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Freddie deBoer has a new article out in which he argues that our society has become overly permissive (without ever actually using the phrase "the permissive society"). He uses a few recent articles to set the scene (an increasingly defeatist sense among the laptop class that there's no option but to be extremely online; a qualified defense in the New Yorker and New York magazine of the notion of being an iPad parent), before getting into the meat of his argument. Where before our society expected people to behave in a certain way most of the time, increasingly there's a broad sense that all lifestyles are equally valid; that there's nothing wrong with following the path of least resistance (in terms of effort expended), at all times in every sphere of your life; and that people who do hold people to higher standards of behaviour than the bare minimum are being toxic in some way. Where before the expectation was to dress formally in the office, now "smart casual" rules the day (if that); where before it was only profoundly autistic and unemployable men still playing with Lego and cosplaying as Star Wars characters in their thirties, now such behaviour has become entirely normalised among the gainfully employed. The boilerplate celebrity interview question "What book are you currently reading?" was retired years ago: no one is reading books anymore, or if they are, it's the same YA slop their teenage children, nieces and nephews are reading. If modern Anglophone society has a telos, it's "umm, let people enjoy things??"
Freddie's point is well-taken and I agree with most of it: Disney and Marvel adults are contemptible, as are adults taking out second mortgages so they can follow Taylor Swift on tour. Grown adults who don't know how to cook proper meals and eat fast/convenience food for every meal should feel ashamed, even if they don't. Some examples of the trend are conspicuous by their absence: it's interesting that Freddie brings up "adult men who proudly eat nothing but chicken nuggets and Kraft macaroni and cheese" and women wearing snuggies in public without once alluding to the body positivity/health at every size movement, even though it's a perfect example of the relaxing of standards across the board. (I mean, these people spent years complaining about the "toxic and unrealistic beauty standards" promulgated by the fashion industry and social media, and apparently succeeded in replacing them with - nothing, no standards at all.) But one of the specific examples he cites seems oddly in tension with the others:
I agree with him that, in the modern Western world, there's no longer much of an expectation for people to live and present themselves "authentically": among sufficiently online women, using Instagram filters on your selfies is the rule rather than the exception; cosmetic surgery (in both sexes) is more common than ever; the less said about LinkedIn, the better.
But it occurred to me: for all of the other examples of the trend towards relaxation of standards, isn't this precisely how the people engaging in these lifestyle choices would defend them? "I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin wearing a tie to the office - wearing a hoodie and sweatpants makes me feel more like myself." "I used to read boring grown-up books because that's what was expected of me and people would make fun of me for reading Harry Potter on the tube - I like that now I can read Harry Potter without shame." And so on.
What do you think?
Freddie remains the king of boldly speaking truth to power by heroically proclaiming exactly what conservatives have been saying for decades. This problem is obviously based on very deep and foundational assumptions of progressive ideology and seeing this as a problem to some extent entails reckoning with the entirety of leftism.
As I see it, the leftist reasoning goes something like this. The last hundred years of psychology, sociology and neurology have chipped away at the idea of human agency, attributing more and more of our decisions and outcomes to factors outside of our individual control. Perhaps it is genes being identified that are linked to obesity or studies that have linked obesity to "food deserts" or poverty or systemic racism, the sum is that as we gain more and more knowledge about the causes of obesity less and less of it is left to personal agency. Agency becomes a sort of "god of the gaps". And while this is most apparent when it comes to conditions that are borderline clinical like obesity or serious social failings like crime, there is no reason that similar dynamics should not be at play in less medicalized failings like "being an ipad parent" or "having childlike pickiness about foods". Perhaps you only eat chicken nuggets as an adult because you were raised in an unprivileged background where your parents never exposed you to more adventurous cuisines? Perhaps you have some as-yet-unidentified gene that makes you "supertaster" and thus highly sensitive to flavors? Perhaps you have some kind of nebulous "trauma" and relying on comfortable childhood foods is therapeutic, I don't know, this sort of BS reasoning is trivial to makeup if you are in the right frame of mind.
The basis of this is viewing a human as an automaton, a deterministic collection of neurons with no ghost inside the machine. If a shoplifter or obese person is merely a product of their environment (or nature) then a picky eater is really no different. All things must be permitted.
Of course I disagree vehemently with leftists here. I don't necessarily disagree on viewing a human as an automaton, after all I am an atheist and a materialist, so I can't claim that humans have some ineffable soul that directs their actions and is responsible for agency. However, I think leftists ignore the degree to which social attitudes and shaming are part of the very environment that inform our actions. For example, taking obesity, I agree that obesity is largely driven by genetics, food environment, sedentary lifestyle/occupation etc, and none of those things are really "personal agency", however, part of that environment is "social pressure to be non-obese", in other words, fat-shaming.
For some reason leftists tend to consider shaming and social pressure as completely irrelevant factors of the environment. I've brought this up in discussions on reddit, that maybe "fat-shaming" actually effectively helps people maintain a healthy weight, and this idea is usually met with disdain. However, leftists are highly inconsistent on this point, as they surely believe shaming people for racism to be highly effective and critical in stopping racism.
In my mind the ascended POV is to recognize that humans are largely controlled by their environment, but to recognize the critical role that shaming has played throughout human social history as one of the most important parts of that very environment.
Huh? What a strange claim. The entire basis of the critical-constructivist worldview at the heart of modern leftist social critique is a hyperfocus on how social attitudes and shaming have a deterministic effect on nearly every aspect of our lives. That’s a key pillar of what they mean by “systemic racism” and “fatphobia” and “heteronormativity”. They think about these things every bit as often as you do, if not more.
The difference is that they believe that reducing the amount of shame individuals experience based on unchosen identity characteristics is a key goal of social justice.
You claim that shaming fat people would have a direct impact on reducing obesity. The leftist rejoinder would have two parts:
Do we actually have strong evidence that this is true? Sure, people in, say, the 1920’s were less fat than people in the 2020s. And yes, at that time, fat-shaming was also more common. But do we actually have any concrete evidence that there’s a causal relationship between these two phenomena? What if people were less fat because of material factors, such as the prevalence of cigarette smoking, the far greater average level of physical labor performed by the average person on both a professional and domestic basis, and the difference in the chemical composition of foods at the time? (Lack of preservatives, lack of seed oils, etc.) If that’s the case, then people’s relative lack of obesity at the time was not primarily due to some greater level of civilizational virtue, and certainly not primarily due to people consciously endeavoring not to be fat because of the threat of shaming. In other words, those people didn’t earn their thinness in some important moral sense. They simply followed the normal patterns of life at the time, and it happened that those patterns were less lipogenic — no idea if that’s a real word — than the normal patterns of life now. Those same people, even if exposed to the exact same level of social messaging about the dangers of fatness as they were in the 1920s, would still turn out fat nowadays because the material changes in our society make it much more difficult to remain thin given the exact same effort level. So, the shaming doesn’t do much of anything except make people feel miserable about things that are largely out of their control, barring very atypical levels of agency.
Even if the shaming did have some measurable effect, it’s still morally wrong and we still shouldn’t do it. The tradeoff isn’t worth it. For every one fat person you manage to inspire to lose weight via shaming and bullying, you’ll just have twenty who spiral into depression and self-sabotage. Shaming has highly variable effects depending on the specific traits of the victim; not only that victim’s personality, but also his or her material circumstances. If that individual has a thyroid condition, for example, shaming is very unlikely to produce an impact on that person’s fatness, but is very likely to produce strong feelings of shame which will achieve nothing positive. And of course, this is all without getting into the frankly somewhat selfish, self-aggrandizing, and ugly motives underneath most actual acts of bullying. Bullying is rarely a prosocial act done for the benefit of the bullied; that’s a self-serving narrative concocted after the fact. Shaming degrades the shamer as much as it damages the shamed. It makes society coarser, more mean-spirited, lower-trust, etc. It encourages the worst and most predatory aspects of the human personality. All so maybe on the margins, 10% of fat people will be a bit less fat for some period of time. Not worth it at all!
Now, to be clear, I personally don’t endorse all of this. But it’s a coherent and sophisticated worldview. It’s certainly not that leftists just haven’t thought about shaming and its importance.
Maybe "ignore" is the wrong word and you could say "deny" instead, but 1 is exactly what I'm saying, they would deny the effect of fat-shaming on reducing obesity or deny that it played a critical role socially. They wouldn't say that fat-shaming had no effect on humans, but that it had no positive effect and generally not engage with the serious tradeoffs at play.
They are engaging with the tradeoffs — they just arrive at a different conclusion than you do! Firstly because there’s a very real disagreement about the facts. Again, do you actually have any evidence that fat-shaming contributed significantly to why people were less fat a hundred years ago? I’m not saying it’s implausible, but I do think there’s a lot more going on and that the picture is genuinely quite complicated.
There is no consensus “leftist” position on obesity. Contrary to what you may imagine, dispositions toward the “fat acceptance” movement remain quite varied among progressives. Positions range from “fatness is entirely socially-constructed, there’s actually no serious health problems associated with fatness, why don’t we just rethink our society to make it more accommodating towards the obese” to “there’s clearly some factors, largely outside of the control of individuals, that are making people more fat than they used to be, and until we figure out what those are and how to fix them, it’s just pointlessly cruel to fat-shame people.” Most serious progressives don’t deny that things like portion control and not eating exclusively fast food have some contribution, but they would argue that these are far from the only things going on, such that shaming is not an effective tool in most cases.
And now that the potentially revolutionary technology of semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) offers a concrete solution to what might be making some large percentage of fat people fat, we might now be able to fix the issue without anyone having to get bullied! And now that we do have Ozempic available — and once we get a better understanding of its long-term effects and ways to mitigate any downsides — I think more progressives will be more comfortable utilizing shame as one tool in the toolkit when it comes to people who clearly have the opportunity to be thin and who still choose to be obese instead.
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