Baby Boomers - living out the great binge!

The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.

So said Kingsley Amis and for once he was right. Yet we're collapsing again into the stew of temperance by allowing the obsession with living forever to dictate to those who make the rules. And it seems that us Baby Boomers are the last bastions of sense and decency - OK call it hedonism - in this world. We created the great binge!

Between 1992 and 2006, the average weekly alcohol consumption for people aged 45–64 (capturing the majority of baby boomers) rose by 85%, compared with a 50% rise in those aged 65 and over, and a 45% rise in those aged 16–24. As baby boomers have aged, follow-up studies with this cohort reveal similar findings. Between 2005 and 2013, the percentage of men drinking eight or more units of alcohol (the equivalent of four pints of normal strength beer) on any one day in the past week changed by only 5% in the over 65s. In contrast, this rate of drinking fell by 30% among 16–24s, 19% among 22–44s, and 12% among those aged 45–64.

They hate us for this those New Puritans with their temperance.  The cult of the NHS demands that any health problem that might be seen as 'self-inflicted' must be dealt with. Drinking, smoking, eating too many burgers - these things are not to be tolerated. And when you or I respond with "it's none of your business", the fanatics from the Church of Public Health peer down at you and say: "but it is, think of the cost to the NHS". The argument is closed, action must be taken to stop us from enjoying ourselves by drinking just a little more than they think we should. For some - egged on by the old temperance lobby - even the merest drop of the demon drink will lead to perdition and doom (defined these days as a 'cost to the NHS').

The latest in a long line of misperceptions is that we - the baby boomers that is - don't understand that boozing carries health risks:

Trying to change baby boomers’ behaviour and attitudes towards drinking and drug use is a tough sell to a generation now steeped in lifelong attitudes shaped by a lack of awareness of the harms of alcohol and substance misuse.

This is, of course, utter claptrap. Of course we know it's bad for us, it's just that we're happy with the trade-off implied by hedonism. We're no more victims of advertising than smokers or kids wanting sweets. If not drinking now means we live longer - maybe - can we be so sure that extra bit of life will be a pleasure too? Or will it be an uncomfortable, perhaps painful, few months dribbling slowly to death in a nursing home? Us boomers look around at our friends and neighbours and decide to live for now rather than for some possible future.

There's another aspect of this claptrap. All this high octane living doesn't seem to be killing us off (rock stars aside and even there most aren't dropping dead). The pubs are filled with people in their 60s and 70s living happy and fulfilling lives. Look down the seats on your holiday flight and check out all those boomers spending the kids inheritance on cooking themselves in the Spanish sun (skin cancer - bring it on) and meandering round Florence, Prague and Madrid lapping up the culture (plus the food and wine, of course).

For the po-faced, narrow-minded, judgemental folk at the Church of Public Health all this won't do at all. We (the Boomers that is) need to be stopped because we're killing ourselves and worse still, we're setting a bad example to the young. Think of the children! So they agitate for advertising bans, for higher taxes, for distribution controls, for watering down the beer, and for draconian licensing regulations. Only when we've been nudged with a large baseball bat into cutting down our boozing will these zealots be happy.

The problem is that we aren't budging. Why the hell should we forgo pleasure now for the sake of an uncertain future. We don't want to die but we do at least recognise that this is going to happen, that we aren't going to live forever. So in the diminishing years left to us, why shouldn't we drink and eat for pleasure? Don't expect us to limit our drinking to a couple of pints on a night out and our eating to a fat-free, salt-free, sugar-free, meat-free, taste-free, overcooked pap. We're not going to do this and the more you nanny us the louder we'll get and the ruder we'll get about the fussbucketry of public health. If they want to live a stressful, dull life without pleasure that's fine by me but, for the rest of us, hedonism rocks. We started the great binge and boy do we intend to finish it!

Raise a toast to indulgence!

In this time of austerity we’re encouraged to be thrifty, careful and to have a mind to our health and well-being. There is no place for indulgence, for hedonism. We must reject this outlook – life’s depressing enough at the best of times for many folk without taking away the little things that make it worthwhile – the small joys and pleasures in which we indulge.

I was rather struck by this from Damien Thompson:

...while the NHS isn’t actually a religion, it’s taken over from the churches as the repository of our deepest hopes and fears. To describe this as secularisation doesn’t tell the whole story: in a curious way we’re reverting to the shamanism of primitive societies, in which the holy man’s first duty was to cast out physical and mental sickness.

Now Damien limits his comments to the need for the NHS to be reformed – something I agree with him about. But, for me, his observation about reverting to paganism is more pertinent still. As our belief in the Christian god fades, we replace it with a sort of modern syncretism – bits of Christian ritual, spiritualism, symbols of times, places and event, and a host of angels, fairies and good spirits.

This new paganism – the world of the tooth fairy, Santa and Easter bunnies – contains at its heart mankind’s age old search for immortality. But whereas the old religion saw immortality in an afterlife, our new faith seeks that eternity on earth. Thus we have a cult of health that pervades everything – from politics to popular entertainment. We are urged to cast aside those things that would put at risk our health. Each day brings a new announcement from the priesthood – warning us of the dangers of some food or some activity. And this is matched by a litany of advice about “well-being”, “good health” and “healthy living”.

This new faith requires us to direct everything we do towards the purpose of that “healthy living” – indeed, those who indulge in undirected pleasure are terrible sinners and the suppliers of those pleasures are agents of the deepest evil.  Good men and women must reject such things and choose instead a modest, healthy life conducted in line with the strictures of the shaman. Above all children must be kept from the dark evils of purposeless pleasures – all their play, what they drink and the food they eat must serve the idea of “well-being”.

We have to learn again that life is but short and that we cannot sub-contract our responsibility to look out for our neighbour. Most of all we need to rediscover the joy of living, of pleasure for its own sake. To shake our heads free of that purposeful, directed life the acolytes of well-being would have us live.

“Lord for tomorrow I’ll not want” goes Therese’s prayer and that is how we should live. Celebrating each great day, enjoying great food, fine drink and good cheer wherever we can get it. The fearful cult of well-being is destroying pleasure and handing to the priests of public health the means to impose their bitter, depressing world of “healthy living”.

Pleasure is a thing to be sought, savoured and celebrated. We must reject the idea that such pleasure has to be directed to the cause of health. So charge your glass with wine or ale and raise a toast to indulgence – it’s what we’re here for, folks!

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Entering an Age of Disapproval

Over the weekend my reaction to the news that David Cameron was insisting on introducing a minimum price for alcohol fluctuated between resignation, anger and cynicism. Resignation at the seeming inevitability of the nannying fussbucket’s victory. Anger that a Conservative prime minister thinks it OK to muck about with prices for the purpose of social engineering. And cynicism in that Cameron appears to be chucking some red meat to the health lobby ahead of the final stages of the Health Bill’s progress through parliament.

With the new week came the dawning realisation that Cameron is merely a mirror of a depressing age – his championing of nannying fussbucketry reflects his penchant for government by dinner party and a resulting tendency for Mumsnet-style kneejerk reactions to perceived problems in “society”.

It’s not just minimum pricing for alcohol, the PM has moaned about chocolate oranges in W H Smiths, the “premature sexualisation” of girls (but for some reason not boys) and has proposed ‘fat taxes’ on the ‘most unhealthy foods’.  Whenever Cameron wants a positive headline he turns to the judgement of other people’s lifestyles and other people’s choices. And in doing this he is simply reflecting the age in which we now live.

We have entered an “Age of Disapproval” – after several decades of growing openness, personal freedom and choice, society has looked at itself and decided it doesn’t approve. Where once liberalisation was applauded, it is now seen as license, as an encouragement to decadent hedonism. We have created a new set of sins – things of which we disapprove.

A few years ago a good night out was something good – a chance to blow away some cobwebs, let our hair down and enjoy ourselves. Now it’s binge-drinking and it's unhealthy - a terrible burden on society and especially on that most sacred of sacred cows, the National Health Service.

There was a time in all our lives when the thing that hit the spot was a full English breakfast – bacon, sausage, fried eggs, hash browns or fried bread, maybe a bit of black pudding and perhaps some beans. After that big night out this great meal set us right again. Now these meals are cancer-giving, artery-clogging and sinful – we disapprove of such indulgence with talk of rising obesity and, you’ve guessed it, the great cost to the NHS of such a terrible diet.

Not so far back in time, we saw smoking as a bad habit but tolerated the smoker – it was their choice after all. We liked the fact that places made provision for smokers while allowing non-smokers space as well. Today, smoking sits as the thing we disapprove of the most. And we don’t stop at condemning the sin – we ostracise and exclude the sinner as well, casting them out into the cold and rain, making them second-class citizens, like pariahs.

Everywhere we look, we see disapproval – complaints about the covers of so-called ‘lads mags’, frowning criticism of models for being too thin and condemnation of mothers for putting a cream egg in their child’s lunchbox. Politicians, doctors, scientists, journalists and pundits fall over each other to express disapproval of the choices other people make. And this disapproval is followed by calls for action to prevent such evil from spreading – whether we’re talking about school dinners, the ‘sexualisation’ of children or me having a very large whisky at the end of a long day.

Right now the pendulum is swinging away from personal choice and private freedom towards a controlling state and society. The “Age of Disapproval” chalks up a new victory with each passing day – with every one of these little wins making society a little less free and life for so many a little less pleasant.

But this is fine for the New Puritans, prohibitionists and healthy living fanatics – it means that people are directed towards an approved, purposeful and sober life and away from indulgent, hedonism and pleasure for the sheer joy of its experience.

It isn’t a better world. It is a dreary, depressing, controlling culture where we may live a little longer but that extra will be free from pleasure, without the chance of indulgence.

It truly is an “Age of Disapproval”.

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Bang!

I thought that some fine words would come to accompany this photograph - taken during the finale to the 'Classical Fantasia' concert at Kirkstall Abbey. But somehow they won't come except to say that the smell of gunpowder, the screams and blasts of fireworks and the eerie lighting really does fit the 1812 Overture!

The precision, the co-ordination and the creativity that go to make up a few minutes of spectacular entertainment is a real joy. That we invest such energy into pleasure - even a fleeting pleasure - stands as a contrast to the soul-destroying drear of a purposeful life. There is no purpose to fireworks beyond pleasure, lighting the old walls just gives a context to that splendid show of fire, noise and light - this is not well-being but pure hedonism, pleasure for its own sake. And I loved it!

Bang!

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Tenets of the New Puritans #3: Healthy living, hedonism and the curse of the clown

In appreciating the ideology of the New Puritans we have to understand first that these are not bad people hell bent on destroying our pleasures. Rather they believe – fervently in many cases – that it is those very pleasures that are destroying us and damaging society. It is as the only song goes:

Cigarettes and Whisky and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane
Cigarettes and Whisky and wild wild women
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane

To which sins we must now add the humble hamburger:

We worry so much about the many dangers to our children, like drugs and pedophiles and violence. But we often take for granted what might very well be the largest danger of all to our kids: the hundreds of billions of dollars spent each year on ads designed to get them hooked on junk food.

That's why I think it's important that this week more than 550 health professionals and organizations signed an open letter to McDonald's, imploring the fast food giant to stop marketing junk food to kids.

We have to understand the mindset of those “550 health professionals and organisations” since they are the shock troops of New Puritanism. And what they want is for us to adopt their ideology of “healthy living”. And a great deal of resource is invested in promoting this ideology through the health service and through local councils

In this section you will find a number of improvement tools, examples of good practice and case studies that address issues of health inequalities and health improvement. The information is divided into subject areas and includes those with high impact and high importance on the current government agenda. We showcase successful case studies from across all sections of the health improvement and health inequalities agenda - from smoking and teenage pregnancy to sexual health and the built & natural environment.

So say the LGID – the ‘improvement and development’ arm of the Local Government Group (what used to be the LGA). And goes on to provide hundreds of examples of what local councils and their ‘partners’ are doing – much of it good advice, some of it excellent and impactful but all of it entirely wedded to the New Puritan ideology of ‘healthy living’.

The problem isn’t that good diet, exercise and moderate behaviour are being promoted but that things that fall outside the ‘healthy living’ prescription – alcohol, “fatty foods”, salt and fizzy drinks – are condemned outright. Hence the letter from those “550 health professionals and organisations”. And such condemnation does not require good evidence but instead just two things – the fact that consumption is a pleasure and the suggestion, ideally from a doctor or “healthy living expert”, that that consumption might be bad for you.

Armed with these two findings, the New Puritans set about persuading the authorities to start controlling these bad pleasures:

‘We really need to be careful about when these adverts are being shown.

'A 9pm watershed for junk food adverts would ensure that they are banned from not just children's programmes during the day but programmes shown at night where families view them together.
'Parents also need to limit their children's screen time and talk to them about the motives behind advertising.'

Britain is said to be on the brink of an obesity epidemic.

The last line – unsupported by evidence, baldly stated – shows how the New Puritans are winning the argument. This is not prohibition but control and such regulation is needed to protect society from that obesity epidemic (as if getting fat is something that we can catch). This will be followed by calls for stronger labelling, health warnings and other elements of the New Puritan “denormalisation” strategy.

And remember, New Puritans are not evil, they are pleasant people who care deeply about society. They are holding out against decadence and hedonism – seeking to protect us from our actions. Importantly, we are infantilised – powerless in the face of advertising’s might and the corruption of “big business”. By accepting that we are unwilling puppets, we allow the New Puritans space to promote another of their beliefs – that the ‘wrong’ lifestyle choices can be cured by doctors. That sin should be medicalised, that the sinner is a victim of “Big Tobacco”, the “Beerarchy” or “the Evil Clown”

I will look at corporate backing for New Puritanism on another occasion but remember that this is now – since the capture of the NHS by New Puritans – a massive, successful and expanding industry supported by multi-million pound public budgets. So it is no surprise that big industries such as pharmaceuticals are at the forefront of the attack on booze, fags and hamburgers.

The idea of “healthy living” seems harmless yet has become the soft smiling face of the New Puritan mission – a mission to “denormalise” those unapproved pleasures. Most importantly, the New Puritan sees what we eat as a mean to an end – to a “healthy life”. Food as pleasure, indulgence, as a joy isn’t acceptable – if we are to get pleasure from food is should be from knowing we eat only that which is “good for us”. For the New Puritan, all aspects of our lifestyle must be purposeful and eating a McDonald's or grabbing a Snickers from the countline is not purposeful – such hedonism has to be stopped:

A new Food Commission campaign will call for supermarkets, grocery stores and pharmacies to stop displaying snacks at the checkouts and to put such products out of temptation's reach.

While we have yet to reach the point where one taste of cheap chocolate or one hamburger leads inexorably to a squalid death from heroin addiction, the message remains that such things are indulgent and dangerous – and there are healthy alternatives!

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Tenets of the New Puritans #1: denormalisation and social direction

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The essence of the New Puritan faith is not prohibition – the adherents of the Church of Public Health do not wish to ban pleasure, any more than their Puritan antecedents wished to do so merely that such pleasure should be approved, communal and uplifting::

From the rich array of popular pastimes in Tudor-Stuart England…the reform-minded founders of New England drew selectively, transplanting only those "lawful recreations" compatible with their errand into the wilderness. Cock-fighting, horse racing, and ball games were out; reading and writing were in. Far from offering release from social duty, recreation was rationalized to serve official ends. Puritans socialized at public worship, town meetings, funerals, and executions. Integrating work and play, they enjoyed a "productive party" -- a barn-raising or quilting bee -- that epitomized the ideal of "useful recreation". Such civic events "expressed the communal spirit of a covenanted people".

The aim of the New Puritan is re-education – to bring about an epiphany of good behaviour. And while they make common cause with prohibitionists – and will support bans – New Puritans prefer the process of ‘denormalisation’.

However, as recent observers have noted, through the widespread implementation of tobacco ‘denormalization’ strategies, tobacco control advocates appear to have embraced the use of stigma as an explicit policy tool. In a recent article, Ronald Bayer (2008) argues that the mobilization of stigma may effectively reduce the prevalence of smoking behaviors linked to tobacco-related morbidity and mortality and is therefore not necessarily antithetical to public health goals.

While the ‘denormalisation’ strategy is most developed in the world of anti-smoking campaign, we see it begin to creep into anti-alcohol campaigns :

One of the key issues coming out of this research is the lack of any evidence showing that normalising the use of alcohol is a good prevention strategy" says Professor Doug Sellman of the University of Otago, Christchurch, who was invited to write an accompanying commentary.

"In fact the opposite is the case. The less alcohol is normalised in family life, and particularly when parents avoid being at all intoxicated in front of their children or supplying them with alcohol, the better the prevention of alcohol problems in young people will be" he says.

And with  ‘junk food’:

The issue of junk food and its consequences is a major challenge for 21st-century society, one which requires actions that are concrete, complementary, and immediate. Concerned by the urgent need to address it, and boasting a solid track record in the promotion of healthy eating habits and denormalization in the tobacco industry, the RSEQ1 is now involved in denor¬malizing junk food in schools.

Thus we see these “harmful” behaviours ‘denormalised’ while at the same time we are urged – and this is especially the case with young people – to seek “value” from leisure activity. Take this Chapter on “Youth Work Ethics”:

The young people decide that this is the way they want to spend Friday evening. It will be a good time. They have been looking forward to do it. It is a chosen and planned part of their life.

Their parents are pleased about the youth project. Their child (who they worry about) is making a good choice: they learn more about life in good ways, they meet new friends, their horizons are widened, and so on. Their child is also not making a bad choice: they are not getting drunk, falling into fights, at risk of dying, and so on.

Read those words – see the directions involved: “it will be a good time”, it is “chosen and planned” and the young people “learn more about life”. The New Puritan denies the possibility of pleasure for reasons of pure hedonism – fun for fun’s sake, if you will! Entertainment must only be entertainment with a purpose – the frivolity of mere fun is sinful. Or, as adherents to the Church of Public Health will say, ‘not in the interests of wider society’.

So youth work – activity taking place outside of formal education – seeks to indoctrinate young people with the tenets of the New Puritan faith: communalism, judgmental environmentalism, the stigmatising of sinful pleasures and the avoidance of risk.

This suppression of adventure, of exploration and of enterprise is carried forward by the New Puritans into their attitude to adult entertainment – the requirement for social meaning in art and literature, the preference for the uplifting story and the morality play, and the use of documentary to bend opinion towards purposeful pleasure and the denormalisation of hedonistic behaviour.

And educationalists grasp this in what they present to learners:

This unit helps students understand how artists can be influential in shaping human values. It does so by addressing social and global issues such as poverty, starvation, crime, discrimination, sickness, war and the environment. Students are encouraged to consider the subjective and expressive currents in art of our time in relation to these issues.

The idea that painting, music, reading and theatre are escapes from our workaday lives does not figure in the New Puritan’s mindset – these things are tools for passing on selected, preferred social values up to and including the denormalisation of those activities that are not approved.

That people continue to enjoy themselves – to reject the prescribed pleasures from the Church of Public Health in favour of hedonism remains a glint of sunlight in an otherwise bleak society. What we can hope for is that, as was the case in New England all those years ago, the search for real pleasure will triumph over the direction and denormalisation directed by our elders and betters:

“Pursuing pleasure for its own sake, New Englanders seized on solemn occasions as pretexts for parties. Austere funerals turned into lavish affairs; "ordination balls" celebrated the installation of ministers; execution days took on "a carnival atmosphere". Notwithstanding jeremiads from the pulpit, alcohol was ubiquitous; under its influence, militia drills could descend into drunken brawls and corn-huskings into trysts. "The tavern became the new meetinghouse": a centre of news, politics, trade, and entertainment. In the more permissive atmosphere of the eighteenth century, men and women flirted at singing schools, drank and danced in alehouses, devoured romantic novels, and engaged in a good deal of premarital sex.”

*The two New England quotes are from a review "Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England" by Bruce Daniels

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