“When people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.” The problems of drinking-related anti-social behaviour in Britain are therefore about cultural conceptions of what drunkenness means, not what alcohol does.My own reasons for having come to the conclusion that it is a cultural issue primarily were, firstly, being told by a psychologist friend a number of years back of some research done on alcohol consumption in a social setting where a control group were given zero alcohol but believed they were drinking alcohol. They behaved pretty much they way the actully drunken group did. The onvious explanation is that drinking together rather than ingesting alcohol was the trigger for a raft of behaviours we think of a drunkenness. The second thing was, looking at 'the night out' as a cultural artefact (an unfinished project of mine) suggests that part of the point of it is the story-telling afterwards: there's a heroic quality to the tales told afterwards about the night out (and I make a hypothesis that this may actually trace back to dark ages male warrior subcultures). I suspect that a big part of the point of the night out is to fuel the tale telling and thus to seal the bonding.
Interestingly there seems to be a pride in claiming not to remember (note the implied skepticism about the full veracity of that) events and embarrassing incidents. It seems to me plausible that drunkenness may be an alibi for disinhibited bahaviour: a way to avoid responsibility and yet to enjoy the 'transcendance' or 'taboo breaking' (this latter fuels my skepticism about amnesia).
So my proposal for dealing with binge drinking is to suggest that alcohol pricing and similar interventions are doomed to have only peripheral effects since the real crime and behavioural issues are probably not to do with the absolute quantities of alcohol (though these do have significant health effects and are concerning for that reason). If we're concerned by the criminal and behavioural issues, then we need cultural interventions to erode and challenge the myths of the night out. For example we need to find ways of not colluding with the meme that drunks are not responsible for their behaviour. If alcohol is a depressant, then it really, in actual fact, reveals 'the secrets of the heart' and so is acutely more embarrassing that anyone publically acknowledges -perhaps it's time to start saying that? And we perhaps need to begin to tell the truth about the events narrated in the day-after story-telling in order to reveal the sordid truth and highlight the antisocial effects and not to collude with making out that it's just a 'bit of harmless fun'.
How to make this cultural intervention is the big issue, because, of course, we know that such things are dialogical and clever responses can derail and subvert messages from the powerful or 'moral' maj/min/orities. Hoever, I thinlk that if a number of us start to insist on the truth telling I've just mentioned and do so in a humble and compassionate way, perhaps that could begin to change hearts and minds. It may be then that we can also begin to address the spiritual issue the article begins to address so helpfully towards the end:
The tragedy James alludes to is that when we get this periodic glimpse of being present, at ease with the world, and available for other people, we wrongly think that drinking more will heighten the sensation. Instead, we should ask ourselves more fundamental questions about how we might live our lives, in order to experience such bliss all the time.Anyone with me?
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