Undisciplinary

Good Take/Bad Take: Gyms, compulsory ethics, and revisionist COVID takes

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Is clinging to "Happy New Year" wishes well into January a charming tradition or a sign of time slipping by? We dive into this seasonal conundrum before taking a hard look at the world of gym culture, where the quest for health often morphs into a pursuit of the perfect body. Our discussion unpacks an eye-opening critique of high-intensity interval training, challenging the notion that exercise should be a grueling endeavor rather than a source of joy. Join us as we unravel the complexities of fitness fads and refocus the lens on well-being and personal fulfillment.

Meanwhile, the classroom becomes a battleground for morality as we dissect the effectiveness of mandatory ethics courses in higher education. With insights from our teaching experiences, we debate whether these courses spark true moral development or merely check a box. And as we navigate the intricate dance between public health and politics, we confront the tension between evidence-based messaging and the political landscape that shapes it, especially amidst crises. Listen in as we confront the ideals and the practical realities of public health, presenting an honest examination of its place in our society.

Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com

Chris:

Undisciplinary is recorded on the unceded lands of the Wadawurrung peoples of the Kulin nation Geelong and the Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to elders, past and present.

Jane:

NG, ng, ng, ng. The concerns about an encouraging sexual promiscuity are unfounded. Just how much free help can people receive from the government have to not pair in the office cake to passive smoking?

Chris:

Okay, well, let's get started. Happy New Year, Jane.

Jane:

Not indulging you in that, Chris.

Chris:

So we were going to do this in January, but now it's late February, but I still think it applies, because I was almost going to say in an email to somebody the other day Happy New Year. So what about just as I guess an easy, friendly one to start with saying Happy New Year in late January? How far away from New Year Day can you be to start saying Happy New Year?

Jane:

Yeah, I ran into a colleague on Sunday which would have been the 18th of February. Oh, at the gym. Interesting.

Chris:

That's a bit of foreshadowing.

Jane:

Yeah, and she said Happy New Year and I said no, the year's half finished. So I feel like that is science and it means that 18th of February is too late for a Happy New Year.

Chris:

Right. So how did they respond to that? Because they were sort of coming at you clearly with a bit of hopeful optimism and it's completing and you just shut it down.

Jane:

Yeah, that's a good question. Perhaps I don't read people very well. No, I think she was fine with that.

Chris:

Made a bit of a joke, but I think that you know it's a greeting that you give to people to welcome the new year and if you haven't seen them and this is the first time you see them for that year then it seems legit Like a lot of colleagues are coming back to be physically present on campus around now, around February. Haven't seen them. Happy New Year.

Jane:

Or haven't seen you for ages. It's really nice to see you. Too many words.

Chris:

Too many words, but I guess it's something you know, considering so many other things going on in the world.

Jane:

maybe we don't want to get too upset about whether it's a Happy New Year, agree, all right, I'm not actually upset, just a bit stuck in my ways.

Chris:

But yeah, I think, is the disappointment that it just reminds you that the year is no longer fresh, it's starting to turn a little bit.

Jane:

That is probably a disappointment.

Chris:

Yes, because Happy New Year should be reserved for when you're kind of like on holidays having a bit of a hangover. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Something beautiful about it You're wearing your jandals.

Jane:

Exactly Got my jandals on. Might even have my togs on, but also I can't remember who I haven't seen since. I mean, I know that there's probably someone I haven't seen since July last year. Do I say Happy New Year to them?

Chris:

Maybe not. I think it's all about the really. It's about the response and just being, you know, appropriately nice. I'm not accusing you. I'm thinking about when I actually said Happy New Year to a colleague and it was legit time to be saying that, because I think it was like around the 7th of January and they said I think they said, is it what's happy about it?

Jane:

Oh yeah, so that's yeah, that's a whole other issue.

Chris:

I think so. Well, you flagged this issue. Gyms Now we had a response to one of our final episodes last year where, well, in two episodes last year we talked about the gym in different ways. I talked about the fellow running in jeans on the gym, on the treadmill Props, and there was another conversation that I can't quite recall about the gym.

Jane:

Oh, it might have been when I was talking about taking cake to the gym.

Chris:

That's the one, and someone responded by saying it was Pat McConville actually, good old Pat.

Jane:

Shout out to Pat. Shout out to Pat, friend of the podcast.

Chris:

Said that they hadn't expected so much gym rat conversation on this podcast, which made me think, yeah, what's the deal with gyms? And is it hypocritical, I guess, to be, you know, doing sort of critical weight, critical public health kind of conversations and stuff, but also participating in gym culture, because I guess, the inference being, gyms are in some ways, or at least have been, epicentres for people to feel anxious about their bodies, to feel that they need to conform to particular bodily norms and shapes, and there's lots of mirrors and, you know, certain gyms have a certain culture attached to them that would seem to run against the grain of the undisciplinary ethos, yep, and I appreciate that I do, and I feel like there is a lot more connection between gym and body shape than there needs to be.

Jane:

For example, I was reading an article in perhaps the Guardian, perhaps something else, which I think I sent you recently, chris, saying something like God, this makes me mad, but I might have been swearing, I don't recall.

Chris:

I think it was the swears which put me off.

Jane:

I thought oh sorry, but it was all about how you shouldn't do HIIT, because that's not the optimum way to lose weight.

Chris:

You shouldn't do what.

Jane:

HIIT stands for high intensity interval training and I do that because I love it, because it makes me feel really happy and tired in a really pleasant way. What I don't do it for is to lose weight. I think I have accepted at this point that I've been the same weight for 30 years or so and that is what it is. But when we have really uncritical things in the media and so on about don't do this and it doesn't say explicitly why but you read through it and try and understand why you shouldn't be doing it and really the underlying thing is that it's not the best way to lose weight or it doesn't optimize weight loss. It makes me realize that so much of so much of the talk around gyms and being in gyms is about weight loss really implicitly and I hear everything he's saying, chris, about gyms being really uncomfortable places for some people and I acknowledge that I go to the gym a lot. I feel like it's my main hobby, which is pretty boring.

Chris:

But my main hobby is knitting, so that's also boring For the listeners. Jane has just returned from the gym. Yeah, I got my gym clothes on Grubby.

Jane:

I reckon, as a woman of a certain age, there's something that makes me feel really great about being able to do a whole lot of physical things. I feel grateful for that and I appreciate that not everyone can.

Chris:

Yeah, you're not on the stand here to defend gyms, because I also attended gym, because how else would have I seen a man running on a treadmill in jeans? I guess I could have been out the front of the window, but I was on the inside looking at him while I was on the rowing machine. Yeah, I think that gym culture has changed from that characterization. Well, some gyms have. For instance, I had previously gone to a gym for a short time which was very macho and I really disliked that. There were lots of men grunting and chains jangling, because I did these big things with chains and stuff like that and it was.

Chris:

I did not like that environment at all and I think, yeah, there's many different reasons to go to the gym or not go to the gym, but there's many different reasons that then just oriented towards weight, I would say, and that some gyms do push against that. But yeah, I mean, there's certainly part of you know, the diet body shaming culture and some gyms do better than others, that would seem to To either encourage that or discourage it. So the current gym I go to is very, you know, not focused on that kind of stuff, and that's also represented by who works there as well and the kinds of people who run it.

Chris:

And yeah, so for me, it's about you know, a range of things, one of which is convenience to get those endorphins pumping. Another is continuing training towards my dream of playing in the National Basketball Association. Do they have like a veterans league yeah, and I'm playing in it. I'm playing in a feeder version of the veterans league yeah, and so maintaining a general level of fitness has been able, has enabled, enabled me to keep doing things that I like, such as, you know, playing basketball, etc.

Jane:

Keep the dream alive yeah.

Chris:

All right, pat. Let us know if that was sufficient or if you want to tell us.

Jane:

And I will say, pat, if it does make you feel better though I do actively push back on any time at the gym Somebody asks me about a food thing, or if I'm around a food thing, I say I don't want to talk about that, or I don't think that that's a useful way to think about what we're doing right now or whatever, and that felt like a really brave thing to do. But yeah, when people are going, to start to have a macros?

Chris:

Was that before or after you told them to piss off You're not here for their happy new years?

Jane:

Look, that was a colleague who was also just doing her best to use her body. Yeah, no, I think I've got a friendly way of doing it now, but it does feel sort of like a bit of a brave thing to push back on some.

Chris:

That is interesting, though I've never seen the food stuff come into it. Maybe that's because I don't talk about it.

Jane:

No, I'm sure the men talk about it as well. Have you got Jim Friends Chris?

Chris:

I don't, and I'd really dislike it when. I see people there who I know, I don't know. You know, should I talk to you Well?

Jane:

they must. I'm just going to sit over here on the Olympic.

Chris:

Island over there.

Jane:

Yeah, all right, moving right along.

Chris:

Moving right along. So we touched on this in the episode with Tamara and Soha, but I think, expanding it beyond that context Compulsory ethics courses. So if you didn't listen to the episode where we were talking about Israeli attacks on Garzan healthcare systems, one of the responses is E Q manual wrote in the New York Times about university students Response to the October 7th attacks was a sense that there was a moral vacuum on the university campuses and that there needed to be ethics courses. Now we don't need to talk about the role of ethics courses in that specific context, but you know, both of us, I believe, have taught compulsory ethics courses in different institutions.

Chris:

They seem to be a institutional response to whenever there's a problem. So Ezekiel manual suggesting it here in relation to Israel Garza. I remember when I was at Penn State in the U S After there was a big institutional coverup of sexual abuse, there was a suggestion that there should be, you know, more ethics training. I'm not sure if anyone said compulsory ethics, but it certainly was floated around in various institutional responses. What do you reckon compulsory ethics courses?

Jane:

I'm not massively into compulsory anything Quite like compulsory seat belts, I suppose, but I feel like this is in a different, different league. I think it's really interesting the idea that an ethics course sort of would somehow make you a better person rather than just maybe a slightly more critical thinker. And I was thinking about that when you were talking, Chris, in terms of ethics in primary schools as an alternative to religious instruction in public schools. In New South Wales they have that anyway I don't know if that's everywhere the idea being to me, I guess, that religious education sort of provides children with some sort of moral grounding or something like that, and that if you don't have a religious commitment, then you could or should be getting your moral grounding in a different but also quite formalized way, which is just sort of an interesting idea.

Chris:

You're kicking on its nest and holding hands.

Jane:

But okay, I was the ethics coordinator at my kids primary school. Very difficult to get teachers, which makes me think as well that when you are prescribing something like compulsory ethics courses, who's going to be teaching them and what are they going to be teaching?

Chris:

Because guys, yes yes, and then we did touch on that who designs what is compulsory and this? I think there seems to be an assumption that there is a clear curriculum that would be appropriate, a clear sort of secular, liberal curriculum, but as you know, many critical scholars have pointed out that excludes a whole bunch of things. So then does it turn into just a way to teach people to critically evaluate and think about things, which doesn't seem like a such a bad thing, but can that not be introduced through all kind of pedagogy anyway.

Jane:

Yeah, exactly, you would hope that that was happening.

Chris:

Yeah, I mean from my experience and you know, no doubt there are people who are listening who have been involved in lots of different ways and could point to good experiences and would but from my experience of teaching compulsory ethics courses, people either sort of just plot along or, and then there is a minority they are a minority but still a significant minority I've found who get very resentful and pushback against what they're being taught. And then another minority who I think then kind of have a maybe inflated competence of feeling that they have. You know, in doing the tick, ticker box from the institutional perspective of everyone gets taught ethics, then some misguided students may leave feeling that they've got ethics that they've achieved that, that requirement.

Chris:

But yeah, I'm so I would come down on a not good from the ways that I have seen and experienced it, but open to being convinced that there are better ways.

Jane:

Yeah, I'd be interested to hear, I would be interested to hear other people's perspectives on this. I will say, actually I've only taught compulsory ethics courses to med students or no, not just med students, but but health students, maybe public health as well and I would say that a minority are really into it and it's really engaging and maybe inspiring for those people. Most of them are just like oh, this is annoying, but I'll do it.

Jane:

And some of them are really resentful and I don't know that. I think beyond maybe engaging a small minority that might otherwise not have been engaged, I don't think they really do anything.

Chris:

Something that yeah, I mean something that I am for is. I do like the idea of and I think could encapsulate some of this sort of stuff the idea of a sort of compulsory or a universally applied to cohort of students like a sense compulsory approach to critical thinking and moral formation. And this happens in, I think, more US liberal arts colleges, where a particular book might be assigned to a cohort and there is the sense that everyone collectively is reading through this book. And so I wonder with med students you know whether if they were assigned a book like Chelsea what I go is another day in the colony and everyone were to read through that and there was some kind of collective response and an opportunity for discussion whether that would be more formative than having a.

Chris:

We're going to go from Plato to NATO discussion of ethics and and you know what have you and the same for? I think yeah, throughout, but others have probably got experience of that and think that's all bullshit to let us know. Let us know. So I'm going with. It's OK to say happy new year whenever you want, but going to the gym is OK.

Jane:

Yeah, I'm going to say the same as you. And happy new year, because now I feel like a commudian.

Chris:

Going to the gym is OK, with lots of asterisks, compulsory ethics courses. I'm leading towards Banto.

Jane:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I'm with you on that.

Chris:

Although they are good for employing ethicists.

Jane:

They are, and I do think that medical ethics is probably an important part of a medical curriculum.

Chris:

I will say that is also true. Ok, so the final one is probably the more substantial I'm not going to say interesting, but I also would lean that way which is an article that came out in January 19th Too late to say happy new year, ben In the New York Times by Pamela Paul. The article is called public health officials can't risk the public's faith and this was brought to my attention from an old colleague of an old friend who's a colleague they are also older emeritus professor Donald Thompson from Penn State. A bit of Penn State mentioning happening today.

Chris:

But this article starts off with an anecdote of from Pamela Paul saying how she was riding her bike with her son and then a passerby screamed at them saying put on your mask. And then they sort of shouted, tried to shout back about the latest science about mask wearing and her son probably told her to calm down. It's all OK. But from that anecdote she's basically going into review this new book from Sandra Gallia. The book's called Within Reason, a liberal public health for an illiberal time and the thesis of the book, or where the starting point, is that public health, according to Gallia, succumbed to a disturbing strain of illiberalism during the pandemic.

Chris:

And I think the fear is that this illiberalism has then undermined trust in public health. And by illiberalism I guess the sense is that there were edicts or mandates or compulsory requirements that weren't necessarily based in evidence or fact or science. For me, I think the biggest one that I think of and was just thinking of yesterday, it's the playground one, and that these kinds of illiberal, because they sort of are going against people's freedom, have undermined trust in public. And Paul sort of summarizes or asked through Gallia, saying if Americans have come to distrust public health advice, what role may public health officials played in fostering that distrust?

Chris:

And that's something I do like about this article, reflecting on the book, is calling on public health folks to reflect on their own role, which I think in in a range of areas sometimes is neglected, you know so.

Chris:

You know, for instance, in other stuff that I've done around food and diet, not seeing the role of public health messaging as actually contributing to some of the very problems that they identify. So anyway, the article and I guess reviewing the book is basically saying that there needs to be these more nuanced discussions of of public health and public health measures. That and this sense that the ideology of public health needs to not be intransigent, that it needs to be a willingness to sort of critique at what they're doing, based on the data and the science. So this is the general summary and maybe I'll leave it there before I go into what I didn't like about this. If you feel that there's anything like it feels at the end point of both this article and you know if it's a fair description of the book is that public health needs to be more nuanced, more reflective and to be based on the availability of evidence.

Jane:

And where there isn't any evidence, to be honest about that and yeah, yeah, I think it's really easy to write something like this in hindsight. I am definitely not for, you know, looking, excuse me, looking at all down.

Jane:

you know the playground example the curfews, the stopping people from hanging out in parks. You know that none of that felt useful and I do think that that undermined people's goodwill and their trust. I think the idea that we can rely on the science or rely on the evidence for all of this is really difficult, though and towards the end of, you know, in the later part of the pandemic, we could, we knew a lot about what was going on. Finally and I do think that at the beginning we've sort of forgotten just that we really knew nothing. We didn't know how it was transmitted, we didn't know who had it, we didn't know.

Jane:

You know, we didn't have right, we didn't have like death rates because we didn't know how many people were infected or just all of those things, such, and you remember there were people like washing down their groceries and all of that you know I watched Apple, but I mean good take. No, I mean watch your apples, you know, I think. I think that kind of really deep uncertainty. You know, we, we all knew that we didn't know what was happening.

Chris:

And that.

Jane:

I don't think anyone was pretending that they did know what was going on. I think the idea of just always acknowledging nuance and uncertainty is fine, except for that's also really frightening for people often and it can be very difficult to communicate. Here we need to shout out to our friends Julie Lee, claire Hooker, who do a lot about how to communicate risk during crisis. So I guess I just felt like, yeah, this is all fine in retrospect, like there are good points being made in retrospect. Being able to operationalize all of that care and nuance While you're freaking out, I as a collective, as a public health collective, is maybe unreasonable. I do also wonder if it might have just been public health time to shine, you know we're always like the people that no one cares about or no one sees.

Jane:

Yeah, but yeah.

Chris:

Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think a lot of these kinds of discussions do neglect how uncertain things were. But in going forward and this is where I would say you know, this is where the take is, if you like, in moving forward, and then you know Galea all, whoever you know, you know it's a book. Paul wrote the article for the New York Times, galea write the book that's been talked about.

Chris:

And the sort of conclusion or the forward looking dimension is that we can't look at the world in sort of good and bad terms. So they are putting it particularly in this US political context where red states, republican states, would have one measure and then blue Democrat states would have another and it would sort of go down party lines. And that's a little bit, I think, in Australia with particularly the way Dan Andrews and Mark Macau and as the sort of Labor leaders were characterized by some of the media and some of the liberal politicians. So they're saying that you know, we can't go down these lines and that we need to sort of get as trust in the science but also be admitting where there is gaps in the evidence. How realistic that is going forward, I don't know.

Chris:

But at this point I quite I disagreed with where Paul says to politicize public health, cave to public sentiment and social media pressure and prioritize influence over the pursuit of truth and this is what he says Gilea says puts us all at risk. So this is this idea that politicizing public health, that we need to move beyond the politics and somehow public health and they do, she does actually use this transcend. You know the final two sentences public health must transcend and us versus them mindset to promote the common good across the political spectrum. Gilea makes powerful case that to carry the worst illiberal outcomes from the pandemic into the next crisis would be a devastating mistake. I would actually say that we need to politicize public health even more because public health is so inherently political.

Jane:

Yeah that to pretend it's not, I think is part of the problem.

Chris:

Exactly.

Jane:

I wonder if I might. I don't know if this is wise or not, but I'll go with it. So I'm currently with our colleague, Chris diggling Excuse me conducting some research into basically exactly this, where we're doing a series of dialogue groups, talking to people about how things should be for the next one, you know, socially. So yesterday I ran a group that was people from Melbourne. Now we're six people and they had really vastly different views on how we should do public health.

Jane:

I guess for the next time, you know from from some people who were like do it all the same again, lock us down. You know that was important to other people saying it was all bullshit, Don't believe in covert. I didn't get vaccinated, I've never had covert, it was all just made up. So there's were six people who had never met before. They were incredibly respectful of each other's, of each other's really different views. They were, they were really thoughtful and really generous in giving their time and so on. I will say that the one thing that they all agreed on really wholeheartedly was that people who are up for election shouldn't be running public health or shouldn't be the face of public health campaigns, and this was interesting to me.

Jane:

So they were like their thing was if Dan Andrew, they would much have preferred that Dan Andrews wasn't fronting all of this information and that had just been some sort of functionary from, like, a Department of Health or something like that, because and I think that was the kind of politicization that they really objected to, that for them, at some point it went beyond trying to reduce transmission of covert to a sort of personality based thing. So you know, I don't live in Victoria, I'm not really familiar, I got to say, but I think that that they all, coming from very different perspectives, all agreed on that one thing about how important it was to be getting information from somebody whose job it was to do this sort of information and explain a bit more about sort of health literacy, science literacy, that sort of media literacy, yeah, and it not be a person who was up for election. I think that is a really interesting idea of public health being political, not in the way that we're using the word political, but as a platform for, I guess, getting and keeping a job.

Chris:

Yeah, that is interesting. I also wonder how much of that is as a result of how I mean politician certainly played into some of those games, but also how the media sort of spun those particular politicians as, as you know, and then spun their motives and those sorts of things. But yeah, I think I mean the problem then is having unelected officials, you know technocratic kind of rule, and all of the associated problems that come with that and can also feed into distrust and feeling that there is a rule from unelected people. But yeah, I mean it's interesting interesting conversation and idea.

Jane:

I mean Dan.

Chris:

Andrews is resigned from politics so he could take over the next one, which I'm sure lots of people we could get him on the, on the podcast, see what he thinks?

Jane:

Yeah, but this sort of doesn't really help with the point that you made, which was that I think that the conclusion of at least Paul's piece and the New York Times piece is really naive and unnuanced. In fact, you know, having called for appreciation of nuance and difference and so on, yeah, yeah.

Chris:

It seems that the solution is not to retreat further from the messiness of politics, but to go further into it.

Jane:

And be transparent about that.

Chris:

But then I mean the whole confounding factor is how politics and public health get played out in media debate and the interests of some to ferment division and confusion.

Jane:

Yeah, and you know, sell papers or generate clicks or whatever it is.

Chris:

Yeah, all right.

Jane:

Yeah, so kind of medium take. Actually, is there a medium take?

Chris:

Yeah, well, I do think the overarching point and I mean maybe to be fair to Gilea, paul does quote Gilea saying that they're not interested in litigating the past and you know what was the right or the wrong thing to do I do think we all, you know, even the humble podcaster included me to reflect on the ambiguity at the time back in 2020, when there was a lot of confusion.

Jane:

Just on the sexually as well, though, chris. I just want to give a shout out to a series that I just came across yesterday on ABC religion and ethics. It's a written piece, a written series by Morgan Brig and Mary Graham.

Jane:

This one that I was reading yesterday is called Human Futures and the incomplete dreaming story of COVID-19. It's a really beautiful read, but it's also relevant to this in that it talks about the at the initial, in the initial period of COVID, people doing things that involve thinking about other people, about the people around them and, I guess, really living relationally in a way that wasn't all about individual autonomy and that then and then I guess what happened when people started feeling that their individual rights were being infringed, and so on. Anyway, I'm not going to try and summarize it because I'm not going to do it justice, but maybe I'll send it to you, chris, and you can link to it.

Jane:

It's really great. Can I just make also one final bad take comment?

Chris:

Sure.

Jane:

Yeah, this is Alabama IVF ruling. Have you seen that today?

Chris:

I have not.

Jane:

In Alabama, the courts have decided that embryos are persons, and so they, I believe, have stopped IVF treatments in the state of Alabama, because if anybody messes up an embryo or something they can be, I guess, charged with murder.

Chris:

Right yeah, so instead they just will be perpetually frozen.

Jane:

I guess so yeah.

Chris:

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah Down, disturbing.

Jane:

Yeah.

Chris:

Maybe something for a future episode.

Jane:

Yep. So yeah, that's my intro. Bad take for the day.

Chris:

Mm. Hmm. Well, you took us on a nice, edifying closer with Mary Graham.

Jane:

Yeah.

Chris:

Peace and then and then ruined it all.

Jane:

Sorry, no worries All right?

Chris:

Well, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram and the like, and we look forward to next time. We have a very good interview coming up which I'm excited about, so look forward to sharing that with you. Bye.