Belligeranti

There is a tic to which the belligeranti have become much addicted. A rhetorical tic.

To illustrate, take this rather typical piece from Christopher Hitchens. He is in full regalia, bucking us up in a Daily Mirror piece called (hats off to Kipling) We must keep our nerve. Hitchens goes through the drill -- the so called peace marchers are hypocrites. Saddam Hussein is the bloodiest thing since heart surgery sans anaesthetic. Peace marchers love Saddam Hussein. The coalition forces are brave boys. The coalition forces are making fine progress. The Iraqi soldiers are terrorists. The Iraqi people would really be strewing flowers in the streets if they weren't so fearful about the above mentioned tyrant -- did I mention that Saddam Hussein is a bloody tyrant? The peace marchers protested against the Afghanistan war, didn't they, the peace, or so called peace, or really friends of totalitarianism, marchers. They are weak headed or sinister. Etc.

That about covers the cognitive content. He was obviously telephoning this one in. Or perhaps sending it in with an automatic guidance system, like one of his much beloved cruise missiles.

But then C.H. reaches deep into his personal feelings. He, too, would be upset telling Mrs. Bum in East Bum that her hubby or son had lost a leg, or perhaps his or her life, depending, in the course of this bold and just war, if he had to. Yes, if the Government for instance hired him for that job, and he'd been fired from Vanity Fair, or somethihg. Yes, even C.H. might shudder a bit, but he'd do his part. Message: we must keep our nerve.

Then we get the drumroll: "However, there is both honour and glory in being able to demolish the palaces and cellars of a murdering dictatorship, inflicting so few incidental casualties (and taking such obvious care to minimize them) that the propaganda of Saddam's goons can produce almost no genuine victims to gloat over."

And then we get this little driblet of prose:

"I feel disgust for those who blame this week's deaths on the intervention and not on its sole target: Saddam Hussein."

The "I feel disgust" locution, and its cousins, have become very popular among the belligeranti. As we noted in the last post, Kanan Makiya was feeling disgust for all those clueless antiwar friends of his calling him up and saying bummer about the bombing, dude. And Andrew Sullivan feels disgust on almost every post.

Now, disgust has been much discussed in recent years, partly due to William Miller's book, Anatomy of Disgust. I've only read Miller's book on courage, but there is an extensive and interesting essay by Martha Nussbaum on Miller's book that articulates his theory and Nussbaum's objections.

According to Nussbaum:

"Miller's book has three goals: to analyze the emotion of disgust; to give an account of when and where people experience disgust in daily life and in the sexual realm; and to investigate the role of disgust in morals and politics. Many writers about disgust have treated it as a bare feeling, with little or no cognitive content. Miller argues powerfully that this approach is inadequate. Disgust actually has a very complex and sophisticated cognitive content. Disgust is "about something and in response to something." It is not like a stomach flu: it "necessarily involves particular thoughts, characteristically very intrusive and unriddable thoughts, about the repugnance of that which is its object." These thoughts revolve around the notion of a particular type of danger for the self, "the danger inherent in pollution and contamination, the danger of defilement." Disgust evaluates its object both as base and as a threat. Thus it is closely linked both to fear (for the self) and to contempt (for the object).'

Actually, the idea that the antiwar people might contaminate Hitchens or pollute him is not implausible. At one time, after all, he was with the "Left" -- a resume that he is going to retire on. You cannot really be a rightwing writer without once having been a leftist. It gives you credibility. This is a puzzle: on the left, having once been a rightwinger gives you no credibility at all. Why should repentence should be so attractive to one side, and so unattractive to the other? Hmm.

But to get back to the "I am disgusted" locution.

The thing about the Daily Mail column is that clearly Hitchens doesn't really feel disgust. There's no emotional fervor here. Perhaps, however, he is reporting a disgust he once felt, and is simply applying the conventional fiction that that particular feeling is prolonged in the report of it. Interestingly, according to Nussbaum, Miller finds the roots of disgust in a certain aversion to life itself -- its fats and sweats and sperm and smells -- and he also claims that the aversion to life -- a sort of death drive -- is characteristically transposed to sex. Disgust has an important role to play in ascesis -- it is, indeed, the favored disciplinary instrument. From St. Anthony regarding a corpse to Christopher Hitchens regarding a peace marcher, there is a clear conceptual continuity.

Still, let's say that C.H. feels disgust at one remove, why report it?

Miller follows a Freudian path about disgust -- that is, he sees disgust intimately connected to desire. This idea has been done to death in the last twenty years, with a lot of speculation built into the idea of the male gaze. The lure of disgust is not only that one will be disgusted, but that one will be aroused. Was it Martin Amis who wrote that the problem with watching pornography is that you never know when you will see something you like that you don't really ever want to know that you'll like?

Some interesting experiments have been done about the psychology of moral feelings, trying to disentangle, if possible, the emotional content of disgust from that of disapproval. Nicols Shaun, a philosophy professor at Charleston College, has written a little paper on this topic: Norms with Feeling: Towards a Psychological Account of Moral Judgment
Shaun considers a series of experiments involving psychopaths in British prisons (hey, the application of this to Hitchens, Sullivan et al. is up to you, gentle reader) that aimed at filling out a notion of Lorenz's about evolved aversion ot inter-species violence. Now, we think Lorenz's idea about this has been pretty well exploded by every study in ethology since. Still, Shaun's point isn't against Lorenz, it is that the experiments are skewed by a body of assumptions about the relation between affective and normative judgements.

There's a term used by Shaun that makes sense, when applied to the belligeranti -- distress cues. Let's take the idea of pack journalism literally, for a moment --that is, that the kind of pro-war journalism we've seen, and its reception by a circumscribed constituency, has created a pack, which is a particular kind of crowd. In a pack, reporting a distress cue like "I am disgusted" -- which, Derrideans among us would surely agree, encrypts another verbal report, I disgust, and repulses it in the same grammatical moment -- is a signal to attack. If disgust is a fear of contamination, the thing to be destroyed must be destroyed so that it doesn't contaminate. We must, in other words, be Friedenrein, in order to achieve real peace -- that is, peace without pollution.

This little phenomenological excursus is an attempt to understand a puzzling thing about certain of the belligeranti: the obvious, visible decay of their writing abilities. Christopher Cauldwell, who is as pro-war as any Weekly Standard writer, is still a fine writer. There's been no deterioration in his prose that I can spot. Christopher Cauldwell is rarely disgusted -- he is, more frequently, fascinated. He operates as a sort of Malcolm Gladwell of the right. But with Hitchens there has been an alarming collapse. I'd say that counterfeiting the distress cue of "I am disgusted by" -- by keying his piece, and most of his pieces, to pseudo-disgust -- Hitchens old lefty ideology is getting its revenge in creating a lifeless (corpselike, aversive) prose. Interesting that being disgusted by should lead, by such insensible steps, to being disgusting.