greeks had been all but forgotten.

The first aircraft was invented in America, but the physics and mathematics and engineering that made it possible came from Europe, from North Africa, from India, from China, from the collision and collection of knowledge by all of humanity.

Think of jazz. Of Asia and Africa’s influence on European cuisine — and vice versa. Of the Moors on Don Quixote. Of the foreign-born on Silicon Valley. Of the green revolution. Of cutting-edge research in medicine. These are not victories of purity, designed by cut-off, like-minded people of similar appearance and narrowly shared ancestry. These are what can be achieved when humanity mixes.

Benefits of mongrelisation

Climate change. Mass migration. Rampant inequality. None of the most pressing and daunting problems today facing humanity have simple answers. As a species, we require creative new approaches, yet-to-beimagined leaps forward. But while we might not yet know what the solutions to these challenges are, we should already suspect from where the breakthroughs are most likely to come. They are likely to come from mongrelisation. From profound impurity. From people and ideas at risk of being suppressed and marginalised in our purity-obsessed age.

Since many of us deny our impurity, those who are most obviously impure among us require allies. And one of their most important allies is literature. Writing. Reading. When, sitting alone, we read a book, something profoundly strange occurs. We are by ourselves. We are only ourselves. And yet we contain within us the thoughts of another person, the writer. We become something bizarre. Something manifestly impure. A being with the thoughts of two beings inside it.

A reader, in the moment of reading, experiences a pooling of consciousness that blurs the painstakingly constructed boundaries of the unitary self. The very possibility of reading, the fact that it can occur, that a human being can experience this, the thoughts of another in the same physical place, that place so deep within, where the reader’s own thoughts reside — and furthermore that the reader is drawn to this experience, seeks for it, desires it — reminds us that the impure is fundamental to what we are, and calls out to us, powerfully, like the sea calls out to an organism that has evolved to live on the land, and yet recreates the sea inside itself, forms a watery womb, every time it conceives a child.

Writing and reading are a commingling. Literature is the practice of the impure. Written words might articulate demands and justifications for purity, but the fact that such words are written and read means they are, by their very nature, impure — prudes perhaps, but inescapably engaged in an orgy. Writing cannot help but remind us of the power of impurity, even when some written words claim the opposite.

Suppression steps in

These suppressions do not occur in a vacuum. For each, there is a context. Individual impurities are cited as harmful. As offensive to a set of beliefs, or to a desired cohesion, or to an economic future, or to the well-being of a younger generation. And then a mode of suppression is selected: a legal one, such as a kidnapping by a drug cartel in Mexico, or a proclamation by a cleric in Pakistan, or the bullet fired by an assassin, anywhere, everywhere.

Such suppression almost never presents itself as an attempt to end free speech in general. Rather, it focuses on the specific. Not the herd, but the lamb. Not the school, but the sardine. On this one particular case of impurity, which has gone too far, and can now, should now, be picked off, swallowed up, in a mighty gulp, never to be heard from or seen again.

Because of this merciless specificity, a scattering occurs, even among those who seek to defend the impure who are writers. You have often observed this tendency. It manifests itself in a focus on the threats to those impurities that we like, to the forms of speech we ourselves tend to value. For many in Europe, for example, this is the threat of violent Muslims against speech perceived as anti-Islam. But while this threat is real and dangerous (albeit encountered much more by writers in Asia and Africa than in Europe), it is not the only threat. Indeed it is not the largest nor the most significant one, in terms of the numbers of writers it affects and the aggregate amount of harm that befalls them. Around the world the dangers writers face come from criminals, from the powerful in their societies, and from their own governments, far more often than from Muslim terrorists.

To focus only on one form of suppression, then, while ignoring the others, runs the risk of seeking to harness indignation as a weapon, rather than as a shield. Of failing to value the impurity of writing, and instead opening a new front in the battle of one purity against another. Mohsin Hamid is a Booker-nominated writer who tackles themes of equality, migration, and belonging.