The new American morality: Abs, not eyes, are the window to the soul

That sense of failure you feel when you haven’t exercised in days? That conviction that if you could pull off better push-ups, you’d be a better person through and through? These, too, are his doing, at least in part. What he left behind when he died last week, at the toned old age of 96, was not only a sweaty culture of relentless crunching and spinning but also the notion that fitness equals character, and that self-actualization begins with the self-discipline to get and stay in shape. In the post-LaLanne landscape, it’s not the eyes but the abdominals that are windows to the soul.

“There seems to be a whole substitute morality, where your obligation is to go to the gym and not ask why,” says Mark Greif, a founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and the author of a widely discussed 2004 essay, “Against Exercise.” “If you don’t, you become a sort of villain of the culture.”…

For Mr. LaLanne, proper physical stewardship involved not ascetic denial so much as activity, activity, activity. You must run! Or at least pump your fists up and down as you walk fast, preferably on an incline! Don’t forgo hammer curls! The true believer has a self-punishing — and often solitary — regimen. And he or she achieves inner peace only because of it…

And if you don’t succeed? To be unfit is to be unfit: a villain of the culture, indeed.