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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.
Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word. You're unemployed because the government shipped your jobs overseas, you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country, men are depressed and committing suicide because of feminism/hostile society/subversion of traditional gender roles, you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages.
When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs? I can accept that even if they did believe that, saying so publicly would be political suicide...but do you think that they believe it? Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?
I can't claim this is particularly rigorous, but I have noticed a broad pattern in which traditional or right-wing ideologies tend to include a strong belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world, whereas progressive or left-wing ones don't. If you look at arguably the most traditional belief system there is, Animism, it attributes agency to absolutely everything down to trees, rocks, rivers and clouds, which are perceived as conscious beings that act with deliberate intent. Even something as simple as it raining is thought of as the deliberate act of a god.
On the other hand, far-left ideologies such as Marxism tend to stress the role of socioeconomic forces larger than any one man in shaping history. It's believed communism's victory is inevitable because the material conditions will shift and make capitalism obsolete. Class conflict is portrayed as inevitable, with the capital class effectively incapable of not exploiting the labour class to the greatest extent they can due to the way the system is set up. I believe there's also a parallel here with progressive beliefs about how white people are incapable of not perpetuating racism due to their position in society.
Great Man Theory, too, is right-coded and stresses the role of individual agency in historical change, where leftists prefer to believe that structural forces play a larger role; conservatives speak of the importance of personal responsibility while progressives emphasise the effect of environmental influences on a person's choices, and consequently cons tend to believe strict punishment of criminals is just as they are ultimately responsible for their choices, where progs favour leniency as they believe a person may have had little choice but to turn to crime.
I would even argue that the reason rightists seem to be more likely to give credence to conspiracy theories is that they align with the idea of a small number of individual agents acting with deliberate intent to change the world, something more plausible to the right-wing worldview than the systemic explanations the left favour, which suppose people perpetuate systems of oppression without necessarily having conscious intent to.
On the other hand, it could be argued that belief in HBD or in certain individuals being chosen by God to rule is anti-agency, and some right-wing ideologies do seek to greatly restrict agency for certain classes of people (e.g. women) or sometimes the population at large, whereas left-wing ones can seek to greatly expand the agency of groups previously denied it (again, women). Perhaps that's not so counter-intuitive though; if you think individual agency is powerful you might logically seek to restrict who can wield it, whereas if you think it doesn't matter so much, why not let everyone have it?
And this is obviously adaptive, for the simple reason that even if you can’t affect the world very much, behaving better can affect it at least a little bit, and probably make life better for you as well. Traditional ideologies have an upper limit to how maladaptive they can be because they have by definition been around long enough to weed out the worst ones.
On the other hand novel or progressive ideologies have no such upper limit; the failures of communism are the obvious example, but there’s thousands of others. Lobotomies, alcohol prohibition, these things died out because they turned out to be bad ideas. That’s not to say absolutely everything new is going to kill millions of people; that’s to say most ideas which go on to kill millions of people are new-ish at the time they’re tried.
So we should generally expect traditional ideologies to tend towards adaptive beliefs, and novel ideologies to have no particular tendency, irrespective of truth value in any which way. And that being said, while adaptive beliefs encourage adaptive behavior, they don’t necessitate it. Most people have at least some disconnect between their actions and beliefs, and we should expect adaptive behavior to be more associated with adaptive ends.
That is, I think, what the thread notes.
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