While there are many aspects to refinement, including the sort of elevated cultural view that leads one to be considered civilized and cultured, today I would like to talk specifically about a limited aspect of refinement, and that is the sort of refinement that takes place for physical materials. Refinement tends to involve two different sorts of materials. Some materials are made better by refinement, which takes away dross and leaves a more purified ore. Other products are made worse by refinement, because that which is natural and pure is adulterated and harmed by the processes involved with it. As it strikes me as rather odd and puzzling that the same word could have such divergent meanings, I think it is worthwhile to ponder this matter a little.

The positive sort of refinement, at least as far as materials goes, is the sort of refinement that takes place of natural ores, taking a given ore and making it more pure through various processes. This process is not necessarily good for everyone or everything involved in it, but the end result is increased purity for the materials in those ores. Those who get to enjoy the fruits of metallurgy (if not the miners or refiners themselves) often benefit from the increased purity of such ores as gold or silver, or even aluminum and tin, or more exotic materials yet. At times the dross itself can be refined for other materials that are worthwhile to refine as well. If we are to be compared to ores that must be refined, we start out life as mixed materials, with a great deal of value that must be refined and purified, the negative aspects of our nature gotten rid of and discarded and that which is valuable and worthwhile purified so that we become of vastly greater value and of much more good to others.

In contrast, there are some materials, especially agricultural ones, where refinement does not increase its worth and value but actually harms it. Such negative aspects of refinement are common in food, whether we are looking at irradiation, concerns over genetic modification (especially by firms such as Monsanto, which seems to poison whatever it touches), or whether the more mundane chemical processes by which wholesome natural oils are turned into hydrogenated oils, or wholesome cane sugar becomes white sugar. In this sort of “refinement,” that which is wholesome and pure becomes less pure as a result of adulteration or tampering, although this loss of purity is often done for other reasons which make the resulting commodities more valuable to those who sell or use such products, even if they are less healthy (or indeed even harmful) to those who ultimately use such products for nourishment. Instead of the increased worth and benefit of such materials, as in the first case, in this second case the materials are less beneficial when refined than they would be if they were simply left alone. If we conceive of ourselves as natural materials for whom refinement means corruption, we would strongly resist any such changes to our nature as being harmful, rather than relishing the purification of our natures from their baser elements.

As a child, I was thought to be rather hyperactive, and rather than drug me into a stupor (as is rather commonly done to overly energetic children these days), my family put me on an enforced diet that was free of refined sugar. This did not mean an avoidance of all sugar, however. Since at this time there was no natural cane sugar sold at all in the United States to my knowledge (this was in the late 1980’s, we must remember), and since by providence a friend of the family’s was the wife of a sugar farmer in Belize, during the spring and autumn of the year my family received a large container of natural cane sugar free of charge from Belize. To my knowledge, technically, this gift of natural unrefined sugar was illegal according to laws which prohibited bringing in sugar from other countries to compete with the sugar monopolies of wealthy farmers in such places as Florida and Louisiana, and which did not provide any healthy sugars because they did not realize there was a large market for it (as they realize now, and profit accordingly).

As it happens, I grew up in rural Central Florida, in an area whose fame rests largely on its fruits like strawberries, oranges, and grapefruit. One of the major, and unrecognized, industries of the area is phosphate mining, and as a child I did some fossil digging in one of the old phosphate pits outside of the small town where I grew up. (Also, one of the field trips I had as a child involved picking strawberries at the farm owned by the family of some of my classmates, but that is another story, as sharecropping field trips are a bit unusual to most people, I suppose.) Phosphate is one of those ores that is refined by processing, even if the dross left behind can even be toxic, although the phosphate thus refined is used often in agriculture as part of the NPK fertilizers used in commercial farming in lieu of more organic approaches.

When we look at refinement, it is far from a straightforward matter whether such refining is good or bad. The refinement of gold and silver, or other ores, can be accounted a good thing, even if this refinement has not always been good for the environment or for the people involved in mining. If we are the gold or silver or other precious material, our refinement is a good thing for ourselves, as well as for those whom we serve. If we are good on our own, wholesome and pure like cane sugar or some other produce, then our refinement is generally a bad thing that leads to our corruption and adulteration. In our lives we are faced with refinement of both kinds, where sometimes the refinement threatens to corrupt us but lures us by its supposed cultured nature, and sometimes the refinement is the purification of the better parts of our nature through the fires of trials that make our character more noble than it would have been naturally. Which refinement we face varies by situation, and determining which is which is by no means a straightforward matter.