Irving Kristol died yesterday, one of the great political thinkers of the last half of the 20th century. Among his sage observations was this from 1972:
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .
It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call "the New Politics" is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings—we must "care," we must "be concerned," we must be "committed." Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.
The insight about American politics has endured through the intervening years. It might usefully be extended beyond politics to policy.
Consider public health nutrition. The "I feel your pain" approach is to pretend that each and every nutrition-related ailment can be "cured" or its onset prevented by modifying one's diet.
Hubris. Overreach. We CAN improve our diets. Certainly. We can improve health outcomes with dietary interventions. Certainly. But the simplistic single-nutrient focus and, worse, the notion of "good" and "bad" foods trumping the science clearly showing it's diets and not individual foods that are important, have taken us down the wrong road.
We need to get back to the science and retreat from amateur poetry, symbolic politics and posturing on nutrition advocacy -- like the simple-minded calls for salt reduction in the absence of evidence of any health benefit and, even, any proven sustainable change in population sodium intakes within the normal range (what renowned Swedish researcher Bjorn Folkow termed the "hygienic safety range" for sodium, 2,300 - 4,600 or even 5,750 mg/day sodium -- the US consumes a world-average 3,500 mg/day).
Genuine feelings of wanting to help solve problems in public health nutrition cannot remain symbolic gestures, they must recognize human physiology and be rooted in science, not compassionate nannyism.
Add comment