Sanitation (philosophy of)

I’ve just finished reading Rose George’s The Big Necessity, about toilets and human waste (euphemism alert!)–as part of my interest in the emotion of disgust. I’d strongly recommend Aurel Kolnai’s monograph “On Disgust” as a philosophical treatment of the subject; it contains some excellent phenomenological work with some important conceptual distinctions (far better than most of what passes for work on the emotions in current analytical philosophy). But Ms. George brings out the medical/cultural/political aspects of the problem of our disgusting bodies–what to do with and about all the shit we produce. The effects on health of inadequate toilets in the “turd world” (Naipaul) are catastrophic, but the sheer unpleasantness of living near human excrement is also appalling. Yet most people don’t want to have to think about it, because of the distastefulness of the topic: no celebrity wants to hitch herself to the shit bandwagon. Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the “god that shits” (E. Becker), then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust.