I've been wondering a lot lately how wacky holistic medicine became a right-wing thing. In the NY Times, Jessica Grose writes that some of it comes from the prominence of diet and fitness among evangelical Christians:
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren co-wrote a diet book called The Daniel Plan with Dr. Daniel Amen and Dr. Mark Hyman, which features a blurb from Dr. Mehmet Oz.
The book includes admonitions like “God isn’t going to evaluate you on the basis of the bodies he gave to other people, but he will judge what you did with what you have been given,” “Satan does not want you living a healthy life because that honors God” and “Why should God heal you of an obesity-related illness if you have no intention of changing the choices that led to it?”
As far back as the 1970s, Oral Roberts University had fitness requirements for its students:
If students were determined to be obese, they were “automatically placed on a weight reduction program. They meet with school doctors and sign a contract to lose a pound or two a week until they reach their goal. If a student fails to lose the weight, he or she faces probation and, eventually, suspension.” In 2016, Oral Roberts was back in the news for making its 900 freshmen wear fitness trackers. “Students are required to average 10,000 steps per day and 150 minutes of intense activity (as measured by heart rate) each week.” The data made up a portion of their grades in health and physical education classes, The Washington Post reported.
Fat shamed by Jesus! Fascinating.
Another thought I have had is that medicine is pretty much the pinnacle of the bureaucratic/scientific/caregiving establishment that many right-wing people despise, so it makes a sort of sense that some of them want to proclaim their independence from doctors and hospitals.
I think these ideas are dangerous, but it's hard to argue against them because eating right and staying fit really are good for you. Many of our health problems really are self-inflicted. But not all of them, and the reluctance of people like Steve Jobs to get establishment-recommended health care may be leading to a lot of premature deaths.
3 comments:
Evangelical Christians can't even evangelize successfully - it's well documented that they drive far more people AWAY from Christianity than they bring to it.
I would assume the same of their efforts to drive people toward fitness - particularly if those efforts revolve around extremely disruptive acts like suspending young people from their college studies, and teaching people to distrust doctors and science.
"medicine is pretty much the pinnacle of the bureaucratic/scientific/caregiving establishment that many right-wing people despise"
Yes, I think that's absolutely right. One could add meritocratic, surveiling, assessing, and other adjectives to the list.
That said, it's interesting that some of them express their contempt by forming a similar sort surveillance, assessing, compliance-demanding bureaucracy of their own. To a large extent, it's just how we do things. I think that whole THING may be the essence of our civilization. More, I'm sorry, than freedom.
The humanities may be in trouble, but by and large Weberian bureaucracy will persist, and probably continue to grow. One could argue that that's what AI is, or anyway what we're going to try to make of it.
I'm still puzzled as to why business bureaucracies get a free pass from the Right. Partly that may be because the business-GOP alliance wants it that way--but only partly.
On my question about populist tolerance for business bureaucracy, I wonder if it's simply that, as Jean-Francois Lyotard put it, “one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés . . .”
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