Is it even possible to have a civilized debate about these things?
I fear not. The reason is religious, but not in a contemporary sense: we associate being overweight with overconsumption (which ain't necessarily so, in this era of high fructose corn syrup injection), so fat is a symptom of Sinfulness (in the form of Gluttony), and being overweight is Divine Punishment. This is all low-level cultural baggage inherited from the middle ages, and it's bloody hard to do away with.
To make matters worse, if this aspect of the debate is framed in Catholic guilt, the gilding on the frame is all Protestant -- divine favour is shown to those who deserve it, so if you're poor/ill/fat you've clearly sinned, somewhere along the line. (This is most evident in US social policy, but there's a good chunk of beat-the-poor over here in the UK social services.)
Finally, as Ken MacLeod pointed out recently, we go through a roughly 150-year cycle of puritanism here in the UK, and we're overdue for another wave of it. It's not necessarily religious, and he figures a lot of the current wave is finding its outlet in green/environmental politics -- not the common-sense "we need to stop poisoning ourselves" strain, but the hair-shirt environmentalism that berates people for not bending the neck before the new dogma. Fat people make highly visible targets, overconsumption can easily be associated with environmental damage in the minds of the onlookers, and it's always useful to have someone to whack on pour encourager les autres.
I don't think we're going to see a civilized debate about these things -- not this generation, anyway -- because the folks hosting the debate want it to be uncivilized.
no subject
I fear not. The reason is religious, but not in a contemporary sense: we associate being overweight with overconsumption (which ain't necessarily so, in this era of high fructose corn syrup injection), so fat is a symptom of Sinfulness (in the form of Gluttony), and being overweight is Divine Punishment. This is all low-level cultural baggage inherited from the middle ages, and it's bloody hard to do away with.
To make matters worse, if this aspect of the debate is framed in Catholic guilt, the gilding on the frame is all Protestant -- divine favour is shown to those who deserve it, so if you're poor/ill/fat you've clearly sinned, somewhere along the line. (This is most evident in US social policy, but there's a good chunk of beat-the-poor over here in the UK social services.)
Finally, as Ken MacLeod pointed out recently, we go through a roughly 150-year cycle of puritanism here in the UK, and we're overdue for another wave of it. It's not necessarily religious, and he figures a lot of the current wave is finding its outlet in green/environmental politics -- not the common-sense "we need to stop poisoning ourselves" strain, but the hair-shirt environmentalism that berates people for not bending the neck before the new dogma. Fat people make highly visible targets, overconsumption can easily be associated with environmental damage in the minds of the onlookers, and it's always useful to have someone to whack on pour encourager les autres.
I don't think we're going to see a civilized debate about these things -- not this generation, anyway -- because the folks hosting the debate want it to be uncivilized.