The battle of British booze - symptom of a deep-rooted moral crisis
British young people seem intent on drinking themselves and British society in a complete stupor. Our government believed that it could change the traditional British drinking culture of knocking back the booze until you fall over into a continental-style café culture of allegedly civilized drinking by allowing pubs and clubs to obtain licences to sell alcohol 24 hours a day.
This would, the story went, help regenerate run-down city centres into civilized piazzas with restaurants and bars and cafes frequented by well-heeled patrons eating and drinking moderately and enjoying their evenings out.
But the drinks industry, a monstrous beast whose main aim is to sky-rocket its profits, which it can do by selling vast quantities of cheap beer, wine, alcopops and spirits to 18-24 year olds, helped subvert the government’s café-culture dream world and turned it into a booze-filled nightmare of over-consumption and violence.
Of course, the drinks industry was swimming with a fast-flowing tide. A generation which was raised with a belief in its unlimited entitlement to whatever it wanted whenever it wanted it and which is the inheritor of a very long British history of binge-drinking (stand up and pour it down your neck until you fall over) was unlikely to resist the blandishments of the “happy hour” and cheap hooch. It was definitely not going to learn to sit for hours with its little finger crooked over a small white wine when it could blast its brains out 24-hours a day with high-alcohol-content drinks that tasted like lemonade.
in denial
Whose fault is this? The government’s? Well, I am sure that anyone with any brains left over after a stimulating night out could have told them the likely outcome of their strange fantasy about Britain becoming like an ad man’s version of France. According to Reuters, the government is in denial:
Despite violent crime between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. rising by more than a quarter, the government will say the total amount of alcohol-related offences has fallen by three percent, the Daily Mail reported.
But Sir Simon Milton, the chairman of the Local Government Association (LGA) and leader of Westminster council, has labelled the new laws a “mistake”.
Is the fault of the drinks industry - manufacturers, pubs, clubs and retailers? Who’s going to turn down the opportunity of lots of lovely moolah when the government gives you such a legislative present?
What about local authorities? Shouldn’t they have exerted more control? Or the drinkers? Shouldn’t they have exercised more self-discipline?
There are plenty of people to blame for turning our city centres into weekend battlegrounds. And, what do you know? Everyone is passing the blame onto everyone else.
Anyway, we can be happy in the knowledge that 24-hour drinking will continue. The government has no intention of changing those laws. Instead, it will punish retailers who sell to underage drinkers and put out adverts warning of the dangers of excessive drinking. So that’s all right then.
But a combination of a “two strikes and you’re out” policy for retailers and public health messages for the drinkers really seems to miss the hard core of the problem. Yes, retailers should make sure they keep within the law, and, yes, public health messages make us all feel better – even if they don’t change our behaviour. But the root of this particular complex of problems lies in a moral crisis and a cultural narrative that says that getting ratted = having fun.
a fundamental moral crisis
According to Udo Schaeffer (in Baha’i Ethics in Light of Scripture: An Introduction)
We are facing a fundamental crisis of morals with far-reaching impact on the stability of the body politic. (p. 101)
What is the cause of this process and where it is leading us? In my view, the crisis of morality is a consequence of the crisis of religion. (p. 103)
The crisis of the Christian faith is closely connected with the the crisis of morality. Norms and moral values are of an axiomatic nature and cannot be proved exclusively by reason. They are linked to convictions, to faith. One must believe in them. Religion has been able to create a system of transcendent values and ideals, to sustain a hierarchy of values, declaring some of them to be absolute and universal, others to be relative and particular. (p. 105)
In the absence of a strong religious foundation for ethics and people’s ethical commitment, we try to rely on reason to derive our ethical principles. But the rational justification of morals fails precisely because there is no guarantee that everyone will be convinced by any given reason for a particular norm, no matter how cogent; there is no longer any “public, shared rationale or justification” for morality, as Alistair MacIntyre states in After Virtue
This means that there are no unconditional duties and no universally binding norms. Each one of us becomes the judge of our own morality and the arbiter of social order.
When these notions are detached from human self-responsibility and from the commitment to the common weal, they become nothing more than expressions of egoism and selfishness. (Schaeffer, Baha’i Ethics, p. 107)
Zygmunt Bauman points up the conclusion of this relativisation of value:
In the plural and pluralistic world of post-modernity, every form of life is permitted in principle, or, rather, no agreed principles are evident which may render any form of life impermissible. (”Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity.” Telos, no. 78, pp. 7-42.)
Says Schaeffer:
Society cannot survive once its members have lost the ability to share and sacrifice, once everyone emphasizes only his own rights and strives to serve only his own interests, once the highest aim in life is “fun”, once society is governed by hedonism and egoism…. The cultural crisis of the West … has developed into a global crisis of human civilization, one which gravely endangers the survival of mankind. (p. 108)
This is what Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Baha’i Faith wrote in in 1936 in one of his extraordinarily far-sighted World Order letters:
No wonder, therefore, that when, as a result of human perversity, the light of religion is quenched in men’s hearts, and the divinely appointed Robe, designed to adorn the human temple, is deliberately discarded, a deplorable decline in the fortunes of humanity immediately sets in, bringing in its wake all the evils which a wayward soul is capable of revealing. The perversion of human nature, the degradation of human conduct, the corruption and dissolution of human institutions, reveal themselves, under such circumstances, in their worst and most revolting aspects. Human character is debased, confidence is shaken, the nerves of discipline are relaxed, the voice of human conscience is stilled, the sense of decency and shame is obscured, conceptions of duty, of solidarity, of reciprocity and loyalty are distorted, and the very feeling of peacefulness, of joy and of hope is gradually extinguished. (Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha’u'llah, p .187)
Future perfecting
This would be a downbeat note on which to end this post. However, I believe that a new, religiously and spiritually founded morality is possible. Well, more than possible, it actually exists in the sacred Writings of Baha’u'llah, embodied (in embryonic form) in the life of the Baha’i community. As Baha’u'llah writes:
The purpose of the one true God in manifesting Himself is to summon all mankind to truthfulness and sincerity, to piety and trustworthiness, to resignation and submissiveness to the Will of God, to forbearance and kindliness, to uprightness and wisdom. His object is to array every man with the mantle of a saintly character, and to adorn him with the ornament of holy and goodly deeds. (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 299)
The alcoholic crisis of our city centres will never be solved by partial fixes to the licensing laws, nor, indeed, by a return to the status quo ante. No amount of policing is going to stop what is in fact a symptom of a deep spiritual and moral crisis. Nothing short of a renewal of a genuine and well-founded faith-based moral orientation is going to do the trick.
Technorati Tags: Baha’i, Bahai, alcohol, 24-hour drinking, licensing laws, morals, ethics, spirituality, Christianity
19 comments
Just the Britons?
The same thing is happening here!
And also here! Thank God for your last paragraph!
Fine joined up thinking with skillful use of quotations, Barney. An clear exposition of the phenomenon, its causes and the path to its ultimate solution.
Thank you Marco, Thurai and Jim for your comments. This moral vacuum is a major issue that faces the whole of humanity. It gives great urgency to our obligation to share the Healing Message of Baha’u'llah with one and all!
Dear Barney,
I was happy to see you quoting Bauman.He is my most favourite living sociologist as his ideas are very close to those of the Bahai Faith.Just read Liquid Love to see how he presents ‘unity of humankind’ as the sole remedy to global ailments, whether on individual or on collective levels.I have shared with him a copy of your published paper on the Bahai discourse of human rights.He is so noble a soul!
much love,
erfan
Thanks, Erfan. Bauman’s ideas are clearly well worth studying and considering. You may be interested to know that he is quoted in Schaeffer’s book on Baha’i Ethics.
Thank you for sharing my paper with Professor Bauman. I am really happy that you have done so.
Excellent post Barney. Abu Yasmin and I were discussing the problem of alcohol in society the other day. He’s grew up in Ireland where drinking alcohol is ingrained in the culture, whereas I was raised in a tee-totalling family obviously. Me - I’d just ban it outright, like heroin and marijuana, but then prohibition in America didn’t work because the people’s hearts and minds weren’t behind it.
When the blessed Prophet was instructed to prohibit alcohol 1400 years ago, it was gradual and it took a conversion of hearts and a realisation of obedience to divine command for it to work.
What I would like to see is strong campaigns from the government that tackle peer-pressure with drinking, like they do with cigarettes.
But you’re right, ultimately the question is one of morality and virtue, and the ‘we can have it if we want it’ ethic that exists in so many Western societies.
Alcohol advertising needs severe regulation
http://www.newstatesman.com/200803060016
This is a big issue in Australia too where alcohol’s place in the culture is reinforced by sponsorships of sport and individual sports heroes by big alcohol producers.
Sports heroes are now continually in the news after incidents at nightclubs, usually assaults.
The problem is so big that the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is looking into ways of tackling binge drinking.
However, things may be changing. The national radio program (ABC Life Matters) spent an hour today on why people don’t drink.
Here is a comment on their web site with my further comment added:
Neil Podger: Non drinking of alcoholic beverages
Another community group who do not drink alcoholic beverages are the Baha’is. They are counselled by the Founder of their Faith, Baha’u'llah, to, instead, become inebriated with the wine of the love of God and to become exhilarated thereby. One can understand, from the content of today’s program and what people have said, that the human race would be far better off if no-one drank alcoholic drinks. As the lady said, lions and deer do not - why should man, higher in the evolutionary tree, do this and make himself lower than the dog waiting patiently at the door?
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Comments
Totally agree, and when you are with a group of Baha’is you can laugh, fool about and have a fabulous time. By not drinking you learn to relax naturally. There is no waiting at social functions for the chatting and friendliness to start as is the case when people are waiting for alcohol to free up their inhibitions.
Michael 7/03/2008 10:35
Umm Yasmin, Erfan, Michael, thank you all for your valuable comments.
I’m not sure that strong government campaigns to tackle peer pressure help. There was a TV campaign in the UK not so long ago in which a drunk young man thought he was Spiderman and went climbing up some scaffolding to impress his friends. Of course, he fell off and killed himself. I wonder what impact this message had on its target audience?
Many years ago, when I was running an alcoholism counselling service in the Shetland Islands, someone told me that trying to combat the alcohol industry with ad campaigns was like trying to stop a charging heard of elephants with a pin.
Public messages have to be carefully judged to have maximum impact.
I would certainly ban “happy hours” and control the number of outlets that can licensed in any one area.
The problem is that the government is bound to be ambivalent about reducing alcohol consumption since the Treasury nets so much tax from alcohol sales. So they should whack the tax up so much that people drink less - it’s worked elsewhere in the world. The problem then is that people travel to places like France where alcohol is not so highly taxed and bring back vast quantities from the hypermarkets in Calais.
Baha’is and Muslims and others who don’t drink alcohol need to show, as Michael says, that it’s perfectly possible to enjoy oneself at social occasions without alcohol. We need to put a new social narrative out there which says that drinking is really uncool.
We also need to tackle the moral issues. If a person’s primary moral and spiritual duty is to come to know and love God, anything - such as alcohol - which works against that must be immoral. No?
Agreed Barney.
My wife is a clinical psychologist and she finds it interesting how many of her clients have problems with alcohol.
Even more interesting is that they mostly seem to stem from drinking wine, even among less affluent people.
It seems that the wine industry (and the alcohol industry in general) have, as somebody remarked on the Australian radio program, “colonised” people. I guess that means the pushers have invaded their minds and taken over their thinking.
The wine advertisers have somehow convinced people it is sophisticated to drink wine.
I remember the time when advertisers spotted a gap in the market a few years ago– women having lunch together. Shortly afterwards, ads started appearing portraying glamorous women sipping wine at upmarket lunch venues.
Even if, as you say Barney, that it is extremely difficult to counter such huge advertising campaigns, it would be fun to try.
Here is my attempt at a slogan:
“Drink wine! Become a wino!”
Thanks Barney for an interesting post.
I wonder, however, why Baha’is aren’t taking more of a lead on this.
Perhaps you could bring together other religious and secular groups opposed to alcohol in a national campaign to facilitate not drinking alcohol on nights out.
There are still far too many places in Britain where the only non-alcoholic drinks on sale are tiny mixers which are twice the price of the booze, for instance.
regards,
Andrew
Peace Barney (and everyone else too),
I’d echo much of what’s been said here. Personally, I think that although all of the measures here are helpful, ultimately, change works on an individual level. That is, at some point, an individual must decide ‘I don’t want to live in this way anymore. I want to change’.
Just a thought
Abdur Rahman
Andrew, I was involved in a committee for a year or two that aimed to campaign against alcohol. I don’t think it ever achieved anything. The challenge is to find a positive message about refraining from drinking alcohol. Alcohol is so deeply embedded in our culture that drinking it is the norm. Those of us who don’t - and here I include Abdur Rahman - are seen as “abnormal”. We have to find ways of making it known that it is spiritually, mentally and physically healthier not to drink alcohol - in fact, that it is “cool” not to drink.
Greetings, Abdur Rahman, thank you for commenting. I agree that is the individual who has to decided he/she wants to change, but it is good to provide positive non-alcohol-drinking role models and positive messages. Interestingly, research shows that religious conversion is one of the strongest motivators for stopping drinking!
Peace, one and all…
Perhaps encouraging alternatives is the best way to start? That is, developing alternatives to drinking.
Abdur Rahman
Good idea, Abdur Rahman. Ideas?
The new Australian Government has recognised the binge drinking problem but whether they have the solution is debatable.
They plan to spend $53 million (24. 45 million pounds) on the problem.
$20 (9 million pounds) of that will be spent on advertising that will” confront young people with the costs and consequences of binge drinking.”
I don’t know whether they have thought of your good idea , Barney, to develop alternatives or to make it cool not to drink. One way would be to find role models of non-drinkers in the sporting fraternity.
Sports clubs are apparently the danger place and the Government is trying to pressure the sports clubs to take some action.
This is on top of the Government move to counter the disaster where poker machines have invaded clubs (sporting clubs, returned service associations) and pubs throughout the land, except in Western Australia.
Tackling what were once called “vices” all come at a cost of revenue to the Government so it shows what a devastating effect binge drinking is having. Of course, they have to say “binge” drinking at this stage.
It would be politically difficult at the moment to move against just ordinary drinking that leads to intoxication.
However, one politician suggested journalists and politicians set an example by not drinking big at the “Holy Grail”, a late night drinking spot in the nation’s capital.
That would help counter hypocrisy that undermines the other efforts. I once worked with senior journalists who would publish editorials about the dangers of drink driving — and then do it themselves.
Reminds me of what is said in “One Common Faith”:
“Consumer culture, today’s inheritor by default of materialism’s gospel of human betterment, is unembar- rassed by the ephemeral nature of the goals that inspire it. For the small minority of people who can afford them, the benefits it offers are immediate, and the rationale unapologetic. Emboldened by the breakdown of traditional morality, the advance of the new creed is essentially no more than the triumph of animal impulse, as instinctive and blind as appetite, released at long last from the restraints of supernatural sanctions. Its most obvious casualty has been language. Tendencies once universally castigated as moral failings mutate into necessities of social progress. Selfishness becomes a prized commercial resource; false- hood reinvents itself as public information; perversions of various kinds unabashedly claim the status of civil rights. Under appropriate euphemisms, greed, lust, indolence, pride — even violence — acquire not merely broad acceptance but social and economic value. Ironically, as words have been drained of meaning, so have the very material comforts and acquisitions for which truth has been casually sacrificed.”
The quote from One Common Faith is very powerful. Thanks for posting it, Barney.
Meanwhile, anti binge-drinking proposals in Australia advanced yesterday when the government took notice of this blog (ha, ha!) and has announced that it plans to use sporting heroes to front the $20 million ( Nine million pounds) advertising program. (see previous posting)
There is a senate inquiry considering the relationship between alcohol advertising and sport. The results will be interesting to see. The recent TV coverage here of the the Rugby Union world cup was dripping with ads for rum, the form of alcohol that has the tendency to turn its users into particularly nasty chappies. It comes in cans so can be scoffed like coca cola.
However, the PM has said that alcohol companies should still be allowed to sponsor sport.
Hopefully that view will change. There is some wriggle room. Discouraging those companies could take various forms short of a ban.
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