Fad diets and pragmatic overload: why Haidt was wrong
This string of tweets from @Meaningness is too important to be left to succumb to Twitter-rot—especially since it points toward an understanding of the failure of Haidt that I’ve mentioned before.
https://twitter.com/nydwracu/status/455403212229861376
When I say “ethical/pragmatic rationalizations for the redevelopment of religious practices”, the most obvious reference point is diets: dietary practices and periodic fasts were once a key part of religious identity, and were justified in those terms—but now that those aren’t strong justifications for actions, they’re justified in terms of ethics (Haidt’s harm and fairness) and pragmatics instead.
I was in New York City over the weekend. After I arrived in Penn Station, I headed off for the Guggenheim for the Italian Futurism exhibit (for the second time), but got hungry along the way. The closest place to the museum that I could find to get lunch was a store advertising ‘juice cleanses’: a chain, as I later discovered. The practice they advertised was periodic abstinence from solid foods, in favor of ‘raw’ cold-pressed fruit and vegetable juices (which run about $10 a bottle, but the place seemed to do good business nevertheless). The whole store was plastered with marketing for this practice, though they did stock some solid foods too—and what’s interesting about the marketing was that it was justified totally in pragmatic terms. That is, with pseudoscience.
There’s a particular type of pseudoscience in the health industry that attempts to dress up Haidt’s purity axis (toxins! toxins everywhere!) in pragmatic terms. It usually fails as science, but science isn’t what it’s addressing, isn’t what it’s trying to do: within liberal society is a taboo against open discussion of Haidt’s three conservative axes, but (here’s where Haidt goes wrong) liberals still care about them. (Haidt is cladistically a liberal, and still takes an insider’s view of liberalism: his analyses of liberalism and of conservatism are different kinds of analysis, since he has an insider’s view of the former, but not of the latter. There may well be some conservatives who buy into the two-axis restriction as much as liberals do, and produce things as sham-like as purity-motivated pseudoscience.) As is demonstrated by the success of this juice cleanse chain—and by the many other things out there that could naïvely be called pseudoscientific fad diets, but this term ignores their true nature, their addressing of some sort of basic human need at a remove.
Now, there’s probably some truth to some of these pragmatically-based fad diets, in that they’re restrictive enough to cut out the things that are actually bad for you. But casual observation suggests that a pragmatic basis is less memetically successful than an ethical basis: juice cleanses are far less widely mentioned or known (and therefore presumably far less widely practiced) than vegetarianism.
Oh come on, don’t be lazy and summarize the twitter exchange into an actually readable post.
spandrell
April 17, 2014 at 01:12
I don’t speak that language well enough to summarize it.
nydwracu
April 17, 2014 at 01:51
Don’t be so modest, you certainly seem to speak it well enough to me.
I think Chapman is correct in that it has not been considered ‘legitimate’ in public discourse, especially concerning state policy, to reference non-material, non-utilitarian values as ‘valid’ (=’objective’) considerations for a long time.
At the same time, many progressive desires and priorities and moral outlooks have inescapably subjective (=’relative’) origins. Their solution is semi-cynical collective and self-deception that pretends that these subjective values have objective foundations.
But the fact of that deception (or more charitably, ‘error’) is entirely distinct from trying to leverage the perception of the exclusive validity of the objective and universal to support the conversational validity of the subjective and relative.
Handle
April 17, 2014 at 15:41
[…] By nydwracu […]
Fad diets and pragmatic overload: why Haidt was wrong | Reaction Times
April 17, 2014 at 04:54
I haven’t finished reading Haidt, but I think it’s obvious that liberals don’t care *as much* about purity as do conservatives. However, since the axis is instinctual, people who can find ways to trigger it in liberals can generally do pretty well for themselves.
I think part of the reason that liberals don’t make more political points using the purity axis is that they won those battles decades ago – nobody argues for allowing people to sell rotten meat, or dumping toxic waste into rivers, etc. It’s all enforcement now.
Anthony
April 18, 2014 at 11:20
It’s not obvious to me. What’s the evidence?
nydwracu
April 22, 2014 at 22:04
Liberal complaints about sexual immorality are all couched in care/harm rhetoric, not purity/disgust rhetoric. While liberals generally agree that pedophilia is wrong, they generally can’t get as worked up about it unless it’s a traditional enemy of theirs, like Catholic priests, and even then, it’s all about the harm to the boys and the coverup.
While various purity-based food fads are substantially more popular among liberals, they’re still not nearly as mainstream as, say, dislike of homosexuality is among conservatives; and for that matter, conservatives have their own purity-based food fads, too. Paleo, anyone?
Liberal environmentalism seems to be as much about people exploiting nature for money as it is about maintaining a “pristine” environment, especially now that most of the really bad stuff isn’t happening anymore (at least in the U.S.). Sometimes it seems that liberals would tolerate all sorts of pollution if only it would cost the Koch Brothers money or influence.
Anthony
April 23, 2014 at 13:47
>liberals still care about them.
I like Haidt a lot, but this is absolutely correct. I might be willing to give way on authority or group loyalty, but progressives are just as fervent about their taboos as anyone else, they just have a different set of them..
cassander
April 20, 2014 at 21:26