Curb Your Enthusiasms

Moralists left and right want to control your carnal desires.

Radley Balko from the March 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

There's nothing inherently wrong with advocating personal restraint or self-denial, be it in food or in flesh. The problem with Shapiro and Spurlock is that neither stops at mere advocacy. Completing Cohen's pattern, both call for government intervention. Neither is satisfied simply to urge better choices. Both seem genuinely perturbed that "bad" choices are available in the first place, and they are ready to use laws to take them away.

Spurlock dismisses the healthier options available at McDonald's and other fast food restaurants, such as salads and fresh fruit, on the grounds that only a small percentage of diners actually order them. His beef with McDonald's, then, seems to be not that the company doesn't offer nutritious food but that it offers more indulgent options as well. He then heaps praise on Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a politician he says "gets it." "Getting it" apparently means sponsoring, as Harkin has, a panoply of legislation aimed at authorizing more government oversight of the food industry, including mandatory nutrition labeling on restaurant labels, Federal Trade Commission restrictions on all advertising to minors, and Medicare coverage for diet counseling.

Shapiro is blunter. He writes, "We must press government to use the force of the law against pornography, obscenity, and indecency across the board...from TV to radio to the Internet, from music to movies." He also endorses the drive to let the FCC censor cable and satellite television, including pay channels such as HBO and Showtime.

Given the intellectual vacuity of their books, it's tempting to dismiss Spurlock and Shapiro as too shallow to be taken seriously. But they are taken seriously--or, at least, many of their arguments are. Moral panics come and go. The panics that leave laws behind are the ones that do lasting damage--and that tend to return.

The debate over vice is often framed as a conflict between the rights of individuals and the collective good. But that gives alarmists like Spurlock and Shapiro too much credit. More often than not, the actual collective good is plugging along just fine, whatever the Chicken Littles may say. The real debate is usually between the right of individuals to live their lives as they please and the desires of others to control them. As H. L. Mencken put it, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it."