sustaining vices

Mrs Treasure started smoking the other week, after four years off the weed. She has now put herself into a category of people who face mild but widespread and systematic discrimination on a daily basis. This discrimination doesn’t come from below. People have been historically tolerant, by and large, of smoking, until this tolerance was eroded by the steady drumbeat of anti-smoking agitation. And this has had to be orchestrated from above, by the government, with the support of the medical profession and with the collaboration of public and private institutions. Those doing the discrimination say that it’s the habit that they’re discriminating against. But habits don’t smoke. People smoke, and it’s impossible to discriminate against one without discriminating against the other.

I suppose it’s an obvious point, but despite the official public hostility to discrimination on various grounds, there’s no hostility to discrimination as such. You can choose to endure it any time you want. Just go ahead and spark up.

This may have something to do with why she started. It occurred to her after work one day that she didn’t have a bad habit. She doesn’t drink or take drugs. She tries to eat well. And she gets up in the morning ands goes to work. She’s rewarded for her work with wages, but there’s nothing in that to indicate that she’s anything more than a collection of useful functions. In short, she didn’t have a vice, and someone without a vice is basically a servant because everything they do is such as makes them useful to others. Want to make life hard for me because of a failure of servility? Well that makes the first drag of the day all the more satisfying.

Having a smoker’s liberation front sounds like hyperbole, but there’s a basic truth behind the idea. People of Britain, light up and live.

Comments

[Phil]

People have been historically tolerant, by and large, of smoking, until this tolerance was eroded by the steady drumbeat of anti-smoking agitation.

Absolutely. I used to tolerate people smoking in my vicinity, even though I didn't like it, because smoking was just something you tolerated. Objecting to smoking, as recently as twenty years ago, would mark you out as a Puritan who resented other people's idle pleasures - even if what you actually resented was breathing their smoke, getting their smoke in your eyes, going home with your clothes smelling of their smoke and putting yourself at risk of emphysema thanks to their smoke.

Unless the whole population - or a sizeable majority - are smokers, smoking is inherently anti-social. Yes, there's been an orchestrated campaign against the habit, which has made it easier for more non-smokers to be less tolerant of it. No, I don't think this is in any way a bad thing.

I suppose it’s an obvious point, but despite the official public hostility to discrimination on various grounds, there’s no hostility to discrimination as such. You can choose to endure it any time you want. Just go ahead and spark up.

Oh good grief. Cue Steve Martin:
"Mind if I smoke?"
"No, go ahead. Mind if I fart?"

she didn’t have a vice, and someone without a vice is basically a servant because everything they do is such as makes them useful to others.

Whereas someone with that specific vice is making themself annoying, inconvenient and (almost certainly) harmful to others.

Having a smoker’s liberation front sounds like hyperbole

No, it just sounds wrong-headed and silly. Unless Mrs T has found a way of indulging her vice without affecting anyone else's lungs eyes skin clothing ect ect, I'm afraid she's earning every disapproving glare. (A pipe-smoker's liberation front, now - or perhaps a pipe-smokers' preservation society... Meeting behind closed doors, of course. That I could go for. I'd probably join the snuff-takers' section, mind you. Eheu eheu.)

[Lorna]

See, I don't think I needed the government or the anti-smoking lobby to tell me that an atmosphere full of cigarette smoke makes my hair and bra (for some reason, bras collect it more than any other item of clothing) stink, irritates my contact lenses and, when I've got a bad cold, makes it quite difficult for me to breathe.

I've never been impressed by the liberty argument, because it's obviously not people choosing to poison themselves that I object to. (I'd question whether anyone can freely choose something to which they're physically addicted, but that's another issue.) If all smokers sat in those chemistry-classroom cupboards that contained dangerous fumes, I wouldn't care what they did. But they don't.

I once saw a poster saying that, since for some people smoking is their pleasure and the residue of their pleasure is smoke, and beer is my pleasure and the residue of my pleasure is piss, blowing smoke into the air someone's breathing is roughly equivalent to me wandering over and pissing on someone's head. That analogy works for me.

[ajay]

If you want a way to be rude to strangers in public places, may I suggest simply wandering up to them and shouting obscene abuse? It's every bit as impolite as smoking in their company without asking permission, and it won't leave their clothes smelling like an ashtray afterwards (do try to avoid spraying them with spittle if you can). It's also actually good for the lungs. (key point: plenty of support from the diaphragm. Shout from the chest, not the throat, or you may lose your voice.)

People have been historically tolerant, by and large, of smoking, until this tolerance was eroded by the steady drumbeat of anti-smoking agitation.
Quite. You can't call black people coons now either, although historically people have been by and large quite tolerant of this as well.

someone without a vice is basically a servant because everything they do is such as makes them useful to others.
No. This is very sloppy thinking. There is a difference between 'having no vices' and 'being selfless'. Most of what we do for fun is useless to others (except in as much as they might enjoy doing it with us). Football is utterly useless to others, but not a vice. Collecting stamps, likewise.

[jamie]

"If you want a way to be rude to strangers in public places, may I suggest simply wandering up to them and shouting obscene abuse? It's every bit as impolite as smoking in their company without asking permission, and it won't leave their clothes smelling like an ashtray afterwards (do try to avoid spraying them with spittle if you can). It's also actually good for the lungs."

OK, let's say that someone's lit up in your presence x thousand times over the course of your life. Let's say that, instead, they'd shouted abuse at you x thousand times, each time for as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette. Do you seriously think that this would be an equivalent inconvenience?

"I once saw a poster saying that, since for some people smoking is their pleasure and the residue of their pleasure is smoke, and beer is my pleasure and the residue of my pleasure is piss, blowing smoke into the air someone's breathing is roughly equivalent to me wandering over and pissing on someone's head. That analogy works for me."

Not for me. It just sounds like body horror. Anytime someone breathes in your vicinity, they're expelling bodily waste products over your head.

"Oh good grief. Cue Steve Martin:
"Mind if I smoke?"
"No, go ahead. Mind if I fart?""

Well, no, not particularly. I don't think you can argue that what's going on is not discrimination, whether you think that's justified or not. I don't mind paying an insurance premium because I smoke, but when you get to the stage where you can't smoke in wide open spaces like parks or on streets filled with various noxious fumes,as in the US, then that's simply pushing people around for the sake of it.

"There is a difference between 'having no vices' and 'being selfless'. "

Stamp collectors and other hobbyists get so fanatical that they ignore their families. Football fans, of necessity, cause inconvenicne to others on matchdays. Blog readers say smartyarse things like this:

"You can't call black people coons now either, although historically people have been by and large quite tolerant of this as well."

...in comment boxes on blogs. Vices inhere to pleasures and this is generally tolerated to a certain extent, partly because people make money from it but also because it's necessary to a certain extent to tolerate the vices of others so that they will tolerate ours. It also gives individuals the chance to make the kind of trade offs (eg nuclear power, terrorism policy, war, investment) as individuals that are generally made over their heads.

I don't object to restrictions on smoking based on this kind of understanding, but I don't like state and corpoprate driven attempts to enforce virtuous communities and I don't think I'm underv the influence of something stronger than tobacco to detect government thinking along these lines.

[dsquared]

I am torn both ways on this debate. On the one hand smoking is a horrible antisocial habit which makes the indoor environment intolerable and inflicts and unwarranted burden on others. On the other hand, people who don't like smoking are cunts.

[Shuggy]

Yup - spot on. I've always thought I'd have given up smoking years ago were it not for people nagging me about it. The irony is, as a 39-year old man, it still serves the function it did when I started: apart from the enjoyment I derive from it chemically, it's an emblem of my refusal to do what I'm told.

One puritan colleague of mine kept saying to me, "Don't you agree it's a totally negative habit?" Eventually I said, "Well, it really pisses you off so that's a positive in my book"...

[Simstim]

Replace "smoking" with "speeding".

[ajay]

"people who don't like smoking are cunts."

Dsquared has clearly taken my advice on obscene insults as an alternative vice - good to see. Wait a minute while I respond in kind:

"I know you are, Dsquared, but what am I?"

Now be quiet, the adults are talking.

"it's necessary to a certain extent to tolerate the vices of others so that they will tolerate ours... I don't object to restrictions on smoking based on this kind of understanding, but I don't like state and corpoprate driven attempts to enforce virtuous communities"

Absolutely right. If only that were practical... I would love to live in a society with no laws on smoking, but where everyone asked permission before lighting up - "Mind if I smoke?" "Not at all, as long as you stay down the other end of the bar"/ "I'd rather you didn't; I'm in the middle of my meal" - but I don't. So, tough.

Smokers almost never ask permission - certainly not in semi-public enclosed spaces like pubs and restaurants. If they are now being restricted by the law, they have only their own rudeness to blame. If your wife lacks the basic courtesy to ask whether people mind before she starts smoking, then she deserves all the (fairly mild) disapproval she gets.

[Lorna]

Anytime someone breathes in your vicinity, they're expelling bodily waste products over your head.

Yup. And if their halitosis were as pervasive as cigarette smoke, I'd object to that, too. Also, breathing is essential to life, and even I'm not misanthropic enough to object to that.