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The Fly and the Human: Ironies of Disgust
- The University Press of Kentucky
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9 The Hermeneutics of the Fly Different animal species evoke distinctive emotional reactions in human beings. On the positive side, we feel affection, admiration, attraction, and aesthetic pleasure. On the negative side, we feel fear, contempt, revulsion, and aesthetic displeasure. Pandas, elephants, whales, cats, dogs, birds, butterflies , turtles, and kangaroos are examples that tend to fall on the positive side. Sharks, bears, worms, rats, mice, spiders, bacteria, bats, snakes, mosquitoes , and lice are apt to fall on the negative side. With some animals we smile; with others we shudder. Toward a small minority (or is it a majority?) we feel something like envy: this is particularly true of birds, whose aerial abilities we marvel at and covet. Sometimes, perhaps, we envy animals their mindlessness, their freedom from angst, their spontaneity. I don’t think we ever hate an animal species, as opposed to fearing it, because to hate something requires that you believe it has wronged you (or another person), and animals, not being moral agents, can’t wrong you—though they can obviously harm you.1 (If some primates are to be accorded the status of moral agents, this generalization needs to be restricted; in any case, it is true for the vast majority of animals.) Yet we are capable of extremely strong aversive reactions to certain animal species: they make our flesh creep, they “gross us out,” they inspire dread and fear. What the number one most disliked species may be is debatable: some say the rat, others the tapeworm, yet others the mosquito. In any case, we simply can’t stand certain animals; their extinction would not sadden us a bit. The humble fly ranks high here. Of the order Diptera (two winged), flies proper are distinct from other flying insects, such as dragonflies, fireflies, and butterflies, in possessing only a single pair of wings and in other anatomical The Fly and the Human Ironies of Disgust Colin McGinn 10 Colin McGinn respects; and we have notably different attitudes toward these categories of insects. Flies in the narrow sense include mosquitoes, gnats, and midges, as well as the common housefly. They are born as eggs, develop into legless maggots, and finally metamorphose into the buzzing nuisances we know them to be. They are short lived, surviving a matter of days, consume only liquid food, and are adept at the art of clinging to things by using spongy pads on their feet; they are also agile and flummoxed by panes of glass. They breed prodigiously (“like flies”) and are quite hard to kill without employing low-level chemical warfare (a rolled newspaper is a notably blunt weapon). With their zigzag flight, protuberant compound eyes, and tiny bristles—conspicuous under a microscope—they strike us as alien and vaguely reprehensible; not pretty, to be sure. Moreover, they exhibit a kind of driven stubborn determination, taking all manner of risks, not afraid to settle in the most dangerous places. They are surprisingly difficult to get rid of. To make matters worse, they often bite—and some even suck blood. They are invasive of human space—taking up residence in our houses, eating our food, seemingly drawn by our orifices, especially the mouth. They will settle on your face without so much as a by-your-leave, and even lick your lips if they get the chance. But none of that comes close to their most notorious trait: their penchant for human garbage, rotting flesh, and feces. The things we find most disgusting seem to excite their ravenous little appetites the most. They love places of death, exposed human waste, and garbage dumps. They like to stick their little feet into such revolting material and then suck on it. Our hell is their heaven (pigs have nothing on flies). Thus they strike as supremely dirty, avatars of filth. They are themselves units of dirt, a measure of how mucky a place is. They are saturated with the filth they so relish, we feel. If anything , the maggots are worse: corpses are their dining hall and playground. Squirming, senseless, hideously pale—not many things revolt us as maggots do. The caterpillar we can tolerate, we love the butterfly, but the fly and its maggot progeny excite only nausea and disdain. Note that our reaction is not one of fear: with the exception of disease-carrying mosquitoes, we are not afraid of flies, since they cannot really harm us; rather, they are objects of our disgust. Flies are perceived as contaminating, as agents...