It is not surprising people see overcoming their alcohol problems as a great liberation because alcohol can undermine every form of freedom ever conceived.
My list of ways alcohol can do this to every idea of freedom developed over the last 350 years is “impressively comprehensive” says revered intellectual historian Professor Quentin Skinner, adding that the question is “very important”.
I would like to pretend this amounted to some major intellectual achievement, but I cannot. I simply overlaid my working knowledge of alcohol’s effects on to Skinner’s “genealogy of freedom”, an overview of the ideas of freedom in play over the last few centuries.
Choosing freedom
Politicians and commentators often talk with impressive certainty about what freedom is. But, in reality, there is no such certainty to be had. It is all rhetorical bluster, often with selfish ends. Freedom is an elusive idea which nobody can dictate.
What freedom means is a matter of personal preference and discussion. There is no absolute right or wrong answer. We need to weigh up the options and choose the account we think best. Skinner’s genealogy lays out the enormous range of coherent alternatives open to us.
“These are all just vocabularies,” says Skinner, who favours a pragmatist approach to choosing between them. “The question we should be asking ourselves is: Which one is going to go deeply into our society and do the most for us.”
Despite the huge range of coherent, sophisticated accounts, incoherent and potentially harmful accounts still abound. The freedom to tote guns, not wear a face mask in a pandemic or to purchase alcohol unhindered is unlikely to serve us well.
Beware self-serving dogmas
Alcohol sellers, as one might expect, simply champion a version of freedom which suits them, damning anything which impedes sales and implying that alcohol is inherently liberating to boost sales.
It is unwise to take this self-serving account seriously. We need to be able to think clearly to benefit from every form of freedom ever devised, with regulations there to help more of us do so.
Logic goes out of the window in likening lower US guidelines to “stealth prohibition”. It is an absurd exaggeration to suggest medical guidance even amounts to coercion, let alone a bygone legal bar.
Following the same approach, we might portray the posting of a sign saying “mind the step” as first stages in a banning free movement. It uses the rhetorical power of an idea of freedom to protect a commercial interest.
The goal is not a meaningful discussion but a distraction from it. Thankfully there remain many genuine and coherent ideas of freedom to choose from intended to serve human goals rather than commercial targets.
Real accounts of freedom
Over the past three-and-a-half centuries formulations of freedom have fallen into three main types, according to Skinner’s genealogy (see image): not having outside interference; not being answerable to arbitrary power; and in self-fulfilment.
Thinkers and countries shift from one school of thought to another, as did JS Mill to defend women’s rights and so too has the US ever since its foundation. We need not be any more wedded to a single vocabulary. Some ideas of freedom might work better in some areas of life than others.
To figure out which view suits us, it may be useful to look at the consequences for different areas of life, say family, education or health, for instance. And we could also usefully be aware of what threatens them since the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
My rough shortlist of ways alcohol threatens every formulation of freedom so far invented includes:
- Alcohol dependence can put us under the arbitrary power of alcohol suppliers, so making us unfree in the “republican” tradition.
- In the “no-interference” liberal tradition, our freedom is undermined by coercion in the form social pressure, advertising and withdrawal.
- In the same tradition alcohol also acts on ourselves to arguably induce inauthenticity, impaired judgement or false consciousness.
- In the traditions of self-realisation alcohol inebriation, dependence and withdrawal may undermine our chances of realising our spiritual or political natures.
We do not need to exclude alcohol from our lives or societies to be free. But we would benefit from the awareness that the commercial exploitation of an addictive psychoactive poses a threat to freedoms we may cherish.
Positive alcohol experiences could also be included in the picture. Alcohol’s sedative effect may aid forms of self-realisation, allowing us to see the upside of being less uptight, perhaps finding it also without alcohol.
A debate we need
What adds and detracts from our freedoms is something we have to decide for ourselves. It has been discussed for centuries and the debate has never seemed more important. Science, society, technology, nature and our fellow humans are creating new threats and new opportunities.
New forms of demagoguery, authoritarianism, geopolitical rifts, pandemic, social division, deception, coercion and censorship threaten freedoms we value. We should be as clear as we can be about what these freedoms are and what they are not so we can defend them effectively.
Alcohol offers a warning that we can lose our freedom without realising it, perhaps partly because we seldom stop to think what it is. It also reminds us that, while freedom can be easily lost, it can also be rediscovered. ■