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Huh? What a strange claim. The entire basis of the critical-constructivist worldview at the heart of modern leftist social critique is a hyperfocus on how social attitudes and shaming have a deterministic effect on nearly every aspect of our lives. That’s a key pillar of what they mean by “systemic racism” and “fatphobia” and “heteronormativity”. They think about these things every bit as often as you do, if not more.
The difference is that they believe that reducing the amount of shame individuals experience based on unchosen identity characteristics is a key goal of social justice.
You claim that shaming fat people would have a direct impact on reducing obesity. The leftist rejoinder would have two parts:
Do we actually have strong evidence that this is true? Sure, people in, say, the 1920’s were less fat than people in the 2020s. And yes, at that time, fat-shaming was also more common. But do we actually have any concrete evidence that there’s a causal relationship between these two phenomena? What if people were less fat because of material factors, such as the prevalence of cigarette smoking, the far greater average level of physical labor performed by the average person on both a professional and domestic basis, and the difference in the chemical composition of foods at the time? (Lack of preservatives, lack of seed oils, etc.) If that’s the case, then people’s relative lack of obesity at the time was not primarily due to some greater level of civilizational virtue, and certainly not primarily due to people consciously endeavoring not to be fat because of the threat of shaming. In other words, those people didn’t earn their thinness in some important moral sense. They simply followed the normal patterns of life at the time, and it happened that those patterns were less lipogenic — no idea if that’s a real word — than the normal patterns of life now. Those same people, even if exposed to the exact same level of social messaging about the dangers of fatness as they were in the 1920s, would still turn out fat nowadays because the material changes in our society make it much more difficult to remain thin given the exact same effort level. So, the shaming doesn’t do much of anything except make people feel miserable about things that are largely out of their control, barring very atypical levels of agency.
Even if the shaming did have some measurable effect, it’s still morally wrong and we still shouldn’t do it. The tradeoff isn’t worth it. For every one fat person you manage to inspire to lose weight via shaming and bullying, you’ll just have twenty who spiral into depression and self-sabotage. Shaming has highly variable effects depending on the specific traits of the victim; not only that victim’s personality, but also his or her material circumstances. If that individual has a thyroid condition, for example, shaming is very unlikely to produce an impact on that person’s fatness, but is very likely to produce strong feelings of shame which will achieve nothing positive. And of course, this is all without getting into the frankly somewhat selfish, self-aggrandizing, and ugly motives underneath most actual acts of bullying. Bullying is rarely a prosocial act done for the benefit of the bullied; that’s a self-serving narrative concocted after the fact. Shaming degrades the shamer as much as it damages the shamed. It makes society coarser, more mean-spirited, lower-trust, etc. It encourages the worst and most predatory aspects of the human personality. All so maybe on the margins, 10% of fat people will be a bit less fat for some period of time. Not worth it at all!
Now, to be clear, I personally don’t endorse all of this. But it’s a coherent and sophisticated worldview. It’s certainly not that leftists just haven’t thought about shaming and its importance.
Maybe "ignore" is the wrong word and you could say "deny" instead, but 1 is exactly what I'm saying, they would deny the effect of fat-shaming on reducing obesity or deny that it played a critical role socially. They wouldn't say that fat-shaming had no effect on humans, but that it had no positive effect and generally not engage with the serious tradeoffs at play.
They are engaging with the tradeoffs — they just arrive at a different conclusion than you do! Firstly because there’s a very real disagreement about the facts. Again, do you actually have any evidence that fat-shaming contributed significantly to why people were less fat a hundred years ago? I’m not saying it’s implausible, but I do think there’s a lot more going on and that the picture is genuinely quite complicated.
There is no consensus “leftist” position on obesity. Contrary to what you may imagine, dispositions toward the “fat acceptance” movement remain quite varied among progressives. Positions range from “fatness is entirely socially-constructed, there’s actually no serious health problems associated with fatness, why don’t we just rethink our society to make it more accommodating towards the obese” to “there’s clearly some factors, largely outside of the control of individuals, that are making people more fat than they used to be, and until we figure out what those are and how to fix them, it’s just pointlessly cruel to fat-shame people.” Most serious progressives don’t deny that things like portion control and not eating exclusively fast food have some contribution, but they would argue that these are far from the only things going on, such that shaming is not an effective tool in most cases.
And now that the potentially revolutionary technology of semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) offers a concrete solution to what might be making some large percentage of fat people fat, we might now be able to fix the issue without anyone having to get bullied! And now that we do have Ozempic available — and once we get a better understanding of its long-term effects and ways to mitigate any downsides — I think more progressives will be more comfortable utilizing shame as one tool in the toolkit when it comes to people who clearly have the opportunity to be thin and who still choose to be obese instead.
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