Healthier in lungs, poorer in spirit

"What worries me is the hum of panic that I sense underneath the public ordinance, a panic engendered by a cult of health that's taken so many forms over the past 30 years that it's become the single religion of much of Western society. You run across it everywhere: in our preoccupation with diet and exercise; the endless ads in the media - in the US at least - promoting new drugs for an increasing number of exotic diseases; and the inclination to turn all eccentric behaviour into a 'syndrome' that can be treated medicinally. While none of these is alarming in itself, they add up to a new Puritanism that turns the old paradigm on its head: now instead of tempting the Fates by being bad, we put all our efforts into being good. If smoking was about being grown up, the new Puritanism is about being a perpetual child, and living in a protected world that has never existed except in fantasy."