Nathan Devers is a normalien, associate of philosophy, author of
Space smoking
(Grasset, 2021).
At first glance, a quasi news item. An insignificant, almost sympathetic, at the very least benign dispatch: in recent times, several French cities have decided to ban smoking outdoors. From Thionville to Grau-du-Roy via Pessac and Carrières-sous-Poissy, cigarettes disappear at their own pace from the common areas. Free zones have been established. Citizens will be able to walk there in peace, without being inconvenienced, without being intoxicated, without being murdered by smokers and their bad example. Around them, no more stinky smells, no more gray curls, no more harmful attitudes. We will finally have cleaned the streets of these semi-drug addicts, of all these unconscious people who take pleasure in putting themselves in danger.
Certainly, smokers will growl.
Like bad students deprived of dessert, they will whine a little.
But, in the end, they will eventually fall into line.
Ultimately, this educational constraint will allow them to get better.
No doubt, in a year or two, they will thank us for healing them.
Two or three months after the imposition of the health pass, here is a new symptom of the liberticidal drive.
Nathan Devers
What if it was the other way around?
What if this urge to heal everything made us all sick?
What if this infantilization transformed us into eternal children?
What if this obsession with cleaning up cities dehumanized them?
What if this policy of good leads to a world of worse?
It should be noted first of all that, contrary to what certain specialists repeat from evening to morning, not all smokers are fooled by their condition. I know that we would like to pass them off as beings without will, manipulated by the tobacco industry, influenced by the films of the 1960s, alienated from nicotine and dreaming of withdrawal. But such an idea is part of another propaganda: that of hygiene. I know, we all know people who knowingly smoke. Either they suffocate under an insurmountable daily life from which they escape for a cigarette break. Either they prefer to live shorter but more intensely. Either they need to smoke to live in society. Or, quite simply, they take pleasure in breathing fire.As staggering as it sounds, sometimes there are good reasons to hurt yourself.
To read also "I wanted to restore the swan song of the cigarette and the model of society that it conveys"
We will then be surprised at this calendar. Two or three months after the imposition of the health pass, here is a new symptom of the liberticidal drive. As if it were, according to Clausewitz's formula, a continuation of the medical order by all means. As if it was up to the state, not only to prevent citizens from harming others, but from harming themselves. As if we were entering what Ruwen Ogien called the field of "positive freedom", that is to say in a society where freedom is constantly conditioned by injunctions, not only legal, but also moral. As if we were sinking even further into the abyss of health psychosis. All this in the name of an absurd syllogism: "Smokers put themselves in danger,therefore they are dangerous ”. Have we thought for a single moment about the consequences of such reasoning? Will we soon go so far as to imitate certain Chinese companies, by prohibiting the French from committing suicide?
It is the story of benevolent contempt, of irrational science, of sick medicine, of intolerance disguised as progress, of a vitalism which hates life.
Nathan Devers
Finally, we will recall where this passion for tobacco-free cities comes from. Some will invoke the American model: the United States is indeed of all the avant-garde. In the 1950s, they spread the cultivation of tobacco; nowadays, they are reuniting with their old demons of prohibition. Other minds, less forgetful than the others, will push genealogy to the point of failing on a Godwin point. Because the inventor of non-smoking areas in public places is none other than a man called… Adolf Hitler. Before the Third Reich, it happened that certain institutions, especially religious ones, dissuaded smoking, and even that certain states, often theocratic, prohibited tobacco. It was, however, Nazism that rationalized and modernized anti-smoking policy. Each has its own references, of course. Corn,unlike cigarettes, history cannot be consumed.
Finally, we will wonder what French cities will look like in the next twenty or thirty years. People masked every time a disease spreads, that is to say (almost) every day? Streets that look like hospital corridors? Fanatics of hydro-alcoholic gel and hand washing? Sectaries of social distancing? Tyrannical hypochondriacs, demanding that the entire universe adapt to their fears? Look-alikes of Nietzsche's "last man", obsessed with their desire to die as late as possible? The living dead scuttling their existence by pretending to love it? The natural threads of Tartuffe and Argan.
It is the story of benevolent contempt, of irrational science, of sick medicine, of intolerance disguised as progress, of a vitalism which hates life.
It's an old story, which Molière didn't care about.
This ancient story, however, is still at the point of its beginning.