| | Joe Maurone quotes Ron Merrill as writing in *The Ideas of Ayn Rand* that:
"The smokers I knew within the movement would certainly have been surprised and pleased if they'd only known that 'smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation'; they were used to being criticized by the rest of us for irrational and self-destructive behavior."
Again, one needs to keep straight what time period one is speaking of -- additionally, in this case, which group of Objectivists. I think a lot of confusion on the smoking issue arises because of people's not keeping in mind the chronological (and local group) context . I'm not sure where Ron Merrill was located. I don't remember meeting him myself. But I can report that as the '70s progressed there was a change of attitude amongst the groups I was familiar with. I first started to meet Objectivists (in any significant number; I'd met a few before then), in New York City and environs, after Thanksgiving of 1968. At that time, for the most part, the O'ists I met didn't raise flak over smoking. A few were already convinced it was a health hazard, but even those few generally weren't critical of people who smoked (though the statement Merrill quotes, that 'smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation,' is a silly exaggeration, I think picked up from Jeff Walker's book).
The first time I took Allan Blumenthal's general-audience psychology course was from spring '70 to spring or a bit later '71. Overlapping, Allan started a course in late '70 for persons with professional interest in psychology (not all of them psychology students or therapists; a couple were M.D.s but not psychiatrists). The professional course continued till late '71, with a long summer break. In both of those courses, ashtrays were on the tables and a fair percentage (maybe a third or more) of the participants smoked. Although some there might have objected to smoking, they didn't do so outloud.
The second time I took Allan's general-audience course was in the mid-70s. By then he'd come to think that smoking was a health risk (though he did still smoke sparingly himself). Smoking was permitted, but there was a degree of uptightness about smoking.
The third time I took that course was after Allan and Joan had split with AR, had then moved to Palm Springs but, deciding that though they liked visiting Palm Springs, they didn't like living there, had then returned to New York City. I was very curious to hear what changes Allan might have made in his course, so I enrolled in one of the first pair of classes (he ran two groups simultaneously, having them meet on alternate weeks). The meeting room in his office was smaller than in his previous office. He said that, given the size of the space, out of consideration for non-smokers, smoking wasn't permitted. He himself was firmly convinced by then that smoking was a health hazard, and he told me he'd tried to get AR to tell her followers that the operation she'd had was for lung cancer (the cause of the operation wasn't stated in the announcements in *The AR Letter*). She wouldn't, and I think he didn't say to people unless they asked him about it that she'd had lung cancer. But he did express his opinions about the health risks to those who asked.
Like John, I'm sorry that this subject developed as a side issue on Jenna's thread. I don't wish to hijack her thread. However, there seems to be a lot of anachronistic thinking on the issue of AR and her smoking, what with people extrapolating backward in time their current knowledge of health risks and not taking account of her knowledge context . And there's further confusion added because of people's making exaggerated statements -- such as the one quoted about smoking being considered obligatory. So I felt it was incumbent on me to report what I myself observed during the years I lived in the New York City area.
Ellen
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(Edited by Ellen Stuttle
on 3/21, 3:20pm)
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