The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [106]
William James gave up the mad chewing in 1908, and Henry’s doctor convinced him to do the same in 1909. In his book on religion of 1917, Upton Sinclair wrote:
In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I sought earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor compelled me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig and the bear—he was vegetarian when he could not help it. The advocates of the reform insist that meat as a diet causes muddy brains and dulled nerves; but you would certainly never suspect this from a study of history. What you find in history is that all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the strongest and cleverest get it.12
In the same book Sinclair says that “man…is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature.” He sighs that “[m]an is an evasive beast,” trying to avoid the truth about himself: harmless sometimes, but “what are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich?” Sinclair explains that happiness is something you can get, and that the way you get it is not by following the latest injunctions—which are a complex mess of symbols and evasions—but by knowing your history and living by the larger rules of humanity, from the ancients on. “We see so much that is wrong in ancient things,” he wrote, “it gets to be a habit with us to reject them.” The latest thing is not the truest, and the oldest is not automatically simple and wrong: “I have known hundreds of young radicals in my life; they have nearly all been gallant and honest, but they have not all been wise, and therefore not so happy as they might have been.” Sinclair stopped fletcherizing. He died in 1968, at ninety. Fletcher never stopped chewing. He died of a heart attack in 1919, at age sixty-eight. Parents continue to urge their children to chew their food carefully, and we cannot know how much of that request is a matter of manners and how much is a remnant of the old scientific-sounding popular fantasy.
Along with the chewing, health reformers counseled a huge variety of advice and yet they were remarkably certain of themselves, never seeming to shy away from imposing some cockamamy scheme on the bodies of thousands upon thousands of real people. I do not think they were being entirely disingenuous. Many health reformers did not act like people trying to get rich; at worst we might say they sought fame as servants of society. They felt certain that people were unhappy, and they adopted a cure. How could they be so sure that one idea was better than another? It seems to me that their choices were so circumstantial, so arbitrary, really, as to press the question. Only one answer seems possible. In fact, all the health reformers were saying exactly the same thing: let us concentrate on our bodies to the occlusion of all else. The great world is too vast, the inner world too boundless. The body, by contrast, is the right size to be the locus for limitation, control, and flights of excess. Chew your food.
We have here looked at breakfast cereal and chewing, two health and happiness eating fads, one still with us, though transmuted, the other essentially defunct. We now turn for a brief look at what we believe we are