The power of disgust

and contagion narratives

I’m surprised we don’t hear more nowadays about Paul Rozin’s disgust psychology. That may be because all ideological camps employ it as a tactic, and no one wants to say the quiet part out loud. Being anti-ideological, I’ve been on a fallacy-hunt; and the employment of disgust-mobilization as a tactic at least qualifies as a para-fallacy.

For those unfamiliar, Paul Rozin is a psych professor at UPenn, who in many respects pioneered something now called disgust psychology. With regard to disgust and the nature-nurture continuum, Rozin is deep in the nurture camp. We learn, he says, what is and is not disgusting.

Let’s back up.

Disgust is a boundary-psychology. Consider the Dixie-cup experiment. Pass out Dixie-cups. Have people spit in the cups. Ask them to immediately drink the spit. See the picture above? Did your face do something similar when you read that? That’s a disgust reaction—far more universal than the objects of disgust. The fact is, you are swallowing saliva as you read this. You do it all day long. What made the exact same substance an object of disgust in the cup? The boundary between inside-the-body and outside-the-body. The substance was “transformed” by crossing that boundary.

The whole thing is complicated by the transgressive thrill, something Nancy C. M. Hartsock wrote about all the way back in 1983, when the boundary is transgressed. Speaking of the “nastiness” of sex and men’s whore-Madonna complexes, she wrote:

The dichotomy between spiritual love and “carnal knowledge” is recreated in the persistent fantasy of transforming the virgin into a whore. She begins pure, innocent, fresh, even in a sense disembodied, and is degraded and defiled in sometimes imaginative and bizarre ways.

Transgression here is a marker of privilege, and the object of the transgression will often be degraded, humiliated, or destroyed.

Transgression is important here: Forbidden practices are being engaged in. The violation of the boundaries of society breaks its taboos. Yet the act of violating a taboo, of seeing or doing something forbidden, does not do away with its forbidden status. Indeed, in the ways women’s bodies are degraded and defiled in the transformation of virgin into whore, the boundaries between the forbidden and the permitted are simultaneously upheld and broken. Put another way, the obsessive transformation of virgin into whore simply crosses over and over again the boundary between them. Without the boundary, there could be no transformation. And without the boundary, the thrill of transgression would disappear. (italics added)

Richard Beck also noted the boundari-ness of disgust and transgression in the case of love.

Given that disgust monitors the boundaries of selfhood and intimacy it should come as no surprise then that love involves a suspension of disgust and contamination sensitivity. More strongly, disgust is a prerequisite of love. Love, to be love, requires a backdrop of disgust. For someone to move “inside” there must be a preexisting condition of having been “outside,” being exterior and other. In short, disgust establishes boundaries of contact. Love enters as a secondary mechanism when those boundaries are transgressed or dismantled.

This isn’t our thesis, but it needed remarking. Beck—a student of Rozin—cited “contamination sensitivity.” Rozin, not surprisingly, takes a page from Mary Douglas’s canonical Purity and Danger, an anthropological study of cultural purity codes and taboos. Disgust and contamination are conjoined concepts that underwrite the notion of contagion. Rozin’s four contagion principles are:

1. Contact: contamination is caused by contact or physical proximity.

2. Dose insensitivity: minimal amounts, even microamounts, of the pollutant confer harm.

3. Permanence: once contaminated, nothing can be done to rehabilitate the object.

4. Negativity dominance: when a pollutant and a pure object come into contact, the pollutant is “stronger” and ruins the pure object.

These are pretty recognizable through self-reflection. We’ve all experienced these phenomena when confronted by objects of disgust.

Disgust is a “promiscuous” emotion (Beck). While babies show no sign of disgust at anything, gladly putting everything into their mouths, by the time we are grown we have learned to be disgusted by a whole range of things. Beck names certain foods, bodily outputs, creatures, sexual behaviors, the dead, gore, deformity, poor hygiene, and moral offenses, as a few examples, to demonstrate disgust’s promiscuity. The “core disgust,” the one that establishes the coordinates for other forms of disgust, is offense at certain oral incorporations—disgust at the fact or idea of certain things entering the body through the mouth. Rozin developed a schema for disgust based on core disgust, in which core disgust is metaphorically extrapolated into “sociomoral disgust” and “animal-reminder disgust” (issues here with mortality).

Douglas showed how contamination/contagion psychologies and narratives serve to do two things at once. They have an adaptive-safety function in avoiding things that are perceived to be (or are) harmful (getting shit in your food is never a good thing); and they police social boundaries.

(I’m resisting the temptation to veer off here into Susan Bordo, on whom I did a lengthy excursus in Borderline, whose feminist take on Douglas, Descartes, epistemological boundary crises, and early Enlightenment [Baconian] misogyny is very good . . . maybe another post.)

In terms of social boundary-policing, contagion is the sense that merely coming into contact with certain people, places, and things will pollute you. That pollution is often irremediable, precisely because each time the point of pollution is recalled the disgust reaction is viscerally recalled with it. If the disgust reaction loses its visceral force, it can be transformed into a more distant reaction: contempt. The rich might be disgusted by the poor when they are in close proximity, or touching them in ways that suggest familiarity, but when proximity is necessary—using servants, for example—the poor can be held in the less visceral and more viscerally sustainable contempt (or its cousin, patronizing affection).

Disgust is accompanied by magical thinking—ideas that are inconsistent with logical or rational analysis, as demonstrated in the Dixie-cup experiment. Disgust stimulates the desire for withdrawal and avoidance in mild cases, and “rejection, expulsion, and elimination” in powerful cases. Elimination can be easily translated here to extermination (kill all the germs, kill all the bugs, kill all the immigrants, kill all Palestinians [“Amaleks”], kill all TERFs).

When the visceral experience of disgust is paired with a narrative of contagion, disgust is socialized (and politicized). Hitler’s propagandists compared Jews to vermin. During the Rwandan genocide, Tutsi victims were referred to as cockroaches.

In less decisive forms of domination and conflict, disgust has become a form of counterfeit argument—a fallacious bypass, paired with either viscous name-calling or catty-elite irony. (Relentless irony has always been a weapon of ruling and retainer classes, because it’s been rehearsed as a lifestyle, a signifier of intellectual superiority.)

Social media is a force multiplier for weaponized disgust and enemy-contagion narratives. Its ideological siloing is reinforced by the rapid resort (300 characters or less) to naming the other as a kind of social disease. If you so much as have a conversation with person-X (pre-designated as one of the infected), you’ve been polluted. You’re spat out, expelled, shunned, quarantined, subjected to a virtual stoning.

There’s a background, of course. As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out a long time ago, we live in a period of utter metaphysical incoherence, wherein the inability to even agree on baseline premises leads us not into dialogue, but shouting matches.

I could flow on here, about MacIntyrean managerialism and the reaction to it . . . yes, I could. But I’ll leave it here, without riffs and wrap-ups.