The Ups and Downs of Deviancy

I  have commented in the past on the sick, twisted, irony that the same period that saw tobacco use demonized, driven out of public spaces – even outdoors ones – and increasingly private spaces as well, saw the legalization, normalization, and glorification of the use of marijuana.   Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who sat as a Democrat in the American Senate representing New York in the days when Democrats, even Democrats from New York, were not all open cheerleaders for civilizational collapse, wrote an article for The American Scholar in 1993 entitled “Defining Deviancy Down”.   The gist of the article was that many were responding to the explosion of social and moral problems, such as family breakups, single-parenthood, and crime by simply lowering standards and expectations, and that this was not a good thing.   Later that year neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer responded to Moynihan’s article with a speech to the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Defining Deviancy Up” in which he argued that the Senator was right, but that he addressed only half the story, the other half being the imposition of new standards on ordinary people so that “once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant”.   A few years later Robert H. Bork, the American jurist and law professor whose appointment to the American Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan had been defeated in the Senate, expanded upon both of these themes at book length in his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1993).   The war on tobacco which is carcinogenic, especially when chemicals have been added to it as is the case with cigarettes, but which can both calm and stimulate minds without impairing them in the slightest, fought simultaneously with a campaign to promote marijuana which is known to mess up people’s minds, is this set of complementary phenomena, defining deviancy both down and up at the same time, manifesting itself in the realm of substance use and abuse.   One could, of course, take the position that the old ideal of mens sana in corpore sano calls for opposition to both tobacco and marijuana, but the position taken by our contemporary culture shows just how much it has come to elevate the body over the mind.   Plato would be appalled.

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we are now seeing the combination of defining deviancy up/down manifesting itself in yet another way in this same area.   Earlier this week, an organization called the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction made international headlines.   Before commenting on how it did that a few words about the organization itself are appropriate.   The CCSA was established by an act of Parliament during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.   At the time it was called the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, which name is still reflected in the acronym, the new name having been adopted for reasons of political correctness.   The organization’s board is appointed by the Governor-in-Council and it operates under the oversight of Health Canada.   Therefore, while the organization was set up as a non-profit charity that accepts private funding and claims to occupy the space between government agency and non-government organization, it is questionable as to how large or how real the distance between it and the government it answers to actually is.   It made headlines by releasing a report, commissioned and funded by Health Canada, on alcohol use which basically said, in about 90 pages, that there is no safe level of consumption, that there are no health benefits to drinking, that bottles of booze should come with warning labels, and that Canadians should limit themselves to a maximum of two “standard” drinks per week.   This attracted so much attention because of how radically out of sync these recommendations are with those of health agencies in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, the United States, France, and basically all of Europe except the Netherlands.

 

The admirably reactionary David Warren, retired Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of the sadly defunct Idler, sees this as a step towards a revival of prohibition.    While some might say that this is reading too much into the report I am inclined to think that Warren is right, as he usually is about most matters that don’t pertain to the patriarch of Rome’s claim to supremacy over the entire Church.   The same media that spent the last two to three years demanding total suppression of Canadians’ basic freedoms of movement, assembly, and religion because “experts” said that “social distancing” and “lockdowns” and basically enforced isolation were “necessary” to stop the spread of a virus that they were depicting as far more lethal than it actually was (even at the beginning) and insisting that anyone who disagreed with them was promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation” and must be silenced, even as they gaslighted everyone with obvious nonsense such as their denial of natural immunity, has been promoting the CCSA’s report and recommendations in much the same manner.   Take the CBC for example.  CBC writers Ioanna Roumeliotis and Brenda Witmer wrote up the story with the same attitude of “the experts” have spoken, we must all bow down and obey that has become so nauseatingly familiar since 2020.   With regards to the CCSA report saying that “no amount of alcohol is safe” they use the words “points out that” rather than the more objective and accurate “claims”.   The appeals to the authority of the World Health Organization are there too and the gaslighting.   The gaslighting is most obvious in the denial of there being health benefits alongside the risks.   Even the claim the most Canadians are unware of the risks is highly dubious.  While the claim applies specifically to the risk focused on in the report, i.e., the risk with regards to cancer, it is absurd to say that most Canadians are unaware of the many other risks attendant upon drinking alcohol, and I very much doubt that anyone undeterred by the risk of DTs, liver cirrhosis, getting into a brawl, driving into a tree or making a total ass of oneself in public and alienating one’s friends and family, is going to care much about a risk of cancer.   Sunlight is carcinogenic.   Is that good reason to either adopt a vampire’s schedule or erect a sunblocker ala The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns?   Bill Gates, in the unlikely event you happen to be reading this, the answer to that last question is “no”.

 

Whether or not our government is about to repeat the famously failed social experiment of a century past when, due to the estrogen poisoning brought on by having given women the vote, we temporarily imposed a total ban on alcoholic beverages, (1) by sponsoring this ridiculous report they are certainly engaging in Krauthammer’s “defining deviancy up”.   One does not have to look far to find the corresponding acts of “defining deviancy down”.   The province of British Columbia is currently decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs, something that its largest city Vancouver did two years ago.    As of the last day of this month, it will be legal for adults in British Columbia to possess small amounts of cocaine, opiates, and methamphetamine.   Both city and province required the cooperation of Health Canada for this, as the federal agency needed to grant a waiver under the Controlled Drug and Substances Act.   It was not difficult to obtain such an exemption as the current Dominion premier is on board with British Columbia’s approach to the drug crisis.   Neither the Prime Minister nor the government of British Columbia nor the city council of Vancouver are libertarian purists who support decriminalization because they don’t think the government should be dictating personal choices.  These are the same people, remember, who a year ago were telling people that they had to have a new, man-made, substance injected into their bloodstream if they wanted anything resembling a normal life in society.   Their argument for decriminalization in the midst of a drug crisis is that they think it will decrease the number of drug deaths.   The reasoning behind this is that as long as hard drugs are illegal, those who use them must rely upon illicit sources, which may be tainted with such substances as fentanyl and down which can cause overdoses in amounts that are miniscule compared to other drugs.   This is also the reasoning used by those who argue that the government should provide, at the taxpayers’ expense, “safe” drugs, needles, and places to use them.    Indeed, those who argue for decriminalization for other than libertarian reasons and those who support government provided “safe injection sites” are generally the same people.    At the very least, this way of thinking can be criticized as myopic, focusing on the danger that fentanyl and other contaminants pose to drug users as if this were the whole of the drug problem, and ignoring the countless other dangers posed by hard drugs, often to other members of society who don’t use them themselves.   A man who is walking down the sidewalk, minding his own business, and gets his head punched in by someone whom he doesn’t know from Adam, because that someone is in a meth-induced paranoia and thinks that he, the man he punches that is, is an alien hitman sent after him by the demonic overlord of a planet in some distant galaxy, will require just as much stiches, hospital time, or morgue space depending on the severity of the attack, if the meth was obtained from a government-funded “safe” site as if it were obtained on the street.   At least if it were obtained from the street, the man would not have been forced to contribute to his own assault with his taxes.   Note that those who advocate this approach of dealing with the drug crisis are the ones who speak about the need to “destigmatize” drug use.   To destigmatize something, however, is to remove societal disapproval, and, as we have already seen with regards to marijuana this, if not nipped in the bud, will become a demand for societal approval of hard drug use and a cultural campaign to promote it.   We are already witnessing this taking shape around us.

 

To summarize, we are being told by the CCSA, Health Canada, and the CBC that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol that can be consumed at the same time that we are being told that hard drugs should be decriminalized and, worse, “destigmatized” and  safe” injection sites provided for their use by the government at our expense.   It is tobacco v. marijuana and the defining of deviancy both up and down at the same time all over again.

 

This time around, however, there is a spiritual aspect to this that was not there when tobacco was being driven out to make room for marijuana.   Neither tobacco, which was unknown to the Old World until imported from the Americas, nor hemp, the plant from which marijuana is obtained and which was certainly present in the Ancient Near East, are mentioned anywhere in the Holy Scriptures by name.   Alcoholic beverages, however, are certainly mentioned in the Bible and the New Testament makes use of the Greek family of words from which our “pharmacy” is derived.   With regards to the nouns φαρμακός and φαρμακεία, these are usually rendered “sorcerer” and “witchcraft” or “sorcery” respectively in English translations of the New Testament.   Their primary reference is with regards to drugs.   The first is often rendered “poisoner” in uses outside of the New Testament, and the second can mean both the administration of drugs and poisoning.    They are translated the way they are in English Bibles because the idea in the New Testament is of the use of substances in magic and communication with the spirit world.   They are never used in a positive sense. 

 

The Bible speaks of alcoholic beverages, primarily wine, far more frequently and by contrast the overwhelming majority of references are positive.   Drunkenness is condemned, but wine is spoken of as a gift of God given to cheer the heart of men.   In what St. John the Evangelist identifies as the very first miracle that Our Lord performed, He instructed the servants at a wedding He attended at Cana at some point between His Baptism and the beginning of His public ministry in Galilee to fill six stone waterpots, each capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons, with water after the wedding wine supply had run out.   He then told them to take the pots to the chief steward.   The roughly 120 gallons of water was transformed into roughly 120 gallons of wine which the chief steward proclaimed to be better than that which had already been consumed.    Four chapters later, after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the only miracle other than the Resurrection which St. John records in common with the Synoptic Evangelists, Jesus in His Bread of Life discourse with the multitude proclaimed the necessity to eat His body and drink His blood.   Later, at the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that He shared with His Apostles before the Crucifixion, Jesus would reveal how this was to be done by instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion in which His followers would partake of bread as His body, broken for us, and wine as His blood of the New Testament, shed for us and for many for the remission of sins.   Partaking of wine as Christ’s blood in this way, has been essential to the main ceremony of regular Christian worship in all the most ancient Churches ever since.   Only in the last couple of centuries in North America have certain sects – separatist groups – substituted the Islamic view of wine for the traditional Christian one, and in support of this substitution invented spurious arguments that Jesus turned the water into unfermented, concentrated grape juice and that this is what should be used in Communion. (2)   Therefore, those who define deviancy up to include the drinking of any amount of alcohol in so doing attack the central rite of the Christian faith and religion, while in defining deviancy down so as to “de-stigmatize” the use of hard drugs, they have embraced behaviour that in the Scriptures is inseparable from trafficking with evil spirits.

 

In this, the true nature of this aspect of the “culture war” is evident.   Ultimately, it is on the spiritual field, that this battle will be won or lost.

 

(1)   About the only thing positive I have to say about prohibition was that it inspired Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian humourist, economist, and political scientist to write an excellent essay against it.  Entitled “The Tyranny of Prohibition” it first appeared in the August 2, 1919 issue of The Living Age, and can be found in several anthologies of Leacock’s essays.   Prohibition is also discussed in his “The Woman Question” which was first published in 1915 and can also be found in Leacock anthologies, including Essays and Literary Studies, the first edition of which was published in 1916.   The two essays taken together can be read as a before and after look at the two big social experiments that occurred together at the end of the First World War.

 

(2)   The sects and revivalists who thought up this idea also started up, in conjunction with the early feminists, a prohibition movement that they inappropriately called “temperance”, which word used properly means the virtue of “self-control” and “moderation”.   This idea remains in circulation largely due to the influence of the book Bible Wines: The Laws of Fermentation and the Wines of the Ancients by Rev. William Patton, first published in 1871.   This book employs the same kind of arguments that Alexander Hislop used in The Two Babylons to back up his claim that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition other than the Bible itself was the pagan religion of ancient Babylon dressed up to look Christian.  There are plenty of quotes and plenty of footnotes which look very convincing unless you take the time to look up the quotes in the original sources, most of which are very obscure to discourage you from doing this.   If you do, however, you realize quickly that the entire book is pure codswallop.     I diagnose those who promote the messages of these books as suffering from a severe case of κεφαληανααυτουπρωκτόςις.