fieldus

High spirits | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Outside its quotation marks, Baudelaire’s argument is nowadays almost impossible to make publicly. But before the statisticians and their nannies eclipse all possibility of praising drunkenness - beyond the prim encomiums to the health benefits of an occasional glass of red wine - it is worth pausing to remember that alcohol is one of increasingly few psychological resources for the vital but often overlooked experience of excess.

Getting drunk, in which the quotidiadrn economies of intention and expression, perception and reaction, are turned topsy-turvy, temporarily levels the creeping walls of propriety with which the rampant public sphere bears down upon the dwindling private domain. The chance to see things differently for a time - a chance given away so cheaply with a few pints in the pub - is often the only thing separating life as a broken cog from life as a full person, giddy with emotion, hiccupping from gulping down the sweet air of human freedom.

No one should pretend that alcohol addiction is in some way better than other kinds of addiction. Nor should there be any doubt that our society’s fondness for binge drinking is related to the spreading epidemic of extreme casual violence. “Booze Britain” is both real and ugly. But it seems to me that the more we publicly condemn the private practice of getting slightly pie-eyed as a quiet, usually fairly harmless way of subverting the hideous, alienated, hypercommodified obliteration of significance that is contemporary existence, the more likely it seems to me that those with a private fondness for the bottle may become alcoholics, as well as becoming publicly diagnosed as such.

How true and wise this sounds with a clear head. In the grip of hangover: dangerous nonsense.

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