Disgust and Discretion

A Parable of Truth Before Manners

I’ve been loathe to give parenting advice in these columns. Newlyweds shouldn’t give marital advice, and people whose children aren’t yet fully independent adults should be cautious about parenting advice. The problem with this is by the time parenting advice has credibility in terms of its outcomes — of course while acknowledging the role of factors outside of the parents’ control in outcomes — it is likely much of the advice is at least partly outdated in our fast-changing world.

Parenting in a world with smartphones is possibly more different than any world of parenting in the past. Those who grew up before 2000 might have more in common with a Roman adolescent’s experience than those growing up in the Panoptipercepticon of the AI-powered cloud and distributed mobile social media.

So with caution in mind, I will tempt the fates by occasionally writing what I will admit is “half-baked parenting advice.” Take it or leave it, there’s no warranty, strictly sold as-is, and may only be worth what you paid for it. These are simply some of the mental models I’ve found useful in making best guesses for parenting.

One of the challenges of parenting as a thoughtful conservative is passing on essential truths while teaching appropriate discretion in expressing those truths that conflict with the official narrative and can result in persecution. For clarity, I’ll use a disgusting but (for now) non-controversial example.

Rise of the Vomit Eaters

Let’s imagine that at some point in the near future, a disturbing new TikTok trend emerges: vomit eating. Over time, vomit eating develops as a distinctive lifestyle subculture. Vomit eaters join the biological proletariat coalition of the Left, and begin to demand certain things of society.

For one thing, vomit-eating sounds gross, so they demand to be called something else, let’s say "nutrition recyclers.” Further, despite the obvious health risks of the lifestyle, they successfully lobby for the psychiatric and medical professions to destigmatize their practices, and health insurance must subsidize prophylactic treatments to prevent or at least delay complications related to their behavior. Anyone who objects publicly, or uses the now bigoted slur “vomit eater,” is promptly canceled. Hollywood follows with movies portraying nutrition recyclers as virtuous victims continually persecuted by bigoted vomitphobes. The transition between vomit eating as a gross social media trend and its acceptance into society as a positive good takes about 15 years.

In such a scenario, parenting surrounding vomit eating becomes complicated. A precocious five-year-old boy of an upper-middle-class couple, seeing a vomit eater in public for the first time, turns to his parents and says, “Yuck mom, gross, that man is eating barf.” The parents are torn. They know being considered vomitphobes could cost them their jobs, and their first instinct is to protect their child from expressing socially inappropriate statements that could affect his future. Like all upper-middle-class people throughout history, their privileged position in society is contingent on amorally serving the ideological regime currently in power, whatever that might be. The regimes have always been careful to provide moral frameworks to justify themselves, which upper-middle-class people — who as highly conscientious worker bees must think of themselves as morally good — enthusiastically adopt.

The Typical Moral Framework of the Upper Middle Class

The couple is acutely aware of the rat race awaiting their son to continue in the upper middle class, hard enough with all of the academic expectations and extracurriculars necessary to get into a “good school,” and none of this will matter if he expresses disapproval of the vomit eaters as an adult or even as a younger teenager on social media. If he said this at school and one of the other parents or children were a nutrition recycler who took offense, he could lose his spot at the exclusive kindergarten where they worked so hard to gain admission. At the same time, they do not desire vomit eating lifestyle for their son. Torn, they cater to the more urgent problem and say “Son, you can’t say things like that, ‘barf’ is a hateful slur, it’s hurtful and it’s important to respect nutrition recyclers, who after all have been oppressed for a long time by gustonormative society.”

The problem is that the parents have shamed their son out of his natural disgust instinct, one of the most protective gifts God gives us. He begins to think, that if vomit eating isn’t disgusting, then maybe it isn’t wrong. But it is kind of shocking, which makes it adjacent to exciting in his brain. A few years later, his dopamine receptors light up a little bit as he hits the search button on TikTok. The carnivorous algorithm springs to life; nothing generates impressions quite like the tension between revulsion and curiosity.

How should the parents answer? “You’re right son, that’s really sick and gross. It’s a shame people lose their minds on the Internet and that we let the tech companies get away with making people crazy.” Such a response affirms the child’s instincts while deflecting blame for the judgment away from the individual and towards the true cause.

While this may seem like a ridiculous example, vomit eating would be more hygienic than practices we are already pressured to accept and celebrate.

The Gift of Disgust

Our natural disgust seems to fall along the line of what can be called sins against nature. Some things are so wrong, so inherently ugly and gross, that something is wrong with us if we need a moral argument to convince us it’s wrong.

Children's brains, however, are highly plastic and responsive to parents’ context clues as to appropriate feelings of disgust. Conservatives are more psychologically prone to disgust, and young children are born natural conservatives:

1. They are easily disgusted — preferring simple tastes like chicken nuggets

2. They are xenophobic to outsiders — one of the marks of healthy childhood development is moderate separation anxiety from parents

3. They thrive best with established and predictable routines

4. They are private property enthusiasts (mine!)

One of the jobs of a parent is to properly order and cultivate these disgusts. Some disgust, such as the aversion to semi-bitter vegetables like broccoli, must be attenuated. Others, however, are biologically functional in terms of reproductive fitness. Much of the Left agenda of activism can be seen as exposure therapy to overcome natural disgust responses in the population; their political term for pre-rational disgust, “implicit bias,” seeks to pathologize instinctual, ancestrally protective responses to threats to survival.

Discretion

Parents, then, should encourage and cultivate healthy disgust in children. Social appropriateness must be taught as a secondary objective to cultivating historically normative and biologically functional tastes, and yes, protective disgusts.

In particular, we must work to create space for frank discussions within the privacy of the family. Our children need unfiltered, uncensored wisdom. This requires teaching the older virtue of discretion.

As a milder example, I have certain opinions about the wisdom of various types of body modification, previously associated with criminals, druggies, and the general counterculture, that have become more mainstream in our society. Many of my close friends have made decisions in this area that I would advise against with my own children.

At the same time, people are social animals. We must live in community with others. Public expressions of disapproval aren’t helpful for largely irreversible decisions people make. How does one resolve this tension?

Reconciling these two principles — the necessity in certain areas to go against the cultural grain and living in community with others — requires the application of discretion. Discretion means keeping one’s mouth shut publicly when appropriate to do so. It means being ok with holding a very different position privately than the rest of society while practicing verbal self-control in public settings when one holds such an opinion. If done competently, this reassures children that having contrary positions on popular foolishness doesn’t mean being a social pariah, and also models how to do the same with their own children, creating a sustainable multigenerational pattern of healthy private behaviors and opinions while still maintaining social ties in an unhealthy society.

After all, wisdom in many areas will always be a minority position. In private, parents should cultivate and encourage healthy, instinctive disgust. If correction for socially dangerous public expressions becomes necessary, the focus should be on the irrationality of the surrounding culture, not shaming the child for having healthy instincts. Those people can’t handle the truth, so we don’t cast pearls before swine.

There is value in cultivating some public expressions of disgust where possible, to build courage and let off a little steam. I will often comment on the ugliness of modern art and architecture in front of my children. It’s such an obvious scam, and self-proving since ugliness is obvious, that it seems to provide a good opportunity to say the emperor has no clothes. Over time, a family can develop its own cryptic public signaling language, maybe just a smirk or a look or a slightly sarcastic comment, that affirms the family’s values without significant social risk. Living in a locale where these necessities are minimized is helpful as well, as I discussed in my piece on Republican counties.

Otherwise, if space for open private discussion is denied because of a misguided desire for public and private “authenticity,” families often find themselves in a series of tactical retreats as the culture becomes crazier and even accelerates in insanity as in the past decade. Proper discretion is like an insulated oven or refrigerator such that one’s private family opinions can differ to an almost unlimited degree from the surrounding society.

The discreet disgust strategy is inherently anti-fragile; the family’s identity is strengthened by its wisdom and willingness to swim upstream. This is particularly true when one’s private mental models accurately predict or model reality. I’m often able to point out how certain things I’ve taught my children in private predict how things will play out in the news. When combined with proper discretion, this enables clear thinking about the world around them, and the ability to do the actual good that’s realistically possible within the limitations of fallen human nature, without the insanity of misplaced idealism or the drag of guilt or shame from post-Enlightenment delusions.