Expressions of disgust surround us. See: The New York Times, National Geographic, MSNBC, Fox, Teen Vogue, and, dear god, Twitter.
Disgust is an emotion designed to protect humans from disease before we had a theory of disease. It is meant to induce us to run away from things that can make us sick, like decaying food or parasites. As our brains changed to rely more and more on a social group for basic needs, evolution seized upon the available resource of our collective disgust to win intra-group fights. Disgust is grounded in biological revulsion to maggots and decaying animals, and abstracted to the sexually promiscuous, the cruel, the ugly, the exploitative, and other social undesirables.
But this abstract disgust is not truth seeking, and our culture outsources the hard work of thinking about how to avoid specific harms to the really easy emotional reaction of disgust.
The evolutionary context for disgust demonstrates two things:
- disgust is useful in certain situations, but
- we don’t mentally constrain it to those situations.
What I mean by that is, when our bodies or our cultures start to recognize something as disgusting, there’s a reason for it. It’s obvious that a disgust reaction to rotting meat serves us in prehistory, so that we don’t eat something that makes us sick. We can also see this more abstractly, that moral disgust served social purposes too. For instance, there is a lot of ambient disgust about sexual practices in modern culture. Considering how many people rely on the Bible, which includes translations of bronze age oral tradition on very old laws on sexual conduct, clearly this disgust has been with us for a long time.
But the environment for the disgust could not be more different – the social disgust for (say) sexual promiscuity was contextualized by an absolute lack of medicine, high chance of death outside of a patriarchal family system, abject poverty that promtped brutal fights and unforgiving rules about inheritance, strong relational interdependence for survival, and so on. Today we have treatments for diseases, many paths for people to survive and thrive without their immediate family, a more diverse society with a place for single mothers, a social safety net (imperfect though it may be), etc. Is the same disgust needed for the same promiscuity today? I think the answer is clearly no.
But disgust is pre-cognitive, our bodies produce it before we have a chance to notice this difference.
Disgust is too stupid for causal logic because it’s not meant to reason at all, but to repel. This makes public expression of disgust supremely suspect. First, it’s fundamentally selfish, manipulating the audience into seeing a personal emotion as an objective value judgement, offering in exchange that feeling of delicious, shuddering revulsion. Second, it’s cowardly, an implicit admission that reasoned argument alone won’t suffice.
Distrust disgust — yours, and everyone else’s. If it’s pointing at something true or useful, articulate that instead.