Bigotry Against Bigots is Still Bigotry

On the modern apologetics of disgust

Bigotry, prejudice against members of a stereotyped population based on the presumption they are somehow essentially physically and/or morally disgusting¹, comes naturally to everyone. Today, this proclivity abounds mostly undetected in the form of bigotry against bigots. The idea is that hate for the haters does not constitute hate because it restores an amorphous moral disequilibrium. How this restoration occurs and why prejudice against bigots is exempt from the general classification remains unclear. We who harbor this paradoxical form of prejudice often do not even recognize the existence of these mysteries. This ignorance results from our installation of culturally accepted intellectual defenses which protect us from the inevitable turmoil of identifying prejudice in ourselves. 

The suffering such self-awareness inflicts is tied to the fact that our world makes far more sense when its most sinister and obnoxious characters differ from us in fundamental ways. We desperately want to distinguish ourselves as neatly as possible from the degenerates. Neo-Nazis, communists, Trump supporters, critical race theorists, rednecks, rapists, racists, and rioters – surely the objectionable here lack a key quality we possess. Today, the hallmark of the supposedly superior usually goes by “empathy,” “education,” and “common sense.” We justify modern prejudices through false humility: “The problematic just aren’t privileged like me. It’s not that I am intrinsically better, it’s that I have been socialized better. I didn’t earn my wisdom!” This is the new apologetics of disgust, novel only in that it swaps metaphysical justifications with sociological rationalizations.

We fool ourselves and others like us with this delectable illusion. It unlocks a shameless hatred of people cloaked in a peculiar plausible deniability. When pressed about our prejudice, we can always fall back on the claim that what we actually despise is the systemic inequity which produces the bad type of person. We invoke this version of “hate the sin, not the sinner” not to morally neutralize our feelings, but to cast our disgust as virtue. Only by inverting our prejudice by superficially sublimating it and distancing ourselves from its muck can we continue to convince ourselves of our saintliness. Like Christians viscerally repulsed by homosexuality, we reconceptualize our nausea, stuff it into an intellectual box marked “moral sensitivity” so that we don’t have to face the shadows within. We decry “the system,” our secular Satan, while curling our lips at society’s offspring.  

That this works despite its clear structural equivalence to patently bigoted claims like “I don’t hate the Jews, just Jewishness” speaks to the desirability of its emotional allowances, the foremost of these being self-righteousness. “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation,’” Aldous Huxley once observed, “is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” The more intrinsic the problematic populations’ defectiveness, the more unique to them their characteristic vileness, the more virtuous and discerning we become. We need not examine or, God forbid, subdue the violence the filthy and depraved elicit in our souls since such responses are just. Not coincidently, prejudices are always “just” to the prejudiced, who invariably regard their moral intuitions as keenly sensitive. Why the gods would bestow upgraded faculties of discernment to the prejudiced, it’s never quite clear. In fact, it smacks of the most extreme arbitrariness.

The tendency to ascribe those whom we dislike or fear negative essences flows from our general habit of viewing particular things as instantiations of more general patterns, which we typically call forces, spirits, laws of nature, or something to this effect. The seminal American psychologist William James succinctly described this aspect of our outlook: “The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims…for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance.” This implicit bias helps us accomplish our goals and survive, but it also fosters essentialist beliefs and stereotypes. 

To avoid inadvertently deceiving ourselves with this new apologetics of disgust, we must work continuously to associate prejudice with disgust and not ideology. Prejudice is disgust for any abstracted category of person, not just for the baddies. The latter definition conveniently allows us to harbor any prejudice we can intellectually rationalize, however illogically or self-servingly. We must recognize the allure of that which exculpates ourselves of responsibility for bigotry and confers a sense of self-righteousness before we can begin to overcome the hateful tribalism that plagues our society and politics. It all starts with us. 

1. These notions usually commingle.