Our fear of insects has inspired countless horror movies (Image: Universal Pictures/Getty)
None of us is neutral about insects. The strong emotional reactions they provoke have deep roots, says Jeffrey A. Lockwood in The Infested Mind
FEAR + Disgust = Horror. That was the feeling that overcame Jeffrey Lockwood as he was engulfed by a plague of grasshoppers. The rub is that this happened while he was working as an entomologist at the University of Wyoming. What should have been a routine check of his field experiment became a moment when insects wormed their way into his psyche. 鈥淭he experience of being buried alive by life challenged鈥� my mental health,鈥� he writes in his latest book, and it catalysed his move into the arts. He now .
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In The Infested Mind, Lockwood takes us on a tour of our emotions surrounding insects and on to the wider world of mental health. These emotions aren鈥檛 specific to zoological taxonomy, so spiders and other arthropods 鈥� animals with external skeletons, segmented bodies and jointed limbs 鈥� are all included.
No one is neutral about insects. Most of us are slightly wary of them, a few have a debilitating horror, and a very few have a love for them, one that rarely speaks its name: entomophilia.
聯No one is neutral about insects. A few of us have a debilitating horror of them, and a very few love them聰
It鈥檚 perhaps because most of us aren鈥檛 that keen on them that Lockwood鈥檚 tour often struggles to engage the reader. The book does nicely clarify that where emotions are concerned, we are 鈥渃ulturally malleable creatures operating within evolutionary constraints鈥�. It points out that negative emotions towards insects are getting more common, at a time in our history when we are probably least exposed to them.
The surrealist painter Salvador Dal铆 had a terror of grasshoppers, brought on in his boyhood after other children tormented him with them. In his art, grasshoppers became symbols of waste and destruction. Dal铆 also found ants crawling over his dead pet bat 鈥� no wonder surrealism beckoned 鈥� and ants came to symbolise mortality and decay.
We know that our emotions are irrational, but this doesn鈥檛 help where insects are concerned. Lockwood makes the point well; many people find it repulsive to eat arthropods such as grasshoppers, fed on fresh grass, but pay good money for other arthropods 鈥� lobsters 鈥� fed on sewage and decay. So why do insects get under our skin so much?
The evolutionary psychology answer is, to use Lockwood鈥檚 phrase, 鈥渟urvival of the scaredest鈥�. In our history, those who quickly learned to be cautious about insects had greater evolutionary fitness and this, iterated over millennia, has got us to where we are now. This is why we are predisposed to be afraid of snakes. But none of these fears is very useful in our modern world. As Lockwood says 鈥� with a US perspective 鈥� it will be a while before we evolve the tendency to fear cars and guns in proportion to their likelihood of killing us.
Lockwood catalogues the central sources of our fears. What we really don鈥檛 like about insects is that they can invade, bite and sting us, that they have quick, slithering movements and quickly growing populations, that their bodies seem weird and alien, and that they defy our will and control. Chillingly, he shows how people use their fear of insects to dehumanise enemies. The Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler thought anti-Semitism the same as delousing. During the Rwandan genocide, a Hutu-run radio station referred to ethnic Tutsi as cockroaches that needed to be exterminated. 鈥淏ugsplat鈥� is the name some in the US government use for civilians killed by drones.
鈥淪leep tight, don鈥檛 let the bedbugs bite鈥� 鈥� remember that saying? You probably weren鈥檛 bitten at all, but did begin to have bugs crawling into your mind. That鈥檚 just part of being human.
Oxford University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淏ugs on the brain鈥�
