Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Disgust is interesting because we all develop nausea reactions to specific things such as human excrement and putrid corpses. However, there is also room for learning: certain substances and behaviours can be deemed disgusting if others say so. The diversity of food preferences, personal hygiene, and sexual practices across different cultures proves this. It is well known that Asian cuisine includes insects and reptiles that are considered unpalatable by Western standards. Less well known is the beverage Kopi Luwak, a rare gourmet coffee from Indonesia that is made from beans passed through the digestive system of a palm civet, a dark brown, tree-dwelling, catlike creature found throughout Southeast Asia. Kopi Luwak is sold mainly to the Japanese at up to £300 a pound, making it the world’s most expensive ‘crappacino’. Or take phlegm. There are few things more revolting than someone else’s creamy mucous. In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the city officials tried to outlaw the commonly accepted Chinese practice of clearing phlegm in public by spitting and sinus-clearing, which are nauseating practices to most Westerners. Ironically, the Western practice of blowing the contents of one’s nose into a handkerchief and putting the handkerchief, with its contents, in one’s pocket could bring on dry-heaves in many Japanese, who consider it disgusting to carry such fluids around on one’s person. I guess we in the West would think the same of other bodily excrements kept in our pockets. Or consider sex with animals. Like many others, I had thought bestiality to be universally taboo until I discovered that intercourse with donkeys is acceptable in the northern Colombian town of San Antero, where adolescent boys are actively encouraged in this practice. They even have a festival to celebrate this bestiality; particularly attractive donkeys are paraded in wigs and makeup. 8(I am still hoping that this last example is an elaborate hoax.)

There’s a saying in the north of England, ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’, and these few examples demonstrate how society and culture can shape what we find disgusting and what we find acceptable. In later chapters, we will see that all of us experience feelings of disgust. Our responses to some disgusting things are automatic and largely unlearned, but the people around us shape others, such as the violation of taboos. In this way, gut-wrenching disgust can be triggered to prevent behaviours that threaten the sacred values of our society.

WHY DON’T WE WANT TO WEAR THE CARDIGAN?

Rozin’s work on contamination shows that adults do not want to come into physical contact with disgusting items even after they have been washed. (One of the items he used was Hitler’s sweater. It didn’t take much ingenuity to adapt this to Fred West’s cardigan for a modern audience, as the principles are the same.) Rozin identified at least four reasons why we refuse to touch evil items, and he found that adults endorse each of these reasons to varying degrees.

1.

We do not want to be seen to undertake an action that the majority would avoid.

2.

Any item associated with a killer is negative, and thus wearing it produces associations with the act of killing.

3.

We believe that there is a physical contamination of the clothing.

4.

We believe that there is a spiritual contamination of the clothing.

Social conformity, the first explanation, is sensible, but only when we imagine what others would think of us. In other words, why does society regard touching certain items of clothing as so unacceptable? Why is the physical contact more wrong than simply saying the name or painting a picture of the culprit? The answer lies somewhere in the remaining three reasons.

Many Web critics argued that my cardigan stunt demonstrated simple association only and that there was no need to talk about contamination. However, an explanation based on association rings hollow to my ears. How and why should a cardigan come to represent the negative association with a killer? If I had chosen a knife or noose, the association account would have been adequate. A cardigan is not an item usually linked to murderers. It is something that offers warmth and comfort and, most importantly for my demonstration, intimacy. This combination was meant to jar and shock. The infamous photo of a snarling Fred West taken at his arrest produces a strong association, but personal items such as clothing trigger stronger negative responses. Images are powerful, but objects are even more so. Intimate clothing is more powerful still. That’s why you never see someone else’s underwear for sale in secondhand clothing stores no matter how well they might have been cleaned and sterilized. This is what Rozin has shown in many similar experiments in which he presents adult subjects with items that have been contaminated. In spite of efforts to sterilize the items, adults still feel disgusted. Something persists in the clothing. More people would rather wear a cardigan that has been dropped in dog faeces and then washed than one that has also been cleaned but worn by a murderer.

What about the explanation based on physical contact? It goes without saying that no one wants to get really close to a serial killer. Maybe you fear for your life, but it could also be that we treat evil as a physical contaminant that could be transmitted by touch. Not touching something contaminated by evil could be another heuristic to avoid having bad things happen to us. Perhaps Mother Nature provided us with a quick and easy rule of thumb: ‘If something is bad, do not touch. You might catch it too.’ After all, we don’t know why someone becomes a psychotic killer. It could be that something they touched or ate drove them mad. In September 2000, twenty-three-year-old Jacob Sexton murdered a Japanese female exchange student in Vermont following a two-month binge on LSD. 9After beating the girl to death with his bare hands, he lay down in front of the state police car when the authorities arrived and confessed that he had felt like killing because he ‘wanted to gather souls’. His defence was temporary insanity due to drug-induced psychosis. Physical substances like drugs can alter our minds and make us do crazy things. Sexton had willingly ingested the drug, but Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD back in the 1950s, also experienced mind-altering trips when he unknowingly absorbed the compound through his fingertips. Simply by touching the drug, his mind was changed. Many toxins can be absorbed by skin contact, and minute quantities of harmful particles can present an invisible threat. Not only do murder and ghosts have to be declared when stigmatized homes are put up for sale, but many US states require houses that have previously contained methamphetamine manufacture labs to be identified and certified clean because of the residual threat of contamination. So when we behave as if houses or clothing could transmit psychosis, we are not being entirely irrational.

However, the fear of contamination does not require something physical. Just the thought of doing something immoral can make us feel physically dirty. It doesn’t have to be murder. When adults were asked in a recent study to think about cheating someone, they felt the need to wash their hands afterward. 10The researchers found that the brain areas that were active when subjects were feeling disgust from physical things like dirt and germs were the same as those that were active when they considered acts of moral disgust. This ‘Macbeth effect’ reveals that tricks of the mind can be just as powerful as the real thing. So thinking that something could be physically contaminating seems a good reason not to touch it. It is as though we suspect that something like an electric shock could leap from the object. This is why the Fred West cardigan stunt triggers mostly a sense of spiritual, not physical, contamination. You can’t wash away such contamination as though it were dirt, but, in a kind of balancing of evil with good, it can be cancelled or ‘exorcised’ by contact with someone good like Mother Teresa. The Vatican university, the Regina Apostolorum , has devised a two-month course on how to carry out an exorcism. From what I understand, these exorcism rites closely follow what was depicted in the classic horror film The Exorcist : a combination of prayers, rituals, and commands for the demons to leave the afflicted. 11The exorcism rite is usually performed in cases of individual possession, and sometimes the sufferer’s home is also cleansed with holy water and blessings.