Just Babies (15 page)

Also, we can use our intelligence to override our coalitional biases when we feel that they have started to run amok. We create treaties and international organizations aimed at protecting universal human rights. We employ procedures such as blind reviewing and blind auditions
that are designed to prevent judges from being biased, consciously or unconsciously, by a candidate’s race—or anything other than what is under evaluation. We establish quota systems and diversity requirements to ensure sufficient representation by a minority group, taking the decision out of the hands of individuals who have their own preferences and agendas.

My point isn’t that the solutions listed above are the right ones. Indeed, they can’t all be right, since they conflict with one another. (Race-blind admission processes for a university ignore race; quotas and diversity requirements explicitly take race into account.) Rather, the point here is that we can engineer certain situations, with the help of custom and law, to eradicate bias where we think that bias is wrong. This is how moral progress happens more generally. We don’t typically become better merely through good intentions and force of will, just as we don’t usually lose weight or give up smoking just by wanting to and trying really hard. But we are smart critters, and we can use our intelligence to manage our information and constrain our options, allowing our better selves to overcome those gut feelings and appetites that we believe we would be better off without.

This is how we cope with our natural propensity to favor our own group over others. But it turns out that there are even uglier aspects of our natures that we need to overcome.

5

B
ODIES

Disgust is a powerful force for evil. If you want to exterminate or marginalize a group, this is the emotion to elicit. The chemist and writer
Primo Levi tells how the Nazis denied Jewish prisoners access to toilets, and the effect that this had: “The SS escort did not hide their amusement at the sight of men and women squatting wherever they could, on the platforms and in the middle of the tracks, and the German passengers openly expressed their disgust: people like this deserve their fate, look at how they behave. These are not Menschen, human beings, but animals, it’s as clear as day.”

Now, one needn’t
actually
make others disgusting to trigger such a response; the more usual method is to use the power of the imagination. You can tell stories about how filthy certain people are and how bad they smell. Voltaire said of the Jews: “These people were so negligent of cleanliness and the decencies of life that their legislators were
obliged to make a law to compel them even to wash their hands.” You can use metaphor, as when the Nazis described “the Jew” as
“a being disgustingly soft and porous, receptive of fluid and sticky, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean body of the German male self.” Often the hated group is compared to disgusting creatures such as rats and cockroaches. This is the rhetoric used in all genocidal movements, against the Armenians, the Tutsi, and so on.

The groups that elicit disgust don’t have to be ethnicities or races.
George Orwell is eloquent about the role of disgust in class divisions.

Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West.… It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.

That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks—habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him.

Earlier in the book we explored the role that empathy plays in motivating moral behavior. Empathy makes one more likely to care: it boosts compassion and altruism. Disgust has the opposite effect: it makes us indifferent to the suffering of others and has the power to incite cruelty and dehumanization.

I
T IS
easy to conjure up the feeling of disgust. Imagine opening a food container, sniffing deeply, and discovering that it is hamburger gone bad. Most people would get a certain feeling that includes a flash of nausea. This feeling is accompanied by a special facial expression (a “yuck” face—nose scrunched, mouth shut, tongue pushed forward) and a distinctive motivation: get that away from me. You don’t want to smell it, you don’t want to touch it, and you certainly don’t want to eat it.

Certain objects, substances, and experiences reliably elicit this reaction. Paul Rozin, the preeminent researcher on the topic of disgust, has developed
a scale to measure people’s “disgust sensitivity.” Here are some items that Rozin and his colleagues ask subjects to evaluate. Just how disgusting do you find these experiences?

•  You see a bowel movement left unflushed in a public toilet.

•  Your friend’s pet cat died, and you have to pick up the dead body with your hands.

•  You see a man with his intestines exposed after an accident.

•  While you are walking through a tunnel under a railroad track, you smell urine.

Your mileage may vary. When I read these aloud in classes and presentations, some people wonder what the fuss is about; others gag. One student in a large Introduction to Psychology class ran out of the lecture hall when I showed these sentences on a PowerPoint slide. Rozin and colleagues have found that
people’s disgust sensitivity ratings predict how willing they are to actually engage in disgusting activities, such as picking up a cockroach or touching the head of a freshly killed pig.

Through experimental research and cross-cultural observation, we know that people everywhere are repelled by blood, gore, vomit, feces, urine, and rotten flesh—these evoke what Rozin dubs “core disgust.” Unfortunately for us, these substances are also the stuff of life. As the title of a well-known children’s book says, “Everybody Poops.” All manner of substances squirt, drip, and ooze from our bodies and from the bodies of those we love. These vary in how repulsive they are. Feces, urine, and pus are bad indeed, but people willingly ingest one another’s semen and saliva; sweat is not as bad as snot; and, at least in vampire fiction, the drinking of blood can be erotic, not gross. Intriguingly, one body product is hardly disgusting at all—tears. Rozin suggests that tears are immune from disgust because we
think of them as uniquely human, but I find
William Ian Miller’s explanation more plausible: tears lack the physical properties of disgusting substances because of “their clarity, their liquidity, their non-adhering nature, their lack of odor, and their clean taste.”

Some people have to deal with these substances for a living, including those who work with the wounded, the diseased, and the dead; others purposely engage in disgusting activities to show how tough they are, or how spiritual, or they do it to entertain others, as on the television show
Fear Factor.
All other things being equal, though, we generally strive to avoid the items on Rozin’s core disgust list.

But we don’t start off this way; babies are innocent of disgust. As Freud put it in
Civilization and Its Discontents
,
“The excreta arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from it.” If left unattended,
young children will touch and even eat all manner of disgusting things. In one of the coolest studies in developmental psychology, Rozin and his colleagues did an experiment in which they offered children under two something that was described as dog feces (“realistically crafted from peanut butter and odorous cheese”). Most of them ate it. Most also ate a whole small dried fish, and about a third ate a grasshopper.

Then, sometime in early childhood, a switch is thrown, and children become like adults, disgusted by much of the world. Psychologists have often wondered what motivates this change, and many follow Freudian theory and blame
the trauma of toilet training. When my own children were young, I read one of Penelope Leach’s excellent books on parenting, which advised:

Don’t try to make the child share your adult disgust at feces. He just discovered that they come out of him. He sees them as an interesting product belonging to him. If you rush to empty the potty; change him with fastidious fingertips and wrinkled nose; and are angry when he examines or smears the contents of his potty, you will hurt his feelings. You don’t have to pretend to share his pleasurable interest—discovering that adults don’t play with feces is part of growing up—but don’t try to make him feel they are dirty and disgusting. If he knows his feces are disgusting to you, he will feel that you think he is disgusting too.

While Leach might be correct that a parent’s overt disgust is disrespectful to the child,
everything else in this passage is mistaken. It’s not that the child discovers that “adults don’t play with feces,” as if this were some arbitrary cultural practice, akin to “adults don’t wear footed pajamas.” Rather, children come to find feces gross. And this insight isn’t dependent on observing an adult’s reaction. After all, a lot of people read Leach’s book and took her advice, and yet here we are, more than twenty years after its publication, and people are still disgusted at poo.

The toileting theory falls short in other ways. Other societies have very different practices when it comes to urination
and defecation (and some don’t even have toilets)—yet disgust is universal. Blood and vomit and rotten meat are disgusting but have nothing to do with toilet training. And even if it were true that children find their body products gross only because adults find them gross, this would only push the question back: Why do
adults
respond that way?

A more plausible theory is that core disgust serves an adaptive purpose. According to this theory, disgust isn’t learned but rather emerges naturally once babies have reached a certain point in development. There is some sense to this timing; if disgust kicked in too early, babies would be disgusted all the time at their wastes and wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Natural selection wouldn’t be that needlessly cruel.

If disgust is an adaptation, what is it an adaptation for? The most popular explanation is that
disgust evolved to ward us away from eating bad foods. Indeed, the English word itself derives from the Latin, meaning “bad taste.”

This theory has much to support it. First, as Darwin observed, the distinctive facial expression of disgust corresponds to the acts of trying not to smell something, blocking access to the mouth, and using the tongue to expel anything already within. It’s no accident that we don’t open our mouths wide when disgusted. Indeed, the “yuck face” is the same expression one gets when actually retching, and this may be its origin. Second, the feeling of nausea associated with disgust serves to discourage eating. Third, our disgust reactions can be triggered by thoughts of eating the wrong foods. As Darwin put it, with perhaps a bit of Victorian
exaggeration:
“It is remarkable how readily and instantly retching or actual vomiting is induced in some persons by the mere idea of having partaken of any unusual food, as of an animal which is not commonly eaten.” Fourth, even controlling for an overall increase in the rate of nausea,
pregnant women are exceptionally disgust-sensitive during the same period that the fetus is most sensitive to poison. Fifth,
the anterior insular cortex, which is implicated in smell and taste, becomes active when people are shown disgusting pictures.

Disgust cannot be entirely hardwired, of course, because people vary considerably in what disgusts them. The idea of eating rat, beetle, or dog makes me gag, but people raised in some societies find these foods perfectly yummy. Some learning must take place, then—a conclusion that is consistent with the bad foods theory of disgust. Humans face what Rozin has dubbed the “omnivore’s dilemma”—we eat a huge range of foods, but some of them can kill us—so we need to learn what we can and cannot eat in a local environment. In the course of this learning, food, and particularly meat, is guilty until proven innocent. Nobody ever told me that it is gross to eat fried rat; I find it gross because, during the critical period of childhood, people around me never ate it.

Some have argued that the food-based theory is incomplete and that
disgust has evolved to warn us away from pathogens and parasites more generally. The anthropologist Valerie Curtis and her colleagues surveyed more than forty thousand people from 165 countries over the Internet
to find out what images disgusted them. They found that pictures indicating potential disease were rated as particularly gross: a skin lesion depicting pus and inflammation, for instance, was viewed as more disgusting than a picture of a clean burn. People were also somewhat disgusted by someone made up to look feverish and spotty-faced. This theory also captures why the smell of an unwashed stranger can be so repulsive—being unclean is a sign of disease.

C
HARLES
Darwin, always an astute observer of human nature, tells the story of his own disgust. In Tierra del Fuego, he writes,
“a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty.”

People can be disgusting. If it’s true that disgust evolved in part to prevent disease, then the disgustingness of people follows naturally—we are disease vectors. But we are disgusting in a more basic way. We are fleshy things and we are associated with all of the substances that elicit core disgust.
“Inter faeces et uriam mascimur,”
in the words of Saint Augustine—We are born between urine and feces.