Disgust

“A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Simon and Garfunkel

Not a popular discussion point, disgust. 

 And much of what I say in this space is probably not very popular although many readers have not figured that out yet. I don’t mean to insult you but I assume that it is not easily grasped that I am always saying, in this blog, that what is happening in the human psyche is that we are motivated by our emotive network first and then we do and think or think and do. 

So it is with things that “disgust” us. The implications of this are far-reaching. We are not motivated primarily by “truth.” Truth is a hard-won luxury. We are motivated by our interests and our interests can be our disgusts that are later justified and made into truths, our truths. Research is showing that what we do is “believe” and then search out those facts that confirm our beliefs and disregard the rest

To set the stage as such: It was now a few years ago that a former mentor of mine Leon Kass stated at a congressional hearing on cloning:

“Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”              

At the time he took a great deal of heat for this and so he should have. I sometime later countered him in a lengthy work. 

Now if you bear with me for a moment his collogue at the University of Chicago Martha Nussbaum also argues much to the contrary about such strong emotions. In her case, she argues that the use of disgust in the criminal justice system has no place in that system. Law should not be made based on our disgust for something, or some act.

I once tried to engage her in an email dialogue about the biological foundations of emotions but failed due to her busy schedule among, I suppose, many other things. In any event, I see no evidence in her work of a deep understanding of the biology of emotion. That said she is on the right track philosophically, and Kass, unfortunately, at least then, was on the wrong one.

So, disgust, it seems from the Darwinian perspective, is a vestige of our reptilian ancestry, and thank heaven for it, for without it we would not survive. It has more than anything to do with eating and saving us from rotten and toxic food. Slowly it has entered into the emotional system and into the parallel world of emotional cognates. Love is full of metaphors of consuming and devouring the other but woe the day when love ends and we vomit the other out because of disgust!

But back to the general, Kass is wrong: my disgust is not your disgust. Yet we have tried throughout history to make this so. Tribal culture made it easier. Authority makes it easier. And of course, my authority is always more authoritarian than yours. My dad can beat up your dad. We are taught to get an “education” and then to stop thinking when it comes to matters of “disgust.” “Son you don’t even need to go there, don’t even think about it. Trust me. What those people do(eat ice cream, mountain oysters, suck each other’s toes, live in Chicago, swim nude)is just disgusting.” If I am told that the other is “disgusting” I tend to adopt that attitude. The people over the hill are different, they look different; they have different birthing, marriage, and sexual practices. “Isn’t that disgusting?” Those savages scalp people. Isn’t that disgusting? The trouble is who taught them to scalp?

The thought then is that the “rule”, the “law”, and the “sin” is always secondary to someone or some group’s disgust when that law discriminates or excludes someone or something.

Are there “universals?” Are there universal disgusts? I would argue that no there are not but there are acts that given the goal of the emotive system and that is to “maximize joy” that human society will form itself to discourage many acts. 

Those acts are so antithetical to maximizing joy in the common good they will naturally elicit various negative feelings among them but not necessarily restricted to disgust but will also elicit anger, fear, rage, distress, and shame among others. So, yes society does, as we recognize, have its short list of universally prohibited acts such as murder but the attendant emotion we each feel might and is, I say, quite different.

Brian Lynch