Virtue of hanging the veil of purdah over liquor

Our lawmakers are about as pedestrian as they come. They tend to be expedient in their motives, and unscientific, magical or shamanistic in their thinking.

A recent horrific road accident involving an articulated lorry - where a beer company had outsourced from an outfit that appears to have shown scant regard for safety standards for drivers - had some insensitive wags wisecracking about how the government would either ban the transportation of beer or abolish road transportation altogether. At any rate, much is not expected of our lawmakers and administrators.

We have long ceased to expect them to be great benefactors who would unite us, the citizens, as society’s political partners and secure with laws and administration the form of government best suited for us to mature by habit the moral virtues and develop the capacities in each one of us – both of which we can only do in societies.

All legislation is said to aim at training citizens in good habits, but many of us count breaking of the law as a mere peccadillo. Moreover, our habitual or accustomed ways of feeling and doing things are characterised more by excess and deficiency than by virtue or excellence. We are known for our disposition to throw a wobbly at the slightest provocation as well as setback, and for our cynicism - we stand ready to filthy any principle, institution or activity for narrow personal gain, while hankering to pour scorn on others (especially functioning advanced civilizations) who fall short of their professed ideals.

If it be true that in our country we are more likely to encounter bad habits, clumsy action and cynicism than to encounter idealism, fine action and moral virtues or good habits, then not just our traditional cultural materials, but also our laws stand condemned.

Our traditional cultural materials - from manners and family values to traditional lore and religion - which shape much of what we feel and believe stand condemned for their powerlessness to inspire us to revere fine and beautiful action, and for their failure to keep us from becoming ensnared by such preliterate practices of stability as divination, magic and witchcraft. However, if there is a connection between good laws and good habits, then the want of good habits must be attributed at least partly to bad laws, which unscientific thinking, preliterate practices and unprincipled motives might be conspiring to produce.

A case in point is the decision to curb alcohol abuse by keeping in purdah all alcoholic liquor in the public square. The abuse of alcohol is expected to decline noticeably, when the sale and consumption of alcohol is brought within a regulatory framework in which the promotion and glamorization of alcoholic beverages are forbidden, all reminders of alcohol are out of sight, and the legal drinking age is raised to 21.

However, when the seclusion of women in traditional societies failed to curb sexual promiscuity, sexual violence, and the homicidal fantasies about heavenly virgins, it is absurd to assume that some such regulatory regime could curb alcohol abuse.
The absurdity of it all becomes even more apparent when we ask why the Prohibition saw the growth in organized crime financed by bootlegging, or why the criminalization of the indulgence in drugs for narcotic effect is falling miserably everywhere to curb substance abuse.

From these and other similar social experiments, we have obviously failed to draw any lessons. Out of sight does not mean out of mind - man is endowed with a vivid imagination. Moreover, virtue is perfected or matured by habit. For instance, without the opportunity to face danger we cannot cultivate the habit of acting bravely, similarly with just and temperate acts. Without acting first to get what we need, wish or desire, we cannot cultivate the habit of avoiding excess or defect in the performance of those acts. In the formation of habits, including what we are habituated to love and hate, the most critical factor is the family’s capacity for discipline and moral training.

The purity of motive might be sufficient to be counted among the virtuous or the saved in heavenly eyes. However, when we wish to get something and are sprung to action, if we do not have the habit of acting in accordance with the virtue appropriate to that action, we would not, in fact, be acting virtuously, regardless of our intention or motive. Besides, if acting in a certain way is painful or irksome, then that way of acting is not a settled habit – it is not a voluntary act. A society concerned with moral excellence cannot completely disregard that virtue and virtuous practices must be, at least painless, if not pleasurable to perform.

It is not that unscientific thinking and unprincipled motives are never present in the work of legislators even in well-managed or functioning democracies. It is just that, living as we do in an ill-governed or dysfunctional society, by no stretch of imagination could we speak of the habits of scientific thinking and principled motives in relation to our legislative work. In fact, one might venture to suggest that our anti-liquor legislation shows in microcosm the crisis of political decision-making confronting us on a much wider scale.

Following the recent legislation on tobacco and alcohol, the minimum drinking age was raised from 18 to 21, and all forms of advertising, promotion and branding of beers, wines, and hard liquor became forbidden.

At an industry level, the legislation signifies nothing less than the prohibition of planning and the execution of ideas to create exchanges – this is business without marketing and without the possibility of taking part in a dynamic process of change – to call this the decapitation of the liquor industry is nothing but apt.

At an individual level, the legislation is an assault on the freedom of informed choice and intelligent action - the absence of product information, the stifling of competition and innovation that would otherwise have resulted in product improvements as well as in new products, and the prevention of research, which impedes the discovery of customer preferences, likes and dislikes.

Yet it is reasonable to assume that such assaults and decapitations, men would suffer willingly for a common good. Men have indeed sacrificed willingly personal, industrial and other freedoms, even in highly civilized societies in order to confront physical and moral challenges to material and rational progress from either within or without.

With us, it is not difficult to make a case for personal sacrifices. As a society, we are not only dysfunctional, but also traumatized. The abuse of alcohol and substance is widespread, poverty seems unstoppable, treachery and corruption are rampant, growth is inflationary, the ethnicities are spawning fanaticism and violence, the indigenous traditions of Oriental despotism are penetrating deep into our colonial heritage of modernity, and we remain enslaved by the need for divination, magic and witchcraft, and ensnared by mysticism and subjectivism.

Our society is clearly at the extreme end of its very short tether. Thus in the face of a society intellectually and morally powerless to deal with the power of choice and the fact of ceaseless change, it would be both silly and futile to object to the decapitation of the alcohol industry and the loss of personal freedom of choice and action relating to alcohol.

Moreover, we need to remember that amid hopelessness and squalor, amid miseries and frustrations of living, many of us would naturally turn to an ethic of renunciation to satisfy the insistent human need to have a feeling of righteousness – and that abstinence is often the only means by which the need to have a feeling of righteousness could be satisfied. In that sense, it would be heartless to condemn out of hand the recent legislation on tobacco and alcohol, seeing how it lends authority to the emotional conviction that alcohol is intrinsically immoral, and how it electrifies the practice of abstinence among those who derive a sense of righteousness from that practice.

When we thus think of the unintended humanitarian effect, which this ill-conceived legislation has on those who are condemned to an ethic of renunciation as a source of moral worth, the need for the ethically more privileged to learn to endure willingly the legislation’s implicit assault on freedom is clear.

To believe that alcohol is intrinsically immoral is no doubt characteristic of animistic thinking; and we may be obliged by the prestige of science to refrain from speaking animistically. Yet without the animistic belief in alcohol’s immorality, those of us in desperate straits would be left without a pretext to feel righteous - and where a sense of righteousness is lacking, or where the feelings of unworthiness and impotence are experienced intensely, the problem of cultural change becomes intractable. And we cannot allow it to become intractable, otherwise our decent to nativism, to Oriental despotism, mysticism and an ethic of despair, would be complete.