The Bowdoin Orient

A family member tiptoes downstairs for a midnight snack. My mother, a former aerobics instructor, awakes to the creaking of the floor, disturbed that these unhealthy habits exist. She yearns to see her family healthy and works hard to keep us that way: she encourages us to stick with sports, and she sets a good example.

But she wants us to make these healthy choices ourselves, without her coercion. Although she believes in her culinary monitoring and aerobic tutelage, she also wants to avoid the one crime that all mothers, and Jewish mothers especially, most fervently condemn in their own mothers. Every language has some word to describe this crime, but the Yiddish words for it carry a special weight—Jewish mothers worry about exposing themselves to accusations that they are a nag, a noodge, or even nudnik.

Looked at in a certain light, the situation of the American government with respect to health parallels this ordeal—American matriarchs and patriarchs yearn for us to be healthy, but they also wants us to be free. Millions of Americans painfully admit every day that they have botched that freedom and developed unhealthy habits that they cannot seem to shake by themselves.

Now, America is a mother deciding how to respond to the unhealthy choices of those she cares about. She wants us to retain our commitment to a limited government and knows that we will rebel if she becomes too much of a nag. But she is also looking at a people confined to their cubicles, chained to their computers, and living a shockingly sedentary life.

With more than three out of five of us classifying as overweight, she sees a people that once vigorously settled the frontier and defeated great armies now decaying into the fattest civilization in the history of man. She sees men, ashamed of their bodies, idolizing sports heroes and weightlifters. She sees women, ashamed of their bodies, purging, starving, and fad-dieting themselves sick, consumed with the hope that they will one day look in the mirror to see a body that might deserve to join that of the celebrity tabloids they idolize.

When I look at the dining hall, the Outing Club, the levels of athletic participation, and the unusually healthy bodies of the students here, and then consider the engaged minds of the students here, I come to think that Bowdoin has special responsibility to address this social crisis. It demands from us a unified, interdisciplinary reflection on what could be called, for lack of a better word, political kinesiology.

Political kinesiology would begin with a distinct observation—the reason Americans are not healthy is because they do not need to be physically healthy in order to achieve many of the political and professional objectives relevant to our time.

Cars and other transportation technologies make long walks to work or school unnecessary. With many wondering whether we are headed for a "postwar" age, the safety of the nation no longer requires our physical strength. With the production of our food outsourced, we no longer need bodies that can lift bushels of corn.

Although the long-term disadvantages include diabetes and other diseases, the immediate disadvantages of being unfit are often limited to handicaps in the dating game or shortness of breath while walking upstairs. I could be proven wrong, but I doubt that sexual conquest alone can sustainably guarantee strenuous physical exertion.

With this broader perspective, this discipline would ridicule solutions to our crisis of fitness that affirm the frantic "status-quo scurry" that looks to diets, potions, elixirs, gurus, and magical recipes to cure the sorry state of our health. Members of America's supra-political leadership class informed by this new kinesiology would scribble on the cover of their notepad the emerging goal—restore health to the American population by committing it to tasks that require physical fitness.

This is a political issue because this injunction might be at odds with America's sacred commitment to liberal democracy. Can a population be recommitted to healthy objectives while honoring a commitment to limited government and freedom?

In the 20th century two regimes weakened their commitment to limited government in order to summon forth and create a more fit and physically engaged people.

Nazi Germany promoted fitness by calling for the production of a master race that required state-mandated exercising, a glorification of militarism, and an absurd, pseudo-scientific, eugenics test that we "Jewish degenerates" did not quite pass.

Communists promoted fitness through the hammer-and-sickle cult of labor. Dictators commanded that all citizens be conscripted in a labor corps that required the building of houses, working in fields, and toiling against nature on state-authorized agricultural projects.

We Americans, with our sacred affirmation of freedom, are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the possibility of ordering our citizens to undertake endeavors of physical fitness. If we are to retain our liberal regime over the next century, we need a political kinesiology, initiated by citizens themselves, that can prove democracy and fitness compatible.

It will be dedicated to the question: What sort of endeavors or tasks can summon forth, and endow with significance, the strenuous physical exertion requisite to the health of our citizenry? It seems to me that competition in the Olympic Games, other athletic contests, and forest conservation, are a great start.

In Federalist No. 55, James Madison frankly acknowledged a "degree of depravity" in human beings that made him worry about putting so much trust in private citizens. He ultimately decided to affirm our form of government because he also observed other human qualities that "justify a certain portion of confidence and esteem."

Over the next 50 years, the challenge of getting America back into shape will test whether Madison was mistaken in his decision to affirm a government that "presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form." It will test whether we need to live under the tyrannical nagging of frenzied grandmothers or if we are in fact strong enough to be free.