The headstrong and lovable William Whitby

There are theories that do not arise in the laboratory, but in states of mind. Ideas that are not formulated to explain the world, but to defend against it. You can recognize them because they are not asking to be checked, but rather to be heard. They present themselves as a mix of intuition, personal experience and general distrust of anything that sounds like consensus. They usually appear when an era starts talking too loudly and someone from the back of the room raises their hand to say they’re not so sure.

The theory of the Australian William Whitby could be summarized with a wry smile as follows: the whole world had been convinced by a new superstition, with a white coat and a strict tone, while the truth – in his opinion – continued to float in the air like a cloud of smoke that no one wanted to breathe in. For Whitby, tobacco was not the villain but the perfect scapegoat: something visible, smelly, easy to point a finger at, while the real evils – radioactivity, industrial pollution, modern stress – absently sizzled behind, disguised as progress.

Today, after reading his magnum opus Smoking is Good for You (Grijalbo, 1980), Whitby seems like the man who stands up in the middle of dinner and says, “I’m sorry, but this is stupid,” just as everyone is already chewing the official version as if it were an inevitable morsel, and is thinking about coming home early and going to bed on the couch. His thesis is something like a conspiracy novel, written by a country doctor with too much free time and too much confidence in his own clinical experience. Whitby looks at his patients (he was a doctor), at his friends, at himself and comes to the conclusion: They smoke, they live, they breathe, some even grow old and are even happy. Ergo: tobacco is good. If it doesn’t bring any good, then at least it won’t do the apocalyptic evil that they sell to us as dogma and that everyone has accepted with their heads bowed.

There’s something almost endearing about the way Whitby dissects statistics with the same ease with which he shakes ashes from his sack. He says numbers are poorly told stories; Science is a new religion with media priests; Fear, the real virus. His reasoning lumbers forward, sometimes with a circular logic worthy of a late-night smoker: I smoke because it relieves my cough, and if it relieves my cough, it can’t cause it. Last point. In another context one would laugh without feeling guilty, but here the laughter is mixed with a pinch of compassion. Besides, you want him to be right.

Because Whitby is not a textbook cynic. He is more of a believer. Someone who swims against the current, not for fun, but out of a deep, almost moral need. He feels cornered by a campaign that he finds puritanical, inquisitorial and exaggerated to the point of delirium. And he answers as best he can: with anecdotes, with loose quotes, with public challenges and bets, with the unshakable belief that personal experience is worth more than any consensus.

From the outside, it’s easy to make fun of it. Today we know that he was wrong about almost everything, that he confused correlation with revelation and stubbornness with clarity. But it’s also easy to see something recognizable in him: the figure of the dissident who can’t stand being told how to live, what to inhale, who to love and who to distrust. The guy who feels like the world has gotten too loud and too confident, and decides to plant a flag — even on the wrong summit — to say, “They haven’t come this far.”

Whitby is passionately wrong, and that makes him human rather than ridiculous. His theory is a castle of smoke, yes, but a castle of smoke built with the tenacity of someone who believes he is defending the ultimate freedom: that of not believing anyone. And there is something in this clumsy, exaggerated, almost comical gesture that evokes a benevolent smile. Because we were all once William Whitby: defending a previously lost idea, pondering in solitude over outdated arguments, convinced that the whole world except us is exaggerating.