Yes, Virginia, it's safe to eat ice cream in public

In the issue dated tomorrow (which appeared awhile ago, obviously, or I wouldn't be talking about it now), The New Republic cast quite a bit of asparagus at the 577-page report of the President's Council on Bioethics entitled Human Dignity and Bioethics. There is certainly cause to cast asparagus. As TNR noted, a quick look at the list of contributors produces a list of people notable primarily for the fact that none of them, with one or two exceptions, actually works in bioethics or any related scientific field, while a preponderance of them are, wait for it, faculty members at Christian institutions of higher education (and mostly we're not talking about Notre Dame or Georgetown).

However, the big brouhaha that's come about on this report revolves around a quote that Steven Pinker attributes on page 4 to Leon Kass (University of Chicago, the American Enterprise Institute, and formerly a contributor to TNR), but which Pinker fails to source:

[Kass] is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

That second paragraph has had a huge airing around Left Blogistan in the last couple of days. And it is deservedly mocked, if for no other reason than that if we take it to its logical conclusion, the Hedgemony would have to shut down the entire restaurant sector, ban concessions at sporting events and other public venues, and mandate something along the lines of what Robert A. Heinlein described in his 1948 juvenile science fiction novel Space Cadet:

Tex wandered on into the second room. "Hey, Oz--come look at this."

Matt and Oscar joined him. There were rows of little closets down each side, ten in all, each with its own curtain. "Oh, yes, our eating booths."

"That reminds me," said Matt. "I thought you had wrecked everything, Oz, when you started talking about eating. But you pulled out of it beautifully."

"I didn't pull out of it; I did it on purpose."

"Why?"

"It was a squeeze play. I had to shock them with the idea that they were indecent, or looked that way to us. It established us as 'people,' from their point of view. After that it was easy." Oscar went on. "Now that we are accepted as people, we've got to be awfully careful not to undo it. I don't like to eat in one of these dark little cubbyholes any better than you do, but we don't dare take a chance of being seen eating--you don't dare even fail to draw the curtain, as one of them might come popping in. Remember, eating is the only sort of privacy they observe."

--Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet (New York: Ballantine Books, 1948, 1975, 1981), p. 188

Kass's attitude in the unsourced quote is indeed worthy of mockery. It's just not entirely clear to me how it can reasonably be used to attack what he's had to say on the question of bioethics, except perhaps to call into question the fact that he's saying anything on that question at all. And while you'd never know it from the biographical information provided in the list of contributors to the report, he does hold an M.D. from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard according to his Wikipedia entry. The more I look into this, the more Pinker's inclusion of that quote in his piece on the bioethics report looks like a strawman. It does not necessarily follow, at least according to the usual principles governing deductive reasoning and formal logic, that a belief that eating ice cream in public is undignified makes one unqualified to have an opinion on the role of human dignity in questions of bioethics. Neither does it mean that every position Kass takes on human dignity must be measured by that one yardstick.

This kind of thing is exactly why professors and editors everywhere are forever harping on the need to cite your sources--and do it rigorously, meticulously, and thoroughly. That this kind of sloppy scholarship can get published in a nationally circulated magazine goes a long way toward explaining the skyrocketing number of students written up each term for plagiarism and other intellectual chicanery. Not only are the students not entirely clear on what plagiarism is (or why it's wrong, or how to avoid it), but they see plenty of examples around them in daily life of people not only getting away with it, but getting paid to get away with it.

(Truth in advertising: I have not, in fact, read every word of the 577 pages of the council's report to verify that there is nothing in there about eating ice cream in public. I did, however, perform multiple word searches on several distinctive words and phrases from the Kass quote that Pinker used--and either found none of them in the council's report or else did not find them in the context of a quote about ice cream. I will happily stipulate that this leaves open the possibility that the Kass piece does indeed contain such a condemnation of the public consumption of ice cream. But I am forced to conclude that, while possible, the likelihood that it does so is vanishingly small.)

Comments

[Andrea]

I've heard Leon Kass (whose children I used to babysit) riff on the dangers of delaying marriage and motherhood, the dangers of not taking one's husband's name... For a while he opposed organ transplants, but he publicly stepped back from that. Sexual reassignment surgery is almost certainly something he would oppose. Eating in public would probably disturb him, although I've seen him at picnics.

The thing about him is that he's a) very conservative and b) insanely unbelievably intelligent. I still think he's wrong most of the time, and he knows that. But the caricatures of his arguments almost never do him justice. He's the rare conservative that I can both vehemently disagree with and still respect -and feel respected by in return.

[bellatrys]

This is ooold blogospheric news: here's the original source and an extended version of the Kass cone quote which we were kicking around in 2005 and the problem with it from an ethical pov is that it betrays a profoundly anti-incarnational attitude towards humanity, a sort of Manichaean "superiority" to the flesh, a yearning for neoplatonic disembodiment, which does *not* lead to good judgment when it comes time for making decisions about what are extremely fleshly matters.

So it's worthy of not only derision but of trepidation concerning putting Kass in a place of making calls which concern Brother Ass, even if [notoriously sexist] Pinker isn't competent to make that argument.