A week ago, I gave my opinion that legalizing marijuana would significantly alter our culture. Last night I got into a discussion about that (over pitchers of beer, no less) and it occurred to me that the best way to strengthen the argument over pot usage would be to look into what alcohol has done for (and to) our culture. Surely there is a large book on this somewhere, but oddly I know of none that actually tackles the contribution that alcohol has had in forming Western consciousness. Given a little knowledge of history, however, and a pretty extensive personal knowledge about the effects of alcohol, I think I can give it a try.
Homer talked of the Mediterranean as the Wine Dark Sea, and his metaphor went deeper than even he suspected. The people of the Mediterranean literally worshiped alcohol, the Roman's giving us Bacchus, and the Jews the very blood of Jesus Christ. Everyone - including those who are now Muslims - drank regularly and got drunk often. Beer was discovered in a several thousand year-old dig of Ancient Egypt, and, incidentally, the scientists discovered the exact composition and made it themselves. Further north, the German and Celtic barbarians were brewing beer themselves since at least early Roman times. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of the spectacular beer bashes the young men had around large campfires, where they would leap across the flames and over spears planted firmly in the ground. Everyone knows that the Vikings were habitual drunks, but not everyone knows that (to jump forward a millennium) the Puritans of New England were, from a modern standpoint, drunks as well. In a class I had at college, the Prof told us of the PhD thesis he did on Puritan America. Just for a point of interest, he found that fully half of recently married women had surviving babies less than 7 months after marriage. So much for the ban on premarital sex (in truth, it was done for the old agricultural reasons - no man wanted a barren wife, who could not produce sons to help with the chores and support him in his old age). Also, however, he found that the average person - this must have referred only to the adult men - had a pint of rum or its equivalent a day. That's a twelve pack of beer or a half gallon of wine. They did not get drunk, however, but drank regularly throughout the day. In a book I read a few years ago, "Mornings on Horseback," about Teddy Roosevelt, the daily drinking is laid out - and we find that the upper crust of the late 19th century drank the same huge amount in much the same manner as the Puritans.
If you think about it, this constant and heavy use of alcohol propelled the colonial and industrial era of Western culture. While alcohol eventually harms the liver and nervous system, among other things, it numbs the pain and boredom of intense physical labor. With the expansion of sugar plantations worked by slave labor in the Caribbean (along with the invention of distilling in the 16th century), booze became very cheap; in fact, workers were often paid in part with booze, which was often meant to be drunk on the job. The men who dug the Eerie canal in about 1830 were given as pay a quart a day of whiskey, which helped keep them warm and happy while plunging away in the earth with their shovels. That they would probably die before reaching age 50 did not matter - their prime working days were used for the expansion of Western society.
But it wasn't only for the workers; even most of the great thinkers of the time - really, of any time until very recently in Western civilization - were heavy drinkers. Alcohol affects the thoughts and emotions - it distances reality and blunts it , making certain acts and thoughts seem reasonable when they are not. There were probably few great theologians and philosophers prior to the 20th century who did not drink regularly, who often did so when they wrote. And of the great historic movements of our civilization, I doubt that Germans would have gone along with Hitler without heavy drinking, and I seriously doubt that the men on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria would have made the journey into the unknown without alcohol. It's affects are not only to numb, but to make scary things seem possible. It also gives the young great energy and endurance, enough to clear forests and fields and to fight in long wars.
This thesis could go on and on, but it seems to me fairly obvious that what we of Western cultural heritage are what and who we are in large part because of alcohol. We have no firm idea how marijuana would affect our collective mentality, but we can surmise that it would do so, and by quite a bit. It is true that we are veering away from the kind of work that was helped by alcohol - and thus the modern attempts to ban or limit drinking - but it is still at the heart of our culture. Pot is a powerful consciousness changer, and it changes it in ways that are in many cases diametrically opposed to the affects of alcohol. We would - will - fundamentally change with legalization and general casual use. I have ideas about which direction this would take us, but that is perhaps for another time. But that it will change us significantly is almost certain. FK
Homer talked of the Mediterranean as the Wine Dark Sea, and his metaphor went deeper than even he suspected. The people of the Mediterranean literally worshiped alcohol, the Roman's giving us Bacchus, and the Jews the very blood of Jesus Christ. Everyone - including those who are now Muslims - drank regularly and got drunk often. Beer was discovered in a several thousand year-old dig of Ancient Egypt, and, incidentally, the scientists discovered the exact composition and made it themselves. Further north, the German and Celtic barbarians were brewing beer themselves since at least early Roman times. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of the spectacular beer bashes the young men had around large campfires, where they would leap across the flames and over spears planted firmly in the ground. Everyone knows that the Vikings were habitual drunks, but not everyone knows that (to jump forward a millennium) the Puritans of New England were, from a modern standpoint, drunks as well. In a class I had at college, the Prof told us of the PhD thesis he did on Puritan America. Just for a point of interest, he found that fully half of recently married women had surviving babies less than 7 months after marriage. So much for the ban on premarital sex (in truth, it was done for the old agricultural reasons - no man wanted a barren wife, who could not produce sons to help with the chores and support him in his old age). Also, however, he found that the average person - this must have referred only to the adult men - had a pint of rum or its equivalent a day. That's a twelve pack of beer or a half gallon of wine. They did not get drunk, however, but drank regularly throughout the day. In a book I read a few years ago, "Mornings on Horseback," about Teddy Roosevelt, the daily drinking is laid out - and we find that the upper crust of the late 19th century drank the same huge amount in much the same manner as the Puritans.
If you think about it, this constant and heavy use of alcohol propelled the colonial and industrial era of Western culture. While alcohol eventually harms the liver and nervous system, among other things, it numbs the pain and boredom of intense physical labor. With the expansion of sugar plantations worked by slave labor in the Caribbean (along with the invention of distilling in the 16th century), booze became very cheap; in fact, workers were often paid in part with booze, which was often meant to be drunk on the job. The men who dug the Eerie canal in about 1830 were given as pay a quart a day of whiskey, which helped keep them warm and happy while plunging away in the earth with their shovels. That they would probably die before reaching age 50 did not matter - their prime working days were used for the expansion of Western society.
But it wasn't only for the workers; even most of the great thinkers of the time - really, of any time until very recently in Western civilization - were heavy drinkers. Alcohol affects the thoughts and emotions - it distances reality and blunts it , making certain acts and thoughts seem reasonable when they are not. There were probably few great theologians and philosophers prior to the 20th century who did not drink regularly, who often did so when they wrote. And of the great historic movements of our civilization, I doubt that Germans would have gone along with Hitler without heavy drinking, and I seriously doubt that the men on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria would have made the journey into the unknown without alcohol. It's affects are not only to numb, but to make scary things seem possible. It also gives the young great energy and endurance, enough to clear forests and fields and to fight in long wars.
This thesis could go on and on, but it seems to me fairly obvious that what we of Western cultural heritage are what and who we are in large part because of alcohol. We have no firm idea how marijuana would affect our collective mentality, but we can surmise that it would do so, and by quite a bit. It is true that we are veering away from the kind of work that was helped by alcohol - and thus the modern attempts to ban or limit drinking - but it is still at the heart of our culture. Pot is a powerful consciousness changer, and it changes it in ways that are in many cases diametrically opposed to the affects of alcohol. We would - will - fundamentally change with legalization and general casual use. I have ideas about which direction this would take us, but that is perhaps for another time. But that it will change us significantly is almost certain. FK
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