Yes, it’s true. I love New York, and for all sorts of reasons, among which is Mayor Bloomberg.
Matthew Cantirino’s posting draws attention to the ironies of Bloomberg’s neo-puritanism. When it comes to abortion we’re not to invade anybody’s private choices: “our bodies, our choices.” But sugary soft drinks (or more accurately corn syrupy soft drinks)? Well, that’s a different matter.
Well put, but some further thoughts.
America has always been a place with a purpose, a city on a hill, a beacon of democracy, the land of the free, and etc., and etc. As postmodern skepticism about the possibility of deep, robust truths takes hold, we’re disoriented. What are we to be FOR! What are we to be passionate ABOUT!
The answer is typically recycling. Bloomberg sees an opportunity in calorie counting, having conquered the wicked demon tobacco earlier in his tenure as mayor.
So there it is: postmodern moralism. Recycle! Locally sourced food! Electric cars! No cigarettes! No fatty foods! Use sun screen!
It’s small, very small, but it’s nonetheless urgent, and sometimes effectively so. The success of the campaigns against smoking, at least among the upper half of society puts the lie to the notion that certain social trends are “inevitable.”
I’ve heard countless liberal friends say that we “can’t turn back the clock” on the sexual revolution. I wonder. If half the energy was put into encouraging chastity that is now expended encouraging recycling, or, if Mayor Bloomberg has his way, controlling appetites for Coke and Pepsi, I’d bet that social attitudes and behavior toward sex, marriage, divorce, and having children would change.
May 31st, 2012 | 9:18 pm
“So there it is: postmodern moralism. Recycle! Locally sourced food! Electric cars! No cigarettes! No fatty foods! Use sun screen!”
That´s weird. In my experience most of the so called post modernists critics usually attack such “third wave capitalist” morality and concerns. Which, ironically, makes the author of this post…a post modernist!
May 31st, 2012 | 10:39 pm
“I’ve heard countless liberal friends say that we “can’t turn back the clock” on the sexual revolution. I wonder. If half the energy was put into encouraging chastity that is now expended encouraging recycling, or, if Mayor Bloomberg has his way, controlling appetites for Coke and Pepsi, I’d bet that social attitudes and behavior toward sex, marriage, divorce, and having children would change”
Reno is right that American society needs to work its way back toward encouraging chastity the way that it works to encourage recycling and end smoking and junk food. But that change can’t come about by merely reinstating Victorian attitudes toward sex. Blue states and Northern Europe have fewer abortions and more stable marriages because they’ve encouraged the kind of responsibility that goes along with recycling, nonsmoking, and health food.
June 1st, 2012 | 4:43 am
Although I have great respect for R.R. Reno, he is the editor of my favorite magizine, after all, I cannot see the logic in his post here. How does Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign against smoking, fatty foods, etc., qualify as “postmodern morality”?
For something to be “postmodern” would require it to transend logic and morality. That is, postmodernism rejects “modernist” notions like logic, and moral reasoning. But Mayor Bloomberg’s fight against fatty foods, skin cancer (by using sunscreen) smoking, and so forth, are based on very modernist notions: that certain things are harmful to humans, and the morally correct thing to do, is fight against these harmful things.
One can certainly disagree with Bloomberg’s crusade here, for a variety of reasons, but his crusade is clearly based on moral premises, entirely within the mainstream moral philosophical tradition: human life is important, and that threats to it, constitute forms of immorality that should be fought. Of course, he’s inconsistent in not applying this morality to the unborn.
June 1st, 2012 | 6:41 am
Sergio Méndez is quite right.
Here is a typical example, an excerpt from the Tarnac 9’s L’insurrection qui vient
“Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital… Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag any and all objections to the exorbitant progress of control. Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Everything is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being.”
And, “There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop – they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. It’s only us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour – the ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on television – only we get to have an environment.”
June 1st, 2012 | 8:00 am
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