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Daniel Koshland, a long time editor of Science magazine wrote the following satire on regulations.
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This communication received by Science was signed by John Winthrop, formerly of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, now on Cloud Nine.
It is particularly gratifying for me to look down from my celestial orbit and see the return of Puritanism to the United States. Years ago I was active in a colony that outlawed smoking, drinking, and dancing, but in subsequent times I have observed a most unseemly loss of enthusiasm for these pioneering ideas. My colleagues and I realized long ago that people could not manage their own lives, and it is good to see an emergence of scientific support for this intuitive understanding. However, warning labels on cigarettes and liquor bottles, and education as to the inevitable consequences of dancing, will not be enough. Strict laws will be needed to protect people from themselves, analogous to the brilliant principle of destroying a village to save it.
In addition to the meager list above, modem society must vastly expand the measures it provides for the safety of its hapless members. Because loud noise impairs hearing and causes psychological stress, young people must he enjoined to listen to rock music at the whisper level instead of the ear-splitting level. Consider skiing, boating, and hang gliding; they are easily more hazardous to one's health than passive smoke and should he abolished. Radiation hazards at 30,000 feet require that airlines protect their passengers by flying at lower altitudes. Flying at treetop level would cause a noise problem, but computers indicate that restricting air travel to 35 miles per hour at 11,547 feet would minimize all danger. At this rate passengers on the Seattle to New York flight might die of old age, but that is a minor tradeoff in the battle against involuntary risk.
Because extrapolation from people living downwind from three-pack-a-day smokers suggests that passive smoking results in an increased cancer rate, designated smoking areas in office buildings, football stadiums, and wind tunnels will not reduce risk to zero and must be declared illegal. With improvement in technology, calculations will show that a smoker in Iowa causes measurable risk to a pedestrian in Los Angeles, and therefore either smoking in Iowa or pedestrianism in Los Angeles will have to he outlawed, whichever is cheaper. Because a martini before dinner is orders of magnitude more dangerous than passive smoking, this too will have to go. Those whose personalities require a happy hour will become more churlish to their employees, more abusive to their children, and less likely to lend a lawnmower to their neighbor, but that is a small price to pay for progress.
A recent report from sleep researchers indicated that most people get far too little sleep. Furthermore, there is a tendency for hard-driving individuals to brag about how few hours of rest they need while maintaining heroically busy schedules. Actually, they are lowering life expectancy and doing their jobs poorly, according to the sleep researchers. Like 9-year-olds, most individuals just cannot be trusted to go to bed on time, and a national curfew will be needed.
There will, of course, be people who advocate commonsense approaches, such as outlawing only behavior that endangers others at risk levels higher than driving to work, but allowing freedom of choice for those who, properly warned, endanger only themselves. This alluring pragmatism will dilute and endanger the entire campaign; an integral part of Puritanism is its disdainful view of the behavior of others. Appropriate dress is a subject for future legislation, because affronts to the eyes should rank with those to the ears and lungs in any orderly world.
The implementation of these necessary and admirable injunctions may, of course, stimulate some irrational rebelliousness. Obnoxious civil liberty fanatics may make the claim that people should be allowed to die as they wish, or even more outrageously, to live as they like. Such a lack of discipline can only lead to chaos and will yield horrible consequences such as loud laughter in subways or jogging without a helmet. We must face the fact that humans inherit a regrettable instinct to have fun, and therefore severe deterrents are needed. Capital punishment seems too strong, but the stocks, a device invented by us Puritans, seem appropriate for those who need protection from themselves. They work very effectively up here in our idyllic Puritanical society, which may explain why some new arrivals are bewildered about whether they have entered heaven or hell."
Daniel E. Koshland, Science , June, 1, 1990
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