On disgust

This post being a record of the hare started by reading the article at reference 1 about why most of us spend so much time engaged with people who are not real, that is to say with people in stories, with people on television or in films. After a few days, this led to the book by one Paul Bloom at reference 2. And from reading his chapter 6, I became fascinated by the strong feeling called disgust and what Bloom calls the body and soul emotion. A subject which has fascinated plenty before me and which has generated a considerable literature - but a subject where one needs to tread with care; to discuss disgust without evoking disgust.

Literature to which Darwin’s study of the expression of emotions provides a handy starting point, a book which I had started to read in connection with another hare, this one started by going to a talk by given by the primatologist Frans de Waal at the Royal Institution in the middle of 2019 and noticed at reference 4. With one of the things Darwin reported being the disgust evinced by a native of Tierra del Fuego on his eating some preserved meat, possibly something like our corned beef or what Agatha Christie calls potted meat. As it happens, once a source of the sometimes fatal disease botulism, so perhaps the native was not so wrong after all.

An anecdote which nicely captures a number of features of disgust. An emotion which is universal; everyone does it in one form or another. An emotion which is learned, in that very young children, say children under 4, don’t do it. And an emotion which is rooted in eating: the need to eat and the risks of eating.

Getting enough food and water was a major preoccupation for early humans, just as it is for animals in the wild today. And part of the key to the success of humans was the variety of plant and animal food which they could and, on occasion, did eat. A variety much increased by cooking. One of the problems with eating plants was that many plants contain protective toxins, not necessarily destroyed by cooking, in which connection our tongues evolved the ability to detect unpleasant bitterness, in effect to detect a wide range of (mainly) plant toxins. At the same time it evolved the ability to detect sweetness, an indicator of the presence of a very easily assimilated form of carbohydrate, that is to say sugar. A very good source of energy which was often to be found in fruit and always to be found in honey, both of which may well have been important in early diets.

However, this did not cover off one of the problems with eating animals, the presence of bacteria and their toxic by-products. Or the contamination of food with bacteria from other sources, in particular the waste products of meat eating animals – including here ourselves. So while we could not necessarily sense these problems directly, we could learn to avoid doing things which made them more likely, we could build systems of knowledge and rules around the getting, the preparation and consumption of food (and drink). Disgust was the emotion which kicked in when those rules were broken, or when it looked as if they were about to be broken. Rules which sometimes lost touch with the real risks, as they can now be assessed. Rules which sometimes look as if they have been elaborated for love of rules per se, rather then because of any problem with food. With such rules and rituals serving as yet another barrier between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Noting in passing that, in most societies, only a relatively small number of species of animals are used for food. In the west, for example, most people get by with less than a dozen; most of the time with just three or four. And with most of those being vegetarian animals rather than carnivorous animals, the waste products of these being a lot more offensive than those of vegetarians.

Noting in passing that both milk and eggs can be construed as the waste products of animals. Many people, for example, would take a dim view of drinking warm milk which they had seen being drawn from a cow, by hand, out in a field.

At the same time, two of the by-products of being human were a fear of death and a need to differentiate ourselves from dumb animals. So while we were animals and we needed animals, we also needed to keep our distance, not to be reminded too often of what we were and the fate that was in store for all of us. A core ambivalence.

Which brings me to the essay at reference 5, where disgust is rooted in the pairing of the possibility of oral contamination and of being reminded of our animal nature. A disgust which manifests in a very bodily way with very characteristic facial expressions - and sometimes with feelings of nausea, if not actual nausea. With vomiting being one way to purge the body of contamination. A disgust which is very mobile: it can easily move from one object to another by contamination, real or imaginary, or by association.

Noting in passing that there is always an object of disgust – it is the object which is disgusting, not the sensations arising from it, sensations which can be ambiguous. So there are smells which are appetising when attached to the right kind of food, but disgusting when attached to the wrong kind of food.

A disgust which drove the evolution of manners, in particular table manners, another subject with an extensive literature, with my own introduction being provided by Margaret Visser at reference 6. Manners which are intended, inter alia, to protect us from the animal smells and products of others – and to protect those others from our own smells and products. Manners which now mean that we no longer share the one spoon and the one bowl of gruel at table: we all have to have our own spoon & our own bowl and we take care not to contaminate the common bowl which anything we have touched – be that by hand or by mouth. Manners which meant, when I was a child, that one was careful about using the butter knife to move butter from the common dish to one’s own plate.

Words

Another way into disgust is through the word itself, which comes from the French, who have the word ‘dégoût’. Which, according to Littré, means, in the first instance, a lack of taste or appetite, a repugnance for certain foods. By extension, repugnance for certain people, things or activities. Perhaps even for oneself. Then gradually diluted into dislikes more generally.

While ‘goût’ is the sense of taste. By extension, the taste or savour of something. Something might have a strong taste, an interesting taste or no taste. By extension, applied to things: clothes, furnishings & furniture, works of art. By extension to the verb ‘goûter’, to try something, to sample something. A word which also functions as a noun in the sense of a light meal.

Turning to the English, OED offers a range of uses for the suffix ‘dis’, roughly equivalent to the modern French ‘de’. Not all of then operate by taking the negative, the reverse of the thing so qualified.

Then disgust is a relatively modern word, not used in Shakespeare, but derived from the French in the early seventeenth century. Starts as disgusted by things to eat then by extension to other disgusting stuff. 

Distaste is another relatively modern word, although it is found in Shakespeare. Milder than disgust.

Taste is a much older word. The sense of touch. A trying or testing. The sense of taste. Perception of quality. This last also being an old sense. Plus various stray meanings, for example a special kind of silk ribbon used for edge binding.

So a split between dis-gust and dis-taste, with the English ‘taste’ carrying much of the burden of the French ‘goût’.

A fairly harmless test

There are a range of questionnaires which test how easily we are disgusted, a quality which varies from person to person, probably from occupation to occupation, but another test is provided by chocolate animals. How happy are you about eating chocolate animals?

Many people prefer to eat their meat in a fairly disguised form, say to eat sausages or beefburgers rather than to have an entire fish dumped in front of them. Does this kind of preference extend to chocolate animals?

I conducted what I think might be called a thought experiment. How would I feel about eating a chocolate rabbit? Or a snail? Or a worm?

I found that it would make a different if the chocolate animal was hollow or solid. In the former case, I usually broke the animal up before eating it, thus putting a distance between me and the animal. So hollow less likely to elicit disgust than solid.

Then it did, as one might expect, depend on the sort of animal. Rabbits fine, beyond the odd twinge at eating an animal which used to live as a pet on our back patio. Snails not so good and worms not good at all. I would certainly avoid worms in a chocolate shop.

I might also say that I have a reasonable number of food aversions. For example, I would eat neither oysters nor sea urchins, not that these last ever come my way, having mostly come across them in the work of Simenon. And getting a snap at reference 10. I would only eat honeycomb tripe if it was fairly well disguised, that is to say chopped up or lost in pork pies. While my younger brother was put off pork pies for a long time by seeing a more or less entire pig being dropped into the mincer. On the other hand, until fairly recently, I was quite happy with preparation, cooking and consumption of livers, kidneys and hearts. But not brains or sweetbreads.

While BH points out that there has been a run on chocolate animals and very few are to be had at the Sainsbury’s at Kiln Lane.

LWS-R considerations

Turning now to my own hobby horse, the generation of consciousness, the first thing to say is that much of the ordinary interest in disgust is in how it comes to be. None of which touches my LWS-R, introduced at reference 9. 

Underlying LWS-R is the hypothesis that one can separate the business of getting the information which finds its way into consciousness from the business of projecting it into consciousness. That there is one system called ‘get’, another called ‘project’, with some kind of a data store lying between the two. A hypothesis which may or may not turn out to be a useful approximation to what happens insides our heads.

So LWS-R is about how stuff is projected into consciousness, about how it is we have subjective experiences, how we have the subjective life that we do. It is about how that projection is done, more than about what exactly it is that is projected, the content of that projection, or how that content comes to be. And disgust is very much a matter of content.

That said, we would need a layer to carry the object of disgust, usually a real object in the here and now, with a position in space, rather than an imaginary object.

A layer to carry information about that object, other than more or less raw sensory information. Say the knowledge that this meat has been in the ground for some weeks. Leaving aside the far northern custom of burying seagulls for a bit, to ripen them up for eating.

At least one layer to carry the bodily sensations arising from the disgust. Possibly muscular sensations from the face, particularly from the mouth and throat. Possibly from the stomach, further down the alimentary canal.

Possibly located in the same space as the object of disgust on its layer.

Once again, work in progress.

Conclusions

All in all, a fascinating subject. A fascinating way of looking at what we really are. A fascination which I have attempted to share.

PS: with the snap of spring flowers being taken this morning, outside South Lodge, on the edge of the St. Ebba’s estate. Not disgusting at all.

References

Reference 1:  The People We Know Best: Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people: Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously - Evan Kindley/NYRB - 2021. March 25, 2021 issue.

Reference 2: Descarte's baby: how the science of child development explains what makes us human – Paul Bloom – 2004.

Reference 3: The expression of emotions in man and animals – Darwin – 1872.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-monkey-life.html. 

Reference 5: Disgust and related aversions – Andras Angyal – 1941. An essay by a psychiatrist then working at a state hospital (what we would have called a mental hospital or an asylum) in Massachusetts. 

Reference 6: The Rituals of Dinner – Margaret Visser – 1991. 

Reference 7: The Geometry of Love – Margaret Visser – 2001. A more recent work by Visser, last noticed at reference 8.

Reference 8: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/modern-marvels.html. 

Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html. 

Reference 10: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-legacy.html. 

Reference 11: Disgust - Rozin, Haidt, McCauley – 2000. An article in an encyclopedia; another useful source, including several pages of references. With reference 5 above being the second of them.

Reference 12: Avoidance of biological contaminants through sight, smell and touch in chimpanzees – Cecile Sarabian, Barthelemy Ngoubangoye and Andrew J. J. MacIntosh – 2017. Royal Society Open Science. Some evidence here that chimpanzees do disgust.

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