More Disgust, Please!
Tyler Cowen, Paul Bloom, and Saving Civilization
“COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?
BLOOM: I’m conscious enough about the limits of our knowledge, which is that I would be very trepidatious before removing an emotion from people because you don’t know what the consequences would be, but yes. It’s hard to think, and maybe you could think of an example where disgust has made the world better. It’s hard to think, and maybe you could think of an example where disgust has made the world better.”1
~ Paul Bloom, in conversation with Tyler Cowen
Really?
Paul Bloom, the author of the excellent Against Empathy, has beyond proven his non-comformist bona fides. Nonetheless, he’s unable to rattle off the benefits of disgust. Would you be able to?
I’ll help with a definition of disgust: “marked aversion aroused by something highly distasteful”.
Now, give me five benefits of disgust! How about five benefits of empathy, happiness, or even fear? I bet those are easier.
As I’ll cover, there are many such benefits to disgust. As Paul’s reaction indicates, the present is a remarkable time of anti-disgust, ‘inclusive’ sentiment. This has predictable downsides.
Disgust evolved to keep people out of groups where they could do vastly more damage than they could possibly make up for. While disease is a massive factor in the evolution of disgust, the impulse goes beyond sanitation and offers an emotionally compelling remedy to many of our social pathologies.
The evolutionary story of disgust speaks to the limitations of the right-wing vibe shift. I agree with Tyler that disgust is a component of right-wing morality. I’d go further and say that disgust is the missing “glue” to a unified right-wing morality (as opposed to a fragile coalition). To slightly oversell it, unification through disgust is exactly what is needed to remedy the excess of performative victimhood and veto points in Western political systems.
Disgust and Disease
If a modern is willing to concede disgust has one benefit, the most common answer is sanitation. Disgust-related behavior, such as cleaning, exile, or dietary restrictions has historically prevented the spread of disease well before anyone discovered germ theory. In other words, disgust behaviors were a pre-rational defense from disease. Historical and modern disease patterns loosely predict right-wing authoritarianism, with some contestation. This demonstrates the variability of disgust behavior according to the risk of disease.
Critics of the sanitation benefit raise two reasonable points:
In modern times, public health applied correctly displaces the need for many of the direct disease-prevention caused by disgust.
Pre-modern disgust resulted in pseudo-scientific scapegoating and other ineffective ‘treatments’.2
These points are largely correct. I do not think disease prevention alone stands as a justification for disgust. However, the evolutionary story of how disgust developed hints at its continued usefulness in modern society.
When dealing with disease, there is a massive asymmetry in incentives to invite someone into a broader group of people. One infected outsider could infect an entire population, with particularly devastating consequences if the outsider is from a region with diseases that the population has no resistance to.
While that specific risk has decreased due to sanitation, vaccines, and treatments, the general incentive structures remain today. Disgust is not just helpful, but crucial, when there are asymmetric risks of contagion, collapse, or dysfunction.
Social Contagion
Humans imitate others.
From barely noticeable habits to whole careers, humans make decisions by faithfully copying those around them. Like a disease, a social trend can proliferate across societies rapidly. While many parts of modern systems make disease spread more difficult, the spread of social contagion has only become easier with print, television, social media and other communications technologies.
The term “viral” is used to describe tweets, news article, videos or clips which rapidly become popular. This be used for good and for ill. A viral article of a youth science fair winner may inspire more children to have an early start on scientific research. At the same time, mass shootings and suicides also spread through social contagion. In between these extremes are all sorts of social trends which you might see as angel or devil depending on your politics.
In other words, anything can go viral. But there’s evidence that negative sentiment and immediacy are far more likely to. In response, norms against gore, violence, or other extreme depictions in media evolved in connection with disgust. If you are concerned about contagion of physical violence, then more of this disgust could help when it comes to news and other non-fiction.
This minor level of disgust is both uncontroversial and transformative. Once you understand the contagion effects of something uncontroversially bad, such as mass shootings, it becomes easier to question more and more social contagions. Particularly questionable are a set of moral fashions which change people’s values as they spread.
Each could deserve a post on their own, but social contagions which become immediately suspect include:
Decline of Local Institutions
Certainly, there are plenty on the top of your head. It’s not so hard to list benefits of disgust now.
Disgust is a stopgap for social contagions. At least, it should be in theory. If a community has an overpowering disgust reaction towards a social media trend, that should stop that trend from spreading to that community. This is a broader firebreak theory of disgust, where it stops not just diseases, but all sorts of other transmission.
Disgust can go too far, as Paul Bloom identifies in his interview with Tyler. People should be aware of the downsides of disgust and to the extent we need more disgust, it is only up to a point. The problem is that the emotional opposition to disgust far outweighs the real costs of disgust, and the moral support for disgust is far below its benefits. There are certainly societies across history and geography where the opposite is true. But Western institutions need more disgust, more firebreaks, and more strict divisions on the margin.
Management
Speaking of strict divisions, large bureaucracies have a common failure akin to social contagion. Bureaucracies can become about micromanagement and social competition instead of their intended purpose. This is the contagion of social competition, or ‘virtue signalling’.
Peter Thiel offers one preventative measure for this problem: strict divisions in responsibility:3 “The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.”
Another common economic finding is wage compression, particularly in large firms. Wage compression, in short, is a consistent finding that gaps in competence are not matched by gaps in pay. There is a bias towards equality, even when skills and contributions are far from equal.
How does undeserved equality and territorial conflict relate? They are both the result of over-bundling. They are the result of merging groups that should be kept separate, either by clear legal and organizational distinctions or by social norms.
Wait. When sales and finance departments mind each others’ business, is it really because they’re disgusted by each other? And limited wage differentiation — does it happen because management is disgusted by lower performing workers?
Outside of extreme cases, the answer is no. But like most emotions, disgust can manifest in subtler ways. The same bundling avoidance behaviors used to prevent disease or social contagion are applied using less extreme emotional reactions.
Take wage compression as the example again. It may come about because a manager has a mild egalitarian discomfort about acknowledging differences. In most cases, we might not go as far as to say the manager is envious of the better worker or gushing with empathy for the worse worker, but there’s clearly an emotional bias which matches those emotions. Similarly, business segmentation or wage differentiation may be motivated by mild aversion or discernment, rather than an emotion felt strongly enough to be called disgust.
Disgust is a lever which moves the entire cluster of unbundling behaviors.
Pronatalism
If you’re very online, the first benefit of disgust you thought of might be pronatalism. A common story about declining fertility is that a more homogenous, anti-natalist monoculture dominated the West and is well on its way to dominated the West of the world, leaving birthrates collapsing. Groups that continue to have high birthrates, such as Orthodox Jews or Amish resist this monoculture by being insular. The solution, as Robin Hanson striking puts it, “we need to cultivate cults”.
Insularity is downstream of disgust culture. There’s nothing like insularity to protect from social or biological contagions! The divergence between Hanson and the Collinses raises a nuance about selective insularity. Hanson is straightforwardly pro-insularity, while the Collinses believe long-term successful cultural groups must continue to be willing to trade to gain technological and economic advantages. Is a Collins-style selective disgust possible? Is it possible to isolate oneself from cultural contagions while accepting technological and economic contributions? There are limited examples of selective insularism, such as Israel’s broadly-higher fertility, which remains higher than developed Western counterparts even when excluded Orthodox Jews. But there is no consistent, replicable strategy for selective insularity at the moment.
Selective disgust is highly valuable because it allows a finer-grained tradeoff between benefits of disgust and drawbacks of disgust. One downside of the near-nonexistence of disgust in modern cultures is that the subtleties and traditions which historically bound disgust have been lost. Many moderns wrongly assume that if society accepts more disgust, there will soon be an uncontrolled disgust leading to the problems that Bloom highlighted, rather than a re-adaptation of disgust norms.
With little-to-no disgust, there’s little-to-no experimentation on new norms to apply disgust judiciously. This is an entire spectrum of human emotion that is not being culturally adapted whatsoever. For that cultural adaptation to begin again, there needs to be at least a bit more disgust!
Institutions
Garett Jones is the author of 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less, a book which argues that a combination of elections and aristocratic institutions, shielded or at least distanced from mass democracy, more effective govern than mass democracy alone. These aristocratic institutions are far from Communist China; examples include unelected judges with lifetime appointments, central banks such as the federal reserve, and counter-majoritarian institutions such as the U.S. Senate. These are more or less part of every Western democracy and were intentionally inserted into Western systems of government by their founders. If there is a connection between disgust and counter-majoritarian institutions, it could be a major direct benefit of increased levels of disgust.
Does that connection exist?
Historically, counter-majoritarian institutions in the U.S., such as limitation of franchise to landowners or direct appointment of Senators, have declined or disappeared as levels of disgust in society and in politics has decreased.
Disgust has a limited correlation with conservative-coded elitism that historically promoted these institutions. If you search for “disgust majoritarian institutions” on google scholar you will get a bunch of egalitarians freaking out about fairly limited uses of disgust in politics.
The empirical evidence for this link is limited. We simply don’t have RCTs about disgust and counter-majoritarian institutions.4
Ultimately, you have to follow the intuitive social pattern that more disgust for the worst parts of societies results in a preference for institutions which give them less say.
Speaking of the worst parts of society, could there possibly be a system that advantages them more than pure democracy? Yes: anarcho-tyranny, a system which “not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.” How does anarcho-tyranny arise? Paul Gottfried has an answer: excessive concern with egalitarianism and insufficient concern for the normal people victimized by the worst of society. While some followers of Gottfried strongly disagree with the counter-majoritarian politics supported by Jones, at least in their modern incarnation., what they can agree on is that there is an excessive concern with giving vetos or other forms of excess power to the worst of society.
This political theory can sound extreme, but in practice it is supported by all kinds of popular ‘kitchen table’ position. Take YIMBY, permitting reform, or anti-crime policies. All of these are about removing veto points — points where one objector can obstruct a public good that would benefit the vast majority. YIMBY and permitting reform explicitly have this goal, for building housing and energy projects respectively. It takes courage to hate the worst of society in the abstract, but when they are getting in the way of something that directly benefits your community, it’s suddenly not very difficult. The clearest case is crime, which polls overwhelming favor ‘tough-on-crime’ positions. Crime is not an official ‘veto’ institution, but when the presence of criminals make entire neighborhoods unliveable, it is a de-facto veto. And even more viscerally than the other two examples, it is a situation where it is obvious the worst of society must be harmed to benefit the majority of people.
When you make the factual case for removing these veto points, you are often met with weaponized empathy. Here is Bloom’s general solution for opposing weaponized empathy from Cowen’s interview:
I would like to see that when a politician comes up and says, “I want to talk about the healthcare plan,” and says, “I want to read you a letter I got from an eight-year-old who told me the story about her father,” I want the crowd to boo and to shout, “Don’t treat us like children.” I think empathy could easily be used as a tool for all sorts of things. If we stop putting up with it, it would discourage it.
If only there was some evolved emotion that would discourage weaponized empathy in favor of the worst of society!
Of course, weaponized empathy is not used exclusively to defend veto points and the worst of society. But it’s hard to see politicians campaign across Western countries and not notice a strong correlation.
Denouement
It’s hard not to notice the disgust-shaped hole in Western institutions. Tough-but-fair decisions face an emotionally asymmetry, from strictly defined managerial hierarchies to counter-majoritarian institutions. It would be easier and more socially acceptable to make these tough decisions if the countervailing emotion of disgust came into play.
In all of these areas, the need for disgust is Aristotelian, not maximalist. Unlimited disgust is not good. Disgust to balance the excesses of empathy and egalitarianism is. In some cases, you can see rational calculation substituting for disgust as a counterbalance. But these decisions remain systematically skewed by egalitarianism and would be improved by a calibrated level of increased disgust.
There’s an implied disgust to both the economically conservative politics of efficient capitalism and the socially conservative politics of faith or normalcy. The conservative circular infighting will continue until someone is willing to articulate and institutionally establish that they are unified by disgust in general, and disgust at the privileged veto given to the worst of society of over normal people.
Like it or not, the experiment is happening. So grab your popcorn, collect some observational data, and get to work!
Tyler pushes him and they eventually agree on a few narrow examples around the forty minute mark, but the sentiment is still shocking
So has modern reactions to disease, driven by disgust or not.
H/T Moritz Wallawitsch. Looking forward to his next article …
I’m happy to take funding to conduct one, though the price tag on establishing new counter-majoritarian institutions might be quite high.
While I agree that in some areas we need more disgust, I'm not sure that total disgust isn't simply a conserved quantity. It's just misdirected is all.
The left has an excess of disgust for the right, compensating for its tolerance of antisocial behavior. Meanwhile the right, oft accused of being too strongly driven by disgust, is too forgiving of its own leaders.
did bloom ask cowen the same question two times? or did you quote that incorrectly?