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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.
Funnily enough, I made a similar point about a year ago:
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