Is the caller there?

If you were listening to WNYC's Brian Lehrer show this morning, you heard the voice of Singletails. Brian had on a New Yorker writer who had written an article (that I haven't read, that's probably sitting in my 'to be read' pile of New Yorkers) about mega-trends in food. The guest (sort of obvious I didn't get his name, huh?) mentioned that in the '50s, the thought was that in the future we would be taking a pill that would provide us with all of the nutrition that we need. However, during the 1960s, there was something of a revolution in food--as in many other areas--whereby the trend was away from 'processed foods.' However, it all comes down to marketing, as these alternative foods involve processing, just of a different sort.

So I called in. I said that I was a guy who would be thrilled if I could go to the supermarket each week and buy a 25 pound bag of something called 'food' that would provide me with everything I nutritionallly needed. And, I asked if the guest didn't think that with the proliferation of meal replacement beverages and protein bars and the like, we weren't perhaps closer to the Fifties' ideal of a pill than we might want to admit. Brian and the guest agreed I made a very good point. The guest added that there's a new produce that is a nutritionally complete loaf of bread, containing everything we need, and it's sold as 'women's bread' and 'men's bread.' Brian closed by telling me never to get married. Point taken, Brian! I won't!

Earlier on the show, there was a discussion of the furor over William Bennet, the Virtue Maven, having been exposed as someone who has dumped $8 million into slot machines over the years. Bob Goldberg from the Weekly Standard was on doing his best to argue that this didn't compromise Bennett as a moralist, as Bennett had never inveighed against gambling as a vice, and that there are some vices that are not intrinsically bad, but can be bad if they're taken too far, and that gambling was one of these.

I think (had I dialed the phone and gotten on the air ) I would have argued that all behavior is morally neutral: neither good or bad. The act itself isn't the problem. But, every act has both positive and negative consequences for the actor and for the society in which the actor lives. These consequences are what must be weighed in determining morality. I can beat someone and everybody's happy, or I can beat someone and have to go to jail because everybody is really unhappy (with me).

I love public radio.

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