Comments on: Feeling For You

By: mch

mch — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 05:26:36 +0000

To curiosity and humility, I’d add pain and the intense sense of isolation it imposes. I think maybe curiosity and pain (with its isolation) are the priors, humility the result (when all goes well). I want most of all, though, to celebrate with you curiosity, terribly overlooked and undervalued in most current discourses about anything and everything.

By: Realestate Acct

Realestate Acct — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 20:20:09 +0000

To sum up “Do onto others as you would have done onto you” and “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” are excellent rules to be consulted before posting as well as generally in life. Also “Don’t do or say anything you wouldn’t want to read about in the newspaper or have discussed on Twitter.”

By: CarlD

CarlD — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 17:37:43 +0000

Luke, I think you’re right. To me the platonisms of ethics and aesthetics end up much the same way, in attempting to legislate a narrow and largely arbitrary sense of the ideal. I like a more anthropological understanding of right, truth, and beauty, but that puts a lot more pressure on our bandwidth.

Re: fat and identity, and perhaps a different approach to the microaggression standoff, I strongly recommend this work of art: http://www.obeasts.org/

By: Luke

Luke — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 03:09:46 +0000

I think that at least part of these kinds of incidental judgements that people have and the weird fierceness of them in contrast to their weak post-hoc justifications (false compassion) comes from not having a good way to talk about non-instrumental aesthetic concerns.

We (I mean Westerners I guess) cannot really appeal to aesthetics as a justification. Think about grammar. People always justify things like lay/lie or “12 items or fewer” in terms of clarity, as though it were actually likely to confuse someone about meaning. Of course, no one is ever confused about meaning in those cases. However, for someone who has a strong aesthetic sense of which is correct, there is a moment of annoyance, a kind of disgust-related aversion to hearing the wrong one. This is actual source of the grammar pedant’s complaint, but it can’t be expressed as a valid justification because it’s not instrumental to some commonsensical social goal. So they invent concerns about clarity of language. Ditto the driver who is momentarily annoyed by a bicyclist and then concocts arguments about how not sharing in licensing fees makes riders freeloaders. The presence of an element that doesn’t fit smoothly into a mental model of how a system should work (for people like themselves) is the real problem. People do have some interest in keeping their mental model of the world well-defined, if only to lighten cognitive load. What’s problematic is the prioritization of one group’s aesthetic concerns over another’s very lives (e.g. drivers who bully cyclists on the road).

I’m a fat person, or I have been on and off, and I more or less share your take on the situation there. I’m quite sure that people aren’t expressing their real concerns when they talk about health or medical costs. (After all, runners have an extremely high rate of injury and no one thinks that they are anti-social; much to the contrary.) Although I don’t really want to sign up for some kind of identity politics of fatness either, I think it is ultimately rooted in the disgust response, much like the kinds of aesthetic judgements that go along with racism.

I think that not being racist and not being homophobic etc. are special cases of suppressing these extraneous aesthetic requirements with the understanding that some specific dimension of variation needs to be tolerated and integrated into the mental model of how things work — but that tolerance is the result of hard-fought gains specific to each case.