Was Smoking Just a Moment?
A question I find myself asking ever more frequently is whether or not smoking still makes sense.
In the history of tobacco, its use was not considered taboo or objectionable on such a wide scale until relatively recently — considering its use for medicinal and ritual purposes by Native Americans predates written records, some estimates pointing to the beginning of the Common Era. Through global trade and the commercialization of tobacco, smoking and other tobacco use came to represent various things at different times in history — which is a testament to the fallibility and unreliability of the laws and public attitudes that govern its use. In nineteenth-century Europe and North America, when cigarettes were not yet mass-produced, smoking cigarettes had become a status symbol among the bourgeois. Later on, during the 1920s, smoking collided with the first wave of feminism (as well as the brilliant marketing campaigns by the likes of Edward Bernays), and women began smoking as a means of liberation by taking up a male-dominated activity. By the 1950s and 1960s — the heyday of Big Tobacco — it had become fashionable for all urban people, no matter their socioeconomic status, to smoke, which was helped largely by the distribution of cigarettes during World War II and by movie stars smoking on the big screens. There actually was some opposition on moral grounds in the early days of tobacco in Europe in the form of royal decrees by King James I, Papal Bulls from Popes Innocent and Urban, and even different warnings from Christian associations. However, these did not do very much to curb the popularity of tobacco in the long-term, and it was only to become more ubiquitous in the wake of industrialization.
As health professionals and others became more aware of the harmful side-effects of smoking, a more persistent effort was mounted during the 1960s by many governments and public health officials in the West to discourage smoking as much as possible. It began with interest groups such as the various health associations (Consumer’s Union, the US Surgeon General, the American Cancer Society etc) putting out advertisements and public reports warning of the harmful effects of smoking until it had caught the attention of lawmakers. The reactions to the new information and campaigning resulted in continuous efforts to discourage smoking. What the tobacco companies could say in advertisements was now substantially restricted; the legal age to purchase cigarettes was increased; smoking indoors was then prohibited; the cigarette manufacturers were obligated to paste those gory pictures onto cigarette packs (“this is what will happen if you continue to smoke”); finally banning smoking outdoors in many places, as well as in public areas and patios. It’s safe to say that the smoker has been reduced to somewhat of a pariah in this day and age. But despite the successes of these efforts in curbing the smoking rate and discouraging later generations from taking up smoking as a habit — it may have all been in vain. It seems that all those do-gooders working for public health departments and anti-smoking associations may have simply fallen victim to the action bias. In other words, they may not have needed to go through all that effort to stop people from smoking.
Aside from the active measures decided, and put in place, by Western governments to discourage smoking, we must consider the larger historical and material forces at play that have done more than any of these anti-smoking campaigns to make smoking irrelevant — things that, on the surface, seem to have nothing to do with smoking or the tobacco industry. With each passing day, as a result of the incredible progress made in research in the natural sciences and the consequent advancements in technology, we see our surrounding urban environments changing drastically. We can think of these advancements in the last twenty years as the transition from the Mechanical Age to the Electronic Age, where the tools and technologies available to the masses are now controlled almost entirely by computers and electronic systems (just think of the difference between 1964 Ford Mustang and a 2020 Tesla Model S). This is also sometimes referred to as the conflict between analog and digital. In the West, there are few domains that have not been affected by this transition (aside from the remaining artisanal craftworkers), and little remains in the way of technology that requires much manual or physical exertion from a human.
Obviously, this transition and these tools are not limited only to cars. Most of you reading this are likely already aware of this, but I will elaborate for the sake of illustrating a more vivid picture. Electronics, digitization, automated labor, and other advanced technology has infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives today and quite literally shapes our physical environment now. It is now on the digital screens of laptops and smartphones, rather than newspapers, that information is produced and shared across the globe in seconds. We now rely on GPS in our phones and cars to guide us, where just twenty years ago we were still reading paper maps. Entertainment is now delivered by Smart TVs, which connect the viewer to any streaming platform they wish, where before there was only regular cable or antenna. Smart Homes allow us to now remotely control the appliances, temperature and security of our homes from our phones. More and more people are now living in sixty-story condominiums, marvels of modern engineering, where before the tallest residential structures were at most five stories. The first trains powered by steam engines reached average speeds of 40 km/h, and today bullet trains in Japan can travel at speeds of up to 400 km/h using magnetic repulsion systems. Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly determining and facilitating what we buy and how we buy it — from our food to our furniture. With the advances in bio-mechanical engineering we see the appearance of such technologies as the brain-machine interface, Neuralink, as well as and prosthetic limb replacements that can move like real limbs. CRISPR is allowing us to edit the genes of future generations of humans and other life on Earth. One of the most incredible new innovations that could soon be changing our physical environments are Smart roads (from companies like Solar Roadways and SolaRoad), roads which include a top layer of tempered glass or strong plastic integrated with solar panels, and whose markings appear as a digital display and can be controlled from a central station, instead of having to be repainted.
Paintings can often reveal to us the fashions, customs, professions, and technologies belonging to the period they were painted in (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic etc). Take, for example, a painting such as Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) depicting those bourgeois citizens in top hats and overcoats, carrying their mass-produced umbrellas riding modern carriages, with the gaslights in the background (all consistent with the industrialization of the time). The painting gives a feel for what late nineteenth-century Paris was like, with the dress, as well as the physical features of the city all belonging to that era. Now take another painting such as Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocents (1567), and imagine that one of the figures depicted, one of the townspeople let’s say, were to be transplanted from this painting to Caillebotte’s Paris scene (keeping in mind that this second painting depicts a small Dutch town in the sixteenth-century under siege by Spanish soldiers). How strange would it look to see an average person from the sixteenth-century Netherlands dressed in his cloth tunic in the middle of a rainy Paris Street at the heights of the industrial revolution? The same way that average person from sixteenth-century Netherlands dressed in his cloth tunic would seem out of place in nineteenth-century Paris, smoking no longer aesthetically fits the rest of the modern painting, so to speak. We must ask ourselves how strange it must look, in modern times, to pull out some dried plant leaves rolled in paper from a carton box, set the tip on fire and inhale the smoke that comes from it — for little more than fleeting psychological comfort. How strange that must look against a backdrop of sixty-story skyscrapers in a modern metropolis, touchscreens of various sizes everywhere from your living room to the airport, everyone scrolling through their various social media accounts on their smartphones, eating food that that was ordered from a robot, delivered by electric cars that will be soon be driving themselves.
I will end on the note that to stop smoking due to health reasons would be a terrible cliché. That’s not to deny the harmful effects of smoking, but considering the thousands of other dangers to our health we are faced with in the modern era (air pollution, lack of readily available healthy food options, biological warfare, generally elevated stress levels), it suddenly seems like much less of a pressing threat. Stopping smoking for aesthetic reasons makes much more sense. After all, status symbols and vice will always be around, but the ways in which they manifest themselves will differ depending on the time period.
