Can We Talk About Fat?

I don’t know how to talk about fat. I’m missing an opportunity to be a healthy influence on my students’ lives. But speaking thoughtfully about fat is hard.

When Megyn Kelly criticized Donald Trump for calling women “fat pigs”, he responded, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” That line earned loud applause from the conservative audience.

American culture is fixated on skinny as a moral virtue, and encourages the denigration of those who weigh more. I too am critical of people who use worries about weight as a weapon to assert their superiority. That makes me an enforcer of “political correctness”.

I don’t think there is such a thing as Political Correctness as it’s used by conservatives to criticize liberals. Let’s just remember the speech codes of the 1950s. As I was growing up, the legal rules restricting what could be said in print, in schools, in movies, and on TV were enforced with severity. Lenny Bruce was arrested in San Francisco in 1961, in Chicago in 1962, in Los Angeles in 1963, and in New York in 1964, where he was sentenced to 4 months in a workhouse, all for saying words in public performance that were against the law.

But saying things which intentionally slandered whole categories of people was fine. I heard adults use every possible form of demeaning racial and sexual expression in public. I thought that was bullshit, a word rarely spoken then except among friends, but I take no credit for originality. It seemed like my whole generation saw the hypocrisy in that combination.

We are freer today than ever before to use our own voices. But conservatives have never forgiven the youth of the 1960s for rejecting their speech codes, their power to say what they wanted and regulate what everyone else said. People who call themselves libertarians don’t applaud the libertarian impulses of the 1960s, when we not only demanded more liberty, but were willing to stand up for it. They don’t celebrate the increased freedom from rules by authorities, the greatly expanded sphere of liberty in speech and in print. Many conservatives don’t recognize the moral value of today’s social codes, which hold racist, sexist, and generally misanthropic speech up to ridicule.

One of their more successful tactics has been to invent Political Correctness. By turning correctness into something negative, they convert their moral errors into a virtue. We are now more aware than ever of what deliberately hurtful speech sounds like and how it works. Why do so many conservatives retreat into familiar patterns of expressing superiority, and defend them with this invented claim of Political Correctness?

I think it’s fear of speaking. But they’re not the only ones who are afraid. I feel anxious when I think about talking about fat. How do I tell some of my students that medical experts say they are putting their health at risk by gaining so much weight?

           

I have seen these students since they came to Illinois College. In class, I am concerned about their intellectual development. Beyond class, I care about their youthful welfare. I have watched as they have gained significant weight in just a few years. These students are men and women, black and white. I make no moral judgments or psychological diagnoses. There is nothing wrong with weight, except that the National Institutes of Health say that being overweight increases the risk of heart attacks, heart failure, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, various cancers, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, infertility and gallstones.

A new study shows that obesity is linked to 1 of every 5 American deaths. Obese 20-year-olds have a life expectancy that is shortened by 6 to 8 years. Worse, their expectancy of a healthy adult life is shortened by about 15 years. Women who develop anorexia as teenagers might lose up to 25 years of life. Overweight is the second leading preventable cause of death in the US, just behind smoking. Weight is important.

The inventors of PC try to make life difficult for anyone who says fat should be discussed thoughtfully as a health issue, not as a social stigma or moral weakness. But that’s not the only reason why few people in our society can talk comfortably about fat. Speaking to relative or friend about weight swings up or down is difficult or dangerous. There is so much psychological baggage attached to weight that conversations about health easily slide into lectures about good behavior.

So far I’ve said nothing to anybody. I don’t know if I will in the future. The health risks of overweight are preventable. But the risks of addressing someone else’s extra weight are daunting.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 17, 2015

Science, Large and Small

Science is unbelievable. Physicists track particles so small that billions of them fit on the head of a pin.

In fact, the pin is composed of them. Astronomers describe places in the universe so dense that light cannot escape their gravity – and there are billions of these black holes scattered across a universe so large that light would take 100 billion years to get across. Scientists can’t see either atomic particles or black holes, but they nevertheless can tell us how big they are, how they behave, their births and deaths.

Amazing. Science is a uniquely human invention. My dogs can also learn about the world around them. But they can’t communicate this knowledge to each other, much less build it up over generations.

Humans have been building science for millennia. The architects of Stonehenge in England five thousand years ago knew precisely where the sun would shine at the summer and winter solstice, and preserved that knowledge by transporting enormous stones weighing many tons more than a hundred miles before precisely placing them in a circle. We know much more now about the movements of the sun and earth, but we still haven’t figured out exactly what the Stonehengers were doing. A new scientific tool which can x-ray the deep underground may soon reveal their knowledge and motives.

All of the science I just described includes uncertainty. That goes beyond the so-called “uncertainty principle”, which says that it is not possible to measure with certainty both the position and the movement of tiny particles. The properties of the Higgs boson are not fully known, although its existence is necessary to confirm the theoretical model used by nearly all physicists to describe the atomic structure of the universe. Most astronomers believe that so-called “dark matter” includes most of the matter in the universe, but it has not been actually observed because it is invisible. The very ability of scientists to speculate about things which cannot be directly observed demonstrates the power of science to unravel the unbelievably large and small mysteries of our universe.

Nobody argues that the science of atomic particles or dark matter is a hoax. Nobody claims that the complex computer models needed in astrophysics are just guesswork. Nobody adds up the numbers of the world’s scientists who agree completely on the properties of the Higgs boson. Nobody convenes conferences of dissenting scientists or pseudo-scientists to argue alternative explanations of the observed phenomena. Nobody suggests that these remaining uncertainties demonstrate that physicists and astronomers don’t know what they are talking about.

There is nothing political about dark matter. Whether it makes up 23% or 27% of the total energy content of the universe doesn’t appear to interest American politicians. But as soon as we begin to discuss the earth’s climate, politicians suddenly have very definite scientific opinions. The same kind of scientific inquiry which has produced remarkable advances in our understanding of distant stars and tiny particles is suddenly unbelievable. Political leaders with high school science educations make pronouncements about the value of scientific research whose most basic features they don’t understand.

Why? Because climate science, unlike atomic science, has political implications. New studies show that the Middle East could become too hot for human habitation in this century. Across the world, 100 million people could be driven into extreme poverty by the increasing heat. If political decisions to change the way we produce and consume energy are not made soon, we will bequeath a deadly world to our descendants in two generations. And that prospect has turned some politicians into scientific geniuses.

Donald Trump says warming is a “hoax”. Ted Cruz says scientists are “cooking the books.” Ben Carson, who doesn’t believe in doing anything about climate change, says about scientists, “They are welcome to believe whatever they want to believe. I’m welcome to believe what I want to believe.”

That’s the whole point. Carson and other conservatives don’t want to believe that anything needs to be done about climate change, because it will be expensive and will involve government action. So they argue that science is just what they want to believe, what conveniently fits into their political ideology.

My dogs would make poor scientists, because they can be individual learners at best, unable to profit from the knowledge gained by other members of their species. But they are better scientists than Republican know-nothings, because they learn from the world around them without political filters and ideological blinders. They can’t work with computer models, but they recognize when someone is all wet.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 10, 2015

The Great Myth of the Free Market

In 1776, in “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith developed a new theory of economics, which we now call the theory of the free market. He wrote that a man should be “free to pursue his own interest his own way.... By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this ... led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” That useful end was economic progress for the whole nation.

Smith was an economic genius who realized that the restrictions placed on their economies by 18^th-century European monarchies stifled productivity and the creation of wealth. If people were allowed to seize opportunities that they perceived, to assess risk and seek reward, the larger economy would grow more rapidly than if rulers dictated how commerce should proceed.

The moral superiority of free choice over monarchical fiat was indispensable to Smith’s argument. As a partner to the demand for more political freedom, the promotion of the free market was inherently democratic.

Since then, no economic system has equaled capitalism in creating wealth, for nations and individuals. The “free market” is such a sweet phrase that it has become a magic incantation, a panacea for every economic problem. The free market as an idea appears to have attained religious status. Proponents of an unfettered market invoke their version of God’s will in favor of their political position against any government regulation, for example, laws protecting the environment. The lineup of conservative presidential candidates has nothing good to say about any economic regulation.

The people who raise the unregulated market to a religious commandment support political advocacy with mythical stories, beginning with Adam Smith. Smith did not have absolute faith in the “invisible hand”. He openly preached that governments must play a significant role in the economy.

Governments should provide roads and bridges and other public works which individuals or private enterprises are not likely to build. He praised regulation of the labor market, but only when it supported workers. “When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.... Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.” Smith distrusted the motives of employers, who sought, he believed, to keep wages as low as possible, “always and everywhere”.

He not only supported taxation, but favored a progressive tax system. “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.... It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

By obscuring these uncomfortable elements of Adam Smith’s theory, free market absolutists offer another myth: regulation has only costs, not benefits. Every regulation increases rather than decreases the costs of doing business, otherwise businesses would undertake these measures themselves. But modern life is dependent on the greater benefits of regulation: food products free of disease, rivers with live fish, air healthy to breathe. Regulations took the lead out of gasoline and paint. Regulations keep harmful drugs, like thalidomide, off the market.

Regulations put seat belts and air bags into cars, saving countless lives, a good example of their value. Every state but one legislates that adult drivers must wear seat belts. That state, New Hampshire, has the lowest usage of seat belts in the country. Live free and die.

Car manufacturers were successful in delaying the deployment of the air bag, costing thousands of lives. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 in favor of government-mandated air bags, writing: “For nearly a decade, the automobile industry waged the regulatory equivalent of war against the airbag and lost — the inflatable restraint was proved sufficiently effective.”

The writers of our Constitution, 13 years after Smith published “The Wealth of Nations”, enshrined the mutual necessity of freedom and regulation into Section 8, “The Congress shall have Power ... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States”.

We can joke about the conservative effort to deregulate our economy. “How many conservatives does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer: “None. If the government would just leave it alone, it would screw itself in.”

But saving lives is no joke.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-C ourier, October 27, 2015