Peptic Justice and Other Alimentary Principles

The effect of liberal rhetoric on taste is called nausea. --Dávila

Continuing with our theme of rightly ordered disgust, it seems that we (Dávila and I) are not alone in believing that sensitivity to our digestive system may be a reliable source of information about the immaterial world.

Lewis notes that Aristotle, for example, maintained "that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought":

When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in 'ordinate affections' or 'just sentiments' will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science.

Wrong abdominal sensations, wrong ethics.

Note that there can be no "social justice" in the absence of gastric justice -- or rather, if one's gastric sentiments are unjust. This no doubt sounds a bit silly, but think about it: "just" has to do with what is fitting, or what is right and proper. Suppose I think it's fitting to conduct human sacrifice in order to ensure that the sun has sufficient nourishment. Imagine how disordered one must be to not feel the injustice of this in one's gut.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but we see an everyday example of this with regard to the abortion debate. Irrespective of one's position, every rightly ordered person is disgusted by the practice. Bill Clinton attempted to square this circle by saying it should be "safe, legal, and rare." Why rare? In order to acknowledge a disgust that is universally felt in the rightly ordered soul.

But we have made great digestive progress in the two decades since Clinton left office. At least Democrats are consistent. Back in the early to mid-19th century, they developed the "positive good" theory of slavery, in contrast to the general sentiment of the framers, none of whom argued that it was moral or just. Jefferson would later write that

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism.

In other words, while he of course owned slaves, he had sense enough to recognize that the institution was evil and intrinsically unjust. Compare him to this nasty piece of work, who argues for the positive good of abortion:

Prior to 1830 or so, you didn't hear Democrats shrieking that

Here I was, sitting in Virginia, in my beautiful plantation, so I could have sufficient time and leisure to focus on politics. And I have all of this -- ALL OF IT! -- because! BECAUSE! BECAUSE! -- I was allowed to own human beings! I will not be shamed into being quiet! I WILL NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT MY SLAVES, OR MY PLANTATION, OR MY WHITE PRIVILEGE!

Back to Lewis. He writes that St. Augustine too spoke of "the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded the kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it."

For example, it turns out that we should not only allow our children to live, but even accord them the love to which they are entitled. Moreover, we should teach them "to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting and hateful":

In [Plato's] Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it...

The human soul is properly nourished by truth, beauty, justice, and other transcendental food. Children should be taught gastric justice, or rather, one might say that recognition of justice -- and injustice -- should reach into one's bones and viscera. If it's only a mental abstraction, it's not going to be very reliable. I'm thinking, for example, of the horrors that have resulted from the rigorous application of abstract political ideologies disconnected from somatic awareness of evil.

This isn't to say that untutored disgust is a reliable compass. The key is to properly link psyche and soma. For example, in Iran they're disgusted by dogs, while in China they're not disgusted by eating bats.

Closer to home, millennials in particular aren't properly disgusted by socialism, and are instead disgusted by positive goods such as the free market, fossil fuels, free speech, and disinterested racial colorblindness. If this doesn't disgust you, you have no ontological taste.

I would go so far as to say that "social justice" is peptic injustice. If you're not disgusted by SJWs and their unjust ethic, there's something wrong with your brain-intestine network.

Here are a couple of closing aphorisms that go to the subject of rightly ordered disgust:

Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.

It is enough to know nothing more than that certain beings have adopted an idea to know that it is false.

At the other end of the spectrum,

The intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

The intelligent man quickly reaches conservative conclusions.

Conservatism should not be a political party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

Perhaps these sound like unseemly self-flattery or unearned auto-congratulation. However, we're the ones who not only reject the whole self-esteem and give-everyone-a-trophy ethos, but first train our disgust on ourselves. We are proponents of the self-disappointment movement, which is the other wing that allows the self to take off in vertical space.

It may have been Chesterton who said that God doesn't love us because we are particularly lovable, but because he wants to help make us lovable. He doesn't just hand out trophies for nothing, but makes it possible for us to receive one by cooperating with his grace. Thus,

Nobody will ever induce me to absolve human nature, because I know myself.

No one who knows himself can be absolved by himself.

We can never count on a man who does not look upon himself with the gaze of an entomologist (Dávila).