Musonius, gluttony, "body positivity" and modern ideology

 With Thanksgiving this past week, a quintessentially American holiday that has turned into a celebration of gluttony and excess rather than anything more high-minded, I think we shall return to Musonius Rufus.  I wrote several posts about Musonius and his philosophy, and this seems to be a nice opportunity to wrap up that series for now, although I will likely return to him on occasion.  We shall consider several points from the surviving lectures of Musonius, while connecting his school of philosophic thought to modern political ideology, and even the nature of that strange thing that happened with next year's "where are they now," Oliver Anthony.

Consider your eating habits, and here, we note that the tension between philosophers like Musonius and Epicurus can be overstated.  Epicurus (as in, "epicurious.com," which does have some good cooking advice), was among the more misunderstood philosophers.  He claimed that life and experience could be reduced to sensation, divided between pleasure and pain, with the former being good, and the latter being bad.  The simplistic, and wrong interpretation would be hedonism, which is the interpretation you take if you hear this claim without actually reading Epicurus.  What Epicurus actually wrote was that the more important pleasures and pains were those of the mind, and hence that one should devote one's self to the higher pursuits of intellectualism, and that one's needs for food are actually quite modest.  A luxury or two in that sense is fine, but the more important thing is contemplation and discussion of intellectual matters.

That is not the impression you take if you hear the reduced form of the claim, is it?

If you gorged yourself on Thursday, and talked about some stupid sportsball game, that is not what Epicurus meant.  If you had a small and simple meal with good friends or family, and some interesting discussion, that actually is exactly what Epicurus meant.

You overate, didn't you?  Of course you did.

Anyway, while Epicurus is not quite 180 degrees at odds with Musonius Rufus and his school of thought, they would still not see eye to eye.  Musonius's student, Epictetus held Epicurus in absolute contempt.  Recall that the core of Musonius is that what seems good is not good, and what seems evil is not evil.  Pleasure is not good, and pain only seems evil.  What is good is self-control.  The point, for Musonius, is not merely that your needs are modest, but that succumbing to gluttony is lack of virtue because it is lack of self-control, which is virtue.

He traces the idea back to Socrates, and his cardinal virtues.  Depending on your translation of Socrates, those would be wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, which is the subject here.  Musonius directly addresses food, your minimal needs, and claims that a failure to exercise temperance is a moral failure.  

Also, Musonius was a vegetarian, and you ate meat.  Actually, I did too, even if less gluttonously than American tradition demands.

Who is harmed, you may ask?  You are, and that is the point.  You harm yourself.  Only you may harm yourself, through lack of virtue, the only true evil.  No, you are not harming anyone else, but according to Musonius's reasoning, that is not possible anyway.  You cannot be injured by another because even an act of violence does no injury since pain is of no real consequence.  The only evil, the only harm, is to act without virtue, and only you can do that, so to say that you are not harming anyone else is almost definitional since it is not possible to harm another.  According to Musonius, that is.

I take issue with the claim, and I elaborated on my reasoning in my rebuttal to Musonius on the right of self defense, but consider.  You are not harming another.  Does that mean that virtue is irrelevant to the matter?

To some ideologies, yes.  If the only consequences of your actions are for yourself, then it is your choice, and virtue is irrelevant according to a purely individualistic moral in addition to political philosophy.  Your actions, even if harmful to yourself, are as orthogonal to morality as your choice in music.

Which I do judge, to be clear.  I judge your taste in music.

Back on track.

Yet of course, we do use the term, "self-harm."  Do we use it with a moral valence?  Therein lies the complication.  We use it to imply a psychological problem, and a judgment of mental illness and moral failing have always gone hand in hand.  My assessments of Michel Foucault have been stated here frequently.  They are not positive, generally speaking, yet on this point, he had a point.  Assessments of madness have always been made with a moral judgment.  He was most interested in the long history of labeling gay people as mentally ill, being gay himself (although really, his taste in age was the issue, and a separate issue entirely, which brings up a different range of cultural and political problems of associations).

What constitutes mental illness?  One could imagine the boundaries changing to classify, for example, extremes on an introversion-to-extroversion spectrum as mental illness (I wish I could recall where I read this, for proper attribution of the idea).  Alternately, for a fascinating novel, try C.S. Friedman's This Alien Shore, which includes a mutated, post-human society (the Guerans) in which the mutations are mental and psychological.  They have adapted to everyone having a range of what we would call disorders by having everyone wear elaborate facial markings that indicate to everyone what the person's deal is.  Reading the novel, it is clear whether the characters are autistic, schizophrenic and so forth, although the terms are not used.  Yet since the entire society consists of people with a range of disorders, along with particular gifts (if we may call them that), what is a disorder?  An interesting take on Foucault, from an extreme perspective, although the way the DSM currently tries to thread the needle is that a disorder causes distress, and blah-blah-blah, but there is still quite a lot of fuckery because psychology and psychiatry are bullshit disciplines, and always have been.

Decades ago, Christopher Lasch wrote a pop-psychology, cultural commentary book called The Culture of Narcissism.  He described therapists as a kind of new priesthood, and little did he know where American culture would go.  Importantly, a priesthood invokes moral judgment.  They may pretend otherwise, but they do.  Psychology and psychiatry do apply moral judgment.  They may claim otherwise, but they do.  More so now, with the profession trained under the models of Derald Wing Sue.

Self-harm.  Self-harm is proscribed, not merely because it is a marker of mental illness, but as a moral failing.  However anyone may describe it, and whatever claims anyone may make, that is a moral judgment.  Suicide, even more so.  Not all moral traditions cast suicide in the same light, but the Judeo-Christian tradition says it is a sin.  (Islam is a little different.)

Suicide, though, is the ultimate self-harm, cast in a moral in addition to medical framework.

Do you take a purely individualistic moral philosophy?  Then you cannot cast moral judgment on self-harm, nor suicide.

The healthcare system does.  The legal system does.  A person can be involuntarily locked away, denied freedom, based on a determination of potential self-harm.  If you accept that law, then you must accept the moral judgment against self-harm.  Otherwise, you must reject the law that permits an involuntary detention based on self-harm.

If you eat gluttonously, you harm yourself, physically at least.  Eventually, it will kill you.  Heart disease, diabetes and other obesity-related conditions, added together would put gluttony at the top cause of mortality in America by far.  You obsess and worry about trivialities, while shoveling shit into your face with no thought for the consequences.  And if you accept self-harm as a moral failing-- as you do if you accept the laws that permit involuntary detention-- then this is a moral failing, as Musonius tells you.

Behold, Thanksgiving, the day on which we give thanks by failing.  By acting unvirtuously.  Immorally.  By shoveling food into our faces and contributing to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and every other condition that has turned America into a quivering mass of lipids and wheezing grotesquery.

And instead of doing something about that, we have what Musonius would find most reprehensible of all.  "Body positivity."  The body positivity movement is built on lies.  Oooooh, am I not supposed to say that?  Too bad.  Truth is truth.  Until five minutes ago, we all knew that eating junk food and sitting on your ass all day was bad for you, and that carrying around a spare tire was bad for you.  Some health and medical beliefs from Musonius's time, like bleeding, were debunked by the scientific revolution, but some things, they knew then, and amazingly enough, empiricism and replication continue to demonstrate.  Don't overeat, exercise.  The search for a precisely correct diet is probably silly for a species that evolved as opportunistic eaters, but eating stupidly is stupid.

Consider changes over time.  As a simple demonstration, do you know the name, Mary Powers?  You probably do not.  She was PT Barnum's "original fat lady."  Here she is.

Consider.  Does she look like a circus attraction, as she literally was, or has your 21st Century American eye changed what you see?  Here is what has happened.  In 21st Century America, people eat unhealthy food, and do not exercise.  Let's go through a few quick exercises.

1.  Food deserts, as they are sometimes called.  There are some regions in urban areas that do not have full grocery stores in close proximity.  Let us ask two questions.  First, why not?  Is it some grand conspiracy?  Hopefully you are not that dense.  Were it profitable, there would be stores with a greater variety of foods there.  Why is it unprofitable?  There are two elements.  First, lack of demand.  Second, although this is much more recent, shoplifting has increased dramatically.  One might note, then, that if you want stores in these areas, enforce the law.  However, demand.  Stores go where there is demand.  Do you still observe morbid obesity in areas where there are regular grocery stores?  Yes.  Hence, don't lean on this crutch of an argument.

2.  Cost.  This raises several points.  First, look cross-nationally.  Americans have more disposable income than citizens in other nations.  Consider Europe.  Despite having far less disposable income, those in Europe are more likely to buy healthy food, such as produce.  They just choose to spend their money differently, a healthy (fresh) diet being more important to them than your stupid shit is to you.  They also, you know, walk.  Even that aside, what happens when we look above the destitution level, at those who spend money on useless things like video streaming services and such?  People make choices.  Bad ones.  Even at the very low end of the income distribution, people spend money in irrational ways, and sure, they buy cheap, unhealthy food, but that is a choice made while wasting money on other things.

3.  Related, actually to both, consider soda.  Soda costs money.  Poor people buy soda.  Americans spend money to get fat.  Soda is not a money-saving decision.  It is a costly decision.  This is spending money, just to get fat.  You don't buy soda for lack of access to a grocery store, you don't buy soda because you cannot afford water, you buy in failure.

4.  Leftists must relate everything to race, because of course they must.  Yet this leads to the strangest self-contradiction we see in modern discourse.  Consider the claim that modern standards of beauty are based on "whiteness."  Body positivity is a black reaction because black people, women in particular, just have different metabolisms and store lipids differently.  Well, one could look over time and cross-nationally, and indeed, intercontinentally, to see that 21st Century America is different, but note that this turns race into a medical fact rather than a social construct!  This is the same group always declaring everything-- race most importantly-- a social construct, but once it becomes useful to treat race as a medical fact, they do so without realizing what they have done.  You could probably trick these people into embracing phrenology, if you did it with a leftist slant, and indeed, I've been in the room with a leftist/critical race theorist who embraced the craziest version of that horrifying thing, "scientific racism," I have ever heard!*

I could continue, but one should not need to do so.

Musonius would scorn any beverage other than water.  Even my coffee, if I am honest.  I am indulging a hedonistic pleasure for the flavor, wasting money, and indulging an addiction to caffeine, which no one needs and without which humanity managed quite well, thank you very much.  Are there health costs?  Perhaps, and perhaps I should give up the bean of java.  Musonius would scoff at the very idea of anyone with the audacity to preach his gospel, on this subject no less, while drinking coffee.

Point taken.

And indeed, to Musonius, the harm to one's self is the same because the harm is not physical, the physical being irrelevant, but rather the abdication of virtue.  Self-control, self-restraint versus indulgence in mere pleasure.  It is that which is true harm, rather than anything physical, to Musonius, because to Musonius, meat is just meat, so to speak.  One merely sees a physical manifestation of a lack of virtue in the case of gluttony, while the only one who sees the manifestation of my particular indulgence is my dentist.  Is there any judginess from my dental hygienist?  Perhaps, but the self-harm, so to speak, is the harm to my own virtue.

And the same, Musonius says, of any gluttony with merely a different physical manifestation, although empirically, the physical manifestations are clearer, with more direct and dire consequences.

Here, then, we start to see why Musonius and those of his school meet with so much scorn from those of the new/far left, despite the fact that Rufie-boy was a pacifist vegetarian.  The "vegetarian" thing is somewhat tainted by the fact that the Palestinians' favorite mustache enthusiast was also a vegetarian, but given his popularity among the left's new favorite group, maybe the syphilitic painter will just become the left's new, official hero anyway.  Once you decide that Bin Laden was actually awesome, why not?

I'm not joking.  I pretty much expect, at this point, that leftists will latch onto Hitler and do some revisionist history to decide that he was the good guy because the West is evil, America is evil, Jews are evil, and by simple-minded Manichaeism, that makes Hitler their new hero.  They've been worshipping bigger mass murderers for years anyway.  This will happen.  Not a joke.

Rufie-boy, though, was a pacifist.  However, his insistence on self-control and rejection of gluttony, central to those few of his surviving lectures (and really, common to his school of thought) do much to demonstrate why stoicism so commonly meets rejection on the left.

If one tried to explain "body positivity" to Musonius Rufus, his withering scorn would make you wish he'd just up and hit you instead.

We observed this very point, with "Rich Men North of Richmond."  It was in no way conservative, nor Republican, nor "right-wing."  It merely decried the use of welfare for junk food.  That is all, but it was enough that, given the rise of body positivity on the left, a man who is not even particularly trim became the new... I'd say "Hitler," but we're five minutes from the left deciding that Hitler was actually awesome, so let's go with... um... Stalin?  No, they love him.  Mao?  Same deal.

Um... I need a deeply evil person that they don't stupidly love.

Uh... fuck, this is hard.

Bin La...

Damn.

This isn't going to work.  Regardless, the point is that the song was basically Woody Guthrie along with a rejection of a particularly perverse policy, but because of body positivity, the left went nuttier than a Trumpist when you tell him that a space laser burned up his ballot femtoseconds before it got scanned.

And this is why we cannot have nice things.

Eating junk food makes you fat.  Fatness kills you.  It does so slowly, wretchedly, and painfully.  Eating healthy makes you feel better.  Exercise makes you feel better.  You live longer, you live healthier, you live virtuously.

Stupidity kills.  Being stupid will kill you, but right now, we're not supposed to say that.  Once upon a time, the tobacco companies lied.  And yet, breathe in that shit, and your body tells you exactly what it thinks of that toxic shit.  It served no purpose, fulfilled no function, clearly made you feel bad, and people did it anyway.

Let's be blunt.  You didn't need mounds of research to tell you that the tobacco companies were lying.  You just needed to recognize that you couldn't fucking breathe.  People let themselves be deluded because they wanted to be deluded.  Everything else was bullshit.

Twenty years ago, Morgan Spurlock did a horrifying but informative thing.  He ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days, and documented it in a film.  You can watch what it did to him, and he felt it.  He recognized it.  He could recognize the momentary feeling of enjoyment of a simple, fatty, salty food, and then how shitty he felt, all the time.  Research is good, but some problems are actually easy.

Musonius got this largely right, because we've known the answer for about as long as civilization has made gluttony possible, which is a long-ass time.  Or perhaps I should say, big-ass time.  Once the concept existed, words became necessary to reference it.

How did you honestly feel, yesterday morning?  Did you feel a bit ill?  How so?  Were you already feeling ill, after dinner Thursday?  You know why, right?  It wasn't tryptophan.  That's a myth.  I spent a particularly engaging Thanksgiving years ago hitting JSTOR for the research on tryptophan because too many of us were science-y skeptics with advanced degrees to tolerate the possibility of bullshit in a discussion when SCIENCE!!! is an option (ABD Biology among the group, too).  You just overate, and overate specifically the kind of food that will really hit you.

That reaction is Musonius, from the grave, telling you "don't do that, dumbass."  Your needs are minimal.  Lack of virtue really does hurt you.  Yes, it is lack of virtue.  And yes, it hurts you.  Musonius would say that the physical pain is irrelevant.  It is, however, an indicator.

Let's go with a classic.  Little Feat, "Fat Man In The Bathtub," live.  The studio version is from their best album, Dixie Chicken.  Really, though, I'll recommend Waiting For Columbus, which has an outstanding version of this, and most of their best songs.

*I participated in a forum several years ago, in which a particularly bonkers speaker made the following claim.  She claimed that white people are intrinsically, racially greedy because they come from the cold climate of Europe, where it is hard to grow things, so they must become greedy and selfish to protect what they have.  That's just evolution, see.  In Africa, though, it is so bountiful and easy to grow things that everyone has plenty, and so everyone just sits around enjoying friends and family, so black people are intrinsically, racially friend-and-family-oriented.  Today, in America.  Yes, I actually participated in a forum, on Case Western Reserve University's campus, at which a faculty member spouted this batshittery.  With a straight face.  With the audience nodding.  I documented it, as a demonstration that it really happened.  This was actually supposed to be a joke from a game called "Survival of the Witless," about tenure politics in academia.  The creator of the game tried to write something so loony that real academia would not be as crazy, hence satire, but we live in the land of Poe's law.