Ideas - Why we can’t live without the universal feeling of disgust

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Disgust — an emotion that makes us human. It can keep us safe from drinking milk that's gone off, thanks to the revolting smell. And as Charles Darwin suggests, disgust serves as part of our core evolutionary function. But it also has a dark side. Disgust has been co-opted by culture, to religious and political divides. Scholars say we need to reckon with this complicated emotion that has the ability to make the world more dangerous.

We're all looking for great places to visit in Canada. One of my favorites is the Stratford Festival. The theatre is truly of the highest caliber and there's so much selection. They have 11 large-scale shows on stage and trust me, whatever is on manure there will be exceptional. People always think Shakespeare when they think of Stratford, but it's so much more. Broadway musicals, family shows, classic comedy and drama. Whether it's Robert LaPage's Macbeth or Donna Fior's Annie, you will be blown away.

It's the perfect Canadian getaway. To quote William Shatner, who got his start in Stratford, every Canadian should make the pilgrimage to Stratford. Start your next adventure at StratfordFestival.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi there, I'm Nala Ayaad. Before we get into today's show, I'd like to ask you for a favor. If you enjoy ideas, please hit the follow button

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It's primal. It's awful. It's powerful. It's vital. Welcome to the complex experience of disgust. complex experience of disgust. Disgust kind of is deeply implicated in our own fraughtness about life itself. Disgust has long been characterized as one of our six core emotions. On the one hand, disgust is physiological, an evolutionary impulse helping species avoid parasites and poisons. It's sort of the front end of our immune system. On the other hand, it's psychological and can be used as a sharp weapon against those who are the other. Disgust has this kind of social ordering function. It's a way of identifying the sort of the gritty, the dirty, the corrupting, the polluting.

And in an increasingly fragmented world, it's an emotion we need to reckon with. Here's Ideas contributor Moira Donovan's documentary, Disgust, the good and evil. In 1928, the German writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin said, all disgust is originally disgust at touching. Some argue this goes beyond sensation, to our discomfort with the outside world, and to the blurring of the boundary between self and other. of the boundary between self and other. And that's what takes me to an insect farm, one of only a few in Canada, housed in a hanger-like building on the edges of Halifax.

Devin, can I just for a second to stop spraying? Sorry, we're now in our farm room, so what we have in here is several hundred million larvae growing at a particular time. One hundred million pulsating bits of, well, ugh. The person showing me around is Greg Wanger, CEO and founder of this black soldier fly farm called Oberland Agriscience. He stopped before a row of containers and reaches down into one of them. I've got my hands fully into a container here of about 100,000 larvae.

I think it says 120,000 in there. 120,000 larvae here. He pulls up one cupped hand, overflowing with moist white blobs. There's probably about a thousand larvae in my hand here, about the size of a grain of rice. From a disgust perspective, I find that very quickly you get over sort of the ick factor of seeing a writhing container of larvae.

I have no problems with this. I've done this many times, but there are people that this is just a little bit too much for them. And I fully understand that. Wenger describes how they're using this facility to produce insect protein, which is put into everything from pet food to fish feed. Of course, in many parts of the world, insects are food for humans. They're healthy, easy to farm, and high in protein.

But in the West, eating an insect is considered by most to be disgusting. Honestly, most of the world, a lot of the world consumes insects as part of their diet. When I was living in San Diego, just across the border in Mexico in the fall, the children run around with these big bug nets to catch the grasshoppers or the locusts, which they then roast and season.

And it's a treat for children and families. And so it really is just us who, we're kind of the outliers on the planet that doesn't eat insects or that find all insects kind of disgusting. The rest of the world has long gotten over this. And I think it's really just training our Western society that honestly, we're the archaic ones here.

And I really do think that a lot of this is education. And what we typically do at Disgust is we push it away and we either ignore it or we put it into a container and close the lid and then it's gone. We can't do that. The way our society is going now, and we have to expect that there's going to be between nine and 12 billion people on the planet, we cannot keep going the way we're going. Back on the factory floor, Wanger shows me another bin,

this time filled with soft plump fly grubs, cooled to what he calls white wine temperature. And because I don't want to be a chicken, I ask. Can I touch them? Of course. I'm feeling some resistance in myself to this, but that means I should do it. As I said, people have run away,

and they're much better when they're actually like writhing and moving around. I did it. I mean, I knew you would be listening. But honestly, I was a little grossed out. Yeah, it's something about the softness. I don't know. Here's the funny thing about disgust. These larvae are completely safe, and yet it's hard to shake the sense that touching them is deeply wrong. We are hardwired to feel disgust. Some have even argued that the ability to feel disgust

is what makes us human. And because it's so powerful, theorists say we need to better understand why it's triggered and how we express it. And that starts with understanding where it comes from. So disgust is primarily located from a neuro sort of anatomical perspective in the anterior insula. So the insula is a structure in the internal part of the brain that's also involved in our interoception, so our feeling about our body in space. It's also involved in our interoception, so our feeling about our body in space. It's also involved in our experience of food.

So very much this sort of concatenation of visceral, like my body, and also consumption, what I'm bringing into my body, is wrapped up in the experiential qualities of disgust. Rachel Herz is a Canadian-American neuroscientist and teaches at Brown University. One of her books is called That's Disgusting, Unraveling Mysteries of Repulsion. Rachel Hurs is a Canadian-American neuroscientist and teaches at Brown University. One of her books is called That's Disgusting,

Unraveling Mysteries of Repulsion. You can't really experience disgust if you can't think. So even the most minimal level of disgust requires an understanding of whatever it is that I'm looking at or stepping on or holding, you know, sticking my hand into is supposed to be yucky. So if I can't realize that, I will not experience disgust. In 2008, hers was asked to be a judge

for the National Rotten Sneakers Contest. At first, she thought, why not? One of her areas of study is focused on smell. Judging the contest meant an all-inclusive stay at a super nice resort. She was told it would be fun. How bad could the eight smelly sneakers from kids across the United States be?

So I agreed. But in the several months leading up to the contest, after I agreed to do it, I started telling people about it and all of them were saying, oh my God, I can't believe that you'd agree to stick your nose into these disgusting rotten sneakers. How can you possibly do this? And the more I started hearing this feedback and the more I started thinking about it, the more worried I actually got about the fact that I had committed to doing this. And so spent a lot of mental and emotional energy being sort of preoccupied and distressed about what I was going to be doing. And then when the final moment actually arrived and I went to do it, of course it was bad. It was very bad.

But it wasn't as bad as I imagined it possibly could have been. And the realization of the differences between my thoughts, my emotions that were, I think, in partial amount preparatory to doing it made me realize how much emotion and context and cognition is involved in our feelings of disgust. While disgust is wrapped up in emotion, theorists have traced the roots of this emotion back to our drive to survive. Its main function is to protect our gastrointestinal system from things we might eat, which will cause us gastrointestinal distress, which we might eat, which will cause us gastrointestinal

distress, which will cause us to get sick specifically to our stomach. So that's called that the poison mechanism. And on my view, that's half of what human disgust is. This is Daniel Kelly, author of the book Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Kelly is a philosophy professor at Purdue University. And then the other half of human disgust is not necessarily about poisons, it's not necessarily about food, and it's not necessarily about a response to things that you've eaten once that then have caused you to get sick to your stomach. It's just, it's sort of the front end of our immune system, and what it's protecting us against is anything which is a transmittable or communicable disease, which is likely just to get us sick in general.

And so it's a part of what some researchers have called the behavioral immune system, and its role is preventative there. So instead of waiting for some microbe to get in your bloodstream and then be fought off by white blood cells, that's sort of a different element of our total immune system. What I call the parasite mechanism is it's designed to protect us from getting infected in the first place. And so what you have there is the system which is monitoring the environment for any sort of perceptible cues of vectors of disease transmission. And those can be, you know, evidence of feces, those can be evidence of someone else in your group who is sick with something, so if there's

a little sort of sweating profusely or if they have open sores on their face. It could be evidence of rotten food, it's another disease vector. It could be things like sexual activity, where, you know, bodily fluids are being exchanged and another potential place for infection. And so the parasite mechanism, it's the domain that it has to monitor is much bigger than just what we might eat. And that I think you can make sense of other core elements of what we now recognize as human disgust as flowing from this particular evolutionary problem. So the fact that when you see something as disgusting,

it captures your attention and you also keep track of what it comes in a close proximity with. I mean, that's just our intuitive psychology, being sensitive to the possibilities of contamination and the way that a lot of diseases actually sort of spread. But disgust is a blunt instrument, rather overreactive. We should expect in the case of disgust and especially the case of the parasite problems that it's dealing with, we should expect to find more false positives than false negatives, just because the kind of logic which is going to be built into a system like this is better safe than sorry.

So we could become disgusted by things which in fact aren't poisonous or in fact aren't parasitic. But the system itself, if it's going to err in one way, it's going to err in the way of like stay away from that thing. But just because it's blunt doesn't mean it's not complicated. American psychologist Paul Rosin, the godfather of disgust studies, was first intrigued by this emotion because of our unease with something millions of us consume every day. Meat. I was puzzled by the fact that meat is the most nutritious food.

It is basically food that we can live on completely. We don't need anything else. It's the most favorite food of human beings and yet it's got there's so many negative things that people feel about it there. We have vegetarians, we have vegans, we have lots of people who just won't eat meat because they're put off by it. And even those who do eat meat, say Americans, we eat only basically three mammals. That's, we had 4,000 mammals. And we only eat the muscle. We don't eat the liver, we don't eat the kidney, we don't eat the brain.

So I said, what's going on here? This is all really good food and people aren't eating it. Even the meat eating people aren't eating much of the meat. So that's what got me going. And then I realized that there was a very strong negative reaction to meat in most forms, even by people who love meat. So that they're put off by monkey meat, they're put off by pig's feet, they're put off by pig's ears, I mean, pig's liver, you know, all sorts of things. So it was sort of, they

were being really selective and very negative about certain parts. And that negativity was largely represented by disgust. So that's how I got into disgust. I didn't start with, I think I should study disgust. So that's how I got into disgust. I didn't start with, I think I should study disgust. Prior to Rosen's work, little research had been done on the psychology of disgust. Many people dismissed disgust as a primitive emotion. But Rosen, who's now 87, saw something complex in the way disgust worked, including the idea of how disgusting objects easily contaminate the world around

them. So if you touch an earthworm, a dead earthworm, to a piece of food that you really like, people won't eat it. I was really puzzled by that. That led me into a whole line of research, which I'm still involved in, which is the whole idea of contagion. That if you touch an earthworm to, let's say, your favorite corn and the cob, it doesn't matter, You won't

eat it anymore. Now, what is that about? It's as if, and it turns out it's like the earthwormness of the earthworm was transferred to the corn. And since you're offended by an earthworm, you're offended by anything which earthwormness has been transferred into, which is now this, say, piece of corn that the earthworm touched. And that was not in the literature of psychology. It wasn't in the literature of anthropology. Traditional cultures all show this. Including the early 20th century anthropological concept of sympathetic magic, meaning things

that have been in contact can have a lasting effect on each other, even if the contact is brief. Rosen wanted to better understand how this concept could play out in psychology. And so we did a study in which we took a cockroach, which is a disgusting animal, and we would touch it to something else like a piece of chocolate, and then we find that people wouldn't eat it. And we'd ask them why they wouldn't eat it. They would say, well, cockroaches are dangerous. They have disease vectors.

You know, who knows we could get germs from them. And it's true that you're more likely to get germs from touching an animal than touching a plant. Because the germs in animals are germs that could survive in you, because animals are like you. So people would say, well, it's a risk to eat something that touched a cockroach. So we said, okay, so we'll do a sterilized cockroach.

This cockroach has been sterilized. It's safer than your fork. I mean, it's perfectly safe. Now we're gonna touch this to your, it's a chocolate or whatever it is. People say, well, I still don't want it. And they're a little puzzled because they just said it was infection.

And it has nothing to do with infection. It has to do with cockroaches was passed into that food. And you know, if you take it in, you're just, it's disgusting and you're defiled by eating something disgusting. So that's what got me into that whole issue of magical thinking and how touching something renders it inedible. Rossin also used experiments to test another principle of disgust drawn from sympathetic magic, the law of similarity.

The law of similarity says if it looks like an X, it's an X. Now in the real world, pre-modern times, it was true. If it looked like a tiger, it was a tiger. And again, that's a pretty good rule of thumb until you get to images. And so we found that people would not eat a chocolate piece of good chocolate fudge that they liked. It was shaped like a dog poop. Now they know it's not a dog poop.

But there's a piece of their brain that says, looks like dog poop is dog poop. Now they know it's not a dog poop. But there's a piece of their brain that says, looks like dog poop is dog poop. And so they are put off by it. We show this over a wide range of disgusting things. It's not as potent as the law of contagion. And some people don't show it. But most people do. But everyone shows contagion. Humans find it hard to let go of disgust, even when it's irrational. But Rawson says there are ways to overcome it. The simplest way? Exposure.

So, for example, in the case of recycled water, which I've also worked on, you take sewage water, push it through filters so that it's pure water, okay? But it was recently foul water and some people won't drink it. A lot of people won't drink it. But it turns out that if you expose them to it and it's their only source of water, after a while they just don't even think about it anymore. Another thing that is fascinating about disgust is how everyone physically expresses it in similar ways. Daniel Kelly. And so the elements of the disgust response include things like the facial expression

that people tend to automatically make once they become disgusted by something. You know, it's called the gape face. The gape face is the scrunched up, eyebrows pulled down, upper lip raised, and nose wrinkled expression when you've encountered something gross. It's a kind of evidence that people will marshal in favor of disgust being innate and therefore sort of part of universal human nature is that facial expression is associated with disgust cross-culturally. Some researchers have argued that animals, like humans, also have an innate sense of disgust. Mind you, eating poo, also known as coprophagia, is a normal behavior for many animals and

is seen in roughly 25% of dogs. This could be due to anxiety, but some say it's just because they like the taste. But this would not be the majority. Cecile Sarabian is a cognitive ecologist and a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France. In her research, Sarabian has analyzed the behavioral elements of disgust in primates and has found, for instance, that Japanese macaques are more reluctant to eat a piece of grain when it's placed on top of macaque feces, even when those feces are fake.

So humans are not the only species to experience disgust. Even dung beetles will avoid feces that could pose a disease risk. And what that means is that it makes sense for all the species to avoid what can make them sick and what can ultimately or what could ultimately kill them slowly. And Sarabian says humans share elements of the gait phase, that wrinkled nose and raised upper lip we mentioned earlier, with macaques and mice. The same part of the brain linked with disgust in humans, the insular cortex, correlates with other animals.

Sarabian was also curious to see if primates shared humans' tactile triggers for disgust, how we recoil at the touch of slime, in my case, slugs, give me the chills. And so Sarabian decided to test this on chimpanzees. To do this, she built a metal box. Food would be placed inside, either resting on a hard, dry rope, or a soft, moist piece of Play-Doh,

what she refers to as a substrate. The wet-dough substrate, if you didn't know what it was, is, of course, the icky one. So basically softness, moistness, and warmish substrates are the ones that facilitate bacteria growth. And this is the hypothesis behind our aversion for anything that is sticky, slimy, basically. And so here with chimpanzees, I wanted to test that. The chimps couldn't see inside the interior of the metal box. Instead, they had to blindly reach inside and feel for the food.

So the chimps would see me placing a food item in the box, but they wouldn't know on which substrate it relied on. And so in order to get the food, they would have to touch the substrate. And so interestingly, when it was the dough substrate, they would place the hand and the majority of the subject would then almost instantly withdraw their hand. Whereas for the rope substrate, they would just take the piece of banana, eat it and go away. And it's the similar aversive response that they observed for humans. Sarabian has also tested the thought processes involved in animal disgust. She looked at how chimpanzees would respond to being shown images of something disgusting,

like a dead animal's body, a rotten food, while trying to complete a task they'd been trained to do. What we observed is that when they were exposed to these disgust, visual disgust elicitors, they would be less performant. So their repetitive exposure to these images would decrease their latency to perform. Whereas interestingly, when they are exposed to control images, there is no decrease to their speed of completing the task. I mean, the study of disgust has also its origins into human psychology and was studied a lot by human psychologists who took rather quite sensory definition of disgust, having

evolved from distaste and being uniquely human. But I think over the years, and particularly, I would say over the last five to 10 years, and this is still growing, we have accumulated more and more evidence from the animal literature, as I've mentioned earlier, with different pieces of the puzzle. So not only behavioral avoidance, but also from the neuroscience research literature, from cognitive studies, that what we would describe as being uniquely human is actually present in most fishes. While not all scientists agree that animals share this complex emotion with humans, what

does seem particularly human is how disgust has expanded from a biological response to a societal tool, Paul Rosin. So my view is that basically culture has co-opted this semi-biological emotion. It isn't totally biological, but it has biological roots. But it's tied into food. And the culture found that, boy, what a great way to get people not to do something. Make it disgusting.

And this co-opting of disgust captured the attention of Cornell University psychology professor David Pizarro. I originally became interested in disgust really because I was interested more broadly in moral judgment and ethical judgment. And as I started studying that, it was clear that emotions played a big role. So that kind of took me in the direction of studying emotions in grad school as well. And disgust just happened to be this emotion that captured my attention.

I was fascinated by it. I think for a couple of reasons. One, I am very easily disgusted. So it's an emotion that is strong in me, I guess. And two, unlike a lot of the other emotions that we talk about when we speak about moral judgment, disgust didn't have like a clear, there's no clear way in which it should obviously be connected to morality. So things like anger, you know, anger involves often an appraisal that somebody did something wrong, like an actual judgment.

That's why you get angry. So it's very clear mapping on to the domain of morality or empathy. It makes sense that feeling somebody else's pain would be important for moral judgment. Discuss sort of like being grossed out wasn't quite obvious why this would play any role if it did in moral judgment. So I was fascinated by that. North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. This program is by Moira Dadovan.

You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayd. We're all looking for great places to visit in Canada. One of my favorites is the Stratford Festival. IED. musicals, family shows, classic comedy and drama. Whether it's Robert LaPage's Macbeth or Donna Fiora's Annie, you will be blown away. It's the perfect Canadian getaway. To quote William Shatner, who got his start in Stratford, every Canadian should make the pilgrimage to Stratford. Start your next adventure at StratfordFestival.ca.

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and that can make it a force for dehumanization. But understanding disgust can make us more alive to the world around us. Here's the second part of Moira Donovan's documentary, Disgust, the Good and Evil. Well, we have established that disgust may be vital to our survival. For humans, it has evolved past that biological imperative to how we define ourselves. It creates a moral domain, a sociological domain, and of course a psychological domain,

self-consciousness. Do I smell? This is Bill Miller, Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan and author of the book, The Anatomy of Disgust. Miller says disgust polices the boundary of the self by heightening self-criticism, but it also shapes the self by heightening self-criticism, but it also shapes the self's relationship with the collective. Disgust is one of our most culture-generating sentiments.

How does it do this? It does it by enlivening the world, making things dangerous and magical in not a way that fear makes something dangerous, but in ways that you could become polluted or contaminated and put to rituals of purification, of self-purification. Miller says in religious practice, purity rituals are often fueled by disgust. So you put up all these rules, different cultures have different rules, like in Jewish culture, the eating, the food rules, the elaborate food rules, where they're so complicated that there's no way you can't violate them. So if you violate them, you're impure. And

I know from Orthodox Jews who say if they accidentally ate some pork or some antitrave cut, they get sick. They get nauseous. So what does disgust do? Without it, I don't think we have the notion of purity, which plays so important a part in not only social mores, especially governing sex, but also food, but religion. And so imagine a notion of purity playing such an important role in human kind of the history of religion, cultic role, without disgust, without, in other words, the horror of being defiled. And Miller says the concept of purity is often used as a way to dehumanize the other. It's a constant feature of antisemitism from about the 12th century on that there is nothing more polluting than a Jew. And they believed, of course, we smelled the Phaetor Eudaicus.

The only thing, the only deodorant that possibly worked for this odor was baptism. So holy water was the first deodorant. Another favorite area of scorn in terms of disgust is women. The historian Alexander Cuthill has written about how medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities target female bodily functions, in particular menstruation, as being impure, unholy, and filthy, and thus disgusting. A common insult was to attack the purity of women, which justified assaults on other cultures, similar to attacks against the mothers of your enemy.

Disgust was also a dominant presence under colonial rule. In the mid 1800s, when the British ruled over the Indian subcontinent, disgust was used to separate the colonizers from the colonized. So part of the Anglo-Indian project of establishing order in a colony on the Indian subcontinent is about setting up certain kinds of enclaves, you know, where they can maintain a certain kind of distance from the dirt and disease

and disorder of the Indian towns as it were, right? It's also about maintaining a certain kind of distance from the Indian bodies. This is Parama Roy. I'm a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Davis. Disgust also played a critical role in one of the pivotal events in the British colonization of India, the Mutiny of 1857. This was one of the greatest threats to British imperial rule in the mid-19th century. And this started as a rebellion by the Indian troops in the British Indian armies, mostly in northern India.

Supposedly it was precipitated by a certain kind of offense against caste sensibilities. And so the troops had been introduced to the new Enfield rifle and there were these new cartridges that they had to insert into the rifle and they had to insert it by tearing off with their teeth part of the cartridge and you know then it would go into the rifle and supposedly the covering of the cartridge was greased with pork and beef fat or at least this is what the rumor said. And apparently this offended the sensibilities of both the Hindu soldiers, well known as sepoys, as well as the Muslim soldiers.

At the same time, stories began circulating among the population that British imperialists had contaminated food supplies with pork and beef. Especially a contamination of the most basic of foodstuffs upon whom, you know, all people rely and which there is no bypassing. And so there were these stories about how supplies of flour, of salt, of sugar and so on had been contaminated by the introduction of the blood of cattle or the blood of pigs, right, and therefore rendering them inedible. Or in fact, if you did consume them, you would in effect have lost your religion, or you would have lost your caste, or you would effectively

have come to be converted to Christianity without your intending it. Whether the contamination was true or not, this fueled the rebellion against the colonizers. But within a year, the rebellion was crushed, and the British continued their rule. Of course, you can see disgust at work in cultural divides everywhere. During the Jim Crow era, for instance, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the idea that a white family having to share a bathroom with a black family was disgusting. And disgust-based polemic applies to class boundaries too. A hundred years after a British writer coined the term the great unwashed,

George Orwell summed up the same attitude in a line from his 1937 book On Life in England's Industrial North, The Road to Wigan Pier. And this is slightly paraphrased. The real secret of class distinctions in the West can be summed up in four frightful words. The lower classes smell. Legal scholar Bill Miller. The reinforcing of these boundaries, these class distinctions that exist for other reasons by somehow making them more concrete and really real,

by saying, oh, they smell. I think, I don't know how to put this, contempt is what you feel for the low when they're not threatening. Disgust is what you feel for them when you feel threatened by them. In other words, far from a strictly evolutionary impulse, what we find disgusting is shaped by culture, and it in turn shapes culture. Parama Roy again. Disgust in a certain sense is inescapable, right? I mean, it's impossible to get away from it.

And at a time when social divides seem to be exploding, disgust is often at the forefront of culture wars. What I find dangerous is ways to rationalize the forms of disgust we feel as grounded in real forms of danger. Everything that we read, all our evidence from the 19th century should make us extremely cautious about the ways in which we think about disgust, the ways in which we rationalize disgust or think that we have come to a form of disgust that is rationally or scientifically based and that is not purely affective, that is not racially inflected or grounded in something else altogether. I mean, unfortunately, this is very much with us and, you know, I

can point to some exceedingly gross examples. Tucker Carlson, for example, of Fox News, he spoke at a certain point about immigrants making the country dirtier. And that was important, right? And because we've heard so much talk, you know, primarily from Trump and Trumpists and so on about immigrants making the United States more dangerous, about their posing threats to the safety of women and children and so on. But Tucker Carlson focused specifically on their making the country dirtier. But disgust is also an emotion we can turn inwards, as we mentioned already, and that

looms largest when it comes to one of our deepest fears. Ultimately, the fear of our own death and all the things that are kind of creeping towards that. Seeing something like a dead animal on the ground, you know, run over by a car, the sort of recognition that we are fragile, corporeal entities that can be cut and broken and everything else, and ultimately,

this is about our demise. And even as our bodies change, as we get older and seeing things, why is it disgusting to see wrinkles or to see something else? It's because it's a reminder that we're heading towards the end ultimately, even though there's lots of reasons culturally that you could say we should embrace that. It's beautiful and hopefully trying to change some of these cultural norms. Psychologist Paul Rosen. I think that fear of death is a very fundamental feature of humans.

And psychoanalyst Ernst Becker suggested that the big thing that Freud got wrong, as it were, is that we're not afraid of having sex with our parents. We're afraid of dying. And a lot of our repression and all that is about not thinking about that. Because if you go around worrying about dying all the time, you won't have a good life. So we have to overcome that and in some sense put it in the back of our mind. Now of course old people remind you of it. The point being that this has to do with the idea that recognition of our own mortality

is sort of fundamentally wrapped up in the emotion of disgust and not having any of that emotional response either with ourselves or towards other people is why I think disgust is broken in individuals like psychopaths. Researchers believe children develop their sense of disgust around four and a large part of the knowledge of disgust is learned. Well, it's a very interesting quote that disgust is the instinct that has to be learned. So it feels like it is this sort of, I mean it is universal in that all humans seem to be able to experience that qualitative emotional state of disgust. But what we feel disgusted by, first of all, is learned, is contextual,

and is not universal. And disgust is influenced by cultural norms in the area of sex and sexuality. So my entry point into these kind of emotional conversations is really quite personal. You know, when I think about my own life as a queer, brown migrant who grew up in Australia, who was interested in questions of social justice in high school. This is Santhoran Raj, associate professor of human rights law at Manchester Metropolitan University. One of his areas of interest is how emotion, in particular toward the LGBTIQ plus community, impacts our laws.

If you look at the colonial laws that still exist in many parts of the world that criminalize homosexuality, they talk about offenses against the order of nature, carnal intercourse against the order of nature. So at the level of kind of statute, at the level of policy discussed almost is crystallized. In England, Raj says this relationship goes back centuries. The Buggery Act, introduced by Henry VIII in 1533, criminalized sex between men, calling it an abominable vice. A later example is the 1895 trial of the writer Oscar Wilde. It's taking us into a time where, you know, English law was interested in criminalizing something known as gross indecency.

It was moving away from having to prove that anal intercourse between men took place to suddenly capturing a whole set of sexual and intimate practices that may not have involved sort of anal penetration. And that's certainly what Oscar Wilde was kind of prosecuted under. And what gross indecency kind of immediately draws our attention to is the gross. You know, when we think about disgust, we think about that's gross, you know, just in a very common vernacular sense. We use it as a shorthand to describe things we're disgusted by.

And here you have a law that actually institutionalizes gross, right? And obviously the use of gross might be slightly different to how we're using it now, but I think its vernacularization today actually echoes the way it was institutionalized then because it was really about expressing this kind of moral repudiation, right? Spitting out of certain sexual behaviors and bodies of the people who engaged in these behaviors from society, right? We had to get rid of them. We couldn't even talk about these sexual practices or give them a name because they were seen as unspeakable, right? You didn't even want to even ingest it, let alone name it, because to do so would to risk your

own contamination or corrupt your own character. In Wilde and Alfred Taylor's sentencing, the judge, Sir Alfred Wills, proclaimed, The crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon oneself to prevent oneself from describing in the language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise in the breast of every would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise in the breast of every man of honor who has heard the details of these two horrible trials.

So I think given that disgust has this kind of social ordering function, it's a way of identifying the sort of the gritty, the dirty, the corrupting, the polluting. The question for Laura is then how do you manage that, right? How do you get into these spaces to either expel that which is disgusting or at the very least find ways of containing or managing it? And this is where I'm particularly interested in the sort of question of management of disgust because I think many people have realized that disgust is something you cannot just completely eradicate from social existence because of the fact that it keeps approaching and reimagining itself in different, you know, bodies and practices and objects. Cicero wrote, in 55 BCE,

the greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust. And in the sexual domain, our emotions get especially complicated and murky. We can also be disgusted by that which we desire. So for example, if you think about people who have a lot of internalized homophobia, for example, who grow up quite deeply closeted, unable to confront who they are, some even turn to kind of conversion practices, right? And it's because of their desires.

And it's their desires that then spark as disgust, right? That which fascinates or interests us. I'm not making an argument that disgust is the only emotion that's relevant here because I think absolutely it's important to talk about fear and anxiety and desire in these other emotions. Where I think disgust is particularly salient or useful

is because it really captures that sense of repudiation really well, that kind of turning away, that almost really visceral kind of gut reaction where we can't even look at something because to look at it or face into it for even just a second is to risk vomiting something out, right? And immediately it's sort of really interrupting our sense of self and that's really uncomfortable. And so if you think about that critically though, from a social or political perspective, that's important to do because so many people

still think of gay sex as disgusting, but you have to confront, well, why is that, right? And if you want to challenge the kind of hostility that takes place, so thinking about other emotions like anger and hatred as well that kind of materialize alongside disgust, you sort of have to confront why people are disgusted by certain things if you want to then limit the kind of the hateful, homophobic, transphobic, hostile consequences that may arise from that disgust. Again, we're seeing those echoes that not only mimic

the kind of homophobic panics of the kind of 80s and 90s, but can even echo the kind of racist policing of segregation and the ways in which certain bodies were also seen as polluting and corrupting and needed to be kept separate on racialized lines. So when we talk about this from that effective or emotional point and use disgust as an anchor, I think it's really helpful to remind ourselves how it connects a whole range of minoritizations together

in some ways and reminds us of the kind of politics that disgust inspires. And I think that's again another issue that is particularly worrisome at this current moment is disgust is a very powerful mobiliser for electoral gains in many ways, right? So the kind of governance through disgust is not unusual and the sort of the scapegoating of particular communities, the kind of targeting of particular people as kind of morally reprehensible, disgusting,

aberrant, monstrous. You know, we see that playing out in global conflicts right now. All this raises the question, what is the relationship between disgust and moral judgment? For more than a decade, Cornell University psychology professor David Pizarro and a group of colleagues have been looking into this.

Originally, we were really interested in this relationship between disgust and moral judgment. And we thought, hey, you know, there's this work showing already that there are individual differences in how easily disgusted some people are. And there have been scales that have been developed by other researchers that are measures of this. So disgust sensitivity is what it's called. And we thought, hey, maybe individuals who are more easily disgusted, maybe they're more likely to have moral beliefs that are consistent with their disgust response. So maybe it's easier to

convince some people by using disgust. It's easier to convince them to dislike this out group or to morally condemn these kinds of actions. So we started by coming up with some questions about morality and using a disgust sensitivity scale that measures people on this individual difference. When Pizarro began working on this investigation, his research group were having difficulty establishing a clear relationship between morality and disgust. But one area stood out. At the request of a friend, Bizarro had included a question for participants about political orientation. And what we kept finding study after study was that disgust sensitivity was correlated with political orientation. And the relationship was, you can say it in a couple of ways, people who reported being

more conservative were also people who reported being more easily disgusted. People who were less easily disgusted reported being more liberal. And I sort of sat on that, to be honest, because I didn't feel like diving into that territory as a researcher. I thought, you know, the political domain even back then was a little controversial. But a graduate student I was working with said, we really have to explore this. And so, so we did. We started doing a little bit more digging and trying to, first we documented that this relationship was there across a

number of different samples. And then we started trying to figure out what exactly it was about political orientation that was related to disgust sensitivity. And we found that things like that kind of family values aspect of American conservatism was very strongly related. So attitudes toward abortion, attitudes toward gay marriage, right, the more easily disgusted you were, the more opposed you were to gay marriage and to abortion. Didn't seem to be related to things like fiscal conservatism or attitudes even toward immigration.

And so that was our original set of findings. So one way of saying it is our initial finding that disgust sensitivity is related to either being liberal or conservative really is not about how disgust shapes overall political orientation. It's just about how political views happen to contain certain sub views within them that are finally tuned to be influenced by disgust. So I'll give you an example. Part of what being conservative is, of course, being a bit traditional,

right? So conservatives are by definition people who are not looking for change. And as evidence of that, we know that political orientation is related to things like openness to experience. So people who are conservative are less open to novel experiences. People who are liberal are more open to those novel experiences. And an emotion like disgust that's supposed to protect you from threat is going to be very sensitive to novel situations where threats might be around. And so one reason we think that disgust sensitivity is related to being politically conservative is those people are just a little bit more finely tuned to dangers in the environment, right?

And so an emotion that's about threat detection is going to play a bigger role in those individuals. Since that first study, Pizarro has continued to pull apart the threads of this relationship. We've tried to dig deeper and figure out what's going on. And as part of that, we've been able to collect data now with a big group of researchers in various countries throughout the world, giving them these scales in their own language. We've shown that it is, this relationship is robust in that it is, it doesn't seem to be that there's some other variable that's explaining it. Like it's not that it's something related to personality traits or religiosity or anything like that. It's just

straight up disgust sensitivity seems to be related to political attitudes, no matter what country we look at. And it's a small effect in that it is, you know, it doesn't explain a whole bunch of why you believe what you believe in the political domain. But it explains enough, and we see it enough, that it is, I think, of interest and importance to understand. As Pizarro expected, delving into how disgust shows up in politics proved controversial. And people on either end of the political spectrum have quibbled with the conclusions of this research.

So a lot of conservatives were not happy with this research, because I think some of them interpreted this as saying, their beliefs are irrational because they're driven by disgust. But other people might actually believe that this is excusing certain ugly kinds of prejudices because it's saying, well, people can't be blamed for holding these homophobic or transphobic attitudes because, you know, this is just part of who they are. I personally think both of those are missing, missing the boat for any belief as a psychologist,

I believe has some sort of explanation to it, some sort of reason that it exists. Regardless of where it shows up, Purdue University Professor of Philosophy, Daniel Kelly, says the fact discussed can be so destructive and formidable means we should be wary of moments where we feel disgusted by other people, even if we think it's telling us something important.

If you yourself are personally disgusted by some practice, or if some significant segment of a population finds a particular practice disgusting, should that count as a reason or should that weigh as some sort of evidence in favor of thinking that the practice itself is immoral. And my line on that is absolutely not. That we should not give any kind of moral significance or moral authority to this particular emotion when we're trying to get it right, as it were. Because even though it can have an extremely powerful feeling from the inside, we have

a story about why disgust has that powerful feeling and how very sensitive it is to social influence in such a way that a lot of times what the feeling is doing isn't tracking some deep, you know, fact about what's right and wrong. It's just kind of recapitulating the way things have been done before. Again, it's not a real, it's not a guide to moral reality. But these days, disgust is being fomented in our politics, in particular with our algorithmically amplified repulsion for others. David Pizarro. You know, I'm of two minds about how disgust is related to our current political climate. On the one hand, I think this is the sort of thing

that's been with us for so long. Go back to Aristotle's rhetoric. He talks about using emotions to persuade people, right? So we know that certain emotions can work to persuade us. One of the things that I find so intriguing about disgust is how easy it is to get people to feel it. In fact, just to go back a little bit to why I originally started studying disgust, one of the reasons was that unlike other emotions, when you bring people in to say the psych

laboratory and you want to get them to feel anger or sadness or fear, you have to kind of go to great lengths to do these elaborate manipulations and you hope that they them to feel anger or sadness or fear, you have to kind of go to great lengths to do these elaborate manipulations, and you hope that they're going to be scared, not just say that they're scared, be sad, not just say that they're sad. Disgust was unlike that. We could bring people into the lab,

show them one picture, and just see on their face that they are disgusted. It's a very, very powerful emotion. On the other hand, as you point out, it does seem like we're living in a time where there are certain groups that are especially targeted by appeals to disgust. And so if anything, I think it's that old wisdom

just needs to be brought down from the shelf and like spread all over again in an attempt to mitigate some of the damage that people can do. So hopefully this research, our research, research of others, can be a reminder to people that this is a really easy way in which you might be being manipulated by people who really, really, really want you to believe certain things. And those things might be ugly things. So to the extent that you can, really take a critical look at what you believe, why you believe it, and maybe look out for that sort of manipulation. We're all emotional creatures.

And disgust is one of those very pervasive emotions like shame, like pain, that you just can't get rid of no matter how hard you try. So what can we do? Well, we should think critically about what our emotions are doing and be mindful of the politics that they organize. There are a number of ways to overcome disgust. But I sort of am friendly at the Freud

and most of my colleagues who think he was a terrible influence on psychology. And he had some bad effects, but he understood the complexity of the human. We have a mind that's very flexible. We have a big brain which can get us out of trouble, and it can get us into trouble. In other words, disgust is part of what makes us human. But so is the ability to overcome it, to move beyond the intuition that something is wrong

and to use that moment to think more deeply about the world and our place in it. You were listening to Disgust, The Good and Evil by Ideas contributor Moira Donovan. You can go to our website cbc.ca slash ideas to see additional material for this documentary. This program was produced by Mary Link. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Pat Martin. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso.

Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed.