Choking logic


Here's an interesting quote I found in a piece on passive smoking:

"Their conclusion was that ‘public consensus about the negative effects of passive smoke is so strong that it has become part of a truth regime that cannot be intelligibly questioned’."

It is only fair to note that this 'truth regime' springs up in every era (witch hunts, criminilized homosexuality, drugs laws, sexual inequality etc. have all been created by intransigent morality rather than hard logic)
Whilst the list in brackets above has been dissapated by current societal mores, there seems to be quite a few new things that can no longer be 'intelligibly questioned' - global warming, smoking, paedophilia, child rearing, racism, rape...and soon even eating & drinking seem like they will be tightly monitored and constricted.

How did the libertarian acid house generation, who are now the urban dwelling bien pensant parents of our new crop of children, become such a massively prescriptive bunch?




4 comments:

Gareth Williams said...

A good question Worm. But I find I never meet these prescriptive people, not just amongst my own generation but my parents too. Everyone seems fairly live-and-let-live. So who are they? We hear a lot about them. It's frustrating as one can hardly wish they'd eff off as they already seem to have done so.

Brit said...

Well if we want to get narrativey about it, you might argue that a prescriptive generation is a reaction to the permissive generation, and so it goes on cycling.

Thus our children will all be passive smoking, global warming and raping away to their hearts content.

worm said...

good stuff, I'd better start saving up to put them through rapeschool

Kevin Musgrove said...

Sit on any bus and you'll find these prescriptive people. Of course, their prohibitions are always of somebody else's vices...