Nosey Parkers
A British professor says sharing cake is like passive smoking. Behold the polite tyranny of the Nosey Parker.
On my eighteenth birthday, the legal age here for drinking, several landlords banned me from several pubs.
You see, I had pinned on my chest a badge announcing my fledgling adulthood. For the previous two years, the landlords had grown accustomed to my business, and my daily recitations of an ambitious date of birth.
‘Happy birthday! Now you can fuck off out of here,’ went the reply.
They were only joking. No sooner was I ordered out of the door but beckoned back through the door to enjoy my one-thousandth, and first legal, pint.
Back then, this wasn’t a big deal. ‘Mind your own business!’ was a verbal headbutt so weighty and so hefty it muzzled even the most militant of curtain-twitchers.
The characters upon which pub life depends warned back then that things would change for the worse, warning to the selectively deaf that the looming smoking ban (back then an absurd imposition) would only encourage those who make other people’s business their own: those George Orwell called, ‘Nosey Parkers.’
“The most hateful of all names in an English ear,” wrote George Orwell, “is Nosey Parker.”
Until recently, the Nosey Parker was a derided and loathed and pitied entity.
Those characters had a point. This week, a British professor said that sharing cake with one’s work colleagues is not just a thoughtful act but tantamount to passive smoking.
Professor Susan Jebb, chair of the Food Standards Agency, said that while eating cake is a personal choice, we ‘must all help each other’ by providing a supportive environment.
She told The Times: “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time, and [yet] we undervalue the impact of the environment.
“If nobody brought cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, okay, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.
She went on, (and on, and on): “With smoking, after a very long time we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment.”
Jebb qualified her comments as her ‘speaking in a personal capacity,’ but her previous sermons on the evils of junk food, advertising, and anything poor people dare enjoy, gave the game away.
By ‘supportive environment,’ Jebb means that smiling, hostile environment in which unelected busybodies impose their pettifoggery upon the rest of us. Unsurprisingly, Jebb got her start working for Tony Blair, the high priest of this loathsome meddlesome illiberal liberalism.
Back in 2015, the mad professor lectured an audience of Clever People, asking aloud whether they could ‘nudge the nation to better health.’
The entire lecture is quite the read. Jebb laments that governments are ‘anxious about public opinion.’ To Jebb, public opinion isn’t the wellspring from which democracy flows but the primitive babbling of burger-munching, cigarette-chuffing, beer-swilling half-breeds talking out of turn.
“A key assumption of modern politics,” she says, “is that we should all be free to live as we like without being nagged. Yet, most of us choose to set rules for ourselves even when we don’t often think of them as imposed rules.”
So far, so grotesque.
She continues: “So might we also accept our agents—in this case, government—setting rules—laws—on our behalf if they help enact things we want to achieve but struggle to do alone?”
Hers is the language of the modern authoritarian. By deploying ‘we’ and ‘everyone,’ Jebb means ‘you’ and ‘them’. By ‘supportive’ she means ‘enforced.’ By ‘encourage,’ she means ‘beat over the head until it stops asking questions.’
Professor, kindly assist me with this crossword puzzle: seven letters…a phrasal verb… vulgar slang… rhymes with ‘duck cough.’ Any clues? It’s on the tip of my tongue.
There’s something rather Clockwork Orange about all this.
According to Professor Jebb, those beneath her who opt for a cheeseburger, chips, and a Doom Bar in Wetherspoon over the sapless five-bean salad placed on the menu in service of sardonic irony, cannot think for themselves.
Beguiled by advertising, by shiny packets, by the tabloids, we buy junk not because we want to pacify an often paltry existence but because our choices are automatic and not a conscious deliberate act.
Therefore, it’s Jebb’s job to tolchok the lewdies over their gullivers before they viddy something real horrorshow to stuff into their litsos.
With respect, Professor Jebb hasn’t put on a pair of steel-toed boots and overalls in her life.
The obesity upon which she has declared jihad is largely a war upon those at the bottom.
Since the 1990s, our ballooning weight has mirrored that of ballooning precarity occasioned by the Clever People, who in their desperate little rebellion against reality imposed their meddling perfectionism upon the rest of us.
During university, I spent the summers feeding planks of wood into a sanding machine. The noise rattled the skull like an oppressive mix between a runway and brick in a washing machine. The hourly rate was a constant reminder that one is running out of luck.
In such work, the little things matter the most. The difference between a slog and a manageable day is often the result of one’s newspaper, the radio, and of course, one’s lunch.
Indeed. Much of the conversation back then centred upon: ‘What you got for break?’ followed invariably by, ‘What you got for lunch?’
The most enviable of lunches were always a Full English breakfast from the burger van parked opposite which siphoned off thousands every week from the legions of factory boys drawn toward it like iron filings to a magnet.
(One time—I kid you not—a philosophy student strolled into the break room with a copy of The Guardian and a packet of sushi. Reader, he’d have been more popular had he urinated in the kettle.)
As Orwell put it, “When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull, wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty.’ Ordinary human beings would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.”
There is something intensely uncomfortable about ‘nudging’ and this progressive trend of polite tyranny.
After all, practitioners pretend nudging is a benign act. It is not. One is not being nudged to do what one ought to do, one is being nudged to do what someone else thinks he ought to do. Nudging is the politest, most insidious form of control freakery.
Who decides what is the right thing to do? And how are these people held accountable? Actually, who do these people think they are?
It is also insulting. Nudging assumes—assumes! —the subject of this vile practice is too thick to grasp that a salad is better for the waistline than a Big Mac. He already knows that. Everyone already knows that.
It is also counterproductive. We all resist doing what is often good for us. Often, that resistance doubles in strength especially because someone else hectors us into making the right choice.
Perhaps we resist because we know that surrender only sophisticates the Nosey Parker. They are never satisfied. Instead, they dream up ever more infractions to police, ever more ‘unacceptable’ behaviours to correct, and ever more ways to nudge people into lobotomised copies of themselves.
If I am right about this—and I am right about this—such authoritarian personalities are merely a dilution of those who penned lurid letters to Der Stürmer.
Everybody knows what is good for them. I wish those who claimed to know what is good for others knew what was good for them: minding their own bloody business and letting others eat cake.
Mr. Gage, I remember George Carlin saying, "When fascism comes to America, it will wear a smiley face."
Ronald Reagan, "the most dangerous words in the English language, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
I have always been amazed by how willing people are to accept that the know-it-alls might really know it all. Mr. Gage - I hope your unmasking of the duplicity of the Clever People is resonant! It is refreshing to me...