Groups are held together by these sacred values. All humans can be disgusted and we would be very suspicious of anyone who did not experience this particular emotional response. When someone says that they could easily wear a killer’s cardigan, we identify them as an individual not prepared to share the group’s sacred values even when these values are purely arbitrary. This is because our supersense makes these values seem reasonable because of the moral indignation we experience fuelled by our intuitive emotional system. As social animals, we depend on our supersense, even when it flies in the face of reason.
In the next chapter we examine how this supersense can lead to some very bizarre beliefs and practices where we think we can absorb someone else’s essence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WOULD YOU WILLINGLY RECEIVE A HEART TRANSPLANT FROM A MURDERER?
THE HUMAN BODY is made up of about two-thirds water. Maybe this explains our proclivity to describe other people with liquidized language, especially those with whom we may have to share some intimacy. Some people are slimy, while others are wet. Someone can be drippy, whereas another can just ooze charm. Is it a coincidence that these descriptions reflect comparisons with slime, a substance usually associated with disgust?
Like food, certain people can be yummy, whereas others can be revolting. And in the same way that essential reasoning influences how we feel about incorporating food into our bodies, the same goes for connecting with other people. When Granny ‘just wants to eat you all up’, not only is she comparing you to something delicious, she may want to absorb you!
When we reason about others, our judgements are coloured by our sense of essential connectedness. At one level, humans are tribaclass="underline" we belong to one particular group and not another. But we also see ourselves as individuals willing to share certain levels of physical intimacy with the group and with specific significant others. Love, hatred, and disgust toward others are fuelled by gut responses that forge our strongest social relationships, and we intuitively think in an essential way about the nature of these connections.
We think like this because we need to justify our emotions in a tangible way. For example, in one study, adult subjects were told that they were to be given a vitamin shot to study the effects on visual tasks. In fact, some were given a shot of adrenaline, without their knowledge. Adrenaline is the naturally occurring hormone triggered during times of arousal. It makes you breathe faster, your heart races, and your palms sweat. What did the subjects make of their change in arousal? It all depended on the context. While they were in the room awaiting the fake visual test, they were asked to complete a mood questionnaire. At this point, a confederate of the experimenter who was pretending to be a genuine participant started acting either very happy or very irritated. The subjects who were unaware that their faster breathing, racing pulse, and sweaty palms had been caused by a drug reported feeling either angry or happy, depending on the state acted out by the confederate.1 Do you remember the Numskulls from chapter 5? It was like the boss Numskull in the head office was receiving memos from all around the body telling him that something was up and that he had to send out a press release to explain why the body was feeling so aroused. Conscious experience was the spin doctor making sense of the messages.
In another study, an attractive female experimenter stopped and interviewed male subjects as they crossed a very narrow footbridge over a very deep ravine.2 After the interview, she gave them her telephone number. The measure of interest was whether they called her later. Twice as many males whom she stopped in the middle of the bridge called her in comparison to males who had been interviewed at the side of the bridge. The explanation was as cunning as the finding: males who were interviewed in the middle of the high bridge were physiologically more aroused by the danger of the situation but misinterpreted this physical response as sexual attraction to the female interviewer. So our experience of emotions is a combination of bodily sensations and our attempts to interpret them. We try to make sense of our sensations.
When we encounter someone who triggers an emotional response, we apply the same interpretive processes. We may not be able to say exactly what it is that we either like or dislike about the person, but we have feelings about him or her. For example, have you ever felt uncomfortable in the presence of someone and not known exactly why? Maybe she stood too close to you, or maybe he shook your hand longer and harder than you expected. Or maybe the person touched your arm during the conversation. Physical contact can be either charming or repulsive. Why? I think the answer is that physical contact leads to the belief in potential contamination during social interaction. If the person is someone we are inclined toward, such as a potential mate or someone we respect, then the contact is welcomed. If it is someone we don’t like, then physical contact can be revolting. Both responses operate on the basis of psychological essentialism even when we are not fully aware of this threat of contamination. By assuming some exchange of essence, we can justify our response in terms of contamination. For example, members of the lowest caste in the Indian system were known as the ‘untouchables’: they were deemed to be so disgusting that a higher-caste member would be contaminated by contact with them. Although the term ‘untouchable’ was officially abolished in 1950, it still operates today as members from different castes maintain various degrees of physical separation.3 The same was true for the segregation that operated in the United States and the apartheid system of South Africa.
Calling people names such as ‘filth’ or ‘vermin’ not only dehumanizes them but also leads others to treat them as essentially different and contaminated. How else could a Hutu neighbour butcher a Tutsi child with a machete if not because the child had ceased to be human and become a cockroach?4 Essentialism justifies whether we embrace others or shun them by providing a physical reason for our actions. Our actions may be socially motivated and for the good of the group, but they also feel right. Where do these feelings come from, and how do we link them to others?
I think the answer lies with children’s developing essentialism, combined with a developing notion of spreading contamination. It is easy to see how such thinking can start to shape the way we respond to living things that we essentialize, most notably other humans. If essences are thought to be transferable, we will not consider ourselves isolated individuals but rather members of a tribe potentially joined to each other through beliefs in supernatural connectedness. We will see others in terms of the properties that make them essentially different from us. Such an idea suggests that some essential qualities are more likely to be transmitted than others. Youth, energy, beauty, temperament, strength, and even sexual preference are essential qualities that we attribute to others. Hence, we are more inclined to think that these qualities can be transmitted compared to, for example, hair colour, the ability to play chess, or political persuasion, which are more likely to be regarded as nonessential attributes of individuals that are more arbitrary and can change over time.
The more essential a quality is deemed to be, the greater the potential for contamination. Furthermore, as we have seen with the killer’s cardigan, this reasoning is always biased to assume a greater potential for negative compared to positive contamination, possibly because, as we saw with respect to disgust in the last chapter, evolution is more geared towards protecting us from harm by making us sensitive to threat. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that the supernatural belief that we can absorb the good essences of others is common throughout our culture, practices and attitudes.