A well-heeled and well-respected investment banker in his late 50s made a small and decidedly unfortunate media splash in October 1995. Gerard Finneran, returning to the United States on an international flight and incensed when he was denied a drink for acting intoxicated, allegedly went on a rampage in the airplane's cabin, terrorizing the crew and passengers before being arrested when the plane touched down in New York. While the most serious charge facing the executive involved physically assaulting a flight attendant, what breathed life into the story was the airline's astonishing charge that, in the middle of his tantrum, Finneran scaled the beverage cart he was demanding access his pants and defeated on it. According to the airline, Finneran used linen napkins as toilet paper, wiped his soiled hands on various surfaces, and then, charged the criminal complaint, "tracked feces throughout the aircraft."
News of what one tabloid newspaper called the "Jet-Mess Exec" instantly made its way around Wall Street, and reaction there was swift and harsh. Clearly, what Finneran had done was unspeakably disgusting--so disgusting, in fact, that some suggested only half jokingly that he would have been better off committing suicide on the spot. Long after the results of his spectacular indiscretion had been scrubbed away and deodorized, the stain on his reputation would linger. In all likelihood, his career would be finished and his life never the same.
While this disturbing tale certainly says something about the unfortunate Mr. Finneran, it says something equally important about his fellow passengers, the newspaper editors who rushed the story to press, and everyone who has since heard about the incident. What it says is that the emotion we call disgust--our feelings of repulsion toward certain objects, behaviors, and people--is tremendously powerful. What it doesn't say is that disgust is also one of only a handful of uniquely human emotions, one that speaks to both our deepest, most irrepressible instincts and to our penchant for taming these instincts.
THE ORIGINS OF DISGUST
Charles Darwin, in his classic book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, took perhaps the earliest scientific look at disgust. Recalling a colorful incident from an expedition to South America, Darwin wrote: "In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his fingers some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac., and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty."
By putting his finger on the meat, the Indian helped Darwin put his finger on three key aspects of disgust: first, that it can be elicited by quite different things--in this case, food and people; second, it is an emotion shared by radically diverse cultures; and third, what different cultures consider gross can vary tremendously. Darwin then inventoried the physiological reactions to disgusting things. At one end of the scale is a frown, often accompanied by hand gestures or body language aimed at pushing away or shielding against the repulsive object. In more pronounced cases, a person's mouth may drop open, and he's likely to spit, purse his lips or blow air out between them, and make an "ach" or "ugh" sound. Episodes of "extreme disgust," Darwin observed, tend to produce facial contortions identical to those observed before vomiting--mouth wide open, nose wrinkled, upper lip retracted and lower lip protruded--and some actually do double over and retch.
As for the larger question of why humans feel disgust, the great pioneer was silent, and for almost a century the scientific explanation of disgust approximated a Supreme Court Justice's famous take on the equally dicey question of pornography: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
NUMBER TWO AS ENEMY NUMBER ONE
And we all do know it when we see it--or at least when we smell it.
What is the most disgusting thing you can think of? Perhaps it is the "gift" the rampaging banker left on the plane. Maybe it's a broken fridge full of rancid meat, a cave teeming with slugs and maggots, or a busload of unbathed hermits with beastly body odor and oozing pustules.
It's no surprise if you're grossed out by these images: the predictability of your response at least partly explains why so little follow-up was done with Darwin's work. In the logic of evolution, humans, quite simply, should have no interest in ingesting or being near things that--like excrement or rotting carcasses--are liable to infect or otherwise harm us. Disgust, from this standpoint, seems like an open-and-shut case of survival by aversion: we develop a primal response to harmful things that is so strong, and so automatic, that even the most spectacularly slow-witted among us are smart enough to walk the other way. It is, after all, one of the few emotions that is almost totally explicit; unlike someone who feels sad, for example, a person seldom walks around wondering what has made them feel so disgusted.
REVOLTING PROBLEMS
Tags:
airplane,
beverage cart,
committing suicide,
criminal complaint,
fellow passengers,
flight attendant,
gerard finneran,
indiscretion,
international flight,
investment banker,
likelihood,
linen napkins,
lobster,
newspaper editors,
rampage,
roach,
surprising reasons,
tabloid,
toilet paper
