The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [111]
This chapter will explain how we came to believe that the thing we use as a metaphor for drudgery-going-nowhere, the treadmill, ought to be part of most people’s lives, most days. Think about how strange it is that the same culture would invent escalators, elevators, StairMaster machines, and step classes. Or that we expect our coworkers to be clean when they get to work, and still clean at the end of the day; yet we also expect them to have a separate wardrobe for the gym, which they drench with sweat. What curious behavior. How did we get here?
In all history, the cultures most obsessed with images of bodily beauty are ancient Greece, twentieth-century Fascists, and contemporary commercial America. Such environments have a big effect on the people who live in them. Of these three, we may be the ones most interested in beauty for its own sake. The ancient Greeks exercised for happiness. Their ideal of a healthy body and a healthy mind was not just noting two goals; it was presented as a causative relationship. Their gymnasia—the word means “to exercise naked”—were the centers of their towns. In Athens, young men trained together, and as they grew up, they got rich together; it was a place to make connections. Greek art reached its pinnacle in Athens, and the favorite subject was the toned body of a beautiful young man. Sparta took strenuous exercise most seriously. There the women exercised naked, too, as muscular mothers for the next generation of soldiers. Muscle was beauty, sportive play was paramount, and pleasure was sweaty. Why? Sparta had a huge population of slaves, a captured people called the Helots, who did all the farming and other heavy labor, but who were always trying to cast off their overlords. So while the Spartans did not have to do the grinding chores of farm life, they did have to stay stronger than the slave population, which outnumbered them. Meanwhile, productive labor came to seem slavish, so that the only action for a free man, other than war, was sport and war games.
In medieval Europe, there was no “cult of the body” beyond praising plump limbs, rosy cheeks, clear skin, and clear eyes; in essence, the lack of disease. Sure, anyone very fat or very thin got teased about it, as did the very short and very tall. But there was no cult of muscle and form. In the West, from at least as early as 500 C.E. to at least as late as 1500, people were never surrounded by images of toned, naked bodies. Call forth from your imagination a man and a woman of the Middle Ages, perhaps a monk in tonsure and a lady of the court with a high, conical hat. Call forth, also, a man and woman of the early modern age: he may be a village merchant and she an alewife. Do you suppose any of them were concerned about how much exercise they were getting? They were not. They did have a lot in common with each other and with us: they associated happiness with love, sex, good food, alcohol, money, parties, faith, and games. Unlike us, they did not associate happiness with exercise. In truth, in the context of most of human history, our idea that a good life includes a lot of physical exercise is bizarre.
What most resembled exercise in the Middle Ages were the knights’ tournaments. These were not invented until the most brutal, martial part of the Middle Ages was over. Tournaments