How much of what I value can survive? I’m no smoker, but it is a little personal enjoyment that many do value. My old mum partook and did alright out of it until she passed away at the age of 89, and yet it seems that the latest Big State expedition into the vandalism of everyday pleasure is to attack smokers. We all knew that this newly elected version of the oligarchy that rules us, sensing that Rishi Sunak got little effective pushback from his barmy proposal to phase out smoking would take up the cudgel. And as with everything the new regime does, it wants to take up its weaponry sooner rather than later.
Other casualties to be counted as collateral damage might very well include the Great British Pub. So it’s not just one pleasure to be affected, it’s social drinking too. This sort of side effect is nothing to write home about whenever any governmental policy is born. Such things carry with them a certain inevitability. One side effect of the clampdown on drink
driving some decades ago now was the hospitality sector. I’m sure the pub trade was affected back then, but at least there was a strong case for not allowing drunks to be left in charge of what is after all a deadly instrument of death on a public street.
What though, is the effect of smoking upon the general health of the population if people are allowed to carry it on in a pub garden? Or even next to a public street outside the pub’s front? We do not know yet exactly where, or if this policy will be implemented, but the BBC tells us:
“The details remain unclear, but smoking could be banned in pub gardens, outdoor restaurants, and outside hospitals and sports grounds.”
And “When questioned on the proposals, Sir Keir said the government was "going to take decisions in this space" and more details would be revealed. “I think it’s important to get the balance right," he said, adding that the NHS was "on its knees”.
You get the picture. The banning of someone’s pleasure was justified in order to get ‘our NHS’ off its knees. No one is actually trying to claim, least of all the prime minister himself. that unlike with drink-driving innocent passers-by or other road users would be harmed.
This measure would prevent smokers themselves getting ill and causing for themselves a trip to the local hospital. Well, I know what my old mum would have thought to that. She managed to stow away her final cigarettes under the mattress for a quiet smoke in the very hospice where she died even as the nurse had her back turned.
I’ll let others argue as to the morality of wasting taxpayers’ resources. I’ve got my own view, but I’m more concerned about the things we value here. Smokers value nicotine and social interactions in a convivial, if smokey atmosphere. Governments value the balance book.
What things are worth having and at what price, it asks. A fair question for government to ask you’d think, along with say, what counts as justice in a civilised democracy. Questions should be asked by government over what our country should look like when we’ve finished our term in office and how we should pay for that vision. I’d even add against my better judgement an addendum to do with what is the best overall good that can come out of some policy or other. That’s a tricky one, especially once you get into what counts as the good. And that’s where it all comes a little unstuck.
We are back to values, once more. Socrates, despite claiming that his best knowing was that he actually knew nothing, did leave a little trail of things he valued. One of those was happiness. He’s supposed to be the first to propose that we can achieve it through our own efforts, something that I really do wish the psychologists hadn’t noticed.
I bring this up, because a long list of others have mentioned it too as a key plank supporting human existence. Philosophers obviously. They’re always banging on about something, but then they’d probably say that that’s what they’re there for. Thinkers such as William James, Zhuangzi and John Locke to name but a few. Epicurus too if you really need to go back that far. Then there are the religious types: Buddha, Confucius, al Ghazali. I could go on.
There are many other personal values now estranged from governmental consideration that we’ve seen disappear over the years. You know them. They’re all to do with the quality of life and the way we as actual individuals in actually reliant communities related to each other. As Socrates would have had it, things to do with a life well lived. Not necessarily things to do with a bucolic or even an imagined existence, but a less pressured one we associate with former eras. One in which when anyone talked about health and safety they didn’t mean HR policy directive no. 46272819, sub section (2) revised. In those times they meant what did that journey mean for a particular person in a particular time and place. Was Blind Jock going to fall into the ditch on his way home drunk from the pub this time?
No one asked if it was necessary to secure all ditches everywhere in order to reduce the impact on ‘our NHS’. We were more concerned with the impact of open ditches on Blind Jock as he stumbled home for the umpteenth time avoiding against all probability that fatal fall.
So, then I hear you say, these are complex times. With great technology and great advancement we have built for ourselves complex lives. For the good of all Jocks, blind or no, ditches must be secured. But is that what government is really doing?
We must get the balance right. Is a balance being struck at all? I’m sure we will hear all the usual stuff about consulting stakeholders in the industry, getting a balance between individual freedoms and societal need and making the future secure for our children, our children’s children and their children, (personally though, I’d avoid cliché like the plague if I were a politician). But was I asked what I thought? Were you? Was it in the manifesto? All good questions that my greater and betters will surely ask, which I hope you’ll nevertheless take as rhetorical points.
We cannot live our lives by referendums, some will counter. Well actually we can, but I’m not going to bore you. More to the point is the stance of the State. Their position is arguably just one more example of societal death by desperate measure. We know how that goes and it’s no longer prophetic to point this out. There’s going to be a virus and so a few freedoms will have to be sacrificed for the good of all. There’s going to be a war and some women are going to have to do without their men for a while, possibly forever; those left at home can look forward to a “Papiere, Bitte” society. Just for security purposes, you understand. The world is going to end if you keep using your boiler, so that’ll have to go.
Go back through the centuries and you’ll find much the same. The church will save you from hell if it regulates your life, the worker of voodoo can save you from total eclipse of the Sun and all you have to do is step into line. In our new iteration of the process the State will pay for it all, too. They’ll supply the honey, neglecting to add who really stumps up the cash.
Aristotle had it that: “Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” In the old world power lay with the Church, the worker of voodoo, the War Cabinet and the king. In the modern world it lies with the scientist and in a mirror image of Aristotle a new “Science of Happiness”. We are Enlightened now, don’t you see?
Every corner of the happiness industry has an angle on this. Even the computer geeks have one. For a wry take on that see Nitrozac and Snaggy's Geek meditation session: In your mind's browser, clear your cache... now delete your history... now navigate to a blank web page…
Can you keep your values any longer without the State medicalising them? The Harvard Study into ageing is a longitudinal one that’s been going on for 85-years at the time of writing and it’s now getting into the second generation of the original study’s participants. In it, things like happiness and what constitutes the psychologists’ conceptual model of a “happiness pie” is studied. It’s just one example.
The things you value and the things that make you happy are reduced to science. Your values are now the object and your input is increasingly not required. You’ll get the benefits, but all they require is your soul in return. He who controls the science now controls the world. We are no longer people, but subjects required to conform to imposed duties. When we say ‘our NHS’ we do not really mean ‘your NHS’ any longer. Government is determined to do things to you and no longer thinks it needs to keep you as a partner in policy.
James Gatehouse