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Jump to full article: South China Morning Post, 2009-06-24
Author: Nin Chan, Ap Lei Chau
Intro: Alex Lo's incisive article ("Ban smoking, but don't rewrite history", June 18) on smoking and social taboos is an elegant show of a disquieting reality: social morality is always premised upon the regulation of pleasure.
Think of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which is a diagnosis of postmodernity. In his utopia, all contraband intoxicants have been removed and replaced with "soma", an officially approved drug that dispels anxiety, without any side-effects. . . .
Smoking is perhaps the purest insurrectionary act that one could commit in public. It is a flagrant transgression of this deification of the body. To smoke, with full knowledge that one is courting death, is to flout the prohibitions that power places upon enjoyment, to reject the substitute satisfactions that propagate guilt and self-disgust.
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