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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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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:

“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.

“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”

The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:

Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”

“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.

She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”

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:

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

…

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!

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:

The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.

Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.

“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.

Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:

To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.

…

Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."

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:

Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.

Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.

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:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

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:

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.

…

Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call "tomorrow" is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call "today." All the days are "Now" for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday. He has not. He does not "foresee" you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way — because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already "Now" for Him.

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.

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:

The controversy between the orders began with a public disputation on grace held sometime around 1581 between representatives of the two orders, the Jesuits represented by Prudentius Montemayor and the Dominicans by Domingo Báñez, the confessor of St. Teresa of Avila. The disputation was heated and led Jesuit theologian Luis Molina to publish a work entitled Concordia in 1588. In his Concordia, Molina proposed a doctrine of scientia media, the “middle knowledge” of God. Scientia media concerns the ability of God to see future contingent events—not only things that will be, but every possible outcome based on the variability of human will. Molina argued that with perfect foreknowledge of how a person will respond in given circumstances, God gives grace accordingly. He thus does not cause us to perform deed A, but knowing that with the help of grace we would voluntarily perform deed A, makes this grace available subsequent to this knowledge, which in turn results in us performing deed A.

The Concordia was a controversial work. It quickly aroused the ire of the Dominicans, who claimed it violated several principles condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. The Dominican Báñez was asked to examine the question and stated that the Concordia did indeed contain condemned propositions.

Molina was offered the opportunity to clarify his work, which he did with several amendments attached as appendices. The book, now amended, began to circulate about Europe and was energetically championed by the Jesuits. But the Dominicans continued to object, specifically to the doctrine of scientia media. The teaching, they said, accorded too much to man’s free will. If scientia media were true, they argued, God’s decrees would be determined by man’s actions, since Molina argued that God gives grace based on what He knows men will do in given circumstances. Therefore, the Dominicans argued, man would be determining God.

Led by Báñez, the Dominicans proposed the idea of physical premotion as an alternative to scientia media. Physical premotion is the theory that God moves the will directly by the application of grace, which infallibly produces His intended result. Whereas the Molina’s theory was accused of extending too much to free will, the Jesuits accused Báñez of leaning too heavily upon grace, effectually negating free will. The Dominicans, however, replied even if grace moves the will, it does not do so in a way that negates its freedom; on the contrary, grace actualizes the will and makes it freer.

...By now (1600) the controversy had dragged on for 19 years and Luis Molina was dead. Pope Clement, still indecisive, ordered the matter to be discussed in his presence, as well as that of Cardinal Camillo Borghese (the future Pope Paul V) and various members of the commission and other notable theologians. The discussions dragged on for three years (1602-1605) with a total of sixty-eight separate meetings held in the pope’s presence. Clement had the matter talked to death—quite literally, as he died in 1605 before the discussions concluded. Seventeen more debates would be held in the presence of his successor, Paul V. By this time Domingo Báñez, as well, had died, and the orders were being represented by a new generation of thinkers.

At this point Paul V seems to have concluded the problem insoluble, at least at that time. In 1607 he issued a decree to the Dominicans and Jesuits allowing each to defend their respective doctrines but charged them to refrain from condemning the other. Beyond this, he ordered them to wait for a judgment from the Holy See on the matter, which, to this day, has never come. Besides the theological rupture, the pope was also concerned with repairing the bad feeling that had arisen between the orders and consequently forbid the publication of new works on efficacious grace, as he surmised these would only rekindle the intense passions that he hoped to extinguish. These rules remained in force for most of the 17th century.

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:

Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.

And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves

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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