Cream and Sugar with Your Cup of Personal Moral Defect?

The subtext of Esquire magazine’s admonition posed as a question — “Is it time to quit coffee for good?” — is not especially subtle.

“So ubiquitous is caffeine in our culture that it doesn’t even register to people as a drug,” the journalist John McDermott observed. That no stigma of any kind attaches to treating coffee as a vehicle for the delivery of stimulants is a menace to those predisposed toward chemical dependencies. It is that lack of a social stigma, not the chemical dependency, that Esquire presents to its readers as the problem:

Step out of the office for a midafternoon cigarette and people might look at you askance. Get caught doing a bump of coke in the office bathroom as a midday pick-me-up and it’s grounds for immediate termination. But slam a Monster or a quad-shot Americano at work and people will think you’re a go-getter.

McDermott’s exposé shines a spotlight on the victims of America’s coffee-drinking culture: A person who attributed the professional and personal problems he experienced not to what he describes as a creatively unfulfilling job at which he worked long hours but to the coffee he drank as an aid to fulfilling his duties; a self-described recovering addict who drank roughly 64 ounces of Diet Coke and three Starbucks double-shot vanilla lattés per day; a former Navy seaman struggling with what he described as a “mental health crisis” and a rare neuromuscular disorder who subsequently diagnosed himself with physical ailments resulting from the approximately ten cups of coffee he consumed daily.

“More people need to know that caffeine is a neurotoxin and it’s hurting you,” the discharged Navy officer insisted. “I would like people to treat caffeine the way we treat cigarettes. There should be a warning.”

The language of the Temperance movement makes conspicuous cameos throughout McDermott’s piece. Some of his victims offer second-hand reports of experiences in which coffee drinkers, in particular, suffered from maladies ranging from “neuropathy to psychosis” that they attribute to “caffeine injury.” Former coffee consumers wield the rhetoric of alcoholism — “sobriety,” “relapse,” etc. — to describe their ordeals. The afflicted heap scorn on the medical establishment for failing to recognize both their affliction and the psychiatric disorders they believe contribute to it. Indeed, McDermott cites a 2014 study on the subject that establishes a parallel between the antisocial consequences of caffeine addiction and “the same types of pathological behaviors caused by alcohol, cocaine, opiates, or other drugs of abuse.”

Esquire’s indictment of a society so callous that it would allow this “mind-altering substance” to become inextricably “woven into the fabric of daily life” laments that coffee has become a “cultural signifier” — and even “a handy substitute for having a personality.” This attitude would be recognizable to the earliest activists for mainline Protestant moral prescriptions, who made their case near the end of the capital-P Puritan era of American politics (I wrote a book about the subject).

Temperance societies in the early decades of the 18th century made few distinctions between coffee and intoxicating liquors, not just because of its addictive and mind-altering properties but because the vulgar coffee houses in which the beverage was consumed encouraged licentiousness and frivolity. Puritanical women’s groups attacked the “heathenish liquor called coffee” over the presumption that it made men impotent and effeminate. Puritanism’s adversaries saw in coffee-drinking the same temptations toward nonconformity and fanaticism that made this upstart sect such a threat. Coffee culture erased important class and gender distinctions, and the venues in which it was pursued were thought to be hothouses of revolutionary thought. After all, “Machiavel the Florentine was born in a coffee house.”

Coffee as an alternative to booze was an invention of the 19th century, long after the Puritanism of Cotton Mather had passed from the scene. Today, popular American culture’s conception of what constitutes uptight puritanical mores is rooted in caricatured notions of Victorian-era codes of moral conduct. As a result, few today would recognize Esquire’s warning for what it is: a testament against sin that harkens back to the values of the 17th century. A leading indicator of the debauched culture that coffee-drinking encourages is a hedonism that rejects self-discipline and disregards the communal good.

Puritanism properly understood did not survive long into the 18th century, but its legacy had a long tail. In some ways, coffee-drinking culture in early America played precisely the socially destabilizing role its detractors feared it one day would. In the autumn of 1773, the Sons of Liberty held one of their first demonstrations against the Tea Act outside a Lower Manhattan coffee house, where radical egalitarian notions had come into vogue. Just over two centuries later, the site on which that coffee house stood had been replaced by office buildings and a corporate park named after New York City mayor Abe Beame’s city-planning commissioner: John Zuccotti.

In 2011, the national “occupy” movement was born around the occupation of Zuccotti Park. As he wrote in his dispatch from the scene, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt witnessed the pervasiveness of certain moral sentiments animating the movement — social equality, communal responsibility, shared labor, and the austere rejection of material temptations. But perhaps above all, the movement called for a universalist code of social conduct, which the righteous, acting as guides, are obliged to impart to the lost and misled. It’s a familiar moral construct of which all Americans are legatees to one degree or another. Our only real struggle is to recognize it in ourselves.

That kind of contemplative introspection is a valuable exercise, if only because it renders the supposedly emerging trends with which we are bombarded in popular media much less radical. And nothing aids the meditative process like a good cup of coffee.