Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 1, Issue 5 , Pages 323-329, September 2005

Disgust

Article Outline

 

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson1

City folks frequently have a romantic, glowing, cross-eyed view of rural life. But growing up on a farm in central Texas, I found plenty to be disgusted by. Farm animals were always getting stuck in birth canals; sickening, dying, and decaying; being castrated and dehorned; and being slaughtered for food. Farm life was not and never has been a pretty sight, and few real farmers have ever considered it otherwise.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is tagging along with my father while he cleaned and medicated an infected wound on a young calf. The sight and smell of the infection overcame me, and I darted behind the barn for a little privacy while I retched as if there were no tomorrow. When the spasm was over, I was as disgusted with myself as with the calf’s suppurating wound. Farm boys were not supposed to have weak stomachs. I was ashamed and felt I’d let my dad down. I resolved it would not happen again, but it was a reaction I simply could not control. It did recur, many times, and each time I was devastated.

Like all kids, I spent a lot of time imagining what I would be when I grew up. I was pretty sure I did not want to be a farmer. But if not a farmer, then what? One of the people I admired most was our country doctor, whom my family revered as part human, part god. This had definite appeal. So I allowed myself to imagine becoming a doctor but dismissed the possibility because of my fatal flaw: my weak stomach. Doctors performed surgical procedures, set bones, and delivered babies, exposing themselves to blood, gore, and unspeakable smells and nastiness. My low threshold for disgust, nausea, and vomiting meant that I could never be a doctor. If someone had told me I would eventually become a physician almost immune to such things, I would have thought him mad.

Two decades later, as a medical student on the obstetrics ward at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, I found myself delivering a baby. From the doctor’s perspective, this is rarely a tidy event but a profound assault on the senses, with blood, urine, and feces often in abundance. After delivering the beautiful baby, I glanced downward and saw a bloody mess on my shoes and the floor. I flipped back in my mind to that childhood barnyard scene where I had been overcome with sensory challenges much milder that this. Something had radically changed, something inexplicable; now I loved it all. I smiled under my surgical mask and offered a silent prayer of thanks.

I didn’t know it growing up, but one of the most valuable emotions we humans possess is disgust—the tendency to recoil from something we consider loathsome and repellent. As this fact is becoming better known, a cadre of specialists called disgustologists is springing up in a new area that bears the provisional name of disgustology.

I wish disgustologists had been around when I was growing up on the farm; I could have used a consultation with one of them. But perhaps it’s just as well that I never met one. They probably would have pathologized my weak stomach and given me pills to fix it, when, in fact, it was a great natural gift.

Novelist Joseph Conrad suggested that disgust can be overridden in situations such as extreme hunger, in which we will eat anything available, no matter how unappetizing or revolting, perhaps even each other, to stay alive. In Heart of Darkness, he wrote, “No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.”2 Perhaps Conrad is correct where near starvation is concerned. Yet the growing respectability of disgust in medicine is based on the evidence that it is a physiological constant that cannot be easily suppressed. It has so much survival value, the thinking goes, that it has become ingrained in us and is part of our genetic endowment.

The reasons are straightforward. People with the capacity to be disgusted are more likely to shun food that is rotten, contaminated, or diseased, which can kill if ingested. Individuals who experience disgust on encountering lethal snakes, spiders, and other dangerous creatures also tend to avoid these threats. Thus the trait for disgust favors the survival of the person possessing it. This enhances the likelihood that this capacity became incorporated in their genes and was transmitted to future generations. Somewhere, way back, I must have had ancestors who were capable of being very disgusted.

Disgust is actually a short cut. When we eat food that is contaminated with, say, staphylococci, we may experience the profound nausea and vomiting associated with staph food poisoning. This is the body’s way of ejecting what is not healthy. Another mechanism is diarrhea, through which the body rids itself of poison in the other direction. But if we have a visual aversion to contaminated food, we won’t eat it; we turn up our nose and walk away and do not experience the throes of vomiting or diarrhea. In my own case, however, not only did I walk away from the calf’s wound in disgust, I threw up in addition. My capacity for revulsion seemed a little too evolved. Nothing halfway, I say.

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Disgust and change 

Public health campaigners are beginning to realize that disgust is one of their most effective allies in getting people to trade in bad health habits for better ones. Health promotion relies heavily on the assumption that people make rational choices about their health, a view rooted in 20th century cognitive psychology. Confront them with the statistics that cigarette smoking leads to cancer and heart and lung disease, and they’ll give up the habit. But as anyone who has tried to stop smoking realizes, it’s not that easy.

Valerie Curtis,3 director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has reviewed the success rates of programs based in rational persuasion and finds them lacking, whether in underdeveloped countries in which the goal is to reduce the ravages of AIDS, malaria, and diarrhea or in developed nations in which the intentions are to increase exercise, give up fatty food, reduce obesity, stop smoking, decrease alcohol consumption, or reduce unintended pregnancies. The reason for failure, she suggests, is that we have been focusing on the wrong strategy. People, by and large, don’t make health decisions rationally, they do so emotionally. Thus she says, “To break unhealthy habits, campaigners need to target the emotions, because they are the decision makers. Where the heart leads, the habits will follow.”

One of the most widely disseminated health messages in Third World countries is to wash one’s hands with soap and water after using the toilet. Diarrheal disease and respiratory illnesses are the major child killers around the world, and the pathogens are carried on people’s hands. If people washed, more than a million young lives could be saved each year. But despite this information, fewer than 10% of mothers in developing countries do this, “and mothers in developed countries are not much better,” Curtis states. She has demonstrated that if people are motivated to do so at a deeper emotional level—“by disgust, or by the desire to conform to social norms and be respected by others, or to nurture and care for their offspring,” they are much more likely to wash their hands. In Ghana, women failed to comply with hand washing because they could not actually perceive the contamination and microbes, so the task of the public health workers was to help them imagine the “yucky stuff [and] make [them] feel disgust …” They did this by creating a television ad showing a mother inadvertently contaminating her child’s food via her hands after using the toilet. After viewing it, 58% of mothers took up hand washing.

In the United Kingdom, stop-smoking programs have employed the same approach. In the successful “give-up-before-you-clog-up” campaign, a cigarette is depicted oozing obnoxious fat. Curtis suggests that weight-loss programs would benefit from the same strategy. Instead of trying to persuade people rationally to lose weight, a better way might be to generate revulsion in obese individuals about themselves, then follow up with a vanity-based reward, such as suggesting how much more appealing they would be to others if they were not fat.

It’s hard to argue against the success of some of these emotionally based programs, yet many people object. We cherish the belief that we’re rational creatures who will choose logically what’s best for us and our offspring: thus the appeal of “just say no.” Moreover, many think it’s wrong to cause people to think poorly of themselves; we should be increasing self-esteem, not sabotaging it. Curtis suggests, however, that it’s time to acknowledge the advances in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology pointing to the brain’s role in behavioral change. As she puts it, “[These findings] demonstrate that our decision making is driven predominantly not by rationality but by emotions, which are seated in our mammalian brain.” This evidence compels us to put our reservations aside and go for the “emotional jugular.”

Simply urging people to do the right thing does not work well in creating behavioral changes. This is particularly true of “abstinence only” education programs for avoiding teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, in spite of the fact that they are advocated currently by President George W. Bush. During his tenure as governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000, when abstinence-only programs were in place, Texas ranked last in the nation in the decline of teen birth rates among 15- to 17-year-old females, and the overall teen pregnancy rate in Texas was exceeded by only four other states.4

Information-based programs aren’t much better. Although they are advocated by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, comprehensive sex education programs that encourage abstinence while providing adolescents with information on how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases, a recent systematic analysis found that, far from reducing unwanted pregnancies, information-based abstinence programs actually “may increase pregnancies in partners of male participants.”5

Perhaps it’s time to take seriously Curtis’s advice to anchor these programs in the brain’s emotional centers by appealing to disgust. But how?

One idea that never fails to elicit disgust in our Puritanic society is sin. People are repelled by it and fear being punished because of it. The facts: 84% of American adults believe in sin; 80% believe in a judgment day; 68% believe in “the devil”; and 50% believe in hell.6, 7, 8 One way of getting Americans to abandon bad health habits, therefore, may be to represent them as moral failings or as a violation of religious belief—the disgust angle—and link them with the dread of being punished by God—the fear factor. Because the capacity for both disgust and fear are lodged in the emotional brain, this would seem to be a double motivator.

But it isn’t so simple. A survey at Columbia University of mainly religious teenage females who took a virginity pledge reveals that 88% have had sex before marriage, and there is no good evidence that these efforts reduce sexually transmitted diseases.9 These and other religious-based programs may fall victim to the law of unintended consequences. Cynthia Dailard, a senior public policy analyst for the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a population control advocacy organization, suggests that teens who take a virginity pledge and hear an abstinence message are less likely to use contraception. “It’s hard to keep a condom in your pocket when you’ve promised not to have sex,” she says.9 But advocates are undeterred. Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the Department of Health and Human Services, is defiant of the naysayers and scoffs at even the idea of data. “I don’t need a study,” he says, “to show me that the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease is abstinence.”9 Horn, who is called the president’s “chastity czar,” is the chief of the federal program to promote sexual abstinence. He says he wants to make it socially acceptable for American teens to just say no to sex. If past programs are any guide, he has his work cut out for him.

Protestant churches often run substance abuse programs. Some are said to be highly successful, but only a few have been thoroughly evaluated.10 Even in those that have been, researchers were unable to ascertain whether religious beliefs caused the changed behaviors or whether other mediators such as social support were the key.11 Disgust plus fear, anchored in religion, awaits proof of efficacy.

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Unhealthy disgust 

Although disgust can be lifesaving when it operates reflexively at the biological level, it can spill over into social and political domains and wreak havoc. There is a thin line between healthy disgust, such as turning away from contaminated food, and disgust toward a person who is a different color or who holds different beliefs. In fact, we are in danger of being swamped nationally by a rising tide of unhealthy disgust—political conservatives disgusted by liberals and vice versa, straights disgusted by gays, developers and industrialists by environmentalists, the list goes on. Often there seems to be no middle ground. Have our genes for disgust gone rogue?

Some biologists favor a genetic basis for racial prejudice. Imagine what things were like in Paleolithic times, when nomadic bands of 20 to 30 individuals roved continually in search of food. If you were hunting and encountered someone of a different band that had strayed into your territory—someone of a different color, say—you probably would either kill them or run away, says Jared Diamond, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.12 Those who defended their territory against “the other” had more to eat and were therefore better survivors and more successful breeders, meaning that the trait for aggressive defensiveness would likely have been internalized genetically and passed to succeeding generations.13 Is that why we seem predisposed today to dislike those who are different from us?

Not so fast, says Robert Kurzban, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “These different groups of early humans almost never came into contact with one another,” he says, “so there would be little opportunity to evolve a classification system that grouped people by race.” Africa, from where we originated, was a big place—so expansive that people may never have encountered those of a different race during their lives, which in any case were short, around 20 years or less. Thus Kurzban says, “In prehistoric times, even our enemies looked like us. There was no evolutionary pressure for brains to instantly classify people into ‘members of my race’ and ‘the enemy.’”14

Where, then, does the pesky tendency to be disgusted by “the other” come from? According to Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at MIT and author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,15, 16 a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, we largely learn it. Our parents train it into us, and we train it into our children, on down the line. Imagine a child crawling toward the poisonous household cleaner container under the sink.16 The mother notices and screams “No!” and makes a disgusting face at the same time. Eventually, the child learns to share her mom’s attitude toward household cleaner. Shift the scene to blacks—or Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, foreigners, pagans, or any variety of “the other” you can think of—and you have the key, suggests Pinker, to the origins of disgust, bigotry, prejudice, and hatred. The underlying reason is not that we carry genes for racial intolerance or other specific forms of disgust, but, because our brains, by virtue of their plasticity, are capable of being shaped in a variety of directions. We are, in short, good learners.

Equipped with this insight, the questions become: What shall we choose to learn? To what influences shall we expose ourselves? We have little choice as children; we don’t pick our parents or our backgrounds. But in later life, especially in this age of the Internet and on-line education, what we learn becomes largely optional. We can train ourselves into or out of certain things, fostering or reversing attitudes and habits.

Today more people than ever before are keenly sensitive to what they expose themselves. I have friends who choose to turn off their television for days, weeks, or months at a time to escape the incessant blather that passes for entertainment and news. Some engage in a periodic “media fast,” foregoing any exposure to newspapers, radio, and TV. I have considered doing so myself, but I am such a news junkie I fear going into a news-withdrawal syndrome from which I might not recover. Other friends clear the slate periodically by retreating to meditation centers to live in almost total silence for a week or more.

Barbara, my wife, and I have engaged in a slate-clearing, disgustolytic, healing ritual for years that has become an essential part of our lives. Each summer, we retreat to an area somewhere in the Rocky Mountains along North America’s handsome spine, the Continental Divide. For up to three weeks, we live in a thin tent in the wilderness in intimate contact with nature. Cut off from phone, fax, e-mail, pager, cell phone, and other communication with the outside world, we discover that sounds, tastes, touches, smells, and colors become more vivid. Creative ideas appear unbidden. Dreams change. Notes are taken and books outlined. As categories and boundaries shift, wild creatures and even inanimate objects speak to us and we to them. Conversations with rocks, trees, and trout become so commonplace they are not remarked upon. Mountains, skies, stars, sunsets, lakes, glaciers, and weather become, like skin, mediators of our existence. All our experiences seem so natural, so perfectly appropriate, that it feels wrong to pass judgment on them. As life becomes more intense, our customary dislikes fall away—disgustolysis, you might say—as our hearts open to what really matters. We emerge energized, fortified, more aware—and, I believe, more tolerant.

In some Buddhist traditions, deliberate exposure to loathsome situations is considered a good thing. Buddhist novices are sometimes instructed to visit graveyards and charnel grounds to expose themselves for long periods to rotting corpses. Transcending one’s revulsions is believed to be a way of overcoming egoistic attachments and attaining spiritual understanding. There is an esoteric Japanese deity, Fudo Myo-o, whose likenesses date back to the 12th century and whose statues were sometimes placed next to bathrooms in Buddhist temples. Fudo is often confused with Ususama, another Buddhist deity who was considered a devourer of stinking matter. Both apparently represent the ideal of having overcome the repugnance that we humans are heir to.17

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The attractions of disgust 

Although few people admit that they are attracted by loathsome things, evidence suggests that the more disgusting a report is, the more likely it will fascinate and captivate us. An example is the dissemination of fables, myths, and rumors—urban legends—on the Internet. The more repulsive they are, the more likely they are to gain traction and to circulate.

In his important book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Ralph Keyes says, “Old urban legends have been given new life in this medium: alligators in sewers, rats in soda bottles, cat food mislabeled as tuna… . Disgust proved particularly potent in promoting the dissemination of reports that licking secretions on the skin of a certain kind of toad could get you high, say, or that Marilyn Manson threw some puppies into the audience at a concert, then said he would only start performing after they were killed.”18

Because disgust immunizes urban legends from scrutiny and increases their longevity, the lesson seems to be that if you’re going to lie on the Internet, lie big and be repulsive while you’re at it. The loathsome whopper is bound to endure.

This suggests that disgusting reports are really not repellent at all. At some level of the psyche, we enjoy being disgusted—disgustophilia, we might call it—denying it all the while. We are like teenagers who delight in being scared witless in horror movies, insisting that they hate being terrified.

A catalogue of disgusting urban legends has been assembled by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson on their Web site www.snopes.com. They range from cannibalism (“roast fetus is the latest gourmet food in Taiwan”) to rogue insects (“venomous spiders lurk beneath toilet seats in public restrooms”) to traffic tragedies (“teen dies in car crash with a plastic Jesus dashboard ornament embedded in her chest”). Many of these myths circulate year after year, defying extinction even after they have been debunked.

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Disgust of the other 

We should never forget that the collective opprobrium of the average man led to the Church’s torture and burning of heretics and witches during the Inquisition. “Kill them all. God will know his own,” said Arnaud-Armaury, the abbot of Citeaux, advising the French anti-Cathar crusaders of the early 13th century. The crusaders—a word referring to the Christian cross—were confused about how to distinguish the heretics from the Catholic faithful. Acting on the abbot’s advice, which reflected their own disgust as average soldiers and average men, they slaughtered over 20,000 people, nearly everyone in town, to get to the reported 200 Cathar heretics—a 100-fold error rate.

The average person’s contempt for indigenous peoples also resulted in the wholesale slaughter of “pagan” Native Americans throughout North and South America following Columbus and the complete extermination of many tribes such as the native inhabitants of the Caribbean islands. This scene was repeated elsewhere in places such as Tasmania, where, as in Arizona and California, natives were bounty hunted like animals by white men. But not just whites, of course. In 1937-1938, according to some sources, it took an invading Japanese army only two weeks—they must have worked at it—to massacre 300,000 Chinese in what came to be known as the Rape of Nanking. Following the pullout of the British from India in 1947, average Hindus and Muslims fell on each other with such a vengeful death grip that they did not disengage until the body count reached one million. The average man’s disgust paved the way for the laws enacted by Nazi Germany that sanctioned the slaughter of six million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, prostitutes, and homosexuals from 1941 through May 1945. In 1994, the hatred lodged in the heart of the average Hutu in Rwanda led to the slaughter of roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. And average, everyday Christians, who no doubt loved their wives and children but who were also inspired by Slobodan Milosevic, engaged in the “ethnic cleansing”—one of the most despicable phrases in the history of language—of thousands of Muslims, who also loved their families, managing to slaughter 7,000 men and boys in the city of Srebrenica alone in July 1995.

In a society as puritanical as ours, there is always the possibility that disgust will join hands with piety and get the upper hand. When this happens, one invariably hears talk of morality, values, and God’s will, even while criminal acts are being committed. Members of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South were very religious and keen on values, and they had no difficulty anchoring their actions, including lynchings, in biblical sanctions. John Shelby Spong, a former Episcopal bishop, in his book The Sins of Scripture, catalogs how the biblical messages of love and charity have been used throughout history to justify slavery and mass murder and to oppose women’s rights and democracy. Spong’s mission, he says, is “to force the Christian Church to face its own terrifying history that so often has been justified by quotations from ‘the Scriptures.’”19

Disgust continues to keep close company with religion and “family values” but, also, ominously, with patriotism. On the Christian television program The 700 Club shortly after 9/11, the Reverend Jerry Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”20 The Reverend Pat Robertson, the host of the program, seemed not only to agree with Falwell’s indictment but extended the disgust they shared. He prayed, “We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government, we’ve stuck our finger in your eye… . The Supreme Court has insulted you over and over again, Lord. They’ve taken your Bible away from the schools. They’ve forbidden little children to pray. They’ve taken the knowledge of God as best they can, and organizations have come into court to take the knowledge of God out of the public square of America.”21

Most Americans, bless ‘em, considered this a low blow. The Reverend Falwell received so much criticism that, in a rare gesture, he apologized a few days later. He was only temporarily cowed, however. On the television show 60 Minutes in October 2002, he rebounded and declared the prophet Muhammed a terrorist.22 Ann Coulter, the columnist and media personality, was disgusted by Muslims in general. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, she said, as if in precognitive awareness of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.”23 The Reverend Franklin Graham, son and successor of the Reverend Billy Graham, seemed to agree with Coulter, saying of Islam, “I believe it’s a very evil and wicked religion.”24 The Reverend Jerry Vines, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared that the Prophet Muhammed was “a demon-obsessed pedophile.”25 He stirred others to action, such as an anonymous contributor to an Internet discussion site, who wrote in March 2003, “There is no pedophile but Muhammed and Allah is his imagination.”26 Comments such as these helped ignite a firestorm of hatred that burned for months, including several murders. What makes this hate talk so sinister is that it is marinated not just in piety but also in patriotism. If you don’t share these revulsions, you are liable to be classified as an unpatriotic American who is aiding terrorism.

Disgust, religious zeal, and patriotism are a volatile mixture. They helped fuel young America’s long march westward, which was believed to be our “manifest destiny,” a term coined by New York journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845. Manifest destiny was considered a divine mandate for Americans to spread to the Pacific shores. Those who got in the way were at grave risk. And people did get in the way because they lived in the way, as they had been doing for millennia.

Disgust toward Native Americans, justified by pious talk by pious people, helped set in motion the infamous Sand Creek massacre of 1864 in Colorado. It was led by the deeply religious Major John M. Chivington, whose capacity for revulsion proved Olympian. Chivington didn’t start out that way. He was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1844 and had a distinguished career on the frontier establishing congregations, supervising the erection of churches, and serving as a missionary for a spell to the Wyandot Indians in Kansas. In 1860, the Methodist Church assigned him to the small frontier town of Denver. During the Civil War that followed, he emerged as a hero at the battle of Glorietta Pass in New Mexico, at which Union soldiers defeated the Confederates in a closely fought contest. Back in Colorado, his dislike of Indians escalated to an obsession. In September 1864, while addressing a group of church deacons, he declared that treaties with the Cheyenne were impossible because they could not understand and obey them. “I am fully satisfied, gentlemen,” he told his devout colleagues, “that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado.” Two months later, he fulfilled his genocidal impulse. In the gray, early morning of 29 November, he led a regiment of Colorado volunteers to the Sand Creek reservation at which Black Kettle’s band of Cheyenne were peacefully encamped. Black Kettle had been promised safety in return for going onto the reservation and, at the time of the attack, was flying an American flag and a white banner of truce from his lodge. In spite of this, Chivington and his men slaughtered between 200 and 400 Cheyenne, mostly women and children, which proved to be the pattern in other army-led dawn ambushes that followed in the next few years.27 Following the massacre, the volunteers sexually mutilated and scalped many bodies and exhibited their trophies to the cheers of adoring crowds back in Denver.28

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the courageous French journalist, author, and cofounder of International Action Against Hunger, has reported for years from wars around the world. In his book War, Evil, and the End of History, he describes the schizophrenic alternation of religious devotion with atrocity during war and how people can be filled with decency one moment and barbaric disgust the next. While reporting on the civil war in Burundi in Central Africa (next door to genocidal Rwanda), which has raged since 1993 and has resulted in 300,000 deaths, he was faced with obtaining transportation in traveling about the country. He found that drivers insisted on traveling on Saturdays. “Why on Saturday? Because the ‘genocidal attackers,’ the Hutus of the National Liberation Front (FNL), the images of whose abominable crimes the entire country keeps replaying over and over again—that priest whom they forced to eat his own penis before they crucified him … those babies buried alive … those children impaled, sprinkled with gas and burned, in their school, by the principal himself …—are also excellent Christians, generally of the Adventist persuasion, who don’t smoke, don’t drink, arrive in the villages singing hymns at the top of their voices, and they consider Saturday a sacred day, devoted to prayer, on which one must above all not shed blood… . Saturday, all day, … [is] the day of rest for the ‘genocidal attackers.’”29

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Disgust in science 

Science, too, has seen its share of disgust. Scientists have loathed one another for a very long time. Infighting has been a theme since the inception of science, such as the legendary spat between Newton and Leibniz over who invented the calculus. Most fusses in science are not of this magnitude, however. Often the issues contested seem trivial to outsiders. As one wag put it, “The fights in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” Some classic disputes between scientists are vividly related by science writer Hal Hellman in his books Great Feuds in Science and Great Feuds in Medicine.30, 31 As Hellman reveals, great advances in science and medicine are guaranteed to offend someone, somewhere. As the beleaguered, 19th century histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal said in his Recollections of My Life, “Who does not know that every scientific accomplishment dislodges some deeply rooted error and that behind it is usually concealed injured pride, if not enraged interest?”32

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Disgust and America 

We Americans, of all people, should be willing to put the brakes on our reflexive repugnance toward others. Consider, as a single example, the demand by francophobic patriots to rename French fries “freedom fries” following our disagreements with France after September 11. How dare the French oppose our policies! Why, if it were not for our interventions in two world wars, the French would be speaking German! Are we so forgetful of our own history? Have we forgotten that French troops were about as numerous as our own on the Yorktown battlefield in 1781, that the French fleet was anchored offshore to prevent the evacuation of the British, and that, without France, General Washington would probably not have prevailed, in which case we might not now be trumpeting American policy and freedom fries? The final battle of the American Revolution was a Franco-American victory, received in gratitude by a weak, vulnerable, yet-to-be nation.33 Can we not pause, recalibrate, and give a grateful nod to our French allies and, if it makes us feel better, continue privately to drown our French fries with American ketchup—although we should recall that even our ketchup did not originate here because the tomato was a contribution of the indigenous tribes south of our border?34

Our country was founded by cranks and misfits who disgusted the average man in their mother country before immigrating here. I will be disappointed if you cannot tell that I am a proud descendent of these unbearable complainers, whose legacy I am doing my damnedest to uphold. I know I speak for millions of Americans who continue to take pride in our robust individuality, which is just a fancy word for eccentricity and difference.

The pervasiveness of individuality in our country means inevitably that we Americans are destined to spend a fair amount of time being disgusted by one another. Fortunately, this is a situation with which most of us learn to live gracefully, converting it alchemically into that strange beast we call the democratic process. But not always, which means that there is a fair chance that some of my views may disgust you. Because confession is good for the soul, I admit up front that I am an overbearing, intolerable American. Moreover, I’m a Texan, a proud son of the Alamo, which compounds things—because the average Texan is even more insufferable than the average American, if such a thing is possible. Nicolas Chamfort, the 18th century Frenchman famous for his epigrams, said, “A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over.”35 A learned European friend of mine, who introduced me to Chamfort’s maxim, suggests that, if we run out of toads, Texans will make a proper, inexhaustible substitute. Although I assured him I am striving for greater awareness of this Texan-American shortcoming, it is an uphill battle. I am discovering that my abrasiveness is written into my stem cells and is not easily modified. Insufferable is simply what I frequently am, may the devil take the hindmost and etch my shortcomings on my tombstone—but doggone it, there I go again. However, things aren’t hopeless. I believe in miracles, including the possibility that I can change. (Psst: I’m holding back. I secretly hope I can combine compassion, forbearance, and tolerance with my Texan-American heritage.)

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The future 

As the world’s population continues to mushroom, people everywhere are being thrust into closer proximity, and we are getting on each other’s nerves. The problem is compounded by massive population shifts as millions of people immigrate in search of a better life, often to countries in which they are not welcome. As a consequence of the uniting power of television and the Internet, we are being crammed together not only physically but also psychologically. In our increasingly constricted personal space, we can no longer escape one another. It is a recipe for trouble. Unable to find solitude in daily life, our irritations have escalated as our differences have become magnified. We now speak of red states and blue states, as if these were gated communities bent on keeping out the undesirables. True, there are those who celebrate diversity and variety, but their voices are often drowned by those championing an isolationist, us-against-them posture. International misunderstandings are now frequent, even between longstanding friends and allies. Ancient ethnic passions that have long been dormant are being rekindled. Rhetoric is inflamed, such as the current reckless talk of crusades, jihads, and evil foreigners. Tempers are flaring, not just between individuals but between nations as well, flavored on every side by religious narrowness and ideological certainty.

We face a crisis of tolerance in our world. Our capacity for disgust may have served us well in our evolutionary history, as we have seen, but when disgust morphs into intolerance for the other, it ceases to be our friend. Our instinctive reaction, of course, is to project intolerance and prejudice to others, to assign it to cultures, religions, and nations other than own. This is a dangerous game. We need to see ourselves as others see us. Each of us is offensive to someone. As Robert Louis Stevenson observed during his sojourn in the cultures of the South Seas, “Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, … yet we ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and the vegetarian.”36

Can we cultivate compassion for the other, for those we consider intolerable? Can we acknowledge ourselves as a source of other people’s irritations? Let us consider our responses carefully, for on them the fate of our civilization may depend.

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PII: S1550-8307(05)00293-4

doi:10.1016/j.explore.2005.06.001

Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 1, Issue 5 , Pages 323-329, September 2005

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