Title: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

Author: Edward Slingerland

Completed: Mar 2024 (Full list of books)

Overview: Why do people drink? We know it’s unhealthy yet we continue to do it. This book covers a lot of different ideas about why evolution hasn’t made us all teetotalers while also covering alcohol’s impact on history and culture. It was a fascinating look at something I consume but don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why I do. Cheers to Edward Slingerland

Highlights:

• if there is something in the biome that has psychoactive properties, you can be sure that the locals have been using it for millennia. More often than not, it tastes horrible and has vicious side effects. For instance, ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made from Amazonian vines, is painfully bitter and quickly brings on brutal diarrhea and vomiting. In some South American cultures, people go so far as to lick poisonous toads. All over the world, wherever you find people, you find them doing disgusting things, incurring incredible costs, and expending ridiculous amounts of resources and effort for the sole purpose of getting high.2 Given how central the intoxication drive is to human existence, the archaeologist Patrick McGovern has only semi-facetiously suggested that our species be referred to as Homo imbibens.
• sites in eastern Turkey, dating to perhaps 12,000 years ago, the remains of what appear to be brewing vats, combined with images of festivals and dancing, suggest that people were gathering in groups, fermenting grain or grapes, playing music, and then getting truly hammered before we’d even figured out agriculture. In fact, archaeologists have begun to suggest that various forms of alcohol were not merely a by-product of the invention of agriculture, but actually a motivation for it—that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread.
• My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively altered must have, over evolutionary time, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand. When it comes to intoxication, the mistake story cannot be correct. There are very good evolutionary reasons why we get drunk.
• This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication.
• The earliest direct evidence of alcoholic beverages deliberately being produced by human beings dates from around 7000 BCE in the Yellow River Valley of China, where potsherds from an early Neolithic village were found to contain chemical traces of a sort of wine, probably not very pleasant by modern standards, made from wild grapes and other fruits, rice, and honey.
• In the Pacific, cultures that never adopted alcohol use—possibly because alcohol would interact negatively with toxins acquired by consuming local seafood—ended up turning to kava as their preferred intoxicant.13 Made from the root of an intensively domesticated crop, possibly first brought under human control in the island of Vanuatu, kava has been cultivated by humans for so long that it can no longer reproduce on its own.14 It has both narcotic and hypnotic effects, and is a powerful muscle relaxant.
• Humans in Eurasia appear to have been lighting up and tuning out for at least 8,000 years, with cannabis becoming a widely traded and consumed ritual and recreational drug by 2000 BCE.
• For millennia, natives of Australia have produced a mixture of narcotics, stimulants, and wood ash, called “pituri,” and used it like chewing tobacco, holding a wad in their cheeks. The active ingredients are various strains of native tobacco and a local narcotic shrub
• It is significant that in North America, one of the few places on the globe where native populations did not produce and use alcohol, there existed instead a highly elaborate system of tobacco cultivation and regional trade, with archaeologically recovered pipes dating back to somewhere between 3000 and 1000 BCE.18 Although we do not tend to think of tobacco as an intoxicant, the strains cultivated by Native Americans were much more powerful and intoxicating than what you can now buy at your corner store. When mixed with hallucinogenic ingredients, as it typically was, it really packed a punch.
• It is Dudley’s contention that this was also the case for early humans, as well as our primate ancestors and cousins, who—following the waft of alcohol molecules to find and identify the rare prize of ripe fruit—came to associate small amounts of alcohol with high-quality nourishment. Individuals who were particularly enamored of its taste or pharmacological effects would have been more likely to seek it out, acquiring more calories than their teetotaler compatriots.
• A very cool evolutionary trick is performed by fruit flies when they sense the presence of parasitic wasps. These wasps are nasty predators that rather unkindly deposit their own eggs inside those of the fruit fly. Under normal conditions, this egg develops into a small wasp larva, which then feeds off the fruit fly larvae, completely devouring them from the inside before emerging to seek out new victims. In an environment where such wasps are a threat, female fruit flies seek out fruit with a high alcohol content on which to lay their eggs. Alcohol is not great for their own larvae, slowing their growth, but little fruit flies tolerate ethanol much better than the sensitive wasp larvae, which are generally killed off.
• When it comes to market economies, contemporary households around the world officially report spending on alcohol and cigarettes at least a third of what they spend on food; in some countries (Ireland, Czech Republic) this rises to a half or more.63 Given the prevalence of black markets and underreporting on the topic, actual expenditures must be significantly higher.
• Humans, though, are apes, evolved to cooperate only in a limited way with close relatives and perhaps fellow tribe members, acutely alert to the dangers of being manipulated, misled, or exploited by others. And yet we march in parades, sit in obedient rows reciting lessons, conform to social norms, and sometimes sacrifice our lives for the common good with an enthusiasm that would put a soldier ant to shame. Trying to hammer a square primate peg into a circular social insect hole is bound to be difficult. But, as we’ll see, intoxication can help.
• ‘capital riddle,’ which you either solve or forfeit your head. The player’s life is at stake.”16 The universality of high-stakes riddles in human mythology highlights, in symbolic form, one of the main challenges that confronts us in adapting to our ecological niche: Humans need to be creative to survive.
• All of this data suggests that small children are so creative because their PFCs are barely developed. There is nothing policing their thoughts, which has both upsides and downsides. Taking twenty minutes to put on your shoes is the price you pay for thinking out of the box.
• cultures as a whole can figure out the solutions to problems that are, in principle, beyond the capacity of any single individual to solve. As cultural evolutionary theorist Michael Muthukrishna and colleagues argue, we need to think of our brains not just as individual organs sitting in our heads, but as part of an extended network, nodes in a massive “collective brain.”
• “cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are.” An anthropological survey of island cultures across the Pacific showed that population size and connectedness with other islands correlated positively with the number of tools possessed by a culture, as well as its degree of tool complexity. In modern urban societies, increased population density leads to increased innovation, as measured by proxies such as number of new patents or R&D activity per capita.
• Although researchers have long thought that the primary function of play was for skill practice and training, this socializing and trust-building function seems more fundamental. As Stuart Brown observes, “Cats deprived of play-fighting can hunt just fine. What they can’t do—what they never learn to do—is to socialize successfully. Cats and other social mammals such as rats will, if seriously deprived of opportunities for play, have an inability to clearly delineate friend from foe, miscue on social signaling, and either act excessively aggressive or retreat and not engage in more normal social patterns.”
• childlike playfulness, something we uniquely crave among primates, is eventually lost. We relish some banter with the hot dog vendor, but keep it short because we’re late for work. As adults, the childish drive to meander, examine boogers, and play becomes subordinated to productive routine. Get up, dress, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. This is the realm of the PFC, that center of executive control, and it is no accident that its maturation corresponds to an increased ability to stay on task, delay gratification, and subordinate emotions and desires to abstract reason and the achievement of practical goals.
• across the ancient world, we see similar evidence that the first large gatherings of people, centered on feasting, ritual, and booze, happened long before anyone had come up with the idea of planting and harvesting crops. Archaeologists working in the Fertile Crescent have noted that at the earliest known sites the particular tools being used and varieties of grain being grown were more suited to making beer than bread.
• As we read in the Book of Proverbs, “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto them that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”
• Donald Horton. In a survey of drinking practices across fifty-six small-scale societies published in 1943, Horton declared that “the primary function of alcoholic beverages in all societies is the reduction of anxiety.”30 He proposed a hydraulic model of alcohol use, arguing that the rate of drinking rises along with an increase in anxiety-generating food scarcity or war, until it runs up against new anxieties generated by excessive drinking. Any given society ends up at an equilibrium between these two extremes.
• Even 12,000 years ago, as Wadley and Hayden note, villages in the Fertile Crescent contained 200 to 300 people and already showed signs of private property, wealth inequality, and social stratification. After that, things got much worse, very quickly.
• When we see super-fast antelopes darting across the plains of North America, we infer the presence of almost-as-super-fast predators who motivated this speed—in the case of American antelopes, actually the “ghosts” of predators, like lions and cheetahs, who went extinct in the region thousands of years ago.57 Our seemingly supernatural ability to detect lies has similarly been driven by a corresponding ability to deceive. Humans are world-class liars, and we’ve been getting better at it for millennia.
• One study, for instance, found that getting strangers to dance in sync with one another—as opposed to conditions where their dancing was partially or completely asynchronous—boosted their pain thresholds (a good proxy for endorphin activation) and reported feelings of social closeness.
• Beer before bread advocates see this site, with its stone basins that could hold up to forty gallons of liquid, scattered remnants of drinking vessels, and evidence of extensive feasting on wild animals, as an illustration of how ancient humans were first motivated to come together in large groups by the draw of intoxication and ritual, with agriculture coming after. It is revealing that there are no grain silos or other food storage facilities at Göbekli Tepe. “Production was not for storage,” notes the archaeologist Oliver Dietrich and his colleagues, “but for immediate use.”119 In other words, people gathered in large numbers at this site for temporary, epic, blowout feasts, accompanied by dramatic rituals,120 all of it likely fueled by generous quantities of booze.
• In industrialized societies, where we have unions and 9-to-5 workdays with set wages and health care, drinking on the job is discouraged. In pre-industrial societies, facilitating drinking on the job is the only way to get the job done.
• Proponents of the beer before bread hypotheses rightly emphasize how the increased cohesiveness and scale of intoxicant-using cultures would give them a distinct advantage in competition with other groups, allowing them to cooperate more effectively in work, food production, and warfare.132 The inexorable pressure of cultural group selection would, in this way, encourage and disseminate the cultural use of intoxicants in the manner that we actually observe in the historical record, and that is completely inconsistent with any hijack or hangover theory of intoxication.
• in ancient Persia no important decision was made without being discussed over alcohol, although it would not actually be implemented until reviewed sober the next day. Conversely, no sober decision would be put into practice until it could be considered, by the group, while drunk.
• Using the state-level imposition of prohibition as a starting point, he compared counties that had been consistently dry for a long period of time to counties that had been “wet,” but were now suddenly forced to close their saloons and other public drinking venues. He found that prohibition reduced the number of new patents by 15 percent annually in previously wet counties relative to previously dry counties.
• As the writers John Markoff and Michael Pollan have documented, psychedelics—primarily pharmaceutical-grade LSD provided by a mysterious, colorful figure named Al Hubbard—played a central role from the very beginning of Silicon Valley’s rise.22 Ampex, an innovative, but now mostly forgotten, Silicon Valley–based manufacturer of storage devices, has been dubbed the “world’s first psychedelic corporation” because of the weekly workshops and retreats it organized around LSD use in the 1960s. LSD was instrumental in the creative design process that gave rise to circuit chips, and Apple founder Steve Jobs claimed that his experiments with LSD ranked as some of his most important life experiences.
• Despite lurid reports in the 1960s about LSD-induced insanity or tripping teenagers leaping off roofs, psychedelics are considerably safer, in most regards, than alcohol or cannabis. They are non-addictive, selectively target certain parts of the brain rather than playing havoc with the entire brain-body system, and cause no known side effects. In a 2009 briefing30 the U.K.’s top drug adviser, Dr. David Nutt, ranked LSD (along with cannabis and MDMA) as less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, although he was later forced to resign because of the resulting controversy.
• One of the most effective mechanisms human beings have invented for assessing the trustworthiness of a new potential cooperator is the long, drunken banquet. As we have seen, from ancient China to ancient Greece to Oceania, no negotiation was ever concluded, no treaty ever signed, without copious quantities of chemical intoxicants. In the modern world, with all of the remote communication technologies at our disposal, it should genuinely surprise us how often we need a good, old-fashioned, in-person drinking session before we feel comfortable about signing our name on the dotted line.
• One of the team’s findings, from survey data about pub use in Britain, found that people who had a neighborhood pub that they frequented regularly had more close friends, felt happier, were more satisfied with their lives, more embedded into their local communities, and more trusting of those around them. Those who never drank did consistently worse on all these criteria, while those who frequented a local did better than regular drinkers who had no local that they visited regularly. A more detailed analysis suggested that it was the frequency of pub visits that lay at the heart of this: it seemed that those who visited the same pub more often were more engaged with, and trusting of, their local community, and as a result they had more friends.
• In other words, go to the pub and have a pint or two. All things considered—liver damage, calories, and all—a spot of social drinking is good for you, and this has nothing to do with any French paradox or narrow health benefit. Moderate, social drinking brings people together, keeps them connected to their communities, and lubricates the exchange of information and building of networks. We social apes would find it very challenging to do without it, both individually and communally.
• Man, being reasonable, must get drunk. —Lord Byron
• let us never lose sight of the fact that drinking, or smoking, or taking an occasional mushroom trip is primordially, atavistically fun. Let us flash our eyes and drink the milk of Paradise. Let us be not afraid to get drunk “in a primary way,” for this is what reconnects us to the flow of experience that other animals get to simply take for granted.
• Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, disputed the conclusions of the Lancet article’s authors, noting that the data showed only a very low level of harm in moderate drinkers. “Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention,” he said. “There is no safe level of driving, but governments do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”
• one reason we have trouble properly valuing the benefits derived from chemical intoxicants is because of a false, but deeply seated, dualism between mind and body that colors our judgment. We have no problem with people altering their mood by watching fluff TV or going for a jog, but grow uncomfortable when their psychoactive hack involves a corkscrew and chilled bottle of Chardonnay. A person who meditates for an hour and achieves x percent reduction in stress and experiences a y percent rise in mood is viewed in a much more positive light than one who spent that hour achieving precisely the same results by downing a couple pints of beer.
• The Tohono O’odham people living in the Sonoran Desert home-brew an alcoholic beverage made from fermented cactus juice, but “no family may drink its own liquor lest the house burn down, [although] they may drink at other houses”—a taboo that effectively makes consumption a public act, and therefore one subject to social control.
• Laboratory research also shows that people in social drinking conditions report increased levels of “positive mood, elation, and friendliness,” whereas subjects required to drink in isolation report higher levels of depression, sadness, and negative emotion.
• Suburbanites typically also lack a social drinking venue within easy walking distance, where they might continue conversations begun earlier in the day or unwind with other regulars between work and dinner. Drinking increasingly occurs only in private homes, outside social control or observation. Knocking back a string of high-alcohol beers or vodka and tonics in front of the TV, even with one’s family around, is a radical departure from traditional drinking practices centered on communal meals and ritually paced toasting.
• Survey data suggests that married couples who drink together, and in similar amounts, report higher levels of marital satisfaction and have lower rates of divorce.66 Studies have also shown that drinking together, as opposed to drinking apart, has positive effects on couples’ interactions the following day.
• We have noted the widespread use of chemical intoxicants by religious traditions around the world and throughout history. It is also worth returning at this point to a discussion of the non-pharmacological methods they have developed for achieving ecstatic states of mind. It is clear that completely “dry” rituals involving dance, especially extended, vigorous dancing, ideally combined with hypnotic music and sensory and/or sleep deprivation, can provide many of the psychological and social benefits of drug-fueled ecstatic group rituals.
• In the 1970s, the psychiatrist and spiritualist guru Stanislav Grof developed a technique dubbed “holotropic breathwork,” whereby intense hyperventilation is used to starve the brain of oxygen and induce LSD-like experiences.77 In a review of non-chemically induced “hypnagogic states,” or episodes of dreamlike disassociation from waking reality, the psychologist Dieter Vaitl and colleagues78 list a variety of techniques by which such states can be induced, including extreme temperatures, starvation and fasting, sexual activity and orgasm, breathing exercises, sensory deprivation or overload, rhythm-induced trance (drumming and dancing), relaxation and meditation, hypnosis and biofeedback.
• the few countries that used Covid-19 as an excuse to attempt prohibition, like Sri Lanka, ended up spawning enormous underground networks of home brewers, cooking up barely palatable—but definitely intoxicating—concoctions out of everything from beets to pineapples.11 People want to drink, and even a global pandemic will not stop them from doing so.
• To have survived this long, and remained so central to human social life, intoxication’s individual-level advantages, combined with group-level social benefits, must have—over the course of human history—outweighed its more obvious costs. This is why both genetic and cultural “solutions” to the alcohol “problem” have failed to spread as quickly as one would expect if our taste for intoxication were merely an evolutionary mistake.