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

by Edward Slingerland

By causing humans to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal—to live like social insects, despite our ape nature—intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups, domesticate increasing numbers of plants and animals, accumulate new technologies, and thereby create the sprawling civilizations that have made us the dominant mega-fauna on the planet.

We are an odd, sad species of ape, trying to make our way in societies organized on a scale we are not genetically equipped to negotiate. The discovery of a liquid neurotoxin that helps us to be more creative, culturally connected, and communally trusting was a crucial stage in our evolution, and we need to better understand how intoxicants continue to function for us today. But 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.

You must always be drunk. Everything depends upon getting drunk, it is all that matters. In order to not feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and pushes you to the ground, you must be drunk, perpetually drunk. Drunk on what? On wine, on poetry or virtue, whatever your taste. But get drunk. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, the green grass of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your room, you find yourself sobering up, your drunkenness diminished or entirely gone, and you ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock—of everything that exists, everything that moans, everything that rolls, everything that sings, everything that speaks—what time it is, the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will all answer you: “It is time to get drunk! So as to no longer be the martyred slave of Time, get drunk, be constantly drunk! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, whatever your taste.

Over the past few centuries—the blink of an eye on an evolutionary timescale—there have been two major innovations in the way that people produce and consume alcohol. The first was the advent of distilled liquors. The second was a set of changes in lifestyle and economics that has made drinking alone,

The ancient Greeks despised “water drinkers,” whose rejection of wine reflected a cold heart, plodding mind, and even moral turpitude.