Tobacco Smoking and the Breakdown of Libertarianism

 

There is an obnoxious pro smoking stance among conservatives and libertarians. It is a perfect illustration of the fatal flaws of libertarianism. Pro smoking positions, and libertarianism broadly, miss two truths that are obvious if one can take off the ideological blinders. 

1: Free consent isn’t always present when you think it is, and it’s often impossible to verify

2: There is no such thing as a choice that affects just one individual

At the age of three, I all but watched my grandmother, with whom I lived, die of strangulation by a lung cancer tumor. She was 53 and had been a compulsive smoker since her teenage years. 

My mother tells stories about how her mother could not even reduce her cigarette smoking to one per hour during pregnancy but would cut each cigarette into four pieces and smoke one every 15 minutes. That does not sound like the freely consenting decision of a responsible adult.

What almost certainly killed her was her foolish decision to invite other smokers to smoke in her office when her office building went smoke free in the late 80s, and her inhalation of the concentrated second hand smoke. Again, it is not the smoker’s habit per se but the smoke that gets breathed in by others near the smoker that causes the real problems. 

This matches the diagnosis given to my father-in-law. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when my wife was a senior in High School. He was 60. The doctors told him it wasn’t the smoke from his own cigarettes but the unfiltered second hand smoke inhaled when smoking indoors (especially with others) that led to the cancer. 

While my high school graduation was marked by an empowering sense of freedom and a round of parties, my wife’s was marked by fear, guilt over her father postponing his tumor operation until after her graduation, the sight of her father in a wheelchair for months, and the horror of a follow-on stroke that left his right arm paralyzed for the rest of his life. 

He died at age 71 of pneumonia, almost certainly made fatal because part of a lung was removed in the cancer surgery 11 years before. His death was the day before my fifth wedding anniversary. My wife was 29. Our eldest child was 4, our second child was 2. 

While statism and fascism create tyrants from the top down, libertarianism creates tyrants from the ground up. A cynical mind such as my own concludes that my grandmother and father-in-law demanded that their families march to the beat of their smoking habit for decades, tolerating no dissent when innocent children dared to push back. This included the waste of money, personal health hazards to the rest of the family of breathing the second hand smoke, the unpleasant smell that lingered on children in school and spouses in offices, and of course the horror of losing a parent in one’s 20s and having to provide intense medical care (to say nothing of the expense) that was all avoidable.

Even if one is a staunch libertarian, smoking cannot be a right because no one has a right to impose those things on others who do not consent to them. But even if my relatives were hermetically sealed and the physical inhalation of the smoke affected only themselves, the libertarian argument still fails. Their deaths alone harmed dozens of lives for decades. 

Moreover, how do we know the behavior was consensual? Smoking is addictive by design, and many who wish to quit struggle to do so for years. It is impossible to declare smoking acceptable on the basis that it’s a consenting decision by an adult, because often it’s not. 

So what to do? Naturally, a blanket ban on tobacco smoking would not work. Nevertheless, communities (to wit: families, churches, neighborhoods) should apply creative social pressure to adults with an addictive tobacco habit, particularly those with a family. And yes, there is a role for government in preventing the sale and manufacture of knowingly addictive, fatal products whether through banning certain ingredients or holding those who sell them personally liable for their costs to society. 

This is true, not just of smoking, but of all human activity. 

Consent is often hard to assess, whether one is talking about sexual activity or even economic activity. Did you really make a freely consenting decision to take on that 22% interest credit card debt, considering your recent job loss, family of upbringing, the psychological hacks vendors used to get you to spend money, and the surrounding peer pressure of consumerism? 

Even if you did, consent doesn’t morph a usurious contract from bad to good. 

And so it goes for the unbounded consequences of economic acts. Buying something is not just a transaction between two private individuals. It sends a market signal and supports production of a certain type of product, reinforces a certain type of business model, provides funding to a certain type of company with certain values. It also takes family resources that could have gone elsewhere. That doesn’t mean it is automatically subject to centralized regulation by a remote bureaucrat. But it does mean that it can’t automatically be judged as good. 

Sin is not a right or the private affair of an individual but an addiction to be cured through the sacraments, prayer, and acts of mortification. All of those cures have a social element as well as a personal element because people exist in real communities and are not isolated entities wandering about in space. 

If we’re going to make genuine progress as a society, conservatives need to stop turning their brains off when it comes to outwardly consensual actions and start actively assessing the quality of those actions and how organic communities can push their people to improve them over time. 

To which end, I suggest a quick read of Elizabeth Anscombe’s brilliant Modern Moral Philosophy. 

Socialism is Petty

 

On my last work trip, in San Diego a month before the Great Shutdown, I asked a coworker from the UK if she’d bring her daughter on any of her trips. She responded that she couldn’t bring her anywhere except during the summer. She explained that in the UK, parents are fined 60 pounds if they take their child out of school for a single day. She told a story of how, for her father’s funeral, she requested to take her daughter out of school. The request was granted, but she was warned that if her daughter were taken out of school again, the fines would start. 

A friend is on a work rotation to Montreal. His wife is unable to check books out of the library because they homeschool and are barred access to check out books because the children are not enrolled in school. My friend is paying Canadian taxes his entire rotation. He and his wife also need to fill out onerous reports for the government about the children’s schooling, despite not being citizens and only being there for four months. 

Another friend’s father is from Spain, and most of his four siblings have lived in Spain for multiple years. They have all moved to the US because the economy in Spain makes it difficult to find and keep a stable job and because the covid restrictions were so harsh that one sibling with anxiety couldn’t stand the isolation. 

Austrian YouTuber Bernhard Kast lamented on his Military History Visualized channel that Vienna needs to roll back the regulations if they expect more dynamic startup companies in the country.                                                                                                                                                                                                             

As soon as the harshest travel restrictions in Canada ended in 2021, multiple rich Canadian relatives of mine beelined it for the Caribbean. I find it hard to imagine vaccine penetration was high in any of those countries. Yet that was ok, meanwhile the same Canadian government was harassing truck drivers, is still harassing my friend over proof of vaccination for his children, and is making it difficult for an unvaccinated Canadian acquaintance to reenter the country. 

Despite all the bluster about how socialist countries treat the poor better, I encountered more desperate homeless people in downtown Toronto than I saw in some poorer American urban neighborhoods. 

The Canadian prime minister is a pretty face and the son of a former Prime Minister. Germany has barely been able to put together a working government the last two major elections. They are also having to rethink their postwar identity as they realize they’re defenseless in the face of Russian aggression and dependent on Russian energy. The UK Prime Minister was ousted for engaging in raucous parties while forcing the rest of the country to abide by harsh lockdowns. France’s prime minister is the first in 34 years to be denied a parliamentary majority. 

At work, I took on a project to research environmental, social, and governance (ESG) regulations for real estate in Europe. Despite touting their environmental leadership, no European countries except Denmark have met their carbon emission reduction targets. And the ESG regulations are a joke. Every building is required to get a certificate, and most real estate professionals know the certificates are useless. They don’t actually measure the real energy performance of a building, and they’re not comparable between countries. The other regulations require a ton of bureaucratic calculations and reporting, and even still, investment analyst Morningstar says that 25% of investment funds are mislabeled as sustainable despite wasting all of this time and money on data analysis and reporting. A global customer of ours related that no one really knows how to comply with these regulations, so they just ask their attorney, who gets information on “what everyone else is doing” and they just assume that will get past the regulator. 

These are mostly personal, isolated examples. But they are real examples. And they add up to a world of harsh restrictions and mountains of difficult rules that waste peoples’ lives. Far from solving real problems, they often hamstring the economy, ruining economic opportunities, especially for young people. No wonder most socialist countries have such low birth rates. 

I wonder how long this false utopia of low birth rates, high debt-to-gdp ratios, and making the US do all their military spending can last. I get the sense that the postwar order is not long for this world, and maybe that’s a good thing. The postwar era may have given many of us freedom from war and a deluge of material wealth, but in many ways it seems like a false peace. 

Review: Mass of Ages Part II

 

After months of hearing about it from others, I finally got around to watching Mass of Ages Part II with my wife. 

Overall, it was a well done introduction to the changes that led to the new Mass, after Vatican II. The film did a good job of interspersing facts, humor, personal stories, average folks, and professionals. The scenery was great, and the juxtaposition of the new and old Masses (and Council documents) in both video and written form was a masterstroke. 

The Good

It is important for us traditionalists to remember that liturgy and history are boring to most people. The film did a great job of making the facts come to life. I’m willing to accept the cartoonish antics at the beginning (though the Titanic reference was overdone) because they at least made a dry, polarizing topic engaging. I will forever refer to the Gloria my former parish sings every Sunday as the My Little Pony Gloria. The animation of the edits to the Missal was brilliant. 

The overall angle of severing the New Mass from Vatican II was a great choice. “But Vatican II changed the Mass” is the most common argument made against the traditional Mass (old Mass), and the doc patiently, throughly defenestrates that argument. 

The inclusion of feedback from the bishops (Council fathers) during the 1967 “test drive” of the new Mass, particularly Cardinal Heenan of England, was eye opening. The doc had a nice, light approach of quoting Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC: Vatican II’s document on the liturgy) vs what actually happened to the liturgy. Video comparisons of the beginning of Mass and consecration in the old and new were fair and well done. 

The film did a balanced job of highlighting the abuses of Bugnini in pushing his agenda while gently reminding the audience that ultimate responsibility remained with Pope Paul VI. Using and citing Yves Chiron’s biography of Bugnini was wise.

I appreciated the blend of bishops, priests, and credentialed liturgical experts like Dr. Kwasniewski alongside ordinary, non-credentialed people. I especially appreciated the balanced, non polemical perspective of Dom Alcuin Reid. 

While his inclusion was an interesting choice, I thought Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire had one of the most salient points. The new Mass, by lowering the reverence given to the Blessed Sacrament, creates cognitive dissonance. The same goes for severing the altar and the tabernacle. It is difficult to believe in Christ’s true presence in the Eucharist when troops of pantsuited extraordinary ministers hand it out like a free sample at the grocery store. And so many respond by discarding their belief in the True Presence.

This is not an exaggeration. During a high school trip to Annapolis, we somehow attended a Mass at the naval chapel during which bewildered non-Catholics joined the Communion line, took a host from the minister, and said “Thank you.” It is hard to imagine this happening at an old Mass. 

The film also did well to legitimize itself by including three bishops, a monsignor, a former curial secretary, and experts on liturgy and music. Though it would’ve been nice to hear from a nun. 

Missed Opportunities

The doc’s biggest missed opportunity is a lack of clarity around its audience. Is the audience the average old Mass attendee or someone with no exposure to the old Mass? Because if the latter, then I can think of a few ways the film could’ve handled the material differently. 

The film devoted much energy to breaking the equivalence between Vatican II and the new Mass. But a massive missed opportunity was breaking the link between the Pope who called Vatican II and the new Mass. Pope John XXIII fired Bugnini and published Veterum Sapientia, an apostolic constitution demanding the priests be trained in Latin and that Latin remain the language of the liturgy. Highlighting this would’ve made very clear that the Pope who called the Council did not want, still less demand, the new Mass. Coupled with the quotes from SC and the Council fathers, this may be a tight enough case to really move people. It moved me. 

It is tough to blame the film for this, but it does not dare to broach the meddling with the liturgy before the Council. Dr. Kwasniewski explains that Bugnini’s first major position was leading the drafting of SC. The good doctor must be heavily filtering himself here because he knows better than almost anyone that Bugnini was also a member (though not a leader) of the liturgical commissions in the 50s that threw out traditional Holy Week, reduced commemorations of the saints on Sundays, removed the confiteor before Communion, and threw out most Octaves (Corpus Christi, Assumption, Sacred Heart, Apostles). 

Also unmentioned is the fact that Paul VI worked closely with Pius XII daily for 20 years and saw himself as fulfilling the liturgical reforms begun by Pius XII. I give them a pass on this one: it is hard enough being a trad, it is almost unthinkable to criticize Pius XII. Yet the film undermines this restraint when Joseph Shaw says that the reverent atmosphere of the old Mass cannot be recreated in the new Mass because the new Mass is a product of a man-centered view of the liturgy. This is true, but it’s too much for someone attending the new Mass who you’re trying to convince to give the old Mass a try. 

I get that the film is called “Mass of Ages” but it is weird that it doesn’t even mention how the reforms also changed the calendar (removed Septuagesima, the Octave of Pentecost, rejiggered most saints’ feast days) and the Divine Office. This is all the more strange given that Dr. Kwasniewski, a participant in the film, authored an article quoting Louis Bouyer, also mentioned in the film, saying how awful the reform of the calendar was. Why not fully expose how recklessly everything was changed all at once? 

Unforced errors

Traditional Catholics must repress the urge to mention freemasonry in front of normal people. Regardless of how reasonable the case is, it’s an automatic turnoff for many. The few minutes covering Bugnini’s alleged masonry and related investigations in the Vatican add little to the story but tinge the creators with enough conspiracy theory juju that it undermines the reliability of their other, legitimate claims. If this couldn’t be avoided, make the freemasonry discussion a separate supplemental video. At least this part was short.

Related, if this audience is on-the-fence-about-tradition faithful Catholics, it’s best to avoid featuring controversial personalities. First, avoid quoting Archbishop Lefebvre during the vignette on the bishops’ feedback on the reforms in 1967. Why raise the specter of the SSPX and excommunicated traditionalists when you don’t have to? And I don’t really know why, but Taylor Marshall is another controversial figure and his remarks didn’t add enough to the film to offset the adverse reflex some faithful Catholics have toward him. 

I understand asking for donations at the beginning. But again, if the audience is faithful catholics with no experience of the old Mass, this is a distraction that gives the tentative viewer, who is only watching because a friend sent it to them, a good 90 seconds to stop watching. 

It is very, very difficult to cover the liturgical reforms of the 60s without turning Bugnini into a bogeyman. On the whole, I think the film does a balanced job, focusing on real quotes from relevant documents and legitimate witnesses to the events. Still, it was not necessary to create dark, cartoon Bugnini. There are enough pictures of him that they could’ve just overlayed his quotes over actual photos of him. 

Again, almost impossible to blame the creators here, but Sacrosanctum Concilium is redacted to fit a traditional agenda. Reading the whole document, while it’s mostly restrained around the Mass, it’s a wrecking ball in many ways. It called for a reform of the liturgical books as soon as possible, emphasized full and active participation “above all else”, talked of removing useless repetitions, demanded a new cycle of Mass readings, abolished the hour of Prime in the Divine Office, called for a reform of the rites of all seven sacraments, and even talked about fixing a calendar date for Easter (!). 

Saint Thomas Aquinas sets the standard by beginning his articles with the strongest arguments against his positions. Admitting the passages in the document that directly call for reforming the traditional liturgy, and gently showing how not every pastoral recommendation by a Council needs to be implemented under penalty of Hell, would strengthen the audience’s trust in the other claims made by the film. 

My professional experience has taught me that there are always some nerds, and naysayers, who do the research and will loudly call you out if you window dress or stretch the truth. I’m afraid the film left itself open to legitimate criticism here. 

Closing

Mass of Ages Part II is well produced, well researched, and very accessible. Recommended watching (and distributing) for those who want a way to explain their love of the old Mass, and the problems of the new Mass, to their friends and family.