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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Seven - Continued
The Sanctity/Degradation Foundation
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[I’m skipping the account of some particularly creepy Germans and what they will do and agree to have done to them.]
p146 ... most people feel that there was something terribly wrong here, and that it should be against the law for adults to engage in consensual activities such as this. Why?
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p147 These feelings -- of stain, pollution, and purification -- are irrational from a utilitarian point of view, but they make perfect sense in Shweder’s ethic of divinity... But why do we care so much what other people choose to do with their bodies?
...Humans... [unlike most animals] must learn what to eat. Like rats and cockroaches, we’re omnivores. [And bears, don't forget bears.]
Being an omnivore has the enormous advantage of flexibility... But it also has the disadvantage that new foods can be toxic, infested with microbes, or riddled with parasitic worms. The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe.
Studying history as I have, I’ve often been struck by the role sieges play in broadening the foods people will eat. When you are literally starving to death you will try anything. Bark is often mentioned in these accounts and the siege of Leningrad during WW2 supposedly featured butcher shops that only served human meat. During one of the Prussian sieges of Paris during the nineteenth century the restaurants served zoo animals.
p148 Omnivores therefore go through life with two conflicting motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.
Another book I often recommend to people is The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. One of the curious features of Basque political history over the past several centuries is their knack of being on both sides of any civil dispute. Despite being a relatively small population that strongly identifies as a distinct national group in the context of either Spain or France, they are never united. This would seem to diminish their strength -- and I’m sure it does -- but it also means that when they end up on the losing side, there will be other Basques on the winning side looking out for the good of the Basque cause in general. Even when it came to the Roman Catholic inquisition, there were the Jesuits (both Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier were Basques) making sure things didn’t go too far.
Having both liberals and conservatives in a society could be viewed as a form of checks and balances on the direction of the society. It probably seems a nuisance to members of each faction, but, over time, it tends to keep the ship of state on an even keel. The final century of the Roman Republic featured violent swings between these factions that eventually resulted in a breakdown of the structure of power as the greatest threat to the body politic became these swings and not any outside force. The institution of Dictator even existed in the Roman “constitution” to (among other things) address this kind of instability. But there turned out to be limits on even that safeguard.
You could probably look at this as the political equivalent of an autoimmune disorder: Something that usually keeps the metabolism in balance gets so out of whack that it can crash the entire system.
The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore’s dilemma. (Note 39. Rozin and Fallon 1987, We don’t know when disgust arose, but we know that it does not exist in any other animal. Other mammals reject foods based on their taste or smell, but only humans reject them based on what they have touched, or who handled them. [I'm not so sure about this. This may speak more to the inadequacy of our sense of smell and taste. We reject foods when we aren’t sure if they are safe when another animal might be able to know this, one way or the other. Also, since he brought up the problems of omnivores, it’s worth noting that carnivores tend to have quite different -- shorter -- GI tracts which makes it easier for them to flush anything that turns out to be bad. Dogs are famous for this. Many of our food related problems come from eating foods -- meats -- that our digestive systems are not optimized for... opines the vegetarian.]) Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins. But it’s not just food that posed a threat: when early hominids came down from the trees... they greatly increased their risk of infection from each other, and from each other’s waste products. The psychologist Mark Schaller has shown that disgust is part of what he calls the “behavioral immune system” -- a set of cognitive modules that are triggered by signs of infection or disease in other people and that make you want to get away from those people. It’s a lot more effective to prevent infection by washing your food, casting out lepers, or simply avoiding dirty people than it is to let the microbes into your body and then hope that your biological immune system can kill every last one of them.
Well this is a foundation that gets triggered for me every single day as I walk around the city. The more Christian and charitable urge us to see the humanity in the people living on the streets but what I mostly see is an active disease vector. Even if they weren’t such a burden on the civic public health system, their rejection of basic sanitation and hygiene standards tends to put everyone else at increased risk as disease spreads inevitably through their ranks. In the (likely) post-antibiotic age, I expect the body politic, even in a liberal hotbed like San Francisco, will find justification for removing this threat to everyone’s health.
...The original triggers of the key modules that compose this foundation include smells, sights, or other sensory patterns that predict the presence of dangerous pathogens in objects or people. (Examples include human corpses, excrement, scavengers such as vultures [also crows and rats], and people with visible lesions or sores.)
The current triggers of the Sanctity foundation, however, are extraordinarily variable and expandable across cultures and eras. A common and direct expansion is to out-group members. Cultures differ in their attitudes toward immigrants, and there is some evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes are more common in times and places where disease risks are lower. Plagues, epidemics, and new diseases are usually brought in by foreigners -- as are many new ideas, goods, and technologies -- so societies face an analogue of the omnivore’s dilemma, balancing xenophobia and xenophilia.
The Jewish ghetto in Venice is a nice example of a compromise solution to this dilemma.
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p149 ...The Sanctity foundation makes it easy for us to regard some things as “untouchable,” both in a bad way (because something is so dirty or polluted we want to stay away) and in a good way (because something is so hallowed, so sacred, that we want to protect it from desecration). If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred... Why do people so readily treat objects (flags, crosses), places (Mecca, a battlefield related to the birth of your nation), people (saints, heroes), and principles (liberty, fraternity, equality). as though they were of infinite value? Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities. When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive.
[Returning to the disgusting Germans] ...If Mill’s harm principle prevents us from outlawing their actions, then Mill’s harm principle seems inadequate as the basis for a moral community. Whether or not God exists, people feel that some things, actions, and people are noble, pure, and elevated; others are base, polluted, and degraded.
p150 ...American conservatives are more likely to talk about “the sanctity of life” and “the sanctity of marriage.” Conservatives -- particularly religious conservatives -- are more likely to view the body as a temple, housing a soul within, rather than as a machine to be optimized, or as a playground to be used for fun.
[Virginity pledges mentioned on the temple side while Bentham’s maximizing of “hedon”s is mentioned on the playground side.]
(Note 44. Libertarians, on average, experience less empathy and weaker disgust (Iyer et al., 2011), and they are more willing to allow people to violate taboos (Tetlock et al., 2000).)
I wouldn’t have thought “less empathy” went with more tolerance. You’d think it would be the other way.
p152 The Sanctity foundation is used most heavily by the religious right, but it is also used on the spiritual left. You can see the foundation’s original impurity-avoidance function in New Age grocery stores, where you’ll find a variety of products that promise to cleanse you of “toxins.” [Also organic and GMO free products.] And you’ll find the Sanctity foundation underlying some of the moral passions of the environmental movement. Many environmentalists revile industrialism, capitalism, and automobiles not just for the physical pollution they create but also for a more symbolic kind of pollution -- a degradation of nature, and of humanity's original nature, before it was corrupted by industrial capitalism.
That the Mephistophelian world is opposed by extremists on either end of the political/religious spectrum, is a point made in both The Brothers K. and by Naphtha in The Magic Mountain.
The Sanctity foundation is crucial for understanding the American culture wars, particularly over biomedical issues. If you dismiss the Sanctity foundation entirely; then it’s hard to understand the fuss over most of today’s biomedical controversies. The only ethical question about abortion becomes: At what point can the fetus feel pain? [I have to disagree here. This is primarily an issue of Autonomy and individual rights. For me, a fetus feeling pain would merely alter the way abortions should be performed.] Doctor-assisted suicide becomes an obviously good thing... Same for stem cell research...
I think the War of Drugs belongs here, too. Something that has gone on for so long with no positive results has to have some hidden justification, like that our bodies (and minds) are temples that shouldn’t be sullied by drugs.
I’m including this next bit for all those Karamazovs,
The philosopher Leon Kass is among the foremost spokesmen for Shweder’s ethic of divinity, and for the Sanctity foundation on which it is based. Writing in 1997, the year after Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal, Kass lamented the way that technology often erases moral boundaries and brings people ever closer to the dangerous belief that they can do anything they want to do. In an essay titled “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Kass argued that our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too for, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can’t justify those feelings by pointing to victims:
Repugnance, here as elsewhere, revolts against the excesses of human willfulness [striving?], warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.
I have to point out an interesting exception to this identification of repugnance with caution. As we saw in The Brothers K. (and will see in The Magic Mountain when we get to Naphtha’s stories) repugnance and disgust is on occasion seen as something to be transcended in the service of sacred acts like nursing the sick or providing hospitality to the freezing stranger. Is there perhaps a kind of perversion involved in this mixing of sanctity with repugnance? Something like corrupting innocence though in the opposite moral direction.
I suspect that many of our attitudes toward “woman” also are a result of this foundation. There would naturally be a feeling of sanctity toward the source of human life and reproduction. Likewise, I’m sure this is the root of both sides of the Madonna/Whore dynamic. A feeling of reverence for the sacred “mother” combined with a feeling of repugnance for the sullying of that sanctity. Henry Ryecroft’s paean to Victorian femininity would be the positive side of this foundation.
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