Personal Commentary

IT IS a bad day, an anniversary in my family history with alcoholism today.  It doesn't usually impact me like it has this year.  Maybe it's the pandemic.  

I've had a number of family members, friends, acquaintances, co-workers who have had their lives destroyed by alcohol.  In the past I'd have said "by alcoholism" but after reading the excellent book by Harold Johnson,  Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People and Yours that distinction is dangerously inadequate.  Many people have their lives ruined and ended by people who use alcohol who in no way approach the category of alcoholics so I don't make that distinction anymore.  

I've mentioned here before how, in my ongoing education in why we have to leave modernism behind as it has aged, been implemented and has proven to be as flawed as every other ism of every other past which we should never try to revive," I was stunned to find out that alcohol and drinking it is a sacred cow of secular liberalism.  I was on what was then a popular lefty blog and in a discussion of Ken Burns show about Prohibition, I said that the biggest problem with prohibition was that it didn't work, that it didn't stop people from drinking and that it was too bad that it didn't have the effect of preventing the drinking of alcohol.  You'd have thought I had said something against the common good, getting angry denunciations that I'd dissed a substance that has no nutritive value which caused enormous numbers of deaths every year, deaths from alcoholism, from diseases associated with drinking - which DON'T require even that the person drink to excess frequently - birth defects, accidents, violent assaults by and to drinkers, especially those to the wives and children of drunken men, fathers, mothers, etc. That rendered the drinker more in danger of being taken advantage of, raped, robbed, beaten up. . . I mean, what's not to find positive about that?

I think the position that drinking and drug taking have in the requisite thinking of secular liberalism is a good symptom that there is a lot wrong with it.  The idea that "rights" "freedoms" "liberties" to do things that have such destructive effects on the lives of those who indulge in them and those the kill, maim and otherwise damage are in any way good or worthy of uncritical support is utterly stupid.  Yet such stupidity is a huge part of secular modernism.  It is an ideological fraud which has, unfortunately, become part of the habitual thinking and so pseudo-morality of many a more genuine liberal.  I'm not calling for prohibition, that didn't work, as I noted to the outraged play-lefties mentioned above, I am calling for the end of the insouciant, non-critical acceptance of alcohol which more than matches the previous attitude as it was practiced in regard to tobacco smoking everywhere.  If a total elimination of drinking would be a huge benefit to the world, any percentage increase in those who practice total abstinence would have a proportional benefit.  The benefits of halving, reductions of more than that in the number of people drinking and, so, producing the harms of alcohol in society, in family life, in personal relations, in the reduction of accidents, violence, expense to those not related to drinkers would have to count as a major advance of the type that universal healthcare would be, that universal free college or apprenticeship training would.  

It's amazing that anyone could object to any of that obvious truth.  Especially those pseudo-liberals and lefties who love to believe themselves to be the keepers of the flame of reason.  Hint on that belief, nuh, uh.  A hint that their position is wrong is that it is shared by innumerable right wingers. 

The argument included the atheist-materialist-scientistic denunciation of Alcoholics Anonymous, an article of faith in the religion that denies it is one, of course based on the slogan that such folk have given alcoholics as an excuse for not trying "I don't accept that there is a higher power,"  which allowed me to point out that alcoholics had accepted a higher power which was more enslaving, more dominating, more exacting, more demanding, one which impoverished them and destroyed them, the ethyl alcohol molecule.  I pointed out, considering the discussion and the history of the denigration of AA that along with that stupid "atom" symbol for atheism that an icon of the ethyl alcohol molecule should be the emblem of the "secular alternative" to AA, an "alternative" which existed in a couple of major cities but which, unlike AA was not even available as more than a Potemkin false front anywhere else.

*  The idea that it is possible to revive any past is one of the dumber characteristics of modernism, perhaps most obvious in various neo-classical, neo-primitive, etc. movements, most of them associated with fascism in various forms.  Fascism is a manifestation of modernism as is religious fundamentalism, ironically, fundamentalism being based in an anachronistic modern approach to reading texts.  All of them claiming to revive a past which is nothing more than a modern myth of those pasts which, in turn, all turned out to be inadequate and in need of scrapping.   Modernism is about as up to date as Edwardian thought, as up to date as the Regency period.  It's time for it to end.   We are meant to move on to the future, not the past.