It's hard to say in which activity cultural reactionaries take more delight: the persecution of vices they do not routinely practice themselves, or the ferocious defense of the ones they do. It has happened more than once that a right-winger who would vehemently defend the punitive incarceration of anyone selling an ounce of weed will also be the first person to denounce as creeping tyranny the news that New York City, say, just imposed an incremental tax on soda. Generally, they will hold both views without detecting the least contradiction between them, and perhaps there isn't one. So long as one is not troubled by the Categorical Imperative, at least, one can be against the vices of others and passionately in favor of one's own.
I was thinking about this in reading the arch-Tory George Saintsbury's 1920 work on oenology, Notes on a Cellar-Book. I went to the book expecting a light introduction to the joys of connoisseurship. I was unprepared to find in its pages quite such a blistering polemic against the evils of Prohibitionism. One might think that for a traditionalist and product of the Victorian era like Saintsbury, the question of whether or not to ban alcohol could go either way. But Saintsbury is clear in his own mind: the attempted abolition of booze was an instance of Pecksniffian reformism, intrusive modernism, and—worst of all—a frontal attack on one of his own dearest pleasures. And for the conservative, the creature comforts, even or perhaps especially when they take the form of cherished private vices, will always come first.
Saintsbury's book is an odd one in part, as I say, because of how unexpected its tone is. Turning to a book on wine, after all—particularly if, like me, you are someone with limited knowledge or experience of the subject, but a desire to learn more—one seeks a companionable guide to the enjoyment of one of life's reputed "finer things." Saintsbury, though, turns out to be a forbidding Cicerone. To be sure, he is witty and garrulous. But he also has a far more keen ideological axe to grind that one was expecting. Wine was, in 1920, at the center of an international culture war, and was not just the high-prestige affectation of a few. And Saintsbury knows which side he is on.
In the eyes of posterity, of course, Saintsbury was "right." The Prohibition Amendment in the United States—which Saintsbury so feared would be imported to Great Britain—is now regarded as a failed social experiment. But that doesn't mean we entirely share Saintsbury's evident self-satisfaction in his own views. After all, the Temperance reformers of the era were motivated by concerns—the effort to combat domestic violence, for instance—that we find it hard today to dismiss. Even if they proposed a false solution, they seem worthy of some revisionist sympathies now that we are rid of the one they temporarily succeeded in imposing. Moreover, Saintsbury's arguments have a specious quality that is all-too reminiscent of the reasoning we hear today from conservatives on topics like gun regulation.
One could perfectly well agree with Saintsbury, to be sure, that an outright ban on all liquor, such as the United States pursued, was going too far. The history of all attempts to legislate vice out of existence suggests that it never works. All it manages to do is to make the same behavior more dangerous for all concerned. Besides, in a world that is in so many respects unjust, it seems gratuitously cruel to take away the few consolations nature makes available to all—among them mild inebriation. One is reminded of Céline's observation in Journey to the End of the Night that "nearly all a poor bastard's desires are punishable by jail."* Surely a rational and compassionate state would not add booze to the proscribed list as well—at least not until they abolished poverty, work, sickness, and old age along with it.
But having agreed with the Victorian oenologist up to this point, we could nonetheless press him: "okay, but could liquor nonetheless be regulated as to quantity, variety, hours of sale, etc.?" Saintsbury if anything detests the people advocating for these reasonable half-measures even more than he does the teetotalers, and it is here that he begins to sound most like today's conservative gun lobby. For he insists that any such policy of compromise is in fact nothing but a slippery slope to outright prohibition. He states that no party has ever been as dishonest as that of the temperance reformers, because, "professing to desire only restricted hours, limitation in strength of drink, heavy taxation, etc., [they] are really working for prohibition itself by steps and degrees."
One hears the same today from gun advocates, every time a modest reform to limit assault weapons, magazine capacities, sales to people below the drinking age, etc. gets proposed. They cry: that is only the first step! Today, it's magazine capacities and exploding bullets; tomorrow, it's door-to-door raids! (And in fairness, it must be added, the left often deploys the same specious reasoning in opposing its own least-favored restrictions.)
Part of the reasons all sides to the culture war deploy this slippery slope argument is that it is largely correct, as least as far as its assessment of the other side's motives is concerned. Most liberals actually would be fine with just banning guns outright. People like myself, who have never owned a gun, have a hard time understanding exactly what the fuss is about in keeping one, and wouldn't mind simply interpreting the second amendment in its original sense: namely, as a limitation on the federal government's ability to regulate state militias that is silent one way or the other on an individual right to carry arms.
The problem with the "slippery slope" argument, therefore, is not that it totally misconstrues the motives of one's opponents. (Many people who argue for "half-measures" in the here and now really do see them as stepping stones on the way to a more sweeping policy overhaul.) The problem with it, rather, is that it makes it impossible for anyone to advocate a middle ground position in good faith, without being suspected of harboring a secret and far more comprehensive agenda. Saintsbury must have been right, for instance, that some of the people trying to restrict hours of liquor sales were out-and-out prohibitionists at heart; but presumably not all were. So too, in our contemporary gun debate, say, there must be people who—in advocating for a middle ground position—really mean what they say.
Even if they didn't, though, this also is true: every policy that ultimately gets adopted will be somewhere in between conceivable extremes. So the argument to any given policy proposal can't simply be: "no, we can't possibly be in the middle," because we always will be somewhere in the middle. Guns are not wholly unregulated in U.S. society currently, for instance, and very few people think they should be. So simply protesting against a new measure on the grounds that it is a regulation cannot be a sufficient argument. Opposing a policy simply because it is in between two extremes, instead of already at one of the two poles, is to oppose every measure ever promulgated, since no matter the policy that was actually implemented, one could still dream up some even more far-reaching variant of it.
However fallacious, though, Saintsbury's vociferous defense of his right to imbibe helps to shed light on the psychology of the conservative partisan of vice. Saintsbury recognizes, to be sure, that liquor could be taken in excess; much as today's gun advocates are aware that firearms are used to commit horrible acts. But Saintsbury, reminiscent again of the gun lobby, takes the view that wine doesn't kill people; people kill people. When confronted with examples of people committing crimes while under the influence, for example, he argues at one point that they should face even stiffer penalties for their acts of violence than they would for the same deeds if performed sober.
Why? Because, they have in that case committed a crime not only against society and their individual victims, but against the reputation of alcohol too. They ought to be punished "double," writes Saintsbury, "—once for the bad act, and once for the misuse of a good thing, by forcing it to reveal [their] true nature." One begins to understand, confronted with this argument, how gun-toting conservatives square the fact of their support for the "personal liberty" to carry guns with their preference for extremely harsh criminal sentencing. Locking people up and throwing away the key is not, to them, merely a matter of ensuring public safety; it is also necessary so as to vindicate the honor of guns. How terrible to taint such a beautiful and noble weapon by association with something so unsavory as human volition.
These are the kinds of absurdities that result when one is needlessly committed to the proposition that something must either be banned outright or permitted wholesale. In reality, of course, the wise treatment of dangerous things and social vices always falls somewhere in the middle: a harm reduction strategy that recognizes the impossibility of wholly eliminating the vice in question, but also tries to regulate its use in ways that minimize its potential for abuse. Barry Goldwater famously said "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," and he was already wrong about that—at least in the sense in which he intended it. But we can amend his statement to a proposition that is true: "extremism in defense of vice is no virtue."
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* Manheim translation.
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