Virtue and Physical Fitness

Occasionally one reads columns like this one that suggest that physical fitness is somehow related to politics. 

OK, this is going to sound a little hypocritical, as I have hard-recommended every activity and pursuit, every wellness wheeze and rejuvenation exercise the modern world has dreamed up.... at some time or another, I have insisted to anyone who will listen that it’s only their failure to incorporate, say, a horse into their weekly schedule that is standing between them and their best self.

As a matter of fact, I have also written extensively about the importance of horses to achieving one's best self. It's been a while since it was a regular topic, but at one time that was a major focus of the blog. What I thought it inculcated was courage, not recklessness; gentleness, and the compassion necessary to understand a very different kind of mind and build trust with it; honor, to ride with other people as well as with your horse; and a capacity for building each of these virtues that can become a skill at building virtue itself. 

She worries that it might bring traits that she finds objectionable in politics.

The mechanism is incredibly simple: you embark on this voyage of self-improvement, and more or less immediately see results. You feel stronger and more energetic, probably your mood lifts, and pretty soon you think you are master of your own destiny. You’re still not, by the way: destiny does not care about your step count. But until that fact catches up with you, which it may never, there you are, high on self-righteousness. You can tell this has happened to you when you start inhaling performatively, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel.

Inescapably, you start to situate other people’s problems within their failure to be as fit as you. This is particularly true if you don’t know them and they’re just a bunch of numbers. All those statistics – depressed people, obese people, people with IBS – imagine how much better they would be if only they took responsibility for their health, the way that you have.

There's always a correlation/causation issue with things like physical fitness and, say, disease; maybe people who are healthier are more likely to engage in physical activities than those who are less healthy to begin with, say. On the other hand, some causal events like stronger bones from strength training and stronger hearts from cardio are provable, and these seem to have follow-on causal effects on health. Likewise, it's pretty clear that exercise both teaches the body to adapt to stress and encourages it to produce higher levels of its own antioxidants. 

Still, what she's really worried about is that you might blame people for their bad luck if they aren't also physically fit. That's fair to some degree, and something to consider.

On the other hand, she is wrong about the nature of virtue. 

I realise it’s not really a question of an unwitting slide into fascism, hastened by a treadmill. It’s more that there is a fixed amount of excellence in any self, and the more you spend on your biceps, the less you have for your personality. 

It's only true that there's a zero-sum game insofar as you're spending all your time building virtue; then you might be building one sort or another. No one, however, is 100% focused on virtue-building. There's always capacity for more.

Rather, virtue building is a skill that you can learn, and you learn it by practice just like you do any of the virtues. Like many things in Aristotle, this is a matter that is conceptually severable even though as a matter of fact the activities are the same. I mean that you practice horseback riding (say) and you develop skill at horseback riding, but also courage, and gentleness, and the rest. Severably, you are learning how to build virtues by building all these virtues. When you want to build another one, you will have greater skill at the business of building any sort of virtue.

The question of what kind of morals one should have thus also ends up being severable. Whatever kind they ought to be, building the moral virtues to support successful practice of those things is just another virtue you can learn. If you've been developing your skills at virtue-building, it'll be easier and you will likely be more successful. All sorts of physical fitness can help with this (although you should be careful of ones that produce concussions, like boxing, where the negative physical effects on cognition may outweigh the virtue-building). It's good for you all the way around.