DRUGS DEFINE THE ZEITGEIST, SO CHOOSE THEM WITH CARE
Elizabeth Farrelly
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
Dec 5 2007
Sometimes it seems nothing will ever happen again that cannot pay
its way. Never again will impecunious nobles publish vellum tracts
of strange, subversive poetry that just might change the world. Never
again will students commandeer the streets for causes not their own.
Never again will universities and banks endow their ordinary, workaday
buildings with the quoins and clocktowers, the flutings and friezes
that give human existence a dignity and depth it may otherwise lack.
This single bottom-line mentality could be the slow-burn result
of whichever Parisian longhair picked up the first stone to storm
the Bastille. Democracy, capitalism, secularism; the holy trinity
has slowly desiccated higher principle till nothing remains but
universal self-gratification. That’s arguable. But there’s another
possibility too.
Next time you find yourself wistfully comparing a fine-honed
terracotta surface with some chipped and mouldering piece of pre-cast,
and wondering why human nature – which generally seems to change
so little – has shifted so profoundly in this alone, consider the
following. It’s not about nature, human or otherwise. It’s a question
of medication. We’re on the wrong drugs.
Take coffee. Native to Ethiopia and Yemen, coffee was, by the 15th
century, built into the ecstatic rites of Sufic Islam. Leaching
from the monasteries into the streets, it gained such popularity as
to be blamed for emptying the mosques and banned, intermittently,
from Cairo to Constantinople. Yet still the coffeehouse, centre of
chess, backgammon, poetry and debate, drove the Ottoman Empire to
its extraordinary zenith.
In Europe, from the mid-17th century, the new drug caffeine (in coffee,
tea, chocolate) was used medicinally to enhance creativity, acuity,
regularity, longevity and wit. But debate raged over the morality of
coffee as recreation.
Throughout the Middle Ages the people’s drugs had been wine and beer –
which may explain why medieval history is largely populated by drunken
adolescents. Alcohol, a brain-function retardant, was much encouraged
by rulers.
Not coffee. Bohemian, boisterous and male, coffee was sedition in
a cup. As late as 1777, Frederick the Great of Prussia issued a
proclamation: "Everybody is using coffee. If possible, this must be
prevented. My people must drink beer."
In England, in 1655, a group of Oxford students and fellows persuaded
Arthur Tillyard, apothecary, to sell coffee outside All Souls. This,
the Oxford Coffee Club, included Hans Sloane (founder, British
Museum), Edmund Halley (of comet fame), Christopher Wren (architect
extraordinaire) and Isaac Newton. Committed to science (they dissected
a dolphin on a cafe table), the group moved to London, rebadging as
the Royal Society.
In France, coffee take-up was slower. Paris’ first cafe belonged to
two Armenian brothers, Pascal and Gregoire Alep, in the 1660s. No
one came. No one liked the bitter drink until, in 1686, the Sicilian
Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli opened the Cafe Procope. Procope
became, over the next century, the point of origin for the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution and perhaps even America itself,
coffee capital-to-be of the modern world.
Voltaire, a Procope regular, reportedly downed 50 to 70 demi-tasses
a day – to which is largely attributed the wit and brevity of Candide.
Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson
were also regulars, as were Robespierre, Danton and Marat.
But not for the taste. According to Bennett Weinberg and Bonnie
Bealer’s excellent history, "the heavily reboiled sediment-ridden
coffee of the day … was consumed exclusively for its pharmacological
benefits". This deliberate experimentation with "a new and powerful
drug unlike anything their countrymen had ever seen" links these
Enlightenment genii with the serious hallucinogenic experimenters
of the 20th century, writer Aldous Huxley and Harvard psychologist
Timothy Leary.
Whether the hunger-suppressing hashish that Picasso and Braque guzzled
in their garret days helped generate cubism is still moot.
But, as coffee had fuelled the Enlightenment, the ’60s peacenik
revolution was powered by LSD. LSD, for Leary, was a "sacrament",
equivalent of the host in Catholic ritual, it offered escape from
ego and "confrontation with God." The link between biochemistry and
God is itself fascinating, but every drug has its day. What the ’60s
floated inside acid’s gossamer bubble sank, soon enough, beneath the
dead weight of heroin.
And now? The defining drug of our time? We think we’re coffee-fuelled
(though few, one imagines, could equal Voltaire’s virtuosity). But
coffee is no longer revolutionary; Swedes are the biggest coffee-heads
by far.
Cocaine is our dinner-party drug du jour. Not the biggest, even of
the illegals. (Marijuana is.) But it’s unquestionably our drug of
money and influence, preferred poison of Richard Florida’s "creative
class". The British spend $5 billion a year on it; with Ireland’s new
wealth, cocaine busts ballooned 750 per cent in four years. Charlie
is back, big time.
Cocaine is the drug of ego. All shiny surface and hollow euphoria,
it’s the drug of stockbrokers and estate agents. Of puppet governments
and corporate warmongers. Of thin girls with expensive teeth and cheap
souls, of sharp subprime boys whipping fast financial horses. Where
acid dissolves ego, cocaine is powdered narcissism. The Age of Aquarius
is dead. All hail the Age of Celebrity. Do what?
Invest, obviously, in coca futures.
Elizabeth Farrelly is the author of Blubberland: The Dangers Of
Happiness, (University of NSW Press).
define-the-zeitgeist-so-choose-them-with-care/2007 /12/04/1196530675470.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
