Smiling and Gravity
December 19, 2015
ALAN writes:
As one who contributed (four years ago) to the debate about being surrounded by people who are smiling mindlessly, I offer these comments on the latest chapter in that debate.
I suggest that smiling is acceptable only if done for a valid reason. “Because everyone else is doing it,” “Because advertising depicts it,” and “Because busybodies are forever telling us to smile” are not valid reasons.
I for one will argue that the mass promotion of smiling is a sign of a culture on its way downward.
Do the Amish agree to walk around wearing perpetual smiles and thus looking like idiots?
I have fewer than five photographs in which my grandparents are smiling, but that fact had no bearing whatever on their character and integrity, and it would never influence my opinion of them or their lives (favorable in both cases).
Commenters Lydia Sherman and Sven make the excellent point that thoughtful people resent being prodded to smile. In one of his essays, Erich Fromm remarked upon the mindlessness with which Americans teach their children to smile at the drop of a whim. Concerning children and their attempt to make sense of life, Ayn Rand wrote in 1970:
“Observe….the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. (If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man.)…..”
[Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, New American Library, 1971, p. 191 ]
And let us not forget these words of Chicago philosopher Mike Royko from one of his columns in May 1989:
“I smile only when it is absolutely necessary and unavoidable, which isn’t very often. ….smiling is unnatural because it violates the laws of nature. When you smile your facial muscles resist gravity. It is far more natural for your face to let gravity do its thing and cause your face to droop. If nature intended us to be smiling all the time, we would have been made with our heads upside down. …..I don’t trust people who smile all the time…..”
[Mike Royko, For the Love of Mike, University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 21-22 ]
