'Liberty requires order. And order requires strong norms and taboos. And strong norms and taboos require disgust'.
Rousing stuff, and true.
When Third Worlders come to the West and see us as weird, unnatural, brains-on-legs, I totally get it. There is something very angular and awkward, very life-learnt-from-a-manual about us. Like in Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon', we, or rather some academics, seem to have convinced themselves that it's possible to build a society on rationality alone. Yet rationality is just a tool to help you get what you want. If you don't want anything then your rationality can't help you.
This was the problem of a high-flying friend of mine. He ended up in the psychologist's clinic because though he could pass any test you threw at him, he could no longer see the point. He no longer knew what he wanted. The psychologist advised him to just sit and listen to music or do ANYTHING that was done just for the hell of it, rather than always as a means to an end, where the ultimate point of your actions is always deferred to some imagined place beyond the horizon, which frustratingly never gets any nearer.
I was in the old city of Riga and saw some British tourists enter a restaurant. One man was extremely short and had a leash, to which was attached another man walking on his hands and knees. I had an immediate disgust response, which was before an intellectualization about the appropriateness of people exhibiting their bondage games in public.
“Disgust,” she writes, “revolves around a wish to be a type of being that one is not, namely nonanimal and immortal.”
This is one of those pseudo-Freudian claims that only academics ever make. Such claims are impossible to either prove or disprove, sound profound and are thus loved by a certain kind of pretentious, unthinking person, yet are almost certainly wrong. Some such claims often contain a grain of truth, but this claim, I suspect, doesn't even contain that.
As regards Martha Nussbaum's claim that some people 'wish to be a type of being that one is not', surely no one fits that bill better than philosophers who deny any moral role for disgust. What could be less human than that?
I have just started to play a new game with myself which I call, 'Guess the Aporia author!' When the title appears in my Hotmail inbox I have to decide before clicking on it which of the two, Bo or Noah, or even some third person (e.g. Peter Frost, Lipton Matthews), has written the piece. This one was super-easy. And I thought it was terrific.
Regarding why many people find homosexuality objectionable, I wonder if comparing our reactions to men kissing on the one hand, and women kissing on the other, could throw some light on why we aren't crazy about them. Certainly I dislike the former more than the latter, yet as far as I can see both equally transgress the idea of 'a sincere commitment to traditional, fertility-oriented conceptions of pair-bonding'.
Yet truth be told, the older I get the less I want to watch ANY two people kissing, regardless of their sex. I'll make an exception for the very tender type of kiss, as at the end of the film Amelie, when Amelie finally meets the man who she has been trying to track down the whole film.
As for the passionate screen kiss, I just want it to be over as quickly as possible and for the story to continue, exactly as though it were 50 years ago and I was watching the film with my parents.
I seem to recall that what one finds disgusting is one of the things that distinguish liberals from conservative. By this measure I think must be more liberal than Bo. Ugly buildings, for example, I find to be ugly, oppressive even, but not disgusting.
Then there is the problem that we see on the woke left, where any politically incorrect opinion is considered to be disgusting. I will never forget how feminists Nancy Hopkins (I think that was her name) stormed out of the Harvard faculty meeting over Larry Summer's suggestion that there might be differences in genetic variance between men and women that would partly explain the underrepresentation of women in STEM. Hers was a powerful public display. It had real rhetorical force at that point in history.
Personally, I have feelings of sacrilege rather than disgust when I see people violating or otherwise disrespecting the liberal values that I hold most sacred, like those embodied in the US Constitution for example. If I had a thesaurus handy I could probably come up with a bunch of other words signifying moral condemnation. Blasphemy for example, in extreme cases. Evil is even worse, as when I say Islam is an evil force in the world, or, at the very least, in the West.
In general, all emotions, including disgust, are expected to be adaptive. Our cultural environment, however, changed very rapidly over the last ~10 thousand years, and especially over the last few hundred years, so it is expected for some of the emotions to be somewhat maladaptive in the new environment.
That may be the case for disgust as well, although not conspicuously so. One should be very wary, however, of people like Nussbaum, who are quick to construct imaginary conceptions of social order that aren't consistent with human nature and would quickly lead to dysfunction. How is one to interpret this: “Disgust,” she writes, “revolves around a wish to be a type of being that one is not, namely nonanimal and immortal.” That's Judith Butler level stuff. Try to moderate emotions by reason and institutions - yes. Go too far and you are creating another communist utopia.
I completely agree. If some scholar carefully reflected on the potential mismatch between our disgust response and modern society, I'd pay attention and likely find the arguments persuasive. Resorting to quasi-Freudian explanations that we're trying to reject our own bestial natures is not impressive though.
'Liberty requires order. And order requires strong norms and taboos. And strong norms and taboos require disgust'.
Rousing stuff, and true.
When Third Worlders come to the West and see us as weird, unnatural, brains-on-legs, I totally get it. There is something very angular and awkward, very life-learnt-from-a-manual about us. Like in Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon', we, or rather some academics, seem to have convinced themselves that it's possible to build a society on rationality alone. Yet rationality is just a tool to help you get what you want. If you don't want anything then your rationality can't help you.
This was the problem of a high-flying friend of mine. He ended up in the psychologist's clinic because though he could pass any test you threw at him, he could no longer see the point. He no longer knew what he wanted. The psychologist advised him to just sit and listen to music or do ANYTHING that was done just for the hell of it, rather than always as a means to an end, where the ultimate point of your actions is always deferred to some imagined place beyond the horizon, which frustratingly never gets any nearer.
O, that Elon would purchase prime time airtime across all major media platforms worldwide to air just about every one of Bo’s essays.
No, I’m not a fanboy. Just someone who is sometimes blessed with a sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Bravo, again, Bo.
Thank you for the kind words
Bo
I was in the old city of Riga and saw some British tourists enter a restaurant. One man was extremely short and had a leash, to which was attached another man walking on his hands and knees. I had an immediate disgust response, which was before an intellectualization about the appropriateness of people exhibiting their bondage games in public.
“Disgust,” she writes, “revolves around a wish to be a type of being that one is not, namely nonanimal and immortal.”
This is one of those pseudo-Freudian claims that only academics ever make. Such claims are impossible to either prove or disprove, sound profound and are thus loved by a certain kind of pretentious, unthinking person, yet are almost certainly wrong. Some such claims often contain a grain of truth, but this claim, I suspect, doesn't even contain that.
As regards Martha Nussbaum's claim that some people 'wish to be a type of being that one is not', surely no one fits that bill better than philosophers who deny any moral role for disgust. What could be less human than that?
Ha! Very good points. Completely agree.
Bo
I have just started to play a new game with myself which I call, 'Guess the Aporia author!' When the title appears in my Hotmail inbox I have to decide before clicking on it which of the two, Bo or Noah, or even some third person (e.g. Peter Frost, Lipton Matthews), has written the piece. This one was super-easy. And I thought it was terrific.
Regarding why many people find homosexuality objectionable, I wonder if comparing our reactions to men kissing on the one hand, and women kissing on the other, could throw some light on why we aren't crazy about them. Certainly I dislike the former more than the latter, yet as far as I can see both equally transgress the idea of 'a sincere commitment to traditional, fertility-oriented conceptions of pair-bonding'.
Yet truth be told, the older I get the less I want to watch ANY two people kissing, regardless of their sex. I'll make an exception for the very tender type of kiss, as at the end of the film Amelie, when Amelie finally meets the man who she has been trying to track down the whole film.
As for the passionate screen kiss, I just want it to be over as quickly as possible and for the story to continue, exactly as though it were 50 years ago and I was watching the film with my parents.
I seem to recall that what one finds disgusting is one of the things that distinguish liberals from conservative. By this measure I think must be more liberal than Bo. Ugly buildings, for example, I find to be ugly, oppressive even, but not disgusting.
Then there is the problem that we see on the woke left, where any politically incorrect opinion is considered to be disgusting. I will never forget how feminists Nancy Hopkins (I think that was her name) stormed out of the Harvard faculty meeting over Larry Summer's suggestion that there might be differences in genetic variance between men and women that would partly explain the underrepresentation of women in STEM. Hers was a powerful public display. It had real rhetorical force at that point in history.
Personally, I have feelings of sacrilege rather than disgust when I see people violating or otherwise disrespecting the liberal values that I hold most sacred, like those embodied in the US Constitution for example. If I had a thesaurus handy I could probably come up with a bunch of other words signifying moral condemnation. Blasphemy for example, in extreme cases. Evil is even worse, as when I say Islam is an evil force in the world, or, at the very least, in the West.
In general, all emotions, including disgust, are expected to be adaptive. Our cultural environment, however, changed very rapidly over the last ~10 thousand years, and especially over the last few hundred years, so it is expected for some of the emotions to be somewhat maladaptive in the new environment.
That may be the case for disgust as well, although not conspicuously so. One should be very wary, however, of people like Nussbaum, who are quick to construct imaginary conceptions of social order that aren't consistent with human nature and would quickly lead to dysfunction. How is one to interpret this: “Disgust,” she writes, “revolves around a wish to be a type of being that one is not, namely nonanimal and immortal.” That's Judith Butler level stuff. Try to moderate emotions by reason and institutions - yes. Go too far and you are creating another communist utopia.
I completely agree. If some scholar carefully reflected on the potential mismatch between our disgust response and modern society, I'd pay attention and likely find the arguments persuasive. Resorting to quasi-Freudian explanations that we're trying to reject our own bestial natures is not impressive though.
Bo