The Dangers of Not Smoking
As with other strains of puritanism through the ages, the stop-smoking inquisition may well be connected to the crisis of our times
David Warren - July 30, 2007
Canadians are an obedient people. We like big government, we like to pay taxes. (We are among the few countries where a party trying to retain national office will use "they want to cut your taxes" as a scare tactic.) We often applaud ourselves for the patience with which we form queues. And we can't get enough detailed regulations.
Only one in five of us smoke. I am unable to determine from official statistics whether this is because half of the smokers have emigrated, or because millions agreed to butt out after spotting a no-smoking sign in a public place.
To be fair, this was the continent of Prohibition, and it could be said that Canada merely represents to an improbable extreme a strain of puritanism that is also detectable in the United States. Their Democrat party often proposes watered-down Canadianism for public policy. The impulse to self-flagellation is at its most poignant when they uphold, for instance, the socialist Canadian medical system as a solution to America's hospital woes: waiting lists not long enough, service too quick in emergency wards, the oversupply of advanced diagnostic technology, et cetera. And to be fair, the anti-smoking crusade has contributed mightily to the creation of a Toronto-like ambiance in Los Angeles and New York.
I wrote "Prohibition," and "puritanism," still emotive terms, and it is necessary to add that North Americans have never had a corner on whited sepulchralism. The Islamic world long anticipated the Calvinist propensity to "tee-totalitarianism." Verily, while I have never found a historian who has run with it, I have noticed that every major reform of the Protestant Reformation moved Christianity in the direction of Islam, including scriptural literalism, legalism and the deconsecration of clergy.
Similarly, divisions that once rent the orthodox world were between iconodules and iconoclasts (respectively, the friends and enemies of imagery and art), and were directly inspired by the military successes of Islamic forces at Byzantium's gates.
Puritanical impulses have likewise surfaced in cultures removed from the old monotheist centres, and the ancient Buddhist revolution in India could be seen as a puritanical reaction to the background resplendency. The edicts of Indian Emperor Ashoka (3rd century BC) give the flavour of a kind of Protestant Reformation within Hinduism. And in another millennium entirely, Maoist communism exposed and exploited puritanical impulses, even in China. We are thus dealing with a universal human frailty.
It follows that anti-smoking regulations can travel, and they have, far beyond the reach that was achieved by our anti-drinking crusade after the Great War. I am, for instance, reliably informed that the formerly hermit Kingdom of Bhutan has recently introduced a ban on the sale of smoking tobacco as part of a national purification drive. This was fairly easy to enforce, since most Bhutanese prefer to chew tobacco. Neighbouring and more populous India has also introduced regulations to match those of Canada and the West. But there people actually smoke, and India is still blessedly India; everyone ignores the regulations.
Formerly Protestant Europe has bought into anti-smoking with enthusiasm; formerly Catholic Europe (and Latin America) with some reserve.
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