Issues With "Disgust"

Martha C. Nussbaum has written this brilliant and insightful piece on.. disgust (why sapiens hate their bodies) and that emotion unleashes so much pain and suffering in this world esp., for non-human animals.

In a world that is obsessed with politics to space not too many are aware that disgust is actually an emotion leave alone Darwin to Paul Rozin to Jonathan Haidt have done ground breaking work on this least understood emotion of ours. 

Hating bodies is a form of self-hatred and leads to hatred of others, human and (non-human) animal. Hating what you yourself are is already pointless and makes for unhappiness. But it is worse still when we know that projective disgust is almost certain to follow. Body-haters are bound to find some surrogate for the animal, the bodily, in themselves, whether it be a racial group, a gender or sexual group, or the aging, who come in for a tremendous amount of body-hatred all over the world.

One particularly significant reason to avoid the projective form of body-hatred is the way it has distorted and poisoned our relationship to the other animals. When humans imagine themselves as essentially immaterial, and therefore “above” the animal (whatever that means), it is no surprise if they neglect the profound kinship that human animals have with other animals. And so it has happened. The other animals are thought of as base and disgusting, and the imputation that we have evolved from animal origins meets with inflamed resistance. Our public debates about teaching evolution in the schools — and whether some other fictional non-theory (creationism, intelligent design) may also be taught as an alternative — are often accompanied with expressions of disgusted incredulity that we wonderful humans could really have apes for ancestors.

With the fiction of the incorporeal driving a wedge between us and all other animal species, we can all the more nonchalantly treat them as if they were nothing. Since I think our torture and exploitation of other animals is a great moral evil, I would like to point out that things would almost certainly not have reached the present stage of cruelty and neglect but for our lies about who we are — our erroneous view that we are not their fellows and family members, but some spiritual stuff floating around somewhere, in or with a body but essentially not of it.

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Let us consider other highly intelligent animals. Elephants fear death, and seek to avoid it for self and others, and even, as we now know, grieve the loss of loved ones with rituals of mourning. Mother elephants even sacrifice their lives to protect their young from speeding trains. That is how vividly they see death ahead of them, and how bad they think it is. But they stop short of body-hatred. They do not adopt a distorted attitude to their potentially crumbling frames that leads to projective aggression against other groups of elephants.

Do not say, please, that it is because they are less aware. We are finding out more all the time about their communication systems, their social organization, their capacious and nuanced awareness. But we do not find disgust. That pathology appears to be ours alone. In her beautiful memoir, Coming of Age With Elephants, Joyce Poole, one of our greatest elephant researchers, describes the way in which her human community impeded her “coming of age” as a fulfilled woman and mother. The researcher group was highly misogynistic and racist. They deliberately broke up her happy romance with an African man. When she was raped by a stranger, they treated her as soiled and did nothing to deal with her trauma. In elephant society, by contrast, she observed better paradigms of inclusive friendship, of compassionate and cooperative group care. The memoir ends when she returns to the elephant group after a two-year absence, carrying her infant child in her arms. The matriarchal herd not only recognize her, they understand her new happiness. And they greet her with the ceremony of trumpeting and defecating by which elephants greet the birth of a new elephant child. No body-hatred, no disgust, no projective subordinations.

Are we humans, by contrast, doomed to some type of body-hatred, particularly as we age? There are many reasons to think so. The hatred of aging human bodies by younger humans, so common in American culture, is already a form of self-avoidance, of denial that this is every person’s own future. And as we begin to get there, a trip to the doctor can produce not just ordinary anxiety but a disgust with the whole business of bodies. In the early days of the feminist movement, the book Our Bodies, Ourselves proclaimed women’s proud independence of body-hatred. We will not be told by society that women’s body parts and their fluids are disgusting. We will not be tutored into that self-loathing idea. We will learn to celebrate our fluids, to contemplate them with a speculum, to get to know our female insides. We will learn to give birth without anesthesia, as ourselves, rather than allowing our child to be extracted from us in an unfeeling state by an impatient doctor.