LOS ANGELES

MY LATE FATHER, a Muslim, loved his adopted home of America — but he was disturbed by one aspect of it. “I tell you,” he would say, “this alcohol will cause the downfall of America and the West.”

“They’ve been doing it for a lot of centuries, Dad, and America’s still kicking the rest of the world’s butts,” I’d respond. “How long is this downfall supposed to take?”

He would usually shush me at that point, though I wished I could press the case that perhaps the Western drinking tradition carried a lesson for uptight, teetotaling societies. As a surreptitious drinker, I wished I could get Dad to relax and enjoy a drink. Or at least watch me have a cold beer or two while playing him in chess; that way he could personally witness that I could still coolly checkmate him as I normally did, rather than my morphing into some raging maniac who would sweep aside the chess pieces and seduce him.

To paraphrase the old soda jingle, I’d like to teach the world to drink, in perfect harmony. That includes Muslims in my family’s native Pakistan and freshmen at American colleges. I’d like Amir to taste the simple sophistication of a gin and tonic. And I’d like Biff to learn to appreciate the differences between a merlot and a zinfandel.

About 100 college presidents, from such institutions as Tufts, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and Duke, recently signed an Amethyst Initiative petition calling for lowering the drinking age nationally. They were greeted as barbarians by many outraged parents and social workers. That’s because Americans have a view of alcohol surprisingly similar to that of much of the Muslim world. Europeans see drinking as natural. Americans and Muslims see it as naughty. The difference between America and Muslim nations is that America lets its citizens to give expression to their naughtiness; Muslims do not. (Although, even America tried to take the right to drink away in the time of Puritan zeal called Prohibition.)

If you have ever taken a Western airline out of Pakistan, you’ve noticed that, as the airplane reaches cruising altitude, a good many Pakistanis shed façades and order up wine and cocktails with their in-flight meals, often buying copious amounts of duty-free vodka for good measure. They are liberal enough to believe that God forbids over-the-top drunkenness, not every last sip of one of humanity’s most poetic achievements.

But over-the-top drinking is a real risk for those of us who achieve escape velocity from teetotalling mores. My father once dropped in unannounced, while I was recovering from a disastrous college whiskey-drinking contest that resulted in my stomach being pumped at a Washington, D.C., hospital.

He was horrified yet gracious to me in my weakened state. And he made me promise to never drink again.

I promised, but I lied. Yet, feeling guilty, I came across a few campus counselors who confirmed that my occasional binges were a sign of the Apocalypse.

I ended up going years without alcohol, then found myself agreeing with friends who speculated that drinking hadn’t been my problem. Rather, my attitude toward alcohol had been the problem, compounded by the kegger prerogatives of college.

One glass of cabernet sauvignon, in the company of friends during the holidays several years ago, ushered me into a new era with a new attitude toward the pleasures of “adult beverages,” though I didn’t tell my father about this change of heart. It has been a savor of the caramel wallop of dark rum, the liberating tang of a good margarita, or the sheer, over-sweetened fun of “girlie” fruit martinis that stand in contrast to the macho but joyless romps of college days. All this, with no hangovers, no DUIs, no drama.

I’m sad that I still felt a need to hide my new, uneventful, adult chapter of social drinking from my father while he was still alive. But it only would have kept him up at night, as all good parents of every age stay up when they worry for their progeny.

Still, I side with the college presidents who recommend a lower drinking age. A high drinking age — one that is delayed for five years past the age when you can drive and three years past the age when you can fight and die for your country — magnifies the sense that alcohol is a naughty substance.

Many European parents teach their children in their early teen years, in small doses, to appreciate some wine with their dinner. One key result, as marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille noted in The Culture Code, is that alcohol there lacks the subversive, violent thrill that it holds in America. Let’s face it, nothing is more uncool than what Mom and Pop teach you to enjoy.

So the paradox is that if those who fear alcohol’s adverse affects could step back and allow their societies to embrace the positive aspects of alcohol, alcohol’s adverse effects would diminish greatly.

Now wouldn’t that be worth a toast?

Rob Asghar, an occasional contributor and a writer in Los Angeles, is writing an autobiographical book, Whiskey, Women and War.