ReageraMera

Ladies and gentlemen,

Although, in the Western world, drugs were already used in the nineteenth century and before, the use was limited to tiny elitist circles of aristocrats and writers. It was only in the late nineteenth sixties and early nineteen seventies that drugs became part of a much broader culture and began to be used by a much more substantial group within the population.

Significantly, the Van Dale, the top lexicon of the Dutch language, the first edition of which appeared in 1864, contained no words related to drugs, such as ‘drugs', ‘cannabis', ‘heroin', etc. before the editions of the nineteen-seventies. I haven't checked, but I presume that that is the case with the lexica of other languages too. Clearly, before the end of the sixties drugs were no part of Western culture.

                            

That raises the question why drugs did become part of Western culture in the sixties. Why did drugs suddenly become fashionable? Was it just because they came on the market at that time? But why did drugs come on the market? There must have been a huge increase in demand for them. But why did so many people all of a sudden want to use drugs? The answer, it seems to me, is that Western culture itself had all of a sudden begun to change drastically, so drastically indeed that one could speak of a cultural revolution. This revolution constituted a transvaluation of many if not all moral values. What had been regarded as good up to that point was now redefined as something evil or at least morally indifferent. And what had been seen as evil or morally indifferent, was now judged to be good. The sudden interest in drugs is part of this more general transformation.

                            

Why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because we, who are opposed to the use of drugs, cannot afford to disregard the link between that use and the broader cultural background. For as long as this background remains as it is, the fight against drugs will be ineffectual. Hence, the fight against drugs involves a more general fight against some of the primary aspects of today's culture, or -more specifically- against certain basic conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil dominant in today's Western society. The aim of this speech is to set out some of these basic moral conceptions, show how they are linked to the use of drugs, and criticize them.

The moral ideas that came to the fore in the nineteen sixties and -seventies and rapidly became dominant in the West, were far from new. They go back to the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. What happened in the sixties and seventies was that these ideas, which had been shared by relatively few people before that time, became the moral conviction of the many. I cannot go into the question why this happened at that point in time, because that would take me too far from what I want to say. The important thing is that it happened. That certain moral ideas, going back to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which had until then been shared by a minority, caught the imagination of the masses and became the new moral orthodoxy, the new cultural paradigm, the new civil religion.

I'll first say a few things about the Enlightenment, because chronologically it came before Romanticism. What are its core moral ideas? Many would argue that these are best expressed by Kant in his small essay Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung?, which is a plea for ‘Mündigkeit'. This word cannot be literally translated into English, but its meaning is clear: it refers to the capacity and the responsibility to think out things for yourself, and not let others think for you. Man has been gifted by reason; he should use it, and not just do what others think should be done.

Now, apart from the fact that this is a questionable piece of advice, since many important forms of social cooperation would become impossible if it were taken literally, I believe that it is simply wrong to see this Kantian belief as expressing the main moral ideas of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, ladies and gentlemen, wanted to achieve not so much an emancipation of individual reason, as an emancipation of the passions, of the desires of the individual. Let me give you a few quotes.

The first is from Thomas Hobbes, who, together with Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza, is one of the seventeenth-century founding fathers of the Enlightenment. Towards the end of chapter six of the Leviathan Hobbes defines happiness, or, as he calls it, felicity.

Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth (...) is that men call felicity.

So happiness results from going after anything one wants or desires, and satisfying these desires. Life is a permanent, restless pursuit of happiness, i.e. the fulfillment of ones desires.

This implies -and Hobbes is honest enough to say it out loud- that there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind.

Now, ‘tranquility of mind' is a significant phrase. It is the English translation of the Roman expression tranquillitas animi, which is itself a translation of two more or less synonymous Greek phrases: απαθεια and αταραξια. Απαθεια derives from α -without- and παθη -passions, i.e. desires. Hence, it means to be without desires. Αταραξια derives from α -without- and the verb ταρασσω, meaning to stir, to jumble up, to agitate, to disturb. Hence, αταρακτος means, to be spiritually at peace, not being agitated. Agitated by what? By the passions, the desires of course.  

Now, this not being agitated by the desires, being at peace spiritually, tranquillitas animi, for centuries in a row was at the heart of the Western moral tradition. This was regarded as one of the most important things to achieve in life. Hence, Hobbes by saying what he says, radically rejects the whole Western moral tradition.

How exactly did the tradition argue tranquillitas animi could be achieved? Primarily, by subjecting the desires to the command of reason. So the fight against the unruly desires, the effort to order them according to reason was traditionally regarded as one of the central moral duties in life. It is not that all desires where regarded as necessarily bad. But they were seen as in need of close supervision. Many of them should be tempered and not taken too seriously. And some, indeed, should be crushed. Reason should stand guard over them all and watch them closely.

Hobbes does away with all this. The desires should not be controlled and tempered. They should be satisfied as much as possible. Therein lies felicity, i.e. happiness. And reason? What does this new Enlightenment view imply for reason? Well, a later philosopher, whose views on morality are very much in the vein of Hobbes, David Hume, spelled it out in his Treatise of Human Nature,

Reason is (...) the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

So instead of putting reason on a pedestal, the Enlightenment, threw it off its pedestal, where it had been for ages, close to the divine. In its place, it put the passions, the desires, and bluntly proclaimed that happiness consists in obtaining as many things as one desires.

Now let me introduce one more concept. Ever since antiquity the desires were seen as intimately linked to pleasure, in the sense that the satisfaction of a desire was rewarded, so to speak, with pleasure. The frustration of a desire on the other hand was seen as linked to what is usually termed ‘pain'.

Obviously, since the desires were traditionally seen as problematic, so was pleasure. It was something that was frowned upon. Pleasure was regarded as not entirely kosher. Pleasure could easily lead a man astray, and make him do things that would not only ruin the happiness of others, but also that of himself. The pain on the other hand that resulted from being thwarted in the satisfaction of a desire, was seen as something positive, in the sense that it is an incentive to not let oneself be bothered by such desires at all and to transcend them. No desires, no pain.

This negative verdict of pleasure, and positive verdict of pain was overruled by the Enlightenment. It declared pleasure not only innocent, but positively good, and pain positively evil. Pleasure was what we do it all for. We need to maximize pleasure in life, and minimize pain. Now, pleasure in Greek is ηδονη, which of course is the etymological root of our notion of hedonism. So, the Enlightenment is in essence a vindication of hedonism.

Now, let's return to the cultural revolution of the sixties and the seventies. Part of this revolution was Enlightenment thinking acquiring a hold over the minds and hearts of the masses. This meant, as we can now clearly see, that an age old tradition of moral thinking, going back to the ancient Greeks, and continued by Christianity, centering on the idea that

desires and pleasure should be distrusted and closely guarded by reason, because they can easily make our life miserable, was replaced by the opposite view, namely that the desires and pleasure are precisely what makes us happy, and reason is merely their ‘servant'. The first view could be named ‘ ascetic', the best name for the second is ‘hedonistic'. The nineteen-sixties and seventies saw the rise, on a massive scale, of hedonism. That is to say, of the pursuit of pleasure and the running away from pain.

What view on drugs follows from hedonism? It is evident that within that moral language, drugs are an asset. They give pleasure, very intense pleasure, instantaneously, and they spare you the pain of having to work for it. From this point of view, little or nothing beats drugs. All other types of pleasure are either less intense, and/or take more time to achieve, and/or require the pain of a lot of mental or physical work. You have some kind of pain? You feel down, insecure, unaccepted, bored, or plagued by troubles that are inherent in life? Well, take a pill, or a shot, or a line, and you will immediately feel great. You will enjoy life again. Lots of pleasure, no pain.

Ladies, and gentlemen, the problem with the argument, for us, is that it is true. As long as you're a hedonist, little or nothing beats drugs. So as long as hedonism is a widely held moral ideology in our society, drugs will be widely used.

Now let us turn to Romanticism, the second main ideological current, underlying the revolutionary change in moral ideas, that started in the late sixties. Interestingly, Romanticism started out, in the early nineteenth-century, as a reaction to the ideas propagated by the Enlightenment. It is often argued that at its root lay a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, in the name of the emotions. But, given the fact that, as explained above, reason was not so highly regarded by Enlightenment-thinking, this cannot be true. So what did Romanticism object to and react against in the Enlightenment? First and foremost against its moral ideas. Romanticism was and has always remained an anti-hedonistic worldview. Yet, Romanticism too, when it became a mass phenomenon in the sixties, considerably whipped up the demand for drugs. How is that possible? To understand it we need to know more about the concern lying at the heart of Romantic thought. That concern is the self,  ‘identity', ‘authenticity'.

It may surprise you, but this was a completely new concern at the time. Before the rise of Romanticism these matters were not an issue. The reason being that human beings were regarded as variations on one single theme. What impressed older thinkers, throughout history, about humankind was not so much the uniqueness of every individual, but the remarkable likeness of each to everyone else. We are all in a sense children of the same parents. We all look more or less alike, we all more or less reason alike, have the same emotions, the same desires, the same sins, etc. Of course there are differences, most importantly the difference between men and women, but these dwindle in comparison to what we share. Now, it is clear that as long as this was the intellectual framework, there was little or no latitude for reflections on the self,  ‘identity', ‘authenticity'.