The Culture of Childing

      Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to direct you to the best article I've seen in some time, a smart, shrewd, and wonderfully pointed (to say nothing of accurate) piece about smoking bans. There are two choice bits to which I'd call your attention, the first a series of speculations in Shakespearean terms:

You could extend the adult/smoker theory a bit to understand some of Shakespeare's characters on the basis of who might or might not smoke. Lady Macbeth definitely would ('Out, damned spot!'); Macbeth wouldn't. Polonius wouldn't even allow smoking in the family chambers, but his daughter Ophelia might sneak a few puffs each day in back of the castle; and of course Hamlet wouldn't be able either to enjoy the habit or quit. Iago would smoke and like it; Desdemona would smoke on the sly but never with Othello, who - poor dear - must have had terrible asthma. Shakespeare himself? Undoubtedly a pipe-smoker.

Cleopatra would definitely have been a smoker, I'd hazard, as would Jaques, Falstaff, the Bastard Falcounbridge, and Richard III. Prospero would have stolen a few drags when people weren't looking. Non-smokers: Henry V, who'd have enjoyed hanging around the smokers as Prince Hal but then banished smoking when he became king; Malvolio, obviously; Richard II, whose face was brittle enough as it was; and Coriolanus, because Mother would have disapproved. I'd rather be in the company of the former than the latter.

      But the crux of the piece, and the issue we all have to address, I think, as we consider the ramifications of these bans, is articulated here:

What worries me is the hum of panic that I sense underneath the public ordinance, a panic engendered by a cult of health that's taken so many forms over the past 30 years that it's become the single religion of much of Western society. You run across it everywhere: in our preoccupation with diet and exercise; the endless ads in the media - in the US at least - promoting new drugs for an increasing number of exotic diseases; and the inclination to turn all eccentric behaviour into a 'syndrome' that can be treated medicinally. While none of these is alarming in itself, they add up to a new Puritanism that turns the old paradigm on its head: now instead of tempting the Fates by being bad, we put all our efforts into being good. If smoking was about being grown up, the new Puritanism is about being a perpetual child, and living in a protected world that has never existed except in fantasy.

And there it is, precisely put, why this insidious new Puritanism is as, if not more, harmful than any of the things it opposes. It's the culture of childing-- one recalls the use of that word in King Lear and its repercussions-- that is perhaps most damaging to us, that is constructing us all as victims, as if liberating ourselves from choice might save us from our infantile selves. I find it odd that those defending the smoking bans never talk about choice, and the reason why should be blindingly obvious; to recognize, and to allow, people choices involves responsibility, and accepting the consequences of one's decisions without relying on excuse about victimization.

      My Canuckistani readers will be familiar with the current commercial in which an older woman chimes on about having worked in a bar for years to support her family, and how she got cancer through second-hand smoke. It's a sickeningly manipulative ad, not just for playing on the idea of death, but for casting the woman as a victim, as if she had no other choices for her life, as if, in fact, Life Itself, had forced her to work in that environment and that environment only, all other opportunities completely shut off to her, all decisions for the facts of her life not hers but those of some unkind, primordial Destiny. Adults make choices. Adults accept the consequences of their decisions, for good or for ill. But the new Puritanism cultivates, preys upon, the idea of victimization, and desperately seeks to blame other facts of life so as to exculpate people from their decisions. From there, it essays to reconstruct the world as some sort of childproof environment, childing others by constantly keeping others from The Bad Things. Notice that the smoking bans are no longer about accomodating shared-space, or ensuring smoke-free possibilities: no, they are about making everyone conform to larger suppositions about what is good and bad, and compelling us, or forcing us, to behave accordingly. Bars are not allowed to provide a choice anymore-- to declare themselves "smoking" or "non-smoking" establishments, or to offer customers options therein; they are obliged to be Non-Smoking because of an infantile notion that people are entitled to go anywhere they want and feel they are within a "healthy" environment. The proponents of the smoking bans talk about their "rights," about their right to go into a bar and not have to inhale other people's smoke, an argument not at all unreasonable. But making all bars (and restaurants and such) have to afford that right is culturally despotic, and it implies that we are not mature enough to make our own decisions. After all, that woman from the commercial didn't choose to work in smoking establishments-- rather than, say, getting another job, or working in places that didn't. No, she didn't make any decisions. Well, balls to that, and spare me, at least, the wails of victimization that people tend to think exonerates them from being responsible for those actions (or inactions, perhaps).

      Instead, this sickening Puritanism doesn't talk about allowances or permissions, or even tolerances: it makes decisions for others and imposes its will on them in the most nefariously patriarchal (or matriarchal) ways. That it does this while wrapping itself in the cloak of Serving The Greater Good makes this all the more despicable. The pretense that any act of prohibition is for "our own good" is smug condescension guised as concern when it most patently is not. (If it was even a kind of genuine concern, smoking itself would be banned, or made illegal, though that too may be coming down the pike eventually.) Such behaviour is moralistic and sniggering, which should be obvious by the fact that choices are being removed and smokers effectively being figured as pariahs. We've gone well past the terms of Please Do Not. We've entired into the offensive domain of You Cannot. And that, that my readers, is a territory of oppression rather permission.

      This returns me, long-winded argument later, to a central tenet which this blog holds dear: that we have to afford people choices. As for bars, which are, after all, privately-owned establishments, they should be allowed to declare themselves smoking or non-smoking, as they see best to their clients and their needs, and should they opt for the former, they can display "Enter At Your Own Risk" signs everywhere by which people would accept responsibility for deciding to enter or not. I'd rather live in Cleopatra's Egypt rather than Malvolio's vapid Illyria.

      Accept responsibility?!?! P'shaw! Not in this day and age. How on earth would we be able to blame all our problems on everything else in the world if did?