This is an odd Montaigne essay, because he seems to fight with his own firm opinion about drinking and vice. He doesn’t think much of drunks:
Now drunkenness, considered among other vices, has always seemed to me gross and brutish. In others our minds play a larger part; and there are some vices which have something or other magnanimous about them, if that is the right word. There are some which are intermingled with learning, diligence, valour, prudence, skill and finesse: drunkenness is all body and earthy. Moreover the grossest nation of our day is alone in honouring it. Other vices harm our intellect: this one overthrows it; and it stuns the body: The worst state for a man is when he loses all consciousness and control of himself.
I have an odd personal history with drinking. I’ve never been all that attached to it, but I’ve been around people who had very strong opinions on the matter. After I graduated college, I rented a house with a few friends who were also working in Washington, D.C. One of these friends was in Alcoholics Anonymous and tended to use the AA prism to organize his life—he saw addiction or family connections to addiction everywhere. So at one point he convinced me to go to an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting with him, and I kept gong for a couple months, even though I don’t think my parents are, were or ever had been alcoholics. The meetings became an odd part of my out of college culture, mostly out of Paul’s force of personality.
During my marriage, my ex-wife also kept an extremely close eye on everything I drank, mostly because her father was an alcoholic, so she was on guard against it in me. I was never a serious risk for this kind of addiction because alcohol tends to depress me, not bring on any state of comfort or euphoria. In fact, the one time when alcohol did seem pleasurable to me was the period when I was taking antidepressants. But even then, only one drink was plenty for me, and I soon learned that enjoying alcohol was an easy way to gain a lot of weight very fast, so I kept it in check.
Today, I’m actually pretty close to Montaigne’s opinion on this. I’m purely a social drinker—meaning I’ll drink mostly if it would seem socially awkward to refrain from it. But I do drink occasionally and don’t really have Montaigne’s moral opposition to it, even if I find drunken company obnoxious. I agree with Montaigne’s position that alcohol consumption feels a bit like poisoning my mind and body, and the depressant effect it has on me hits within two or three drinks, so I tend to stop there.
But back to Montaigne: he has strongly stated views, but spends most of this essay attempting to persuade himself to take a softer view. Such as this thought:
Even among the Stoics there are those who advise you to let yourself drink as much as you like occasionally and to get drunk so as to relax your soul: They say that Socrates often carried off the prize in this trial of strength too.
But even though the ancients were accommodating of the drink, that still doesn’t quite convince him:
Leaving aside the fact that I readily allow my beliefs to be captive to the Ancients, I find this vice base and stultifying but less wicked and a cause of less harm than the others, which virtually all do more direct public damage to our society. And if, as they maintain, we can never enjoy ourselves without it costing us something, I find that this vice costs our conscience less than the others: besides it is not a negligible consideration that it is easy to provide for and easy to find.
So he comes to internal compromise—he doesn’t like it, but considering all the vices in the world, those that do harm to others are more serious. Having settled that, he let fly one of the best quotes in all of his essays:
If you base your pleasure on drinking good wine you are bound to suffer from sometimes drinking bad. Your taste ought to be more lowly and more free. To be a good drinker you must not have too tender a palate.
There’s a sound logic behind that thought—but then again, is being a good drinker an admirable thing in Montaigne’s view? I’m not sure. Neither am I sure if he thinks lechery is a vice to be avoided. He seems to take a little of both sides here:
Like shop-apprentices and workmen we ought to refuse no opportunity for a drink; we ought always to have the desire for one in our heads: it seems that we are cutting down this particular one all the time and that, as I saw as a boy, dinner parties, suppers, and late-night feasts used to be much more frequent and common in our houses than they are now. Could we really be moving towards an improvement in something at least! Certainly not. It is because we throw ourselves into lechery much more than our fathers did. Those two occupations impede each other’s strength. On the one hand lechery has weakened our stomachs: on the other, sober drinking has rendered us vigorous and lively in our love-making.
Montaigne goes on in the next few paragraphs to note how his father spoke very respectfully of women and he believed French men of his father’s age were less caught up in sexual shenanigans.
But it’s always the case that later generations assume the days of their parents and grandparents were more chaste than their own. I know for a fact that it was not the case, especially for my parents’ generation in the 1970s. The seventies were probably the most sexually crazy decade modern culture has lived through. Many contemporary surveys, in fact, find that the current generation of teenagers are the least sexually active they’ve come across in modern times. This does not surprise me either, creating the completely bizarre cultural alignment of grandparents who had wilder youths than their grandchildren.
This essay is also odd in its own way—lots of moralism up front, but by the end, Montaigne’s resigned to accepting human behavior for how it is:
A man can be as wise as he likes: he is still a man; and what is there more frail, more wretched, more a thing of nothing, than man?
Having arrived at the point of embracing folly, Montaigne gives us a nice little synthesis of Aristotle and Erasmus in this highly economical paragraph:
Aristotle says that no outstanding soul is free from a mixture of folly. He is right to call folly any leap—however praiseworthy it might be—which goes beyond our reason and our discourse. Even more so, in that wisdom is a controlled handling of our soul, carried out on our soul’s responsibility, with measure and proportion.
I completely accept folly and think we need to create space for people to lose their heads in life, even having a little too much to drink on occasion. I feel empathy for those with substance abuse or other addiction issues. My addictions are more accurately called obsessions and they aren’t about creating pleasure or even calming anxieties. They are more about keeping my mind in motion so I can be something other than a passive consumer of the world around me.
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