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

by Edward Slingerland

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.”