Reasoned argument

As I do when riding to work or pushing Johnny in his buggy, I exercise debates.

It is often said that we do not have a drugs problem, we have problem because drugs are illegal. I was wondering if aesthetics could help. I hypothesised that there might be an aesthetic of opiates. That there might be a connoisseurship of heroin that would analyse the experience and recognise from sensual nuance the provenance, the makers hand, and so on. I hypothesised that if there were such an aesthetic, it would help to mitigate the social ills brought about by heroin use. Users would strive to become more sophisticated, would shun the bad stuff, and generally use would go down. It became quickly clear to me that even though there is an elaborate aesthetic of alcohol: malt whiskies, champagne, bordeaux, CamRA, etc, this doesn't stop people drinking paint thinner and lamp fuel until they are blind and killing each other.

So, is there a place for aesthetics in addressing social ills?


Consider the much commented upon recent phenomenon of obesity. It suggested itself to me that the food to which connoisseurs are drawn: largely fresh, local, free-range, organic and slow, stands in contrast to the foods implicated in obesity: pre-prepared, of no certain provenance, factory farmed, hydrogenated, transfatted, sweet, fizzy and fast. But, as with alcohol, all the aesthetics of food do not stop parents shoving burgers through school fences at their kids who would otherwise have to survive on fresh veg.

With food, even if it is ignored, there seems to be a link between conoisseurship and healthy eating (in spite of possiblecounter examples such as Antonio Carluccio or fois gras).

So I was left in a more complicated space. On the one hand aesthetics and health - physical and social - appear to be linked. But on the other there is a widespread and dominant antipathy in Britain to developing aesthetics. It is associated with snobbery, class division and the national myth of modest self effacement.

One problem of food aesthetics is that what was tacit and common-sense has been turned into propositional and sophistic. Instead of recognising a fresh vegetable we are expected to apply critical theory to food labeling: understanding a red/amber/green code of saturated fats; understanding what saturation means, in terms of fat chemistry, and then extrapolating from there to recognise what hydrogenated fats and transfats are. And that isn't all, labels just remind us of how stupid or clever we were in school. You didn't used to have to go to school to know about food.

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