This column prides itself on taking you to places where others fear to venture. Today we plumb new depths, literally, as we go down the toilet.
“Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies. Even on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our bottoms,” wrote Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French philosopher.
He wasn’t the first great thinker to ponder the significance of potties. Diogenes of Sinope, nicknamed “The Dog” and a contemporary of Socrates, believed any act considered natural and normal in private should also be viewed as acceptable in public. That included “number ones” and “number twos”.
We are a little more enlightened now and realise that exposing human waste to other people risks spreading disease. Which is why the United Nations on Tuesday is marking World Toilet Day to promote the improvement of sanitation globally. The logo for the event is based on Rodin’s statue The Thinker – a nice touch as both World Philosophy Day and International Men’s Day are also commemorated this week. (Bloke with no trousers seated and pondering the meaning of life. Tick, tick, tick.)
The overlap between toilets and philosophy doesn’t end there. In her book What is Philosophy For?, the British ethicist Mary Midgley said “philosophy is best understood as a form of plumbing”. In public debate, we rely on certain concepts – such as freedom and justice – to make sense of the world. But these concepts require constant maintenance, lest they create blockages in reasoning. Faulty concepts may not “drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor”, Midgley wrote, but they can “quietly distort or obstruct our thinking”.
One of the most famous essays in philosophy is On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, an American professor who died last year. Bullshit is defined as speech “unconnected to a concern with the truth”. His work has gained fresh attention in an age of chatbots and artificial intelligence – blamed for generating a Krakatoa of bullshit that is clogging up our smartphones and communication channels. Likening bullshit to the emissions of a windbag or overconfident twit, Frankfurt says: “Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.”
For the Marxist Slovenian intellectual Slavoj Zizek, toilets help to explain how “ideology is at work precisely where you don’t think you will find it”.
He gives the example of French, German and English loos. In France, the hole in the toilet is at the back “so when you produce excrement it quickly disappears”. In Germany, it’s the opposite – the hole is at the front and the excrement is “displayed in the back” allowing you to “inspect” it before flushing, he remarks. In England, “the toilet is full of water so the shit floats in it before it disappears”.
Zizek argues that the three designs correspond to deep-rooted national ideologies. First, the “revolutionary hastiness” of the French – the waste is “quickly liquidated like a kind of guillotine”. Second, the “reflective thoroughness” of the Germans. Third, the “pragmatism” of the English who offer “a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected”.
There is no practical reason why one style is preferred over the other. So ideology “has to be at work”, says Zizek.
You might dismiss this as highbrow potty humour. But there is a serious message. When stripped of our tribal garb, we are united by common urges: a need for freedom. A need for justice. A need to go to the toilet.
George Orwell recalled an incident in the Spanish Civil War when he saw a fascist soldier, seemingly having been disturbed doing his “business”, running away holding up his trousers with both hands. “I refrained from shooting at him,” wrote Orwell. “I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting him.”
In a profound sense, we are made human by a single movement. The point was underlined in an unusual study produced a few years ago by a pair of cognitive scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They designed what they called the Minimal Turing Test – an adaptation of a long-standing rule for measuring the ability of computers to mimic human intelligence.
[ ‘I can’t go to the bathroom in other people’s houses. I am unable to perform’Opens in new window ]
In the “minimal” test, you are asked to imagine you’re standing before a judge. The judge is tasked with killing anyone considered to be AI and to spare the life of anyone human. You have just one word to prove you’re human. What word do you choose?
Among the most frequently picked words by participants in the study were love, compassion and please. Curse words and favourite foods, such as pizza, also featured prominently. People were then asked to choose between different words, deciding which they thought most likely to have come from a human and which from a machine. Certain words such as love and please scored highly. However, the winning word was “simpler and distinctly biological”, as a report on the study put it. The word “selected most frequently to denote the very essence and soul of humanity” was ... poop.