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

by Edward Slingerland

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated.

Those who puke together stay together.

While it is socially acceptable to talk in purely aesthetic terms about our interest in fine wine, microbrewed beer, or designer cannabis, we remain uncomfortable talking about our need for embodied pleasure for its own sake, rather than as a side effect of more respectable, abstract connoisseurship. This is a hang-up that we need to get over.

“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.”129

We should also accept the fact that pleasure is good, for pleasure’s sake, and requires no further justification.