The luxury of phobias: how to face your fears - The Times
Challenge yourself with today's puzzles.
The other day a colleague reminded me of my phobia of morris dancers. This was a surprise. Have I ever confessed to a phobia of morris dancers? I suppose I must have done or else she wouldn’t have said it. Although it did not — unlike bloody morris dancers — ring any bells. Feasibly, my dislike of morris dancers is such that I have ceased even to think of morris dancers, unless forced. Philosophy, though, abhors the unexamined question. So I had a think.
Yup, fair. Deeply unkeen on morris dancers. But why? “Because you’re insane,” you may reply, but this would be description, which is not the same thing as analysis. First up, I dislike their fluttering ribbons. I’m not fond of ribbons. Sigmund Freud might have a thing or two to say about that, but I have no memory of any formative female figure in my life ever wearing them. I am also not wild about sweaty men in white shirts. Could that be a school thing? I likewise dislike prancing, hats with feathers, beards that look like they are made of bees. Did all that come before the morris dancer thing or cause it? I could not say. It is what it is.
Probably it’s a step too far to call it a phobia. At worst, it is an aversion. An ick. I have plenty of those. I also do not like, for example, the stickers you find on fruit. I struggle with saliva noises, or people who have white stuff at the corner of their mouth. Oh, and spiders’ legs, but only in particular circumstances. When still attached to spiders, they don’t bother me at all. When they come off? Gah.
Philosophers should not get the ick. Or at least, not if they cleave to the sort of largely western analytical philosophy that was hammered into me. For aversions are irrational, which is what differs them from fears. Kierkegaard distinguished fear from dread. The former, he reckoned, had an object, and suggested a course of action, even if that course was “run away”. The latter was formless and nameless, and a response to the abyss of existence. This feels more like what I’m talking about, only not quite. Because at the bottom of my abyss there seems to be a dismembered arachnid, the label from a banana, and a jolly Englishman banging sticks. Why? I don’t know why. Again, it is what it is.
One common theory of aversions is that they are useful, but just for reasons we don’t quite understand. For sheer survival, it is probably helpful to be scared of disease, dirt and the uncanny. That doesn’t mean, though, that we should trust these fears. John Stuart Mill was prescient on this, noting that cleanliness feels like a natural human thing to value, but also that kids are manky (I’m paraphrasing here) which means the antipathy must be learnt, rather than innate.
It’s also worth reminding ourselves that one generation’s squeamishness can seem frankly shameful to the next. Consider, for example, what your grand-father probably thought about gay sex, or what many white Americans once thought about interracial water fountains. There is no better tool for totalitarianism than an ability to make people go “yuck”.
Of late, it seems, people talk quite a lot about “having the ick”. The term is used particularly about dating; that indefinable feature somebody might have that turns out to be a dealbreaker. They run funny, they have a squeaky voice, they have a mouth that, just a bit too much, looks like their dad’s.
In a way, it’s a bit like the techno-philosophical notion of Uncanny Valley. The idea comes from the Japanese robot-maker Masahiro Mori. He realised that we tend to like robots more if they look like humans, and we relax in the presence of actual humans, but we are deeply unrelaxed if a robot looks almost like a human but not quite.
You will find something similar to Uncanny Valley at the root of folk terrors about vampires and zombies, and perhaps also, and in an even darker way, at the root of xenophobia and racism. And I wonder, a bit, if growing discourse about “the ick” has something to do with our new online lives. On the screen, we have become fastidious curators of our own perfection. Offline life can’t match up. Hence the ick.
None of this, I’ll grant you, might sound like much of a luxury. Perhaps, though, we should treasure the ick precisely because it is a reminder of the fundamental randomness of our personalities, and how little we can ultimately control them. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” said Hamlet to Horatio, “than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Question your icks, particularly when they’re weird. Fight your icks, especially when your ick gives you the ick. Don’t expect, though, to necessarily understand them. It’s fine. You don’t have to. And thankfully, nor do I.
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