Several studies have probed the emotions of people along the political spectrum, and found that disgust in particular is tightly linked to political orientation. People who react strongly to disgusting images are more likely to sit on the political right and show concern for what they see as bodily and spiritual purity. They tend to oppose abortion and gay marriage, for example. But how ingrained is it?
Montague says they can predict with 95 per cent accuracy where a person is on the liberal-conservative spectrum just by showing them one picture.
Any regular readers I may have will recall that one of my preoccupations over the past six months or so has been integrating gut instincts–the knowledge of the gut, which is often hidden or redirected by trauma–into useful avenues of knowledge.
The way I read this study–and it warrants pondering–is that conservatives, in retaining the capacity for innate, instinctual, disgust, also retain a capacity for gut level decision making, and the reconciliation of instinct with reason, by which I mean the capacity, ideally, to listen to both.
If you have no response, obviously, you cannot integrate that response over any period of time.
It is a commonplace that sociopaths show little or no empathy with regard to the suffering of others. It is, to me, a commonplace that the political left has overlooked and excused the most DISGUSTING crimes imaginable. They do this BOTH by an aptitude for distraction, and, apparently, because they have lost the capacity to listen to their bodies wisdom. This is how moral imbeciles like Van Jones and Cass Sunstein can continue to look at the history of totalitarian regimes and see anything but horror.
Or ponder being unable to react in any way to the image of unborn fetuses being ground up for useless medical treatments? As far as I have been able to determine, fetal stem cells are in almost all cases rejected by all but very close family members. Only ADULT stem cells seem to do any good, and those seem to do a great deal of good.
I have often said that politics can for many be seen as a SUBSTITUTE for a conscience. Left wing politics in no small measure exist to reassure people incapable of normal–for our species, seen purely biologically–reactions to scenes of primitive psychological importance.
And what do you do when you lack something? You overcompensate. I will posit that left wing politics are the Monster Trucks of people with tiny moral capacities.
Obviously, European thought has evolved past ACTING on primitive impulses. We did after all come up with the idea of enshrining the notion of universal human rights in a founding document. But there is nothing in granting equality before the law–and PRACTICING equality before the law–which requires us to abdicate our more primitive instinctual drives, and using them as way-finders for our own individual moral integration.
As Peter Levine says over and over in his books, the loss of the gut leads to a loss of a sense of self. We could perhaps even posit the loss of disgust as a defining attribute of the worst aspects of modernity. Seen in this light, the atrocities of the National Socialists and their Communist brethren make perfect sense: their sense of “disgust” was abstract, and thus functionally useless in directing them morally, or providing countervailing individualisms.
They claim disgust so vehemently, they clamor so loudly for the rectification of injustices, precisely because these emotions are LACKING. They make up in drama what they lack intrapsychically. This is the reason they feel no emotional connection with concrete outcomes, why they feel no need to learn from their mistakes and change their behavior to help the people they claim to care about: they don’t in fact care about anything but generating strong feelings to mask their inner incapacity to be fully human.
This is a rich mine.
