Why We Drink

On the political philosophy of alcohol

Freedom and whisky gang thegither

-Robert Burns

On a recent trip to Sweden, I was stunned to discover, nosing around a neighbourhood supermarket, that every single beer on sale (except for the very large selection of non-alcoholic ones) had an ABV of a mere 3.5% - which would put it at the very bottom of the strength spectrum here in Britain. Asking a Swedish colleague about this, she told me that it is possible to get beer of a proper strength, but only at specialist State-owned Systembolaget shops where you have to pay through the nose and which operate under highly restrictive conditions (for instance, they are forbidden to sell six- or four-packs). Otherwise, the poor benighted Swedes have to make do with what is to my eye little better than beer-flavoured sparkling water.

I found this fascinating, as a foretaste of what is likely to come here in the UK. Public health campaigners have had alcohol in their sights for a long time (I wrote about the issue earlier this year) and the new Labour government is intent on pursing a ‘Nanny State’ drive in order to ease pressure on the creaking National Health Service. No doubt this will include measures to reduce alcohol consumption - it being an increasingly important element of the bourgeois psyche in 2024 to proclaim virtue through abstention from the demon drink.

In light of this, it seems important that somebody mount a philosophical defence of alcohol, based on is relationship to freedom. Robert Burns, in insisting that whisky and freedom were linked, was tying the fate of his national drink to that of his beloved nation itself. But I would like here to make the case that there is a more fundamental sense in which alcohol and freedom interrelate. I will go out on a limb: the ability to freely drink alcohol is a vital feature of Western democracy (and plenty of non-Western democracies too), and we should view with great suspicion any attempt to limit it. It has a canary-in-a-coal mine quality: where alcohol is threatened, other, more sinister moves are inevitably afoot.

Let’s begin, as I often do, with Michael Oakeshott. In On Human Conduct, Oakeshott lays out for us the problematic nature of freedom in modernity. Medieval people were in the vast majority of cases fixed in castes into which they were born and which they could not leave. Moderns are free to make their own way. But this, for Oakeshott, was both a blessing and a curse. Freedom is difficult: when one is free, one has to take responsibility for one’s choices, and indeed one’s failures. This puts the individual under immense pressure, and a lot of people have neither the taste nor the inclination for it. The result is that freedom is in modernity a much-contested subject. Some of us like it, but others of us very much don’t.

This is different from the subject of the old liberal trade-off between freedom and security. Oakeshott was speaking to something more primal than that. To be modern is to be forced to be free. And given that this will inevitably produce both positive and negative reactions, it follows that the conditions of freedom will have to be negotiated and fought over. There will be political pressure in favour of liberty but equally strong political pressure against it, and this will in the end mean that, even in a notionally ‘free’ society, individuals will have to struggle for distinctiveness against the demands of conformity placed upon them by their fellow citizens.

This idea, that freedom is something that has to be negotiated, is an important one that is rarely noticed or understood. For a free society to function, the people who like freedom have to be free in a responsible way. If they behave too freely and lose the run of themselves in the romance of their own personal adventures - Oakeshott’s favourite symbol of this was Don Quixote - then there will be a backlash. So it is extremely important that responsible freedom is cultivated in the population, not by a nannyish government (that would be a contradiction in terms) but by the population itself: a free people will have to raise future generations in such a way as to equip them for nothing less than the conditions of being responsibly free.

Alcohol is a vitally important site of education in this regard. Alcohol is fun. But drinking too much of it is a social ill (not only, nor indeed mainly, from the perspective of public health, but from the perspective of civility: drunk people are just terrible to have to deal with, and cause no end of trouble). If one wants to drink, one has to learn to do so, in the language of the day, ‘responsibly’. To put it in more apt terms, one has to learn to ‘hold one’s beer’. This means, in essence, familiarising oneself with one’s own body, and the process of drinking, so as to be able to identify when one is at the limit of what is comfortable and convivial (which will of course vary depending on the circumstances), and the limit of what the people around one will tolerate.

Some people exposed to this education decide drink is not for them at all and become teetotal; others find it difficult and become alcoholics; most of us are in the middle somewhere. And for generations, this has been a central plank of the process of becoming a mature adult in the West. We start as teenage idiots drinking cider on a park bench, or something similar; we end as mature adults who can have a drink or two whenever they like (or refrain entirely; I do not judge), safe in the knowledge that they will be hangover-free and that at no stage will their feet end up in their mouths. And the great majority of people negotiate this process successfully, so that they come at the other end being both responsible in the sense of not bothering anybody, and free in the sense of having command over their own relationship with alcohol.

The educational value of this cannot be understated, and is equalled only perhaps by the widespread availability of the car (a subject to which I will return in future posts, though which Matthew Crawford has more than adequately covered elsewhere). Learning to control and order one’s relationship with alcohol is a kind of microcosm for the process of learning to be a properly functioning citizen in a democracy - able to understand oneself, in relation to others, and able to limit the exercise of one’s own freedom in such a way as to live tolerably within society. Heaven knows the results are not perfect, and it is worth observing that the existence of socialised health care inserts a very strong dose of moral hazard into the equation which really ought not to be present. There are casualties. But this, too, has its corresponding virtue in the sense that being comfortable with the possibility of failure - and of harm - is itself an important feature of a free society. A free society, by definition, is one which can tolerate a certain amount of risk as the necessary corollary of freedom. And by tolerating the presence of alcohol and permitting it to be freely consumed, such a society itself becomes educated in respect of what it means to be responsibly free in the round.

The same sorts of arguments as I have made here could of course be made in respect of heroin, LSD, pot, etc. But through long historical experience alcohol has shown itself to be by far the most appropriate and pleasant of all of the possible options for fulfilling this social role - there is no drug that is more conducive to sociality, so ritualistically important, and which pairs so well with food. And we should therefore be very concerned about the pressures that it is coming under - from all sides. A State which is uncomfortable with the free consumption of alcohol is one which is neurotic about freedom per se. And a society which is uncomfortable with the free consumption of alcohol is one whose population is used to being infantilised, and reluctant to take on the risks and responsibilities associated with democratic citizenship. This does not bode well for more significant freedoms across the piece, because it suggests - to repeat - that the condition of being responsibly free is itself becoming structurally unsound. This is in turn suggestive of two regrettable developments: that government is becoming more or authoritarian, and that our populations are becoming less capable of exercising freedom properly. These are, obviously, linked.

In any case, as part of the fightback, and now that I’m back from Sweden, let me recommend that you join me in a dose or two of the poison itself; mine’s a wee dram of the 10-year-old cask strength Glenellachie that I’ve recently been enjoying. To freedom - and slàinte mhath!