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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?
Two things:
"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.
You are obviously correct. I think that's because the religious generally don't behave as if they actually believe in predestination or an omniscient god (same thing), not because they don't actually believe in personal agency.
I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)
Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.
Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).
This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:
If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.
(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)
This reminds me of my puzzlement at the reception of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. I imagined that English politics in 1651 had a right-wing that favoured monarchy and the divine right of kings, and a left-wing, that favoured Parliament, diggers and levelers, and if the diggers and levelers got too rambunctious, a Lord Protector. I further imagined that the right-wing would love Hobbes. Why? Because they would notice that a mystical faith in the divine right of kings wasn't persuading everybody. Some persons had a more mechanistic, materialist take on how politics worked, and Hobbes' reasoning, about needing a king to maintain order, would persuade them, perfecting social harmony as both the pious and the mechanistic/materialists agreed on the need for a king.
I was wrong. Quoting wikipedia "The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics" and "Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers." The divine right of kings was a mystical doctrine and one profaned it by offering worldly justification.
So yes, the rightist mind finds the enigmatic, such as monarchy, beautiful. The tiny minority of rightist (just me?) who distrust enigma and construct mechanistic/materialists accounts of why we should be right-wing are rejected by the right. And then there is the left, which offers mechanistic/materialist accounts of why we should be left-wing (that I find unconvincing due to neglecting the details of the mechanisms).
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