The Dangers of Disgust - Hegemony, Disgust, and Social Exclusion

To manifest the unimaginable, Nazi propagandists infused various media with images and with messages designed to associate Jews with bacilli, and to categorize Jews as vermin, intending that the presence or to the image of a Jewish person might trigger the same disgust response most persons experience encountering visual images (or graphic accounts) of swarming bacilli and vermin. The success of this association made possible the concentration camps and their hellish, murderous environments, for Jews became classified as diseased and unwholesome, as subhuman entities whose extermination was not only made excusable by degradation to the subhuman, but thought essential for preservation of the health of the larger, non-Jewish German population. Good health depends on purgation of what is diseased, and continuance of health requires separation from whatever is in a (contagious) diseased state, or whatever is poisonous to the body, and the disgust response evolved to ensure avoidance of what is diseased or infected and therefore corrupting of wellbeing.

As though human nature is a malleable material, many people thought – or hoped – that the horrors of the Holocaust were so shocking that human nature had been forced to a profound and an enduring transformation, and that henceforth the unthinkable was removed as a possibility; never again would genocide be tolerated, with such barbarities being an unfortunate reality of the past, but an unthinkable possibility for the future. Through its repeated utterance, the empty slogan ‘never again’ was accepted as self-evident truth, but human nature remained as it has always been, and the barbarities of the Rwanda genocide were facilitated by targeted propaganda, with Tutsi tribe members being labeled as cockroaches, and what does one do with such vile things? Exterminate them. One does not desire peaceful coexistence with cockroaches in one’s own home.

The human disgust response in itself is nothing immoral, and indeed is vital to wellbeing, but as with almost any human capacity, this trait can be motivated for malicious ends. Our disgust response of course is adaptive, for health and longevity, requisite for gene propagation, are aided by avoidance of harmful substances, and hence nature endowed humans with a sensitive disgust response that we may usefully avoid various substances and situations that threaten good health. The disgust response varies within individuals, and therefore individuals are not uniform in their disgust responses, but typically we are  disgusted by what has turned rancid and noxious, and the response of many if not most individuals to an incidence of incest is disgust. Nature did not require scientists to inform her of the potential deleterious consequences of reproduction amongst close kin, and nature instructs us that the consumption of spoiled substances can prove quite harmful indeed.

The disgust response is protective, its purpose to exclude, and therefore the disgust response tends to establish an insulating bubble around the individual or the group, to segregate, to distance the healthy or those assumed healthy from whatever is unwholesome or whatever is stigmatized as such. The danger, then, arises when a government or a government agency, desiring to restrict or to encourage particular behaviors, crafts messages and policies designed to persuade some substantial portion of the population that those declining to conform to whatever rules, restrictions, or compelled behavior the government promulgates as necessary or at least advantageous, are contagious hosts of virulent diseases and a threat to the health of the compliant. The tacit assumption here is that the compliant are free of disease. Hence the disgust response is worked upon intentionally, to encourage degradation of all members of the disobedient group. Human beings are highly susceptible to in-group/out-group dynamics, with members of one’s own group thought superior, including morally superior, to members outside of the group, and one is primed to judge outsiders as corrupted, not just morally but physically as well.

That the disgust response can serve the aims of political powers and dominant classes in establishing and in maintaining a desired hierarchy, through facilitating a stratification and segmentation of society needed to manifest that hierarchy, is given ample evidence by the existence of caste systems, such as in India. The ‘untouchables’ were held as such due to their assigned place in the social hierarchy, which in fact was no place at all, so degraded were they considered, with the disrespect and the ostracization of these poor souls not based on any innate characteristics of cognitive capacities or physical limitations. Their position at the lowest level of society, or even outside or beneath society, required that they must perform the most degrading of labor in order to survive, and by their need to perform this debasing labor their position was cemented. Hence their optionless need to perform the only labor available to them if they were to eat ensured that they remained socially excluded. So subhuman were the untouchables deemed, they were thought outside of the caste system. The upper classes believed that they could be contaminated by a mere brushing against an untouchable. Here, the human disgust response, so useful in many ways, was exploited by hegemonic powers to maintain social injustices, with the social injustices necessary for continuance of the hierarchy.

The practice of untouchability was outlawed in 1950, but human nature is less tractable than the law, and consequently widespread discrimination within a caste system endures, with 160 million or so persons still deemed tainted at birth due to their being born to members of the lowest social stratum (the Dalits), and by this membership being classified as impure. The Dalits routinely are treated abominably, and rarely can the Dalits find justice or any form of compensation through the legal system, for the law supports this discrimination. Dominant caste members frequently assault, and sometimes even murder, Dalits, and do so with the expectation of impunity, an expectation that rarely is frustrated.

The root of the word humiliation is humus, a Latin word for dirt. Hence there are associations between dirt and being, socially, in a debased state. The concepts of disgust, shame, and humiliation all have this common thread of debasement and lowliness, of something to be banished from sight, to be scrubbed out of existence. Health demands no less, and if a particular group can be associated with uncleanness, with disease and contamination threat, then by this manipulation of the disgust response this group can be scorned, condemned, isolated, expelled, or even exterminated. Justification for this treatment is presented as necessary for the public good, and therefore as reasonable and rational, but never was there any valid justification for condemning Jews as a defiling infestation of ‘sound’ German stock, nor can any sane case be offered that the Tutsi were in any way equivalent to cockroaches. Derogatory representations of Jewish persons and members of the Tutsi tribe were intended to offend the viewer, to thereby provoke revulsion and disgust. Clearly, the intent was to conjure a sense of shame for being Jewish or being a Tutsi through associating members of these groups with what is repulsive and disgusting, for once this association is successful these groups can be diminished to a class of the subhuman, thereby justifying their exclusion and mistreatment.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written well and widely on issues of shame, disgust, and humiliation, and as she asserts, shame and disgust are necessarily hierarchical, and that indeed, absent a hierarchical structure, shame and the associations with disgust that can accompany being in a shamed state are not supported. She holds that vulnerability to the state of shame is almost always correlated to socioeconomic status, and for confirmation of this claim, one need only consider how shameless often are the wealthy and the well-positioned, for in such individuals the emotion of shame is difficult to induce. Going in the other direction, the upper classes routinely and effectively induce shame in those of a lower socioeconomic class than themselves, and habitually exhibit disgust response behaviors towards members of a class they deem of a lower status than themselves.

The disgust reaction evolved initially to ensure avoidance of placing into one’s mouth anything rancid, putrid, or otherwise noxious in any way, but this reaction proved too useful to be contained, and concepts of dignity and of status required for their full development incorporation of expressions of contempt and disgust into social intercourse, that thereby rank and distinction may be established and maintained. Disgust is a common reaction towards those one deems one’s inferiors. Hence, shame and disgust are employed to establish, to define, and to perpetuate class distinctions that serve to justify the oppressions and the injustices perpetrated by a dominant class over lower classes. The sanitation worker will willingly, and without any evocation of a sense of disgust, don the coat of a rich person, but the rich person would not willingly don the coat of the sanitation worker, even though the sanitation worker’s garment may be the cleaner of the two vestments.

The disgust reaction is universal, yet it supports social disunity. In asserting, by word and by deed, that certain activities and the people who engage in them are ‘disgusting’ and hence worthy of distain and exclusion, the ones demonstrating the distain thereby establish themselves as above those upon whom they pour their contempt. Evidence of the disgust reaction serving to solidify hierarchy and social stratification is amply provided by the incident of some years ago of a member of the United States Congress stating that he desired that tourists not be allowed admittance into the Capital because they were of an offensive smell. One has little doubt that the politician so willing to publicly proclaim his disgust for members of the general public is of lower moral status than many of those he deems rabble, and surely no less prone to emitting offensive smells, but it was his social-political position and not the facts of the matter that motivated this demeaning utterance.

Though this politician was criticized for his comments, he suffered no consequences politically, and he himself was not degraded by his dismissive attitude and derogatory words, for he gave expression to nothing more than what has been practiced for millennia: the attempted or the actual stigmatization of others not because these others warrant such treatment but because this practice establishes and sustains dominance. The stigmatized are diminished socially and are vulnerable to exclusion, and in possessing and expressing such sentiments as distain, scorn, or contempt one feels superior, and feeling superior is ever a potent temptation. Humans always organize themselves into a hierarchy, and the higher in the hierarchy the more superior one believes oneself, and the lower in the hierarchy, the more one is likely to encounter scornful treatment. Humans tend to be disposed towards others on the basis of in-group versus out-group dynamics, and expressions of exclusion towards members of the out-group are assumed necessary to preclude contamination of the ingroup by the outgroup. By a disgust reaction, overt or disguised, stigmatization is attached to members of the outgroup, and thus members of the outgroup are intended to feel shame so that they may, by their disgusting actions, thoughts, appearance, or whatever, be propelled downward and justly excluded from acceptable, sanctified society.

In the psychological and sociological literature there is some effort at distinguishing shame from stigma, but the distinctions are not persuasive, and stigma and shame are conjoined such that one who is shamed is one who is stigmatized, and one who is stigmatized is one who is shamed. The term stigma has various meanings and applications, such as in real estate when a property is identified as suffering a stigma due to a present or a past issue with contamination, and here, of course, no element of shame is intended in this use of the term. Yet were one to inhabit a location deemed contaminated, and not necessarily physically contaminated, then the potential for stigmatization and shame is present. Additionally, the term stigmata has religious and other symbolic applications, referring to physical manifestations that may, but not necessarily so, involve an element of shame. These exceptions notwithstanding, in the context of shame considerations, there is the inescapable aura of stigma. 

One of the best-known works on stigma is Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, and in this work Erving Goffman writes:

             “The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to                                          refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral                                            status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised
              that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor – a blemished person, ritually
              polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places” (1963, 1).

Signs are no longer burned into the flesh of those deemed worthy of branding, nor are individuals obligated as a condemnation of transgression to wear a scarlet A on their person, but modern society has its signifiers of inclusion and of exclusion, the compelled use of facial masks prevalent in the recent pandemic, and the shaming and the exclusion of those who refused their use, being but one example.
The criminal justice system has, to varying degrees over time, employed shaming punishments, doing so to impose a publicized identification of offense on the part of the offender, that all may know of her diminished (moral) status. The shaming punishment may involve the display of a sign on one’s person or on one’s property, a public utterance of some sort, or engagement in a demeaning ritual. Irrespective of the means, the intent is the same, namely, to identify the individual as having committed some act or failed to have abided by some favored practice, with the consequence that the individual is diminished in standing, and consequently can be excluded. Exclusion is the first and necessary step to condemnation and to eventual elimination.

Most people know that perfect justice is unattainable, but the desire that justice be as even and as widely distributed as possible is common, and most people wish to live in a society that values justice over one wherein injustice prevails. Research suggests that an understanding of the concept of justice may be built into the human psyche, for very young children, even infants, appear to exhibit responds that signal that the child is sensitive to matters of justice and of injustice, or at least what the child judges as such. Whatever innate tendencies humans may have concerning a sense of justice, in practice, justice, as is said of beauty, may reside in the eye of the beholder, and what one person or one particular group judges as just may be judged unjust by another person or another group. Yet however disparate particular judgments may be, human beings do seem to assign great value to justice, and often deem objectionable, even intolerable, instances of injustice, but what often goes unrecognized and even more often unacknowledged is that such judgments are influenced if not largely determined by the values of one’s particular social group, and thus may represent social rather than ethical distinctions. Therefore one might reasonably assume that most persons – assigning so high a value to justice – would be alert to, and would seek to resist, attitudes and modes of social behavior that encourage the sort of stigmatization, shaming, and disgust responses that perpetuate and expand the hegemony rather than encourage equitable treatment.
​
The facts of human history, and of human nature, confirm the error of that assumption. Given the power of the disgust response to be exploited to unjust purposes, we should ever be vigilant against all attempts to manipulate our disgust response, particularly so if that manipulation is made with the intent to condition us to demean and to exclude others. Our vigilance against and our opposition to that manipulation must be unwavering when the effort at manipulation is made by authorities, governmental or otherwise, sending messages overt or suggestive that persons who do not comply with whatever restriction or mandate imposed by that authority are as a consequence of noncompliance disgusting beings corrupting of public health and welfare.