Gross National Politics

[groovedaddy]

You’re an eminent philosopher at the University of Chicago. What can you tell us about the state of ideas in America?
There’s just something about our public culture that’s not that friendly to philosophy. I think religion is thought to be where you go with your big questions.

Or perhaps the business world.
Yes. There has been a focus on skills that make a short-term profit and not enough thought about the preconditions for a successful democracy.

Your inquiries have lately revolved around the politics of physical revulsion, which you see as the subtext for opposition to same-sex marriage.
What is it that makes people think that a same-sex couple living next door would defile or taint their own marriage when they don’t think that, let’s say, some flaky heterosexual living next door would taint their marriage? At some level, disgust is still operating.

In your book “From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law,” which will be out in February, you draw a distinction between primary disgust and projective disgust.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/magazine/13FOB-Q4-t.html?th&emc=th