A thread on the psychology of disgust & the culture wars. Our engagement with the moral order is affected/mediated by our disgust response, much like our enjoyment of wine is affected after we find a fly in it. Psychology regulates purity categories.

Consider core disgust, disgust related to the body: the fly in the wine scenario. Remove the fly. Still, the residue of the drowned bug remains in our minds (if not in the wine itself). We’ll tend to not want to drink the wine even if the wine has been purified.

Core disgust involves feelings of revulsion and logic doesn’t matter. I can tell you that I’ve removed all impurities but the feeling of contamination will stay. Impurity has a permanence to it. In our minds, the thing has been “ontologically” altered. Solution: discard the wine.

This is called negativity dominance: the idea that the contaminant has more potency than any positive attributes of a given substance. Example: fill a swimming pool with wine and then add a t-spoon of urine to it. Gross! Nothing you can do will make it seem worth drinking.

And nothing is ever quite pure or clean enough when disgust is given too much of a role in mediating the environment. This is why germ freaks often end up turning on each other while picking on “sins” that are different from their own. I'm getting ahead of myself. So ...

Now consider social disgust. It functions like core disgust. An apparently impure thing contaminates our sense of a pure social order. We want it removed but the feeling of contamination stays. Permanence is also a feature of social disgust, so is negativity dominance.

For different social groups, different things bring about the feeling that the social order has been defiled. In more religiously conservative circles, sexual purity is particularly idolized/idealized, whereas in more woke circles, diversity is idolized/idealized, etc.

Doesn't matter what group you're part of. Every group has its own picture of what is morally impure; as “that which defiles” — as Jesus says (Mt 15/Mk 7).

Say a heroic figure from history is called out as racist. For the woke, this is ontological contamination. The fly's been in the wine, so it is permanently undrinkable. There is nothing redeemable. So what to do? Well, obviously: remove the contaminated being. Discard the wine.

Magical thinking dominates. When something disgusts us, some sort of ritual purification becomes more important to the group than anything like a reasonable argument. In woke circles, ritual purification looks like: diversity training, protesting, doxxing, scapegoating, etc.

But no one is completely exempt from this irrationality. Different groups have different demands for what constitutes and produces ritual purity. Given this, the least we can do is try to understand it.

Notably, Jesus spent a lot of his time going against the irrationality of purity codes on all sides: his presence had a decontaminating effect. He suggested the possibility of positivity dominance which is what is assumed by people on the opposite side of any culture war issue.

Every side on the culture war assumes their own side's problems are overcome by what they get right. Jesus just took this further and suggested that redemption can be complete for everyone.

Jesus suggested that what defiles is less what enters the body than what the body does/says (Mt 15/Mk 7). He changed the focus to what we can take responsibility for, not what others should take responsibility for. His focus remained on mercy, not the logic of sacrifice (Mt 9).

Jesus is all about forgiveness. And I submit that the culture wars will not be overcome without a deep sense that forgiveness should be the focus. This is not antithetical to justice at all, but its fulfillment. Justice has to be restorative for it to be justice at all.

I know this is tricky territory. There's more to say than can be said here. And there is pain and confusion on all sides. All have sinned and fallen far short of the glory. But when the logic of self-satisfied sacrifice dominates, the result will only be more pain and confusion.

As an interesting aside: it makes sense to me that in the midst of a literal pandemic, there would be an outbreak of moral outrage too. In studies on psychological disgust, core and social disgust are never far from each other.

Some satire offers a neat example of how this puritan logic of disgust might play out: