Disgust is used a lot in politics these days. Thankfully, there is also research into disgust as well as how liberal and conservative brains process things differently, including how various emotions correspond to different political groups. Why is it important? We want a participatory democracy.
Like all emotions there is a biological explanation for disgust. Disgust has its uses in keeping us healthy, especially in avoiding rotten and poisonous food. Disgust is most closely linked to digestive bodily functions. The short definition is that disgust comes from the recognition that the body feels unpleasant because it has been contaminated. We learn what causes the contamination so we can avoid it.
Disgust is the physiological foundation for the moral ideas of purity and sacrilege. Morality and its study used to be confined to debates of philosophy, political science, and religion. No more. Now the research into morality centers on physical, biological, and evolutionary explanations.
That means we literally feel what is right and wrong. Poor Ennis felt his attractions to be wrong which made him feel alienated from his body. Those feelings guide us in the morality of such things as incest, rape, and cannibalism. The strength of those feelings guide how vocal we are when the society discusses how to handle disgusting topics.
The brain responds to topics of moral purity the same way it responds to tainted food. If something is held as sacred and pure and something else taints that purity the same feeling of disgust is created.
Disgust, once felt, is very persistent. Bite into a moldy apple and the disgust will keep you from ever biting into another one. Once a political idea (like "liberal") is tainted with disgust, the feeling is very difficult to shake off. Which is why political operatives work very hard to smear someone or some idea as disgusting. Once tagged it will stay tagged.
Think about the ramifications for gay marriage. If children are taught that homosexuality is disgusting, they will want to stay far away from it. As their moral sentiments develop, they will begin to see homosexuality as a contaminant in society. When thinking about the sacred institution of marriage, they will feel the threat of this impurity to something they want to keep clean. It's pretty easy to mobilize them against this threat because the feeling is long-lasting and easy to activate with a political sound bite.
Which is why Fundies work hard at making sure children never learn that gays and gay marriage is just another variation of humanity.
There are two lessons to learn from this. First, if you want someone to support your idea (like the notion that addressing global warming might be a sensible thing to do), don't let it get associated with disgust (such as how people feel about the elitism of scientists -- be it real or imagined). Second, if you want someone to oppose an idea, just riddle it with associations to the profane and impure. Do so with references to basic bodily functions and you'll be particularly effective.
The emotion of disgust will trump reason every time. Don't believe people who say people are rational.
So consider this posting as my participation in democracy. If only a handful of people know about the power of disgust they can manipulate the rest of us any way they want. The more people who know the more who will recognize the politics of disgust and call out the perpetrators as unethical. In addition to everything else they teach, high school civics classes should teach about the brain and politics.
And in a related discussion…
Are a person's values created by the culture or are some values consistent across cultures? Here are a few that are proving to be universal -- fairness, avoidance of harm, loyalty, authority, and purity. Of course, the relative strengths of these (and other) values varies between cultures and between individuals.
For example, liberals put a priority on avoidance of harm and fairness. Conservatives stress loyalty, authority, and purity. Which means in our fractured American politics we're not debating how to apply core values to a particular problem, we're debating the core values themselves. And wondering why the opponent is being so obtuse. Is there a way out of this dilemma?
Step back a bit. According to ethicists, an individual matters, but doesn't matter more than any other individual. Ethical rules must be of a kind that can be applied to everyone.
I'm sure you can hear the Fundies shouting, "But of course! My ethics are correct (because they're derived from my religion) and you had better follow them." Of course not. As I understand it, if an ethical rule isn't appropriate for everyone according to their values, it isn't ethical.
Fairness and harm avoidance can be applied to everyone. Loyalty, purity, and authority cannot. The first statement should be obvious (though we still have people in America who maintain slaves). The second might need a bit of explanation.
Authority means that certain people are special, they should be respected and obeyed more than others and they have the right to tell other people what to do. Loyalty means the inside group (family, country) is more important than those not in the in-group. Purity, when applied to relationships, means that the pure people should be treated better than the impure people. These values cannot be applied to everyone the same way.
That does not mean loyalty and authority are bad values. Of course, we treat our family members, whom we love, better than we treat strangers. Of course, we need authority figures or we would spend our lives in meetings trying to reach consensus on everything. We need laws and authority figures to enforce them. As for purity, well…
However, when we debate issues we can now look for the underlying clash of values and can now say that fairness and harm avoidance are more important than loyalty, authority, and purity unless there is a compelling reason. And to take it a step further, our advances in moral progress have been made when we figure out how to apply fairness and harm avoidance to more people. Long live the liberal.
No comments:
Post a Comment