The frisson of revulsion and the palimpsest of nature

These days we see more and more ads, television shows, and movies that portray homosexuals embracing, kissing, and engaging in other acts of intimacy. I am a heterosexual and, every time I see one of these portrayals, a shudder of disgust -- I think of it as a frisson of revulsion -- passes through my body. I am sure that most people would classify this frisson as homophobia, a response that in this day and age is almost universally condemned as morally repugnant and evil.

These reflections prompted me to ask the following question: Is this sense of revulsion a part of my nature or has it simply been inculcated in me by the cultural environment in which I was raised. This is, of course, the age-old question of: Nature vs. Nurture. If my feelings of revulsion are not part of my nature, but have merely been inculcated in me by the way in which I was nurtured (i.e., raised), then it should be possible, by changing the way I am nurtured, to correct them. Perhaps if I were to submit myself conscientiously and in good faith to the reeducation camps of modern progressive liberalism, I could be purged of all such feelings and my thinking "corrected." The blank slate in my soul on which my upbringing wrote all the bad instructions that cause my frisson could be wiped clean and I would be restored to pristine goodness, rehabilitated as a kind of non-homophobic noble savage.

If these feelings are, in fact, simply culturally determined, I am even willing to consider the possibility that I have become so inveterately habituated by my environment to responding in this morally repugnant and evil way that it is effectively impossible to change me and that the only way the world will become a better place is when I and the cohort of people like me perish from the face of the earth. Sentiments of this kind often take something like the form: "The world will be a better place when all those old, white, heterosexuals die off." In fact, if one follows this train of thought to its logical conclusion, one might be inclined to argue that it is actually better for society to take preemptive action to cleanse itself of people like me in the public interest (kind of the way liberals fantasize about improving the world by killing off all the "deplorables"). If the reeducation camp doesn't work, the extermination camp will. Either way, if my frisson is culturally determined, that would seem to imply that it will be possible someday and somehow to reeducate or exterminate our way to a brave new world in which no heterosexual will ever feel a frisson of revulsion when he or she encounters homosexuality. The dawning of this brave new world will be one more example of "liberal progress" and another degree on Obama's inevitable moral arc of history.

But these considerations prompted several further questions in my mind: Isn't my frisson of revulsion at homosexuality simply a somewhat extreme manifestation of my preference for heterosexuality. Or, expressed conversely, isn't my sexual preference for heterosexuality simply a mild, attenuated form of my frisson of revulsion at homosexuality? And: if my frisson of revulsion and my preference for heterosexuality are essentially two manifestations of the same thing and my frisson is morally repugnant and evil, then, isn't my sexual preference for heterosexuality morally repugnant and evil, too? And, finally: if it is true that my frisson of revulsion at homosexuality is culturally determined, then, why would it not also be the case that the sexual preference I feel is a mere cultural construct, too, and in no way an unalterable part of my nature, something merely inculcated in me by my cultural environment, but in no way an unchangeable feature of my being? If that were the case, then, hypothetically, sexual preferences could likewise be effaced, and our brave new world might eventually consist of humans who not only feel no frissons of revulsion at homosexuality but also do not have any sexual preferences whatsoever and are perfectly indifferent to whether they engage in homosexual or heterosexual couplings. In fact, the categories "homosexual" and "heterosexual" would disappear, mere cultural constructs erased by correct ratiocination.

The absurdity of this hypothesis, however, (there are those who actually believe it is true) suggested to me that perhaps my frisson of revulsion is not a cultural construct after all. Rather, my weak mind is forced to conclude, the most likely explanation is that my frisson is somehow connected to my sexual preference, both of which are part of my human nature, which is itself determined primarily by the bi-modal distribution of the biological sexes in humans. But, if my frisson is simply a part of my human nature, I find it difficult to understand how it can be morally repugnant and evil. I happen to be guy (that is, a representative of the one mode), and that's all there is to it. But, if that is the case, then it will never be possible to create the brave new world free of frissons of revulsion because any attempt to purge these morally repugnant and evil frissons will simply be an attempt to deny human nature. Seen in this light, the closest analogy to the reeducation camps of modern progressive liberalism (and the extermination camps they logically entail) are the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution or the tribunals of Jacobin France.

Whenever I consider issues like these I am reminded of the metaphor of the palimpsest. A palimpsest is a page from a medieval manuscript from which the old text has been scraped or washed off so that new text can be written on it. Perhaps my soul (or personality, if you prefer) is like a medieval manuscript that needs to be scraped clean. That is, if my frisson of revulsion is merely a cultural construct, then, it should be possible to scrape or wash off this construct from my soul and replace it with a text of new moral instructions that cause me to respond "correctly" to homosexuality. But, what if it is the finger of nature that has written these things, indelibly, on the page of my soul and humans are vainly attempting to expunge and write over them? In that case, the underlying text written by nature will always continue to seep back through to the surface (as often happens with real palimpsests) and reappear.

Is it possible to expunge the texts written by nature?

Update:

In his article Biological Limits of Gender Construction, the late sociologist J. Richard Udry, stated:

If [societies] depart too far from the underlying sex-dimorphism of biological predispositions, they will generate social malaise and social pressures to drift back toward closer alignment with biology. A social engineering program to degender society would require a Maoist approach: continuous renewal of revolutionary resolve and tolerance for conflict. [emphasis added]

I note that Udry's remark that societies will "drift back toward closer alignment with biology" is the equivalent of my metaphor of the palimpsest in which "the underlying text written by nature will always continue to seep back through to the surface" and that Udry's characterization of the program required to degender society as "Maoist" is the equivalent of my observation that "the closest analogy to the reeducation camps of modern progressive liberalism (and the extermination camps they logically entail) are the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution or the tribunals of Jacobin France." I do not claim, of course, that Udry's article supports the views expressed in this blog post, only that it is interesting to note that the same metaphors occurred to both of us.