In the August/September issue of First Things, I wrote briefly about New York’s Nanny-in-chief, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and his proposal to regulate the size of sugary drinks for sale in Gotham. Many commentators chortled. I’ve found myself thinking his efforts serious, and a sign of our times. Our neo-bourgeois elites feel the need to impose their order on the lower classes.
Over the last fifty or so years, our common culture has decayed. Inane reality TV has replaced anodyne shows like “Leave it to Beaver.” Sex, profanity, and violence course through fiber-optic wires. Pornography dominates the internet. All of this has taken place against the background of a dramatic weakening of moral confidence. Today we find it very hard to pronounce behavior bad or wrong. We prefer softer, therapeutic statements: it’s unhealthy or self-destructive. Or we focus on utility: certain behaviors have high social costs. Or we step back: “Who I am to judge?”
Pope Benedict XVI has referred to this weakened moral confidence as a dictatorship of relativism. It’s an arresting image, one that correctly highlights the way in which elite culture polices what we say and think. The way in which objections to same-sex marriage are denounced as simple bigotry and ignorance provides an obvious example. But to my mind it’s more accurate to say that our age is dominated by a moral diffidence, not a strict relativism.
Very few people imagine that there are no moral truths, but many believe these truths are soft and plastic, not infinitely malleable (murder is a firm no-no) but nonetheless mobile and adjustable (“mercy killing” isn’t murder). The firm voice of the social consensus only intervenes when you or I speak up and say that aborting Down Syndrome children and killing patients with advanced dementia is evil. It is forbidden to be morally outspoken about things that our elite culture thinks morally ambiguous.
The social consequences of this plastic and diffident moral consensus have been complex. But one thing has become clear in the last decade or so. Elite Americans have found ways to survive and even thrive. The rest? Everybody else struggles to find firm footing.
As Charles Murray documents in Coming Apart, his study of white Americans over the last fifty years, the top 20% has undergone a neo-bourgeois revival of sorts. Marriage is common, divorce much less so. Children are overwhelmingly likely to be raised by both biological parents. People are engaged in their communities, raising money for the local schools and so forth.
Meanwhile, the bottom has fallen out from underneath the bottom 30%. Marriage is less and less common, while illegitimate children are more and more likely. Less than half of children born to poor white Americans live with both biological parents. The poor are unlikely to be married, and they’re increasingly unlikely to work full time. They are more likely to be in prison. And they don’t participate in softball leagues, PTA, or other community-building activities.
Put simply, the bottom third of white America—which if we add African Americans and Hispanics the percentage of Americans very likely comes to more than half—is characterized by dysfunctional communities and disordered lives. It’s an antinomian environment, and over the last few decades, order has been imposed by shrewd policing, the threat of (and a great deal of actual) imprisonment, enticements of consumption, and the bread and circus of the popular media.
Meanwhile, although our elite society affirms Heather’s choice to have a child by artificial insemination when she is single and forty, the majority quietly organize their lives around tried and true patterns: careers are well-prepared for, mates carefully chosen. Moreover, marriage provides a stable context for children who are tortured with tremendous pressure to succeed in school—and who are exhorted to eat healthy foods and stay slim. It’s not the 1950s, but elite Americans are leading a neo-bourgeois revival largely organized around health and wealth. It’s a disciplinary culture that is utilitarian and therapeutic rather than moral and metaphysical.
In any event, the divide between the neo-bourgeois elite and the rest is clear to see when it comes to obesity. It has many causes, but epidemiologists know that it is strongly correlated to income and education. The weak social norms that characterize the bottom of society tend to leave people at the mercy of their own undisciplined desires and appetites, which of course includes what and how much they eat. Meanwhile, in the much more functional upper reaches of society, strong social pressures operate that motivate sedentary lawyers and investment bankers to strap themselves to elliptical trainers and other modern instruments of physical discipline. The same pressures encourage dieting. Woe unto him who eateth the French fry.
This is where Mayor Bloomberg comes in. In a functional society, elites set the tone, not only because it’s pleasant to rule, but also because of a genuine noblesse oblige. The impulse is made all the stronger by the aesthetic and cultural sentiments of our neo-bourgeois elite culture, which regards obesity as a taboo and source of shame. Shouldn’t the great and the good do their best to raise up the lowly? And then there are the health care costs. Doesn’t good stewardship require intervention?
Just this way of thinking encourages Mayor Bloomberg to intervene with regulations limiting the sizes of sugary drinks. He’s guiding people toward “healthy choices” with regulations. That’s what he did with smoking. It fits quite well with the usual role of elites, which is to impose their vision of the good life on the lower orders of society. This can be done prudently or imprudently, with haughty disdain or a modicum of sympathy. But unless elite culture lacks self-confidence, it gets done. In the two or three decades after the cultural upheavals of the 1960s elite culture was disoriented and unsure. Not so today, as Bloomberg’s confident interventions show.
Bloomberg the billionaire is in touch with elite opinion. The top 20% may have a diffident and plastic view of moral truth, but they are quite firmly committed to the supreme importance of health and fitness. Over the last decade elite culture has been very explicit in shoveling a great deal of mockery and shame on the fast-food eating and overweight post-industrial proletariat (especially if they are white and live in Texas). Regulating their behavior follows naturally.
R.R. Reno is Editor of First Things. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
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Comments:
The enlightened elites "know" that these 3 major values need to be imposed by government or mankind will simply fall into ruin. The Strong (corporations or Churches or whatever) will be running roughshod over the weak. People like Bloomberg see themselves as, not only holding back evil forces of manipulation but, as guiding the stupid into enlightened ways of existing--i.e...green, skinny and obedient to our betters.
It still amazes me that the "liberal" forces for freeing us from manipulation are so hyper-manipulative and yet so self-forgiving...because their "Cause is good".
I also find it rather unseemly to be picking exclusively upon the "lower classes" when there is so much rampant lying, fraud, and other forms of criminal and anti-social behavior to be found among the "upper classes" - starting in this day and age perhaps first and foremost with those in the upper echelons of banking and finance. Why, oh why, do commentators like R.R. Reno never lift a finger to denounce the evils committed by those who hold real power in society, focusing their social commentary instead on safe and easy targets among the relatively powerless sectors of society?
No one knows if Romney will run up Obamaesque deficits. It's quite clear that Obama certainly will.
Totalitarian means to get people to eat nutritious foods will always fail in the end for it has its origin not in any real concern, but in a desire to have power over others, what every person innately resents and will in some manner eventually rebel against. If Mr. Bloomberg was really concerned with obesity among the poor, not power over them, he would start with finding a way to make nutritious foods affordable, where the poor would actually have a choice to stay healthy through the consumption of healthy foods.
Your concern: "I wonder if America, in the eyes of conservatives, hasn't deteriorated to the point where it is no longer salvageable."
The answer is no when speaking of most every conservative in America. But you could have gotten an affirmative answer if you posed the question differently: "I wonder if America, in the eyes of conservatives, hasn't deteriorated to the point that they will no longer submit to the ostrich-life adopted by most honest liberals, but instead choose to be an opposition that will now never shut up."
I fail to see how this article is any less uselessly elitist than Bloomberg's push. What does the author suggest instead of pointing the finger at liberals? What good does that do the real poor most of us won't have to look in the eye today?
This is generally not true. In big cities, you can find grocery stores -- especially those catering to Asian immigrants -- that sell fresh fruit and vegetables at rock-bottom prices. And in suburbia/exurbia, there are still farmer's markets that haven't been taken over by yuppies. Coupon-clipping and buying what's on sale will also help out in the produce aisle.
There are a lot of myths about food and obesity that seem to come from both sides. Mrs. Obama plugged the "food desert" theory that claims that there are no fresh food or vegetables for sale in inner-city neighborhoods but others actually did the hard work of looking into this and mapping grocers and found the theory false. Poor people are also not more likely to be obese than wealthier people -- what is true is that the variance of BMI is higher for the poor so you find both lots of obese people and also lots of underweight people in that group. There also is not much evidence to challenge the traditional view that obesity comes not from lack of nutrients but simply from too many calories -- nutrients prevent you from dying young but they won't help you lose weight if they are accompanied by lots of calories (e.g. switching from Coca-Cola to fruit juice probably will not help you shed any weight -- switching to Diet Coke will).
You write “There also is not much evidence to challenge the traditional view that obesity comes not from lack of nutrients but simply from too many calories…” It is possible that I have been reading faulty scientific data showing that excessive fat cells accumulate in infants and toddlers (that can’t be exercised away) that lead to a problem with obesity the rest of their lives. I’d like to see the evidence that this is not so. When deprived of nutritious food at an early age, children will eat more of cheap fatty meats, salt-preserved foods, and excessive cheap carbohydrates because of nutritional starvation (factors in obesity, early diabetes and high blood pressure). What really comes first, the nutritional deprivation, or the eating of too many calories? I suggest that if one says the latter, it is scapegoating fast-food restaurants to side-step a complex problem involving food consumption. You, together with Mr. Bloomberg, are suggesting that we simply find ways to reduce caloric intake, and I’m suggesting that we find ways to eat healthy. There are poor persons in some Third World countries that are able to do this, so why can’t we?
Yes, I have journeyed to areas where I was told I could get vegetables and fruits cheaper, but after making these journeys, I far too often ended up with oranges that are dried up inside, apples and other fruits already going bad inside or having a very short table life. It doesn’t take too many disappointments to just stop. And the ubiquitous Farmers Markets where I live are almost always more pricey than the conglomerate food chains (I live at the center of a Farmers Market and have to get a bus to a conglomerate store to get better prices!).
In any case, I still believe Mr. Reno’s point is valid, and for me it all points to a totalitarian modern-liberalism that can’t resist exercising its penchant to exercise control over people’s lives instead of thoughtfully and collaboratively finding real solutions to complex social ills.
The liberal "elite" like Mr. Bloomberg try to enforce healthy eating common amongst wealthier Americans, but without actually doing anything to make it more possible for moms to be home to cook a good dinner for their family, (i.e. promoting tax policies that encourage marriage.)
I live in a mixed-income and mixed-race area; I see the results of social disintegration every day -- as well as the results of the newly dedicated "elites" to community and civic organizations, churches and schools, and huge volunteer improvement projects. The two parts of my community very rarely interact, and despite a great deal of work on the part of the organizations and institutions to "reach out" to the poorer people, they remain suspicious, insular, and very much held hostage by their problems and their lack of connection to anyone. It is easy to theorize about things like this, but nothing beats living in the middle of it to show the stark differences and the real (not theoretical!) difficulties of their lives and the life of a mixed community.
What I have come to believe is that post-WWII, much of the intellectual Left was still flirting with communism, and eventually got in bed with Stalin, Jean Paul Sartre providing what was for most Leftist intellectuals a convincing invitation (why Camus was ostracized in that community—his insistence that Stalin should be opposed). They would also jump in bed with Mao and Castro. Having lived inside leftist politics throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, including allying myself with the sexual revolution whose principles were thoroughly outlined and adopted from the writings of Wilhelm Reich, it became abundantly clear that the common enemy for most every Leftist was the nuclear family. It was viewed as the most important target in dismantling the capitalist system, for the nuclear family was viewed as an embedded and all-justifying model for slavery of every kind (man possessed and dominated wife and children, and the first objective was to get women out of the home and into the work market and children raised primarily by the State [who is old enough to remember how women who stayed at home were ridiculed in every left-wing media outlet and university?], and eventually activists would form bureaucracies that would liberate women and children from men: this was especially true in the welfare system where help would be given to poor families only if there was no man in the picture, the State becoming a Father in a matriarchal model to replace our Father in heaven, who is neither male or female).
It is important to have these discussions because the more deeply we think about it, the more we come to realize that the main problem is not sex or food consumption, but the ongoing assault on the nuclear family in its many manifestations (I have a friend, and educator for more than 25 years, who told me how they have to educate children on social realities that they can’t discuss with parents because they are just too ignorant, and I said to her, “You’re calling me ignorant” and she said, “No! Not you. You’re different.” “But how can you know that without ever having meaningful conversations with parents?” “You got a point,” she admitted. What she is certainly not aware of is that her distrust is really not of the parents, but of the nuclear family that they continue to assault, and this distrust is now institutional and unconscious, and the many policies opposed to the nuclear family (especially in sex education) are knee-jerk.
Laws that force persons to reduce their caloric intake at restaurants (parents can’t do it, so we will!), or force educators to throw condoms at children when indoctrinating them into embracing the principles of sex liberation (parents won't!), are totalitarian, but totalitarian with a singular mission: to destroy the nuclear family. The only war that will have any results by those opposed to the policies of Bloomberg and Company is the fight to prevent the ongoing dismantling of the nuclear family and work towards its restoration. It will certainly look differently than in the past, but essentially it will restore authority to the parents and the State will do all it can to insure that children will have a man and woman as parents who will have significant time to spend with them. For the dismantling of the nuclear family is truly the main altar in child sacrifice.
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