It’s readily admitted that exercise is both good and good for you. But can it be virtuous? And can athletics provide friendship, community, and tradition? Writing in Law & Liberty yesterday, I answered emphatically in the affirmative. I was responding to the writer and editor Sohrab Ahmari’s deprecation of “lifestyle rightism,” which he described earlier this year as the idea that “political change can be brought about by making better personal, investment, and consumer choices.”
My argument to the contrary focused not just on the benefits of physical activity, on an individual and a community level, but also on how such things both make up and strengthen the apolitical activities that a polity exists to defend. Ahmari’s view seemed overly — or perhaps overtly — political in a way that failed to capture the benefits and joys of things that are good in themselves.
“To think otherwise,” I argued, “requires thinking of all aspects of public life as existing in a unified, top-down, centralized whole, seeking constantly to reabsorb into politics any lingering or stray elements, and disdaining what one cannot easily understand.”
Read the whole thing here and discover how the Apostle Paul, John Milius, Edmund Burke, and Michael Novak relate to my case.