Alcohol is further out of fashion these days than at any time in living memory. Even American Prohibition just made people try harder to get alcohol. Today, though, alcohol drinking in the US has fallen to record lows, with only 54% of Gallup survey respondents saying they consume it. Nearly every cocktail-serving restaurant or even bar I visit these days has non-alcoholic mocktail options, often with sophisticated bartending flair – something barely imaginable twenty years ago.

The reasons for this are not too hard to imagine. On the one hand, the medical studies about alcohol’s harms keep piling up, often indicating that even moderate drinking – the kind touted as beneficial to health a couple decades ago – may now have many negative health consequences. On the other, alternative mind-altering substances are now easily available – most obviously cannabis, legal in many American jurisdictions and across Canada, which is a clearly healthier alternative. All in all, all things considered, the downward trend in drinking is probably not a bad thing. And there’s plenty of traditional precedent for being suspicious of alcohol: the fifth of the Five Precepts, guiding lay people, enjoins refraining from alcohol on the grounds that it causes heedlessness.

That said, there are reasons why alcohol has remained so enduringly popular in human history. And we do ourselves a disservice by disregarding them. Alcohol is not for everybody – many people find it takes control of their lives in a harmful way. But even for those people, there’s usually a reason it got so powerfully appealing in the first place. In many human lives, ones where one can control its consumption well, alcohol plays a very positive and valuable role. And as we approach the one festival in the North American ritual calendar where the drinking of alcohol typically plays the largest role, it’s worth thinking a bit about alcohol’s positives.

One such positive, not to be ignored, is the flavour of alcohol. While it’s usually an acquired taste (few enjoy their first sip), once acquired, the taste of fine alcoholic drinks can be one of life’s great pleasures. It is both similar to, and complements, the taste of good food: I’m not much of a wine drinker, but something would feel lacking from a French or Spanish meal not accompanied by a glass of red. I recall a gourmet friend who greatly disliked the feeling of alcohol intoxication, but drank anyway because alcohol provided flavours he couldn’t savour otherwise.

This pleasure can reach much deeper than the simple pleasure of, say, a drugstore chocolate peanut butter cup – it is the sort of pleasure that one learns to appreciate in its complexity, as one does with great art. When one imagines the figure of the connoisseur – one who knows and appreciates something through sophistication – the first image that often comes to mind is that of a wine lover. Many enjoy the taste of wine or whisky or rum so much that they will go far afield to visit the vineyards and distilleries where they are produced. (I greatly enjoyed my own trip to Islay.)

All that said, of course, there is also a clear pleasure to alcohol that has nothing to do with the taste. This is the pleasure of drunkenness or tipsiness – the pleasure pursued by undergraduates throughout the ages, who drink low-quality booze and may not even enjoy the flavour of finer kinds, yet nevertheless find alcohol greatly valuable for the state of mind it produces. I dare say far fewer people would be led to the pleasures of connoisseurship if they hadn’t first experienced the pleasures of drunkenness. One’s inhibitions go down and one is in far more of a mood for joyous youthful shenanigans.

But even when one is older – when those shenanigans have lost their novelty, when one’s bones may no longer survive the rigours of a mosh pit – intoxication remains a social lubricant. The first sign that someone has an alcohol problem is that they drink alone, in quantities large enough to feel its effects – because drunkenness alone is at best numbing; it is not fun. (That is in sharp contrast to cannabis, which is perfectly pleasant to consume by oneself.)

Drinking together, by contrast, can do a great deal to strengthen social ties and bonds of friendship. As he laments the loss of the late great Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers (of Mary Ellen Carter fame among others), Eric Bogle recalls on his At This Stage album:

Stan and I shared a couple of bottles of Glenfiddich together. Now at the end of two bottles of Glenfiddich you get to know a bloke pretty well. I liked him. And we sat all night long, you know, till 7:00 the next morning, singing songs and swapping tall tales and trying to outdo each other.

Alcohol at its best lets people really get to know each other. Whether it’s Japanese letting loose with sake under the cherry blossoms, stoic vodka shots with former Soviets, wine with Italian dinner, a Oaxacan mezcal distillery that’s been in the family for eight generations, or cold beer in an Australian outback pub, alcohol brings people together around the world – sometimes even across cultural boundaries.

Some such alcohol-related activities are traditionally male – but in an era increasingly and rightly concerned with male loneliness, maybe we should take this as an occasion to think more about alcohol’s positives for men. Men in our society often don’t get a chance to strengthen bonds of friendship. Sharing drinks together is one way they can. The stereotypical UK “lads” who come home drunk from the pub every night might be setting themselves up for health problems, but they are not at all facing the loneliness epidemic when they’re out every night with friends. There’s a balance. Most American men would likely be better off – maybe even healthier – if they got together once a week with other men over a couple of brewskis.

Even the traditional suspicion of alcohol is not universal. The Five Precepts make sense in the context of early Buddhism’s strong asceticism. But contrast the precepts with the marvelous Jewish festival of Purim, where the Talmud proclaims that one should drink so much that one can no longer distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Even Moses Maimonides, generally an advocate of moderation in all things, said that on Purim one should “drink wine until drunk, and pass out from drink”. Much of the Jewish ritual calendar is about coming together as a community – and the rabbis clearly understood what a powerful role alcohol can have in making that happen.

None of this, again, is to say that everyone should drink. Everything involves tradeoffs, and the harms and negatives from drinking are real. We should just also make sure not to lose sight of the positives.