Musings on the Scandal of the Body, Part 1: Why We Curse

As a psychologist I tend to muse, theologically, about the stuff of life. One facet of human existence that I've been intrigued with has been cursing and profanity.

Specifically, why is profanity so scatological and sexual? Obviously, the sensory aversions we have toward human waste may be the simple associative reason for scatological references. But this analysis doesn't help us understand why sexuality is so often implicated in profanity. So, to my mind, there seems to be more going on. I've posted about this topic before and was prompted to revisit this topic by a recent book published by Steven Pinker.

Pinker, psychology professor from Harvard, is one of the most influential psychologists working today. Pinker's books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Words, Words and Rules, and The Blank Slate are all worth reading (for theologians I highly recommend The Blank Slate). Recently, Pinker released a new book, The Stuff of Thought. In The Stuff of Thought Pinker has a chapter on the psychology of profanity and cursing. That chapter was recently published as an article for New Republic. Pinker's New Republic article can be found here. It is a great read.

Although Pinker's article is a fascinating survey of the cognitive science of profanity he fails to crack the mystery of why profanity is so scatological and sexual. Many of those deep questions remain.

My contribution has been to suggest that part of the mystery surrounding profanity can be revealed if we examine it from an existential perspective.

Specifically, as I've written about before, psychologists have amassed evidence that the body is a mortality reminder. That is, the body, with its waste, smells, ooziness, and vulnerability, makes our animalness salient. We find this degrading and fearful. Man wants to be an angel. Profanity cuts through those illusions. This is the source of the offense.

To profane something is to strip off the spiritual overlay, to make something sacred base and common. Profanity desacralizes human beings. For example, to call a woman a f****** b**** is to take someone made in the Imago Dei, to be encountered as a mysterium tremendum, and reduce her to a barnyard animal in heat. This is the offense of profanity, its desacralizing maneuver.

But profanity not just degrading. In my analysis, the degradation is filled with existential significance. To be reduced to an animal creates an existential dread: Am I ONLY an animal? If so, do I have a soul? And if I don't, what happens to me at death? In short, profanity is a death reminder and this, too, is an offense.

Profanity is a theological act. In its offense we find body and soul, the animal and the divine, and death and resurrection dancing in a dialectic.

Theology can be found in the most unlikely of places.