Falling out of love

Over the weekend, there was an interesting article in the Observer entitled Last orders: how we fell out of love with alcohol. This isn’t maybe the most rigorously researched piece, and it relies heavily on anecdotal evidence, but it does reflect a fundamental truth that, over the past twenty or so years, drinking alcohol has become markedly less fashionable, something I have observed on this blog on several occasions.

After reaching a post-WW1 peak around 2000, in the wake of lad culture and Cool Britannia, per capita alcohol consumption has steadily declined, and is now about 15% lower. Plus, in many situations, drinking alcohol has become less acceptable, and abstaining seen as virtuous rather than cranky. I discussed this back in 2013 in a post entitled Socially unacceptable supping.

Nor is this evenly spread across the board. While the older generation are drinking much the same, their younger counterparts have substantially cut down. “Between 2002 and 2019, the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds in England who reported monthly drinking fell from 67% to 41%.” This clearly gives a pointer to the future direction of travel, and the fall in consumption inevitably lags behind the change in attitudes.

As something becomes less fashionable, people are more likely to prefer to do it in private than in public, which is bad news for the pub trade. According to the statistics produced by the British Beer & Pub Association, in the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 (which is as far as they go), total beer consumption fell by 22.8%, but on-trade consumption almost exactly halved. The trail of pubs now demolished or converted to alternative use is all too obvious. Some will argue that the Anteater Tap is still doing great business, while ignoring the fact that the Sir Garnet Wolseley across the road, which was ten times the size, has been replaced by flats. Even within a declining market, it is still possible to be successful, but that doesn’t make the wider narrative any less true.

In the past, a lot of drinking in pubs was centred around ritual and routine, often linked to the workplace. But all those Friday lunchtime drinks with the office team, after-work unwinders, Sunday lunchtime sessions and “I always go out with Bill and Frank for a few on Friday night” are now much diminished if not virtually extinct. If you’re no longer going to the pub out of habit, but have to make a positive choice to do so, you may well decide not to bother.

Of course you can go to the pub and drink soft drinks or non-alcoholic beers, but the people doing that are in general doing so to go along with their alcohol-drinking peers. In any social group, once a tipping point of non-drinkers is reached, they will begin to question what is the point of going to the pub in the first place.

On the other hand, the article points out that, while it undoubtedly carries health risks, throughout history alcohol has made a major contribution both to human creativity and human sociability.

That, [Professor Edward] Slingerland adds, is where alcohol comes in: put simply, it can turn the PFC (pre-frontal cortex) down a few notches and expand our minds. “Alcohol is a cultural technology,” Slingerland believes, “that we have developed to briefly get us back to our five-year-old brains when it comes to flexibility and creativity. After a few hours it wears off and we can glean the results.” Across the world, throughout history, alcohol has been associated with creatives: artists, poets, great thinkers. “And this is not a myth,” he says. “There’s good evidence it increases creativity, which as a society we need.”

Alcohol can also play a key role in fostering relationships. By temporarily turning down the PFC, we’re more inclined to trust and be open with other people. “In the same way that shaking hands started out as a way to show we aren’t carrying weapons,” says Slingerland, “drinking beers – taking our PFCs out – is like putting our mental weapons on the side. By relaxing the PFC, it’s harder to lie or fake.” And, he adds, alcohol boosts feelgood chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. “These don’t just make us less inclined to cheat. Because we feel positive about each other, it creates a sense of bonding that’s crucial for humankind.”

And I’ll certainly drink to that!