I’ve been reading an interesting series of posts from Rod Dreher and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Rod starts off with a post about a 602-pound woman who is intentionally trying to get to 1,000 pounds. He brings this up first before going on to rail against an article in the New York Times suggesting that stigmatization against fat people is wrong and unproductive.

TNC, responding to the same article, muses:

I’m not clear on precisely how much shame can actually help. It’s shame that’s created our absurd McWeightLoss culture where Octomom takes to the cover of celebrity magazines to show off her new bikini body, and retired athletes claim to have found the secret to losing five pounds a week. It’s symptomatic of who are, of our abiding belief in short-cuts, and our technological ability to elide truth.

Rod responds here defending shaming the obese, relating his own struggles with being overweight, and that he doesn’t want to slip into accepting or being okay with his vice (of, he says, being mediocre and gluttonous and lazy).

Where to start?

I suppose I can start where Rod started – the six-hundred-pound woman who is trying to get to half a ton, and her encouraging and enabling co-fetishists. Although coming up with a correct and consistent theory of morality is extremely difficult, I am fairly sure I can call this behavior ‘imprudent’ if not out-and-out ‘morally wrong.’* One would assume that this woman (and her boyfriend and other enablers) has some desire to see herself be enormously fat. Fulfilling desires is generally a good thing: however, we are complex creatures with many and often conflicting desires. I would imagine that this woman also has other desires: desires to live and not to die, desires to express and give love, desires to be part of a community of human beings, to be self-determinate in her life and act as an independent agent, and so on. I think it is fairly self-evident that these desires are all thwarted by her immense size. If this fetish is like other fetishes, then I suspect it is consuming enough that she either does not think of or does not realize how negatively the rest of her life is being impacted by being 600 pounds. And as Dan Savage might have advised her, she could almost certainly have satisfied and managed this desire by overeating once in a blue moon and having her boyfriend call her a pig to her heart’s content, and then to stop dwelling on it and go running in the morning and maintain a healthy weight – one-quarter to one-third what she is now. It would certainly be much healthier. Although it is difficult to comment on the quality of life of people you don’t know, I find it a virtual certainty that she is drastically diminishing her own quality of life and shrinking her horizons by expanding her size. ‘Imprudent’ is a rather modest way to describe this behavior.

What I find a bit more telling, however, is that Dreher uses this extreme example to segue into the health costs of obesity, and contrasting this with starving people in Haiti, to make his later point that obesity is a spiritual problem. That’s some fancy slight of hand but it’s not very convincing. It is difficult for me to see how people who are starving are either helped or hurt by someone far away being obese. It may look awfully pious to paint fat people as out-of-control moral devils and the starving as moral angels, but it’s totally unrelated to why either group is the way they are. It is not as though the world has a limited amount of food supply and those who eat too much are preventing others from eating enough. In fact, we overproduce food and feeding the planet is not a matter of insufficient food production – the reasons people go hungry and are starving have to do with economics, infrastructure, and politics. “But there are starving people” is not a legitimate charge against the morbidly obese; “but you are diminishing you capacity to enjoy and experience these valuable things in life” is.

Rod also talks about his own struggles with weight. He says he’s put on some weight and is about 20-25 pounds heavier than he should, and even that this is approaching obesity. I find it very difficult to take this complaint seriously. Here is a picture of Rod from last year:

It is hard to imagine how 20-25 pounds on that slight frame can be reasonably taken as a man who seriously struggles with his weight. Perhaps he does, I don’t know. But knowing people who legitimately are larger and trying to lose weight, I have to ask myself if this is a bit of self-posturing and self-flagellating. If Rod is 20-25 pounds overweight due to bad habits, he certainly could stand to lose some weight. However he is hardly a member of the class of people who are obese, have food-addictions, or have weight-related health problems and are trying to get down to a manageable size. These 20-25 pounds are almost (but not quite) vanity weight. Bolstering my interpretation, Rod later goes on to talk about how lazy he is and how hard he is on himself about his weight in his follow-up post. Although Dreher himself might not be, it is entirely possible to have an extra 20-25 pounds without being either a glutton or a sloth. Perhaps he is exaggerating for the sake of the blogosphere, I don’t know; I just find his caricaturization of a handful of pounds to be a bit unbelievable.

I can’t help but wonder if people like Rod who go to lengths to stigmatize being overweight (and have concerns about their own weight) are being counterproductive. I would agree to some extent with the original NYT article and also with TNC: shaming is a solution to almost nothing. Shame encourages evasion and hiding more than seeking a solution. And because weight affects our perception of beauty, a focus on weight loss is often indistinguishable from a focus on increasing beauty. (A cursory glance at weight-loss advertisement is a pretty good indication of this.) I’d be much happier to see Rod – or anyone for that matter – talking more about health and activity than weight and fatness. For the vast majority of people, it is the altering of our lifestyle around healthy activities, exercise, and healthier and better foods that affect our overall health more than a single-minded focus on weight. I suspect there are deeply-rooted cultural and systematic reasons** why populations become overweight. But I also suspect the more we promote a single-minded focus on weight and attach strong stigmas to fat, the more likely we are to get our piousness and self-righteousness from attempting to attain some standard of beauty rather than promoting our health. I suspect that pursuing healthy activities and a healthy eating pattern first would lead to the net side-effect of smaller waistlines. Weight and health may correlate, but one does not cause the other; and the same for weight and gluttony, and even weight and beauty.

*The reason being I find it difficult to make a moral issue out of what one does to oneself – nevertheless one does not exist in a vacuum and even given that a person cannot morally wrong themselves, this woman’s actions could still be classified as immoral. Regardless of whether it is immoral or imprudent, this line of behavior I feel pretty comfortable condemning as a wrong way to live. The immorality of her boyfriend and her enablers, however, I am much more comfortable in asserting.

**The wide availability of cheap, government-subsidized foods (such as corn, which has given us the ubiquitous high-fructose corn starch) is one example of a systemic cause tending to increase weight. More difficult causes may be things like an increase in cultural activities that require sitting down, long periods of time spent in vehicles, and generally living in an environment radically different from the one we evolved and mostly lived in only ten thousand or so years ago.

Ophir (perhaps the only person who still reads this blog) had some objections to a previous post in the comments here. Although I initially considered responding as a comment, I think the explanation is long enough to warrant a post.

Here’s some of the original comment, a little bit redacted:

If your personality and behavior are indeed nothing but the biochemical makeup of your brain then [your choices are] no different from a rock falling to the ground (and not floating in the air) or a sunflower seed developing into a sunflower (and not a tulip or an elephant). In other words, from the very first instant of the Big Bang it [...] was [...] completely inevitable that I’d be writing this comment on your blog.

There’s a lot of assumptions in there that I disagree with, and it would be difficult to unpack them all. But the basic assumptions are something like this: if a mind is a purely physical phenomenon, then human actions are predetermined; if human actions are predetermined, then there is no free will. (Please correct me if I’m wrong, Ophir.) There are two issues here: physicalism versus dualism, and determinism versus free will.

I remember sometime in my teens quietly disowning the doctrine of nonphysical souls. I had read enough of the Bible to see that it wasn’t really mentioned in the earlier parts – arguably the Jews didn’t have a concept of an incorporeal human soul until perhaps the time of the second temple – and the scant few references in the New Testament that Christians built their doctrine of the immaterial soul on – well, these were shaky ground to say the least. The modern concept of a nonphysical soul, at least across the Western world, is owed largely to Descartes, who in order to preserve his Catholic faith in the light of reason drew a stark metaphysical line between the “physical” and the “spiritual” – a line that previously had not existed. Descartes hypothesized a lot of silly things to keep up this presumption: e.g., that man was both physical and spiritual, two realms which never interacted. But if they never interacted, how was mankind both? One of the more famous bits of silliness was the postulation that a gland in the brain was used by the spiritual soul to manipulate the physical body. Ever since, philosophers who like a physical-spiritual dualism have pondered how the physical and the spiritual (or logical, or however they want to term it) interact. I don’t see any reason to postulate such a dualism – I don’t see any evidence for this bicameral existence, no one has yet come up with a good definition of what exactly it means to be “nonphysical,” and as we know from things like computers and primitive biological nervous systems, arrangements of physical components can create logical systems (and, one would hypothesize, perhaps even consciousness). The physical atoms and molecules run along on their own, following physical laws, and as they do they create logical states which do their own, logical things: some logic (software) running on top of a physical, biological system (hardware). While there may in fact be a “nonphysical” realm (whatever that means), I have no reason to believe in its existence. As a philosopher friend of mine has put all this, “Descartes needs to die.” His dualism is just untenable.

As a Christian, when I quietly disavowed all of this spiritual-physical dualism (keeping it on the down-low, having seen how attached most Christians were to their nonphysical souls), I squared this away with the very-Jewish concept, inherited into Christianity, of resurrection. If God was God, then God could reconstitute physical matter into its previous configuration, thus resurrecting whatever creature existed before its physical body was destroyed. I thought of this physical soul – and still do think of it – much as a building. You can tear down a building, but if you still have the blueprints for it, you can reconstruct it. The human body is exponentially more complicated than any building, but the analogy still holds. The building is me, my physical personality, my physical soul. It will one day die. The question then became if you destroy a building, you don’t destroy its blueprint – so while the thing’s physical manifestation might’ve been demolished, where has the idea gone? Does it still exist? (xkcd says no; I’m not so sure) This gets into questions about the ontological status of information and ideas. I still do not have an answer to any of that. I may not want to say information exists in the same way that atoms exist, but does that mean it doesn’t exist at all apart from its physical manifestation? I don’t know.

Many years after my deconversion from Descartes’ cartesian dualism I read Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body (amazing amazing scholarship), which explains, among other things, the Greek medical concept of pneuma – usually translated “spirit” – and how that informed Paul’s interpretation of the body. Though this was not Martin’s main point, it does tie in nicely with dualism because he shows that this modern concept of mind-body/spiritual-physical dualism did not exist in the ancient world. There was nothing “nonphysical,” just degrees of physicalism, from light (pneuma) to heavy (earthly) stuff. In short, he ended up confirming to me that the Christian case for dualism was very impoverished indeed..

But whether or not there is a Christian case for it, I do not think there is a good philosophical case for dualism. Physical systems can and do create logical, information-carrying systems. There is no soul pushing around the atoms in a computer. We are a different form – a far, far better form – of information processing than computers, but we are still a form of information processing. We don’t know how we do all we do, but we know some of it, and in the absence of evidence for a soul pushing the molecules and squeezing the chemicals in my brain, I’ll opt for the brain just being the physical stuff on which the patterns of my personality play. It’s frightening at first, but in the end it’s a little bit magical and awe-inspiring.

To the second matter of determinism versus free will: as a former, and repentant Calvinist, and someone who went gradually from Calvinism to more-or-less Pelagianism* before he (de)converted away from Christianity, I have done a lot of thinking on determinism and free will. Not to say any of it’s right, just that these thoughts have been echoing around inside my skull for some time, with all the emotion and logic and passion that goes on inside a human skull.

I was allured to Calvinism by my church youth group when I was in middle school. All of the church youth ministers were Calvinists. And they seemed to have a pretty logical system worked out for it. Though I now think their reading of Romans 9 was miles off the mark, they did have a hermeneutic they used, along with passages like Romans 9 (or Ephesians 1) to back up their beliefs. And this was my first exposure to an attempt to reconcile human behavior and choices with belief in a deity. I did reading and praying on my own, and speaking with various youth ministers before I “came out” as a Calvinist. At the time I found it very compelling. Although there are other relational events that happened then (coming out as a Calvinist to my family was second worst – and bad although on an entirely different plane of bad – to coming out gay), those are peripheral to the story. The story was: I was a young kid, in high school, reasonably intelligent, and totally a Calvinist. I loved Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, the whole lot of those Calvinist superstars. They had their theological systems for answering so many questions.

But what eventually ended Calvinism for me was another question: the question of the goodness of God. Although I would argue vehemently that God could be good while still damning people to hell or saving them to heaven based on his (inscrutable, and almost irrational – or as we’d say supra-rational) will, in the end I had to face the fact that Calvinism raises severe questions about the goodness of God. Either there is no such thing as goodness, and goodness is just a label we assign de facto to everything God does; or there is such a thing as goodness, and a Calvinist God is not good. The first to go was the idea of double predestination (John Piper’s favorite), and then limited atonement (the “L” in TULIP) and I was a four-point Calvinist for a while. Eventually, and accelerated by more study into various Christian thought over the centuries, I rejected Calvinism altogether as being an immoral and monstrous view of God. I truly repented of it, in every sense of the word, and embraced personal choices as the cornerstone of morality.

I haven’t thought about determinism and free will as much since my deconversion away from Calvinism. However, I have found myself, at least presently, loosely in a space called Compatibilism. What Compatibilism says is: it doesn’t matter if our future decisions are predetermined or not, because we still make choices. If, ever since the Big Bang – or at least ever since life started evolving on a scale large enough to be immune to quantum effects – the future of life has been set, then so what? So what if I am writing this blog because a billion years ago a quark bumped into another quark and made a proton instead of a neutron? Even if that is so, I still do not know the choices I am about to make. I have to weigh the options, or give in to passion, make sense of input, rationalize, and make the choice. I have no crystal ball that tells me what I’m going to do. I – along with everyone – behave as if I have free will. Even if the future is totally determined, it doesn’t matter because I don’t know the future. If I were capable of seeing my future choices, then you might argue that it matters, but in the end, in this world and in this place that I inhabit, it doesn’t. And what would it mean for my will to be “free”? Free from what? Does anyone ever make a decision free from outside influences? A decision totally free from inputs is totally random. Is this what free will is? How free is it? Does anyone make a decision free from their life history, from past events, from considerations and suggestions bombarding them consciously and unconsciously? Is it possible, and could anything short of total randomness be considered truly “free”? But that wouldn’t be any sort of will at all, it would just be chaos. What matters to me is that we are responsible for our choices, even if these are not separable from our personal histories – after all, that’s what it means to be living in time – and whether my future actions have some element of chaos in it or if it’s all laid out by the laws of Newtonian physics, I don’t know what those decisions are and I continue to make my choices independent of the future. And so I end up being in that strangely liberating space of Compatibilism. Even if the future is determined, I am more than a rock falling to earth because I still make choices. I am still responsible for them.

This ended up being more about my personal history than a philosophical defense. But I’m a personal being embedded in time, and that’s okay.

*My personal opinion: when it comes to the foundational doctrines of Christianity, Pelagius was more right and Augustine was more wrong. But this is a whole ‘nother very long post.

Just some tomfoolery from the internet, a little website that compares Google search suggestions. When you’re typing into the search box on Google, they’ll make suggestions of what you could query for based on common searches. This little web app lets you compare two search terms with suggestions of popular searches Google would give you to ‘complete’ your query. The two queries are on the left and right and the Google suggestions are in the middle. Thicker arrows represent more popular searches. Check it out here.

Some of my favorite comparisons:

Everyone gets to be an idiot, Hitler, and the Antichrist. How they both manage to be stupid and an evil mastermind at the same time escapes me:

It’s at the top of everyone’s mind:

It’s all a matter of perspective:

Internet wisdom:

More wisdom, this time on science:

Pop culture:

Living life tends to have a chilling effect on my ability to blog. I have at least two partially-finished posts that I’ve been meaning to complete and post, after I get all the Christmas gifts settled, and have lunch with this and that group of friends, and arrange to meet up with so-and-so when he’s up here for the holidays, and go out to this local artist’s studio (he was a really cool chap by the way), and go see the Nutcracker (mediocre), and once I start getting home at a reasonable time from work so that I don’t just plop down on the couch and watch the latest Netflix flick.* That in mind, I have asked a friend to keep me to a weekly schedule after the new year. No excuses.

But here are some year-end links for you, in spite of all that. Mostly it’s some of the cool and/or important stuff I’ve found over the year and shared out through my Google feed:

First up is the anti-gay hysteria going on in Uganda. Box Turtle has done a brilliant job of covering this story. (If you’re wondering where the title “Slouching toward Kampala” comes from, check out this poem by Yeats – classic, important bit of cultural English-language knowledge. You should know it.) Uganda is already a hotbed of anti-gay sentiment, and the fire was inflamed when some American ex-gay activists went over for a conference to proclaim that gays could be “cured” from homosexuality if they really wanted to be. Those activists have, of course, done a miserable job of distancing themselves from the draconian new legislation that was proposed a few months after their arrival, as also the international Anglican Church and many American pastors with ties to that country have had very mild rebukes. This legislation makes the typical anti-gay (and in this day and age, unexcusable) slur conflating homosexuality and pedophilia, and among other things it makes “repeat homosexual offenders” (e.g., those who have had sex more than once) and persons guilty of “aggrevated homosexuality” (among other things, HIV positive gay men, and remember this is in a country that is part and parcel of Africa’s severe – and largely heterosexual – AIDS crisis) liable for life imprisonment or death. Under this legislation, anyone who knows someone is gay and doesn’t report then to the police within 24 hours is liable for several years’ imprisonment. Oh yes, there is also a provision for extradition for these offenses committed in foreign countries. It is very likely that this legislation, or some form of it, will pass. This is a glimpse of what total minority persecution and anti-gay hysteria looks like. For a look from a gay man on the inside of Uganda, check out Gay Uganda - an excellent source of both inspiration and heartbreak.

On an aside, not a good year overall for gay marriage (but in Washington everything-but-marriage domestic partnerships passed by popular vote; YAY). This guy has great videos rebutting some of the absurd distortions put forth by conservative religious groups arguing against same-sex marriage. On religious freedom here, and he covers all the arguments I’ve heard on that front, and on ”bashings” here and religious misunderstandings of it - both videos are chock-full of information you ought to know if you want to argue for gay marriage. I highly recommend both.

Second is all the information about American-perpetrated torture that’s come out this year. Glenn Greenwald has, as always, been a great champion of human rights and provider of critical information in these cases: here is his post responding to and highlighting pieces of the Inspector General’s torture report, and here again on a British high court’s order to release information about British complicity in US torture (our government has purportedly sliced open a man’s testicles with a scalpel, you know, to protect us from The Terrorists). Sullivan posts on it here. And here is the disturbing 2004 report on Guantanamo detainees from the International Committee of Red Cross. I’ve watched with dismay as the discussion has shifted from whether the US tortures prisoners, to whether it’s okay that the US tortures prisoners, to asinine defenses of “moving forward” and why we shouldn’t prosecute anyone for flagrantly breaking the Geneva Conventions which this country’s legislature signed into law (and is therefore constitutionally the supreme law of the land), until eventually this discussion has moved altogether into obscurity. The ACLU has an interview video with British detainees released from Guantanamo; this video should be required viewing for all Americans. Even more depressing than all this is the uncritical acceptance of these practices by certain religious persons in this nation; what good is religion if it is not grounded in a deep sense of justice? But then again, I’ve come to decouple justice from religion, as is necessary for anyone witnessing the actions of some, but not all, devoutly religious persons. But I digress.

But while we’re on the topic of religious insanity, the Slacktivist as always continues to be a point of relief from evangelical insanity. For those of you who don’t know, Fred (the Slacktivist) is himself an evangelical Christian who on his blog routinely takes to task many of the absurd and even evil things propogated by those claiming his faith and the name of Christ. From evolution denial to his Left Behind series (some sort of mass internet therapy for those of us who grew up with the books and have been scarred), Fred is always a good read.

And now we come to the random links. Jason Kuznicki makes a convincing case that Athenian pederasty, as awful as it was, was probably less morally objectionable than Athenian marriage. Classically Liberal makes the case that sex offender laws more often capture consensual teenage sex than actual predators. XKCD captures my feelings about the odious Papyrus font. Liu Bolin, a Chinese artist, wins my award for best art I’ve seen this year. And if you like stunning photography, an interview parts one and two with Art Wolfe.

I leave you with a quote:

The question of how to spend my life, of what my life is for, is a question posed only to me, and I can no more delegate the responsibility for answering it than I can delegate the task of dying.

- Anthony T. Kronman from Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life

* Recently I’ve been getting into Mad Men. I hate Don Draper with a passion but it is an excellent show. Presently Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is sitting at home waiting for me.

Don’t have much in way of posts – though I do have some vignettes in my head* and some photos I’m working on.** For now, though, let me share some links I’ve come across over the past few months.

Photography

Art Wolfe is, well, just made of awesome. I didn’t realize until recently he had a website.

This may be Trey’s best HDR – and he has a lot of them. Typically I find his HDR a hodge-podge of good and bad, but there are some stellar gems thrown in there. This is one of the best pictures I’ve ever seen, and it reminds me why I subscribe to his blog.

In case you don’t check the Big Picture religiously (as I do), here are some of my recent favorites from the past few months: The End of the Christmas Season, Tibet’s Great Prayer Festival, Scenes from Pakistan, Portraits from the Congo, Holi, and Holy Week. That’s a lot, but they’re all worth it, even on the second go-around.

Gay Rights, Etc

Sullivan responds to the National Review’s response to Iowa and Vermont. (And again to Rod Dreher.)

The exceptional thinking behind stereotypes.

This Youtube video debunking some of the common claims of gay marriage infringing on religious freedom. (Also check his video here about the difference between so-called Christian ‘bashing’ and gay bashings.)

The Box Turtle has had some quality articles the past couple months (though it’s still too many a day to put in my feed reader). I’d especially urge you to check out his coverage of the insanity recently going on in Uganda, and this brief post about Iraq.

Politics and Political Theory

Scott Sumner on economic theory and liberalism.

Wilkinson on ‘liberaltarianism’.

Glenn Greenwald on torture under Obama. (And on his overreaching, Bushian executive powers, again and again and again.)

Jason Kuznicki on nature and human nature.

Classical libertarian gripe about big government. (So delicious and painfully true).

Colbert does Glenn Beck.

On that final note, the disintegration of the GOP has been very interesting to me. It decided to align itself tightly with a particular strain of political American Christianity, and has been eaten alive by it, marginalized into that political religion’s insular corner of the world. And that religion has accommodated itself to some odd political claims. It’s a toxic mix. I’m not sure how this will all work out. Unlike many of my co-northwesterners, I’m not convinced human ‘progress’ is a given, but something that is deeply cultural and extremely fragile, which must be fought for and won. The Democratic party is now in power through no virtue of its own but because the Republican party is a disheveled mess, and I worry about an unchecked political party; what is best for the liberties of individuals is a limited, checked political power achieved through the marketplace of competing ideas. Because of the GOP massacre and subsequent flailings (Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and all the insanity that is currently driving the right), that marketplace in the US is dead right now. How will the current marginalization of the Republican party affect the drive toward greater human liberties and conversation of how to pursue them in this country? How long will this phase on the right last? How will conservative political American religion react to the aftermath of the Bush years? Fascinating stuff. But I’ll tell my inner classical liberal to shut up now.

Fin.

*Don’t expect anything soon.

**Ditto.

Welcome to my new (and one should hope, permanent) domain. The beauty of Wordpress is that I can add other things besides blogging to it – such as a photography gallery and a fuller about page – and that it is generally quite flexible. You’ll notice, if you’re coming from the Blogger account, that I’ve imported all the old posts. If you aren’t coming from teh Blogger account, hello! Though I’ve had a couple friends give feedback on the design, it’s still new, so if you find any problems or are so raving-mad disappointed in it that you must have an outlet, feel free to contact me. Do keep in mind this is something I do in my spare time.

Read on…

A break from heavier posts. A friend of mine has recently launched his music into the public arena, in hopes of something more. His work is quite good, and I encourage you to take a look.

(Okay, so I had a flash banner up, but I couldn’t get it to link nice and didn’t want to spend the time fixing it – apologies, Corey!)