Iqra’i

Poulos has a bathtubful of good advice on tap regarding imported beers (I can publicly agree with his recommendation of Delirium Tremens because I drank it in Quebec and therefore legally), while Noah finds common cause with George Will over the beverage’s fundamentally therapeutic nature.

Personally, I bristle a bit at this paragraph of Will’s piece. Admittedly, I think he broaches the issue as delicately and critically as possible, but this is the sort of semi-scientific assertion that so usually gets presented as proven fact in the MSM that I’m not confident his readers will mirror his skepticism:

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

Or maybe it has to do with the circumstances under which alcohol was introduced to those populations. If, as Will suggests — heck, asserts — earlier in the column, beer production was tied in Eurasia to the settlement of cities, it seems logical that the concurrent rise of new forms of nutrition and new social circumstances in which to consume them might have caused the two to become interwoven. Even the development of social conventions around alcohol, let alone the concept of an inherently public “drinking space” (pub culture, etc.), would have presented significant external constraints on immoderate consumption individually, and enabled the “teaching” of proper consumption intergenerationally.

When alcohol was introduced to peoples who hadn’t been exposed to it generations earlier, by contrast, it was presented as just another foodstuff or commodity and stripped of the social context that had made its consumption manageable. Without the publicity and contextualization of Eurasian alcohol consumption, of course native individuals were more likely to be harmfully immoderate in their use of the stuff. (This actually happened in the other direction as well — think about the difference between use of the peace pipe and Europe’s early-17th-century tobacco mania.)

I’m sure that in reality it’s some mix of both; I just wish the scientists would stop being so reductionistic about things, especially when such reductionism shades toward social Darwinism. It’s also an interesting cautionary tale about the introduction of alcohol to populations unfamiliar with it and who lack the proper public context to consume it moderately: such as what happens to college freshmen every year, for example.