Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

Let’s pause here and update our list of features that characterize disgust psychology. We’ve already noted the boundary monitoring, expulsive, and promiscuous aspects of disgust. We can now add a fourth feature to our list: 1. A Boundary Psychology: Disgust is a system that monitors boundaries. Disgust regulates the act of incorporation and inclusion. 2. Expulsive: Disgust is a violently expulsive mechanism. In mild forms disgust simply prompts withdrawal and avoidance. In stronger forms disgust involves violent rejection, expulsion, or elimination. 3. Promiscuous: Due to disgust’s developmental peculiarities (i.e., its sensitive period), culture can link disgust to a variety of stimuli, many unrelated to food. Consequently, disgust is often found regulating moral, social, and religious experiences. 4. Magical Thinking: The contamination appraisals involved in disgust are characterized by magical thinking, which overrides reason and logic. Consequently, when disgust regulates moral, social, or religious experience magical thinking is unwittingly imported into the life of the church.