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

by Edward Slingerland

People like to masturbate. They also like to get drunk and eat Twinkies. Not typically all at the same time, but that’s a matter of personal preference.

A crucial but often unacknowledged feature of any sort of evolutionary mistake view of alcohol or other chemical intoxicant use is that it sees getting drunk or high, like masturbation or stuffing your face with junk food, as an unmitigated vice. A vice is a habitual practice that gives fleeting pleasure, but that is ultimately harmful to oneself and others, or at best a waste of time. Indeed, even the most ardent fan of masturbation would have to admit that, all else being equal, there are probably more productive ways to spend a weekend afternoon.

Given the potentially enormous costs, and apparent lack of benefits, to impairing our cognitive control, why do humans still like to get intoxicated? Why is the labor-intensive practice of converting wholesome grains and delicious fruit into bitter, low-dose neurotoxins, or seeking out intoxicating plants in the local biome, so ubiquitous across cultures and geographic regions? It should puzzle us more than it does that one of the greatest foci of human ingenuity and concentrated effort over the past millennia has been the problem of how to get drunk.

At 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.5 It is no accident that the earliest human archaeological finds from around the world always include huge numbers of specialized, elaborate vessels used solely for the production and consumption of beer and wine.

Yet, as in the case of religious belief and practice, the very ubiquity of human intoxication renders the mystery of its existence invisible.

Equally surprising is the central role that the production and consumption of intoxicants play in cultural life, from ancient to modern times. All over the world, wherever you find people, you find ridiculous amounts of time, wealth, and effort dedicated to the sole purpose of getting high. In ancient Sumer, it is estimated that the production of beer, a cornerstone of ritual and everyday life, sucked up almost half of overall grain production.50 A significant portion of the Incan Empire’s organized labor was directed toward the production and distribution of the corn-based intoxicant chicha.51 Even ancient dead people were obsessed with getting wasted. It is hard to find a culture that did not send off their dead with copious quantities of alcohol, cannabis, or other intoxicants. Chinese tombs from the Shang Dynasty were packed with elaborate wine vessels of every shape and size, in both pottery and bronze.52 This represented a cultural investment equivalent, in today’s terms, to burying a few brand-new Mercedes SUVs in the ground with their trunks full of vintage Burgundy.

The evolutionary anthropologist Ed Hagen and colleagues70 have similarly shown that when it comes to plant-based recreational drugs like cannabis or hallucinogens, the hijack theory, at least, is undermined by evidence that humans have biologically adapted to consuming them. Take cannabis, for example. THC, the ingredient in cannabis that gets you high, is actually a bitter neurotoxin produced by the plant to avoid getting eaten. All plant drugs, including caffeine, nicotine, and cocaine, are bitter for a reason. The astringent taste is a message to herbivores: Back off, if you eat this it’s going to hurt your stomach or mess with your brain and probably both. Most herbivores, being sensible, give plants like this a wide berth. However, some particularly stubborn ones—or those with a powerful taste for coke—develop countermeasures, evolving to produce enzymes that detoxify the toxicants.

We may be biologically preadapted to handle the relatively low alcohol levels found in rotting fruit, or to processing the toxins found in the coca leaf, but this leaves us helpless once the development of agriculture, large-scale societies, technology, and trade puts powerful beers, wines, and distilled spirits at our disposal, or tempts us with refined cocaine or super-THC strains of cannabis. The ancient Scythians, fearsome warriors though they were, would have been reduced to dribbling idiots had they had access to the Maui Wowie or Bubba Kush I can pick up at my local cannabis dispensary.

“That’s because alcohol and drunkenness didn’t need to find their place within Viking society, they were Viking society. Alcohol was authority, alcohol was family, alcohol was wisdom, alcohol was poetry, alcohol was military service, and alcohol was fate.”80 This had its downsides as a cultural strategy. Medieval Vikings would make modern frat boys look like herbal tea-sipping grannies. As Iain Gately notes, binge drinking played such a central role in their culture that “a striking number of their heroes and kings died from alcohol-related accidents,”81 ranging from drowning in enormous vats of ale to being slaughtered by rivals while rolling about in a drunken stupor. Perpetually drunken and heavily armed warriors also posed a threat to those around them. The highest praise accorded to the legendary Viking/Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf was that “he never killed his friends when he was drunk.”

If you want help with the Unusual Uses Test, just rope in a little kid. Solving lateral thinking tasks is where the four-year-olds who get distracted by an ant crawling across the floor when they are supposed to be putting on their shoes, or who suddenly decide to strip off their pants apropos of nothing, really come into their own. Kids are crappy at logistics and planning, but their little chaotic minds explore the nooks and crannies of possibility space with a speed and unpredictability that leave adults completely in the dust. Look at any small child, at any point in the day, and they are probably performing something like the UUT: turning a cardboard tube into a rocket ship, or using a large stick as a horse.

As Henrich also observes, a particular historical experiment displays the danger of trying to wing it in the absence of traditional cultural memory. In the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese, noting that manioc is easy to grow and provides impressive yields even in marginal cropland, imported it to Africa from South America. It quickly spread to become an important staple crop in the region, and still is today. Yet the Portuguese neglected to also import the South American indigenous cultural knowledge about how to properly detoxify manioc. The difficulty of reinventing the wheel, as it were, is dramatically illustrated by the fact that many contemporary Africans, hundreds of years after the introduction of manioc, continue to suffer from health problems caused by low-level cyanide poisoning.34 The point, Henrich concludes, is that “cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are.”

So, given the downsides of most non-alcoholic chemical intoxicants, and the incredible amount of time, effort, and pain demanded by non-chemical means, it’s not surprising that most of us, most of the time, have chosen to opt for a few pints of beer over sticking sharp objects through our cheeks. If we want to enhance mood and temporarily take the PFC offline, a delicious liquid neurotoxin seems to be the fastest and most pleasant option.

Dionysus is the god of wine, drunkenness, fertility, emotionality, and chaos. Dionysian art indulges in excess, ecstatic elevation, altered states. His worshippers famously included the maenads, wild women who would gather secretly at night in the woods for the original bacchanalia, alcohol- and drug-fueled parties rather like contemporary raves, only with a much darker edge, more nudity, and occasional cannibalism.

In one classic study,35 male volunteers from the Indiana University community were subjected to arguably more intense stressors than overcrowding in a cage: They were made to watch a digital clock countdown from 360 to 0, at which point they would receive a painful electric shock or have to give an extemporaneous speech, into a camera, on the topic, “What I like and dislike about my physical appearance.” This speech would then be rated by a panel of judges for degree of openness and level of neuroticism. (Human subject approval was apparently much easier to get in the 1980s.)

This bias against Mr. Spock in favor of Captain Kirk is validated by recent experimental work suggesting that people are more cooperative in public goods games when forced to decide quickly or told to trust their intuition.53 Telling them to reflect, or forcing them to take their time in making a decision, brings out the rational sneak and generates more cheating at the expense of the public good. There is a good reason religious and ethical systems across the world and throughout history have linked spontaneity and authenticity to moral reliability and social charisma.

Charismatic politicians, like Bill Clinton, seem capable of temporarily but genuinely convincing themselves that their current interlocutor, maybe a small businessperson concerned about tariffs, is the only person in the entire world they care about, and to give them what appears to be their full attention, even while part of their brain might be intent on the big donor across the room. There is some evidence that psychopaths, the ultimate social defectors, are able to suppress genuine emotional “leakage,”59 contributing to their creepy ability to stone-cold lie.

The take-home lesson is: Keep your eye on the guy who is skipping the toasts.

In ancient Egypt, the Festival of Drunkenness was a major holiday commemorating the salvation of humankind when the fierce goddess Hathor was tricked into getting drunk on red-dyed beer instead of human blood. After some ceremonial preliminaries, it consisted primarily of everyone getting completely hammered in the Hall of Drunkenness, participating in ritually sanctioned sexual orgies, and then eventually falling asleep. As Mark Forsyth observes, “This was drinking with only one aim in mind: sacred drunkenness, and to be a holy drunk you have to be wholly drunk.”103 In the morning, an enormous image of the goddess was snuck into the hall, and then everyone was abruptly woken up, still drunk, by an ear-shattering din of drums and tambourines, to find the great goddess looming over them. This can’t have been wholly pleasant, but it had to have been awe-inspiring.

There is a very good reason we have historically gotten drunk. It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers, and trippers who emerged triumphant. In all of the ways outlined above, intoxicants—above all alcohol—appear to have been the chemical tool that allowed humans to escape the limits imposed by our ape nature and create social insect–like levels of cooperation.

Gately has also argued that more recently the “water trade,” the infamously alcohol-soaked, after-hours but mandatory drinking sessions endured by Japanese salarymen (and they were almost all men), was a key driver of Japanese industrial innovation in the 1970s and ’80s. One of its functions was to suspend social hierarchy norms in order to allow innovative ideas to flow from junior to senior employees. “Alcohol was the lubricant that enabled the Japanese business machine to run smoothly,” Gately notes. “While the gerontocracy demanded and received respect for their years when behind their desks, after work, off premises, and over a drink, they let their young Turks speak.”

There is simply no way these conversations would have been catalyzed by a new Starbucks or bubble-tea establishment—we needed a pub. This is precisely why, in Oxford colleges, evenings of discussion and debate formally begin with the Latin declaration, nunc est bidendum (“Now is the time for drinking”).

Video meetings are probably more efficient; but efficiency, the central value of Apollo, is the enemy of disruptive innovation. The pub doesn’t just make us feel better; used properly, it makes us, in the long run, work better.

Something is lost in a world where at least a temporary dissolution of the self is never given space to occur.

He quotes from an essay by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset on the bacchanal paintings of Titian and Velázquez: Once, long before wine became an administrative problem, Bacchus was a god, wine was divine…Yet our solution is symptomatic of the dullness of our age, its administrative hypertrophy, its morbidly cautious preoccupation with today’s trivia and tomorrow’s problems, its total lack of the heroic spirit. Who has now a gaze penetrating enough to see beyond alcoholism—a mountain of printed papers loaded with statistics—to the simple image of twining vine-tendrils and broad clusters of grapes pierced by the golden arrows of the sun.

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.

Explicitly acknowledging and documenting the functional usefulness, individual solace, and deep pleasure provided by alcohol and other intoxicants is a much-needed corrective to today’s popular wisdom on the topic. Intoxicants are not merely brain hijackers or vices to be eliminated or grudgingly tolerated. They are essential tools in our battle against the limiting aspects of the PFC, that seat of Apollonian control, as well as the constraints of our primate nature. We cannot properly grasp the dynamics of human social life unless we understand the role that intoxicants have played in making civilization possible. As that great champion of Dionysus, Friedrich Nietzsche, declared in one of his characteristically cryptic aphorisms, “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.”