When Virtues Run Loose

Those with modern sensibilities might say that CNN has been caught fat-shaming people by reporting that Covid death rates are ten times higher in countries where most people are overweight. 

The report quotes a study that found 88 per cent of Covid deaths were in countries were more than half the population was classified as fat.

Shame on CNN. Such insensitive reporting only serves to unfairly stigmatise fat people. Next they’ll be suggesting that being overweight has something to do with heart disease!

When you understand that an obese person is someone who weighs as much as two healthy people combined, you could say that they are therefore twice as healthy. Why doesn’t CNN make that argument?

The biggest risk factor for Covid is not diet, it’s failure to wear two masks, a face shield, gloves, and a hazmat suit while driving alone, or those who maintain an unacceptable amount of apathy about getting a 5th booster shot.

Rather than worrying about Covid deaths, the media should be promoting body positivity. 

Okay, I’m being entirely facetious. Obviously. 

But in these politically correct times, not offending someone is seen as the highest form of virtue. It wouldn’t be surprising at all to read something like this as serious commentary. Actually, you can. It’s everywhere.

Warped, fake compassion is the true sickness of our age. Loving people to death with sentimentality is the real pandemic of our generation.

Take the dreaded Monkeypox, for example.

The CDC has come to resemble a pretzel more than a health advisory body. They twist and contort their reporting to advise that 98 per cent of cases have been found in gay men who, to quote the CDC, have sex with other men, while going out of their way to emphasise that ‘anyone can get Monkeypox’.

Well sure. And anyone can be run over by a car, but playing on the road makes it far more likely. You cannot say that, though, lest you stigmatise people who play chicken with oncoming traffic.

The CDC and other health bodies, in attempting to tippy-toe around what they must consider to be fragile feelings, actually endanger the gay community by failing to give them clear health information that they require to stay safe.

We are now more concerned about protecting a group’s feelings than about genuinely helping them. It’s reflective of a culture that, having abandoned any source of objective truth, now regards feelings as the only reality. It’s so nice, it’s dangerous.

English philosopher GK Chesterton observed that:

‘The modern world is not evil. The modern world is far too good.’

He argued that the rejection of Christianity would let loose ‘virtues gone mad’ because they would be isolated from a single unifying truth.

This explains why, in our post-Christian world, we have a generation who care only for charity toward others, and their charity (sorry to say) is often untruthful.

It’s the same overdone virtue that insists, to be kind, that obesity is beautiful while ignoring the myriad of associated health risks. It is kindness that lies.

But it’s not just charity and kindness that are now running out of control. That other great virtue, humility, is now so overdone as to be completely destructive.

Many of us watched with amusement as former Australian Health Secretary Dr Brendan Murphy told a Senate Committee hearing that he could not say for sure what a woman was without advice from his department.

In like fashion, US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson famously said she could not be sure what a woman was since ‘I’m not a biologist’.

Humility was supposed to mean being doubtful of yourself, not doubtful of obvious truths. But this has been completely reversed.

These days, people assert themselves while, in order to demonstrate humility, they doubt reason and logic. Ours is the generation that boasts about how we would never be so arrogant as to say that two and two is four.

We wouldn’t be so opinionated or judgemental as to say for sure what a woman is.

We are so humble we have become stupid. And we’re proud of the fact. We have become so open-minded that our brains have fallen out.

Love for love’s sake is not love at all. It is something else. The same goes for kindness, charity, humility, and any other virtue you care to mention.

The virtues are only helpful in so much as they reflect ultimate reality and truth. But divorced from reality, they become dangerous.

If the reality is that being overweight is unhealthy but, to be kind, you tell the obese person that obesity is beautiful, then your virtue is more harmful than any of the vices.

The vices – sloth, envy, gluttony, and so on – are as immediately recognisable as dangerous as the red devil with his pitchfork and horns.

But the seductive charm of virtue untethered from reality threatens to destroy Western culture, even as we pat ourselves on the back at just how virtuous we have become.