In his book-length essay, “Man’s Unconquerable Mind,” (1954) Gilbert Highet writes about – well – he writes about all of history really. At the beginning, he brilliantly sketches the rise of humanity right up to the flowering of classical Greece where he pauses for a moment, and then goes on to detail the rise and fall of Rome, the dark middle ages, and the long struggle up to “modern” times which, in 1954, included the end of WWII and what was then being called “the atomic age.”

I was just struck by a paragraph that appears at the end of the third chapter of his book:

“In fact, the history of much of the twentieth century, with its struggles against communism and fascism and national socialism and so on, will be best written as the record of a war for the command of men’s minds. Communism and fascism and national socialism and other forms of state-worship are attractive ideologies, attractive to simple minds. They are collections of ideas partly true and partly false, but imposing in their boldness and clarity, and claiming to give a complete intellectual explanation of the problems of human life. Much of the future of mankind will depend on the skill with which these ideas are taught and rebutted, manipulated to fit different societies and intransigent facts, exploded by penetrating criticisms, or superseded by truer and more effective explanations of the essential problems of existence.”

As I read this paragraph published in 1954, I thought “How prescient! How clearly Highet has just warned us to be alert, to keep on learning, to use our minds and our language in the pursuit and preservation of truth.”

Every day brings news of this and that new regulation, standard, rule, or law that will apply, must apply, will be adopted throughout the new European Union. What a disaster that is going to be before it’s all done. It looks to me as if Hitler, Marx, and the others will end up having won after all. And here in the U.S., the do-gooders with their snouts in the taxpayers’ trough are heading us in the same direction. What’s being laid on smokers, tobacco farmers, and the tobacco industry as well as on business owners who deal with the public is nothing less than “ideologies attractive to simple minds. . . imposing in their boldness . . .claiming to give a [solution to] the problems of human life.” It is up to us to rebut the manipulation of the intransigent “facts” that anti-smokers peddle, that the anti-sugar, anti-fast food, anti-everything lawyers and their lapdog bureaucrats and followers are trying to enforce on our culture and society.

Incidentally, in his brief sketch of the initial rise of civilization Highet mentions tobacco unselfconsciously. He has used the word “invention” to name the process by which humans tamed animals like wolves to become dogs, cattle to become plow-pullers, horses to become transport.

Then he moves on to plants: “Equally wonderful, perhaps more wonderful, was the invention of plants. Almost everything we consume, except animal food, is part of a plant, carefully bred from selected stock: our wheat and sugar, our fruit and roots, the tobacco we smoke, the hemp and cotton we weave—all these and many more were once wild plants growing in the jungle. Some intelligent man or woman found each one of them, tasted or tested it, by patient experiment discovered how to rear it, improved it, fertilized and crossbred it, and thus invented it as surely as Diesel invented his air-fuel-compression-ignition engine.”

In 1954, a brilliant professor of the classics at Columbia University could write such a sentence. Today, the positive reference to tobacco would in all likelihood be editorially stricken from the text.

I enjoyed reading this, Dennis.

Junk Science today links with a Number Watch piece entitled "Threshold of Insanity" which fits well with the ideas expressed in what you quote above. The writer points out that all the exact thresholds determined by bureaucrats, junk scientists and legislators are essentially absurd and entirely arbitrary because no such thresholds exist, and that the thresholds are used primarily to oppress the people. This brief piece also explicitly points out the fallacious use of threshold in the tobacco and obesity wars. See the Number Watch piece here

[This message was edited by Wanda Hamilton on Wed August 13 2003 at 02:23 PM.]

Thank you, Dennis. That was outstanding.

Compare what Dennis was reading to what the typical anti read today:

Secondhand smoke causes 53,000 deaths each year.

Smoking makes your teeth and fingers yellow.

You have the right to breathe clean smoke-free air.

Notice how one is quite a bit deeper than the other. LOL