Leon Kass on ice cream cones

I apparently missed this back in 2003 -- University of Chicago bioethicist Leon Kass, the chair of President Bush's bioethics council, objects to the public licking of ice cream cones (via Kieran Healy):

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.

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. 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. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. 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."

Kass, Leon: The Hungry Soul at 148-149. (University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999)

Our civilization is doomed!

Comments

[News Reference]

That's Leon Kass being satirical, right?

Please tell me Republican Bush's stem cell policies, the policies that put the brakes on America investing in possibly the most promising health science research in human history, wasn't dictated by a moralistic Luddite who thought that "eating in public is offensive."

Republican Bush's concern over stem cell research always seemed like didactic puffery, but it strains the mind to think that America's stem cell science policy was informed by someone who could seriously write, "it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing)."

If the revulsion from such tripe shows up on the face, does that count as one of the "involuntary bodily movements" that is "shameful behavior" in the view of this regressive right winger?

Republicans are all to ready to usher back in the Dark Ages.