Prohibition and Civilization

[Draggingtree]

Prohibition and Civilization

By Albert Jay Nock • February 12, 2014

 

Leslie Jones / cc

Prohibition, as a policy, has had a great deal of public attention, but the kind of civilization connoted by prohibition has had very little. This is unfortunate, because the general civilization of a community is the thing that really recommends it. The important thing to know about Kansas, for instance, is not the statistics of prohibition—as most writers on the subject seem to think — but whether one would really want to live there, whether the peculiar type of civilization that expresses itself through prohibition is really attractive and interesting.

 

The Reverend Floyd Keeler, for example, writing in the July Atlantic, devotes a whole article to proving that, in Kansas, prohibition does prohibit, within limits. This is not without interest, of course; still, it would seem much more interesting and truly practical to tell us what life is like under a general social theory of negation and repression: for such is what life in Kansas comes to. That, after all, is the determining test. Burke says—and I earnestly commend his words to the advocates of our grand new policy of Americanization, whatever that means: “There ought to be in every country a standard of manners that a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” No one can fail to remark, in the present war, the immensely superior spirit of the French in defense of a truly lovely civilization. The final test, indeed, of any civilization,—the test by which ultimately it stands or falls,—is its power of attracting and permanently interesting the human spirit.

Concerning Kansas, therefore, the question is not whether prohibition prohibits, but whether, under prohibition, the

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