A Case of French Wine for Professor Rorty

 A Case of French Wine for Professor Rorty

 

In a recent edition of the London Review of Books the Novelist and Francophile Julian Barnes reviews a book titled A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front. 

 

The central story of the book is that, in addition to a daily ration of wine (a bottle’s worth each man), troops were plied with a lethal form of spirits (about 50% proof). Indeed, before an attack “over the top”, infantrymen were often forced to drink the stuff, up to a quart of it. The idea was that the sozzled soldiers would be oblivious to the mortal dangers they faced across No-Man’s Land. Any success of an attack would usually be due to accurate artillery fire pulverising the trenches, bodies and sanity of the enemy. The surviving attacking infantry, although still completely drunk, were nevertheless adequate to the task of occupying the enemy’s trenches and finishing off any still living injured and demoralised men.

 

So far, so sobering. Of wider interest is Barnes’s (and presumably the author’s) discussion of the place of alcohol in French life in the early C20. The LRB article is illustrated with a contemporary French temperance poster showing the dangers of “alcoholism. It places side by side the pictures of a smart young man in the bloom of health and his dishevelled “twin” ravaged by “alcoholism”. Smaller side illustrations show the contrasting fortunes of the youths should they serve in the army. The alcoholic is in big trouble – sentenced to hard labour or even the firing squad for his sodden dereliction of duty. The non-alcoholic, by contrast, is shown -what is this?- merrily tipsy, at worst spending a sobering-up night in the guardroom. 

 

What’s going on? Further panels on either side of the poster reveal all. “Alcoholism” has nothing to do with the healthy natural drinks of wine, cider and beer and everything to do with “bad” industrial spirits made from potatoes, beetroot and grain.

 

According to both patriotic mythology and scientific opinion at the time wine, that splendid product of French soil, was beneficial to body and soul. Moderate drinking (up to four litres a day, according to some authorities) was not at all harmful. Quite the opposite: “Bliss was it in that time to be alive, and to be a wine drinker very heaven” (after William Wordsworth).

 

 This “settled” view of the medical truth of the matter of “good” wine and “bad” alcohol is an excellent extreme example of the delusions that pass for truth-seeking and that, according to the arch pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, blights all or most philosophic and scientific endeavour. Rorty claims that we cannot know Truth in its immutable purity: there is no standpoint from which we can see reality as it is; our thoughts and language can never amount to be a mirror of nature.

 

Rorty says that the best we can aim for is to attempt to justify our beliefs, trying harder and harder with explanation and sincerity, if necessary “failing better”. Even here, the process of justification is wobbly and contingent. For the process of justification itself is not absolute and objective, but justification to and within a community about matters that serve or govern that community. 

 

In another article in the same LRB a reviewer mentions the settled belief once widely held concerning the age of the Earth. It was created, according to respected authority, on 22^ndOctober 4004 BCE. This “truth” was arrived at by a careful study of the Bible and the creation myths of significant ancient civilisations. It was a conclusion widely accepted at the time by Europe’s religious and learned.

 

And so it goes on. Religious communities still hotly debate theological truths; political ideologues of all stripes hotly debate among themselves (and of course for others) the true nature of society and the true way forward.

 

Scientists now proceed by testing hypotheses for falsehood. There is little or no room for the assertion that our processes of justification have led to truth that is irrefutable (although exceptions must surely be allowed: otherwise, for example, why would we trust our lives to aeronautical engineers, or our journeys to cartographers?).

 

The slippery and open-ended nature of justification often leads to cynical manipulation and denial as well as honest error. Leaving aside the virtues of wine drinking, the struggle to identify the risks of smoking is one example. The tobacco lobby can argue, against justified belief in the dangers of the product, that no irrefutable truth has been arrived at – the jury is perpetually out. The same happens in the case of climate science, which indeed is beset with hypotheses and data in constant need of refinement or even rejection. How easy is it then for sceptics to scoff and stall because no claim is irrefutable.

 

In Rorty-world (this is not meant as a slight) we have to admit to the contingency and often the precariousness of our beliefs. Unfortunately, this creates large room for the not so scrupulous, those full of bellicose certainties and, in Yeats’s words, “passionate intensity”.

 

To return to the truth of wine drinking. Currently in Spain it is officially okay for men to drink up to 35 (UK) units of alcohol per week. In the UK, it is officially not okay to drink beyond 14. What to believe? Is it a case of in vino units non est veritas?

 

December 2024