I don’t drink alcohol or take any drugs recreationally, and never have. I realize that that puts me in a fringe minority of the population, especially because it’s not for any kind of religious reason. The drive to use psychoactive substances is nearly universal, so I’m an outlier. Why do I value personal teetotalism?
I consider Penn Jillette an inspiration for this decision. Penn’s libertarianism obviously doesn’t imply personal or political teetotalism, but personal teetotalism does offer a solid rhetorical point for libertarianism: that one can choose not to consume even a legal substance like alcohol highlights that the primary basis of a choice to use a drug isn’t the law. Having this rhetorical point isn’t a reason for Penn or me to choose teetotalism, but it is an additional compatible argument that disconfirms the omnipresent claims that libertarians advocate for drug legalization only out of a selfish, personal desire to use drugs.
One core reason for Penn’s teetotalism is simply that he wants to be smarter, and using psychoactive drugs recreationally obviously makes you stupider, even if just temporarily. James Randi, who is an inspiration to Penn Jillette for his scientific skepticism, is also a teetotaler. Randi articulates part of my justification for teetotalism: having control over your mind and understanding and addressing reality as accurately as possible. This is a big part of my justification. Once you study a bit of the literature on heuristics and biases, you’ll realize that your own map of reality is already hopelessly flawed. It seems base to me to handicap myself even more.
It is often said that the young drink to rebel. I just never picked up this habit. Maybe it was just to express my own individuality, rebelling against the popular notion of youthful rebellion? I have always been weirded out by conformity.
It’s not just that as a utilitarian I want to appreciate and understand every precious moment of my own existence. It’s also that as a materialist atheist I recognize that consciousness arises from a physical process in the brain only. Taking a psychoactive substance isn’t modifying the access point to the mind; it is modifying the mind itself.
How does this play out socially? I find that drinkers roughly fall into two categories, those who use alcohol as a substitute for experience, and those who use alcohol as a complement for experience. I should caveat that obviously one person can be a different kind of drinker at different points in time.
Some people drink as a substitute for meaning and happiness. Unsatisfied with their classes, jobs, careers, or personal lives, they drink for a temporary escape. These kinds of drinkers have little to look forward to other than a break from an otherwise unfulfilled life.
Others use drinking as a complement to their own lives. Already having attained, or at least successfully striving for meaning, purpose, and value in their lives, personal and professional, they use alcohol to enhance their lives, enjoying the physiological effects for their own sake, enjoying the taste of the drinks for their own sake, and perhaps using alcohol as a social lubricant.
I think that substitute drinkers often suffer low self-esteem, and that they have a hard time socializing with principled teetotalers like myself. In a social situation, a substitute drinker feels threatened by a composed, happy teetotaler who doesn’t use alcohol as a crutch. By juxtaposition, the teetotaler’s very presence calls attention to the substitute drinker’s void by not validating the substitute drinker’s behavior. Since they’re Insecure, substitute drinkers more often seek to socialize with other substitute drinkers to validate their decisions. Humans, after all, do have biological drives for conformity.
There’s a habit among substitute drinkers to use the nuances of drinks as a vehicle for vacuous conversation. I find excessive deliberation about a drink’s attributes, or talk about what a drink says about a person, endlessly insipid.
Complement drinkers on the other hand, well-adjusted and secure, can socialize with teetotalers quite well, because complement drinkers are not threatened by teetotalers. Complement drinkers can be interesting, can abstract, and can carry on conversations about more interesting things than the drink they’re holding and what exists only in their immediate vicinity.
Exclusively socializing with other non-religious teetotalers would be a quixotic task, since there are too few, so I do my best to seek out complement drinkers instead of substitute drinkers.
Cross-posted to The Paltry Press
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Giving Whiskey and car key’s to Seth is like giving power to the government. He’ll crash into a lake and…he’ll….I’ll work on this one later.
I’ve published an article largely in response to what Seth’s written here, which can be found at [http://wordsandshapes.com/post/8120426430]. I also want to respond specifically to a couple things Seth says, not to disparage teetotalism but because I think some of his arguments for it are problematic.
Seth seems committed to the idea that substance use compromises one’s ability to fully understand reality while at the same time claiming that biases render each of our personal maps of reality hopelessly flawed. This second point seems damaging to his argument—hopelessness can’t get much worse—but I assume this is simply a rhetorical oversight. If he wishes to maintain that personal maps of reality are somewhat but not entirely flawed he can argue that further compromises to understanding are undesirable. However this view is contingent on reality’s being separate from experience; and at the very least, facts about experience are a subset of facts about reality. Reality cartographers will have to collect all the data on various experiences in order to make a full and accurate map. If it turns out one can’t get all the data on drugs and alcohol without experiencing their effects first-hand, teetotalism could actually restrict one’s understanding of reality. Further, any comparison between the understanding a teetotaler sacrifices and the understanding drug users sacrifice would be hard to come by since each packet of understanding comes at the other’s expense.
I think it is worth questioning the merits of understanding as a goal and the relation incapacitating drugs might have with understanding in a broad sense. If it is the case that reality can be fully understood through the learning of a finite set of knowable facts, then perhaps the best approach to understanding is an approach which maximizes the number of facts one can learn. If, however, there exist any serious barriers to a complete understanding of reality (an infinite or incredibly large number of facts or reality’s possessing a mysterious and unknowable nature, for instance) then perhaps becoming stupider could be said to aid understanding. Put differently, an awareness of how little one knows is sometimes more desirable than an increase in factual knowledge.
To sum up, I think reality is a big place. I don’t think anyone can explore all of it in time. Like an electronics store after Thanksgiving, you have to rush to the spots you hope will have the best stuff. People in other sections of the store aren’t missing out on reality or incapable of dealing with their problems effectively, they just went for a new TV while you were maybe looking for a camera.
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