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Health warnings can be bad for you. Risk brings us together Health warnings can be bad for you. Risk brings us together
(35 minutes later)
In the margins of every story about health – how long red meat lurks in your intestines, how much baby boomers binge drink, what a vegan diet can do for your sleep patterns – lies a question: what makes your health anybody else’s concern? Why shouldn’t a grown adult decide for herself how many tomatoes she wants to eat? Who cares whether a stranger’s liver has had a break two days a week? The question is never asked but always answered: because this constitutes an “NHS timebomb”.In the margins of every story about health – how long red meat lurks in your intestines, how much baby boomers binge drink, what a vegan diet can do for your sleep patterns – lies a question: what makes your health anybody else’s concern? Why shouldn’t a grown adult decide for herself how many tomatoes she wants to eat? Who cares whether a stranger’s liver has had a break two days a week? The question is never asked but always answered: because this constitutes an “NHS timebomb”.
Related: Older people drinking too much could create NHS ‘timebomb’, says doctorRelated: Older people drinking too much could create NHS ‘timebomb’, says doctor
The logic is that we have a right to demand healthful behaviour from one another because we all pay for the consequences otherwise. A proper understanding of the risks of this substance or that will lead to a healthier populace and a less burdened NHS. Therefore anybody who doesn’t prioritise their health over their habits is freeloading off a social resource.The logic is that we have a right to demand healthful behaviour from one another because we all pay for the consequences otherwise. A proper understanding of the risks of this substance or that will lead to a healthier populace and a less burdened NHS. Therefore anybody who doesn’t prioritise their health over their habits is freeloading off a social resource.
It’s an argument made in bad faith: this kind of priggish policing has nothing to do with freeloading. Even – indeed, especially – in countries with minimal pooled health resources, health-seeking behaviour is valorised to the point of its serving as a proxy for morality. Corpulence is read as laziness, stupidity and a lack of self-discipline. Slenderness is superiority, elegance of mind and appetite as well as limb. All disease is endlessly traced to obesity, and thence back to personal deficiency.It’s an argument made in bad faith: this kind of priggish policing has nothing to do with freeloading. Even – indeed, especially – in countries with minimal pooled health resources, health-seeking behaviour is valorised to the point of its serving as a proxy for morality. Corpulence is read as laziness, stupidity and a lack of self-discipline. Slenderness is superiority, elegance of mind and appetite as well as limb. All disease is endlessly traced to obesity, and thence back to personal deficiency.
Environmental and social factors, not to mention luck and chance, are erased in this worldview, even though they drive or dwarf any healthy choices a person could make. The entire diet and self-denial narrative is an attempt to fence off human empathy and replace it with censoriousness. If a person gets terminal cancer out of sheer misfortune, it is impossible not to put yourself in their shoes, offer what help you can, sympathise with them, feel their loss. If, on the other hand, a person gets cancer because they stuffed their face with processed pork, your energy is directed instead into poring over their personal deficiencies, so that you might live as differently to them as you possibly can.Environmental and social factors, not to mention luck and chance, are erased in this worldview, even though they drive or dwarf any healthy choices a person could make. The entire diet and self-denial narrative is an attempt to fence off human empathy and replace it with censoriousness. If a person gets terminal cancer out of sheer misfortune, it is impossible not to put yourself in their shoes, offer what help you can, sympathise with them, feel their loss. If, on the other hand, a person gets cancer because they stuffed their face with processed pork, your energy is directed instead into poring over their personal deficiencies, so that you might live as differently to them as you possibly can.
Nowhere is risk aversion and the senseless amplification of personal responsibility more pronounced than in pregnancy, where a series of directives allows us to plot it over time. Nine years ago the Department of Health issued vague drinking guidelines for which there was no evidence – one or two units of alcohol, once or twice a week.Nowhere is risk aversion and the senseless amplification of personal responsibility more pronounced than in pregnancy, where a series of directives allows us to plot it over time. Nine years ago the Department of Health issued vague drinking guidelines for which there was no evidence – one or two units of alcohol, once or twice a week.
Now, the advice, and indeed the norm, is not to drink at all, even though nothing has changed: there is still no reason to believe that drinking in moderation causes harm in pregnancy. A decade ago the obsession was blue cheese and pâté; now, while of course those prescriptions remain in place, new dangers have emerged. Pregnant women are advised to avoid new furniture and frying pans. The problem is not the relish with which control is exerted over women, nor the misogynistic rationale so often advanced (which usually boils down to “this evidence is too complicated for the average woman to understand, so she would be better off avoiding the business altogether”).Now, the advice, and indeed the norm, is not to drink at all, even though nothing has changed: there is still no reason to believe that drinking in moderation causes harm in pregnancy. A decade ago the obsession was blue cheese and pâté; now, while of course those prescriptions remain in place, new dangers have emerged. Pregnant women are advised to avoid new furniture and frying pans. The problem is not the relish with which control is exerted over women, nor the misogynistic rationale so often advanced (which usually boils down to “this evidence is too complicated for the average woman to understand, so she would be better off avoiding the business altogether”).
Rather, it is again an argument made in bad faith: of the many, terrifically sad things that can happen in a pregnancy, most have nothing to do with choices the mother made. To fixate on individual behaviour is effectively to erase the legitimacy of a person to whom a bad thing simply happened for no reason, and with it her call on your kindness. As the social bonds of empathy are eroded, so the social responsibility of the market is simply waved away: it’s not for the manufacturers of sofas and utensils to stop using chemicals that cause birth defects, it’s for the individual mother to avoid the sofas. Rather, it is again an argument made in bad faith: of the many, terrifically sad things that can happen in a pregnancy, most have nothing to do with choices the mother makes. To fixate on individual behaviour is effectively to erase the legitimacy of a person to whom a bad thing simply happened for no reason, and with it her call on your kindness. As the social bonds of empathy are eroded, so the social responsibility of the market is simply waved away: it’s not for the manufacturers of sofas and utensils to stop using chemicals that cause birth defects, it’s for the individual mother to avoid the sofas.
When you abandon the idea of systematically creating a better future you lose the belief that the future could be betterWhen you abandon the idea of systematically creating a better future you lose the belief that the future could be better
One of the most interesting theories about obsessive risk culture I’ve heard came from Ellie Lee, a sociologist at Kent University’s Centre for Parenting Studies, who related it to the end of ideology. When you abandon the idea of systematically creating a better future you lose the belief that the future could be better, and are left perpetually defending an undependable present.One of the most interesting theories about obsessive risk culture I’ve heard came from Ellie Lee, a sociologist at Kent University’s Centre for Parenting Studies, who related it to the end of ideology. When you abandon the idea of systematically creating a better future you lose the belief that the future could be better, and are left perpetually defending an undependable present.
Last month, at a protest against the Battersea park adventure playground being turned into a Go Ape, a youth worker advanced a practical explanation: if you privatise things, you create a blame culture and you lose the ability to accommodate danger. No teenager could now be allowed to break an arm on the tree top experience because his parents, having paid £30, would sue; therefore he has to be harnessed.Last month, at a protest against the Battersea park adventure playground being turned into a Go Ape, a youth worker advanced a practical explanation: if you privatise things, you create a blame culture and you lose the ability to accommodate danger. No teenager could now be allowed to break an arm on the tree top experience because his parents, having paid £30, would sue; therefore he has to be harnessed.
But the very risk of breaking an arm was part of the point of the adventure playground. That was how solidarity, self-belief and resilience were built. It is why soldiers have emotional bonds so strong that they grieve one another with the same anguish as parents grieve children – they have understood protecting the group as indivisible from protecting oneself. It is what drives us to create things together, whether health services or adventure playgrounds, that are larger than anything we could create alone: the understanding that risk is random, that it cannot be forestalled, that it’s a lesser life without it, that the worst things can happen to the best people, that fortune is indeed outrageous and its slings and arrows can only be weathered socially. But the very risk of breaking an arm was part of the point of the adventure playground. That was how solidarity, self-belief and resilience were built. It is why soldiers have emotional bonds so strong that they grieve one another with the same anguish as parents grieve children – they have understood protecting the group to be as indivisible from protecting oneself. It is what drives us to create things together, whether health services or adventure playgrounds, that are larger than anything we could create alone: the understanding that risk is random, that it cannot be forestalled, that it’s a lesser life without it, that the worst things can happen to the best people, that fortune is indeed outrageous and its slings and arrows can only be weathered socially.
By contrast, the fascination with eradicating lifestyle risk is, at root, an attempt to distance ourselves from one another, reject a shared burden of misfortune in favour of a neurotic drive to take personal responsibility for things you largely can’t control. It is a creed of isolation and cruelty, which is best resisted. Choose danger in 2016, welcome it. Choose red wine and salt. Forget your lower intestines and your fitness regime. Choose one another.By contrast, the fascination with eradicating lifestyle risk is, at root, an attempt to distance ourselves from one another, reject a shared burden of misfortune in favour of a neurotic drive to take personal responsibility for things you largely can’t control. It is a creed of isolation and cruelty, which is best resisted. Choose danger in 2016, welcome it. Choose red wine and salt. Forget your lower intestines and your fitness regime. Choose one another.