Month: February 2009

Via Arts and Letters Daily, a bemusing article about a curious reversal in the past half century: in today’s western culture, food is governed by a host of moral rules, while sex is unrestricted; exactly the opposite of 50 years ago:

Thus far, what the imaginary examples of Betty [a hypothetical 1950’s housewife] and Jennifer [a hypothetical 21st-century 30-something] have established is this: Their personal moral relationships toward food and toward sex are just about perfectly reversed. Betty does care about nutrition and food, but it doesn’t occur to her to extend her opinions to a moral judgment — i.e., to believe that other people ought to do as she does in the matter of food, and that they are wrong if they don’t. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way; it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done. Jennifer, similarly, does care to some limited degree about what other people do about sex; but it seldom occurs to her to extend her opinions to a moral judgment. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way — because it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done.

On the other hand, Jennifer is genuinely certain that her opinions about food are not only nutritionally correct, but also, in some deep, meaningful sense, morally correct — i.e., she feels that others ought to do something like what she does. And Betty, on the other hand, feels exactly the same way about what she calls sexual morality.

I don’t think that I would go as far as the author does in asserting a causal relationship between the morality of food and sex, but it does seem to me that the human desire for moral codes remains pretty much constant. It is my impression that the followers of today’s puritan religions — progressivism and environmentalism — subject themselves to a complex of rules every bit as stringent as the Victorians or the 50’s Cleaver types. People today who scorn the idea of sexual restraint practice a rigid self-discipline and ideological purity in their nutritional intake and imagined environmental impact.

And ironically, often to the same degree of self-contradiction. Most everyone today is bewildered and repulsed by the Inquisition-era idea that the suffering of the body is inconsequential in light of the fate of the soul. Yet people continue practices — recycling, for instance which consumes more energy and resources, and thus release more pollutants and carbon into the environment, than not recycling; or opposition to nuclear energy — that are objectively detrimental to the cause they claim to care about, in (as far as I can tell) an appeal to some sort of benefit to one’s individual character.