This essay will make a lot more sense if you have read Part 1.
It was in the nineteenth century that the figure of the drunkard really came into its own as the demonic, diseased boogeyman of successive temperance movements in the US and Europe. At times he embodied specific social problems, such as alcohol-fueled domestic violence; at other times he seemed a composite of everything his culture hated and feared, from disfiguring disease to demonic infestation. Though Younge would certainly have recognized his broad-spectrum depravity, two centuries and relocation to North America had changed him in one crucial way: he was no longer the despised “other” but perilously close to “us.” Younge says explicitly that the drunkard is the polar opposite of the ordinary drinker, who drinks because of thirst. Two centuries later, the drunkard and the ordinary drinker were not opposites but just a few short steps apart, as this cartoon from 1846 illustrates.
Anyone could become a drunkard, so the only sure way to avoid “the drunkard’s progress” was not to drink at all, an idea that eventually produced the most notorious social experiment in US history: amending the Constitution to ban the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcohol.
People like to say that Prohibition didn’t work because people still found ways to buy, sell, and consume alcohol. But it did work in one way: even long after Repeal, Americans drank much less than they had before Prohibition—about half as much, to be specific. In fact, despite the wild initial celebrations we’ve all seen on film and in photos, US alcohol consumption didn’t return to pre-Prohibition levels until deep into the 1970s. It’s fair to say that the figure of the drunkard had done his work too well; despite Repeal, large swaths of the population remained abstinent—or nearly so—to avoid any chance of being overtaken by the ravages that alcohol could inflict.
In other words, as the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, the alcohol industry was liberated from its legal shackles but still faced a formidable public relations challenge. Somehow, it had to erase the idea of “the drunkard’s progress” and restore the chasm between the ordinary drinker and the drunkard that Younge and company had created. In short, the drunkard needed to be “othered” again.
Enter AA and allied researchers such as E. Morton Jellinek. On the surface, they rejected the drunkard and the moralizing rhetoric that made the figure so despised, replacing the drunkard with the alcoholic, who suffers from a disease, rather than moral turpitude or existential inferiority. But the cure for this disease turned out to be God and a program of moral reform, a program for penitents, not patients. Scratch the surface of the alcoholic, and you find the drunkard–not as Satanic or bestial as his early modern counterpart, for sure, but just as debased, hopeless, and trapped. Moreover, the fatalism that saw the drunkard as permanently irredeemable without divine intervention is exactly the outlook of the alcoholic.
AA and company translated Younge’s rhetoric of infection into the disease model, which became a new way of “othering” risky drinkers. According to the disease model, alcohol is not an intrinsically dangerous drug, just dangerous to a tiny subset of the population. In other words, alcohol’s risks are subtracted from the commodity alcohol and transferred to a defective consumer: one whose body handles alcohol differently because of a yet-to-be-discovered physical anomaly or complex of physical, psychological, and social traits. To put the matter very simply, temperance movements blamed the physical, social, and economic effects of excessive drinking on alcohol, whereas AA blames those same effects on alcoholism, a mysterious ailment affecting a small fraction of the population. Neither explanation is very convincing.
And features of the disease further separate alcoholism from alcohol. Once established, alcoholism is irreversible and worsens over time, even among the completely abstinent. Like Younge’s drunkard, AA’s alcoholic is permanently “infected,” able to achieve daily remission of symptoms only with divine help. The permanence of this infection is conveyed by several AA myths, including the myth is that alcoholics who relapse after years or even decades of sobriety find their disease as advanced as it would have been had they kept drinking to excess the entire time. This preposterous idea, no doubt devised to discourage relapse, helps sustain a visible population that identifies as alcoholic despite many years’ complete abstinence. And this population underscores the idea of alcoholics as fundamentally different.
Those who seek help in AA promote their own othering with every statement. Saying “I’m an alcoholic” is the first step in the AA program, the step on which all the other steps depend. At meetings, every utterance begins with “I’m ____, and I’m an alcoholic,” even when making a brief procedural announcement. Though addiction experts have begun to focus on “alcohol use disorder” as something that affects, rather than defines, people, this shift has not penetrated very far into the culture, where AA’s identity-based paradigm still shapes the way people see and understand the problems caused by alcohol.
Some new programs seem, on the surface, to contest the idea of an alcoholic “other” fundamentally different from an “us” of moderate drinkers. A recent article in Medium skillfully profiles a variety of new trends challenging the notion that only alcoholics have reason to give up alcohol. But the trend reinscribes the distinction between moderate drinkers and alcoholics, starting with the trend’s catchy name, “Elective Sobriety,” whose wit trades on the widespread belief in a population for whom sobriety is not a choice. What makes this new “lifestyle” sobriety appealing (and worth spending money to achieve) is the illusion that the electively sober are doing something different from the non-electively sober, when, in fact, they’re doing exactly the same thing: choosing not to drink in order to improve their health and quality of life.
So what social labor does the alcoholic do? In Younge’s day, the drunkard was, quite explicitly, the antithesis of the godly man. In the metaphysical battle of good and evil, he was evil; in the social battle between order and disorder, he was disorder. He was the visible “proof” that these battles were real and urgent. Moreover, he aroused fear, disgust, and loathing, which elevated the moral authority of those who condemned him (and sold a lot of penny pamphlets). He could be used to specific political ends, such as demonizing the royalists in the English Civil War, or he could be used more generally to discredit political and religious criticism, which flourished in alehouses.
The alcoholic does very different social labor. One important job is to divert attention away from economic conditions that promote alcohol abuse, such as the downward mobility, financial insecurity, and alienation created by neoliberalism. If some people simply have a “disease,” then we don’t have to think much about why alcohol use disorders have become so prevalent that they’re helping to reduce American life expectancy. Or why they affect the poor more than the rich. When they afflict the people we see living on the streets, we don’t have to ask about the relationship between alcohol abuse and indigence. We assume the “disease” came first and the indigence followed as a natural consequence, when, in fact, alcohol use disorders are as likely to be effects as causes.
A job I’ve already mentioned is to absorb the negative features of the drug alcohol, locating them in defective individuals, rather than in the substance itself. In that way, the figure of the alcoholic licenses consumption that the public might otherwise recognize as unsafe. Here’s how. From observation and from media, especially shows such as Intervention, people form a picture of what an alcoholic is then use it to assuage anxieties about their own consumption. As long as they don’t drink alone/drink in the daytime/have blackouts/lose a job/go to rehab/get a DUI/get two DUIs/suffer DTs, they’re not alcoholic and therefore not really at risk from drinking too much.
For a great example of this reasoning, see Rhonda in the HBO film Risky Drinking. Rhonda affirms over and over that she is “not an alcoholic,” comparing herself to a heavier-drinking friend to rationalize her own regular binges.[1] What better way to encourage dangerous consumption than identify a foil who drinks–or used to drink–more recklessly than you do? And popular speakers on the recovery circuit, along with writers of fake memoirs such as A Million Little Pieces contribute to “othering” with tales of debauch that are just as lurid and exaggerated as anything that ever came from Younge’s pen.[2]
So is there such a thing as an alcoholic? I honestly don’t know. Having been raised on cautionary tales about Uncle Ted (homeless alcoholic) and Aunt Cheryl (dead alcoholic) then exposed for years to AA, the recovery industry, and the mainstream media, I can barely imagine a world without the figure of the alcoholic in it. Until my imagination grows equal to the task, the best I can do is defamiliarize the figure a bit by considering its historical roots and the social labor it performs today.
[1] At one meeting of the Mom’s Happy Hour, there were six guests and nine empty wine bottles on the sideboard, suggesting that each guest had already consumed eighteen units of alcohol or eighteen times the recommended daily allowance for women.
[2] Fun story, for people who read footnotes. Many years ago, I wrote a novel about a drug user who had been abstinent for three years. I did that on purpose because I wanted to explore something different from the usual “bottoming out” story. Big mistake. No agent would even read it, and I couldn’t figure out why until one finally told a mutual friend that she wouldn’t waste her time because readers only wanted to read a crash-and-burn followed by redemption.