Disgust: The Role of a Powerful Emotion in Politics
The Tories' sewage policies trigger disgust in UK voters
"Sewage Pipe" by Isengardt is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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If I had to pick the most interesting public intellectual in the world right now, my money would be on social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research has shown that David Hume, the great sceptical philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, was right when he said that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.”*
In modern terms, Hume’s insight is known as motivated reasoning. We have previously discussed it in this essay. If you need a refresher, the idea is that our judgment calls are based on our emotions. Our allegedly logical minds then find a way of rationalising what our hearts have already decided. Deploying conspiracy theories as the bodyguards to failing ideas, a theme we have discussed at length in this blog, is just one example of a much broader trend.
Haidt, who has a Substack, is a fox rather than a hedgehog, prepared to run multiple models to understand the world. We quoted him at length in a previous essay on why human beings are “90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.” We are social individualists. Our ancestors competed hard against each other; but groups also competed against other groups. We are “selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we fool even ourselves"; but we also “have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group.”
Much of Haidt’s work shows us how people come to the intuitive and emotional judgment calls that are then protected by motivated reasoning. He describes five moral foundations. The first is the care/harm foundation, which often underpins progressive politics. The psychologist says that the driver of a car with a “Save Darfur” car is proudly announcing his or her membership of the progressive team (confusingly called liberals by Americans). When conservatives emphasise care/harm, they give it a less universalist spin, for example, by caring about people who sustained injuries while serving in the armed forces.
The second moral foundation involves fairness/cheating. This also receives different spins across left and right. A left-wing example would be the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is concerned about the wealthy exploiting ordinary people without paying their fair share in taxes. A right-wing example would be the Tea Party, which is worried about allegedly socialist Democrats taking money away from hardworking people to give it to allegedly lazy people on welfare and undocumented immigrants.
Haidt’s third moral foundation is loyalty/betrayal, which is particularly common among fanatical sports fans. In politics, it tends to feature on the tribal right, particularly with nationalists, who read the universalism common among leftists and liberals (in the European sense) as treachery to the tribe.
Authority/subversion is the fourth moral foundation. People on the right who are motivated by this framework often emphasise hierarchies, pecking orders and deference; and find the social egalitarianism of leftists and liberals galling.
The final moral foundation involves sanctity/degradation and is the theme of today’s essay. The people who feel this strongly find certain actions trigger feelings of “stain, pollution and purification,” not to mention disgust. We touched on this in the previous essay quoted above about our mixed chimp/bee nature. Argentina’s new libertarian leader Javier Milei has said that people should be able to sell bodily organs on the free market - a view that will trigger strong emotions in many of us.
Religious conservatives are particularly motivated by this foundation, although New Age leftists who are worried about “toxins” in their food also regularly invoke it. The sanctity foundation is particularly important for understanding the current culture wars, in Haidt’s view. It underlies conservative concerns about abortion, for example.
To sum up, the left often relies on the care and fairness foundations, while the right uses all five. Conservative politicians have a broader way of connecting with the emotions of voters, which can give the right an electoral edge, Haidt argues.
Although Haidt’s book on these issues, The Righteous Mind, was published more than a decade ago in 2012, it still has great explanatory power today. Why is Donald Trump still a strong contender in the upcoming US Presidential election in November, despite leading a coup attempt in 2021? Despite his obvious flaws, including narcissism, Trump is an expert in playing with the emotions of people who feel that something is terribly wrong with the world. For example, his outrageous rhetoric about immigration plays with the sanctity/degradation foundation, which is often a blindspot for leftists and liberals (in the European sense of the world).
Also, why is Palestinian nationalism such an attractive cause for leftists? Haidt’s template shows us that it gives them a wider emotional palate. Israel’s heavy-handed assault on Gaza, which has led to much loss of innocent life, including babies, triggers disgust, which is a powerful emotion often left untouched by the left. It supercharges the care/harm framework and can be combined with loyalty/betrayal.
We can see something similar in Spain, where leftists can be reluctant to criticise the right-wing narratives of Catalan and Basque nationalists, which emphasise tribal themes and the allegedly corruptive nature of outsiders. Meanwhile, Spanish hard-right party Vox has a hotch-potch of semi-contradictory policies. The only common theme is that all the underlying issues provoke strong emotions in angry people.
Also, voters who are offended by the way that Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has included Bildu (a party led by a convicted terrorist) in his “Frankenstein alliance” are an important factor for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Spanish politics. Disgust at terrorism in general is also a key factor for anyone who wants to think about Sánchez’s lack of political capital. In recent news stories, Hamas thanked him for his stance on Israel/Palestine in November; and the Socialists have also included people accused of terrorism in Catalonia in the party’s controversial amnesty proposal. Emotions are running higher than usual in Spain.
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells
Disgust is a powerful emotion underlying sanctity/degradation. Haidt says that it is important for our species because we are omnivores - we evolved to eat a variety of foods of both plant and animal origin. Omnivores feel a certain tension between seeking out new sources of food and fear of potentially dangerous new foods.
The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore’s dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.
This ancient pathway later drove more complex behaviours to avoid pathogens, parasites and other threats, including washing food, removing lepers from the community and trying to avoid dirty people. Our ancestors used to associate plagues and epidemics with foreigners, which is why xenophobic and nativist politicians often stress the alleged dirtiness and corruptive nature of outsiders.
The rest of this essay will look at how Haidt’s template can help us understand the staggering unpopularity of the UK Conservative Party (or the Tories). It is the most successful political party in the whole of the west when it comes to winning elections and has been in power since 2010. Like other parties on the right of the horseshoe, much of its electoral success over the centuries has been due to the way that it has been able to engage with the primal emotions of voters.
And yet the Tories are in a terrible state under Prime Minister (PM) Rishi Sunak (a multi-millionaire, who is the party’s fifth consecutive PM in 14 years). The next general election is due no later than 28 January 2025 and is expected in the second half of 2024. Labour leader Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, is ahead in the polls by a country mile after a personal journey to the centre left from the hard left.
Labour (a social democratic party backed by a socialist base) just smashed the Tories in twin by-elections, suggesting trouble ahead for the British right, while the latest data confirmed the UK economy is in a recession. If recent polls are right, Starmer’s Labour could get a majority of more than 200 in the 650-seat House of Commons, compared to 80 for the Tories under former PM Boris Johnson in December 2019. In some scenarios, the Tories could slump below 150 seats, the party’s lowest level since the modern Conservative Party was formed from the Tory Party in 1834. You have to go back to 1802 to find a worse result, when the Pittite Tories got just six seats out of 658. Every result since has been over 150.
Why are the Tories expected to get their worst result in 222 years? Brexit must be part of the answer, as we have discussed here, here, here and here, as well as in some of the other essays we have linked to today. While not quite as destructive of value as Catalan independence would have been, the Conservative politicians who sold it as a panacea have been revealed to have been hawking snake oil. The vast majority of Brexit voters now regret backing the UK’s independence from the European Union (EU). The shambolic premierships of Johnson and Liz Truss only served to make the situation appear much worse for voters.
Any analysis of British disappointment in the Tories has to include the way that poverty has got worse over the last decade and a half. UNICEF has said that child poverty in the UK is among the worst for the world’s richest countries and has been gradually getting worse. Meanwhile, the National Health Service (NHS) lurches from crisis to crisis and is failing to meet its own targets under Tory mismanagement. Manufacturers have publicly complained that infrastructure has deteriorated over the last decade after the ruling party emphasised austerity for too long.
The housing market has also failed, which is bad news for a party that positions itself as the defender of homeowners. English homes are more expensive than those elsewhere in the rich world, while being in worse condition, an analysis last year shows. The difficulty in getting a foot on the housing ladder has turned younger British voters against the Tories in droves, with many also losing faith in generational upward mobility. Many of those who are unable to afford a deposit for their first home see personal success as being outside their control. This is very different from older generations, particularly for people were able to buy cheap housing in their youth and then gather equity as prices soared while their mortgages shrank and disappeared.
Under-investment in the public sector is a big theme underlying child poverty, a failing NHS, poor infrastructure in general and a dysfunctional housing market. About 17% of the British population nowadays live in public housing, called council housing, compared to almost a third in the late 1970s. Selling council houses to their tenants - the flagship policy of Tory PM Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s - guaranteed widespread working-class support for the Conservatives, but failing to build much social housing afterwards meant it could only ever be a one-off play. More than 2m tenants had bought their council houses by 1995 (five years after Thatcher left office). This meant that home ownership in the UK hit an all-time high of nearly 71% in 2003. By 2016, though, this level had fallen back to 63% - young people and recent immigrants have struggled to get a foot on the housing ladder in the 21st century.
As we mentioned in the essay that quoted Haidt at length, market fundamentalists think that austerity is a force for the good as it will create incentives for entrepreneurs to provide innovative solutions in the private sector. While there is an element of truth to this observation, the people who believe in magical austerity often seriously under-estimate how long it takes to reconfigure society and how painful the transition will be for many ordinary people. Austerity will always tend to hurt young people if home-builders in the private sector are restricted from building cheap new housing in popular areas at the same time that the pool public housing is shrinking.
To make matters worse, Brexit put a dent in the safety valve. In the decades before the UK left the EU, many young graduates (including me between 1991 and 1994) moved to continental Europe to teach English while we learnt major European languages and tried to work out what we wanted to do with our lives. In my case, I went to Madrid. Others (both graduates and non-graduates) would move to Europe to work in the hospitality sector for a time. While both options are still possible, at least in theory, they now involve much more paperwork and bureaucracy for young British people who only have one passport. People with one Irish grandparent have an edge.
When combined with British people taking “expat” deals with companies to work in EU countries (as I did between 1997 and 2000 in Madrid), people emigrating properly (as I did in 2005 when I moved to Barcelona) and homeowners cashing in the equity on their overpriced homes to buy property in places like Benidorm, the south of France or Tuscany, there were large flows of people from the UK to the EU before Brexit. By 2023, there were around 1.3m British people living in the bloc.
Venom
Despite Conservative mismanagement of the economy, the housing market and infrastructure, as a British resident of Spain, I am sometimes surprised by the visceral dislike of the Tories that I hear when I speak to friends, relatives and colleagues back home. The sheer venom that I hear when people discusses the Tories often takes my breath away. An allergic reaction to austerity policies is part of the story, but I don’t think it is the full story. I believe that Haidt‘s moral foundations framework can provide us with a key to understand why the Tories are quite so unpopular.
As a right-wing party, the Tories should be a little better at emotional engagement than Labour, with a wider emotional palate, as we mentioned before. However, the ruling party seems to have lost touch with the sanctity/degradation axis. In one significant example, the party last year voted to allow water companies to continue to dump sewage into rivers and coasts for at least 15 years. Many ordinary voters quite rightly feel disgust at the decision, combined with anger at the party’s combination of incompetence, mismanagement and alleged corruption.
Expecting people to literally swim in shit is a long way from what philosopher Michael Oakeshott described as the “conservative disposition.” The Tories have let their devotion to free markets go too far. It is true that markets can create the conditions for value creation and innovation; and attempts to replace them with bureaucracies are doomed to failure.
However, markets should have limits, as political philosopher Michael Sandel argues. Pumping sewage into rivers and seas might be good for the profits of privatised water companies but that doesn’t mean it is good for society, let alone being a policy that will help incumbents win re-election. Disgust might not be the only factor, but it adds a little emotional punch to the widespread rejection of the Conservatives after a decade and a half of poor decisions.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the famous flexibility of the UK’s unwritten constitution isn’t necessarily a positive. A well-written constitution would probably make it much harder to implement policies like this. For example, Article 45 of the Spanish Constitution says that everyone has the right to enjoy an environment suitable for personal development and the duty to preserve it.
Brexiteers can be very annoying on the the internet so the comments are closed for the week. If you are an extremist reply guy, please go somewhere else to vent your emotions. See you next week! The next column will be published on Sunday instead of Saturday due to personal logistics.
Further Reading
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
*Hume is a somewhat controversial figure nowadays. A prolific author, he wrote a racist footnote about Africans in 1753, which looks ugly and awful to modern eyes, not to mention being flat-out wrong. Although the views expressed are clearly dreadful, it is worth mentioning that he wrote the passage came more than 50 years before Britain banned slavery and reflected views that were sadly common in that place and time. Sweeping judgments on whole groups of people also went against the grain of the rest of his philosophy, which was usually cautious about avoiding general statements that would be difficult to defend.
Finally, I can’t help wondering how well any of our opinions will fare over 270 years. Retrospectively cancelling Hume’s entire body of work seems a little too harsh for one error of judgment. Please note that contextualising the comments shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of the philosopher’s racial views. Hume’s infamous footnote was clearly bigoted and wrong.
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