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Notes -
Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics
Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:
The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:
This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:
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At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:
Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:
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If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.
The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:
OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:
Oh dear.
Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.
Having agency is right-wing.
The current Christian theological consensus is that God knows the future with 100% accuracy. Shouldn't that make right wing thought align with zero agency thinking?
While the consensus is that God knows the future with 100% accuracy, there is not Christian theological consensus on predestination, election, or free will.
In the Evangelical tradition I grew up in the position I heard the most was that the Bible commands us to choose certain things, which means choice is possible. And that the Bible says God knows all things, including the future. Like most Evangelical theology, how to square that circle is left as an exercise for the reader.
The Calvinists, quite famously, believe God chooses who will be righteous and who will be damned from jump. We have no ability to choose salvation or damnation. Many Calvinists believe that we do have free will, but our choices are based on our desires and characters and God choose to give us particular desires and characters that will constrain the choices we have available.
The Catholic church teaches that we have the free will to either accept or reject the grace of God, and that when God predestined the course of history he left room for us to make decisions. He knows what decision we'll freely make in advance, of course.
C.S. Lewis described the intersection of our choices and God's predestination this way in Mere Christianity:
Oh, is it time for Time Travel Jesus discussion now? Awesome!
TLDR on the Lewis quote: God is omnipresent, and He is also omnichronal. Time is the specific arena within which we make our real choices with real consequences, even though from outside of time it looks like fate.
The Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity became a mortal chronal being. Does that mean that, in the thirty-two years He was Jesus of Nazareth who had not yet died, there was no Logos in Heaven? That seems absurd to me; one can no more separate the Persons of the Trinity than you can remove your shape from your body.
In my theological thought experiments, I model the Word as the perfectly accurate truth about God the Father, an infinitely complete and divine description, the only possible counterexample against Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. So the Son experiences time as one of Adam’s children for a time to bring the message that God is not an ineffable immaterial entity external to spacetime and abstracted from our merely human concerns; He walks with us and guides us in love, in concern for the poor and abused, because their suffering matters.
And then there’s the timeless sacrifice of the Jews’ Messiah for the sins of all mankind, the zero-point of history. It ripples back into the past as the sacrifice of countless animals by Iron Age and Bronze Age Hebrews, Shemites, and Noahics. It ripples into the future with the assurance that the debt is paid even though we haven’t yet committed the sin and earned its wages, entropy and death.
This is the Good News, as CS Lewis fictionalized it: “When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Stone Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” And if instead we consider time not a true dimension but rather a description of the order now present permanently winding down as potential energy becomes waste heat, He is the opposite of entropy, making all things new starting with His own corpse revived, rebuilt, and perfected.
Time Travel Jesus loved you from the foundation of the Earth.
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Re: Catholics, well, I'm pretty sure it's messier than most people realize. There was a big controversy a couple hundred years between Jesuits and Dominicans a couple hundred years ago that was never actually settled (the pope just told them to stop talking about it) over how exactly human choice exists in combination with predestination. The Dominicans were basically Calvinists on this narrow issue, and that remains a viable option for Catholics today, if I understand rightly.
As a Calvinist, like you said, people choose things, just our choices are themselves based upon our own character, desires, etc. And I don't think that fallen humans will turn to God on our own.
Our agency matters, because God works through means, not apart from them.
Thanks for bringing a Calvinist perspective, since I was not confident I portrayed the Calvinist position right. Growing up my Dad always told me, "Son, beware the yeast of the Calvinists."
He also said that Arminians were Calvinists who flunked logic, though I never could figure out why. Every time I try to study Amrinianism they either seem to be agreeing with my perspective, or saying something completely incomprehensible to me.
Yeah, I think the default view in many places is basically Arminian, though probably with fewer moving parts (e.g. prevenient grace) than the original Arminian position would have had.
But I think a more predestinarian theology is clearly biblical.
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I did remember the Jesuit versus Dominican bit, but looking up the details, one set of references says it's about free will, while another says it's about grace. The operation of grace would be different enough that the freedom of the will and personal agency isn't a problem.
"Is grace irresistible?" is a small difference, but even a small difference is enough:
Thanks for that context. It really clarifies the Catholic Church's stance on this matter.
I agree wholeheartedly with the Jesuit's "middle knowledge" and it's neat to see an argument that seems to be a direct precursor to Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" theodicy.
It (assuming you are referring to the Jesuits) isn't the same as Liebniz's "best of all possible worlds" theodicy. Leibniz was working from the principle of sufficient reason, among other things, which the Jesuits would not affirm, as they would think (roughly speaking) that human choices are brute facts; there is no reason sufficient to explain the choice beyond the choice itself.
The Dominicans' position is more compatible with that, I suppose.
Jesuits would deny the principle of sufficient reason? That's remarkable to me. I don't know much about Jesuit theology, but I would have thought...I mean, our choices are not ontologically simple enough to be brute facts.
The connection I saw was to the idea that God can see all possible outcomes, and His providence moves events in such a way that the choices He can predict we will make work towards His greater plan while preserving free will. That seems to fit well with Leibniz's thought, especially from this section of his Monadology:
It seems to me that the Dominican's primary objection is that God structuring the universe around our choices puts God subservient to man's decisions, in a sense. Which I don't really agree with, but I can understand the objection.
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