Are Nut-Ban Detractors Promoting Smugness?
The thread on nut allergies over at (again) the Times’ Well blog is an instructive example of an attitude toward disease that’s unfortunately gaining traction.
Many conservatives want to believe that society is basically fair, that there’s no sexism or racism, that equal opportunity exists for everyone. On both sides of the political spectrum, there are those who want to believe that the natural world is basically fair. Disease is predictable and mostly one’s own fault. Any attempt to change the natural course of it without getting to the root of the problem — the lax morals of disease sufferers or the decadent society in which they live — will probably fail or result in unintended consequences.
When it comes to nut allergies, you can’t very well blame the kids, so there are two options. You can claim that life-threatening nut allergies simply do not exist. “As a professional scientist, I have had conversations with fellow scientists convinced that their child would die if someone had a peanut butter sandwich in the same room — these people ought to know better!” one commenter writes. Or you can blame the parents. “Seriously, I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see the stats on severe epidemics of kids keeling over from being in the same zip code as a peanut in OTHER developed countries. You know, the ones where you can’t sue and the schools can’t be pushed around by lunatics,” another says. Back in your day, kids spent hours playing cowboys and Indians and running around the block and rolling around in large piles of crushed almonds until Mom called them in for dinner. But nowadays, with an overscheduled generation of kids constantly being shuttled back and forth from tai chi practice and guitar lessons — well, of course the pampered little darlings are going to develop nut allergies.
Either way, it’s a lot less threatening than admitting that nature is pretty arbitrary.