“Public Policy’s Absent Aesthetics”: I’m at AmCon

rantin’:

…What leapt out to me was the absence of the aesthetic side of smoking vs. wearing the patch. I don’t just mean that smoking looks good, although it does: Smoke dissolves like perfect conversation. Smoke turns women into chapels.

What I mean is that all these aesthetic associations reinforce nicotine addiction. The sights and smells and sounds of smoking (tapping the cigarette against the pack; I knew one woman who made a little kiss sound every time she took a drag) intertwine in memory with the release, calm, or rush of nicotine. Of course alternatives that lack any aesthetic value aren’t real replacements.

This isn’t a brief for smoking. The classic book on this subject is Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime, which he wrote in part as a (successful) pathway toward quitting. It’s his elegy for his habit. Klein’s book is countercultural—to some, even shocking—because it dares to admit aesthetic motives into a conversation that has been wholly colonized by health-and-safety language.

Mainstream discussion of public policy, or even (in secular contexts) personal moral behavior, proceeds as if health, safety, economic prosperity, and happiness are the only legitimate motives for action. More than that: We talk as if health, safety, economic prosperity, and happiness are the only possible motives for action.

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