Beyond Outrage - Disgust, and why it makes this moment so dangerous for America.
What’s the difference between outrage and disgust? If you look up “outrage,” the definitions relate to anger. The first definition for “disgust,” on the other hand, is revulsion. While both outrage and disgust could be called emotions, most of us would say outrage starts in the brain and then, in extreme cases, inflames the rest of our bodies. Disgust starts in the gut -- a revulsion, something involuntary that presents first and foremost as a physical reaction.
I’ve been writing to you about the politics of outrage. In truth, a frightening number of us have advanced to the even more toxic politics of disgust. America can deal with outrage, but America might struggle to master disgust.
Disgust isn’t about disagreement; it’s about visceral rejection. So many of us rejecting so many “others” presents a major challenge for the American idea of "Out of many, one."
This difference between outrage and disgust in our politics first occurred to me as I was reading an article in The New Yorker by Jiayang Fan about the world’s most disgusting foods. Here it is: Disgusting Food. The article describes the author’s visit to The Disgusting Food Museum in Malmo, Sweden. Yes, there is such a place, and we’re told it’s the top ranked tourist attraction in Malmo, which is Sweden’s third largest city. Featured foods range from foie gras (did you know the ducks are force fed until their livers swell to ten times the normal size?) to skinned and boiled guinea pig, to a rice wine requiring a child’s fresh excrement as part of the fermentation process. There are also many dishes centered on bugs and preserved fish. The museum tour culminates with a visit to a wall of cans which when uncovered allow access to the scent of surstromming, a fermented herring, the smell of which has induced more vomiting than any of the museum’s other scent and taste exhibits. (The prospect and frequent reality of vomiting is part of the museum's allure. I think I won't be rushing to this particular museum).
Of course, all these disgusting foods are beloved in their native cultures. For every person who reacts with what Charles Darwin himself called “disgust face,” there are many who react with pleasure. The foods are not only subjectively disgusting, they are objectively foreign, deeply other. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Recently, I joined a few Asian-American friends at a restaurant in Queens to have hot pot, a fondue-like communal meal in which ingredients are dipped in a shared pot of boiling broth at the center of the table. By the time I arrived, bowls of sliced pig arteries, pig intestines, cow stomach, duck feet, and pale-pink brains of unidentified provenance already sat around a burbling vat of broth, spices, and chili oil. All of these would have made it into a Westerner’s encyclopedia of disgusting foods, but everyone at the table knew that the gusto with which we consumed the entrails and viscera connected us.
I asked my companions if they’d had any memorable encounters with disgusting food. Nearly all of them named dairy products that they had tried for the first time in the United States. A Chengdu native recalled the chalky taste of a protein shake, making the classic disgust face as she spoke. “The first time I had pizza was bad,” Alex, a forty-year-old network engineer, said. It was margherita pizza, and he thought that the little white splotches of melted burrata were fresh vomit. “I couldn’t believe that there were people who ate this regularly,” he continued. “But Americans told me this was a very common food here.” He bit into the muscled leg of a bullfrog.
“And?” I asked.
“And I just learned to get used to it.”
It was at around this point in the article -- the mention of “disgust face” -- that I started thinking about Donald Trump. If you are one of the many who despised Trump, I would guess that your visage reflexively twisted into disgust face many times over the last 5 years. It's also likely that your stomach quite often started to secrete more acid and that you became mildly nauseous. None of these reactions were any more voluntary than breathing; they were physical and automatic and hardwired. I know that people on the right, Trump supporters, must react in similar ways to people on the left. I couldn't tell you exactly which people elicit disgust because I'm not on the right. It's also possible that the disgust reaction is more acute amongst those on the left because Trump is such a uniquely pungent character; there's really no equivalent for better or worse on the left.
More problematic -- unlike the Asian Americans who became accustomed eventually to American dairy foods because they decided that's what they would do -- now, quite to the contrary, we are encouraged not to become accustomed to anything so other, so foreign, as to disgust us. In fact, our political machine, as described in the last essays, does everything it can to identify objects of disgust and then trigger that disgust as often as possible. Whereas Alex in the article got used to pizza, our political and media ecosystem does everything it can to convince us, figuratively, never to eat that. Whether they would actually have left the country if Trump had been re-elected or not, it's certainly true that many on the left spoke of the possibility. It's as if they were saying, "if the national food remains this gross for four more years, I’m out." As for the disturbing number of Republicans who refuse to accept that Trump lost the election, it's as if they're saying "there is no way that the America we know could ever eat this slop. It didn't, and we won't."
None of this bodes well for our country. American political reactions have become as visceral as American bigotry. On dating apps, many people will say "No Trumpers" or "No Libs" as though they're enforcing a racial or religious covenant in their neighborhood. Now, instead of acting out of visceral disgust for "just" a racial or ethnic minority group, many people act with a similar or greater level of disgust for an entire half of the country. And the forces that thrive on outrage and disgust are growing in each party.
Can we break this cycle? I'll offer a proposal next week.
The Politics of Disgust