Smoking Sin
by Mike D'Virgilio
Issue 131 - May 5, 2009

In the good old days when people were more concerned with their souls than their bodies, smoking was just another pleasure people might indulge in. Now with the demise of the soul as a topic of popular concern the body is all we’ve got.

I was reminded how this new morality can be every bit and I would argue more obnoxious than the old by an article in The Chicago Tribune. The books editor is writing about a new book about cigarettes and here are a few of her assessments of smoking:

[A] commodity that was nasty, dirty, disgusting, expensive, obnoxious and deadly could add one more adjective to the list: irresistible.

Or

The great mystery of cigarettes is why anybody ever smoked, and why anybody still does. Even before the dire health risks were fully documented, smoking roughed up the throat and befouled the air and left messy piles of ashes.

Or

Everybody knows cigarettes are a health nightmare.

Or

To turn a pathetic addiction into a jaunty symbol of rugged individualism was the greatest triumph in the history of advertising.

Or

The tobacco companies made a silk purse—a purse bursting with profits—from the sow's ear of a deadly habit.

I wonder how she really feels. I hate to break to all the anti-smoking Nazis out there, but smoking is not a premature death sentence. Certainly there is risk, but not nearly to the degree we’ve been led to believe. The Hartland Institute gives us a bit more balanced look at the habit so many love to hate.

We need to be reminded that 40,000 people every year see it as an acceptable risk to get in a motor vehicle and don’t make it to their next birthday. That is about 10 times the casualties in the entire six plus years of the Iraq war! Where is the outrage about the carnage caused by motor vehicles every year? There is none, because as a society we see it as an acceptable risk, one we are willing to take for the perceived benefits. Smokers are no different, and the vast majority live typical lifespans.

I decided to write about this because I’m sick of America’s obsessive religion of health (“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the creator . . .” Rom. 1:25), and to publicize a wonderful quote I came across on this subject:

There is a streak of Fundamentalism here. The Lord did not give man lungs in order that he should pollute them. If the body is a temple, then one ought to treat it with reverence; and if one does not, let him be damned. But that line isn’t popular anymore. In fact, sin is not popular. It’s damnably hard to find a good sin in a time when such formerly sure-fire items as abortion, homosexuality, and adultery are celebrated as expressions of liberation. Enlightenment has struck—but morality does not love a vacuum.

The idea of sin is powerful, both in attraction and repulsion. To point at a wrongdoer and lament that he is an unfortunate product of an inequitable society, or that he has had the misfortune to have been born with his genes askew, is milk and water stuff compared to the satisfaction of pointing at him and announcing, there, by God, goes a sinner! At a time when sin is in such short supply and the pure-in-lung are jogging four miles a morning, flossing, avoiding eggs, and drinking Perrier with lime, the sinner is he who refuses to abide by the commandments of the health-obsessed. A large number of saints, notoriously careless of their bodies, would today be hellbound. So the need for sinners is being satisfied at the expense of smokers—and not just cigarette smokers who are courting catastrophe, but pipe smokers who are known for their erudition and cigar smokers who are known for their good humor and longevity.

Walter Goodman
“In Defense of Smoking” (1979)
In The American Spectator

Michael D’Virgilio heads the Culture Project, where this first appeared.