I’m a big Nicholas Kristof fan, and very much enjoyed his piece in this morning’s grey lady: Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal . Kristof writes about the phenomenon of disgust, its evolutionary role in protecting us from harm, and its usefulness as a predictor of political views. An excerpt:
…conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.
The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.
I’m not a neurologist or an evolutionary biologist (though my contempt for the usefulness of the latter profession as having much to contribute to the study of contemporary gender roles knows almost no bounds). I’m intrigued by the notion that disgust manifests differently in folks who lean right as opposed to those who lean left. And it occurs to me that one of the things that is essential to my own liberalism is a sense that disgust is, more often than not, a moral failing to be overcome rather than a righteous response to the genuinely contemptible.
The language of disgust is, of course, frequently reactionary. How often have we heard folks, motivated by varying degrees of homophobia, go into verbal paroxysms as they explain how “disgusting” it is to see two men kissing or expressing romantic affection? How often, in a not-too-distant time, was disgust invoked as a sign of a “natural horror” at interracial coupling? Indeed, racists and other bigots are often eloquent in expressing their disgust at “race-mixing”, gay marriage and other novelties. Growing up, I can remember teenage boys trying to outdo each other in conveying just how nauseating they found the thought of male homosexuality. “Dude, seeing two faggots makes me want to hurl.” “Yeah? I saw a couple of queers and I did hurl.” The degree to which one feels disgust, in other words, becomes evidence of heterosexual virtue. It’s both pathetic and infuriating.
As someone who’s taught sex education in one form or another for twenty years, I’m keenly aware of the close proximity of shame and disgust. Parents who catch their small children touching themselves will frequently use the language of disgust: “That’s dirty”, “That’s nasty”. Those same kids, when they first discover how babies really are made, will themselves offer expressions of disgust; it is hard, in their little minds, to reconcile that the areas from which we excrete are also the places where we form new life. Undoing some of this early programming, which so often leads to adolescent disquiet and shame, is a vital part of sex education. Little wonder, then, that my avocation as a sex educator leaves me with little appreciation for the virtues of disgust!
I’m convinced that at its core, disgust is the opposite of empathy. When we are repelled by the malodorous homeless man, we lose our capacity to feel his pain. When we are revolted by animal suffering in slaughterhouses to the point that we don’t want to look, we permit ourselves to remain willfully ignorant of the ways in which these sentient creatures suffer for our pleasure. Disgust becomes an excuse for selfishness. “I’m sorry”, we say, “I just can’t handle it. I’d rather not know.” This is not evidence of a healthy discrimination or a sensitive soul; indeed, the presence of disgust is evidence of the opposite. Disgust is a “distancing reaction” that asks us to pull away, to withdraw our attention and our compassion. And while it might be a useful evolutionary tool for discerning rancid food, it’s worse than useless just about everywhere else.
I have learned to overcome disgust. The first time I volunteered in a homeless shelter, I had to fight a gag reflex. Disgust called me to retreat, to turn away from what was painful; my sense of responsibility to my fellow creatures called me to drive away that disgust. When folks show me pictures of things that are hard to look at — victims of car bombings, victims of factory farming, victims of extreme poverty — I force myself to look. Not out of prurience, not for the sake of easy pity and a quick mutter of “there but for the grace of God go I”, but so that I can imprint hard things on my consciousness and use them as a spur to action and a spur to greater compassion.
Jesus healed by touching, often touching folks who inspired disgust in others. He overcame, and taught His disciples to overcome, the culturally-conditioned revulsion coded into the Law. Much of the language of the Torah is about what is “unclean” or “abominable” or “disgusting”, after all. (I know that many folks take the Torah very seriously, as do I. It is only the literal-mided to whom I address my rebuke here.) Being spiritual rather than narrowly religious, is, in a sense, the insistence on prioritizing love over disgust. One might say the same about liberals and conservatives.
Our bodies are not disgusting. Other people’s bodies are not disgusting. Love is not disgusting. Suffering, human or animal, may seem revolting — but we need to overcome that reflexive disgust in order to get to empathy, to compassion, and to righteous action.
Disgust says “look away”; love says “come closer, and do something to fix this.”
Or maybe, I’m just a damned liberal.
Re: Our bodies are not disgusting. Other people’s bodies are not disgusting.
The problem wth this is that it seems to imply that the Fall (either our fall, or the angelic fall) never happened, does it not? Not for the first time, Hugo, you seem to be falling into the error of Pelagius. Christ did the things you say, true, but He also describes hell as a place where “the worm never dieth” which presupposes that we find “worms” (presumably maggots, from the implication) to be disgusting. If we didn’t, the saying would have no force. Therefore, disgust is not a bad thing.
Parenthetically, I’m not happy wth the two-way typology of liberals and conservative. There are more political viewpoints than those two. I’d freely acknowledge myself to be non-liberal (and I’d happily accept the term ‘authoritarian’), but not really a conservative. Your classic figure of evil, Savonarola, was certainly an authoritarian, but he was hardly a conservative- he was seen, at the time and since, as a radical of the left.
This is a fantastic post. Sorry I don’t have anything more eloquent to contribute.
What brilliant takes on this fascinating emotion! If you have not heard of him, I think this is a good place to share Jonathan Haidt’s work. He is my favorite Moral Psych researcher. His findings suggest that we first feel emotions and only then “make up” the beliefs, morals, explanations to go along with them- not the other way around, as is commonly thought. I’ll try to avoid showering you with links, so here are just a few…
One of my favorite studies by him: http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.emotionaldog.manuscript.pdf
His faculty home page, including many links: http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/
Disgust Scale: http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/disgustscale.html
He also contributes on Edge.org
Wow. What an incredible post.
I volunteered with homeless people, and you are right – I was definitely fighting my disgust, certainly at the beginning.
But then I started telling my friends about my father sexually abusing me, and some recoiled from me. I really don’t think they actually blamed me – I really sensed it was this visceral reaction, disgust.
I know that I often feel disgusting, probably for the same reasons.
Hector: I don’t think ‘not disgusting’ is equivalent to ‘not fallen’. Evidence of fallenness, to my mind, comes more in the fact that our bodies are imperfect and unruly, susceptible to disease and age and death. None of those things have to be disgusting in order to be bad.
Lovely post. It gave me much to think about. Thank you, as always.
PS. And yes, you are a bleeding heart liberal…
and Hector – disgust may well be evidence for the fall.
“Unfallen” creatures do not seem to have the response beyond its evolutionarily useful (i.e. – bad-food detecting, etc.) application.
If he thinks that animals don’t have a sense of disgust, he’s never met my cat. Picky little thing will turn up her nose at anything she doesn’t like.
On a slightly more serious note, when I read these studies, I’m struck by the divide between conservatives and liberals seems like something that is never going to be crossed. We both want “the best” for the country, but what “the best” is is radically different things. I truly don’t know what to do about that.
I used the name you referred to me as in a previous post…
I’ve gotten the “disgust” comment quite a few times in response to my sleeping with my step-brother, especially from those who don’t actually know my story. It’s certainly a painful word to hear, considering I can’t change my past and no one will ever know my experience exactly.
But I’ve been watching how I react to things that are often perceived as “disgusting.” Rather than seeing a dead animal on the side of the road and thinking it’s gross, I think of how sad it is that humans have created systems capable of such destruction, and that this animal probably struggled to survive all alone as cars zipped by. I feel more connected to the world looking at things with compassion rather than disgust, as hard as it is not to turn away.
Hugo, I think this is your best and most intelligent and insightful post as a writer so far. Well done. I’m envious, and wish I had written it.
Hector, have you ever experienced a genuine moment of pleasure in your entire life?
Great post, Hugo.
Personally, I think I’m most likely to feel disgust as a result of intolerance in others towards people who are different from themselves. I’m not sure what that means–if the disgust is a way of distancing myself from those who are intolerant, if it’s is a way of reassuring myself that I’m not intolerant, if it’s a way to feel a little bit better than others… Anyway, thanks for some great food for thought.
Another good and thought-o-genic post. Some of the thoughts are these…
Sometimes what people think of as disgust is actually triggering, as in hearing about a horrible thing that happened to someone else and feeling hurt inside. It is not quite the same as a visceral reaction to something that just makes one want to throw up but doesn’t have a moral dimension. This is hard to explain–something decaying and smelling bad makes me think “there is a hazardous substance that should be handled with caution, if at all”, but reading or hearing of or seeing cruelty and suffering are a whole nother level of horror.
As to which items cause disgust in whom, that’s a complicated one. You some while back posted about the frequency of bathing, and a lot of people think that a dislike of natural human odor is a learned attitude. I’m not sure–I think some of us, like me, are mutants, not wired up the same–I just don’t like it. (I can’t stand dog smell either.) There are some folks, I guess, who have some innate reactions they can’t help. But we can understand it is us and use our own good sense to stay away from the unpleasant thing, without trying to make the whole world conform to our liking. If they come up with a portable smell-filter for the nose, I’ll try it. There’s some things I can get used to, and some I never can. It’s not my fault, or anyone else’s.
Our discomfort with what nature has given us in the way of physical form is understandable, when one considers the various design flaws. But these flaws are not necessarily the result of some “fall” by any human being; they could be because the designer if there is one is still learning and making mistakes, or something like that. Any power that would punish me for something someone else did long ago is clueless. How does anyone know that I, or any of us for that matter, might not be smart enough to resist temptation, to wait till the fruit falls and plant our own tree or something really clever like that?
I haven’t got into the Haidt work, but the Kristof article you cited at the beginning was a bit of a surprise–I didn’t fit into either category he adduced, but straddled both.
…And Naomi, what happened to you is disgusting, but YOU are NOT disgusting.
I don’t meet too many liberal germophobes, either. Some liberals I know have a whole spectrum of neuroses, but they are quick to admit that this problem originates with them. Conservatives, on the other hand, always frame the discussion in terms of “them,” implying that all other people are inherently dirtier than they are. “They” don’t wash their hands after using the toilet, or “they” cough and then don’t use sanitizer, etc. These are the same types of people who wanted to put AIDS patients on deserted islands, like the Hawaiian lepers in the 19th century. The safety director at the company where I work (owned by evangelicals, BTW) gave a talk at the quarterly meeting where the topic was HIV/AIDS awareness. He gave the statistics for infections in our county, shook his head and said “It’s out there, folks. It’s out there,” as if he expected AIDS-ridden zombies to come crashing through the windows at any moment to attack “us.” These are the same people who go on at length about how zealously they clean their floors; they show off the pre-moistened washcloths they carry in case their children touch dirt, etc. etc. It gets really old. Curiously, they’re also the ones who browbeat their doctors into prescribing antibiotics for illness that is viral. But that one may have more to do with lack of education — yet another increasingly typical signature among political conservatives.
They must have grown up half a century back and had teachers yapping at them about germs all the time–and parents obsessed with bowel functions. That was my first thought–but then, my teachers and parents at least didn’t try to tell me that certain classes of people were germier than others.
Now I see ads for colon cleansers and stuff that can make your teeth white instead of off-white. Progress? Ha. Now, with the swine-flu worries, one of the receptionists at the union hall about went into hysterics the other week when I asked for a kleenex. I understand she was duly reassured, but I’m still surrounded by ads for this and that bizarre nostrum, and I still sometimes find myself reading advice columnists who think it’s okay to tell someone they smell bad, never guessing for a moment that the problem might be in your nose. Or your brain.
Some of these people make some other folks long for the old, pre-asepsis days; but that too is a mistake. Medical/safety needs aside, disgust needs to be questioned even when it’s worth obeying.
I get annoyed at the use of “obscene”, “indecent”, etc. to describe sexually explicit images that while repulsive to me are not near as disturbing as reading the news. A photo on the frontpage of Salon some while back, of an abused man lying in a pool of blood, was far worse–and it was the actuality of such things that is obscene, not the picture, which is why I didn’t complain; there are some people who DO need it waved in their faces.
If someone can’t stand the sight of blood, they can still give to the Red Cross or something; if they are upset by the homeless, they can give what they don’t need to charity. As for the worm that never dies, earthworms are vital for soil health, and maggots can be used to clean infected wounds, or so I read.
Great post, Hugo.
Angiportus,
You some while back posted about the frequency of bathing, and a lot of people think that a dislike of natural human odor is a learned attitude. I’m not sure–I think some of us, like me, are mutants, not wired up the same–I just don’t like it.
But how do you think you know this? I have a variety of strong reactions to smells, sensations, etc. that “feel” natural, but I know that doesn’t mean they’re not learned behavior. We can know ourselves, but we can’t know ourselves that well.
(The reason that I press this issue is that it’s a handy cop-out, which is not to say you’re using the logic in that fashion. I’ve heard plenty of people claim their ‘natural’ reaction to gays is revulsion and disgust, so it’s not their fault, etc etc.)
Good question, djw, and I must say that I am not entirely sure how I know that mutation is responsible for different wiring, or that what seems natural/inherent is never learned. I don’t know for sure, it was just a guess based on my knowledge of myself and how I differ from the rest. I can’t see myself ever coming to like certain smells, just as with colors, shapes, etc. It’s possible that there’s other people like that. I think I have a better guess at what is natural/inherent for me than some people do for themselves, just because I’ve had to work so hard to puzzle myself out. But I would not go so far as to presume that no one else knows what’s truly innate with them.
It’s just that a lot of people with kneejerkular reactions to this or that–such as homophobia or puritanism–seem not too introspective in that area, and not too deep-thinking to start with. Their dislikes are suspiciously similar to what they’ve heard from their elders and schoolmates. (If in fact everyone is born like that, how do some folks manage to overcome it?) How many people get any training in analyzing their reactions, let alone managing to do this on their own?
My revulsion at the smell of unwashed human beings is suspiciously similar to the prejudices instilled by the soap and deodorant industry. But no one taught me to be equally revulsed by the smell of dogs; my parents are dog people. Also, I like the scent of blooming hawthorns, rowans, pyracanthas and so on more than the roses and so on favored by the run of flower fans. This makes me think that I and perhaps others do have inherent biases.
I put some thought into mine and how I react, but there’s a lot of folks don’t, whatever the source of their prejudices may be.
I’ll try not to use it as a cop-out.
The definition of a liberal as one who is empathetic and a conservative as one who is xenophobic is simple-minded and stereotypical.
Let’s look at “disgust” from another angle. What did abolitionists feel when they saw slaves on the selling block? They felt an intrinsic disgust.
Disgust is thus a function of morality.
And what happens when liberal feminists justify anti-woman practices in the Moslem world? Because they are overcoming their “disgust,” they are able to tolerate and explain away immoral practices.
You may say that it isn’t so simple.
That’s exactly my point.
But don’t forget that it is the Law that introduced the ideas of loving one’s neighbor, the societally disadvantaged and the outsider.
Innate or learned, visceral or philospohical, it’s the results that count. Whatever it is I react to, I’ve found I get better results if I put some brains into it, and I’m glad that doing so is encouraged here.
As one who seems to fit the definition of both liberal and feminist, I have never been able to overcome my disgust at misogynistic practices in the Moslem, 3rd or tribal worlds. A Nat. Geo. article on caste inequities in India provoked the same horror. My reactions seem to have come from an empathetic action of my imagination, aided by Logic, rather than either school, parents or any religious input–unusual for a lone-wolf, asocial, self-centered kid like me. But like I said before, results are more important than origins.
The “liberal” parent who decries the treatment of POWs one minute and then hits their child in a fit of rage the next, is, to me, a very phony liberal. Likewise any party who preaches about succoring the poor and then condones any discrimination against someone else because of their reproductive anatomy. I suspect these latter phonies are people who never got around to analysing their no-doubt-learned disgust. I think we all need to leave them behind. But how to deal with those intellectuals (?) who justify barbaric practices in the name of cultural diversity, that’s going to be a project.
I have personally never met a feminist who condones anti-woman practices in the Moslem world. While I suppose there may be some who exist (anything is possible), I suspect the alleged feminist who is a-okay misogynist practices from other cultures is largely a mythical creature.
Mr.Shulman’s larger point is interesting though. But he may be using the word “disgust” a little too broadly. I think the site of a slave on auction block is morally horrifying but I wouldn’t think of it as “disgusting” in the literal sense that I think Hugo means it. I think Hugo and the NYT article he links are referring to “disgust” as a sense of physical revulsion, rather than just moral revulsion that may or may not have its roots in a sense of physical disgust.
Moral/philosophical revulsion can cause physical discomfort that might be hard to distinguish from squeamishness-type disgust, especially in the heat of the moment. But you’re right, there’s some definition-fluctuation or something going on, and some overlaps. Wrods like barbaric, immoral and so on can also be considered loaded in some circumstances, and perhaps should be used with care.
I just checked out a book on people with unusual sensory hyper-sensitivities. There are many ways to be non-neurotypical, and it might account for some people’s discomfort with certain phenomena.
Pingback: Do men have an obligation to witness the birth of their children? | Hugo Schwyzer