Coffee and the Protestant Ethic
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of
Until the seventeenth century, coffee remained a curiosity for Europeans, mentioned in accounts of journeys to the exotic lands of the Orient. They could not imagine consuming a hot, black, bitter-tasting drink--much less with pleasure. It reminded them too much of hot pitch, which was used in medieval times for battle and torture. (17)
...The seventeenth-century bourgeois was distinguished from people of past centuries by his mental as well as his physical lifestyle. Medieval man did physical work, for the most part under the open sky. The middle-class man worked increasingly with his head, his workplace was the office, his working position was sedentary. The ideal that hovered before him was to function as uniformly and regularly as a clock. (The first example that comes to mind is the famous clocklike regularity of Kant, whose neighbors allegedly set their watches by his precisely timed daily walks.) It is perfectly obvious that this new way of life and work would affect the entire organism. In this connection coffee functioned as a historically significant drug. It spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually ideologically. With coffee, the principle of rationality entered human physiology, transforming it to conform with its own requirements. The result was a body which functioned in accord with the new demands--a rationalistic, middle-class, forward-looking body. (38)
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