A psychosocial analysis of a physical reaction
It may surprise you, or perhaps not, but disgust seems to be everywhere these days. At least, anyone who follows public debate even a little can easily get that impression. Politicians are no longer simply described as stupid, untrustworthy, opportunistic or dangerous, but as ‘repulsive ‘. Views we disagree with are labelled ‘toxic’, and certain public figures actually make people physically sick. And this phenomenon seems less figurative than it sounds. Psychologists who confront test subjects with politicians from the opposing party not only find increased reports of revulsion, but also measure physiological reactions associated with it. Other research shows that political messages which moralise a subject can evoke similar feelings. Public debate is not merely becoming more heated; it is changing in character. It is becoming toxic.
Now, history gives little cause to idealise the past as a time when opponents mainly engaged in debate and, afterwards, satisfied with the quality of the discussion, went for a beer together. Since time immemorial, people have portrayed one another as filthy, unclean, sick or contagious, and political history contains examples of this that are too horrific to present disgust as a new phenomenon of our time. Disgust is therefore an age-old political and social emotion, but what is interesting is that the vocabulary of contagion has made a comeback. And this in a culture that has long regarded itself as rational, individualised and democratic
In this context, something stands out about our language. The word ‘toxic’ has, in a relatively short space of time, spread far beyond the chemistry laboratory. In 2018, ‘toxic’ was named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries due to the sharp rise in its usage and its ability to encapsulate the cultural zeitgeist. We are now familiar with toxic relationships, toxic work environments, toxic cultures, toxic masculinity, toxic rhetoric and toxic politics. These days, it seems that virtually anything involving two people can be toxic.
You Can’t Talk to Poison
Of course, the fact that we label so many things as ‘toxic’ these days could simply be the usual inflation to which a successful metaphor falls prey, but the choice of this particular metaphor is significant. After all, you cannot talk to poison. A political opponent, however difficult it may sometimes be to acknowledge, has a perspective, a history, intentions and arguments, and even feelings. Poison has none of that. Poison does not need to be understood and cannot come to a different realisation. You do not need to wonder what it has been through, why it thinks the way it does, or whether there might be something in its perception that you have overlooked. Poison is identified, isolated and removed. To call an opinion toxic is to say more than that it is reprehensible. It also changes the status of the person who holds it.
From judgement to reflex
This is precisely where disgust becomes psychologically interesting. When I say, ‘I find what you’re saying incorrect, dangerous or morally reprehensible’, there is still a mental space between me and your statement. I am the one forming a judgement about something you say and, however passionate that judgement may be, I can in principle still relate to it. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said of this: ‘There is a space between stimulus and response. In that space lies our power to choose our response.’ With disgust, that space can disappear. You say something and my reaction is: yuck!
That is the first sense in which I describe disgust as regressive. Not because emotions are primitive and rationality superior, but because representation gives way to the immediacy of experience itself. What makes this regressive is not where the emotion might be located in the brain, but the relationship I have with my own experience.
This brings about something else as well. First I say: ‘I find what you’re saying disgusting’. A moment later: ‘What you’re saying is disgusting’. The grammatical shift is small, but psychologically significant. My state of mind has become a property of the external world. I cannot stand someone and he becomes unbearable; I am disgusted by him and he becomes disgusting; I react physically to his presence and he makes me feel sick. The cause of my inner state shifts to the outside, whilst my sense of ownership in it disappears.
The involuntary reaction is an effective mechanism when dealing with spoiled food. Anyone who, upon taking a suspicious mouthful, first wishes to examine at length whether their disgust is sufficiently justified in epistemological terms has a problem from an evolutionary perspective. Spitting it out and keeping one’s distance is usually wiser. Revulsion is effective precisely because it bypasses the detour via reflection.
A political opinion, however, contains no bacteria. The intensity of my reaction may nevertheless suggest the opposite to me: because my body reacts so strongly, there must apparently be something outside me that causes and justifies that reaction. The outside world seems to have become more dangerous, whilst in reality it is primarily my relationship with that outside world that has changed. To put it in more everyday terms, I have become a drama queen.
That wouldn’t be particularly interesting if it were merely an emotional exaggeration. There is a second regressive effect at play. Whilst I externalise my reaction, I depersonalise the other person. They lose their status as a subject by becoming toxic or contagious, whilst I lose ownership of my own reaction because my defence mechanism is presented as inevitable. ‘I can’t help it, that man really does make me physically sick.’ Where there were once two people who wholeheartedly disagreed with one another, a biologically much simpler system emerges: toxin and immune response.
This makes the question of why our era in particular seems so receptive to this idiom more interesting than the revulsion itself. After all, we live in a culture that attaches extraordinary value to reflection, knowledge and rationality. We are highly educated, have access to virtually unlimited information, and guide public action with research, expertise, data and models. Precisely for this reason, it is tempting to describe modernity as a largely successful story of increasing knowledge and control, the limits of which have only recently become apparent. But in doing so, we would be oversimplifying the matter.
The claim to master reality
The Enlightenment has not only expanded our knowledge, but above all has made a particular way of knowing extraordinarily successful: analysing, distinguishing, specialising and then intervening. This resulted in concrete ‘makeability’. Diseases became treatable, forces of nature controllable and social institutions changeable. But the sheer existence of a capacity to shape reality does not imply an absolute entitlement to shape it.
It is precisely the success of this way of knowing that has produced an ever more differentiated reality. Our control over the individual parts increased spectacularly, whilst the coherence of the whole slipped further and further from our grasp. The world became increasingly manageable in its individual parts, yet ever less governable as a whole. Yet that diminishing manageability did not automatically lead to modesty. As our capabilities increased, so too did the expectation that reality could be fully analysed, understood, and corrected. It is precisely when actual power diminishes that powerlessness becomes unbearable.
Something similar took place in the mind. Tradition, authority and community ceased to be taken for granted, and the individual became freer to determine their own life and reality. That was emancipation, but it also meant that different realities came to coexist. The fragmented mind encountered the fragmented world. It is precisely there that democracy appears in a different light.
Democracy as an Exercise in Tolerance
Democracy was not merely a means of peacefully distributing political power. It was also a cultural response to the consequences of emancipation. After all, as soon as people are truly recognised as individuals, a necessary difference arises. The other is truly autonomous only when they are under no obligation to see the world as I do. Democracy institutionalises precisely that unpleasant realisation: that people who enjoy the same rights and look at the same world can nevertheless reach different conclusions.
In that sense, democracy was one of our most important cultural defences against disgust. Not because democratic citizens learnt to love one another or because politics suddenly became rational, but because an institutional and psychological space was created between aversion and exclusion. I was free to challenge your views, to ridicule them and to find them morally reprehensible, but you remained a subject. You were granted speaking time, legal protection and a voice. And when enough other citizens shared your view, I had to tolerate it becoming a political reality.
That word, ‘tolerate’, perhaps hits the nail on the head. Democracy is not merely a form of government, but an exercise in bearing reality. It does not require me to approve of reality, but to acknowledge its existence, precisely when it does not coincide with my convictions.
When the Other Does Not Disappear
This makes the other person a particularly painful presence. He is not merely someone with whom I disagree. He embodies the boundary of my reality. After all, we both have access to the facts. I explain to him what is going on, refer to the science, correct his misunderstandings, and, if necessary, even provide him with a link. And yet he does not reach my conclusion.
For the democratic mindset, that should be the starting point of the political question. For the mindset that assumes that reality can and must be fully analysed, understood and managed, this signals the end of patience.
Initially, we assume that the other person does not understand. But if the facts are really so clear and he is aware of them, why does he still think otherwise? Gradually, the explanation shifts from his intellect to his character. He no longer merely misunderstands; he refuses to understand. He is irresponsible, malicious, corrupt or morally suspect. The difference of opinion becomes a failing on the other person’s part. And when even that moralising fails to make him disappear, a still more fundamental boundary remains. ‘I am disgusted by him.’ What I cannot change, I can at least reject.
Here a paradox emerges that seems characteristic of modern consciousness: as our actual grasp of reality diminishes, our claim to control it may paradoxically grow stronger. What leads, socially speaking, to more control, rules and interventions, may translate, on an individual level, into greater conviction, moralising and, ultimately, emotion. One possibility remains carefully overlooked in this context: that it is not necessarily reality that falls short, but my relationship to it.
It is precisely here that the deepest regression lies. Modernity has taught us to objectify reality, but disgust ultimately objectifies our own subjectivity. ‘I cannot bear this’ becomes ‘this is unbearable’. My limit becomes the limit of what is permissible. My state of mind becomes knowledge of reality.
And so a very old category returns. Not true or false, but pure or contaminated; not reasonable or unreasonable, but safe or toxic; not someone with whom I disagree, but someone whose proximity threatens me.
Perhaps that is why it is, in fact, the superlative of polarisation. Polarisation at least presupposes two poles which, however far apart they may be, affirm each other’s existence. Disgust wants to rid itself of the other pole.
The democratic movement is precisely the opposite. It does not ask us to be less convinced or to make all truths relative, but that we can remain convinced whilst the other continues to exist. I can be right without it following that you must disappear.
Perhaps maturity begins with a rather modest thought: my disgust is real, but it is mine. My political judgement need not shift by a single millimetre as a result. What returns is merely the psychological space between me and my reaction, and thus between me and the other. In that space, I can observe, think, judge, challenge and perhaps even laugh, without the other person first having to be declared a poison.
Perhaps that is ultimately what democratic civilisation asks of us: not that we like reality, but that we can tolerate it without elevating our aversion to a defining feature of that reality.
And so disgust is not the mark of the intellectual with a razor-sharp analysis and an unconventional yet committed opinion, but a response from an ideologue of mastery and control over reality who cannot bear that reality refuses to conform to his convictions.