Under no circumstances should this department sponsor or be affiliated in any way with an event that includes alcohol. (Report on Site Visit Conducted by The American Philosophical Association (APA) Committee on the Status of Women (CSW), p. 12.)
Last night I was reminded of the passage above. I heard a story about a prominent philosopher that I admire, who had groped a graduate student while under the influence of alcohol. I wondered if there was a pattern or a one-off. A few weeks earlier, before the Peter Ludlow story hit the media, the philosopher Abe Stone, asked on his facebook page, "why do philosophers drink so much alcohol in professional contexts?...Even if this had no bearing at all on the issue of sexual harassment (though clearly it does have some!) it would be something we ought to discuss." I think Stone is right about the phenomenon: there is a problematic, drinking culture in philosophy. In some departments it is passed on from one generation to the next. I always found it remarkable that my supervisor preferred Chinese food over beer. (I am pretty confident that was one of the many subtle reasons why I gravitated toward him.)
This is no surprise, of course. There is a lot of drinking in the societies in which professional philosophy is embedded. But the problem is notable in professional philosophy because it has extremely fluid boundaries between work and not work. (This is a field that has, of course, low tolerance for the very intelligibility of ontological vagueness.) So, even if one were to ban alcohol from all sponsored events (not just the Boulder department, the APA smoker, etc.), the alcohol related problems, including sexual harassment, would not disappear in professional philosophy. (This is no criticism of the CSW Report at Boulder!) For, alcohol is one of the social glues of our profession (which, after all, has a legitimate professional fondness for conversation). For example, I edited a volume where in his acknowledgments, my co-editor promised me a drink.
Even so, the Wikipedia sentence I just quoted continues with "excessive alcohol consumption is associated with widespread and significant brain lesions." So, over and above the harms inflicted on others, when professional philosophers drink a lot, we destroy our most valued bodypart--often the key to our (professional) self-worth. We are not ignorant of this. So, I suspect, then, and to offer my answer to Stone's (rhetorical?) question, pervasive alcoholism in professional philosophy is, in part, an expression of pervasive self-loathing.
Perhaps we could have a symposium dedicated to this topic. :)
Posted by: Michael Kremer | 02/25/2014 at 02:51 PM
In my experience in the academy, the rhetoric of connoisseurship is often the cover story for drinking problems. I suppose that a lot of us feel socially awkward, and I suspect that depression is pretty common in the professoriate.
Posted by: Julie Klein | 02/25/2014 at 04:40 PM
I'm familiar with two departments in which alcohol is always present, in the first place obviously because talks and seminars and so on have free wine, but also of course because it is often at house parties and pubs and so on that we talk philosophy. Only this weekend, I visited my old department, found myself invited with hours' notice to a house party, and talked philosophy until the small hours, and proper academic philosophy, with very decent philosophers. It was brilliant philosophically and personally (not that the two are different, as you mention). I'm trying to remember why we drunk there, and the obvious reasons seem to explain it entirely. I have no need of what to me is a very strange and surprising hypothesis, that it's to do with self-loathing.
Of course moderation is important, and of course there is going to be huge variation from department to department, and (among students) from year to year. But that we are not moderate does not resonate with me in the least. Philosophers' attitude to alcohol, in my experience, is not at all problematic. Now of course my opinion is not worth much - I'm only a graduate student, I've only had so much experience - but I do want to challenge the thought that it's plain that we have a drinking problem.
Posted by: James | 02/25/2014 at 04:44 PM
James, your opinion matters. (Why think that graduate students have less standing?) But have the two departments you mention done a climate survey recently?
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/25/2014 at 04:54 PM
How interesting!
I don't drink, but my not-drinking is so completely not a thing (never liked the taste; never knew people who did; family doesn't, particularly; etc.) that I'm often not very aware of it going on or not. I assume that what you are reporting is accurate. I am going to watch for it now.
From the outside, it seems a product of wanting to ease high levels of social anxiety and being very sensitive to whether or not one is conforming. But as you say, self-destructive behaviors - let alone compulsively pursued ones - show that one is indeed prepared to harm oneself.
Posted by: Ruth Groff | 02/25/2014 at 05:06 PM
Eric, I was only thinking my opinion matters less because I've had less time to see what alcohol means in philosophical contexts. Aspects might only appear over long periods of time and by seeing a number of different departments and so on.
Neither department has done a climate survey. I could give heaps of favourable anecdotal evidence, but I appreciate that, even when the sample size is as small as a philosophy department, people will be legitimately unconvinced by it.
Posted by: James | 02/25/2014 at 05:16 PM
James, well, I think there is no doubt that joint drinking is highly valued in professional philosophy in all kinds of official and informal contexts. But we probably also allow ourselves to overlook the harms.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/25/2014 at 05:20 PM
Eric, I totally agree. Of course alcohol has downsides as well as upsides. What I want to take issue with is the thought that there is, in your words, "pervasive alcoholism in professional philosophy". No doubt there are alcoholics, and no doubt there is a pervasive problem with alcohol in some departments. But I have not experienced this at all, which suggests that we can't make a claim as broad as you have done.
Obviously I don't mean to sound dismissive. This is no doubt something we need to talk about as a profession.
Posted by: James | 02/25/2014 at 05:46 PM
Socrates did plenty of drinking: it just never affected him, somehow. See Symposium 214a “Against Socrates, sirs, my crafty plan is as nought. However large the bumper you order him, he will quaff it all off and never get tipsy with it.”
Socrates drank as soon as the boy had filled: but “What procedure is this, Alcibiades?”
And in the Laws, 649b-650d, drinking parties are proposed as a way of teaching the young self-control. I think Plato agrees with you, Eric, that drinking is not the problem, as much as how we allow ourselves to behave under the influence.
Posted by: Sandrine Berges | 02/25/2014 at 07:12 PM
James, it takes time and attentiveness to discover that somebody is an alcoholic; if you are enjoying yourself you might not (wish) to notice.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/25/2014 at 10:32 PM
Agreed, Sandrine!
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 02/25/2014 at 10:33 PM
On the isolated topic of self-loathing in philosophy, it might be interesting to list some self-loathing philosophers vs self-optimistic philosophers. I would think of Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, and Foucault off the bat as self-loathing. I would think of Aristotle, Husserl, and Russell as self-optimistic philosophers (though Husserl carried a deep sadness after his personal losses in WWI and the rise of Nazism). That's too short a list to try to assess what might be a common denominator in each group, of course. I would wager, however, that philosophers who hold a postmodern position against the possibility of a self-posessed ego or veridical speech acts would tend to succumb to self-loathing -- when they believe that there's nothing but historically inherited junk in the attic, which they can't really discuss veridically outside of the power-centered anti-egoic episteme anyway.
Posted by: Avi Metcalfe | 02/26/2014 at 02:39 PM
You know, in all this recent talk about what's happening "in philosophy," I don't recognize either my department or those I know--or anyway those I respect--in other departments. Frankly, I don't regard those engaged in sexual harassment or habitual excessive drunkenness--i.e., those who are slaves to their basest passions--philosophers. They may be academics who teach in departments of philosophy; they may be "professional philosophers"; but they aren't philosophers. Perhaps the recent obliteration of the line between philosophy and the profession is part of the problem?
Posted by: M. Anderson | 02/26/2014 at 06:50 PM
No True Scotsman?
Posted by: David Bzdak | 03/04/2014 at 07:16 PM
I think that the results of a recent study on aggression in bars are relevant here:
"Results
Ninety percent of incidents involved male initiators and female targets, with almost all incidents involving intentional or probably intentional aggression. Targets mostly responded nonaggressively, usually using evasion. Staff rarely intervened; patron third parties intervened in 21% of incidents, usually to help the target but sometimes to encourage the initiator. initiators' level of invasiveness was related to intoxication of the targets, but not their own intoxication, suggesting intoxicated women were being targeted." (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acer.12356/abstract If behind a wall, then see this: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/03/285307535/mens-drinking-isnt-the-driver-of-sexual-aggression-in-bars)
Important is this bit: "initiators' level of invasiveness was related to intoxication of the targets, but not their own intoxication, suggesting intoxicated women were being targeted".
If this would also be true in settings in which philosophers drink together, then limiting alcohol use would indeed keep the men from groping the women, but for the wrong reason: it would change the potential target's behavior, not the initiator's. This seems to me to be similar to banning miniskirts to protect women from being groped. These are both victim blaming strategies that limit women's freedom, while accepting predatory behavior by men as a given (boys will be boys etc.).
To be really clear (just in case..): what needs to change is men's behavior, not women's, and men's 'initiating' behavior is apparently not linked to their alcohol intake (in bars, according to the study).
Posted by: Femke | 03/07/2014 at 06:29 AM