Fear and Loathing in Politics and Academia

Carrie and Megan talk to Dr Leonard Cassuto, Professor of English at Fordham University, about his class called "Literature and Psychology of Disgust," which explores how language evokes emotional responses, particularly disgust, and his book Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, which was released in September. 

Chapters

• 7:13 Interview with Len

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi. Welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa, and I'm upright at my computer.

Carrie: Oh, boy. The worst has arrived. Again. 

Megan: Yeah. Again. I know. I remember when he was in office last time, people had commented that we sounded a little bit depressed in our intros at certain times. I can't pretend that I'm not depressed right now. 

Carrie: Yeah. I'm just glad I'm not living in the States anymore. It definitely hits differently when you're there versus away. 

Megan: Yeah. I bet it does. Do you feel safer? 

Carrie: Intellectually, I realize no matter what, it's going to affect the entire world, especially its closest neighbors, even more than the rest of the world. But the entire world is going to be affected. So, intellectually, I understand that I'm still at danger, but the effects are going to be slower for us than people who are actually living in the United States. It's not quite as the existential dread that I had the first time; I'm not having that right now. Eventually, I think it will hit. 

Megan: Yeah. In the States, they're planning on doing mass deportations. I don't know how feasible it is, but they're going to try to make it happen. 

Carrie: Oh, it will happen, at least in some form. Jamal Bouie has been talking about it on TikTok, Bluesky, and stuff. I find his analysis, or prediction, or whatever you want to call it, pretty compelling—that they're going to do it because it's going to make a lot of people a lot of money. So, it might not end up in that many people actually being expelled, but they will be rounded up. I think he's right about that. 

Megan: Because it'll make private prisons, again, a lot of money? 

Carrie: Yeah. A lot of people, including the prisons, money. 

Megan: Yes. It's all about money. 

Carrie: It's still a capitalist society, after all. 

Megan: After all. Yes. It may not be a democratic one for long, but it's a capitalist one. 

Carrie: Yeah. Those two things are separate, the economy versus the political structure. People conflate them, but they are two different things. So it's going to be bad. Very, very bad. 

Megan: It is. So for those who are listening that are also very sad, we're right there with you. 

Carrie: Yep. We get it if you're sad, we get it if you're mad. It is kind of interesting, just how I feel like people are angrier this time. Which I think is actually a more useful emotion.

Megan: It's much more a useful emotion. 

Carrie: So I'm hoping that this turns into something.  But it's rough. It's really rough. And then, of course, up here, we have our own Maple Trump. I do think he's different from Trump. He's got a lot less charisma, he's a lot less funny, and all that stuff. All the stuff that you can be, I sort of see why people might have some interest in this person. I don't get it with Poilievre. It's just weird. He's like the guy that you think that the cool kids would have beaten up in school. I just don't get it. 

Megan: Okay. And he's your right-wing radical leader?

Carrie: Yeah. He's the leader of the Conservative Party, which has traditionally been like the 90s and before that. It was much more like old-school conservatism. But then it became a lot more entwined with evangelicalism. I think Poilievre is even possibly worse than Harper was. Anyway, it's not fun.

Megan: It's not fun.

Carrie: Everyone's mad at Trudeau now because for the same reasons that people didn’t want to vote for Biden or Harris—it's inflation and all that stuff. In fact, inflation was worse here than it was in the United States. 

Megan: Oh, really? 

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Megan: Well, we also have people that weren’t voting for Harris because of Gaza, or they wouldn't have voted for Biden either for the same reason. 

Carrie: Yes. And I think that was not that big of a part of it, but I do think it was there, especially in a place like Michigan.

Megan: Yeah. There's a lot of refugees there.

Carrie: There's a lot of Muslims there. 

Megan: Well, she did lose Michigan. 

Carrie: Yeah. I do think it played a role. I just don't think it was the biggest part, even though I was also very upset about Gaza. 

Megan: Yeah. [inaudible].

Carrie: I just did not understand Biden's response to it at all. And I was hoping that if Harris got in, she would change things, but she just didn’t say that she would, and so you couldn't really trust that. I would hope she would, but honestly, I don’t know.

Megan: You don’t know. She might just be, like, Biden just [crosstalk].

Carrie: As bad, or worse either, potentially. I don’t get that feeling from her, but she didn’t say that much. So it was really hard to know. And she was kind of painted into a corner because she's the VP. She can't go against her boss too much. I do think that there should have been a primary. It's really unfortunate that Biden stayed second for so long. I don't know if the Democrats could've won it all this time. But at least there would've been a chance, I think, with a primary, because then they would've gotten the person who spoke the most, at least the Democrats—the Democratic voters out there. 

Megan: Yeah. Because they just didn't turn up this time—the Democratic voters.

Carrie: Yeah. 14 million people didn't vote for the president at least? 

Megan: Yeah. That's wild.

Carrie: So there's a huge number of people who just stopped voting for at least the president. That's a rough time. 

Megan: It's a rough time.

Carrie: [inaudible] a rough time. 

Megan: Yeah. It's funny. Our episode today is about disgust. 

Carrie: That's true. And we did talk about it. We did talk about the election and how hopeful we were, or at least hoping we were. So it's an interesting time to bring this up.

Megan: Yeah. It really is.

Carrie: I think it's a really good episode. 

Megan: Don't just determine if it's going to be a good episode or not from our sadness and frustration and anger at the top of this.

Carrie: Yeah. Well, also, I do think that one of the things you have to do under fascism is find your joy. You cannot let them drag you down. You have to be angry, and you have to be joyful. Probably equal measures of both. Don't let the fuckers win. 

Megan: Don't let the fuckers win, yeah. Absolutely.

[music]

Carrie: Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and the author of, or editor of, 10 books, including 'The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education' with Robert Weisbuch, 'The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It', which was inspired by his 'Chronicle of Higher Education' column, 'The Graduate Advisor', which I'm pretty sure I've read, and 'The Cambridge Companion to Baseball', which won the best anthology award from the North American Society of Sports Historians. His most recent book is 'Economic Writing as If Readers Matter', which was released in September, and we will be talking about that. But he's also an award-winning journalist who writes on subjects ranging from science to sports in venues from 'The New York Times' to 'Salon.com'. He also co-teaches a class called 'Literature and Psychology of Disgust', exploring how language evokes emotional responses, particularly disgust, which is why we wanted to have him on. So welcome. 

Megan: Yeah. Welcome. 

Leonard Cassuto: It's great to be here.

Megan: Why did you want to teach 'Literature and Psychology of Disgust'?

Leonard: Let me begin first by saying that this course, 'The Literature and Psychology of Disgust', is a team-taught course. I want to shout out my partner in the enterprise, who is in the psychology department. His name is Dean McKay, and he is actually a published disgust researcher, whereas I have done a lot of work in the literary representation of monsters, which is disgust [inaudible]. 

Megan: Oh, very cool. 

Leonard: We were introduced by another psychologist with whom I co-taught a course in horror, and that was great fun too. My horror partner was retiring, and he set me up with Dean. He thought that we might find some common ground, and indeed we did. We decided right away that this was a course we wanted to try. Now, that was about 10 iterations ago, over, I guess, about a 12-year period. So we are veterans of this course, and we are, in fact, readying its newest iteration for this January. It has been a howling success, not only with the students but also with us. It's been very generative in our work. But when we decided to teach it, we saw immediately that the way literature represents and reflects on disgust is quite a bit different from the more materialist way that psychology treats the subject. And we believed—correctly, it turned out—that if we brought those two disciplines into conversation on this topic, the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. And it has proved to be so. 

We have been really thrilled by this, and we're interested in getting the word out. This is, if not the only course on disgust that's being offered in a college or university—or, for that matter, anywhere else in the country—if it's not the only one, it's one of a very small number that you could count on one hand. We believe that the subject is not only interesting but also highly salient for the time that we're living in and that more people ought to be getting into the pool with us because the water is wonderful. 

Carrie: Yeah. Can you explain why it's so fruitful or so interesting?

Leonard: Well, when we get the students together on the first day, most of them come in believing that disgust is an instinct or a reflex, but it isn't. Disgust is an emotion. As an emotion, it has certain properties, including the fact that it's social. It's learned. All disgust is learned with one single exception: if you put a drop of a bitter taste on an infant's tongue you will get the disgust face—the kind of crinkled-up, screwed-up, get-out-of-my-face kind of expression showing that the capacity for disgust is present from birth. But what we are disgusted at is something that we learn, and what a culture collectively decides it's disgusted at gives a real window into what's happening in that culture at any given moment.

The United States, in particular, is having a somewhat regrettable burgeoning of disgust in the public sphere right now, and I think that's part of what makes it salient. But in a broader educational context, you can learn a lot about how to read a book by studying how emotion is being represented in it. If you're a psychologist, you can learn a lot about how to study emotion if you look at how it's being represented in art, whether literary or cinematic. It's a way of bringing the abstract and the concrete together, which is something that I talk about in my new book about academic writing—that the abstract and the concrete are absolutely bound to each other as if in a binary star, where gravity is pulling them toward each other but also keeping them rotating around each other. So if you want to be able to write well or understand things correctly, you have to be able to balance the abstract and the concrete, and this course does that.

Megan: So you must talk about Frankenstein. Do you?

Leonard: In fact, we can. Frankenstein is one of many things that we could put in there. I have taught Frankenstein, but we don't teach Frankenstein in this course simply for no particular reason. We could. We teach a number of novels. Frankenstein is first written in 1817, revised later, and so the language can be a little bit difficult for students. But, we do give them some 18th-century poetry. I guess the disgusting aspects in Frankenstein—you have to imagine that. When Mary Shelley is talking about what happened to the creature, she is rendering him in distinctly abstract terms, leaving you to imagine it for yourself. Some of the books we assign don't leave too much to the imagination. That's, in some ways, better for the purpose. 

Carrie: That's true. So what books do you assign?

Leonard: So the poetry that I just referenced, Jonathan Swift wrote some poems about a lady's dressing room where you have this guy who goes into his would-be girlfriend's bedroom, and starts looking around and sees all the evidence of the work that she does to make herself pretty. And climaxes that this being the 18th century, he discovers her chamber pot. And [inaudible] he that she can't look the same to him anymore after this.

Carrie: Oh, no.

Megan: Oh my goodness.

Leonard: And, by the way, to return for a moment to the assumption students bring in when they believe that disgust is an instinct or a reflex, and that some things are automatically disgusting—one of those things is shit. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Leonard: How is that not discussed? How do you learn to be disgusted by shit? Of course, you do. Anybody who's had a child knows it.

Carrie: That's true. 

Leonard: All of us who have been children, we've forgotten it, but it happened to us. So this idea that all disgust is learned. That means that when you see what members of a society are agreeing to be disgusted by, you are learning a lot about that society. When Jonathan Swift is writing about this individual who is prowling around in the bedroom of this woman he hopes to lie down with, we're learning about him. We're also learning about the morals of 18th-century England, how in a really stinky society, people simply aren't bathing all that often, and where the streets are filled with horse manure. And so it's very difficult to envision today how fragrant the cities were in 18th-century Europe. Swift is showing how hygiene is a constructed idea. 
This is something that we can all learn from because we grow up with the norms of hygiene that are in our own culture as it's completely normal to do that. But to understand hygiene as an idea that cultures construct for themselves, you're deciding what is clean and what is dirty. 

The idea of clean and the idea of dirty acquire not only symbolic but also moral force. To be dirty is to be not fully human. Let's think for a moment about cholera. Cholera is a disease that is spread through sewage—that is, through fecal matter, through shit. In the 19th century and before, cholera epidemics were a scourge. They would flare. Because cholera is so contagious and acts so fast, it burns itself out much more quickly than, say, a pandemic like COVID-19. And so you get these isolated flares, but they would be very lethal where they were. While the contagion theory of disease was not fully understood until well into the age of modernity, people understood that cholera was a disease of the poor. It was a stigmatized disease even before people realized that open sewers were what was causing it. So the meaning of dying of cholera was quite a bit different from the meaning of dying of what was called consumption, tuberculosis—because tuberculosis was an equal opportunity killer. 

And so in a lot of fiction across the ages, including, for example, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' which is the most-read novel in American history, you have deaths from consumption where you have somebody who isn’t having disgusting diarrhea. They are instead fading away with the kind of red cheeks and hollowed-out face that, paradoxically, but also not entirely unrelatedly, is also associated with female beauty. If we look at the way that female beauty is constructed, it looks a lot like somebody’s dying of tuberculosis.

Carrie: Yeah. I was just thinking about how romanticized tuberculosis is, even though it was—or at least more recently—more associated with poverty. Eventually, it became more associated. You were more likely to get it if you were poor.

Leonard: Well, yes. Once cures are discovered, then only poor people get sick.

Carrie: Right. But it was still romanticized beyond that. It was interesting. I think it’s because of this female beauty association that I hadn't even thought of before.

Leonard: Yeah. It’s disturbing to reflect on. But it’s not disgusting to die of tuberculosis in the 19th century. It is disgusting to die of cholera because there are class markers attached to those two diseases, and you can see then how disgust binds itself to ideas about class, among other things. Disgust also, of course, binds itself to race. We can see this in the presidential campaign that, at the time we’re talking, is still going on. Although [inaudible] the podcast drops, it’ll probably be over.

Carrie & Megan: Yes.

Leonard: We can decide to have a conversation about immigration, a subject upon which reasonable people may have a range of opinions. They may or may not compromise as a result of that conversation, but it can be conducted in what we could call rational language. Or you can inject disgust into it, and you can accuse immigrants of eating cats and dogs. Now you have disgust in the picture, and disgust is aversive. It is profoundly aversive. It's so aversive that it works so fast that people who don't think about it mistake it for a reflex. That's how fast it is. It's an emotional reaction, alright, but it's an emotional reaction that is saying, "Get this out of my face as quickly as you possibly can because I am revulsed." Disgust is the enemy of engagement. It's the enemy of reflection. It discourages both of those things. And so, when you inject a disgusting image into what could be, let us say, a conversation about a policy issue that we, as a society, need to reflect on together and come up with a consensus answer to, then you are essentially creating a lower likelihood of any of that conversation or reflection, let alone consensus, ever happening. 

So the politics of disgust are confrontational, or they discourage engagement, but they're the opposite of sitting down across from somebody and discussing reasonably anything you might be disagreeing with. 

Carrie: So is disgust stronger in all of these ways than other emotions? Because I know anger can kind of hijack us a little bit. But is disgust worse? Is that why politicians use it more, or more recently anyway? 

Leonard: Well, let's consider anger or, let's say, contempt even. Contempt is not a useful emotion if we're going to talk about building a just society. Contempt doesn't make you want to run away. In fact, contempt can be, among people who practice it. I'm going to use the word "delicious." You can enjoy a feeling of contempt. 

Carrie: Sure can. 

Leonard: But if you're rooting against a team, if you're the underdog team, you're rooting for defeats the dynasty that was expected to win, maybe you're going to feel a delicious sense of superiority over that other team. There's nothing that wants to disengage there. You want the object of your contempt to be there. But if you're disgusted by something, you don't want it anywhere near you. And so, both emotions—you can feel soft disgust or you can feel intense disgust. You can feel soft contempt or soft anger. You can feel intense anger. 

Megan: So it's a spectrum? 

Leonard: All emotions exist on their own separate spectra. But as disgust increases, so does the desire to run away. It's not running away in fear. It's running away in revulsion. Whereas if you get angry and angrier and angrier, you might yell louder, but you don't necessarily want to go away. And so the chance of possible conciliation may be more likely in this case because at least you're listening to each other. Just like in a therapist's office, a therapist might encourage people to voice their anger in a way that's not going to cause irreparable harm, of course. The anger needs to be out there because it's part of the engagement process. I have never heard of a therapist encouraging somebody to express disgust. 

Carrie: No. You just opened my mind to something I had never considered before. So, thank you for that. 

Leonard: Well, thank you. That's [inaudible]. 

Megan: So, what are some other things that disgust us that you can show through literature?

Leonard:  Lots of things can, of course, but the arc of the course that we teach begins with what is called core disgust. The psychologist will tell you that there are a number of things that characterize emotions. There has to be a facial expression that's associated with them. We have one with disgust. You can recognize the face of somebody who's being disgusted, but there also has to be an evolutionary value to the emotion. And psychologists, and I think they're not alone here, speculate, I think reasonably, that disgust evolved as an emotion originally to protect us from getting poisoned by bad food. So the word disgust has a root in that. Gustatory has to do with taste. It's bad taste.

So the feelings of disgust that relate to food and other physical sensations are what psychologists call core disgust. This is kind of the fun part of the course because you can bring in dried bugs, which you can buy on the Internet, and say, "Who in the class wants to come up and have some dried crickets?" And this buzz is great commotion in the room, of course. Some of them do come up and challenge themselves, and they eat the dried bugs, and we'll crunch on some of them. Dried mealworms. You can get all this stuff on the Internet. And everybody gets to reflect together on what does it mean for cultural identity to be disgusted by a particular food. Because teaching in New York City, as we do, we have students from a variety of races and ethnicities. They offer up stories of the foods that they are growing up with or have grown up with and, in many cases, still treasure, which they know that they can't bring their friends home to eat. 

Megan: Yep. Absolutely. 

Leonard: And so this allows for some useful thoughts about how what we put in our bodies helps us to define ourselves and each other and how disgust is acting as a kind of policeman between what's okay and what isn't. For example, the movie 'Sausage Party,' which came out about 10 years ago, we assigned[?] it. It's at the risk of—as E.B. White and his wife, Katharine, once said—that if you try to dissect humor, you unfortunately wind up killing it. We take the chance anyway because 'Sausage Party' is a very funny movie, but it is also working freely with the idea of disgust. It imagines what would happen if the foods in the supermarket were sensate beings. There's a lot to say about this, and I'm not going to elaborate on all of what's going on in this movie, but I will say that the way that the writers and the actors of this movie conceive of it is that the food is potty-mouthed. 

So you have the hot dogs, the buns, the vegetables, and the tacos. They're all cursing at each other. When you have these food objects using words that we are accustomed to thinking of as dirty, that's already creating tension. It's tension that allows us to ask, "Why do you feel this way? How is this working? What do you think is the meaning of this in this particular work of art?" As a scientist and a humanist, we tell our students that this course is organized around two big ideas: How does it work and what does it mean? And then if we ask those two questions about occasions of disgust, then we can learn a lot not only about the mechanics of a complex emotion, but also its meaning in terms of aesthetics, culture, identity, and who we are as people who are in this classroom right now trying to learn. 

So we start with core disgust, and the course arcs towards the more complex manifestations of disgust, culminating in the idea of moral disgust, which is really where the rubber hits the road. In moral disgust, for example, we can talk about the phenomenon of the serial murderer, who is a morally disgusting human, but who receives much more attention in our collective imagination than the frequency of serial murder would ever dictate. That is, the chances of being targeted by a serial murderer, let alone a sexual psychopath, who gets—and they get all the press. If you keep killing people for their money, you're a serial murderer. But that's not as sexy as the idea of kidnapping women because you want to eat them. The odds of being targeted by a serial murderer are less than the odds of being struck by lightning. If we just narrow it to sexual psychopaths, then it's yet even higher. It's even more of an extravagant act of imagination. So why are we imagining this right now?

Why do parents go to such lengths to guard their children against something that is rarer than a lightning strike when they are not spending any time teaching their children how to avoid lightning strikes? What's happening there? So we teach a novel about a serial murderer. It's set in 18th-century France. As I was saying earlier, the aromas of 17th-century France go on vivid display there. The novel is called 'Perfume,' and it was an enormous bestseller in its time. It is about a supernatural conceit in which a boy is born in 18th-century France, and there are two supernatural things about him. One, he has no body odor, which means that in a world where everything stinks, he makes creeps people out. The second thing about him is that his own sense of smell is perfect. It's better than you could possibly imagine, and he never forgets a smell. And so, he grows up to become a murderer because society marginalizes him and basically never gives him any path to advancement. He becomes a perfumer eventually, by accident, because he wants to create a perfume that can allow him to be seen. He figures out that the only way he can do this is by killing women and stealing their scent and making it into a [inaudible]. 

Megan: Wow, that sounds fascinating. [crosstalk].

Leonard: [inaudible] story. Oh, it's a good story. It's a really great novel, but it also allows us to talk about, as great art will, not only itself but also how does it refract itself through the sensibilities we have today. We're living at a time when serial murderers are a subject of overactive imagination. Now, moral disgust also has some really important current implications. Moral disgust is something that the debate over race in the United States has, at different times, been a story of moral disgust. Southern segregation is a disgust narrative. "I don't want to drink at the same water fountain that you drink at because I think you're disgusting, and I think that I will, through what disgust theorists call sympathetic magic, become disgusting if I touch what you touch."

Megan: Interesting. 

Leonard: And so we assign a novel by Thomas Dixon called 'The Clansman.' It came out in 1905, and it was a bestseller in 1905. It's a white supremacist novel, and it's absolutely horrible. We don't have the students buy it because it's available for free on the Internet. And if you buy it, you might be buying it from a white supremacist group because they keep it alive. But it's, of course, easy to read, and we want them to read it because Dixon, as an author, is trying to make his readers in his time disgusted by African Americans. Paradoxically, when we read it today, we're disgusted the other way. We're disgusted at him. And so, there's so much disgust flying back and forth in this book that it becomes a very rich locus through which to study the working of moral disgust because it's ultimately a moral judgment that's being passed, and you're finding evidence for it. This is something, of course, that's been happening in United States culture since time immemorial—that enslaved people were imagined as less than human, which was a very difficult psychological act to sustain because to try to imagine another human being as less than human requires constant vigilance and creates enormous tension. You look at the way that slave owners used to sleep with their human property, and you can see how tough it was for them, too.

So then, the classification system that because you have so-called Negro blood, you are therefore enslaved. All of this is a story of class and social construction, but it's also a story of moral disgust that's been told over centuries. And so you can find a work of art that gives you a window into this, but ultimately we're learning about ourselves by doing this. And, by the way, one of my points of entry into this subject was that the first book that I published is called 'The Inhuman Race: The Grotesque in American Literature and Culture.' It's about this racial grotesque, which is racial disgust. So, I've been interested in this for decades, and this course is giving me a chance to open it out from new and different angles.

Carrie: When you were speaking about creating this disgust around African Americans, what I thinking of was the pools when they became desegregated and poured in, was it bleach? I can't remember what it was into the pool so that nobody could use it. Because they didn't want to be touched by water that had been touched by a black body. 

Leonard: That is absolutely salient here. These are the kinds of examples that Dean McKay and I bring into the course all the time. If you would raise that, we would try to find something on the Internet that would perhaps illustrate it visually. There's also a historical analog to this: that after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated the schools, there were numerous school districts in the South that abolished their public schooling rather than allow the races to mix. And so, there was no public school in various counties in the South for some years after that decision. And when you think about how appalling that is—this is the United States of America. So, again, what does it mean that this has happened, that this could persist? And, of course, the desegregation of the schools, the Brown decision, desegregated all of the public space in American society, and it had an immediate effect on many such spaces, such as bus stations and the like. But it's been much less effective in the generation since in schools. And school was the place that was the original center of the suit. But, as any American knows, the schools in the United States are by and large segregated.

Megan: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Leonard: They're not segregated by law, but they're segregated by practice. 

Megan: Absolutely. You already mentioned this, but when I was thinking about when you mentioned eating cats and dogs things, there are two different kinds of disgust here. Right? Because I have a different kind of disgust when I hear that. I'm not thinking I'm disgusted that people are actually doing this. I'm disgusted that someone would say that people are actually doing this. 

Leonard: Well, there you go. I mean, that's part of the way that we can immediately complexify this. What does it mean also that you corrupt a debate? And I say corrupt, that William Miller, who wrote one of the best books on disgust, it's called 'The Anatomy of Disgust,' has a very vivid image. He says, "If you have a barrel of wine and you add a teaspoon of sewage to it, it changes everything. If you have a barrel of sewage and you add a teaspoon of wine, it changes nothing." Disgust is sticky. It's really sticky. Once you put disgust into a conversation, it's very hard to take it out again. And where I'm arcing—and you got there before me—is what does it mean that our public sphere is so filled with toxic and disgusting imagery right now? This has been going on for a while, and I'm going to say that this was introduced in the last, I'd say, 30 years by the political right in the United States. But right now, the political left in the United States is so disgusted by Trump that it is now something that's happening on both sides. 

The example that I gave in which you just raised again of how the immigration debate is being poisoned by having sewage added to wine, as it were. That's a deliberate political tactic to discourage anything resembling reasonable conversation or even agreement, which was reached, of course, months ago. There was going to be border legislation, but that's a political story. But where this goes in terms of the classroom, we don't get partisan in our classroom, Dean and I, but we do talk about civics, especially at the end of the term when the time comes to sum up the course. Because, ultimately, when you surrender to disgust, you are giving in to a judgment that you are arriving at. Snap, just immediately. Disgust delivers its verdict so quickly, you don't even always realize that a verdict happened. So, our public sphere, to the extent that disgust is allowed into it, is being made less civil and therefore less productive as a democracy, less trustworthy as a democracy.

When Lincoln and Douglas debated in 1858 as part of their race for the Senate, they held a series of debates around the state of Illinois, and their debates lasted about two and a half hours with long public statements that people attended or read about in the paper because people took shorthand and then published the transcripts in the newspaper. That was reflective democracy. If we're going to do democracy properly, it has to be more reflective than it is now, and that means that we need to be more attentive about keeping disgust out of it. 

Carrie: How do we do that? 

Leonard: We ask students to be attentive to how disgust works in the public sphere so that they can do their part to try to clean it up again or at least recognize where they are being asked to make a decision too quickly on the basis of a disgust reaction rather than reflective contemplation. So, that's our civic message to them at the end, it's not a partisan message. It's a message to go out and be a responsible citizen and recognize the ways in which disgust, as adaptive as it is as an emotion—because all emotions have adaptive value. As adaptive as disgust can be, it has its place, and we need to watch it to be careful of where it's working, where it works, and where it shouldn't. So we can all be better citizens if we look out for that. 

Carrie: Well, that is excellent advice. 

Megan: It's really. 

Carrie: Maybe this is a good time to switch to your book. Why did you want to write 'Academic Writing as If Readers Matter', and why now?

Leonard: So, the through line between what we've been talking about with disgust and what we're now talking about with my new book is the idea of community—the idea of productive community. I recently saw a play in revival off-Broadway, George Bernard Shaw's 'The Devil's Disciple'. And there's a line in the play, which is set during the American Revolution, by the way. There's a line in the play where one character says the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. 

Carrie: He's so ready. 

Leonard: So I wanted to write this book because the academic community is being fragmented in part by poor writing. Not only because of it, but poor writing is keeping us from communicating with each other. Just as discussed, it inhibits the kind of rational communication that citizens ought to be engaging with each other about issues that are common to us. The academic writers need to recognize that we exist in a larger community, that academia is and should be a productive community that exists in a constructive relation to society at large. Now, we can see that society at large is looking at academia in less and less positive light. You have show trials of college presidents followed by public executions. This is reflective of, among other things, a breakdown of trust in academic institutions. So what can restore trust? Well, communication is central to whatever is going to restore public trust, that if academic work is to be seen as a public good, and it is one, it has to be seen as one. Otherwise, why would society at large want to fund it? And we have to be able to communicate more effectively.

A lot of academic writing is a display of effort, of research, of information gathering, of insight even. But if the reader can't connect with it, then communication hasn't happened. It shows illusion instead, that where the writer, "Oh, I put this out there. I must be communicating." Well, not if the reader can't get through it. Not if the reader is going to be so frustrated by it that they're going to throw it across the room. So academic writing has to be more conscious of academic readers. Hence, the title 'Academic Writing as If Readers Matter'. Readers have to matter. And yet academic writers, too many of them, write as though the welfare of the person who would be reading them is of little to no importance.

Now, I open this book by talking about why this might be so, and I talk about what I call the primal scene of academic writing. And the primal scene of academic writing is some student writing some paper for some teacher someplace. And it is then, of course, iterated many times over the course of the life of that student as far as the student goes in school. And it can start as early as middle school, and for some people, it never stops. Me. But the distinctive feature of this primal scene, it's one which is easily overlooked, particularly by people who have become so used to it that they have ceased to look at it acutely, is that the reader is being paid. You're writing for a teacher who is paid to read your work. So this is how most people learn to write serious stuff. So you're writing for an audience whose attention you can never lose because they're paid to give it to you. Well, if you repeat that a few dozen or a few hundred times, you'll just get used to the idea that the audience is never going to be alienated, that the audience is never going to quit on you, and you develop bad habits.

So there's a start to all of this, and the way out of it is to envision the reader, to think about what does the reader need from me. So the tips about how to write well that are in this book are all based on this idea of trying to envision the circuit that you're making of one hand clasping another. There's a picture of that in the book, creating some kind of connection in which exchange happens because that exchange makes the world bigger. It makes the world richer. And if somebody is going to do work to create information or to disseminate information, it becomes sort of tragedy and irony if it's being put out there and it doesn't create that connection because the writer isn't thinking generously enough about what the reader is doing or wants to be doing with this work. It's not that everybody needs to write for 'The New York Times'. It's that you need to think about, "Who am I writing for and how can I reach them?"

Megan: Yeah. It sounds like through your class and through this book, you're just talking about engagement here. It's very important to you.

Leonard: Exactly. Yes. The two through lines that I can see running through 35 years, more than 35 years, of intellectual work are ideas about monstrosity in which I imagine the monster as the enemy of community because that's how you envision serial killers, by the way. Imagine serial killers as preying on the middle class. In real life, they never do—or not never. They almost never do. And on the very rare occasions that they do, like Ted Bundy, they become celebrities. But most of the serial killers are picking off people at the margins. But we imagine the serial killer as a community-hating monster. And so my work, when I was thinking about monsters, I was thinking about monsters as the enemies of community. Then there's the other side of my work where I've been working on reform of academia, particularly graduate school, for many years, and this book is absolutely contiguous with that. This is about, "How do you build community? How can we build a community of intellectuals?" And so this book, 'Academic Writing as If Readers Matter', is to me a lot more than just a handbook about how to write well.

It's also an argument about why academic work is important and academics ought to see themselves as a community because when we write poorly, we are pulling the whole team down, and we are eroding the relation that academia needs to have with society at large so that it can function as a public good. So there's a lot at stake here. And in some sense, I've been writing about the same thing when I write about how to build a better graduate education. That's the previous book. And how to write well, it's the same idea because we have to build an intellectual community that is outward-facing and generous.

Megan: Yes. I love that. 

Carrie: I love the idea. For me, this podcast is trying to do that. Maybe that wasn't exactly the thought I had in my head, but, yes, we are trying to be outward-facing and we're trying to be generous and we're trying to build a community of people who care enough to not shit on other people for the way that they talk. 

Leonard: That's another reason I'm delighted to be here. 

Megan: Yeah. Thank you. 

Carrie: So, you might have kind of answered the next question, which is, why is it so often hard to read academic writing? Do you have any more thoughts about why academic writing is so hard to read?

Leonard: Yeah. I talked about how we're trained to ignore readers, but we are also trained to be defensive. This is the other [inaudible]. That this is a competitive arena. And some of this is unavoidable, these job opportunities that people want, and it's a good job. I love my job, and I want to be worthy of it. But just because this workplace, like so many others, is competitive, doesn't mean that people should be communicating as if in a defensive crouch. Where the most important thing is, don't call me stupid. Assume I'm smart. So I'm going to write so that you think I'm smart because you can't understand me. 

These are evolved strategies that are anti-reader, and therefore, they're unproductive, but they are understandable in light of the way that we have constructed a set of norms as a culture because academia is a culture that encourages this kind of behavior. And I might add, it's not necessarily limited to academia, when medicine was professionalizing in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, doctors actually, were having meetings and they were saying, basically, "How can we become a guild? How can we go from just being the doctor whose office is on the corner of the village, who would pull your tooth or treat you if you were ailing, and whose reputation was built entirely by word-of-mouth? How do you move from that to being a credentialed profession where there are barriers to entry, where people have to demonstrate their credentials in order to get in, and how do we maintain this and make it into something that is going to have the kind of powerful reputation that we want for it to have in society at large?" So this is a process of professionalization that a lot of professions were being invented and put into, or being professionalized at around this time, and doctors actually had conversations. 

This is in the archive, discovered by Paul Starr, who wrote a social history of American medicine a few decades ago. He finds in the archive these writings where doctors are encouraging each other to use Latinate terminology and other impenetrable linguistic forms so that patients can't understand them.

Megan: For the purpose of that, the actual purpose.

Leonard: For the purpose of it. Yes. Or the actual purpose of not being understood so that they can look like mystical wise men, and that their patients will think they're smart because they don't understand them. The best way to be smart is to be simple, uncomplicated, and approachable, which has, of course, a much higher degree of difficulty than being obscure, oblique, and unnecessarily complex. 

Megan: Yeah. Absolutely. Oh my gosh. A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper, and someone wrote an academic journal article and said, "This was so easy to read. Thank you." And I thought of it as the biggest compliment that I could have gotten about it.

Leonard: I'm glad you feel that way because you should feel that way, and I would feel that way if I got such a compliment. 

Megan: Yeah. But I could see that there are some people who probably would take offense to that, that it was easy to read. 

Leonard: That's sad, to be fair. Now, Judith Butler, who's a famous philosopher, I want to [inaudible] here because many years ago, decades ago, I want to say, Butler got into a certain amount of hot water because she said, basically, "I have to write in this very difficult way because my brilliant ideas can only be understood if they're expressed in this complex way." People attacked her, and I think that they were right to. But the Judith Butler of today repents that earlier stance, has said that she looks back at some of her earlier sentences and she winces at them. And, of course, because she is truly a brilliant person, she didn't have too much trouble adapting to the practice of writing in a way that is more approachable both inside and outside of her discipline. So kudos to Judith Butler because that's a step that more of us should be taking.

Carrie: It's also a sign of growth that we don't see in a lot of people of that generation. 

Leonard: Yes. And I hope that my book is written so that it can be approached that way. And actually, it's a wise-ass book starting with the title. I hope that because my hair is white, it's also wise. 

Megan: I love it. 

Carrie: No, I actually really thought that the book was very well-written and I love all the examples, and it really made me think of some of the worst offenders in our field and one in particular who I don't dislike as much as other people do. But his writing style is impenetrable.

Leonard: People keep looking right at you and say, "Who was it? Who was it?" 

Carrie: Well, any linguist listening to this knows who I'm talking about. Do you want to leave tips for our listeners if they're doing any kind of academic writing? Not all of our listeners are academics, but many of them are. 

Leonard: Well, maybe. First tip is, you don't have to be doing academic writing. Anytime you are writing about something serious, you can benefit from what's in this book. At least, I hope and I believe so. The first tip is please buy the book. It's not that expensive, and it's a dandy softcover. But, really, I think that the tip I'd like to leave your listeners with is the idea that there's somebody on the other side. Think about who it is. Think about what that person may want or need from you, and allow that to affect your task. And if you do that, you aren't just going to become a better writer. You're going to be a more generous person than if you didn't do it because writing is not only thinking, writing is performance. It's a public performance, and we all need to be better selves in public so that we can make our collective space better.

Megan: I love that. It's beautiful. 

Carrie: Beautiful. 

Megan: What a great way to end this great conversation.

Carrie: Yeah. This is amazing. 

Megan: We really appreciate it.

Leonard: Well, thank you. I've really enjoyed talking to you. 

Carrie & Megan: Thank you.

Carrie: Us too. And we always leave our listeners with one final message.

Megan: Don't be an asshole.

Carrie: Don't be an asshole. 

Leonard: Amen. 

Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon. Theme music by Nick Granham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com, and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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