"When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied"
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Pleasure is the bait here, not the sin. Woolman starts by admitting the seduction of "feeling their minds elevated" - a surprisingly generous phrase that names what alcohol promises: uplift, lightness, a temporary expansion of the self. Then he tightens the screws. The elevation is counterfeit, because it arrives by "strong drink" and ends in the most humiliating outcome for an 18th-century moral imagination: not just a hangover, but a disordered understanding.
The sentence works like a slow moral descent. Appetite becomes indulgence; indulgence becomes cognitive collapse; collapse becomes social betrayal. Woolman is a Quaker, writing from a world where virtue is measured less by private ecstasy than by steadiness - clarity of mind, reliability in community, and reverence. So intoxication isn't framed as a quirky personal vice. It's a civic event. "Duty as members of a family or civil society" yokes the home to the polis: drink fractures the smallest unit of trust and radiates outward.
The sharpest subtext is how he describes the drinker's spiral as a kind of apostasy: "cast off all regard to religion". For Woolman, spiritual discipline isn't abstract; it's the scaffolding that keeps people governable by conscience rather than impulse. Still, he refuses the easy pleasure of condemnation. "Much to be pitied" is a moral stance: the drinker is not a villain but a damaged neighbor, someone whose agency has been surrendered to appetite. It's pastoral rhetoric with teeth - social control delivered in the language of compassion.
The sentence works like a slow moral descent. Appetite becomes indulgence; indulgence becomes cognitive collapse; collapse becomes social betrayal. Woolman is a Quaker, writing from a world where virtue is measured less by private ecstasy than by steadiness - clarity of mind, reliability in community, and reverence. So intoxication isn't framed as a quirky personal vice. It's a civic event. "Duty as members of a family or civil society" yokes the home to the polis: drink fractures the smallest unit of trust and radiates outward.
The sharpest subtext is how he describes the drinker's spiral as a kind of apostasy: "cast off all regard to religion". For Woolman, spiritual discipline isn't abstract; it's the scaffolding that keeps people governable by conscience rather than impulse. Still, he refuses the easy pleasure of condemnation. "Much to be pitied" is a moral stance: the drinker is not a villain but a damaged neighbor, someone whose agency has been surrendered to appetite. It's pastoral rhetoric with teeth - social control delivered in the language of compassion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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