Once more with ice and lemon: disproportionate alcohol consumption is not about enjoyment, but something dark and troublesome, writes John Waters.
It is not merely problematic because of the symptoms - black eyes, broken bodies, wet brains, clogged-up A&E departments - but more so because of root causes. It is hard to find a word for these that works, because the ones that might have had a chance of alerting the culture to its own skewed perceptions have been colonised and corrupted. "Alienation" is close, but it has too many leftist connotations to be useful anymore.
People do not drink to excess without, so to speak, very bad reasons. To do so regularly is suggestive of a lack in the individual, some unresolved element of hurt or incomprehension. For a culture to be drinking excessively is indicative of deep, unresolved, collective pain. Drink is escape, analgesic, refuge, shield, mask or anaesthetic.
People imagine they are drinking more because they like to enjoy life, but what they really mean is that alcohol enables them to live at all.
Last week's report by the Health Research Board indicating that alcohol consumption in Ireland has increased by 17 per cent over the past 11 years is not, therefore, alarming in terms of the increasing and baneful fallout of these patterns only. It should concern us even more on account of what it is screaming at us about the underlying health of the society.
One way of accessing the truth is to look more closely at the relationship between alcohol consumption and prosperity, which was not covered by this survey. The general picture emerging from the more filligreed research in this area suggests that all categories of people tend to react to increased prosperity by drinking more, but that poorer people tend to spend much higher proportions of their incomes (higher than other categories and higher than previously) on alcohol. This insight enables us to see the error in the idea that increasing consumption equates unambiguously to increased enjoyment.
Nor - and this is why leftist cliches should be rejected - is it simply a matter of material disadvantage, since the problem manifests disproportionately in urban areas, with those who work in agriculture least affected. The issue really hinges on expectation, on comparison, on disconnection from some deeper fabric or meaning, on participation in a culture whose skewed sense of priorities is reflected in an insane use of a respectable drug. This is why the argument about alcohol cannot be allowed to short-circuit into another debate about social equity. The abuse of alcohol is an indicator of spiritual malaise, which cannot be addressed by a materialist analysis.
Every time a new set of figures is released, a superficial cultural appraisal of the situation disgorges a series of ready-made explanations and proposed solutions which serve to mask a picture in which pain and grief are active elements even before the drink is poured. Alcohol treats pain, by numbing it, yes, but also by changing its configuration, by translating it from a silent, inchoate or festering inner hurt into, for example, the crunch of fist on cheekbone or the blank stare of the brain-dead. The primary problem, then, is not drink-fuelled violence, drunk-driving or binge drinking, but the underlying, hidden psychoses which give rise to destructive patterns of drinking.
We need to shake off for good the idea that drinking too much is simply having too much of a good thing. Alcohol is a drug. It is also, of course - and this is partly why it has become so insidious in our society - a facilitator, a de-inhibitor, and a relaxant. When we look at a pub, or a bottle of stout, we do not think, "drug".
But perhaps it is time that, with a part of our brains anyway, we began to do so. It won't be the complete picture, but it might allow us to find a more balanced perspective. We need to stand back from the cultural evasion and perceive the calamitous absurdity in the idea that a mind-altering substance has acquired such a central role in our culture.
The issue, then, is educational in the deepest sense. The societal abuse of alcohol indicates a serious cultural deficiency, converging on a cultural inability to comprehend how the natural mechanism that is humanity should properly function. To put it as starkly as possible: we have lost the capacity to teach our children how to live.
It is relatively futile to think in terms of restrictions on opening hours, higher taxes or random breath testing. These measures may show results in some narrower context, but they do nothing to address the deeper problem, which just goes underground from such responses. We need first of all to acknowledge what alcohol is, what it does, how we have used it, and why its escalating consumption is not, in hardly any sense at all, a symptom of our increasing conviviality. We need to acknowledge that, in bequeathing such a culture to our children, we are sentencing them to a lifestyle and a way of coping with reality that can have for them but one of two outcomes: madness or death.