just a selkie in the sea

(I also go by Liz)

avatar by @PotechiPon on twitter


as I stated last night, I just read a book that, while decently written, ultimately felt like it wasn't as explanatory as it thought it was. also, this is a long post and I apologize in advance (but also if you're interested in the kind of thing I think about a lot, even if you don't want to opine, give this a read).

The book: Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform, Ruth Clifford Engs, 2000

The thesis: Great Awakenings (in the religious sense) occur every 80-100 years in the United States. The three Great Awakenings the author discusses (Jacksonian, usually known as the Second [1830-1860], progressive [1890-1920], millennial [1970-20xx]) have all been accompanied by health-reform surges she terms "Clean Living Movements".

During the reform stage, activists have agitated to change behaviors—what historian John Burnham (1993) has called "bad habits"—that have been perceived as negatively harming the individual or society. During the cycle's ebb, popular changes or reforms that "make sense," such as personal hygiene, have become institutionalized. On the other hand, a backlash has often occurred against unpopular or restrictive reforms, such as Prohibition. Tangential to health-reform surges have been undertones of nativism, feminism, and eugenics. (2)


Now, to be clear: this book isn't really trying to say it's doing much other than documenting the three Clean Living Movements, including similarities in both topics and overall movement contour. However, I personally believe that regarding these movements as stemming essentially from religious impulses (literally, "These health-reform movements, like the Great Awakenings that spawn them, have come in approximately eighty-year cycles." (2, emphasis added)) flattens how much we can explore about the actual dynamics of these Clean Living Movements and their chosen foci. Per the introduction,

James Q. Wilson (1980, 29-30) has argued that Great Awakenings occur at times when the prevailing set of moral understandings seem inadequate to address human behavior. Traditional patterns of family life are challenged by new opportunities available to youth, and customary standards of community are flouted by rising levels of urban violence and public disorder. Often there is a sudden enlarged youthful segment of the population that defies conventional morality and exhibits a growing sense of alienation from existing institutions. An acute sense of personal stress makes individuals receptive to new religious appeals that address the political and social upheavals that created this stress. When the religious revival becomes a generalized and powerfully felt cultural critique, an awakening is underway. (2)

This is fine and good! I agree that those are things that lead to Great Awakenings. However, I think there is a very compelling case to be made that religious revival and Clean Living Movements are parallel processes, each addressing in their own ways the cultural stress that created them.

Last thing before I get to the questions for you: I want to make sure you understand the kinds of things we're talking about when we say Clean Living Movements. I'm taking Engs's comparison framework because I do genuinely think it's an interesting and valuable way to think about these movements.

First (1830-1860)Second (1880-1920)Third (1970+)
Temperance, Tobacco, Women's rightsProhibition, Cigarettes, SuffrageDrunk Driving, Smoke-Free Environments, Equal Rights Amendment
Christian Physiology, Diet (think Graham and Kellogg)Physical Culture, Pure Food and Drugs legislationFitness, "Wellness"
Lamarckian Inheritance and PhrenologyEugenics and Birth ControlGenetic Sequencing and Abortion
Cholera and SanitationTuberculosis and Public HealthAIDS

Questions Time

listen I am so sorry these sound like textbook-chapter comprehension questions but I swear this is all me

  1. Either based on what I've outlined here or your own reasoning, do you find the argument that specifically religious awakenings give people a moral drive to reform other areas of themselves/broader culture compelling?
  2. Are there other explanations that you also find compelling or would want to explore? I would love any and all theorycrafting here honestly—I know what I think and what my academic impulses tell me, but I want to know about you and how you think these pieces fit together.
  3. In the introduction, Engs states that she views nativism and eugenics as tangential but related to these Clean Living Movements. Do you agree? Are they actually tangential, or are they intrinsic? What are the vibes you get when you think about Clean Living, whatever that means to you?
  4. Engs wrote this before ~The Internet~ really took off as a major cultural influence. Do you have any thoughts on how the pace of internet culture might affect the timeline of these reform cycles? Do you think the Millennial reform cycle has ended and we're in a fourth wave, it's a long tail on Millennial, something else? This is something that's really interesting to me right now.
  5. Are there any other things you might want to bring up around American diet or health culture, especially in a broader context of what it might tell us about culture and society overall? I'm always interested in hearing about what other people are interested in.

(End note: I am, of course, happy to provide the citations in the quotations on request, it just didn't feel super relevant to what I'm trying to communicate here.)


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in reply to @JhoiraArtificer's post:

  1. not spiritually but yes. We'll get back to this.

  2. yeah

  3. see below explanation

  4. Most of these seem to happen in times when diet and health are big topics in the papers or a scene. Which brings us to:

This is all educated guess:

When you get people together, around a common topic, they get to know each other faster, and are more likely to talk to a greater number of people, because they all share at least one topic for conversation. Religious groups are great examples of this, but you see it elsewhere too. But religious groups also have authority figures, preaching morality and current events and perhaps what they percieve as the ills in this world. And then that prompts others to reflect on, talk, and gossip on it. currents form, then factions-but-not-really, then enough people agree on an idea and act on it. It's like, social media dynamics unless the clergy are good moderators.

Health things are one of those things where it's incredibly easy to misdiagnose a lot of stuff you can see with your eyes. So too with drink and drugs. Fat people, smelly/dirty people, alcohol and drug users, all have examples people know of where they weren't great people, and it being like, pre-1970, people think that's normal to feel discomfort or revulsion about.

So you've got all of these topics you're trying to come to consensus on, right? best way to get consensus is acting on a shared fear/bigotry. We've seen it with the tea party and trump factions of the US republicans even. complete disagreement until they can blame it on a scapegoat.

These still go on! We see it with people trying to ban AI art, or ban cars outright, or scream that 'queer' is extremely bad and no one can use it not even the queers. Or that drag is innately transphobic.

In this essay, I will outline how you can draw a straight line from these so-called "puri-teens" to the

  1. Not really or sort of? I can buy that it can in some cases (no claim on those cases specifically) it can be the driving force but not that it necessarily is

  2. The same cultural pressures that lead to religious awakenings also lead to pushes for 'clean living'. They are both responses to the same underlying concerns. Those two things can be overlapping, and even when they aren't, they are probably mutually re-enforcing. In a religious society, it would be unsurprising to find the two interlinked but proponents for the latter aren't exclusively religious and those that are religious aren't always members of the dominant religious group

  3. I don't know if I have a good enough feel for clean living. Like, is the 'clean living' hyper-concern about toxins, etc. in diet an extreme form of concern about the dangers of second-hand smoke? I can see that as a yes or a no. At their base they're a concern about health and protecting ones body but it kind of feels like it might be flattening things too much? This is me just not having done the reading. I'm not trying to make a distinction on the latter being 'scientific' while the former isn't. I guess as an example of something non-scientific (which isn't to say not based on evidence or observation) a cultural prohibition against eating certain kinds of animals or animals that died in a certain way feels more like the second-hand smoke side of things. All of this is to say, if those two things are both the same thing then things like eugenics are definitely more intrinsic than tangential. Even if they are treated as separate things, I would still want to link them more than saying they're tangential. I guess like my connection of the religious awakening and clean living, I would say they are both caused or enabled by the same underlying concerns. Whether or not you could have one without the other, you would probably need concentrated effort to separate them?

  4. A thing I have started to feel, without having done enough reading to back it up, is that the internet and mass communication probably makes it feel like things are changing more or in larger ways than they actually are. Like I am sure they are to some degree, but I don't know if they would actually scale linearly (or faster) with faster communication or if some previous advance in communication ease/speed/reliability was already enough to cause the current pace (and I could easily believe that advance was something like the telegram or even earlier with mail delivery). To what degree are fads changing faster and to what degree do the facades of those fads change more in the time of their rise and fall. Or maybe, to what degree are we going through fads faster and to what degree do we see more variety within a fads rise and fall. This is a half-complete thought.

I know in both the obviously good and obviously bad ways, the internet has made it easier for more people to more easily find likeminded people and as such certain kind of movements may be able to gain more adherents more quickly. But there's also more competition for attention. Maybe we get more groups pushing these kinds of ideas in a niche way more regularly and either that makes the trends smaller because it's hard for any one group to gain consensus or maybe they happen more often because there are more chances for any one of them to take off.

  1. Hmm, I'd be interested in how a sense of personal community ties into either of those things. A thing I'm still sort of thinking about from the above question is to what degree the internet has increased our ability to be less directly involved with the people around us (and to what degree other trends like suburbanization were already making those cultural shifts).

Heck yeah, thank you so much for your responses! If this is something you're interested in reading more about in any particular aspect I definitely have a bunch of recommendations.

Because I'm focusing on America there's a frequently-unstated (Protestant, including secularized Protestant) Christian cultural bias, but I think you're absolutely right that kosher/halal potentially are a form of 'clean living', albeit one old enough it doesn't feel weird to me haha.

On a personal level, I would argue the concern about toxins in food isn't so much a secondhand smoke thing as that they're coming from similar places. I would say that Paleo, Quantified Self, Fitbit 10,000 steps, biohacking, organic, no plastic containers are all potential modern manifestations of Clean Living currently, or at least (common refrain!) aiming at the same anxieties. Does that make sense?

If this is something you're interested in reading more about in any particular aspect I definitely have a bunch of recommendations.

I would definitely been interested in reading more about the second great awakening. I've read a bunch from the tail end (and slightly after that period) by virtue of reading a lot of labour and could do with a better understanding of how they connect (i've maybe got little pieces of it. it's hard to read labour stuff from that period in the us/canada and not end up reading any religious writing from the period [either from progressive ministers involved in the movement or in religious backlash]), and e.g., the "father of canadian healthcare" was progressive and in a progressive party and also he wrote his thesis on eugenics)

Because I'm focusing on America there's a frequently-unstated (Protestant, including secularized Protestant) Christian cultural bias, but I think you're absolutely right that kosher/halal potentially are a form of 'clean living', albeit one old enough it doesn't feel weird to me haha.

they're also what I went to because due to Christian cultural bias, it's harder for me to separate out what would no doubt be great examples from protestant culture that I have more trouble seeing or separating out

On a personal level, I would argue the concern about toxins in food isn't so much a secondhand smoke thing as that they're coming from similar places. I would say that Paleo, Quantified Self, Fitbit 10,000 steps, biohacking, organic, no plastic containers are all potential modern manifestations of Clean Living currently, or at least (common refrain!) aiming at the same anxieties. Does that make sense?

Yeah, this makes a ton of sense

I think a lot of it is also that until like the 1980s, we didn't have particularly high resolution detection mechanisms for substances, and for like 40 years the news kept covering how various foods were actually toxic to you, even after the pure food and drug act.

mixed with the fact that eating the same food too much gives you scurvy or b12 deficiency or whatever but laypeople didn't know that, "so clearly eating too much of that food was the problem, and not the lack of other ones", etc

I also hate to say it but I think that without good access to other information, a lot of people were roped into eugenics because people just trusted authority figures (and scientists) much more back then, and couldn't easily check them.

that's not an excuse for them being eugenicist, but more why so many US progressives and Russian communists in history espoused support for explicitly eugenics at the time.

most people aren't very credulous and aren't taught much (or how to self teach outside of school), just look at NFTs and artists who thought they were the future that should subsume other methods, and cryptocurrency hype in general

I just realized I didn't reply to Point One. You have, with unerring accuracy, chosen the one topic in all of this I know the least about... as my other interests pick up ~just afterwards. That said, I'm guessing I could dig through footnotes and Works Cited in my books and find some stuff for you if you like!