Psychologically the case stands thus: alcohol has indeed an inhibitory influence on mind and body. The feeling of excitement, the greater ease of motor impulse, the feeling of strength and joy, the forgetting of sorrow and pain—all are at bottom the result of inhibition; impulses are let free because the checking centers are inhibited. But it is absurd to claim from the start that all this is bad and harmful, as if the word inhibition meant destruction and lasting damage. Harmful it is, bodily and socially, when these changes become exaggerated, when they are projected into such dimensions that vital interests, the care for family and honor and duty are paralyzed; but in the inhibition itself lies no danger. There is not the slightest act of attention which does not involve such inhibition. If I read in my study, the mere attention to my book will inhibit the ticking of the clock in my room and the noise from the street, and no one will call it harmful. As soon as my attention increases, and I read with such passion that I forget my engagements with friends and my duties in my office, I become ridiculous and contemptible. But the fact that the unbalanced attention makes me by its exaggerated inhibition quite unfit for my duties, is no proof that the slight inhibition produced by attentive reading ought to be avoided.
The inhibition by alcohol, too, may have in the right place its very desirable purpose, and no one ought to be terrified by such physiological statements, even if inhibition is called a partial paralysis. Yes, it is partial paralysis, but no education, no art, no politics, no religion, is possible without such partial paralysis. What else are hope and belief and enjoyment and enthusiasm but a re-enforcement of certain mental states, with corresponding inhibition—that is, paralysis—of the opposite ideas? If a moderate use of alcohol can help in this most useful blockade, it is an ally and not an enemy. If wine can overcome and suppress the consciousness of the little miseries and of the drudgery of life, and thus set free and re-enforce the unchecked enthusiasm for the dominant ideas, if wine can make one forget the frictions and pains and give again the feeling of unity and frictionless power—by all means let us use this helper to civilization. It was a well-known philosopher who coupled Christianity and alcohol as the two great means of mankind to set us free from pain. But nature provided mankind with other means of inhibition; sleep is still more radical, and every fatigue works in the same direction; 443 to inhibit means to help and to prepare for action.
And are those who fancy that every brain alteration is an evil really aware how other influences of our civilization hammer on the neurones and injure our mental powers far beyond the effects of a moderate use of alcohol? The vulgar rag-time music, the gambling of the speculators, the sensationalism of the yellow press, the poker playing of the men and the bridge playing of the women, the mysticism and superstition of the new fancy churches, the hysterics of the baseball games, the fascination of murder cases, the noise on the Fourth of July and on the three hundred and sixty-four other days of the year, the wild chase for success; all are poison for the brain and mind. They make the nervous system and the will endlessly more unfit for the duties of the day than a glass of lager beer on a hot summer’s evening.
Drying up a Nation Emotionally
What would result if prohibition should really prohibit, and all the inhibitions which a mild use of beer and wine promise to the brain really be lost? The psychological outcome would be twofold: certain effects of alcohol which serve civilization would be lost; and, on the other hand, much more harmful substitutions would set in. To begin with: the nation would lose its chief means of recreation after work. We know to-day too well that physical exercise and sport is not real rest for the exhausted brain-cells. The American masses work hard throughout the day. The sharp physical and mental labor, the constant hurry and drudgery produce a state of tension and irritation which demands before the night’s sleep some dulling inhibition if a dangerous unrest is not to set in. Alcohol relieves that daily tension most directly.
Not less important would be the loss on the emotional side. Emotional desire for a life in beauty would yield to the triviality of usefulness. Puritanism has held back the real American spirit of artistic creation in fine arts and music and drama: prohibition without substitutes would crush still more the esthetic spirit in the brain of man and would make beauty still more the domain of women. Her more responsive physiological constitution does not need the artificial paralysis of the inhibiting centers. The mind of the average woman shows that lower degree of checking power which small alcoholic doses produce in the average man. But just therefore she and men of the female type cannot carry on alone the work of the nation. A national life without the artificial inhibitions of the restraining centers becomes for the large masses a matter of mere practical calculation and righteous dulness. Truly the German, the Frenchman, the Italian who enjoys his glass of light wine and then wanders joyful and elated to the masterpieces of the opera, serves humanity better than the New Englander who drinks his ice-water and sits satisfied at the vaudeville show, world-far from real art. Better America inspired than America sober. Can we forget that in almost all parts of the globe even religious life began with intoxication cults? God Indra was in the wine for the Hindus and Dionysius for the Greeks. It is the optimistic exuberance of life, the emotional inspiration, which alcohol brought into the dulness of human days, and the history of culture shows it on every page.
But with the emotion dries up the will. Mere righteousness needs no stimulation. But the American nation would never have achieved its world work if the attitude of resignation had been its national trait. Those pioneers who opened the land and awoke to life its resources were men who longed for excitement, for the intensity of life, for vividness of experience. The nation would not be loyal to its tradition if it were not to foster this desire of intense experience: the moderate use of alcohol is both training in such intensified conscious experience and training in the control and discipline of such states. The nation needs both, and as the child learns to prepare for the work of life by plays and games, so man is schooling himself for the active and effective life by the temperate use of exciting beverages which playingly awake those vivid feelings of success. The scholar and the minister and a thousand other individuals may not need this training, but the millions, the masses, cannot prepare themselves for a national career of effectiveness if this opportunity is taken from their lives. History shows it abundantly.
To be sure, all this is but half true, because, as we said, the individual, and finally the nation, may seek substitutes, may satisfy the craving for emotional excitement, for will elation, for intense experience, by other means than the oldest and most widely scattered. Zealotism in religious belief, tyranny and cruelty, sexual over-indulgence and perversion, gambling and betting, mysticism and superstition, recklessness and adventurousness, and, above all, senseless crimes have always been the psychological means of overcoming the emptiness and monotony of an unstimulated life. They produce, just like alcohol, that partial paralysis and create intense experiences. They thus take hold of the masses, so long as the social mind is not entirely dried up, with the necessity 444 of a psychological law. There is no more dangerous state for a healthy, strong nation than mental monotony in the life of the masses. Catholic countries play to the imagination at least through the religion, monarchic countries have their own picturesqueness and color, America under prohibition pushes the masses into gambling and reckless excitements and sexual disorder and money-crazes and criminal explosions of the mind.
The Temperance Experiment in Mohammedanism
Has not history experimented sufficiently? Prohibitionist stump speakers may tell us that their cause means the hitherto unheard-of progress of civilization; the United States, after abolishing slavery for mankind, is called on to end also the tyranny of alcohol under which humanity has suffered for ages. But are there not two hundred millions of Moslems who are obedient to Mohammed’s law, that wine drinking is sinful? What is the outcome? Of course, it is not inspiring to hear the boast of the Moslems that the Christians bring whiskey to Africa and bestialize the natives, while the Mohammedans fight alcohol. But aside from this, their life goes on in slavery and polygamy and semi-civilization. All the strong nations, all those whose contributions were of lasting value to the progress of mankind, have profited from the help of artificial stimulation and intoxicants.