Content Warning: Contains graphic themes including bodily fluids, moral disgust, and sexual violence (discussed, not described). Maybe don't read over breakfast.

I found a book about disgust recently. W.I. Miller’s The Anatomy of Disgust ^[1]  is a serious academic work about vomit, faeces, and why other people’s smell is always worse than your own. Naturally, I was intrigued.

As someone into social psychology, I often encounter discussions about emotions influencing society: how anger can motivate political movements, or how social interactions are regulated by pride and shame. Disgust, meanwhile, is something I've mainly encountered as a biological matter rather than a social one. The book starts with its evolutionary function: recoil from dangerous pathogens and you are more likely to survive. So far, so logical. But then...  Then I met Catherine of Siena.

The Stories We Swallow

Catherine was a fourteenth-century caretaker tending a woman with a disgusting cancerous wound. The smell made Catherine retch. But rather than keeping her distance, she saw her nausea as a personal failure and was determined to correct it. Basically, she exposure-therapied herself by staying even closer. When the retching persisted, she escalated to an act that defied the logic of stay-alive biology: she collected the pus from the wound into a cup and drank it.

At this point I had to set the book aside and focus on my breathing to avoid becoming part of the subject matter in a public library.

How could one willingly swallow pus?

Well… there's a reasonable chance you've done so yourself today. 

Every morning, millions of people pour a white liquid into their coffee, their cereal and their children’s cups. It arrives cold, clean. The smell of the body it came from removed. Processing, distance and language change how we perceive what we consume significantly, allowing us to ignore the roughly one drop of pus per cup of bovine lactation. ^[2] Catherine drank from a wound and was made a saint; we drink from a carton with a smiling abuse victim printed on it and call it breakfast. How is any of this supposed to make sense?

The difference between Catherine's cup and ours is less about the substance than the story attached to it. We don't just invent our disgust; we learn what to recoil from and what to accept as normal. Social structures pass these judgements on until they become so familiar that questioning them hardly occurs to us. (Bourdieu’s concept of habitus seems relevant here for how this encodes into subconscious physical habits, which is next on my reading list.^[3])

At this point in Miller's book, disgust has stopped being a safeguard and become a verdict. The initial logic seems to disappear… My fluids are fine; yours are a problem. A saint is holy for overcoming it; a woman is expected to overcome it and thanked with oppression. And a whole people can be declared disgusting, with the feeling serving as apparent evidence that oppression is justified.

Orwell's Sense of Smell (Miller's final chapter)

The bridge between gagging and judging is short, neurologically. Sapolsky notes that evolution essentially "duct-taped moral disgust onto the insula's existing repertoire."^[4] It appears to be the same alarm for both rotten food and rotten behaviour, firing first and leaving the rationalisation for later.

Orwell understood something about this connection long before we had fMRI scans. In The Road to Wigan Pier ^[5], he describes the class prejudice he inherited as a child, which he refers to as the four frightful words: "The lower classes smell."

When he chose to live among them in a filthy lodging house, confronted with unemptied chamber pots and non-existent table manners, he found a truth Miller emphasises: Disgust leaves no room for pity. Up close, his biology revolted and clashed with his socialist ideals. Yet on the train out of Wigan he saw a girl on her knees in a slum backyard, poking a stick in a blocked drain. He called her expression "the most desolate, hopeless expression" he has ever seen. As he was looking at her through the glass, protected from the smell, he felt pity. As Miller points out, sympathy is best elicited at middle distance.

Orwell did not hold back pointing at the hypocrisy of the bourgeois left who claimed to attribute virtue to the working class, yet "still take such pains to drink [their] soup silently". High-minded ideals, defeated by the sound of supper.

Now, it’s easy to judge a broken class system from a comfortable historical distance.

I do not have a class system to point to. But I have someone...

Dora 

Two weeks ago someone called out for help right in front of my building. I let her in. It turned out that she has a serious infectious disease, and saving her would take all my energy and most of my money.

I hesitated, and I hate that. The worst part is knowing that if she had been a kitten, I would not have. But she is not; she is one of the ugliest felines this city has to offer, flea-ridden, leaking pus, and I find her disgusting.

I resent her for costing me everything I chose to spend on her. I know that's wrong. I know I would complain far less about the effort if she were cuter. I know that's not right. A kitten could be twice as filthy without repulsing me. I know that's completely illogical. But knowing a reaction is not rational doesn't turn it off. And watching my own empathy stutter over aesthetic repulsion created a second, deeper layer of disgust, this time directed inward.

And it gets worse. She is an obligate carnivore. So to keep her alive, I have to buy dead animals from the industry I find morally disgusting, and have spent years advocating against.