Anti-Climacus

LINK: A good dissection of the pathology behind the anti-McDonald's movement:

"It is striking how morally loaded some of the discussions about food are. In one of the funnier scenes, Healthy Chef Alex - a holistic health counsellor who believes in 'integrating appropriate food choices and lifestyle options' - tries to coax Spurlock away from the 'corrupt' world of meat-eating and towards a Good Life of nuts and lentils (4). Spurlock visits a school where the pupils are calm and attentive and claims that it's a result of their eating healthy school dinners from the Natural Ovens Bakery rather than the sugary fare stuffed down kids' throats in other districts. Food, it seems, is not only about taste, enjoyment or nutrition; what we eat apparently reveals something of our moral character."

And sometimes it seems to me like this particular character of critique infects other areas--the notion that some choices aren't explicable when people make them, and so have to be attributable to some mental deficiency or another (the oh-so-Socratic notion that if only people really understood what their interests truly were, they'd think like me).

It's a bit of a non-sequitur which is about to follow, but not really--this seems to quite frequently bleed over into the political realm, where (usually liberal) people say something to the effect of 'isn't it a shame that all those rural people (or whatever group you like) vote Republican?' because a 'true' ordering of preferences would put them in the Democratic party. Really, this is mostly a symptom of underdescription in theories of individual choice (if you can't understand why people make the choices they do, maybe you don't actually understand them all that well).

And it's only a short leap into crudities and 'aren't we so much better than them'-ness, which is the basis for the lack of civility in politics. It's clear to me that, though I'm not going to vote for Kerry, the world won't fall apart if he gets elected--I don't think that he wants different end results than Bush does, he just wants them by different means (or maybe isn't sure what his means would be, but that doesn't prevent him from wanting the same ends). Why this level of civility is so rarely returned is unclear to me.