Spoiling the joke
25 Apr 2005 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecatDavid Brooks, attempting to be humorous, opines the following at the New York Times: "Living Longer Is the Best Revenge" (registration required - http://www.bugmenot.com may be able to help). And I'm here to ruthlessly nitpick it.
The release of a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that overweight people actually live longer than normal-weight people represents an important moment in the history of world civilization.
The history of world civilization? Try the history of Western civilization over the last 100 years or so. Prior to that and elsewhere, most people don't believe that what the US government considers to be a "normal weight" is necessarily the healthiest weight.
Mother Nature, we now know, is a saucy wench, who likes to play cosmic tricks on humanity.
Do you mean, like the cosmic trick of the fact that the Earth isn't at the center of the universe? Because the notion that people with a few pounds more than other people might have a chance of living a little longer doesn't exactly strike me as "cosmic."
health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.
Er, try "the US government and health insurance companies and doctors have for years been mistaken about what is the 'healthiest' way of living and the most 'responsible' way of eating." And, amazingly enough, bodies don't necessarily pay that much attention to social moral judgements such as these people "deserve to live" longer than those people.
I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded.
A lifetime of behavior that your society told you was "irresponsible" but your body went ahead with anyway because it knew the right way to nourish itself has turned out to put you in the cohort of people who statistically live the longest. Or in other words, your body is smarter than you are, you stupid jerk. Which shouldn't actually be a cause for embarrassment - the instincts that cause living beings to take in nourishment are a heck of a lot older and better refined than the consciousness than causes humans to feel like they know better than what their bodies tell them.
I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. ... In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve.
Humans make up notions of "deserve" that have nothing to do with reality. Which doesn't mean reality is "perverse." It means humans are mistaken.
Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment.
Ah, thank goodness "Mother Nature" still has a modicum of human decency.
Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by.
Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest," as any good geek will tell you. (But you're right anyway. On this, at least.)
The release of a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that overweight people actually live longer than normal-weight people represents an important moment in the history of world civilization.
The history of world civilization? Try the history of Western civilization over the last 100 years or so. Prior to that and elsewhere, most people don't believe that what the US government considers to be a "normal weight" is necessarily the healthiest weight.
Mother Nature, we now know, is a saucy wench, who likes to play cosmic tricks on humanity.
Do you mean, like the cosmic trick of the fact that the Earth isn't at the center of the universe? Because the notion that people with a few pounds more than other people might have a chance of living a little longer doesn't exactly strike me as "cosmic."
health-conscious people can hit a point of negative returns, so the more fit they are, the quicker they kick the bucket. People who work out, eat responsibly and deserve to live are more likely to be culled by the Thin Reaper.
Er, try "the US government and health insurance companies and doctors have for years been mistaken about what is the 'healthiest' way of living and the most 'responsible' way of eating." And, amazingly enough, bodies don't necessarily pay that much attention to social moral judgements such as these people "deserve to live" longer than those people.
I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded.
A lifetime of behavior that your society told you was "irresponsible" but your body went ahead with anyway because it knew the right way to nourish itself has turned out to put you in the cohort of people who statistically live the longest. Or in other words, your body is smarter than you are, you stupid jerk. Which shouldn't actually be a cause for embarrassment - the instincts that cause living beings to take in nourishment are a heck of a lot older and better refined than the consciousness than causes humans to feel like they know better than what their bodies tell them.
I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. ... In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve.
Humans make up notions of "deserve" that have nothing to do with reality. Which doesn't mean reality is "perverse." It means humans are mistaken.
Mother Nature is happy to tolerate marginally irresponsible misbehavior. She doesn't want you to go completely to seed. If you're truly obese and arouse hippos when you visit the zoo, you could still punch your ticket at any moment.
Ah, thank goodness "Mother Nature" still has a modicum of human decency.
Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by.
Darwin never used the phrase "survival of the fittest," as any good geek will tell you. (But you're right anyway. On this, at least.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 04:21 pm (UTC)I was recently reading a book about sumo, and it explained that the reason sumo wrestlers are supposed to put on weight was not just to be bigger than their opponent, but to lower their center of gravity so they are harder to move when they crouch down.
Too bad women aren't allowed to do sumo...
no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 04:31 pm (UTC)I can understand the consernation some people might feel though if they'd really been busting their butt in the service of their diets and so on just to meet an artificially stringent "health" guideline and then they were told that their effort did not, in fact, make them superior people at all and might not have been healthy. That's got to be a hard mental pill to take.
One of my big questions, of course, has always been why we think that top-flight physical fitness should be a (lately THE key) measure of goodness in a person anyway. I think if you ask anybody, they will agree that a truly good person spends their time in the service of others rather than in the service of themselves. But then if someone spends all their free time working out and following complex eating regimens, the same people will often picture that person as very morally good. While there could be some argument based on putting less strain on shared medical resources (although that only flies to any great degree in a country with public health insurance I think), beyond a certain point of fitness, it probably doesn't make a big difference, and beyond another point the strain on the health care system probably increases (due to sports injuries, etc.).
There are a lot of weird things like that in our ethic these days. Like, we seem to think that people who spend a lot of time outdoors are intrinsically better people than people who spend a lot of time indoors. Why?
no subject
Date: 26 Apr 2005 04:49 pm (UTC)Yeah. Well, the sooner they learn there are no guarantees, the better. [/snark]
The "fit = morally good" idea replaced the "no sex outside marriage = morally good" meme (this is well treated in Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth). Neither has anything to do with what I consider morally good (which is something like "trying to relieve suffering and undo harm").