A Well Tempered Society

It came and went in practically a blink of the eye and, so far as I can tell, elicited very little response. Have the PC thugs so inured us to having our words, thoughts, and bodies policed that policing the visual just seems natural? I should at this point probably point out what I am talking about. Last week I came across a little note in the news that mentioned that the group that rates films (not as in good or bad but as in R, PG, and so on) is going to consider the presence of smoking as grounds for an R rating. That's right, from now on if a character in a movie lights up a cigarette then the film will most likely be restricted to audiences 17 or older. I guess 17 year olds are more mature and will be able to tell fact from fiction- only fictional people smoke, right? Did it ever occur to anyone that most children don't smoke and that they typically take up the habit around 17 or 18 or in college? Maybe we'd better get a new rating that says looking at someone smoke should be limited to 21 year olds (same problem there, if you ask me!)

I'll be honest, I wasn't quite sure how to react to this little bit of information but over the past week I'd say the preposterousness of this whole thing has engendered nothing but contempt and anger. I got even angrier when I found out that some states in Europe (and maybe even the US) are considering making it illegal to smoke while driving! First outside, then away from the doors, and then out on the kerb. We are but one step away from smoking becoming illegal across the board!

Any society- particularly a democratic one- has a right to project its morals and ethics into society within reason. Families also have the right to not want their children to smoke or take up any other bad habits. And individuals have every right to smoke. The question is: Where does a society's desire to project its morals become dictating its morals? It seems bad enough that smokers have become social pariahs these days but now the image itself has become taboo.

There are about a hundred ways (actually I only came up with 3) to look at this issue. Where did all of this begin, where is it going, and will it matter? It just seems to me that the tendency to create a moral character, an image of a right and proper man and woman, has, in its long history from temperance to abstinence, largely failed until recently. It used to be that the moral bedrock upon which we built our moral citizens (or our fictional ones) was solidly religious. The rise of secularism and its spread throughout society seems to have forced us to question the religious basis of such 'moral citizenry.' Yet, oddly enough, the new mould or new groundwork is much more effective and dangerous for it is premised on both scientific and social scientific research. Such grounds give our claims that society and individual behaviour must be managed some veneer of legitimacy.

It is difficult these days to convince others to stop drinking and smoking by appealing to Christian beliefs as the temperance movement once did. Instead today we point to the myriad studies telling us that smoking kills (we know this yet we still smoke!) and that movie characters can make smoking look sexy. Thus, we should not only warn people of the dangers of smoking but ban the image itself lest others take up the habit. We ban certain foods when the warnings don't stop us from eating and when violence warnings fail to keep kids away from video games we try to link it to real violence. When our exhortations of piety, faith, temperance, good thoughts, and good health fail to produce the citizens we want we instead force it upon them. We have, in short, begun the process of codifying our moral citizen into law and justified it with help of the academy.

The question remains why? More pointedly, however, we might ask how, given that humans have a long history of proselytizing our ideal moral character, has this task been adopted and promulgated by our own government? This is where the rights of a democracy come face to face with its own liberal values. It is also when one must ask whether there isn't something more sinister yet subtle that drives this all. Foucault once noted that governments became interested in their peoples- indeed even creating the idea of a population and the study thereof- when the behaviour of those peoples came to serve a purpose. What he meant by this was that governments became much more interested in the health and education of its people when the wealth of the state (or the wealthy few within it) required healthy, educated citizens. We might even take Marx's point that the reigning morals of any society are the morals of the reigning class.

Whether we can prove this or whether it matters we can say this much: society is increasingly becoming driven, framed, judged, and legitimated based on this image of a moral character. This has always been so but now we have found the means to not simply exhort those around us to right behaviour but to force them to do it or, worse yet, make them believe in it all on their own. We have found a far more effective and insidious means of eliminating the rough and dirty little practices in society. We are on the verge of a very well tempered society indeed.