Cake-shaming

The thin cakey line between libertinism and Leviathan

First, a bit of Mary news: CYBORG ARGUMENTS LIVE!!! UnHerd members can tune in at 7pm UK time tomorrow evening (18 January) for my debate with Elise Bohan, transhumanism advocate and author of Future Superhuman.

And US PUBLICATION DATE!!! I’m thrilled to say I have have one: Feminism Against Progress will be published in the USA by Regnery Books on 25 April, and American readers can now pre-order a print copy. I’m hoping to make a few in-person appearances on the East Coast around those dates, so if that’s your part of the world stand by for updates.

Meanwhile, in the actual news, there’s been much harrumphing about a report in yesterday’s Times that Oxford health professor and head of the Food Standards Agency Susan Jebb said ‘office cake culture’ should be as frowned upon as causing others to inhale your cigarette smoke.

Speaking at the first meeting of the Times Health Commission, Jebb correctly noted that personal choice isn’t always enough - because we all, as the meme has it, live in a society.

“We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment,” she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.”

Her words have infuriated Right-liberals, for whom there should be no constraint on individual behaviour save “personal choice” and, perhaps, the benign “invisible hand”. Why, laments anti-anti-smoking campaigner Christopher Snowdon, is “a nominally Conservative government” still granting power to “these awful statists”?

Snowdon has made a professional career out of denouncing the excesses of nanny-statism and advocating personal responsibility. But here he has it backwards. Leaving aside the fact that, as the Times article makes clear, Jebb wasn’t speaking on behalf of the organisation she leads, but in a personal capacity, what she’s proposing here is not in fact a further incursion of nanny-statism. Rather, it’s the only effective guard against it: public stigma.

If Right-liberals such as Snowdon are dead set on the state having nothing to say about personal choices, Left-liberals feel much the same about the people around us. This extends, well beyond the choice to eat (or not eat) cake, going as far as to say it doesn’t really matter what disgusting things you get up to, it’s no one’s business but yours provided it’s consensual. Anyone who thinks otherwise is “kink-shaming”.

The trouble, though, is that we still do, in fact, live in a society. What we do very much impacts those around us, and others really do often have skin in the game where our personal, individual choices are concerned. And as Jebb rightly notes, not everyone is equipped with the social and cultural capital to make ‘good’ decisions in a world stripped of guard-rails.

Both Right-liberals and Left-liberals recognise this, but have less than adequate solutions for the problem of what to do with people who don’t always get it right, and whose mistakes impact others. On the Right, this amounts in practice to hectoring those who struggle with ‘good’ choices about “personal responsibility”. On the Left, the usual answer is top-down regulation of individual behaviour (for example via junk food advertising bans), so social damage limitation needn’t run the risk of making anyone feel ashamed or told what to do.

And the logical endpoint of this two-pronged assault on informal mechanisms for ensuring good behaviour is an order characterised by moral lawlessness (you may not constrain my behaviour) in tandem with impersonal tyranny (individuals will not constrain your behaviour, but an impersonal system will manage it anyway). That is, a kind of libertine Leviathan. No critique of the nanny state is complete unless it recognises that it’s ultimately driven by this deep aversion to moral judgement.

And the only possible alternative to the libertine Leviathan is in fact what Jebb proposes, which is mis-identified by Snowdon here as nanny-statism: not regulatory norms, but social ones. If it’s Not Done to ply people with cake, less cake will be forthcoming. We may argue the toss about whether or not this will scratch the surface of what’s making us all fat, but Right-liberals have to accept that the only alternative to the libertine Leviathan is, in fact, public shame.

This also extends well beyond cake to many other fields of social behaviour, as the always provocative feminist magazine Reduxx understands:

Wielding public shame has historically been women’s preserve. Arguably, it still is: not a week goes by without some unfortunate being pilloried on the internet for having a Bad Opinion - something that, again, Right-liberals are fond of denouncing. But the field of contest should not be the role - or necessity - of public shame, but its content. We are pointing an immensely powerful social force at entirely the wrong things.

The vanguardists of public shaming are, and have always been, bourgeois women. And at present, the loudest voices in this group insist that this tremendous power be wielded only in the name of ‘intersectional’ social codes, and not in defence of healthy lifestyles, public order, or sexual self-restraint. As long as this continues to be the case, Leviathan and its libertine denizens will continue to flourish - urged on, in different ways, by liberals of both Left and Right.