Fruit and Nuts

I read Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels when I was in my early teens and before I had watched more than a couple of the film series that was inspired by the books. Thus I had read Thunderball before I watched either of the two film versions of it (the second film version, which like the first starred Sean Connery as 007, was Never Say Never Again). (1) I was disappointed, therefore, to discover that my favourite part of the book had been omitted from both films. In the story’s primary plotline Bond is sent to recover two atomic bombs that had been stolen by Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his terrorist organization SPECTRE. If you have seen either of the films you will recall that before even receiving this assignment, Bond had stumbled across a clue while he was hanging out at a health spa, breaking the rules and seducing the nurses.

What is not mentioned in either of the movies is the reason why Bond was at the spa to begin with. In the novel, however, this is spelled out at great length in a hilarious secondary plot that leads into the main story. Bond has just undergone his annual physical examination and, while the report indicates he is in prime condition, M, director of the British Secret Service is not satisfied. He, having just come back from a health retreat with all the fanaticism of a new convert, summons Bond into his office and gives him a lecture about eating right and his smoking and drinking habits and then sends him away for a mandatory stay at the health spa. The cab driver who takes him there comments on how odd it is for someone of Bond’s age and health to be going to a place that caters to a clientele of old men with bad backs. While Bond seems to utterly disregard the rules of the spa during his stay, he too comes away from the spa as a convert. He quits drinking, cuts back on his smoking, even switching to a lighter, filtered brand of cigarette, and subsists on a diet of yogurt, Energen rolls and other health foods. He is now so full of pep and energy that he drives his housekeeper, his secretary, and everyone else around him crazy. This all comes to an end when the blackmail message from Blofield arrives. Bond is summoned into an emergency meeting where M, who has already reverted back to his old habits offers him a smoke, and replies with a “Humpf” when Bond says “Thanks sir. I’m trying to give it up”. Having been made aware of the crisis and given his assignment, he returns home and orders his housekeeper to cook him up a real breakfast of bacon and eggs and hot buttered toast (“not wholemeal”), and is subsequently back to normal.

I have always read this as an excellent satire of health fanaticism, although it is apparently inspired by an actual clinic that Fleming himself had attended. Eight years before the publication of Thunderball, C. S. Lewis had mocked health fanatics in the first paragraph of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third of the Narnia books by suggesting that the reason the character of Eustace Scrubb was initially so disagreeable was because of the progressive, forward thinking, advanced views of his parents, who were among other things, teetotalers, non-smokers, and vegetarians.

These books appeared shortly after World War II which, if those who believe we are living in a “post-modern” era are correct, is the prime candidate for the event that signaled the end of the Modern Age. If the Modern Age is thought of as a project that had as its goal the replacement of Medieval Christendom with secular, democratic, liberal nation-states then this project was more or less completed around the time of the war. This is directly related to the fact that health fanaticism was becoming such a nuisance that it became a major object of satire.

Orthodox Christianity does not include elaborate dietary laws, of the sort that Judaism and Islam have, but rather takes a libertarian approach to the matter of food and drink. The development of this approach can be seen in the New Testament beginning with Christ’s statement that it is that which comes out of the heart and not that which enters the mouth that defiles a man, to St. Peter’s vision in which the animals the Old Testament forbade the Jews to eat are declared clean, to the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to St. Paul’s explanation of Christian liberty in his epistles. What the Christian church enjoins upon its members is something much more difficult than merely following a checklist of what you can and cannot eat and drink. Building upon an ethical foundation lain in both the New Testament and classical philosophy it encourages the cultivation of virtues, habits of good behavior that are typically characterized by the traits of balance and moderation. The Anglican catechism, for example, in the section which explains the Christian understanding of the Ten Commandments “according to their spirit and purpose as our Lord teaches in the Gospel” includes as part of our duty to our neighbour the following “To keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity”. Temperance, as used here and in the New Testament where it is described as a fruit of the Spirit, means self-control and moderation.

The cultivation of virtue and character is the work of a lifetime and a path that lies between two ever present temptations. One of these is the temptation to give up and give oneself over to habits of excess. The other is the temptation to substitute a list of rules and to keep adding to it until you are buried under it. These temptations are never succumbed to in isolation from each other. Thus, when the North American descendants of the Puritans substituted a prohibition against the consumption of alcohol for Christianity’s traditional exhortation to sobriety a perverse culture of drunkenness began to develop.

Likewise, as the post-Christian Western world began to develop extremely unhealthy eating habits, such as the consumption of large amounts of fast food, pre-packed processed food, and junk food the health nuts began to crawl out of the woodworks, each with his own long list of what you should and should not eat. These lists frequently contradict each other - one health nut will prohibit fat, another will tell you to eat lots of fat and avoid carbohydrates, one will tell you to eat your food raw, another to eat it cooked, etc. What they have in common is that none of them recommend anything as simple as a balanced diet, and indeed one of the oldest versions, a pre-Christian pagan doctrine that was resurrected in the nineteenth century under the new name of vegetarianism for the new scientific era, prohibits the consumption of one of the major food groups entirely. Its most extreme adherents, vegans, prohibit the consumption of two of the major food groups while self-righteously proclaiming their moral superiority over everybody else.

Health nuts often believe that they have some special knowledge, that the medical establishment is conspiring to suppress and keep from the general public, which provides the secret to better health and a longer life. This resembles the doctrine of gnosis from which the Gnostics, the early enemies of apostolic authority and orthodoxy, derived their name. This too points to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christendom and Christian orthodoxy as the genesis of these ideas. Eric Voegelin argued that the very concept of a “Modern Age” had its origins in Gnostic eschatology and it is significant that he identified Puritanism, the extreme form of English Protestantism in which many of these lifestyle prohibitionist movements have their roots, as a form of Gnosticism.

As the Modern Age progressed and the Western world moved further away from orthodox Christendom, more and more of these legalistic health and lifestyle movements popped up. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the teetotal movement, vegetarianism, and sects that teach that Christians are required to eat kosher. It is not at all surprising that with the near completion of the secularization of the West by the end of World War II, the number of such movements exploded. I think the response of Ian Fleming and C. S. Lewis to these sorts of people – mockery, derision, and satire – is the right one, at least so long as they are merely an annoying, nagging, nuisance. When they try to enlist the government, which in the interest of reducing the cost of socialized medicine often seems inclined to listen to them, to compel us by law to conform to their wishes, it is a different matter and we should actively combat this sort of health tyranny. Otherwise, let us attempt to cultivate the virtues of self-control, moderation, and balance, which will do far more for our health than to follow the latest health fad, peddled by a bunch of fruits and nuts.




(1) Interestingly, Fleming had originally written Thunderball as a screenplay and adapted it into the novel, which was then in turn re-adapted into the movie versions.

Advancement or Decline?

Eight years ago, historian and historical philosopher Dr. John Lukacs, in an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “It’s The End of the Modern Age” wrote:

For a long time, I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago.

After a brief synopsis of the history of his thought on this matter he says that during the ten years prior to his writing:

my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, are passing but that we are living through — if not already beyond — its very end. I am writing about the so-called Modern Age.

This is a recurring theme in Dr. Lukacs’ writings and one which he has devoted entire books to. A Catholic and self-described reactionary who fled to the United States from his native Hungary shortly after the Communists took it over at the end of World War II, he has little sympathy for the ideas of progress, technology, and growth that many would see as the moving spirit of the Modern Age, but rather eulogizes the bourgeois values and civilization that were also associated with that Age.

Others, looking at the same phenomenon through very different lenses than those of Dr. Lukacs, have described it differently.

Neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, in the late 1980’s wrote an essay entitled “The End of History” which was later expanded into a book. The thesis of this arrogant piece of liberal triumphalism was that it was not just an age that was ending, but all of history, because when liberal democracy becomes universal, mankind would have achieved the end which human development was advancing towards.

The grandfather of postmodernism, French socialist and literary theorist, Jean-François Lyotard saw the passing of modernity (not quite identical to what historian Lukacs calls “the Modern Age” but there is much overlap) as something to celebrate. To Lyotard, the end of modernity meant the end of the meta-narrative, his term for theories which purport to completely explain the world, which he argued post-modern man had grown to be skeptical of.

While each of these views is quite different from the others they have in common the idea that the last century has been one of major societal transformation. Change has taken place and is taking place at an accelerated and perhaps accelerating rate. The question is: is this change good or bad?

As one who is naturally and proudly conservative by disposition, who rejects the Whig theory of history and favours Lord Falkland’s maxim “When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change” I am inclined to look at these revolutionary changes as being negative. Thus I find myself sympathizing with Dr. Lukacs’ perspective more than that of the other two. My temperament, however, is hardly evidence of the correctness of my judgment. Let us take a look then, at the question at hand..

Is civilization in decline? The answer depends on how what we understand “civilization” to mean. Many understand “civilization” to refer to modern developments in technology and science and the accompanying changes in the political, economic, and moral arrangements of the societies in which these developments have taken place, viewed in opposition to earlier “primitive” versions of the same. This understanding of “civilization” virtually demands that contemporary society be always viewed as more advanced than past society. It is inseparable from the progressive viewpoint.

This is not the only way of understanding “civilization” however. Another way, and one which I would argue is superior, is to understand “civilization” to refer to the quality of a society marked by civility and civic virtue. Civility and civic virtue are related concepts which largely overlap. While some would reduce “civility” to “politeness” and “civic virtue” to “obedience to the state” this is a very misleading oversimplification. Civility and civic virtue are both aspects of an understanding of self as part of a greater whole, i.e., society. The good of the whole is greater than the good of the self and therefore the self has an obligation or duty to society as a whole. The cultivation of that duty is civic virtue. Civility is the aspect of civil virtue in which we behave properly towards other members of our society. This includes, but is hardly limited to, politeness.

The idea that society forms a whole which has as its end the highest good, to which all other goods are subordinate, is fundamental to the ethics and politics of both Plato and Aristotle. George P. Grant said that “Western society at its height has been” the uniting of Christianity and Plato. In the Christian West, especially the English-speaking part of it, the idea that the good of the whole is greater than the good of the self was balanced by the concept of the rights and freedoms of the individual. It was a delicate balance. Society requires that its individual members put the good of the society ahead of their own to the point of being willing to die for their society in war. Society’s survival depends upon this sense of duty and obligation. If, however, society does not recognize rights and freedoms on the part of the individual which it cannot take away at whim, government can use the concept of the greater good to justify abuses.

The collapse of civilization at the end of the Modern Age can be regarded as the ultimate fulfillment of the goals of the liberalism which was the spirit of the Modern Age. Liberalism was a form of individualism which upset the balance between the whole and the self, by defining society as a contractual construction existing to serve the sovereign individual. Throughout the Modern Age which saw the ascendancy of liberalism, Western societies continued to regard themselves as societies with a Christian core identity.

Since World War II however, that has changed. Whereas non-Western societies have no problem continuing to identify themselves with their traditional faiths, Western societies now prefer to see themselves as having a secular identity, a post-Christian identity. Church attendance is in decline. Orthodoxy, which we will define as Scriptural doctrine as expressed in the early ecumenical creeds of the Christian Church – Apostolic, Nicene, Athanasian – is waning in the pulpit, as respect for Scriptural and ecclesiastical authority is waning in the pew.

The Christian Church will survive, of course. Jesus Christ promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. The question is will the societies whose civilization was once shaped by Christianity survive now that liberalism has triumphed and they have rejected their Christian identity?

The sweeping changes we see all around us in the post-modern, post-Christian era, mark the triumph of the self over the whole. The rights which protected the individual from the abuse of power in traditional society have been transformed into selfish demands that power cater to every whim of the self. Culturally, we have seen the media of art advance technologically. To give one example, the technology of recorded music has advanced from phonographic record, to audio cassette, to CD, to electronic music files, each step being marked by better quality in terms of clarity and definition of the sound. Yet as the media has advanced, the message has declined. Which is more important, the medium or the message? Sensible people would say the latter, and the same period that saw these incredible technological advances saw the new technology being used to convey music which is increasingly vulgar, profane, pornographic, anti-social and violent in its character. Those who vocalize objections to these trends are told in response that these judgments are all subjective, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and “who are you to judge”? What that really translates to is the assertion on the part of the self of its right and ability to define reality, including morality and aesthetics for itself.

This is also what we see in the post-WWII revolution in morality. The self has declared its own pleasure to be the highest good and declared entire categories of behavior that pertain to material pleasures to be off-limits to society and societal standards of what is right and what is wrong. The self will decide for itself what is right and what is wrong and society’s only role will be to affirm it in its decision. If the decisions of a couple of young selves (for we cannot call them a young man and a young woman – the self has reserved for itself the right to define what a “man” or a “woman” is for itself) results in a pregnancy, and the couple lacks either the ability or the desire to take upon themselves the duty of raising their child, society’s interest in preserving the sanctity of human life must take backseat to the interest of the self.

The advocates of this new empowerment of the self identify it with “freedom” but it is not freedom in any but the most superficial sense. The collapse of the cultural, moral, religious, and social core of a society creates a vacuum, and nature, as the old saw says, abhors a vacuum. The hole will be filled by political and economical control. The same decades that have seen the moral and cultural collapse described above, have also seen people’s ordinary, everyday lives become more and more subjected to bureaucratic administration and regulation, as well as the emergence of a new political and economical order carried out on an international rather than a national scale. The new “freedom” of the empowered self from cultural, moral, and religious restraint is only the opiate that blinds it to political and economic domination. Aldous Huxley saw it coming.

Political and economic total control, the collapse of national identity into a new international order, and the collapse of society as a cultural, religious, and moral whole. A “brave new world” it may very well be. A civilization, it is not. This is definitely a period of decline.