This page makes use of an innovation of mine called 'dual-purpose text.' Click anywhere in the text below (not in the white space around the text) to get to the top of the page very quickly and easily - there's no need to find a separate top button or to scroll. The page on Web design describe this innovation and others, including 'the rail,' which can also be used to reach top of page. The link below is shown as underlined but not in colour.

[Essential background information is the fact that I've never smoked - not even once. Nothing here is in conflict with the fact that smoking is a major cause of premature death and ill-health. Anyone who smokes would be well advised to give up as soon as possible, if at all possible. Anyone who doesn't smoke would be well advised never to start.]

Is smoking one of the most important things about a person, or one of the least important?

Surely, the answer has to be: one of the least important. A campaign in this country used the slogan, 'If you smoke, you stink,' but it's the advertizing campaign which stinks, not smokers, a campaign based on rubbishy values, on unexamined assumptions. If you disagree, try answering these questions. Some of them are based upon thought experiments, upon extreme situations - but these can reveal vividly the values of a person, the depth or superficiality of a person. So:

(1) If you have a son or daughter, a teenager, and you warn them about the dangers of smoking and the costs of smoking - but despite all that, they begin to smoke. Do you love them any the less? Do you value them any the less? Do they 'stink?'

(2) I have a book, one of the most important of all in what I call Humanitarian History, Martin Gilbert's 'The Righteous: the unsung heroes of the holocaust.' This isn't a book about grey areas. It depicts clearly, unforgettably, two different classes of people: those who saved Jews, or did everything they could to save Jews, taking huge risks, the risk of summary execution - for their families as well as themselves - or of being carted off to a concentration camp - and those who did the dirty work of informing the authorities, finding hidden Jews, executing them and executing the people who had risked their lives to hide them. The photographs in the book are matter of fact, but moving in the extreme. So, we have a photo of two Dutch farmers, Willem and Johannes Bogaar, 'with two of the Jewish children whom they hid on their farm.' Is it important to you that you should know whether these two farmers were smokers or non-smokers? I don't know the answer, but the answer, of course, is completely unimportant. In the case of one of the heroic people described in the book, the answer is known: Tadeusz Stepniewkski, a member of Zegota, the Polish Council for Assistance to the Jews, is actually smoking in the photograph! There was no country, of course, in which the penalties for helping Jews were more extreme than in Poland. Does Tadeusz Stepniewski seem diminished now that you know that he smoked? Did he 'stink?' Don't you think now, if you didn't think so before, that to use a word like 'stink' is disgusting?

And what of the Jews' persecutors? Would a member of the Einsatzgruppen - the groups who shot men, women and children - and babies - become less loathsome in your sight if you knew that he was a non-smoker rather than a smoker? Are you favourably disposed to him, because he 'didn't stink?' There's a world of supremely important values where smoking isn't of negligible importance but of no importance at all. Do you agree or disagree?

In other worlds, not the tragic world of mass murder but the worlds of intellectual and artistic achievement, for example, smoking is irrelevant. Do you, for instance, know or care which great physicists or chemists or biologists smoke or don't smoke? Which great poets or novelists?

(3) To feel superiority to someone is very easy. The issue of smoking is only one of the tactics by which people try to become dominant the easy way. A non-smoker who believes all the anti-smoking propaganda may be a moral coward, deficient in any number of ways, but feel superior to smokers. If so, self-examination is an urgent necessity. Again, do you agree or disagree?

The ban on smoking in public places in this country can be defended. I'd defend it. But nobody should have any condescending pity for the smokers huddled outside buildings. I attended a string quartet concert recently - Beethoven Quartet Opus 59 No. 2, Bartok's 4th Quartet and Haydn's Emperor Quartet, Opus 76 No. 3. And a short time later a recital given by the cellist of the same quartet and a pianist: Beethoven Cello Sonatas Opus 5 No. 1 and Opus 102 No. 2. The young cellist has a wonderfully accomplished technique, a very ardent yet mellow style of playing. After the second concert, as I left, here she was outside the building having a cigarette. She obviously had the will and the self-discipline to acquire the exacting technique of the cello, and I think that any anti-smoker who claims that she's nothing but a sad smoker has lost the right to be taken seriously.

By what right does a non-smoker feel superior to Joe Simpson, the author of 'Touching the Void?' In 1985, he and Simon Yates set out to climb the remote west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. It was 1985 and the men were young, fit, skilled climbers. The ascent was successful, after they had climbed for over three days. But then Simpson fell, and broke his leg badly. There was no hope of rescue for them. They had to descend without any help. Yates was lowering Simpson on the rope but lowered him into a hidden crevasse. He couldn't hold him and was forced to cut the rope. Simpson wasn't killed by the fall, He managed to drag himself out and drag himself down the mountain, dehydrated and injured, until, at last, he reached base camp.

From the same book, 'Heavy smoking had never affected my performance in the Alps, but I was forced to agree that it might be wise to stop during this expedition. The risks of high-altitude sickness and pulmonary oedemas, about which we had heard so much, were all that helped me through a few days craving tobacco.'

There are large numbers of outstanding smokers, and large numbers of mediocre, dull, dismal, cold, unimaginative retarded anti-smokers - as well as anti-smokers who are anything but. Here, I focus attention on just one outstanding smoker, George Orwell: uncompromising, honest, inquiring, morally courageous as well as physically courageous, and a writer of lucid prose which is sometimes searing, sometimes funny and very enjoyable, nearly always, despite its superficial 'plainness,' completely distinctive.

From a medical view of George Orwell written by George Ross:

'A heavy smoking habit probably also contributed to his gaunt appearance. Perhaps due to his childhood respiratory illnesses, Orwell developed bronchiectasis, a condition characterized by perpetually dilated bronchi and fits of coughing.

'In 1938, Orwell went to a sanatorium because he was coughing up blood, and was eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis. The peripatetic author could have been infected in his childhood in India, as a police officer in Burma, as a soldier in Spain, or "during years of tramping, poverty, and vagabondage" in France and England, according to author John Ross, MD, of Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston. His treatment consisted of simple bed rest and good nutrition--both of which improved his health enough for him to be discharged several months later.

'Eight years later, depressed by his wife's death, Orwell moved to a windy and damp Scottish island. His health worsened significantly just as he was working on the first draft of 1984. Fever, weight loss, and night sweats sent him to the hospital, where he underwent "collapse therapy," a treatment designed to close the dangerous cavities that form in the chests of tuberculosis patients. Orwell described his experience with collapse therapy in detail, and the treatment "may have influenced the depiction of the tortures of Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love" in 1984, according to Dr. Ross. "But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs, the curvature of the spine was astonishing," Orwell wrote, perhaps drawing on his firsthand knowledge of the wasting effects of tuberculosis.

'Orwell's poor health and apparent infertility (based on his own musings in his letters as well as the medical evidence linking some respiratory ailments to infertility) probably contributed to the despondency in his writing. "Orwell himself told his friends that 1984 would have been less gloomy had he not been so ill--it was a very dark, disturbing, and pessimistic work," Dr. Ross said. The author's severe illness "gave him a tremendous amount of focus," perhaps by making him aware of his own mortality.

'George Orwell died in 1950, ending a life plagued by sickness. That sickness, though, contends Dr. Ross, "made him a better and more empathetic writer, in that his sense of human suffering made his writing more universal."'

All this will be incomprehensible to many anti-smokers, those who find any artistic or spiritual benefits of suffering impossible to conceive. I maintain that language isn't complete and is far from perfect, so that it's often necessary to use a word where another word, a missing word or replacement word would be far better. For lack of a better word, I use the word 'spiritual,' even though I'm an atheist. The contrast between the spiritual benefits of suffering and the humanitarian urge to reduce suffering, the understandable instinct to avoid personal suffering, is stark, but necessary. (Another example of the spiritual linkage between suffering and artistic achievement - this at the highest level - comes from the late Beethoven, as in, for example, the slow movement of the Quartet Opus 132, titled, 'Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesen an die Gottheit, an der lydischen Tonart,' 'the thanksgiving of a convalescent.')

There are doctors, like Dr Ross, quoted above, who have deep insights, and doctors who are shallow. In general, the emphasis in medicine on good health rather than poor health is not just understandable but obviously necessary - but may be a source of bias and {distortion}. The phrase 'a healthy mind in a healthy body' is one of the most trite of all trite phrases. Very often, a choice has to be made. This is a consequence of {separation}. If you have to choose, do you approve more of the person in perfect, glowing health who is bland, humdrum, limited, very severely limited, or the person of depth and intense compassion whose body is wracked by coughs? (Perhaps the result of smoking)?

I imagine an anti-smoking campaigner of a limited sort who reads Orwell and misses the humour of 'Down and Out in Paris and London,' its unforgettable depiction of the abyss of poverty and only becomes interested - in a prim and censorious way - when he finds a comment such as 'Boris slept the night at the house of a cobbler, another Russian refugee...Meanwhile, I had eight francs left, and plenty of cigarettes...'

When George Orwell met Henry Miller before going to Spain to fight for the republic, Henry Miller was scornful of the idea of defending democracy. Alfred Perles gave George Orwell's reply, 'that...where the rights and very existence of a whole people are at stake, there could be no thought of avoiding self-sacrifice. He spake his convictions so earnestly and humbly that Miller desisted from further argument and promptly gave him his blessing.' (Quoted in Bernard Crick, ('George Orwell: a life.') But there are anti-smoking campaigners who wouldn't be impressed, oblivious to almost everything in 'Homage to Catalonia' except comments such as 'The shortage of tobacco was the worst of all. At the beginning we had been issued with a packet of cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes day, then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when there was no issue of tobacco at all.'

As long as people confine themselves to the modest aim of avoiding cigarette smoke, of guaranteeing their right not to be exposed to cigarette smoke in most circumstances, then I've no quarrel. It's understandable that people should not like the smell of cigarette smoke and want to avoid it.As long as the modest and restricted aim of avoiding cigarette smoke is free of moral overtones and moral disapproval, then well and good. But time after time, people don't do that. They indulge in {disproportion}, condemning and attacking smoking, making opposition to smokers a main aim of life, when responses of this degree are better reserved for far more serious matters.

I myself am not bothered by cigarette smoke, unless it's very dense. Given the choice between exposure to cigarette smoke and exposure to a mobile phone user's interminable, moronic conversation (only half a conversation, of course), I'd far rather be exposed to the cigarette smoke. I'd claim that some people - not all - who are very sensitive to cigarette smoke are making too much of it, and should be more robust.

In the terms I use in Linkage Theory, fanatical opposition to smoking is a typical product of the mechanical mind, based on false linkages, automatic responses, a completely inadequate survey and distorted weightings (all, in this case, concerned with the question 'what are the most important things about a person?')

For further information:

http://www.forestonline.org/

A Web site which campaigns for smokers. The extensive set of links it provides is very fair-minded. It includes anti-smoking sites and sites which help smokers to stop smoking as well as other pro-smoking sites.