THE HARVARD CRIMSON | March 3, 2020
Page 6
Editorial The Crimson Editorial board
Op-Ed
Vital Signs of Collaboration
End Bigotry Against Atheists at Harvard
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s coronavirus, COVID-19, continues to grow, so must global cooperation. The University announced last week that a group of Harvard scientists will collaborate with Chinese researchers over the next five years to study the coronavirus. Harvard Medical School Dean George Q. Daley and Zhong Nanshan — the head of an expert team within China’s National Health Commission — will co-lead the team, which will focus on creating more accurate diagnostic tests, designing vaccines, and antiviral therapies, and will be largely funded by a $115 million grant from the real estate giant and Fortune Global 500 company China Evergrande group. The transnational partnership highlights the importance of countries and institutions around the world transcending national borders to solve global crises. Though Harvard is an American institution, its role as a leader in academia and scientific research endows it with duties to people around the world.
The collaboration offers Harvard the potential to continue its legacy as a leader not just in the field of public health — going all the way back to the smallpox vaccine in 1799 — as well as in global cooperation. Researching coronavirus is crucial not merely because it threatens Har-
vard students — who now face University travel restrictions on Italy, Iran, China, and South Korea — nor because it affects Americans — which, as the six U.S. deaths suggest, it no doubt does — but because it threatens the safety of people around the world — sickening nearly 90,000 and killing over 3,000 people. The collaboration offers Harvard the potential to continue its legacy as a leader not just in the field of public health — going all the way back to the smallpox vaccine in 1799 — as well as in global cooperation. But in the present, Harvard’s public image has faced criticism — specifically given the scrutiny it has received for accepting foreign funding, as well as funding from morally questionable private sources. This joint project offers the University an opportunity to demonstrate its institutional commitment to advancing knowledge in pursuit of positive societal transformation. Moreover, we hope that through its involvement with the pandemic, Harvard can help take control of the social narrative of coronavirus. In light of recent racist attacks against Asians and Asian Americans from New York City to Los Angeles, whoever is helping frame the discourse around coronavirus must remain cognizant of the xenophobia that this conversation has the potential to generate. Coronavirus cannot become the object of racist rhetoric or a vehicle for racialized and xenophobic policy. The spread of such a disease must be addressed vigorously, but not at the expense of tormenting and ostracizing our neighbors. Writing of the reports of stigma
around the world related to the virus, Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote in an email to college students, “That is not who we are at Harvard, and I
Coronavirus cannot become the object of racist rhetoric or a vehicle for racialized and xenophobic policy. The spread of such a disease must be addressed vigorously, but not at the expense of tormenting and ostracizing our neighbors. ask you to join me in ensuring that everyone in our community is treated with respect and dignity.” That call shouldn’t just concern our campus community, but the global one we are a part of and to which Harvard as an institution of knowledge production and social influence is so deeply responsible. Cooperation across borders — regardless of trade wars and whatever other sources of stigma might prevail — must continue. We applaud Nanshan and Daley for their leadership toward that end. This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
Column
Why “Clean” Eating Can Really Be Toxic
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urrently, there are over 46 million posts on Instagram tagged “#cleaneating”. Many of them come from accounts dedicated to health and fitness, whose administrators adhere to a dizzying array of diets: vegan, keto, paleo, Mediterranean, and raw being the most common examples. There is no formal definition for clean eating, but that hasn’t stopped people from using the term. It actually seems like tangible guidelines are beside the point; clean eating isn’t really about what you eat so much as how you feel about it. According to its evangelists, clean eating is a way to feel good — it relies on the assumption that diet has an impact on mental health. What you eat undoubtedly has an impact on your brain, as numerous scientific studies have confirmed. However, a fixation on eating healthily isn’t necessarily a good thing. In fact, the clean eating trend, along with “cleanses” and similar fads, may be contributing to a rise in a little-known condition called orthorexia. Orthorexia is essentially an obsession with eating “pure” foods. It comes from “ortho”, meaning right or correct, and “orexia”, meaning appetite. It hasn’t yet been officially recognized as an eating disorder by the American Psychiatric Association; the name was only coined in 1997 when Dr. Steven Bratman, a physician from California, wrote an essay detailing observations of his health-obsessed patients. “Orthorexia begins innocently enough,” Bratman wrote. “But … Over time, what they eat, how much, and the consequences of dietary indiscretion come to occupy a greater and great-
er proportion of the orthorexic’s day.” Eventually, “the sufferer spends most of his time planning, purchasing and eating meals. The orthorexic’s inner life becomes dominated by efforts to resist temptation, self-condemnation for lapses, self-praise for success at complying with the self-chosen regime, and feelings of superiority over others less pure in their dietary habits.” I’m well-acquainted with orthorexia; there was a time in my life when I displayed many of the symptoms. It was difficult for me to eat foods that I deemed “unclean” without an anxiety-inducing level of guilt. On days when I only ate acceptable foods, or hadn’t eaten much at all, I felt almost euphoric; on days when I had “messed up,” I tormented myself with
The clean eating trend, along with “cleanses” and similar fads, may be contributing to a rise in a little-known condition called orthorexia. disparaging thoughts about my weight and health. I’m hardly the only one who’s experienced this; I’ve been surrounded by them my whole life, from athletes who cut out entire food groups to reach “optimal performance” to friends who only eat the lower-calorie versions of the food they actually want to eat. I often wonder if, in the absence of an ever-present diet culture, these problems would still exist. What started out as something positive — encouraging people to eat well — has morphed into an environment wherein people are encouraged to disregard their mental and physical health in pursuit of sketchy dietary advice.
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hen Harvard Law Professor Adrian C. Vermeule ’90 made a lame attempt at humor by tweeting that principled conservatives would be “[t]he very first group [headed] for the camps” under a post-Trump liberal regime, critics condemned him for trivializing the Holocaust. They did so even though he did not mention the Holocaust and even though he might just as easily have had in mind the camps in which Japanese Americans were interned during World War II or those in which the People’s Republic of China is confining the Uighurs today. A joker who comes anywhere near the Holocaust does so at his peril. But a few months earlier, when Vermeule took dead aim at atheists, the critics were silent. In defense of state laws that forbid atheists from holding public office or serving on juries, he tweeted that they are “sensible” because atheists “can’t be trusted to keep an oath.” This wasn’t an inadvertent insult, like his tweet about “camps” may have been; Vermeule demeaned atheists intentionally. The critics were silent because bigots enjoy far greater freedom to slander atheists than any other minority group.
If Vermeule had said the same thing about laws in Southern states depriving African Americans of the right to hold public office and to serve on juries, the uproar would have been deafening.
When I say sketchy, I literally mean inaccurate; a lot of the diets touted by health-food bloggers as “clean” aren’t even beneficial and might even be harmful. For example, it’s true that on the whole, vegans seem to live longer than non-vegans, but that might also be because their diets are generally higher in vegetables. People who eat an omnivorous diet high in whole-grains and fibrous foods can be just as healthy as vegans — perhaps more so, since they have to worry less about vitamin deficiencies. Keto diets are great for losing weight, but staying on them for too long might mean that your diet is low in fiber, which is essential for your body to function properly. Paleo and raw diets can actually be dangerous. And the “diet”, low-calorie, and low-sugar products that dieters love are often filled with artificial sweeteners linked to nasty long-term health outcomes. The clean eating trend, then, has become less about eating well than needless restriction. I don’t think that the influencers who promote clean eating think that they’re doing anything wrong. It might be that, despite their best intentions, they have simply tapped into and exacerbated toxic undercurrents in our culture. Social media is an echo-chamber; trends and ideas are amplified, often without any real thought put into their merits. Add this to the constant comparison that social media encourages, and disordered dietary habits that lead to restrictive eating — especially ones promoted with colorful, aesthetically-pleasing Instagram posts — can spread like wildfire.
If Vermeule had said the same thing about laws in Southern states depriving African Americans of the right to hold public office and to serve on juries, the uproar would have been deafening. Harvard students would have overrun the Law School and demanded his resignation. Had he targeted Muslims, gay individuals, or Hispanic immigrants, the reaction would have been the same. But even at a university whose students detest bigotry and discrimination, a faculty member who accuses atheists of immorality bears no greater risk of being condemned than one who speaks out against, say, abusive husbands and neglectful parents. Because bigotry against atheists is common and tolerated, most atheists refuse to describe themselves as such. When asked by polling organizations about their religious beliefs, about 4 percent of respondents say they are atheists. But a clever study conducted by researchers at the University of Kentucky found that people who do not believe in God comprise about 26 percent of the population. The researchers hypothesized that, because “religious nonbelief is often heavily stigmatized, … many atheists [] refrain from outing themselves even in anonymous polls.” Summarizing the results of a study published in 2016, one author described atheists as the “group Americans love to hate.” It is all but certain that many Harvard students are closeted atheists. Atheists tend to be far more educated than those who are religious. According to a 2018 report by the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of atheists and other “Solidly Secular” persons hold college degrees versus 14 percent of “God-and-Country Believers” and 12 percent of the “Diversely Devout.” The student bodies at universities and other places of higher learning also contain mostly young people, and young people are far less likely to affiliate with churches than their elders. Yet, because atheism is stigmatized, many are reluctant to state their lack of faith openly and the influence of atheists is muted. Because atheists tend to be better educated than believers, Vermeule’s attack on them is also a veiled broadside against education. His assertion that it is “sensible” to preclude atheists from holding elected office and serving on juries further implies that less-educated people are better suited to public service. Why anyone would hold these opinions is a mystery; that a professor at one of the country’s elite law schools does is horrifying. Vermeule’s attack on atheists also implies that religious individuals can be trusted to uphold oaths. But if that is so, one must wonder how he can explain the ease with which Republican members of the United States House of Representatives and Senate ignored their oaths during the impeachment proceedings? The GOP is the party of religion. Republican officeholders typically wear their religious affiliations on their sleeves. Yet, instead of upholding the Constitution and judging President Donald Trump’s culpability objectively, as their oaths required, they frustrated the investigation, rigged the process in his favor, and ignored the evidence entirely. When push came to shove, their religious beliefs gave them no moral courage. The only exception was Senator Mitt Romney, who was pummeled by Trump and Fox News for allowing his religious convictions to influence his vote. Oh, the irony. Vermeule’s defense of state laws denying civil rights to atheists is religion-inspired bigotry, pure and simple. It’s time to put people like him on notice that atheists are entitled to respect. I hope that members of the Harvard community will send him this message, loudly.
—Rebecca E. J. Cadenhead ‘23 lives in Canaday Hall. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.
—Charles M. Silver is a Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2011.
helen wang—Crimson Designer
Rebecca E. J. Cadenhead Hangry
By Charles m. silver
