Friday Frivolity: Sid DeLong on the “If by Whiskey” Method
If by Whiskey
Sidney W. DeLong
The Whiskey Speech was delivered on April 4, 1952, to the Mississippi legislature, which was considering whether to repeal Mississippi’s prohibition of the sale of alcohol. The speech was delivered by Noah S. Sweat Jr., who later went on to become a law professor at the University of Mississippi.
My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, this is how I feel about whiskey:
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
Here is a reenactment:
While many have condemned The Whiskey Speech as an epitome of the fallacy of equivocation, a politician talking out or both sides of his mouth in order not to alienate either the “Wets” who wanted liquor sales or the “Drys” who preferred prohibition.
I instead think of it as sheer genius and, indeed, the most reliable method to form a fair opinion on anything. The “If-by-whiskey” method seems perfectly suited to many of the issues dividing Americans.
For example: As an exercise, imagine how you would complete the two contrasting paragraphs that might follow the following prompts:
“If by undocumented immigrants, you mean . . . .”
“If by capitalists, you mean . . . .”
“If by Christians, you mean . . . .”
“If by artificial intelligence, you mean . . . .”
Simplistic answers to complex issues are more difficult after this exercise. (If you have trouble generating opposing descriptions, perhaps a chatbot will help you.)
The If-by-whiskey exercise also exposes a phenomenon I once called call “paradigmatic thinking” in order to explain our paradoxical law of secrets blackmail. A secrets blackmailer who is legally free to disclose someone else’s embarrassing secret commits blackmail if he demands money for keeping the secret. Yet paradoxically, he may lawfully accept an unsolicited “bribe” from the other person not to disclose. Why do the two identical exchanges have such dramatically different legal consequences?
My explanation was that the different treatment resulted from two different ways to imagine the circumstances that gave rise to them. Criminal statutes such as the law of extortion often read like mathematical theorems involving the relations of bloodless characters known as A and B involved in abstractly defined activities. In order to invest these abstract rules with moral value, we must reimagine them involving real people in real life situations. Like the actual people who will be arrested and tried, the cases can be quite different: we confront conflicting paradigms with different moral values. And the different ways in which we “cast” these dramas lead to radically different moral conclusions.
Contrasting blackmailer paradigms were on display in the #MeToo movement in which private claims against abusers involved their payment of damages in return for a release and a confidentiality agreement.
“If by blackmailer you mean an opportunistic swindler seeking to profit by threatening to destroy the marriage and reputation of a man desperate to keep his misstep a secret” you will think a one way about the law of blackmail.
“But if by blackmailer you mean a victimized young woman desperately seeking compensation for the harm she suffered at the hands of a scoundrel who criminally abused her and who demands that she keep his secret in order to be paid,” then you will think a different way about the law of blackmail.
Finally, as the last example shows, the ‘if-by-whiskey’ approach has one rhetorical bias. The second of two contrasting depictions will tend to trump the first one. Imagine reversing the order of The Whiskey Speech paragraphs, so that the first ended with “tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools” and then the second one ended with “the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair and shame and helplessness and hopelessness.” Your vote would swing from “Wet” to “Dry.”