Damn Elitists!
I watched part of an old ‘Frontline’ on tv the other evening. ‘Frontline’ is one of the few fairly good shows on US public tv – actually one of the two, I would say, ‘Nova’ being the other. US public tv is so mediocre it’s painful. (And public radio is even worse. But that’s a separate subject.) It was about ‘Alternative’ Medicine. One part of it I found particularly extraordinary – an interview with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. I’ve always disliked Hatch, frankly. He’s very conservative, and he has an irritating voice. He sounds like someone who’s trying to soothe a rowdy room full of six-year-olds – in fact I suppose he sounds a bit like Mr Rogers. Mr Rogers was a very nice fella, but I’m afraid those soothing calming bland voices make me want to punch something.
But that’s neither here nor there. Hatch could have an irritating voice and still be a good Senator. (Though perhaps not one of the best. It may be that a really good voice is basic equipment for a Senator. That’s an interesting question…but not the one I want to look at right now.) But there’s more wrong with him than the voice. The excerpt from the interview was about a 1994 bill he sponsored that de-regulated ‘dietary supplements,’ which means that the FDA (the Food and Drug Administration) cannot monitor dietary supplements in the way it can (and must and does) monitor drugs. It can only act after a supplement has been shown to cause harm, after it has gone on the market. Here is what Hatch says on the matter:
We had to take on the whole FDA and the whole raft of left-wing groups that believe that everything in our lives should be regulated and that we can’t– we’re so stupid as a people, we can’t make our own decisions and that we’re so dumb that we don’t know what’s good for us. It’s the attitude that government should tell you everything you should do. You don’t have any right to make any choices yourself. And they threw everything but the kitchen sink at us, but we had the people with us. And the reason we had the people is because a hundred million people have benefited from dietary supplements.
I’ve heard a lot of infuriating right-wing rhetoric in my time (as we all have) but that takes the biscuit. Though it certainly is impeccably conventional – the right does just love to pretend that any form of safety regulation amounts to assuming that people are stupid. But Hatch of course doesn’t bother explaining how all these brilliant people are supposed to know what’s in the bottles on the shelves. What – we just know by looking that the contents are safe? Are what they claim to be? How? How, exactly, do we know that? How do we look at a heap of gleaming capsules and divine what is inside them? Do we carry a laboratory with us when we go to the store and buy our vitamins and other supplements?
And I was reminded of Hatch’s comments when I read this Guardian article in which the Health Secretary, John Reid, makes a similar kind of claim.
The health secretary, John Reid, angered health campaigners and anti-smoking groups when he said yesterday that smoking is one of the few pleasures left for the poor on sink estates and in working men’s clubs. Mr Reid said that the middle classes were obsessed with giving instruction to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and that smoking was not one of the worst problems facing poorer people…He said he was an advocate of informed choice for adults, rather than bans, describing himself as favouring empowerment, rather than instruction. Mr Reid fears advocates of a ban are behaving as if members of the public are incapable of coming to their own sensible decisions.
He favours empowerment rather than instruction? What can that mean? Are the two in tension? Are they mutually exclusive? Does learning something disempower people? If so, how? But that’s a trusty bit of rhetoric. If there’s something you disagree with, if you can manage to frame it as someone assuming other people are stupid, you’re on your way to victory, however nonsensical the claim may be.
I’ve always detested the PC jargon about “empowerment”. It has the aura of a secularized version of passing out Holy Communion. But, of course, its real neo-liberal meaning is to create a diffusion of responsibility that renders any possibility of effective collective action all the more unlikely, converting resentment into an illusion of opportunity, all the while keeping those who a really in positions of power and the interests they serve unalterably and non-responsively in their place.
Yeah, I’m allergic to that word too – hence quotation marks.
Very good point about neo-liberal meaning. “converting resentment into an illusion of opportunity” – that’s downright eloquent, that is. Downright aphoristic.
And the idea that instruction is somehow inimical to “empowerment” – is quite remarkable. What, ignorance is power? Yeah right.
I have now adapted your aphorism as my sig line for a urban planners’ forum I participate in! :)
Well, maybe he, Reid, could still be right in a very politician sort of way. In the same way the worst populists can still be right. What they usually show is the gap between the lower classes and their problems and the “elites” and their concerns.
I have read the Guardian and the Independent and the way they treated this issue and felt slightly uncomfortable, I must say. For instance both ran several articles and interviews of “single mothers” living in council estates, most of them outraged by Mr Reid patronising views, and none of them sounded at all like the people I know. (I am a non-smoker and I live in a council estate)
Maybe Reid is actually showing us what the real problem is: non-smoking policy are usually directed at non-smokers exclusively, their rights and their health; and the debate in the UK, or the US for what I know, takes absolutely no heed of the opinion of smokers, treating them as non-entities… The fact that to encourage people to stop smoking is, in my opinion, a good thing doesn’t mean I can justify bullying them.
In the same way, I am not sure I like that sentence: “to create a diffusion of responsibility that renders any possibility of effective collective action all the more unlikely », surely, it can be argued that all collective action create a diffusion of responsibility? Isn’t that the real meaning of “empowerment”?
I just want to acknowledge a short e-mail, with no name-dropping and in ordinary language, the substance of which I entirely agree with, from John Halasz, .
Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
“[T]he right does just love to pretend that any form of safety regulation amounts to assuming that people are stupid.”
Well, as a secular ultra-conservative, I suppose I happen to be part of ‘the right’ – but I certainly make no such pretension as to safety regulations. Clearly, there are some on ‘the right’ that do, since demagogic dumbbells are to be found right across the political spectrum: for every Michael Moore, there’s a Rush Limbaugh. What conservatives are generally opposed to is the absence of cost-benefit and risk-benefit thinking, as a result of which some safety legislation may do more harm than good (for example, requiring separate airplane seats for infants may make flying so expensive that parents will chose to drive instead, a far riskier mode of travel). At any rate, as far as I know there are few on ‘the right’ who are in favour of scrapping safety rules lock, stock and barrel.
As to the case in point: on scientific grounds ‘Alternative Medicine’ is deemed to be bullshit by most educated people, regardless of their political convictions. This is because alternative medicine is not evidence-based, but belief-based or assertion-based. This does not mean that one should ban it across the board, but that it certainly should be subject to the same safety rules as ‘conventional’ medical treatment. It’s hardly a big issue on the right-left divide.
Sorry, anonymity by mistake. My name isn’t ‘C’ but ‘Cathal Copeland’ as below.
“Maybe Reid is actually showing us what the real problem is: non-smoking policy are usually directed at non-smokers exclusively, their rights and their health; and the debate in the UK, or the US for what I know, takes absolutely no heed of the opinion of smokers, treating them as non-entities”
Yes…I realize this is seen as a problem. Christopher Hitchens rants about it a good deal (and he is a smoker), as does Simon Gray in The Smoking Diaries – actually Gray is more whining than ranting, I think. Gray is also a smoker. But what your sentence overlooks (as the rants and whines usually do) is the question of harm to others. I don’t think it is that smokers are treated as non-entities – it’s that in public places they are inflicting a harm on other non-consenting people. I realize (again) that line of argument irritates smokers intensely – but I don’t see how they can deny it. It’s not as if there’s some countervailing benefit to smoking that would provide an argument that the small harm to others is outweighed by the great benefit to smokers. There is no benefit to smokers, apart from the putative pleasure of smoking. It’s not self-evident that a mere pleasure to oneself is enough to outweigh harms to others. So it’s not a matter of ignoring or non-entity-making, I don’t think, it’s more a question of who is doing what to whom. Of who is the subject and who is the object, who is the perpetrator and who is the perpetree.
“What they usually show is the gap between the lower classes and their problems and the “elites” and their concerns.”
Hmm. Well, ‘concern’ is a fairly loose term. It’s possible that in fact smoking is very much a problem for the lower classes, whether it’s a ‘concern’ for them or not. Things can be harming us without our worrying about it or being concerned about it – through sheer lack of awareness, just for one thing.
Still, I know what you mean, I suppose. Fretting about second-hand smoke can seem a very yuppyish, purity-obsessed kind of fretting. But it could be a reasonable kind of fretting all the same.
“What conservatives are generally opposed to is the absence of cost-benefit and risk-benefit thinking, as a result of which some safety legislation may do more harm than good”
That can be a useful kind of opposition, and I’ve learned from it. Learned if nothing else to at least try to take all factors into account rather than just one. But. That may be true of conservatives in the UK but it is emphatically not true of them in the US – that’s exactly my point. Hatch is not some flake, he’s a powerful Senator. (For that matter, in terms of influence, unfortunately Limbaugh is not some flake either. Gingrich and others thanked him for helping with the great Republican overthrow of 1994.)
“At any rate, as far as I know there are few on ‘the right’ who are in favour of scrapping safety rules lock, stock and barrel.”
Over here, there definitely are – there are millions of them. Again, that’s just the point: that the mainstream right considers all regulation and safety legislation as a nuisance that interferes with trade, an unwarranted intrusion by Big Gummint, the dead hand of the State, etc etc. That’s also the problem with the WTO, as a matter of fact: it tends to treat safety and environmental and labor laws as mere protectionism, and declare them in violation. That’s why anti-globalization is not purely mindless raving about Starbucks, it has a core of quite rational concerns about the viability of all sorts of legislation.
No, what I am concerned about is not the aim of the policy. I know that smoking is bad for your health, I know about the dangers of secondary smoke. What I am saying is that you will stop people from smoking for the wrong reasons.
This is not mere rhetoric. It could be argued that all antismoking policies are a mere attempt to treat a symptom instead of a disease. Whatever name you give to this disease, you lose credibility when you make an enemy of your patient… For instance, and this is particularly true in the US, people from the “lower classes” and ethnic minorities are an overwhelming part of the population serving time in jail. But do you personally support a purely punitive approach to this problem? The same can be said of drug abuse, chronic unemployment or whatever… If you treat only the symptoms, you may perhaps keep the passive smokers happy for a while (make them feel more secure) but you won’t solve the problem.
There is a truly frightening – and probably bogus – statistic quoted around here: something like one in four of all male twentysomethings in the UK seem to have been at some point the perpetrator of criminal behaviour. Does it make sense to lock them all?
In the same way, does it make sense to throw all the smokers on the streets?
IMO one of the problems here is that virtue is being used to justify haste. I think that this, like so many others, is a case where we will lose in the long term by undue concentration on the short term. (War on Terror springs to mind–my mind, at least.)
The real focus of any campaign to reduce or eliminate smoking shd be children and teens. We may never get them all to eschew the horrible habit, but if the percentage of teens who smoke continues to go down, so will the eventaul damage. Also noteworthy, in view of the long running War On Drugs, is that tobacco use is at least as significant a predictor of drug abuse as marijuana use.
btw, I believe the entire quote started with ‘my mum said…’ and was intentionally provocative in a public debate. You may cynically say this is political hedging but the context does have some bearing to the story which has spread like wildfire without it.
I think its a point worth arguing and I wish politicians to bring up contentious ideas even if to dismiss them or have them dismissed. The objection is that smoking isn’t a major quality of life issue for those in circumstances of violence, drugs, unemployment, poverty, poor education etc. That class ignorance is a cause of misquided good intentions is uncontroversial. Catchy centralised initiatives often miss local necessary problems and this may be a good example.
ags,
But I think you’re running two things together. Smoking as a health issue – smoking as a problem for the smoker – is one thing, and smoking as a problem for other non-consenting people in the vicinity of the smoker is another. So
“If you treat only the symptoms, you may perhaps keep the passive smokers happy for a while (make them feel more secure) but you won’t solve the problem.”
that’s not really true. Treating the symptom does indeed solve the second problem. In that instance, the symptom is the problem.
Actually maybe all three of you are running them together.
“The objection is that smoking isn’t a major quality of life issue for those in circumstances of violence, drugs, unemployment, poverty, poor education etc.”
Yeah, I got that, but I’m not clear about what follows from it. I’m not clear why the two parts of the equation are incompatible. If smoking is ignored will that somehow help solve the other problems? If so, how?
Or to put it another way, is the opposition anything more than rhetoric? It looks like rhetoric to me, and fairly pointless rhetoric at that. Perhaps I’m missing something.
Completely OT, but thanks for Eagleton vs. Fish. Not only hugely entertaining, almost to the point of belly-laughs, but Eagleton, somewhat contrary to reputation (?), scored good, reasonable points throughout. This is part of why I don’t like analytic philosophy. Really, don’t literary critics have better things to do?
I spent part of last week arguing at an analytic philosophy website against “compatibilism”. In the end, I was forced to agree with the author of the post that, given the alternatives of compatibilism, reductionist determinism, or “libertarian free will”, my view was closest to “compatibilism”, but still… I found out today, though a link off of CT, that the author of the post is an evangelical Christian. Who knew?
I haven’t run off with my tail between my legs, due to the fact that I don’t have a tail.
Further to context, in Reid’s defence I think he was responding to a suggestion that cigarettes only be sold in 20s because that could price them out of the reach of the very poor, who often buy them in 10s, and wouldn’t be able to afford a packet of 20 (edging up to five quid nowadays). At least, that’s what it looked like when I saw the clip on the news.
So he has a point, middle class people patronisingly dictating to the poor what to do with their few pennies.
As a matter of interest, the epidemiologist who first convincingly demonstrated the link between smoking and cancer (Sir Richard Doll I think) opined in a broadcast that he thought it a waste of resource trying to prevent the young from smoking. He suggested that we would be better advised attempting to get older smokers to stop. His contention was that teenagers and young adults do not consider the risk of disease, further in the future than they have yet lived, sufficiently significant to deter them from the instant gratification delivered by a cigarette. He pointed out that the largest part of the risk from smoking is due to chronic damage and that someone who has given up for five years after smoking for ten has little greater probability of dying of heart disease or cancer than someone who has never smoked. I accept that this addresses only the issue of self harm, not that of harming others. I used to smoke in public places and I now consider that I was wrong to do so.
I have heard enough of John Reid on the Today programme to have come to think of him as an exemplar of that kind of linguistic nihilism that Mark Lawson writes about in the Guardian article.
Mike Shoemark:
I was not aware of this: “someone who has given up for five years after smoking for ten has little greater probability of dying of heart disease or cancer than someone who has never smoked. ” Very interesting from a public health point of view–concentrate on smokers who are starting to have second thoughts: “It’s never too late to stop”.
This does not speak to the issue of whether tobacco plays a significant part in a teenage tendency to drug abuse, but I don’t expect to see any good research on that topic anytime soon, given the money that Big Tobacco can throw around.
JH,
Welcome for Eagleton-Fish item. I’ve noticed the same thing about Eagleton. I think his repuation for saying silly things is deserved, because I’ve read some silly things he’s said, but I’ve also read some things that quite made me start with surprise at their bullseye-hitting aspect. He can be a hell of a phrase-maker. I did a Comment on that a long time ago – about some Guardian article of his.
“So he has a point, middle class people patronisingly dictating to the poor what to do with their few pennies.”
Well…maybe. But I’m dubious. Given that cigarettes are 1. toxic, 2. addictive, and 3. advertised by people who make a profit selling them – I can’t say that it’s a form of condescension that’s high on my list of Bad Things.
There’s a huge problem with the ‘target the oldies not yoof’ idea. That is, the fact that tobacco is extremely addictive. Experts in the field say it’s more addictive than heroin. So from that point of view it’s obviously better to prevent people from ever starting to smoke than it is to try to get them to stop.
I know people who would give a limb to stop. I have a friend who has part of a jaw missing, and who now has a new form of cancer, and who is the object of unkind remarks when she visits her oncologist, because ‘she’s a smoker you know!’ She would like to stop. She would really like to stop. She has stopped, several times, but not permanently. And she’s no fool, in fact she’s a judge. But she can’t (hasn’t been able to so far) stop.
Needless to say, she wishes she had never started. There are statistics about how many smokers wish they had never started and wish they could quit now. I don’t remember the exact percentage but it’s very high.
“This does not speak to the issue of whether tobacco plays a significant part in a teenage tendency to drug abuse, but I don’t expect to see any good research on that topic anytime soon, given the money that Big Tobacco can throw around.”
I don’t think that the concept of ‘gateway drugs’ is particularly useful, and certainly not when applied to tobacco. Tobacco doesn’t expose the smoker to dealers in the same way, say, cannabis does, I imagine you could find an association between later drug use and underage sex – that doesn’t imply any causal connection though.
And lets be honest, tobacco is such a dangerous drug, even compared to illegal drugs, that in many ways the damage has been done to a large number of people without any gateway aspect to worry about for a minority.
My favourite statistic is that a cigar has twice the lethal dose of nicotine in it. Puff on!
“And the idea that instruction is somehow inimical to “empowerment” – is quite remarkable. What, ignorance is power? Yeah right.”
Just a small point, but from the context of the original quote, couldn’t the word “instruction” be meant in the sense of a direction or order, rather than that of imparting information? If so, then it’s not unreasonable to oppose instruction and empowerment. In fact, according to the quoted article, Reid “said he was an advocate of informed choice for adults, rather than bans”, which does suggest that he *is* in favour of “instruction” in the educational sense, rather than the mandatory one. If you see what I mean.
Ah. I do see what you mean.
“Mr Reid said that the middle classes were obsessed with giving instruction to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds”
Maybe this is a difference in UK and US language. Instruction in the singular doesn’t mean giving orders, in my mind – but maybe over there it does. In which case – I take that part back.