“America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” “The Iron Law of Fashion,” and History

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of

U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing,

according to an extensive new survey by the Pew Research Center.

Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape,

affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups.

While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults,

it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites,

blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults

with only a high school education; and among women as well as men.

‑ From “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” 12 May 2015,

Followup to Pew Research Center’s Study of 2007.

      The Pew Center’s exhaustive study of “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” for 2014 has shown “Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population” since the Pew study of 2007, while “Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.” And that unaffiliated group includes increasing percentages of self-identified atheists (+1.5), agnostics (+1.6), and “Nothing in particular” (+3.7)

      That last group is significant. Atheists care enough about the gods to deny them, and the cliché observation is correct that militant atheists care a great deal; and in many places in America even declaring oneself agnostic is taking a position. As Eric Hoffer wrote, “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not,” and “Nothing in particular” may be the closest we have to such gentle cynics.

      Anyway, as I write the Pew study has been making news, and the general trends are significant. I’ll throw in here, though with those arguing that the results are not definitively significant since the studies give only two “snapshots” of American religiosity and the trend lines between two points. The whole graph is dynamic, ongoing, and, tracked for more than a few years, a whole hell of a lot more complicated.

      First, there is what has been called “the iron law of fashion change,” which I reduce to “the iron law of fashion” and relate to Mark Twain’s suggestion in “Corn-Pone Opinions,” “that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing — if it has indeed ever existed” (published posthumously, 1923). Allow here for satiric exaggeration and oversimplification, and insist strongly that fashions in politics and religion are of greater consequence than whether beards are “in” or “out” for men or women wear skirts or jeans. Still, even as there are fashions in appearance and manners and literature, even so there are fashions in politics and in religion. If it’s a human behavior, allow for fashion, always.

      Fashion viewed more earnestly, broadly, and over long periods gets us to historical trends and ethnic and cultural variation.

      I'll emphasize historical trends and note that over the long haul human cultures have tended to become more secular, at least insofar as increasing percentages of people don’t use theology to account for storms or volcanic eruptions or eclipses, plagues, or invasions. Still, like fashions, “These things go in cycles.”

Knocking around Athens some 400 years BCE, one would probably hear underemployed old men complaining about increasing irreligion among pampered young men, and the execution of Socrates was a kind of sacrifice to assuage the unease of the City (although I have some sympathy with occasionally banishing particularly obstreperous philosophers, as a warning to the rest). The concern of such religious conservatives was, to put it mildly, misplaced. The next few centuries saw the spread of mystery cults all through the Greek world and beyond, and in the time of Rome interest in even such exotic cults as that of the Jews — and then the rise of Christianity and then Islam.

      And eventually both Church and Mosque ceased being mass movements of the fanatical faithful and settled down to ritual and institutions in the Medieval Church and courts and schools in the golden age of Islam.

      Except for the occasional (periodic?) outbursts of religious fervor in Crusades and answering Jihad, obsession with death in time of plague and hysteria over heresy and, later, the witch threat.

      And then there was a relatively secular Renaissance in Italy ca. 1300, expanding out to most of the rest of darkest Europe by 1500. Walking around Florence much of that time or Rome during the reigns of the more corrupt Popes, one might talk of a growing secularization. Or you might talk that way unless you ran into the followers of Girolamo Savonarola crying out for purifying Florence of the 1490s — and doing some direction-action purifying on their own. Or unless you were observing carefully in the German mini-states in the 1510s and noted that a rising nationalism (or at least dislike for Italians and other foreigners) had religious significance, and that significance wasn’t a desire for secularism.

      In the West, the sporadically and somewhat secular Renaissance was followed by Reformation and then reformations of the reformation: and Reformation was followed by the small religious wars of the 16^th and then near-genocidal wars of 17^th centuries of the emphatically Christian era. (The Wars of Religion had other causes, but religion was a biggie.)

      And then came the 18^th-century Enlightenment and increasing secularism followed by Revival and 19^th-century middle-class religiosity — and general indifference in the upper and lower classes — and on into the 20^th century with our ups and down of Fundamentalism (a modern reaction against Modernism), evangelical passion, spiritual experimentation … and increasing numbers of loud atheists and louder fans of football or music or American Exceptionalism or other alternatives to religious faith.

And there were similar patterns of relatively secularity and Revival in Judaism, Islam, and other faiths.

      Most people most of the time want at least a little significant meaning to our lives, and this requires some varierty of faith and/or wilful blindness to the actual triviality of the human species — to say nothing of human individuals — in the larger scheme of things. If you’re doing okay, you can successfully slide on through believing in yourself and your luck and your immediate social world and, beyond that — “Nothing in particular.” Or it may be convenient to join a church or get involved with some other religious community.

      Whatever.

      Other people, in other times: in bad times, other situations, other cultures — then you might try the religion thing or return to your ancestral faith.

      And the same will be true for billions of others; and so the trivial wheels of fashion will spin on, and the Great Wheel of historical cycles will grind along, with luck not going into high gear — Crusades or 17^th-century style — and, with luck, not grinding down cities and peoples in the name of the gods or God or something else greater than ourselves.

Why NSA, FBI, and Other Folk Will Continue Spying on Americans

            I'm writing this blog post shortly after a Federal court has ruled illegal — illegal, not specifically unConstitutional — "The unprecedented and unwarranted bulk collection of the entire U.S. population's phone records by the government" of the United States, and not long before the US Congress debates extending key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act beyond their expiration date of 1 June 2015.

            Moving into a major election year, the Congress is not going to cut back significantly on surveillance of Americans nor are they — or any other moderate-to-highly visible group of politicians — going to cut back significantly in years without major elections. The surveillance of Americans will continue, along with anyone else heavily using electronic communications for two basic reasons.

            First, because large-scale bulk collection of data can be done and is routinely done by various political States and a hell of a lot more by "Non-Governmental Organizations" in a broad sense of the term: including commercial operations. American and others spill our guts to the companies, so the data are out there; and being out there, that data will be collected, sifted, analyzed, shared, sold, and used: by commercial operations and by security operations.

            Second, because no politician with ambitions, and only a vanishingly small number of politicians of any sort would be dumb enough to be totally honest on the subject on record.

            Let me repeat a thought experiment. Question to the President of the United States, or would-be President: "Sir (or Ma'am), given that the President's main duty is to protect the American people, will you do everything possible to prevent an attack on US citizens?" Answer from the President (or candidate):

          I'm not going to ad lib some bullshit clichés here, and you won't get a good sound bite; so I've e-mailed my text to your smart phones but will read it for the record.

          First off, Thomas Hobbes in the 17^th c. said that the first duty of any Sovereign was to protect his, her, or its subjects, and that's true enough; but Hobbes, at one time notoriously, followed that premise about protecting subjects to a logical conclusion that so long as the Sovereign provided protection, he, she, or it had to be obeyed absolutely; and Hobbes pushed his argument to recommend what we'd call totalitarian government.

                   The first duty of the President of the United States is "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States": my first job is defending America, and performing that job can cost the lives of some Americans or, at times, a lot of Americans. The first job of the President includes preserving the US Bill of Rights, and those rights can endanger Americans.

          Most Americans most of the time would be safer in a police state. That we don't have a police state protects racial and ethnic minorities and people with unpopular opinions, but the net effect, even among minorities, is a loss of lives of people who'd survive better under an authoritarian of even totalitarian regime. That "tree of liberty," as Mr. Jefferson said, "must be refreshed from time to time" with blood, but not just "the blood of patriots and tyrants" but also of average, innocent folk who'd be not be killed — or wounded or maimed — if America were as rigorously policed as Germany under the Third Reich: but, in a non-racist way, with equal opportunities for all trouble-makers to be neutralized.

          So, my duty is to protect Americans, but limited by — as the truism has it — limited by balancing safety with liberty.

         And balancing safety and liberty with concerns beyond liberty.          So: Will I do "everything possible to prevent an attack"? No, I will not.          What is possible to be done pretty obviously includes things that have been done. What has been done has been very well documented by chroniclers and historians, and in our time by courageous people working for groups like Amnesty international.

          There has been at least one regime that has tortured children in front of their parents to break the parents and get them to cooperate in suppressing antigovernment activity — or minimally to terrorize the parents and population. Will I order the torture of even one child to prevent an attack that might save many Americans? No, I will not. I will leave it as an absolute prohibition, literally absolute: no torturing of children, not even if doing such evil might — always might — do good.          Great powers including the United Kingdom and the United States have bombed cities to flaming rubble to pursue war aims. The US invaded Iraq on the possibility it might become a threat. Would I order a military nuclear attack on a foreign city to preempt a terrorist attack on a US city? I would not. It's bloody arithmetic, but violating the taboo against nuclear weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners wouldn't be justified even if it saved the lives of three or four or five thousand Americans.

          Get the point?

          Toughen up, people. If you're going to be free, you and your children are going to have to take risks. If we as a country are to behave morally, some of us who might've lived long, healthy lives will end up dead or wounded or maimed.

            So, I'll protect your butts but also your freedom and that of your descendants. I'll do what I can to keep you safe, but I will also "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and try to keep us, as a people, decent human beings.

          If you don't like it,
                   impeach me. OR

                   don't vote for me as President. OR

                   vote against me for re-election.
 

            Now, what are the odds on such a speech getting made, or, if made, the speaker's having a career in US politics?

            So long as politicians can't say, "Hell, no! I won't do everything possible to protect you," they're going to have to do such relatively innocuous "things" as spy on us.

Gay Marriage: The Thin Edge of the Camel's Nose Heading Down the Slippery Slope

[Justice Samuel Alito] went on to ask why, if

marriage were a fundamental right, four people —

“let’s say they’re all consenting adults,

highly educated. They’re all lawyers” —

could be denied the right to marry and form a single union.

 — Jeffrey Rosen, Yahoo News

            We should take seriously what Amy Davidson has called "Justice Alito's Polygamy Perplex" and the possibility that the legalization of gay marriage in the USA and elsewhere will be what's facetiously called the thin edge of the camel's nose heading down the slippery slope … in this case a slope leading to a reexamination of not only marriage under the law but also new thinking about family formation.

            Good God, I hope so! I hope we slide down that slope with literally "all deliberate speed" — in the old sense, before that line became a sick joke with resistance to desegregation.

            Jeffrey Rosen tells us that "[…] Justice Kennedy has insisted that laws disadvantaging gays and lesbians violate their dignity and their constitutional rights to liberty and equality," and Justice Kennedy is correct. What I'm interested in, though, includes the disadvantaging of gays by their not being able to take advantage of the crasser advantages of marriage.

            I'm an unmarried/never-married guy with some background in history and ecology, and I understand that marriage has long functioned and functioned well for what is known as "natalism" or "pronatalism," the encouragement of the production and raising of children for the security of the State (see Exodus 1.8 f.) and prosperity of society: "People are the riches of a nation." But some time after Earth's human population hit three billion, pronatalist theory became pretty problematic ecologically, and military engagements throwing mass armies at one another haven't worked out that well from, say, the Napoleonic Wars through the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-89. And with a current human population of over seven billion and rising rapidly, with a significant number of countries with nuclear weapons for serious warfare, with climate change offering significant challenges and nonrenewable resources increasingly not renewed — let's say that nowadays natalism as public policy is a bad idea.

            So non-reproductive unions can be in themselves a good idea.

            Non-reproductive marriages where the couple adopts are an even better idea.

            It could also be a good idea to have reproductive and family-raising units of more than two consenting adults.

            The nuclear family has been a pretty popular way to manage marriage and child-rearing, but it has hardly been the only way; and the sort of rigorously nuclear family that's the dominant ideal in America nowadays — Mom, Dad, kid(s) — is a relatively new invention. Until recently, many children grew up in households, with a grandparent or two around (if they lived that long), and in the house or fairly close by, there were relatives, friends, and often a servant or, for the rich, a staff.

            Indeed, I'm not that ancient, and I grew up in a functioning neighborhood in Chicago where there were significant adults in my life beyond my parents, and who helped raise me.

            Anthropologists and science fiction writers have documented (anthropologists) or imagined (fiction writers) complex ways for getting children a good deal of adult attention in a manner that offers a range of models somewhat beyond Mom and Dad and without, as in the nuclear option, exhausting Mom and Dad — especially Mom — and often driving them, and the kids, up the wall.

            There are alternatives: "line marriage" is suggested in at least four novels by Robert A. Heinlein, and various forms of threesomes are suggested in novels such as Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. And Ursula K. Le Guin, author of much anthropological science fiction, has a good deal of fun with the anthropologically baroque family life on her planet O, where the people are divided into two pretty much arbitrary "moieties" — halves — and "Marriage […] is a foursome, the sedoretu — a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships." Le Guin concludes her explanation drily with "It’s just as complicated as it sounds, but aren’t most marriages?"

            What Justice Alito sees as a possible reduction to the absurd of the logic of gay marriage might turn out a good idea for variations on the theme of marriage.

            Among other things the debate on gay marriage should encourage consideration of alternatives to the nuclear family, and the debate should combine that consideration of examination of real conflicts on marriage and, well, money. We need to debate vigorously the crasser advantages of marriage in tax breaks for married couples as such and tax deductions for children, even as those children are eligible for public support: for a major example, public schools.

            I'm a former teacher and was raised a Chicago liberal; and I believe with all my heart in well-funded public education such as I got. I support downright generous public funding of schools and childcare and preschools, plus generous tax breaks for the first child and for adopted children. And for the second child for a couple, and maybe a third, in case, as my mother would've said, "In case, God forbid, something bad happens." Beyond that third kid, however, we need to talk.

            In a world of seven billion people, should couples get tax breaks for exceeding a sensible bag limit for children?

            Gay couples not reproducing are moving in the right direction. Gay couples adopting, are doing even better.

            And a reproducing foursome that wants a third biological kid — well that's good, too.

            From the Old Stone Age into the middle of the 20^th century, encouraging families was an excellent idea. It can still be a good idea, but we must expand the definition of family to include various combinations of consenting adults and, sometimes, their kids. And we must get down to wonkish details about tax codes and crass discussions of advantages for families in terms of money.

On Liberty: Required Vaccinations, Calorie Counts, & Food Pimping

            In 1970 or thereabout — anyway, sufficiently long ago for the relevant statute of limitations to have run out — I told the truth to an agent of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and probably misled him.

            I told the agent, "Mr. N__ is a very patriotic young man," which indeed he was. When he entered the University of Illinois, he didn't just take ROTC in the standard varieties most of us took, since required to, but entered Marine ROTC and had every intention to go off to Southeast Asia to fight for his country. As time and the war wore on, and as Mr. N__ studied US warfare in Vietnam and environs, he came to believe first that the war was ill-advised, then that it was wrong, and finally that it was an unjust war and immoral — and Mr. N__ became a highly active participant of the anti-War movement.

            Indeed, Mr. N__ was more active in the movement than I and, let's say, unfanatical in his devotion to nonviolence. He also rendered important services that I got to observe when he and I were marshals at a demonstration and one of our local Anarchists or outside provocateurs needed to be kept moving along and called Mr. N__ and me "Peace pigs."

            (Yes, we had our troublemakers in the Movement, and the Powers that Were supplied provocateurs, and even the Peace Movement occasionally needed some muscle. And Mr. N__'s mere assertive presence was enough to keep the moment peaceful.)

            Mr. N__ loved America and served it, so he was a patriot.

            And so I affirmed to the FBI guy, in full knowledge that I spoke the truth but probably not a truth that the FBI leadership, at the time, would accept.

            A lot of that was going on 1970 or thereabouts: some really serious disagreements on definitions of words like "patriot" as in whether a patriotic young American man resists his government when his government does evil or keeps his mouth shut, submits to the draft, and fights when he's told to.

            I state the matter as I would have back then and will state it even more emphatically now. America lost the Vietnam War. We're still here. We've got problems, but we're doing okay, and we'd be doing better if we had told the French to go to hell in 1946 and never fought in Indochina. Therefore no vital interests of the United States were involved in the war: had vital interests been involved — some "existential threat" as politicians say nowadays, there would have been horrible consequences when we lost. Q.E.D.

            So Mr. N__ was a patriot because he acted out of love of his country, and he was right.

            You do not, however, have to believe that to accept the point of the story for this blog post; you may indeed believe that Mr. N__ and I and the other peaceniks were traitors. The point is that argument over key words was and remains important, words like "patriot" and "traitor."

            A decade and a bit before I talked to the FBI agent — before the 1960s and "the Movement" and the US forms of "The Troubles," William Arrowsmith of the University of Texas suggested that defining key terms was crucial during periods of stress in ancient Athens and that the great Greek tragedies could be analyzed as each defining a key term contested (as we'd later say) in Athenian culture. So Sophocles's Philoctetes was about defining timē ("price," "worth," someone's value) and Euripides's The Bacchae was an examination of sophia, "wisdom."

            There's a brief shtick I heard among country-western singers that starts with the rhetorical question, "'Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?'" and responds to it, "Shee-ut! Not while there's outright theft." And I flattered Arrowsmith and a tradition of Shakespeare scholars in writing a dissertation in the late 1960s into 1971, mostly on defining "wisdom" and "folly" in Shakespeare's major mature tragedies, with glances at other key words like "Nature" with a capital and "nature" without, "man" and "manly," and "traitor."

            Recently, I've been re-listening to Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer (1989) and Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Region Cultures of North America (2012). Woodard's work stems from Fischer's, and both look at competing cultural values, including meanings of some key words such as "order" and, what I've finally arrived at, liberty.

            When we were looking over the "unalienable rights" part of the US Declaration of Independence, one of my students noted that Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, was "a simple hypocrite!" I thought for a moment and said, "Not simple." Jefferson, as a well-educated and very bright person, was a hypocrite, if a complex one, in claiming liberty while owning slaves, but his contemporaries in the Virginia 1% ca. 1776 weren't hypocrites, at least not on this issue.

            It's safe to assume that most Virginia aristocrats didn't think enough about political issues to be hypocrites, and those who did think thought in terms of "republican liberty" of the old Roman sort, where owning slaves was part of aristocratic liberty. Owning slaves gave the elite freedom from servile manual labor — significant word, servile — and embodied the independence and power to order about one's inferiors, plus the authority where those inferiors usually obeyed and the power to coerce them when they got uppity.

            Liberty meant elite independence from interference from above, and the ability to enforce one's will on those below oneself in the hierarchical order of things.

            "Liberty" (libertas, classic liberty) was not a simple word.

            "Liberty" still isn't simple, although aristocrats nowadays usually have the brains not to call themselves aristocrats and to condescend more politely to people they consider their inferiors. Nowadays liberty gets most contested in claims of freedom from government regulation in such matters as sex, religion, commerce, and dealing with children.

            Dealing frequently in blog posts with sex and religion, I'm going to restrict myself to a couple issues on commerce and kids, and I'm going to start with a statement on liberty that's become pretty standard for traditional American liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Indeed, when I first read it at age eighteen — as soon as I'd puzzled out the old-fashioned language — it seemed to me a commonsense statement of the obvious. This is from John Stuart Mill's classic 1859 essay "On Liberty," where, he says,

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle [….], that the sole end for which mankind are warranted […] in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any [adult] member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. […] The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. […] Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. ("Introductory," paragraph 9)

         The principle was paraphrased to me as a child as "Your right to swing your arms starts at the next kid's nose," and there is a good chance you'll agree with it. The challenge for Mill was applying his elegant principle in the messy real world, bringing his full "Essay" to over 110 pages; and application remains a challenge. To begin with, Mill was a laissez faire, "leave it be," hands-off libertarian radical when it came to commerce. He wanted the government to stay out of the marketplace. But: but Mill was a laisse-faire, "leave it be," hands-off libertarian radical when it came to commerce on the grounds of "utility," what we might call pragmatic grounds. In advanced commercial societies it was usually better, he believed, to just leave the market do its thing; but commerce is necessarily a social activity in which people's conduct definitely "concerns others" — and therefore could be regulated "to prevent harm to others."

         Also, Mill excludes children from his principle of liberty and, unfortunately, "those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage." Hey, he was radical for 1859, but that allowed for a heavy dose of what we'd call ethnocentrism and condescension for the "wogs" of the Earth: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." As we used to joke, "As H. Rap Brown would say" — a Black Power activist — "'Damn White of him to say that ….'"

            Anyway, it's still relevant that Mill would have State and society protect children and young people below the age of majority even from themselves; and he goes on to insist that "There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others" that any full adult in a society "may rightfully be compelled to perform" in various kinds of "joint work necessary to the interest of the society" that offers us protection" and "to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill usage," concluding that "whenever it is obviously a man’s duty to do," something he may "rightfully be made responsible to society for not doing." This follows from the Principle of Liberty because, clearly, "A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction […]" — although he had of be careful with trickier cases of making people do something positive to help others as opposed to just forbidding them to hurt others.

            I clearly don't have a right to swing my arms randomly into some other guy's nose, but things get tricky in cases were I may have an ethical obligation to try to stop him from beating on some third person. Those fictional corporate "persons" the US Supreme Court has been much concerned about can clearly be stopped from doing harm, such as selling tainted meat, but can they be made to reduce harm or even do some good?

            There is also the problem when people profit by encouraging and/or arranging for other people to do that which society thinks will harm those others, even if Mill's principle would have them free harm themselves. If an adult is free is sell his or more often her sexual services and other adults are free to purchase those services, it may still be permissible to forbid someone to act as a pimp.

            Which brings us to some issues in our time.

            By Mill's principle, it would be tyrannical for State or Society to prohibit an action if it hurts some adult individual if that hurt is completely and entirely confined to the individual acting and suffering the action. If you want to ruin your health in one way or another, that, in itself, is something an adult "you" is free to do. But if State and society may only act "to prevent harm to others," we have often acted "to prevent harm to others" in the area of public health.

            If you've got a serious contagious disease, the State can order you to stay home, and the State and your neighbors are justified in enforcing a quarantine, even if quarantine blatantly and seriously restricts your liberty.

            But what about a positive action like inoculations against contagious diseases, especially diseases of children?

            Back when I was doing summer work in the bio-science and medical biz, I was taught, "There is no such thing as an absolutely safe procedure," and that theory was reinforced for me when I drove home a colleague with a high fever from our inoculations at Illinois Public Health — the bubonic plague shot probably — and when I myself almost got a vein torn just getting blood drawn. Some kids are going to get bad reactions from inoculations, and, given the great law of Nature, "Shit Happens," a small number of those reactions will be dangerous and a very small number will be deadly. The safest thing for your kid would be to live in an area where just about everyone else has had inoculations or a childhood bout of some disease, avoid the shots, and depend on "herd immunity."

            Can the State coerce people to forego that game and get their kids inoculated; and can Society, as in the neighbors, act on our own to shame "Goddamn freeloaders!"?

            Uh, yeah. The answer to the question is "Yes." Carefully and reluctantly, we can so act; it is the obligation of State and Society to protect kids generally, not just yours, and it's a right and obligation of State and society to compel "positive acts for the benefit of others" in protecting public health.

            A more problematic situation involves commerce and speech and the somewhat paradoxical idea that society might have to allow people to act as whores and johns (and janes?) — in the interest of liberty — but could, without injustice, forbid pimping.

            And, of course, there can be regulation of commerce when there are good utilitarian (and for Mill, Utilitarian) reasons for regulating, especially when, again, public health is involved.

            So: Even in the midst of an obesity "epidemic," Carl's Jr. is free to make obscenely fattening burger combinations — 1230 calories in one Half-Pound Mile High Bacon Cheeseburger — and adult customers have the liberty to buy and eat them (although I shouldn't, since one of those Mile Highs delivers the calorie allowance for an inactive day for a man my size). But Carl's Jr. has had some fun, and apparently a good deal of success, coming close to literalizing the expression "food porn" in their 2014-15 commercials. What are their rights, using John Stuart Mill's approach, for commercials and marketing?

            Even adding in the US First Amendment so beloved by aging dissidents such as I (Life Member, ACLU) — even adding free speech, there's a fairly simple solution here.

            You have the right to stuff yourself at Carl's Jr. or more sufficiently with a Denny's Grand Slamwich, with Hash Browns (1528 calories), but they have an obligation to tell you the calorie count, and not just on their websites or a smartphone app.

            Those brilliantly produced TV ads can have a slow-moving crawl across the bottom in a readable large font and clear colors giving the calorie count of the food pushed by those gorgeous models. Ditto for the menus, as some jurisdictions have already required.

            Mill's principle of liberty was paraphrased by one of my students as "Freedom is the right to screw yourself," and I have asserted the right of people to "Go to hell in our own manners, so long as we don't seriously annoy the neighbors." There is no absolute right, however, to encourage people to screw themselves or grease too much the road to perdition, or to obesity.

            "Sex workers of the world, unite! Solidarity forever! Form unions and free yourselves of pimps!" And even before the unionization of sex workers, the pimping of other vices, like gluttony, can at least be rationally regulated.

            Obesity isn't an epidemic, but it is a problem in American public health, and other places penetrated by American "food ways." Pushing fast food (etc.) is commerce, and especially when commerce affects public health we can at least demand disclosure and helping to ensure people's informed choice is buying a product.

            I want to see calorie counts on all menus for any food-pusher operations bigger than a pushcart or a mom-and-pop corner dive. And Carl's Jr.: If you stick with those models, better put the calorie count on the bottom and in a large diagonal band across the screen, with the numbers where people's eyes go when checking out the models.