Golden Aged Fallacies: a Response to Stangler
R. McKay Stangler’s fine essay, “Fitness in the Age of Cultural Disunity” addresses what he views as a source of divisiveness in our country. Since he announced his viewpoint as that of a conservative, I thought it might be worthwhile for me, as a liberal (or, as he put it, Western progressive), to respond to it.
First, I was struck by the many points on which we agree.
Like Mr. Stangler, I have a problem with the phrase “my truth.” I hear it as steel being raked down a blackboard: you own your lies, truth is everyone’s or nothing at all. In other words, the phrase is an oxymoron, it’s also repulsive in suggesting that the world is purely solipsistic, and that the speaker of the phrase has no responsibility to convincing others of their perspective. I suppose I see truth as a scientist might see it: as very real but always provisional, something we work toward and course-correct as we go. That’s what I hope we’re doing here.
I agree, too, that the problem of asserting one’s “truth” is evident in the Healthy at Any Size Movement (and while I don’t see HAAS as having much traction in the culture at large, it can serve as a useful example). Like Stangler, I do not believe one can be (or, rather, is likely to be) healthy at any size, and in the case of children, I think promoting any sort of obesity amounts to abuse.
Further, I agree in proclaiming the “moral worth” of the advice one gives in the gym, when it’s worth is moral. Often, however, we are merely offering probabilistically better choices (as with someone who says they prefer being fat to lean), not morally better choices. But I strongly agree that, as he says, “some choices are better than others.”
I also tend to agree with the assertion of the power of “shared terms,” especially in the fitness space, where words like healthy, strong, fit, clean, etc., serve as prompts to action. But here a problem arises because, although we (meaning fitness culture) share these terms, I doubt we ever mean exactly the same things by them. Certainly, they are “uniting ideas” and “spacious,” as he says, but I remain skeptical of “traditional and generally agreed-upon definitions.” Traditional for who, precisely? The word freedom has traditionally meant very different things to different cohorts, say Black Americans and White Americans. Traditional is a word frequently used to cover up all sorts of perspectival biases. And “generally agreed-upon definitions” similarly exist only for brief periods among narrow coteries of like-minded folk. In fact, all of the terms cited in the essay are relative, unstable, and constantly changing: what one meant by healthy or strong or fit was very different in 1840, 1920, 1960, 1995, and 2024, and what one meant at those times was also determined partly by socio-economic status, geography, gender, and education.
My point about history is important, because it seems Stangler’s argument relies quite often on a hazy and pleasant Golden Age, which I am apparently too young to recall. (And arguments that stem from appeals to that time, back when things were great, are called golden-age fallacies.) In the essay, there was a time when “traditional” definitions held sway; of agreement on universal categories; when there was “an existing order” that has now given way to “a new order of personal feeling.” Since he doesn’t specify when these eras occurred, I’ll limit my response to: I’m unaware of any such times. But I’ll add that I am also unaware of any time when metaphysical truths underpinned shared definitions of words. I love history but can’t seem to find such instances: words like virtue and God and transubstantiation were very much contended in 16th century England and remain so today; words like democracy and liberty along with a multitude of others were hotly contested since the 18th century. How about equality? What universal understanding undergirds that hot potato?
In the case of HAAS, Stangler posits a time when “We once had generally agreed-upon definitions of things like minimum healthy levels of activity.” When was that? The guidelines he cites (150 met minutes per week) were instituted in 2008 and, if anything, there is broader agreement on them now than then because social media has made many more people are aware of those guidelines. Oddly, he also mentions the food pyramid and nutrition labels as “social developments.” Those things were products of the government, and that’s a word in which we have completely lost all sense of shared meaning: for large swathes of the country, it has become an abstract scapegoat for all sorts of grievances. Including being too fat. That’s right, many people today are far more likely to blame the government, blame the food pyramid for their adipose tissue. Yet I don’t believe there was a mythical era (say, before Reagan hypnotized half of America into believing government is the problem) when everyone knew what the word government meant and agreed on it. There have always been demagogues and charlatans trying to convince us that are problems are caused by unseen forces, that we are not responsible for our fates. What I will argue is that we need constantly to reset our terms (as Stangler does in his essay) and thereby, perhaps, think a little harder about how we use them.
Of course, the problem of obesity continues to grow too. The essay argues that our waistlines are expanding at least in part due to a breakdown in spacious ideas and moral choices, that if fat people were simply to “sacrifice” more, work harder at eating better (“regular labor and effort”), and have “the backbone to withstand unhealthy temptations” we wouldn’t be dealing with an obesity epidemic. As numerous doctors have pointed out, the faculty of willpower did not suddenly decline over the past forty years. Unfortunately, I think here Stangler falls victim to the very “emotivism” he decries: he feels it is true that the obese simply need more backbone, willpower, and moral rectitude. However, we have boat-loads of data demonstrating that this is not the case. Organizations like the NIH and the AMA have determined that the causes of obesity are multi-factorial, including environment (what foods are available), knowledge, socio-economic status, stress, activity levels, genetics, and social and cultural norms. Just look at history. We’ve been shaming fat people and denigrating their moral abilities for centuries—and not only does it not work (because it is wrong) but it has backfired. People are not fat because their peers are too politically correct to moralize their behavior.
We can all make better choices when we talk about health.
Moralizing individual foods is, I think, similarly misguided. Stangler writes that, “We simply know, based on all available history and data, that kale is better for your body than a doughnut.” Okay, we all know what he’s talking about—but I’m going to disagree. If you wake up after your 12-hour fast and are going for a 20-mile run, you are better off eating the doughnut; same thing if you’re taking a test that morning. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that in almost all cases labeling a food good or bad without stating the caloric context (maintenance, deficit, or surplus) is meaningless. Furthermore, thinking of foods as good or bad doesn’t work very well. Better to think in terms of dietary patterns: for a vegetarian, one who actually eats vegetables and not processed vegan foods, who also gets sufficient protein and is eating at maintenance, a doughnut is neither good nor bad, just calories.
I would add that there’s a subtle but ugly condescension in saying that obviously kale is better for you than a donut. I very much doubt that the obese mother trying to feed her child doesn’t know that kale is probably a better choice than a donut. But what if you have to drive 30 miles out of your way for kale, and you can’t really afford the gas or the time? Also, kale vs. donut is an awfully easy binary. What about cheese? Eggs? Meat? Are they good or bad?
In and of themselves, neither. What you’ve eaten for the last three weeks is far more indicative of what a food might do to you than whether we think of it as good or bad. And there are more than a few healthy dietary patterns to choose from (and which depend, like much else, on context, like activity level and type, individual responses to various foods, etc.), so I don’t think uniform standards will help us much here.
So, yes we ought to communicate the moral worth of the choices we make and the words we employ, but chief among those choices ought to be the decision to get outside of our own limited perspectives and get things right. And for that we need to work together to determine the truth, because that work never ends—a new golden age is not on our doorstep.
Daniel Kunitz is the author of Lift: Fitness Culture from Naked Greeks and Amazons to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the editor at large of Ultraphysical as well as editor in chief of Sculpture magazine.
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