We Have Ignored The Physical Side Of Life

Next time you see someone railing against ‘materialism’…

In the long run, it will prove as impossible to get great leaders and creators out of a sickly people as it is to get beautiful flowers or nutritious food out of diseased and sickly soil. And in the whole record of the teaching of Jesus, there is not so much as one word about conditioning and grooming the life of the people as a whole, not so much as a suggestion of any such social and racial hygiene as is contained, for instance, in the Code of Manu of the ancient Hindus. And the effect is writ large today all over the Western world, which resembles a garden that has been allowed to go to weeds. This deficiency is so great, and the consequences so utterly ruinous, that I believe no merit in the teaching otherwise can compensate for its deficiencies or warrant an effort to retain as our religion a regimen so faulty. 

The deficiency becomes even more evident and serious the further we probe into the Gospel teaching. Nowhere is there any recognition whatever of the basic importance of the physical side of life—of man’s relation to the Earth, from which he has been formed; of the state of the soil that supports the plant and animal life which supplies his food; of physical health in man himself, and of bodily beauty and a vigorous will to beget children as indications of it. On the contrary, the emphasis is exclusively spiritual—that is, psychological and devotional. The entire physical side of life is disparaged, when it is not entirely ignored. One may believe that this misrepresents the mind of Jesus, that the distortion is due to the refracting medium of the minds of his disciples through which his teaching has come down to us. But there is no proof of this. The record as we have it certainly indicates a very lopsided and unhealthy view of life. And it has left a blight wherever it has spread. 

A human being is a psycho-physical unity. We have no experience of “body,” “mind,” or “soul” as separate entities. They are but the inextricable and interdependent parts of our being; or, yet more exactly, but different aspects of one organic whole. They never occur, and strictly should never be considered, apart from one another. 

Thus the physical is seen to be the foundation, support, and indicator of the mind and spirit. Exceptions only prove the rule that a really healthy and wholesome outlook on life is not to be found in a person who was badly put together in the first place, and who is diseased and sickly to boot. In the long run, health of all kinds is largely dependent upon eating the right kind of food. And human food itself cannot contain the elements necessary to robust health if the very plants that men and animals eat, feed upon sickly soil. As to all this there is an increasingly authoritative consensus. 

But the continuing disregard of the physical in yet other fields is leading to most vicious consequences. People need to know that health in the fullest and highest sense, of “body, mind and soul,” cannot be maintained so long as the philosophy of “the melting pot” causes people to flout the Doctrine of the Thoroughbred, to violate all the known laws about breeding, and to plunge into an indiscriminate crossing of races, types, and classes. 

Moreover, physical beauty is not a temptation of the devil and a thing to fear, as our fathers believed; nor is it a thing to take little into account, as most people of our own generation are inclined to do. Rather, is it one of the most important marks and evidences of desirability in man or woman, and an indication of both fitness and readiness to produce desirable offspring. All history shows, and all reason confirms, that no people can ever make anything of itself except as its reproductive instinct keeps it constantly reinforced with a steady stream of vigorous and gifted new life, which flows chiefly from the superior part of the population, and from which in one way or another sickliness and defectiveness are early filtered out. 

Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or otherwise, the life of a people must conform to such basic physical necessities as these or it will go down to destruction. It may take time, but there seems to be time aplenty; and time will always work against the violator, fatally and inexorably. Sooner or later the population will no longer produce men of the caliber that seers look for, but for whose maintenance and increase they almost never make any provision. It will have become a race of cowed and spiritless fellaheen, whose gradual deterioration has at last left them the easy mark of an unspoiled and more masterful people, and from whom one wave of conquest after another has washed out all but the last traces of their original strength and manhood. They are finished, fit only for the dunghill. 

Frankly, I think this is the fate to which any people exposes itself that follows Jesus, century after century, in his disregard of the physical, of the Earth, of diet, sex, beauty, breeding and the Doctrine of the Thoroughbred. It unfits them for survival. He was so set on the fruits that he forgot the roots, and in the end roots decide. Without healthy roots the best plants die. Jesus’ exclusive emphasis on the so-called spiritual is pernicious and ruinous. This is revealed, and proved, far more than any but a very few people today realize, by the decadence so marked in this Western world of ours, which has longest and most closely been exposed to Jesus’ teaching. We are marked for extinction. 

–William Gayley Simpson “Which Way Western Man”