Purity and Defilement: Part 6, The Promiscuity of Disgust & Eucharist

One of the interesting facets of disgust is that it isn't an emotion we have at birth. Small children are notorious for having little to no disgust response. They will put just about anything in their mouths. I remember when my son picked some gum off the floor in a subway station in New York City and starting eating it.

That curiosity is combined with another: We eat only a small fraction of the edible foodstuffs in our ecosystem. There are lots of things we could eat but just don't. Americans, for instance, don't eat bugs, worms, dogs, animal brains, and so on. We find these wholly legitimate foodstuffs to be, well, disgusting. And we know that these appraisals are local and cultural. World travel quickly establishes that food choices tend to fairly narrow in a given culture.

Putting these two observations together the following has been speculated. Humans are the only animal on this planet that can live in all of the earth's land ecosystems. Obviously, the food available in each ecosystem varies widely. So when a child is born they don't have any innate food preferences. They will, as we said, eat just about anything. Thus, children are naturally open to the foodstuffs present in the ecosystem they are born into. Then, suddenly, in their toddler years the disgust response emerges. And it often slams down hard. Much to the chagrin of parents. Last week the child would eat anything. This week they like nothing. Suddenly, the child gets very conservative and locks down on a very narrow set of foodstuffs. The psychology of disgust has finally emerged.

In short, disgust seems to develop in a way very similar to language. Like their openness to all foodstuffs a child is born with the facility to learn any human language. Then, after a period of time (called a sensitive period), the child's natural facility to acquire language is lost. After the sensitive period a new language can be learned but it has to be done in an effortful and deliberative manner. Toddlers don't need vocabulary flashcards to learn their Mother Tongue. Just talk to them and they soak it up. I wish I could learn Spanish that way. But my sensitive period has long past.

Disgust seems to operate in a similar way. At birth we are open to most foodstuffs. But when the sensitive period closes we laser in on the narrow choices offered to us in our culture. And once these tastes lock in we are generally hesitant to eat or try foods outside those early exposures. Try some fresh animal brains for breakfast! No, thanks. Do you have some Frosted Flakes?

What does all this have to do with our discussions about disgust psychology and the Christian life? Well, what we see in all this is that disgust has a plasticity to it, a feature we don't see in other emotions. That is, although disgust is innate the targets of disgust can he highly variable given cultural contexts. And what psychologists have discovered is that disgust has attached itself to aspects of life that have little to nothing to do with eating or oral incorporation, the adaptive core of disgust. Why does disgust attach to all this extracurricular stuff? The answer seems to be that during the sensitive window of development disgust can promiscuously attach to just about any stimulus. Generally, these are foodstuffs but any other stimuli that creates recoil or revulsion or exclusion within the culture also seems targeted.

And it is this promiscuity of disgust that worries us. We feel revulsion toward things that create moral or social problems for the church.

How promiscuous is disgust? Well, for North Americans (again, disgust is culturally variable) psychologists have noted that the following stimuli tend to be reliable disgust electors:

1. Food

2. Body products (e.g., feces, vomit)

3. Animals (e.g., insects, rats)

4. Sexual behaviors (e.g., incest, homosexuality)

5. Contact with the dead or corpses

6. Violations of the exterior envelope of the body (e.g., gore, deformity)

7. Poor hygiene

8. Interpersonal contamination (e.g., contact with unsavory persons)

9. Moral offenses

Much of this list is reasonable if disgust is primarily a response to protect us from eating things that might be toxic or a disease vector. However, much of this list has little to do with eating or oral incorporation. For example, as we've been discussing in the last few posts, disgust often regulates moral and social reasoning. The incorporation isn't oral in these cases, it's social.

Looking over the the disgust domains psychologists have attempted to look for patterns. The classification scheme proposed by Paul Rozin is going to be the scheme I use to structure the posts to come. Specifically, Rozin breaks the disgust domains down this way:

1. Core Disgust: Food

Revulsion centered around eating and oral incorporation. The adaptive core of disgust.

2. Sociomoral Disgust: Moral offenses, people

Revulsion centered around moral and social judgments. The aspect of disgust related hospitality in Matthew 9.

3. Animal-Reminder Disgust: Gore, deformity, animals, hygiene, death

Revulsion centered around stimuli that function as death/mortality reminders. The existential aspect of disgust.

In the posts that follow we'll work through each of these domains. We'll start with disgust and morality moving on to disgust and social life and conclude with the existential aspects of disgust. But to conclude this post, let me demonstrate how knowledge of the disgust domains can illuminate Christian theology.

Think of the disgust domains in relation to the Eucharist. Notice how every disgust domain is implicated in the Lord's Supper:

1. Core: Food is involved.

2. Sociomoral: The act occurs in the social context of table fellowship.

3. Animal-Reminder: The emblems are considered to be "blood" and "flesh," with strong cannibalistic overtones.

Food, hospitality, blood. All facets of disgust are implicated and blended in the Eucharist. We eat. We drink blood. We welcome sinners to table. Why this particular combination? Is it just a coincidence that the Eucharist conflates the disgust domains into this ritual?

My hunch is that the Eucharist was instituted to regulate the disgust psychology of the Church. Disgust is so promiscuous is needs regulation and sanctification. I think the Eucharist is engaged in that task, shaping and reshaping how we think about morality, hospitality and death. There is a reason, a deep reason, that the central act of Christian worship conflates eating with hospitality and death.