Clean, Unclean, and Coronavirus
President Trump’s recent suggestion that the use of disinfectants might some how eradicate the presence of a virus in people affected by the present COVID-19 epidemic generated no small amount of controversy, and quite a bit of mirth.
What was missed in this reaction was something revealing — and potentially significant — to understanding how the U.S. president, and many of those who support him and trust his pronouncements, see the challenges poised by the pandemic.
Seen through this lens, it is possible to understand what motivates both the president and his sincere supporters in areas so seemingly disconnected as responding to the pandemic, immigration policy,
Consider just for a moment, separated from the noise around this story, just what it is disinfectants do. Few would not know that disinfectants clean things, not just in terms of evident soiling (cleaning a window, say, or a kitchen counter) but eradicating unseen things that cause putrefaction — specifically, germs. We know this because of what the product labels say; we know this because of the ways in which we observe our parents using these substances when we are children.
Said in different words, disinfectants purify. That is what they do, and it is the idea the manufacturers of these products want us to associate with them. (There is a reason why it’s called “Purell.”)
Researchers in behavioral science have demonstrated how different human emotions lead to different priorities in understanding the moral universe. Anyone who has watched Pixar’s brilliant 2015 movie Inside Out has been introduced to this idea. All humans experience, to a greater or lesser degree, the same basic suite of emotions; but each human experiences those emotions differently, and lives at a distinct “default setting” (or, to use the phrase favored in behavioral science, “appraisal tendency”) with respect to each of those emotions.
Jonathan Haidt, a researcher and teacher at New York University, has demonstrated in his large body of work strong associations between these emotional default settings, the moral emphases that arise from them, and the political affiliations that result. To say it more succinctly, a wide variety of studies by a large number of researchers have shown that emotions — and especially emotional default settings, something shape by a combination of factors and deeply woven into individual personality — shape political perspectives.
In an article reviewing research in this field published in 2007 in Science, Haidt summarized this basic concept in a picture worth a thousand words, shown here. The most important message of this image is the single steepest line, which shows the strongest correlation; it is the red line showing the importance placed on purity across the political spectrum.
Correlation is not causation, of course, and it is important to remember that this work depends on the self-reported political identification of a large number of people.
But within this finding is a considerable amount of explanatory power, I submit, of both President Trump’s worldview and his command of confidence among those who support him.
The president frequently speaks of being disgusted at things. He famously expressed disgust at Hilary Clinton’s bathroom break during a 2015 debate of democratic candidates. He describes political opponents, critical media coverage, or even other heads of state as “disgusting.”
Disgust is a powerful, visceral emotion. It also has played an enormously significant role in helping our species adapt and survive. The basic disgust reflex can turn us away from things that may harm us — unsafe substances and foods, for example.
It’s no accident that, as a consequence, religions have throughout history affirmed this basic human emotion by constructing teachings about purity. By describing and delineating between things — animals, behaviors, even other groups of people — that are “clean” and “unclean,” religions have sought to translate a basic and universal emotion into a guide for moral conduct.
There is nothing original in the observation that President Trump’s public discourse is often a “politics of disgust.” But it is just possibly an error to understand, much less dismiss, President Trump’s frequent use of this phrase as an expression of emotion. It might be more accurate, and more illuminating, to understand him as speaking in terms of, and marshaling, beliefs.
All people have beliefs, of course; some of them, but by no means all, are religious in nature. And beliefs serve the necessary function of connecting our emotional responses provoked in each of us by the world around us into a systematic way of navigating through that world.
It’s not just a coincidence that the president relies on this language frequently and is also known — and describes himself as — a “germophobe.” Nor is it a coincidence that his language about disgust is heard by those who share this inbuilt orientation toward purity as words, not of outrage, but of assurance. In the president, they see someone who understands and experiences the world as they do — a world in which they feel surrounded by those who do not sufficiently grasp or defend the imperative for purity.
This same worldview naturally aligns itself with a disdain toward immigration (which is seen as in some way diluting the purity of the nation), with hard-edged ingroup/outgroup distinctions, or with the historic — and utterly false — association between purity and racial characteristics.
It cuts no ice to tell people that their feelings are wrong, or to expect minds to change by critiquing emotions. Faith communities sometimes fall into this trap, and unsurprisingly lose rather than gain credibility as sources of moral guidance in consequence; they are, essentially, trying to lead humans by deprecating part of what makes us human.
Instead, the hard-edged desire for purity that becomes galvanized by cries of “disgusting!” can only be moderated by actual human relationships built across the divides an imagined world of purity creates. Seen as a moral goal, purity is, after all, much less a scientific state than a social construct (though, not surprisingly, it is the one such goal that most eagerly seeks to state itself in pseudo-scientific terms). Like all such constructs, it can only be critiqued from within, not from outside
When personal relationships give counterexamples to socially constructed ideas of purity, those ideas begin to falter. This is what’s happening in the New Testament accounts of Jesus entering into the land of the Gerasenes, holding up the story of the conduct of a Samaritan for admiration rather than ridicule. The tactic of change embedded in each of these accounts (and many others besides) is to give recognition and equal regard to something regarded as impure, rather than directly challenging the categories themselves.
It might fairly be said that this simple idea is the single most powerful catalyst for social change held within Christian tradition — a set of beliefs that, at least in its earliest years, outraged society by denying the importance of ingroup/outgroup boundaries between whole classes of people in the ancient world. It may be time for us to revisit and renew the power of that message — if we hope to restore the capacity for interpersonal trust on which democracy depends.
