The meaning of smoking

My kitchen window, on the first floor (level 2) of our flats, looks down on a road leading to the station. That’s where most passers-by are going to or coming from, often with cases on wheels that provide the first sound I hear on many mornings. Today itt’s cold out there and a man who just passed wheeling his case and looking underdressed was plainly feeling it. But he still had a cigarette on, which entailed keeping his hands, or, strictly, one of them, ungloved.

It obviously meant something to him to be smoking as he walked and shivered and I thought back to my own smoking days, when I too would have wanted to light up while walking in the cold. Or while working outside at gardening or building something. Part of the story is obviously addiction, though addiction is in some usage just a label for liking to smoke. But another part is the extension of our personal zone and the bubble of culture out into the alien environment. Instead of taking in nature in the form of its air we take in as our own smoke, the work of our lungs and their prosthesis, the cigarette. The cigarette, part of which, after all, is inside us, isn’t an external device but a bit of us. Like our own mouths, we can’t see it; it’s an intake channel equivalent to and as intimate as the nose.

Smoking is a defiant declaration of independence: ‘Wherever I go I can make my own environment, breathing my own stuff and not what nature offers and moving in a cloud of my exhalation. Between nature and culture I'm for culture every time.’ Hence the appeal of lighting up even in the most inconvenient circumstances -- up ladders, under cars, on mountainsides, on bikes. It’s an assertion of our self-sufficiency, the mastery of the human over the worst the world can throw at us, of our dominance over nature. (Having written that I'm aware there’s a gender dimension to all this.)

And as such it’s a stance that’s out of fashion. Now we think we’re rejoining nature. (’We’ being, I suppose, more the white middle class.) Once more (the last time being ancient Greece?) we’re animals with bodies that we’re keen to let the air get to, the more the better - just see us on the beach compared with our ancestors of two or three generations back. Any bodily residues on skin or clothing are removed by crazily frequent showering and laundering. Kids at my primary school in the 1940s would wear the same clothes for, it sometimes seemed, the whole winter, including in bed. Farmers, shepherds and navvies, who -- the first two at any rate -- I romantically thought in my teens should be expressing in their dress and mien something of their noble communion with nature, like Tolkienian Elfs or Ents or whatever they’re called, wore old suits and smoked -- and whistled not folk songs but hits from the Light Programme. Nor did they bother about getting soaked: the only rainwear was a sack across the shoulders: let nature -- which is, let’s face it, just a pain half the time when you’re trying to make a living -- do what it will: me, my clothes, my fags and my bits of tunes are all I need to be a king.

The price of symbolic reinforcement from at least one of these cultural appurtenances was cancer and wrecked lungs for some, a risk most of us have judged excessive. But I don’t underestimate the satisfactions of smoking in the open air or despise those who hang on to them. David Hockney, who I reckon a wise man, can’t be all wrong.

The wreckers of culture

In today's Independent on Sunday, Paul Moore, whistleblower from the bank HBOS [Halifax Bank of Scotland], is reporting as saying, "Look, I love the Halifax, I love the people, and most of the business was good. But there was a terrible culture…" that pushed people to take reckless risks.

Cultures is the key concept here, in the sense that organizations and institutions as well as communities have cultures.

Our targets for public exposure in this crisis ought not to be just bankers (and 'bankers') but the wreckers of cultures. We see their work all around us. Think of the cultures that have been destroyed: the old BBC in which people were left to themselves to get on and make fine programmes, the government as run by Clement Attlee, the self-respecting workforce of the former railways, those successful teams in any number of different fields in the war, the long-gone culture that enabled a scholar to take twenty years of research to produce a great work and some distinguished scholars to publish nothing at all and yet found schools of study – of historical studies, for instance -- through their PhD teaching. The basis of these cultures was a belief that people could be trusted to get with their jobs without interference – to ‘be professional’, as it’s called -- and reliance on motivation by pride in work.

Think of all those people in the public sector who used to love their jobs and now, because the culture of their organisation has been wantonly wrecked, have come to hate working in them – or have taken early retirement. I know such individuals across a range of sectors from universities and schools to social services to the National Railway Museum in York. (For many examples, see Simon Caulkins’ columns in The Observer.)

It takes many years to create a culture, the briefest time to destroy it. We've learned to be sensitive to the fragility of natural ecologies; we need a parallel intolerance of vandalism in cultures.

Maybe we need a campaign to identify and label the culture destroyer as a menace to society, Public Enemy No. 1. He/she needs to be put to shame for arrogance and ignorance, with documentation of crimes committed. We need appearances before beefed up parliamentary committees. We need descriptions of what such wreckers do, guides to identifying them, outfits to whistleblow them to --- and counter-examples of what it is to manage and foster a culture in such a way that it doesn't get complacent and stays creative without sacrificing trust and pride in work.