Light Up, Children COUNTRY SQUIRE MAGAZINE

Listen to this article

BY SEAN WALSH

Let’s get smoking again, if only to help the easily offended

“I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” —Albert Einstein

If we’re serious about arresting our spiritual, cultural, moral, and aesthetic decline—and if we wish to push back against the general entropy of good manners—then we need to get people smoking again. Not everyone, necessarily, but certainly some. Starting with the kids. They are the future, after all.

That last point is important. Smoking, like learning the cello or shoplifting, is one of those hobbies you need to take up when very young if you’re going to get good at it, or even do it safely. The science is disputable, but it seems intuitively correct that the best time to start is while the body is still developing and the lungs are best placed to acquire a natural immunity. Other experts might differ, of course, but I think we hear enough from them.

The suggestion is unorthodox. That is because we have inherited and absorbed the Enlightenment’s sloppy thinking about the nature and composition of the human person. Descartes—a smoker himself and quite possibly also a stoner—kicked off the confusion when he suggested that we are an unlikely trinity of mind, matter, and whatever causally mediates between these two substances.

Being French and sophisticated, the soldier and founder of modern philosophy was mistaken—but in an interesting way. The correct view, the properly post-Incarnational picture, is that we are a communion of body and soul.

The truth is that the spiritual and the physical—for better or worse, in both benefits and harms—are mutually intertwined. This is something the health fascists, with their tedious and mistaken emphasis on the person as mere body, want us all to overlook. The lanyard-laden ghouls of the nationalised “health” service, practitioners and propagandists alike, are obsessed with the mechanics of the human body yet stubbornly indifferent to the teleology God has woven through it—the animating principle we call the soul. They act based on a category error, one only a small degree of separation from the heresy of transhumanism and its attendant horrors.

This entanglement of soul and body means that the reductionist, utilitarian mathematics—which these days doesn’t so much guide as dictate social policy—will never account for the non-measurable ingredients essential to an individual’s overall contentment. There are, in other words, spiritual goods, and for some people, tobacco is a pathway to these.

Smoking is calming, encourages reflection, and, in a social context, has a physical grammar that contributes to the rhythm of conversation, inserting pauses within which reaction finds the time to mature into response. It can contribute to the economy of manners and is a generator of social capital.

It reminds us that the sensual is a good and that our obligations towards pleasure are duties of moderation, not prohibition.

Even the cost of smoking has its upside. The creative smoker should be a soldier in our collective battle against government and its unrelenting, tyrannical habit of taxing everything we do—an addiction more pronounced than that of any chain smoker.

I’d go further, as it happens, and call for a new golden age of smuggling, centered on tobacco, which would give home-grown innovators a chance to compete with the vape shop interlopers in the crowded space of the alternative economy.

These positives don’t register with the secular puritans, who talk endlessly about passive smoking and length of life, as if either should trouble us in the least. Regarding the first, there is nothing preventing people from smoking more aggressively; and as for the second, we can reply that a long life is not necessarily always a good one. There is plenty of longevity in the Old Testament, and often as not, those “blessed” with it wish they hadn’t been.

All this before we even get to the aesthetics of lighting up and its status in the wider cultural tradition. We know it’s only a matter of time before the gleeful censors excise from popular art all reference to this most dangerous of vices.

Remember that bit in The Godfather when Michael lights the guy’s cigarette and, in a moment of near-Sartrean existential revelation, notices the steadiness of his own hand?

Or the final scene reveal in The Usual Suspects?

If the health nomenklatura had their way, such high-art instantiations of cigarette chic would vanish faster than an unperson from the Soviet photographic record.

And I can’t even bring myself to think about the desecration these people would visit on this:

You can’t remove all iconography, motif, or literary reference from the cultural tapestry without unstitching the whole thing. Such is its relevance. The anti-smoking censors don’t get this because they fail to grasp that the butterfly effect exists also in art, where individual elements are connected in unexpected ways.

Which brings us to the best reason to start smoking again: charity, the most durable of the theological virtues.

There are many people—also God’s creatures—who live in a state of insatiable grievance, spending every day searching for the next thing to be offended by. It is simply kindness to give them what they need, as often and as fulsomely as time and resources allow.

I suspect that if smoking goes retro and becomes a thing again, it’ll really hack them off. What more motivation do you need?

Start lighting up—for their sake as much as ours.

Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has. Sean was recently appointed Associate Editor of this magazine – we are honoured to have a man of his talents onboard.