Disgust is a culture-bound syndrome
Symbolic disgust is subjective, not objective, and is a culture-bound syndrome.
What induces the symbolic disgust response is defined by prevailing cultural forces. That’s to say, for the most part we’ve learned to morally loathe whatever it is that we’ve come to do; this information isn’t genetically inborn but socially acquired.
What might have made a Japanese person commit ritual suicide in the eighteenth century because he couldn’t stand to live with himself and his shameful social offense would for most of us today be quickly forgotten as a trifling incident. Given their sheer emotional intensity, it’s easy to mistake feelings of symbolic disgust for an immovable moral reality that exists outside our own subjective heads. But they don’t. —Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
We don’t have to “learn” how to get diarrhea or vomit, or revolt at pus-filled sores. But we do have to learn the symbolic disgust, what to hate, shun, or shame, and that is culturally relative.
- see also: pms and other pathologies are culture-bound syndromes for how much our pathology is more culturally relative than we think
Further reading ⚭
- Bering’s essay that is basically an excerpt from his book: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/disgust-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/
- Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, Carolyn Korsmeyer: https://academic.oup.com/book/7567