talk till morning
For the Love of Ideas
from normality to sin
the normal can become evil and the evil can become normal
Ten years ago was revolting. A world where they forced carcinogenic fumes into your pink defenceless lungs from centimetres away, laughing as they did. Nobody would so much as bat an eyelid to the assault. Long gone are such dark days. We have corrected the problem so now they can only commit such disgusting atrocities to each other in a sectioned off part of the pub away from where normal people dwell.
A reaction like this to smoking in a pub is entirely expectable in the modern day. Yet in the years leading up to it being made illegal in licensed pubs in 2008, such a reaction would be met with hostility from those who considered it normal.
Since the dawn of humanity, we have utilised tobacco leaves for the nicotine therein. Christopher Columbus is cited as “discovering” them in 1492 on the Santa Maria’s voyage to India that accidentally landed him in the New World. 360 years later, Turkish soldiers introduce British ones to cigarettes made in Russia during the Crimean War. Here mass production started in the UK, and finished in 2014 with the last cigarette plant being closed in County Antrim.
The flint that sparked the fire immolating the fag industry was the Royal College of Physicians in 1962. At this point it was normal for people to smoke. But as understanding of the health effects of smoking tobacco grew, so too did resistance to its consumption and subsequent government regulations restricting its saleability. The banning of general advertising of tobacco products in 2003 paved the way for the 2008 smoking ban in pubs.
It would be wrong to credit the change solely to politicians and regulatory bodies who proposed and enforced these rule changes. Something had to drive those proposals. To incentivise those regulations even in the face of possible public resistance. Such a massive swing restricting the day-to-day activities of individual people would normally be met by ground breaking resistance. Yet it was not, as a mechanism that acted ubiquitously on the hearts and minds of everyday people was at play. This mechanism was moralisation.
When the Royal College of Physicians started to realise smoking would dramatically reduce your life span it taught people the biological hazards. As is so often the case with human beings, it is not these discoveries themselves that brought smoking to its knees. No matter how justified or truthful scientific information is, for the majority of human beings to abide by its teachings (no easy accomplishment given our capacity to act irrationally), it must have teeth. A social force that changes the everyday rules of everyday people.
Britian's 'smoking problem'
Paul Rozin wrote The Process of Moralisation in 1999. In the paper he postulated a now widely accepted understanding of moralisation as: ‘the process through which preferences are converted into values’.
With smoking, the agency of the Royal College manifested itself as the initial attachment of smoking to health problems. This snowballed into the widespread preference of smoking as a bad activity for people to indulge in, fuelled by the scientific understanding of smoking’s harms. Thus, the bridge crossing from scientific to the banks of the social commenced.
As this moralisation propagated, ‘smokers’ rather than just ‘smoking’ became an extension of it. ‘They who forced carcinogenic fumes into your pink defenceless lungs’ and self-destructively added to our growing NHS debt, were wrongdoers. Given this moralisation was negative, i.e. the values associated with smoking were being changed to regard it as a bad thing, and became directed at a labelled people rather than an activity, it graduated into the realm of stigmatisation.
The moral of this story is where there is agency, and that agency becomes directed at a labelled group of people and manages to become empowered so others align with it, then the normal can become evil and the evil can become normal.
Though unnoticed, this mechanism is ubiquitous in many realms of our lives. In the particular case of smoking, moralisation is largely a force of good as it has largely dissuaded people from smoking.
On a scale of far higher magnitude, moralisation can be held responsible for some of humanity’s greatest triumphs and disasters. We would still be lopping off heads for speaking ill of the crown had Robert-François Damiens not inspired feelings of empathy within the 18th Century crowd attempted assassination of King Louis XV. Throughout Europe a trickle of sympathy for the previously evil, now victimised failed-regicide, gathered discharge as it flowed through the centuries. At its contemporary mouth, the river’s discharge has never been greater and, though not eradicated, the physical torture and execution of criminals is now largely considered evil (with notable exceptions like Saudi Arabinan and Guantanamo Bay).
This holds true for less brutal realms of life. At roughly the same time as Damiens’ martyrdom nudged our understanding of criminals as evil worthy of torture and execution in a different direction, so too did out moralisation of mental health change.
In the 1980’s asylums, being ‘Mad Houses’ (some were established under the Mad House Act 1774) for the ‘insane’, were closed and replaced by psychiatric hospitals and community care. At least in part because the previously evil ‘insane’ had this moralisation taken out from under them. Now the ‘insane’ are ‘ill’ and given medical and social help rather than incarceration. It is now evil to treat mentally ill people with the same understanding as in the 18th century.
However, moralisation of smoking sometimes goes too far when extending into fuelling stigmatisation and stops being such a force of good. Therefore, to say such a mechanism of life as moralisation is brilliant is short-sighted.
A desperate matter of fact is this mechanism works both ways. As I said, its heartless double-edged nature means the normal can become evil and the evil can become normal.
1975-1979 witnessed one of the worst genocides in recorded history. Pol Pot’s political party, The Khmer Rouge, systematically murdered a third of the entire country’s population. The brutality of the killings was unforgivable. Among them was the party’s system of distributing the county’s scarce food supply. To earn your share, you had to perform well. An example of ‘performing well’ was the medical attention forced field labourers were given when sick or injured. Teenage boys, with absolutely no medical experience, were rewarded for how many patients they operated on without anaesthetic and how many they gave bogus injections of chemical concoctions absent of medicinal properties.
Among other things, the genocide was driven by the moralisation of ‘light skinned’ urban dwellers as sadistic evil overlords who had exploited the plight of ‘dark skinned’ peasants. Pol Pot’s regime flipped the order on its head, making what were previously normal urban dwellers into ‘evil beings’. Thus, the horrendous acts of violent murder that went on in the killing fields were, in part, remarkably driven by the same process of moralisation that has helped to destroy smoking in the UK. Revealing the desperate double-edged nature of this mechanism’s swing.
Such is the unfortunate nature of many of the most powerful forces operating within human societies. Moralisation goes far beyond the stigmatisation of smokers. Whilst it can do great things for the world, it can decimate it too. Moralisation’s unfortunate reality is that whilst it can make what is normal, evil it can also make what is evil, normal.
There being such a wide variety of varied cases in this article has demonstrated the omnipresence of moralisation in all walks of life. It is a force that can both build the brightest world possible and dam it to Hells the Devil would tremor in. Moralisation is by no means the only force at play in these scenarios. Of course, it takes place alongside the multifarious political, social, and economic forces that shape our world. But it is one often overlooked and capable of changing what was wholly normal into something entirely evil, and vice versa.
I wonder what part of today’s normality will be a sin tomorrow?