Auster on water bottle culture

As I think I mentioned earlier, I’m not much of a fan of Lawrence Auster.  He’s not on my blogroll and I don’t read him all that much.  When I do, I internally brace myself to absorb his philosophical perspective and energies, which aren’t very pleasant.  Still, I really like the first part of an article he wrote today on water bottle culture:

A conspicuous but of course never remarked-on sign of the decline of our culture in recent years has been the practice of drinking publicly from water bottles. One side of this phenomenon was the habit, mainly of urban women, of carrying a water bottle in their hand and continually drinking from it as they walked along the sidewalk or crossed the street… Another side of the phenomenon was the way in which even high-level public figures would drink from water bottles while appearing on televised panel discussions, while giving speeches, and so on. Behavior that once would have been seen as unacceptablly rude or low-class became normal overnight. No one resisted it. No one ever said to his host at an event, “Please bring me a glass, so that I don’t have to drink from a bottle as I sit at this panel discussion being broadcast on CSPAN.” It showed how, in liberal society, even intelligent people mindlessly adjust to every downward shift in the culture.

Like Auster, I think the drinking of plastic bottled water is morally incorrect.  I disagree with Auster on the reason, though.  Auster believes that “Western liberal people have become obsessed with having a constant supply of fluids. The idea must have spread among the politically correct that if you are not imbibing water every minute throughout the day, your free radicals might make you age prematurely or you’d get some dread disease.”  To Auster, drinking bottled water is a groupthink behavior which places a materialistic pseudo-scientific fad over tradition.  Tradition, Auster believes, is correct, has and continues to lead to morally and spiritually correct lives, and such modern deviation, even though minor, is a sign of the times.

I don’t have a particular stance on how often one should drink water.  It is the plastic, not the drinking, that bothers me.  I believe drinking plastic bottled water is morally incorrect because the environmental costs of the bottles, including manufacturing, transportation, and distribution, which all rely heavily on fossil fuels, far outweigh any potential benefit in its consumption.  This cultural acceptance shows a shocking disregard for how limited natural resources are and warns of a drastically different future when resources are far more scarse.  These people are in for a very rude awakening when that happens.

As for me, I do drink a good amount of water, but I have a stainless steel water bottle.