Would you Slap your Father?
May 28, 2009, 11:22 am
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
And what does it say about your political views?
Historyman, this thread’s for you!
P.S. I would never slap my father. And I don’t like public restrooms.
So I guess I’m a conservative.
Thank goodness Science is progressing as quickly as it is – soon we’ll be able to reduce everything about the human experience to neural responses.
Hahaha, thanks Prof. K. Check out reader’s comments in the column too, some of which are hilarious.
After mentioning the column in your thread, I took the test at http://www.yourmorals.org as suggested by Kristof. (The site has many tests & this one concerns one’s level of disgust.) My score is slightly higher than the average. Which means I’m a liberal, hmm…
—-
The scale you completed was the The Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin.
The scale is a measure of your proclivity to feel disgust. People vary quite a bit in how strongly and how often they feel disgust, and in the kinds of things they find disgusting. Earlier research using the disgust scale showed that there are three sub-types of disgust:
1) Core disgust: the “core” of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.
2) Animal-reminder disgust: things involving death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations. These things remind us that we, like animals, are mortal.
3) Contamination disgust: this kind of disgust is a defense of the whole body, not just the mouth, from contact with dirty or sleazy people
The idea behind the scale is that disgust is an important and understudied moral emotion, as well as being an emotion about physically dirty and gross things. Disgust is involved in many moral codes, for example it appears to be part of the psychological foundation of widespread ideas of purity and pollution. Many religions (e.g., Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) have extensive rules for regulating human bodily processes and keeping them separated from sacred objects and practices. Disgust appears to provide part of the structure of these rules and practices. Disgust also has clinical ramifications, for it seems to be involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder and in a variety of phobias.
In the graph below, your scores are shown in green, compared to the average of all other people (in purple) who have taken the scale on our website. Scores run from 0 (least sensitive to disgust) to 4 (extremely sensitive to disgust). The first green bar shows your overall disgust sensitivity score. The next 3 green bars show your scores on the three subscales described above.
One more… Some years ago I read a pretty entertaining book called An Anatomy of Disgust. (Prof. K, you’ll be pleased to know that the author was a professor law at Michigan.) It’s the kind of book that makes for perfect summer reading. You need not take my words for it; just check out reader’s reviews on the Amazon site.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sob-yhXKLhIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=anatomy+of+disgust#PPP1,M1
http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Disgust-William-Ian-Miller/product-reviews/0674031555/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
Re: disgust: I think Orwell wrote (possibly in “The Road to Wigan Pier”) that the insuperable barrier to unity and harmony between the social classes is that the poor stink, and no amount of theorizing can deodorize them.
Well, thanks for helping me waste 45 minutes.
What does it mean if your father would insist that you slap him, preferably with a rubber chicken, as part of a humorous sketch and, while you don’t really like public restrooms you’ll take ‘em over the less savory alternatives?
Jean, you ought to have been a lawyer!
1. I would tell my father to ask my sister. She’d do it!
2. Yes, it’s all relative. When I was in some places in Europe, a good old grotty American restroom would have looked pretty good!
Thank goodness Science is progressing as quickly as it is – soon we’ll be able to reduce everything about the human experience to neural responses.
Maybe not everything, but I do have a strong suspicion that a lot of what we believe and decide is based on “gut feelings” and other nonrational reactions. I think many people’s reactions to “hot button” topics like gay marriage (or homosexuality in general) and abortion are visceral in origin, with the reasoned arguments being adopted and made after the position is already firmly held on the gut level. I don’t suppose this means that one side can’t be right and the other wrong, so I am not exactly arguing for relativism. But I do think our gut reactions to homosexuality and abortion (and a great many other topics that separate liberals and conservatives) lead many of us to find certain intellectual arguments much more convincing than others.
Also, from things I have read, I believe this is not a flaw, but a part of being human. There is a neurological condition described in Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide in which people lose an unconscious function to react “emotionally” (very broadly speaking), and it leaves them virtually powerless to make simple decisions. They will debate endlessly things like what cereal to eat for breakfast, weighing all the pros and cons exhaustively without being able to arrive at a conclusion. Apparently we need an internal push one way or the other when faced with a choice.
I have a book that I hope to find the time to read someday soon called Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law by Martha C. Nussbaum. Here’s the PW review from Amazon:
Jim Pauwels, thank you for the reminder about Orwell. The passage is from Road to Wigan Pier, and is worth re-reading.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:m6tdx3HEWpkJ:ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79r/chapter8.html+orwell+poor+stink&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
As always, one can’t tell whether Orwell is conservative or liberal, though he surely was a kind of saint: He is so honest about his own feelings of disgust, and literally puts himself in the shoes of those who rouse disgust. Orwell says that he overcame his revulsion at the stench of the poor and working class by living among tramps, which he wrote about in the great Down and Out in London and Paris a few years before Wigan Pier.
The Orwell reference reminded me of Harry Reid’s illiberal disdain for the smell of tourists in the Capitol Building before the new Visitor Center diverted the unwashed: “In the summertime, because (of) the high humidity and how hot it gets here, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol.”
Historyman. It’s time for you to demonstrate the truth of your convictions by ditching the anonimity and telling us who you are. My son is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, so Ifeel I have the right to ask.
Mr. Nickol, I’m inclined to agree. In fact, I believe there’s a kind of wisdom in accepting that we “know” so very much through instinct. The whole of politics is defined more by our guts than any kind of rationality – a fact that as a policy analyst I know only too well. Politics is only one realm in which our wiring prevents use from hearing “reason.” Prof. Fish’s recent Times Op-Ed touched on the same themes.
The real subject of my jab was the co-optation & technologization of the language we use to describe ourselves (see my own words above, re: wiring) . What we now call a neural response or a gut reaction was once, I believe, referred to as the laws of God, which were written in our hearts.
Also, (and I know this smacks of dualism, so I’ll try to phrase it carefully) I’m not entirely certain that its mere neural responses that are the reactions themselves. Socrates suggested in the Theaetetus that just as it is not the eye that sees, but is the means by which we see, so neither are our nerves anything other than the means by which we experience the laws of God.
Of course, this is blasphemy to the modern scientific man, who can know only what is measured by the fluttering of electrons, but it seems to me to strike closer to the truth.
Jim Pauwels and James Englert: In An Anatomy of Disgust mentioned by me above, the author ends with a discussion of Orwell & smell.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sob-yhXKLhIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=anatomy+of+disgust#PPA235,M1
Michael Gonyea: My appreciation for your suggestion, but I’d rather remain anonymous for now so I play well my self-designated role of a skeptic on this site (as on most sites I’ve participated). Hmm, on second thought, I’ll reveal my true identity as soon as I land a tenure-track position. :)
Stories like this irk me to to end. Not because of the content but because of the myopic framing of the question in terms of ideology driving feeling of discomfort or disgust with regards to hitting one’s father or authority figures. Extrapolating relationship with authority based on one’s political ideology does not seem to me very credible.
Much of our relationship with authority has to do with culture (as well as our formative experience with our families but this too is driven by culture). A very liberal Asian, for example, would recoil in horror at the idea at aggressive displays of undermining social authority conventions. As would a First Nation person.
Relationship to authority is far more related to one’s cultural background than one’s ideology. Americans tend to be the most anti-authoritarian people as it is deeply engrained in the mythology of American culture. British culture, by contrast, by in large wish to maintain the monarchy and the honour of the Crown is a driving principle in jurisprudence.