In the spirit of Drinkies, keep it light
’Cause God loves a drunk, lowest of men
Like the dogs in the street and the pigs in the pen
But a drunk’s only trying to get free of his body
And soar like an eagle high up there in heaven
His shouts and his curses they are just hymns and praises
To kick-start his mind now and then
— Richard Thompson, “God
Loves a Drunk”
I wanted to call this column Drinkies but sober souls overruled me and decreed it be Spirits, which is fine if a bit more solemn than the treatment I’d had in mind.
Drinkies, I’ll still argue, would have been the better rubric, conjuring as it does a slightly antique ambience, the sort of Don Draper martinis-at-lunch joie de vivre we can imagine existed before we were born, when people were less worried about how their pleasures might be destroying their bodies. Drinkies evokes Nick and Nora Charles or maybe Scott and Zelda before crash and crack-up. Drinkies is a sparkling, silly name that suggests a certain dismissal of the harsher consequences of drinking — so to my mind it would have been more appropriate for a column that, for the most part, takes for granted that people will and probably ought to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation.
Were I writing Drinkies, I probably wouldn’t have to write sentences like that last one, for we’d be all aboard the party bus. Drinkies would be more about the latest trends in cocktail shakers, fruity goozler novelties and bar paraphernalia. For instance, we might ponder the plight of the makers of pistol-shaped flasks now that the Arkansas Legislature has caved to the NCAA. (Such things exist! We thought we’d made the product up, but you can buy them online. If you’re worried your pint of schnapps won’t make it past security, just drain it into a replica of a constitutionally protected killing appliance. What a country!)
But this isn’t Drinkies. This is Spirits, and words not only matter but sometimes force perspectives and educe philosophies. For why do we call alcoholic beverages “spirits” anyway?
A spirit is an immaterial intelligence, something like the human soul or an angel or (more to the point) demon. It refers to the defining quality of an organization or a nation. It derives from the Latin word spiritus, which literally translates as air, breath, or breeze.
All these spirits are invisible yet perceptible through our other senses. A spirit is something felt, a tickle on the skin or a stirring in the heart.
Interestingly enough, the first printed use of “spirits” to refer to alcoholic beverages occurs in the Baptist preacher John Bunyan’s allegorical novel from 1678’s A Pilgrim’s Progress, when “Mr. Interpreter” — often considered a stand-in for the Holy Spirit — offers the protagonist Christiana some honeycomb and “a little Bottle of Spirits.” Bunyan’s attitude was typical of his time; he accepted that — Noah’s humiliation in his tent aside — there were some benefits to moderate drinking. (Teetotalism wasn’t much of a thing until the early 19th century when Joseph Livesy founded the Preston Temperance Union.)
We drink for all sorts of reasons: because our ancestors did, because it allows us to experience a state that is somewhat outside ourselves. It has been with us since we began to civilize ourselves and neuroscience explains
that ethanol, the psychoactive ingredient of alcohol, impairs the electrical signals that flow between neurons, interrupting the usual channels of communication and depriving us of the associations that normally inhibit us.
To look at it another way, drinking can help us escape the tyranny of constantly trying to make sense of an insane world. A little confusion of the neurons mightn’t be a bad thing if it allows us to overcome our preoccupation with ourselves, if it bumps us out of the ruts of conventional thinking. A drink or two can divorce us from our top-of-mind preoccupations; we might momentarily lose our self-consciousness.
But we also understand how wholesale derangement can be dangerous. Which is why it might be all right for buzzed people to flirt with each other or to try to paint or play guitar, but we certainly don’t want them making life-altering decisions or trying to drive or piloting a plane.
And given that alcohol has real and measurable effects and that some percentage of the population simply cannot tolerate the stuff, it’s understandable why some people might choose not to drink. Maybe they’d prefer to keep their neurons communicating
as efficiently as possible. Maybe they don’t enjoy the artificial lightness that social lubrication can provide. One man’s thrilling zip line ride is another’s life-scarring nightmare is another’s quest for spiritual ecstasy.
It’s perfectly reasonable to abstain, because the world and its complications will always be there when you come down.
Fair enough.
But I don’t think we ought to be so quick to deny the ways alcohol can mitigate the world. There is value in forgetting, in being able to lay down one’s intellectual burden. The famous French paradox — the French have lower levels of heart disease than Americans despite having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats — might in part be explained by the fact that the French don’t seem to worry as much about things as Americans. Sure, eating rich foods can be unhealthy, but maybe not as unhealthy as worrying about eating rich foods. The wine the French drink doesn’t inoculate them from heart disease, but the fact that they drink wine is indicative of a healthier attitude.
There’s science to bolster my belief that while drinking obviously impairs judgment and removes filters, it doesn’t change character — it doesn’t necessarily make you more rude, promiscuous, violent, aggressive or anti-social. Anthropologists believe that one of the reasons people get drunk is to justify taboo-breaking behavior.
The undeniable effects of ethanol are only part of the equation; the larger problem is the cultural perception of alcohol. Experiments with placebos have shown that people behave in ways that are consistent with their idea of the behavioral effects of alcohol when they only think they are drinking alcohol.
“[A]lcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and … even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour,” social anthropologist Kate Fox, who has extensively studied drinking culture, wrote in an 2011 essay for the BBC. “Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it, when they don’t need to be told not to binge-drink vodka shots ….”
Our point exactly.