I'm heading over to Gracie Mansion this evening for a bit of a soiree with Mayor Bloomberg and, I expect, Governor Pataki. I'll do my best to hold my tongue about these fascist smoking prohibitions that have lately come into fashion.

If memory serves the last time smoking was banned in New York was during the ill-conceived temperance movement of the late 19th century. Back then the underpinning of such measures was Puritanical religious fervor. Nowadays the underpinning is equally puritanical, yet the God of the Old and New Testaments has been replaced with the golden calf of health. I really hate the extremist health crazes that have been festering since the 1980s. If we're to ban anything it should be tofu and other such privations of the good.

I'm all for being healthy, certainly. However, it is wrong to exalt human life and health as the highest good. There are other concerns that are more pressing (virtue, anyone?). The mania about dieting and denying oneself any product that has even the slightest chance of hurting one physically is just the other side of the proclivity to support the distribution of condoms in schools, for instance (it doesn't matter what people do as long as they don't hurt their bodies in the process).

What's worse is that such movements coopt the universality of morality while doing away with its constraints. Today's exhortations to eat healthy and never smoke bear the same moral weight for many people as "though shalt honor thy father and thy mother" used to. Health is more than just a lifestyle for people. Weekly trips to church have been replaced with trips to the gym. The call to constant vigilance against temptation and evil has been replaced with a call to seek out the man disgusting enough to put a hamburger to his lips. A few days ago I walking with a group of friends, some of whom were smoking. We came to a stop in front of a rather mouth-watering bakery and looked into its windows. The people who were standing by the door talking immediately fled. One turned around and gave us a very dirty look, the sort you'd expect Hester Prynne to receive while wearing her scarlet "A." Generally speaking the difference between traditional morality and this new form is that old understandings took human nature and free will into account. Righteous actions were good only insofar as one chose to do them. No man could be coerced to do the good. The only good pressure to apply to the non-believer was shame. When it comes to matters of the body, though, and a group of fanatics who have set up the human form as their new Form of the Good, their materialist worldview does not prevent them from using the coercive power of the state to blur the distinction between public and private in the hopes of achieving the perfection they seek. (If you need a bit of reading and want to explore the issue of public and private space check out Hanna Arendt's Human Condition).