Once in a while I come to write a post knowing what I want to say, pinning it on some tale or phenomenon that seems to work well, so I can unfold the thing coherently. Then I go to Google to check spelling or dates, and the whole story goes cattywampus. I had it all wrong. I have to start all over again because my thinking was based on false assumptions. Of course, that’s good to find out BEFORE I post.
This time it was an Aeon (the online magazine), an article from a woman named Nina Strohminger. I had just finished a post intended to dissect the parts of what we call “religion” because the meaning has been so confused and misused. As an important component of “religion,” I offered spirituality and contrasted it with morality on the basis of boundaries. Morality is always drawing boundaries between “what is done” and “what is NOT done.” Spirituality is removal of boundaries, radical inclusion. Nina gave morality the role I had given spirituality, but her indicator was not sin but “disgust.” At her website she includes a link to her idea of includes the Strohminger Grotesque Art Database. It’s a ZIP file that I can’t open so far. Here’s the banner:
In the end I had an academic scandal. It was clear that Nina was an upstart defiant critic of a stuffy professor. This squib advertises Colin McGinn.
“Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. . . Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. “The Meaning of Disgust” is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.”
Colin McGinn
It is a Puritan point of view with a prurient subtext. A cover for abuse.
Then I find out about McGinn. He is a sexual harasser who in 2013 was forced to leave his job. An example of his attitude is a faculty meeting where he joked about feminists dripping hot wax on their nipples. The reaction of the nearly all-male group was laughter. Disgusting. “He claimed he was misunderstood due to cultural differences, humorlessness and his own superior intellect and knowledge of philosophy of language.” Even more disgusting. But not surprising. I’ve long seen the philosophy Ph.D. as a hiding place for skinny boys with bad breath and no love life who tried to excuse everything with their own brilliance. At least by now they don’t try to be UU ministers.
Nina is not a feminist, but one who defends the right to be disgusting, grotesque, repulsive, an outsider (as female academics are sometimes seen). Not because the judgment of them is mistaken, but that they also ought to be included in the valuing of life -- on moral grounds. The problem always is that if one draws everyone into the circle of acceptable, what’s still out there? Charles Manson? But he’s only insane. Can insanity be repulsive now that we don’t chain them in dungeons anymore? A long list of rebellious creators like Pasolini or deSade have made it a point to BE disgusting, because that gives them a vantage point for raking culture. They are identified as transgressive, but also admired and valued. Why is that? Because of their morality, which urges protection of the small and weak, honesty and fairness in government, and the erotic. They work between stigma and compassion. Disgust is a justification for stigma: the dark, the poor, the infected, the uneducated are "disgusting."
Nina’s doctoral thesis is entitled “The Hedonics of Disgust.” Thus, she is or ought to be defining her morality over against the conventional vanilla establishment standards, which empowers white males. She also wants acceptance of her own moral code by the establishment because it signals acceptance of her work as “good.” She seems to be addressing propriety, defying rules about fat or nudity or gender. I wonder how far she would take this idea. I wonder whether her moral boundary isn’t ignoring what is not merely disgusting but evil. Is that a real boundary? I wonder how much she knows about the Mineshaft, dedicated to disgust as a sexual turn-on.
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago in her book, “Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004)” was taking on a similar subject but from within the establishment. Sleek, blonde and lawyeresque, Nussbaum was welcomed with open arms, very much within the mainstream. I read it, approved, and by now have forgotten what she said exactly. Bland, starched, near-Puritan. The contrast is in Nina’s images of the grotesque, which I will NOT forget. I’m NOT disgusted, but what can you expect from someone who watches CSI-Miami?
I had wanted the next step forward in my “body loop” version of developing humanness to be empathy. Empathy is an extension of the brain, mostly through the eyes and the mirror cells scattered in the prefrontal cortex above the eyes. It comes from the phenomenon of seeing someone do something and simultaneously holding an echo of the “doing” in one’s own brain. It is possible to “echo” emotions in the same way and, in fact, it is this phenomenon at the core of a number of human capacities, as though the eye-beams were physical neuron connections. In fact, people say they can “feel” eyes on them, even if they can’t see the watching person.
Charity or compassion without empathy is oppressive, even sometimes as bullying and destructive as hatred and violence. People tend to think of empathy as a thought exercise when it is actually a dark brain "feeling" once the information comes in through the eyes.
Langewiesche’s most recent article in “Vanity Fair” describes a soldier riding alone in the back of a military transport on its way to murdering the five captives with him, a fact he is not quite registering. He shares a cigarette, one of the captives gifts his “worry beads” to the soldier, two of them -- one an adolescent -- lean against the oldest man and cry. Even in a print description our sympathy goes to them; description makes them human.
There in the back of a dark, jolting truck -- trying not to think -- was an indelible challenge to the soldier’s identity, not because of any moral code but because of “feeling with” the captives. Being a soldier means denying empathy for enemies. He is unable to prevent the execution of the captives because of the force of mainstream dominance.
Conversion of St. Paul -- Caravaggio
Denying empathy is the essence of stigma: one has no need to understand lesser beings -- they are considered mindless animals or automatons if they are considered at all. Empathy is an animal ability, but the capacity to deny it is human. I think Nina and friends have it upside down. A primitive form of empathy is a basic component of being animal, closely related to “theory of mind” which is how predators predict what prey will do. Morality comes later when people are gathered into groups, close together and competing. It can be arbitrary, as mucky as hatred itself.
I’m on the side of feeling things but I would never exclude rationality or forcefulness from the complexity of a person’s identity. And I would rule that “soul” is maybe part of identity but never part of morality. Soul, if it exists, is not a creature of the community, but an essence of a person that connects it to the universal, the “Over-Soul,” if you like, while paradoxically validating its individuality.
Empathy is our access to other people. We can obey the demands of our particular subculture and appear entirely moral, but without being in sync with others, absorbing them, learning what they know, we are not fully human. The following is from a review by Maria Popova of Ollie Sacks’ latest book, “On the Move: a Life”
“Who we are and who we become is in large part the combinatorial product of the people and ideas we surround ourselves with — what William Gibson so memorably termed our “personal micro-culture” and Brian Eno called “scenius.” The more different those people are from us, the more they expand the echo chamber of our own mind, the more layered and beautiful the symphony of the spirit becomes. Nowhere is this self-expansion via relationship more evident than in the friendships between great artists and great scientists, one of the most heartening examples of which is the friendship between legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks and the poet Thom Gunn.”
Of course, today it’s possible to have a worthy, soul-deep relationship with someone without ever meeting them, without worrying about conventional morality. My friendship with Tim has been like that. The more different those people are from us, the more they expand the echo chamber of our own mind, the more layered and beautiful the symphony of the spirit becomes.
Cinematheque - Barrus
