Whatever happened to pleasure and moderation?

Tuesday May 3, 2011

We’re living longer than ever, writes Joe Jackson, but we seem to be doing so in a state of constant fear. Pleasure and risk must be balanced by moderation, self-awareness and the recognition that everyone is different

Reading the New York Times is often a depressing experience. Take, for instance, a recent headline: ‘LIKE TOBACCO AND ALCOHOL, IS SUGAR ANOTHER KILLER’? The article below the headline concerns a Dr Lustig who believes that sugar is ‘toxic’, ‘a poison’, and a possible cause of not only obesity and diabetes but heart disease and cancer. For all I know he may turn out to be right, but there are a couple of things about the article which strike me as notable.

The first is that the rabidly antismoking NY Times seems (in the article, as well as in the headline) to have added alcohol to the list of things with no positive attributes: they just kill you and that’s that. This is in line with other recent rumblings from the public health juggernaut. Alcohol causes cancer, we are told; previous guidelines for safe drinking have been set too high. Never mind that those guidelines were basically arbitrary, and unrealistically low for many people. There is no safe level.

That phrase – ‘no safe level’ – should be familiar to smokers. As Chris Snowdon has recently pointed out on his excellent blog, it was also the mantra of the anti-alcohol movement in the USA about a century ago. A whole generation of kids were softened up for Prohibition by something called Scientific Temperance Instruction, which taught that the only safe level of booze was not even the ‘glass of red wine with dinner’ which health authorities have in more recent times allowed us, but zero.

Pleasure

The other odd thing about the NY Times article is not, by any means, unique to it. On the contrary, it’s a fact of modern life that two words are missing from every discussion that touches on health. Those words are pleasure and moderation.

We have always known, surely, that many pleasures carry an element of risk. But a rational (and dare I say, healthy) person should acknowledge that both sides of the equation are important. In other words, pleasure and risk must be balanced, and the keys to that are moderation, self-awareness, and a recognition that different people and different situations are – well, different.

The antismoking movement has been telling us for years that no one enjoys smoking. We only smoke because (a) we are miserably enslaved by nicotine addiction (which is at best a huge and misleading generalisation) and/or (b) we are seduced by evil tobacco company advertising (which is absurd, since people smoked for thousands of years before advertising existed). Try telling an antismoker that millions of people derive pleasure and comfort from tobacco – and that perhaps this is not entirely irrelevant – and he or she will simply refuse to listen.

Moderation

Zero-risk and zero-tolerance are increasingly promoted as ‘the only game in town’. If pleasure is mentioned at all, it’s likely to be depicted as something illusory, and as a sign of weakness. Moderation? Freedom of choice? Even if there are such things, we apparently can’t be trusted with them.

We’re living longer than ever, but we seem to be doing so in a state of constant fear – thanks to the people who are supposed to be there to make us feel better. It almost makes you want to go to a monastery and live on raw carrots. Except that sooner or later, someone is going to decide that that’s bad for you, too. So it’s hardly surprising that some of us say, to hell with it all, and just get drunk.

That’s the problem with zero tolerance: anything else, however moderate, however pleasurable, becomes ‘extreme’ – and also a transgression, which invites more and more stringent prohibition. It never ends.

Or rather, it can end in one of two ways. One is that health authorities lose all credibility, and no one listens to anything they say any more.

The other is that we end up with a truly dismal society, in which no one is allowed to live the way they want, and the only people having any fun – if you can call it fun – are the sanctimonious prigs who are already worryingly close to running the whole damn show.

Joe Jackson is a musician and writer